Sex In A Secularized, Trivialized Culture

The study, released Monday and published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics, found that teens exposed to high levels of sexual content on television were twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy in the following three years as teens with limited exposure.

The study’s authors are quick to point out that the factors leading to teen pregnancies are varied and complex — but they say it’s important for parents, teachers and pediatricians to understand that TV can be one of them....

“We were surprised to find this link,” said Anita Chandra, the study’s lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization. “But teens spend a good amount of their time watching television — an average of three hours a day — and we don’t know a lot about its impact on their health decisions …

“We don’t think that (TV) is necessarily more significant than some of the family and neighborhood factors that can lead to teen pregnancies. But even when we removed all the other factors, we still saw a compelling link between a high exposure to sexual content on television and teen pregnancies.”...

In the final analysis, teens who had watched the most sexual content on television during the three-year study period were twice as likely to have been involved in a pregnancy as teens with the lowest levels of exposure.

Chandra said TV-watching was strongly connected with teen pregnancy even when other factors were considered, including grades, family structure and parents’ education level.

But the study didn’t adequately address other issues, such as self-esteem, family values and income, contends Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director of Answer, a teen sex education program based at Rutgers University.

“The media does have an impact, but we don’t know the full extent of it because there are so many other factors,” Schroeder said.

Bill Albert, chief program officer at the nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, praised the study and said it “catches up with common sense.”

The study, paid for by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, followed a 2004 study by some of the same scientists that indicated watching sexual content on TV can make teens more likely to have sex at earlier ages.

Chandra said the new findings are significant given the intractable social and public health problems associated with teen pregnancies. While the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has dropped considerably since the early ‘90s, the U.S. rate remains one of the highest among the world’s industrialized nations. Nearly 1 million young women between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant each year in the U.S., and they are more likely than other teens to drop out of high school and live in poverty....

Chandra noted that many TV programs fail to give viewers realistic depictions of the potential consequences of sex, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

“If teens are getting any of their information about sex from TV, they’re very rarely going to get a balanced portrayal,” she said. “When there is a portrayal, how often is it coupled with a discussion of contraception use or safer sex or the consequences of what could happen?”...

In response to the news of this new study, the National Association of Broadcasting released the following statement:

“Though NAB has not had a chance to review the report, it’s worth noting that broadcasters encourage parents and caregivers to use the V-chip and other program blocking technologies that would screen out shows that are inappropriate for children. We would also point out that broadcast television is generally far less explicit than programming found on cable, satellite and on the Internet.”...

“Right now the message teens are getting is that everything is great, and there really are no consequences to sex,” Chandra said.

“Since the time that we did our data collection, the amount of sexual content on TV has doubled. … It’s important for kids to have the tools to understand what they’re watching.” (MSNBC)

There are far more consequences than this article and these researchers suggest, and wearing a condom won't prevent all of the consequences. Even the people in our secularized, trivialized culture who study these issues as part of their profession significantly misunderstand and misdiagnose the problem.