Well, I work with students that are between 12 and 15 and I must tell you that the data shown in the questionnaire doesn’t surprise me in some fields. First of all, a great percentage of my students start their sexual life very early. In my opinion that happens due to many factors:
-their families don’t have an effective role ( a lot of parents have several jobs and aren´t at home, others have parents with social problems like drug addiction or they are even in jail and others don’t care at all about their children). The example they have at home is sometimes extremely hard to live with. My school has a considerable percentage of cases of abortion. This year I had some students from the 9th grade that had an abortion. The way students and their mothers reacted was amazing for me because it seemed as if they were talking about teeth extraction without psychological consequences;
-physical and psychological violence is also present among my students. They aren’t mature enough to understand the dimension and the importance of sex in their lives. Sometimes they use sex as a reflex of what they are used to live and watch at home and sometimes as a weapon used (without having that conscious) against themselves ;
- the concept of intimacy is changing among youngsters. In the past the first sexual intercourse happened later and it was something special, to share our intimacy with somebody we were in love with or that we loved. Nowadays, as Jorge said, it’s like a game or in my opinion just a way of having quick fun. They just do it and don’t think much about it. What is interesting to analyze is that this behavior is happening also with girls.
Sex and love is falling apart and this fact brings inevitably more problems to teens and future adults.
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5 comments:
It's interesting this trip in space and time in which Mabel is our guide. This is important: to do a trip in space, we don't need to go to another country; all we need is to go to another district in the town and there we can see a very different way of living, including a very different way of facing sexuality. Sex is a part of us and we are influenced by our environment and living conditions. So, people of Camarate (Lisbon Surroundings where we can find Mabel's school) seem to have very different living conditions comparing to my students (Torres Vedras is a small town 50 Kms away from Lisbon, and many of my students don't even live in the town - they live in villages, in Torres Vedras surroundings). I think a lot of my students try to associate sex and romance, something that can bring more elevated feelings and more elevated emotions to them.
It seems that there are trips we have to do deep inside (ourselves) to realize how different lives are. The trip I have been doing with my students for 2 years now has been tough but it has also been an enriching experience. They have taught me a lot about the meaning of life! I must confess that it’s been a truly “trip in (inner)space and time”
There are a wide variety of factors that can lead students to specific behaviour. As Jorge so clearly said, the environment and living conditions, the lack of family values and rules make my students face the dark side of life since early ages. They just live with feelings of rejection and anger and these feelings are reflected in their everyday lives: at school, with peers, with boy/ girlfriends, in sex, etc( of course that this is not a blind rule because there are some that don’t follow the path).
When life is so difficult, emotions are expressed in a not so beautiful way…
Mabel, what a wonderful comment you've done! It is deep and, in spite of that, it is poetic!!! You proved that it is possible to talk about hard life in a beautiful way. It is very good to have you in this project.
Congratulations.
I'm sorry to contradict such politicaly correct thoughts, but I don't know from what time are the teenagers you are refering to that started sexual life later. Nowadays there is a larger number of cases, or they are more visible, or having other consequences, (STD's, for instance) but teenage pregnancy comes from a time where adolescence was not even known as such. Until just a few years ago the legal age for marriage in Portugal was 16. Have you thought about this?
Ana Paula, thank you for your comment. It gives me the oportunity to clarify my opinions and, maybe, we will get a better understanding of this subject.
You are right saying that «teenage pregnancy comes from a time where adalescence was not even known as such». Anyway, I say that when my parents were teenagers (in the 40s of 20th century) there was a lot of youngsters starting sexual life only after they had get married. It is true that people, in that time, used to get married younger than they do nowadays. But, there is no doubt that the age of 1st sexual intercourse usually was later than nowadays. The culture, at that age, was highly influenced by the church, and religious leaders used to value sex outside marriage as a sin. After that, there was «May of 68» in France, democratic revolution in Portugal in 1974, democratic revolution of Romania in 90s, a bigger influence of mass media in societies behavior, etc. All these changes produced big changes in all culture, including in sexual attitudes. Today, teenagers have different criteria to decide what is right and what is wrong: what is right is what leads to well being, not what leads to heaven. So, they expect sex to give pleasure and more and more teenagers have precoce sexual intercourse thinking this way they will improve their well being.
If we read the data of our questionnaire (see posts with the questionnaire data), we confirm this point of view. I will be back to this subject in a future post.
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