Online bullying, sexting and the intriguing new reasons behind the dramatic fall in teenage pregnancies
AS She stared at the positive pregnancy test, Natalie Smith was overwhelmed by a sickening conviction that, at just 17 years old, her life was over. her hands wobbled as she picked up the phone to tell her mother the news. She knew she would be shaking with shock and fury, and with good reason.
‘Mum was only 16 when she had me and wanted me to enjoy the kind of future she hadn’t,’ says Natalie. ‘She was so cross she refused to speak to me for a week. I was so terrified I booked a termination.’
It wasn’t until the evening before Natalie’s scheduled abortion that her mother calmed down and promised to support her daughter if she wanted to proceed with the pregnancy. Natalie is now 32; her unplanned but muchloved daughter ellie is 14.
Research in the past has shown that daughters of teenage mothers are much more likely to become teenage mothers themselves — so the tacit assumption would once have been that ellie was destined for the same fate.
Yet she is adamant this will not happen. She will break the family cycle, she says, and no one doubts she means it.
‘A pregnancy would ruin my teenage years. I want to wait to have sex and definitely wouldn’t do it without contraception,’ insists ellie.
Natalie seems similarly convinced. ‘ellie is so sensible and attitudes have changed so much since she was born that I can’t see history repeating itself,’ she says.
In fact, within this family and many others there has been a big shift in attitudes towards teenage pregnancy in the space of just one generation.
It has become anathema to countless thousands of youngsters — the sort of wondrous change of which the Seventies pioneers of the sex education movement could only have dreamt.
In two decades, teenage conception rates have halved. Yet recent reports on the causes of this decline are conflicting.
One view is that the success is down to the Department of health’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in 1999, which led to better sex education and access to sexual health services.
LAST
year, a paper published in medical journal The Lancet found that areas of the country which had received more funding under the initiative had undergone the biggest reductions in under-18 conceptions.
The Government is so persuaded by the argument that children should be better informed about sex that this year it announced sex education for school pupils as young as four should be compulsory.
But not everyone is convinced. Another study, published last month in the Journal of health economics, refuted these findings, concluding that subsequent
cutbacks were behind falling pregnancy rates.
This research found that the largest decreases in teenage pregnancy rates had been in areas where authorities had made the biggest cuts to their teenage pregnancy services between 2008 and 2014.
The explanation was that easier access to contraception encouraged youngsters to have sex, leading to more risks taken and more unplanned pregnancies.
This division in expert opinion is further complicated by the explanations teenagers themselves offer. Sexting, bullying, social media smears and body insecurity are all cited as reasons for the decline in conception rates by youngsters growing up in a febrile climate of anxiety and peer pressure.
‘Online shaming is making this generation more conservative,’ says child psychologist emma Kenny. ‘They are less likely to have promiscuous sex purely because they don’t want everyone to know. Information spreads like wildfire on social media, amplifying the stigma associated with teenage pregnancy.’
Meanwhile, it seems falling pregnancy rates are also linked to the rise in sexting — the sending of X-rated text messages — which means teenagers may enter into relationships of a sexual nature without actually meeting in the flesh.
While this may lead to sex being deferred, sparing girls the trials of teenage motherhood, it leaves a potentially explosive legacy of explicit pictures and messages.
emma Kenny is upbeat about the general trend. ‘Cyber-communication is replacing face-to-face relationships and a lot of young people find sexting satisfying,’ she says.
Statistics seem to support this shift to online sexual interaction. Recent U.S. research found the number of high school students who have never had sex has increased by more than 10 per cent in two years, while another study suggested 93 per cent of boys and 62 per cent of girls were exposed to online pornography as adolescents.
Such behaviour will shock older generations, the sum total of whose sex education was usually a one-off biology lesson.
‘We barely talked about sex when I was ellie’s age,’ says Natalie, from Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, who is now married to ellie’s father harry, 35, and has two younger children, Jude, eight, and Oscar, five.
‘When I was 11, I saw one video in the school hall about sex. We all giggled and that was it.’
One might have expected Natalie’s parents to have been more open about sex at home, given their accidental pregnancy. Natalie’s mother, now 49, had just left school when she found out she was pregnant and had been dating the father — whom she is still with — for a year.
But, says Natalie: ‘ Mum has never talked about how she fell pregnant or what it was like having me so young. I think she’s embarrassed.’
Natalie met harry, three years her senior, when she was 13. They started having sex when Natalie was 16, by which time her understanding of pregnancy had come largely from playground gossip.
‘ Several of my friends had already lost their virginity,’ she says. ‘ even though it wasn’t openly discussed by adults, underage sex was normal.’
