Sex on TV leads to teenage pregnancies

By George Tyndale on Nov 7, 08 09:59 AM

Teenage girls who watch a lot of sexual activity on TV are twice as likely to get pregnant as those who don't.

This is the finding of a major research project in the United States which studied 2,000 youngsters aged between 12 and 17.

Researchers identified 23 programmes popular with teenagers which had high levels of sexual content, including Sex In The City and Friends.

By the end of their three year project a quarter of those who watched a lot of these shows ended up pregnant. In the group which did not watched less the figure was just 12 per cent.

They conclude that TV which glamorise sex and neglect to mention the downsides like disease and pregnancy encourage youngsters to become sexually active.

I mention this because in last Sunday's newspaper column I suggested that there must be a link between behaviour seen on TV and what happens in everyday life.

I suggested that television had played a major role in turning obscenity, sexual depravity, drunkenness and cruelty into the everyday coinage of life in Britain.

And that this must have had an influence on real-life binge drinking, the sexualisation of our children, yobbism and..... teenage pregnancy.

This is dangerous territory. In the past those who have mounted campaigns about what happens on our TV screens have been characterised as fogeys and/or religious nutters. Actually some of them have been fogeys and/or religious nutters.

But in the wake of the widespread disapproval generated by the Brand/ Ross affair it seemed reasonable to suggest that new thresholds needed to be put in place.
The new evidence from America would seem to support that view.

And if you think that the US research is irrelevant in this country because just about every teenager over here watches sex-drenched TV then just remember this. Our teenage pregnancy rate is double that in the US.