Something most parents already knew:
Sexually charged music, magazines, TV and movies push youngsters into intercourse at an earlier age, perhaps by acting as kind of virtual peer that tells them everyone else is doing it, a study said Monday.
"This is the first time we've shown that the more kids are exposed to sex in media the earlier they have sex," said Jane Brown of the University of North Carolina, chief author of the report.
Previous research had been limited to television, said the study which looked at 1,017 adolescents when they were aged 12 to 14 and again two years later. They were checked on their exposure during the two years to 264 items -- movies, TV shows, music and magazines -- which were analyzed for their sexual content.
The effect was not as pronounced for blacks, the study said, perhaps because the black youngsters in the study were already more sexually experienced than the whites were when the research began and thus were less influenced by media exposure over the two-year period.
In general it found that the highest exposure levels led to more sexual activity, with white teens in the group 2.2 times more likely to have had intercourse at ages 14 to 16 than similar youngsters who had the least exposure.
The study was conducted on children ages 12-14.
HT: Clayton Cramer
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2 comments:
The disparity in race is interesting ... I don't think the lack of media exposure explains it fully ... it's a not-well-known-enough fact that church-going black folks are quite conservative and exert control over their children, even more than white people of the same strata
Yeah--I am aware of that.
One wonders if they controlled for church-going, or for that matter, intact families.
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