First of all I would like to point out that the number of collected questionnaires from my school is not enough to reach a conclusion on the average sexual behavior of adolescents in my area. Nevertheless, my experience gained during the last 7 years I get involved in sexual education gives me clues on how adolescents think and why they act so.
Here is my explanation on some of the collected data:
Sexual behavior at a very early age (12) has been mentioned to me personally by a girl who was raped and a boy who was led to a prostitutes’ house by his own father. So I can’t see any will in this action from the side of the child. We cannot say that they agreed on what happened to them. I am also not sure if other cases refer to masturbation and not to a normal sexual intercourse at that age. Most students that filled the questionnaire were shy and didn’t ask any questions, even when they didn’t clearly understand what was asked.
Sexual activity at ages below 16 was a result of not clear and conscious decision, as it happened while the persons were drunk, during a party, most of the times. And if there is no real sexual intercourse at this age, for the reasons that Gonçalo Brás Gomes has very accurately mentioned, teenagers are exploring their bodies with sexual acts, even without having any relation with the other person. That’s what struck me, hearing about the easiness of acting so. And it’s very clear that boys pretend to have emotions towards girls, so that they convince them to be with them.
Another interesting finding through my talking with my students was that most of the times when the first sexual intercourse happens at an age below 16, girls don’t do it again unless they find a boy they are sure to have a long-lasting relation or they keep having this first boyfriend for the next years and even marry him when they finish school. They don’t change easily sexual partners. Boys of course have a completely different attitude.
For me, this questionnaire was the chance to start talking with my students about issues that (as they told me) they had never talked with their parents about. Some girls told me that I did very well to start such a conversation in the classroom because they had the chance to hear how boys think on such issues and they realized the difference of attitude towards sex between boys and girls. The data collected by the questionnaire are thought provoking but not concluding to general results.
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Maria, you are right when you point out that questionnaire does not allowed us to take scientific conclusions. In fact, it is not a scientific inquiry - that was the 1st note I pointed out in the lessons of analisys of the data with my students (I will publish a post about the discussions we made in those lessons).
I am really worried with teenagers that have sexual intercourse as a result of a non conscious process, because they are drunk or because of other circunstances. That is a reason because sexual education and education in general is so urgent in our societies.
There are, everywhere, people who are raped - it is tragic. Sex and violence together: the two basic human impulses in Freud's point of view; two impulses working together in some spirits with bad education or with no education at all. That leads those spirits to have a very wrong behavior. Tragically, that leads people arround them becoming their victims. That is, again, a very strong reason to develop education in our societies (and specifically to develop sexual education and ethics ) .
Even if our questionnaire did not give us scientific statistical data, it gave us relevant information about different sexual attitudes and behaviors. That was a good starting point to discuss sexual attitudes, like you said.
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