Opinion | Young people are usually taught to delay sexual activity. Is that message the best one?

When it comes to sex education for young people, new research suggests that our approach deserves a failing grade.

The problem? A pervasive idea that later is always better, no matter what.

“Abstinence education teaches that healthy sexuality is no sexuality, and I wanted to put that lesson to the test,” said Diana Peragine, a doctoral fellow at the department of psychology at University of Toronto Mississauga. “Researchers have traditionally focused on the public health concerns that are raised by an early sexual debut as a cause of problem behaviour, often grouped together with teenage drinking and smoking drugs.”

The reason for the focus on public health concerns is obvious. Early sexual intercourse can lead to sexually transmitted disease, unwanted pregnancy, injury and other negative health outcomes.

“I wondered, though, if engaging in sex was a normal part of adolescence,” Peragine recalls of the reason she started down this research path. “And if there might also potentially be some positive healthy effects associated with accumulating experience and practice.”

This may sound like a contradiction. But it’s possible for an activity to have both risks and benefits. Most research has been narrowly focused on the risks. So Peragine and her colleagues designed a research plan that would widen the lens to try to discover things that most people haven’t been looking for.

The results were published last month in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and what the team discovered is that, although there certainly are negative health outcomes associated with early sexual intercourse, at the same time, it’s associated with healthier sexual function and fewer sexual difficulties later in life.

The question, of course, is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. The picture gets even more interesting, however, when you widen the lens for other categories, too.

As per long-standing tradition, we have tended, both colloquially and in much sex research, to focus on intercourse as peoples’ “sexual debut.” There’s a lot of sex outside of intercourse, though.

“To start, we found that sexual debut occurs at age 17, on average, when defined narrowly, and traditionally, as first sexual intercourse,” said Peragine. “However, 93 per cent of Canadians surveyed were sexually experienced prior to this event, raising questions about whether it reflects their sexual debut at all.”

And when the researchers opened it up and asked about masturbation and nonintercourse partner stimulation, an entirely different picture emerged. Early sexual initiation had no significant relationship to adverse outcomes and, at the same time, was associated with fewer sexual desire difficulties and better sexual health.

Aside from the fact that it’s a heteronormative standard that excludes a lot of people who have different sexualities, our hang-up with intercourse is failing us in research and in sex-ed classes. Masturbation and partner stimulation are often optional lessons in curricula or are only included in the context of delaying intercourse.

“At present, there’s really no single set strategy for delivering sex-ed in Canada. There are no national guidelines recommending a comprehensive approach rather than abstinence only,” explains Peragine. “It’s ultimately up to individual provinces and territories to make curriculum decisions and up to school boards to interpret curriculum.”

She continues: “And then, it’s up to the teachers to decide on the breadth and the tone of lessons given their own training, knowledge and comfort with the material or with the curricula, which can vary pretty tremendously.”

Especially given that masturbation is, apparently, still controversial.

“Despite their potential benefits to sexual function in adulthood and the relative safety in comparison to partnered activities, the inclusion of masturbation and sexual pleasure in sex-ed is hotly contested,” said Peragine. “More contested, perhaps, than any other topic out there.”

It may be a distant memory now, but the updating of the sex-ed curricula to include masturbation and gender identity for sixth graders in Ontario in 2015 under Kathleen Wynne’s government was controversial. Many conservative leaders criticized the changes, and it became a campaign issue in the 2018 provincial election.

“Even the current Ontario curriculum includes delaying sexual activity as a key health concept in Grade 7 and abstinence in Grade 8, which is defined as abstinence from all sexual activities,” said Peragine. “Students learn these are healthy choices because they reduce the risk of pregnancy, disease and injury. But healthy sexual development also includes learning to have functional and healthy sex. And students may be getting shortchanged on this front.”

Abstinence education has recently been rebranded as Sexual Risk Avoidance Education and still stresses that “No Sexuality is Healthy Sexuality” for teens.

Said Peragine: “Our findings not only contradict this view but suggest that efforts to delay sexual activity may carry risks themselves and might even be detrimental to young people’s sexual health in the long run.”

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