January 29, 2005 8:01 AM

Time to recognize the risks our children face

School a giant chain of sexual connections

If you’re effective, even with a small proportion of the population, in getting them to use condoms or change their behaviour or whatever, you’re going to be effective in stopping the disease.

  • Prof. James Moody

By now, I would imagine that most of us have heard of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. For the uninitiated, it’s a drinking game with the premise that any actor or actress can be connected to Kevin Bacon using no more than six degrees of separation. The underlying theme is the overall interconnectedness of the motion picture community, but the theory can be applied to just about any institution or social aggregation.

In an institution the size of a typical high school, the social (and es, sexual) connections are even more complex…and perhaps infinitely riskier.

Half the romantically active students at a large U.S. high school were linked by up to 37 degrees of separation, according to a study that mapped the teenagers’ sexual patterns. The sociologists who wrote the paper also found that most of the adolescents were faithful to their partners. But because the teens had dated people throughout the school, the overall student community’s relationships formed a giant chain of sexual connections.

“Instead of the stereotype of a jock or somebody having lots and lots of partners, what you have is everybody who is active has one, maybe two [former] partners. A few people have three. But that’s just enough to connect everyone,” James Moody, co-author of the study and a sociology professor at Ohio State University, said in an interview.

The researchers, whose work was published in the American Journal of Sociology, found that 288 students — or 52 per cent of the teens who were romantically active in the previous 18-month period — were linked by up to 37 degrees of separation. In other words, when researchers plotted the sexual activity as a graph, there were 37 individuals between the two most-distant people in the large network.

What this would seem to indicate is that, when it comes to sexually-transmitted diseases, it appears that our children may well be at much greater risk than we had imagined. With the risks and temptations of unprotected sex prevalent among teens these days being what it is, it doesn’t take a math whiz to calculate the risk factors.

If you accept the premise, immunologically speaking, that when you engage in sexual contact with someone you are also having sex with all of their prior partners, this is no small concern. And this is no isolated incident. Teens being the social beings they are, one could easily and reasonably assume that virtually every high school in North America is a similar network.

It’s a public health official’s nightmare waiting for the right time to spring to life. Yet it is also a scenario that is highly preventable- if we as parents can convince our children of the seriousness of the risks they face. It’s not exactly a stretch to admit the risks of unprotected sex. Nor is it a stretch to understand that teenagers are going to experiment with sex. Yes, we can talk to them and try to convince them of the risks of teenage pregnancy. And yes, we can try to convince them of the risks of STDs posed by engaging in unprotected sex. And yes, we can even trying to convince them of the advantages of abstinence. Too often, though, and those of us who were teenagers at one time should be able to vouch for this, youth, sex, and common sense seldom travel hand-in-hand.

The risks now are much more serious than when I was in high school. Then, the phrase HIV/AIDS had yet to be invented, and recreational sex was, well, recreational. The risks, while not absent, were certainly not what they are today- and this is every bit as true for adults as for our children.

If you care about your child, take some time to be certain that they understand the risks they face if they engage in unprotected sex. Life would be so much easier if children agreed to abstain, but we all know it’s nowhere near that simple. Sex, and the promise of sex, is a powerful force that can crumble the resolve of the most resolute among us- teens or adults. This is even more true for a child in the midst of coming to grips with their sexuality.

Talk to your child. Discussing sex with them may be an embarrassing or difficult prospect, but it becomes much easier when you consider the cost of ignorance. We CAN make a difference.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Technorati

Technorati search

» Blogs that link here

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on January 29, 2005 8:01 AM.

Congratulations, America! You have chosen well! was the previous entry in this blog.

If you can't slice it, I don't wanna breathe it.... is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Contact Me

Powered by Movable Type 5.12