It is a truism that being a teenager is tough, but nowadays there is an additional hazard to be negotiated almost on a weekly basis. It is the fallout from parental anxiety attacks brought on by headlines such as "50 per cent of teenage girls aged between 16-19 are having sex", writes Breda O'Brien
These reports result in covert or subtle-as-a-sledgehammer parental attempts to find out to which 50 per cent their daughter belongs. One teenager told me she dreads opening the subsidised newspaper thoughtfully distributed by her school, in case it contains another article which will send her mother into a tailspin.
There is one odd and surely unintended consequence of this focus on the high numbers who are allegedly sexually active.
Those who are not having sex begin to feel abnormal. Perhaps there should be a society for the protection of the reasonable teenager.
They haven't gone away, you know, but we are at risk of making them an endangered species by our refusal to believe they exist.
The teenage young women that I know, admittedly middle-class and urban, flatly deny that the figure of 50 per cent is accurate and declare that the real figures are far lower.
The 50 per cent statistic originated from media coverage of a North Eastern Health Board survey designed to establish consumer attitudes to family planning services. Some 1,010 women aged between 16 and 49 were interviewed, but the numbers representing women aged 16-19 would have been much smaller, perhaps 200.
To generalise from this survey the sexual behaviour of all young women is quite a leap. Forty-five per cent of this age group said they had had sex in the previous year, but the more satisfying round figure of 50 per cent sticks in people's minds.
Despite the probability that there are huge differences in young women's sexual behaviour which depend on personal maturity, the quality of relationship with and between parents, educational advantage, and career prospects, let's just accept for a moment that 45 per cent is a reasonable estimate.
The 55 per cent who are not sexually active will find little comfort in the health board's sexual health website for young people. The homepage's first topic is what to do when you forget to take the pill.
Further exploration leads to advice to try outercourse, with suggestions for erotic massage and mutual masturbation. The website does admit somewhat airily that this may lead to difficulties with avoiding intercourse.
While token nods are made in the direction of acting in accordance with personal values, the assumption is you want to know how to put on a condom. The website states that no one should be pressured into sex, but seems to assume that if there is mutual consent and precautions are taken to avoid disease and pregnancy, there are no further questions to be asked. I didn't find any articles headed "Is everybody doing it? No! And here's 10 reasons why you shouldn't either."
Many teenagers find this truly exasperating. The assumption is that teenagers are incapable of abstaining from sex, which is patronising in the extreme.
It does not help them to maintain a choice not to be sexually active. They have very good reasons for this stance. They don't feel that this level of intimacy is right at this stage of their lives, they know that no contraceptive offers perfect protection against either pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection, and in the somewhat confined social circles in which they move, they don't fancy the idea of continually meeting former sexual partners who may be blabbing about them.
They also know that "waiting until you are ready for sex" means, in the case of at least some teenage boys, about 15 seconds.
These young women are being flooded with sexual imagery from every direction, and they need help negotiating that swamp, not sweeping assumptions that every teenager is so hopping with hormones they are all hopping on each other.
The North Eastern Health Board survey does contain one other nugget of information, which is that 25 per cent of the 16-19-year-old age group did not know, and a further 24 per cent answered incorrectly, when asked at what stage of their menstrual cycle were they most likely to conceive. "Fifty per cent of teenage girls aged 16-19 display deplorable ignorance about how their bodies work" is admittedly not a catchy headline. Yet one would have thought it a matter for concern, nonetheless.
Oddly enough, those who answered incorrectly must have been reading the health board's website, which says: "You are most likely to get pregnant when you're ovulating, but the time you ovulate can vary from month to month. Also sperm can live in the body for around five or six days so pregnancy is possible at virtually any time in your cycle."
I looked for the qualifier that while this is theoretically possible, there still remains a relatively narrow window of some five or six days in any given cycle where pregnancy is possible. It wasn't there, although elsewhere on the site there was a reasonable if sketchy explanation of natural family planning.
Meanwhile, in the US, from where we seem to import most of our ideas these days, the numbers of teenagers having sex has declined significantly, from 54 per cent in 1991 to 46 per cent in 2001. Last December, Newsweek magazine looked at this phenomenon, and at the accompanying decline in teen pregnancies and teen abortions. It concluded that while religious belief was definitely a factor, there were other factors as well, such as "caring parents and young people's sense of their own unreadiness".
This is at least an indicator that the solution to teenage sexual activity does not lie in acting as if all teenagers will inevitably have sex, but is a thoughtful evaluation of the factors which help people to wait.
I am not suggesting that the current level of sexual activity is acceptable, but I suspect that like the US, the level of premature sex will decline. Facetiously, a society where there is an expectation that all teenagers will be sexually active offers only one opportunity for rebellion, which is to buck that expectation. More seriously, recognising that there are many steady and responsible teenagers out there, and doing everything we can to support rather than undermine them, wouldn't hurt either.