NATALIE
discovered she was pregnant in January 2002, when she had just left school and begun working as a hairdresser.
‘ Mum reminded me of the opportunities I’d miss — the cruise ship I’d planned to work on and the freedom I’d lose. I’d never realised she felt that way.’
But a week later, during which time Natalie booked her abortion, her mum had a change of heart: ‘She sat me down and said she would help me bring up my baby, just as her motherother had helped her. But it wasn’t easy.
‘My friends were shocked and it was hard watching their lives carry on without me,’ says Natalie. ‘I comfort ate and gained 5st. I felt overwhelmed.’.’
After ellie was born, Natalie, who moved in with th harry when ellie was three weeks old, struggled to adjust. ‘It took months to properly bond with her,’ she says. ‘I don’t regret her for an instant but I wish she had arriveded later.’
Little wonder that she was anxious for her daughter to avoid making the same mistake. She discussed sex openly with ellie in a way her own ‘ prudish mother didn’t.
‘If sex is talkeded about on television I’ll bring it t up so she’s not embarrassed,’’ says Natalie. And it seems to have worked.
ellie, who hopes to become an interior designer after university and has beenn having sex education since the age of ten, adds: ‘I don’t feel awkward asking mum anything. Shehe has explained that after she had me she couldn’t go out, and she wants me to get a
good job and r relationship before I get pregn pregnant.’ Yet she also cites social media, and in particularparticu skinny Instagram models, as a reason she is reluctant t to have sex. ‘Girls are more body-consciousbod nowadays,’ she says says. ‘They worry boys will think they’rethey’ fat or that they don’t have bo boobs. Being pregnant would be ju just awful.’ She prefers flirtingflirtin with her classmates online on social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.
‘It’s called “linking” — where you act like a new coup couple but the flirtation is limited to online contact,’ explains Ellie Ellie, whose longest relationship, earli earlier this year, lasted a week and who whose girlfriends are similarly abstine abstinent. ‘ Talking online means less pres pressure.’
It’s also a fact that emergency contraception has never been easier to access. Last month, S Superdrug announced it was to sell a halfprice version of the m morning-after pill. And, adds Kenn Kenny: ‘Let’s be honest — abortions ar are really easy to get. You don’t even have to go to your doctor. Teenagers can call the British Pregnancy Abo Abortion Service with a caller identity code and be seen the same day.’
And, Kenny says, o other sociopolitical changes have helped.
‘Access to the intern internet has made all teenagers, no matte matter what their background, aspiration aspirational,’ she says. ‘ Teenage mums a are hardly glamorised on Instagram,Insta while popular reality television programmes such as Teen Mom and 16 And Pregnant provide carcrash accounts o of teenage pregnancy. Girls know pregnancy will sap their ambition ambition.’
Then there is the powerfulpow tool of shame. ‘You would ge get bullied for getting pregnant,’ s says Brooke Ramsay, 15, from CroydonCroy in South London. ‘Everyone kno knows we’re too young to have babies.’
A-grade student B Brooke, who dreams of becoming a marine biologist, recalls a recent date with a boy who had asked her out on Snapchat.
An hour after they met, he moved in for a kiss and tried to touch her bottom. ‘I said no because I knew that if I did kiss him, or more, he’d tell everyone and I don’t want people thinking I’m a slag,’ she says. ‘My generation is quick to judge.’
It seems as if Brooke — who has had two boyfriends, each lasting about a month, and gone no further than a kiss with either — rebuffs advances on account of her reputation as much as her moral values. And who can blame her when rumours spread so quickly via smartphones?
‘Guys who have dated my friends have told everyone they’ve had sex afterwards when they haven’t,’ says Brooke.
ThIS
has all come as something of a shock to Brooke’s mother Claire, 44, an accounts assistant married for 15 years to Grant, 48, a car dealer.
‘I didn’t even know what periods were until secondary school,’ says Claire. ‘But Brooke knows all about sex already. Free condoms are handed out at school. The embarrassment has gone out of it. But Brooke knows her own mind. She won’t let boys touch her.’
having been introduced to sex education in school at the age of ten, with a cartoon video, Brooke was given a ‘ sex workshop’ this year in which she learnt how to put on a condom.
‘We practised on a banana,’ she recalls. ‘ The condom felt slippery and disgusting and sex just sounded painful. Plus I know if I got pregnant I’d feel sick and would be constantly worrying about my school grades.’
Nevertheless, Brooke and her friends — none of whom has yet had sex — come under intense pressure from boys, who seem as anxious to dispose of their virginity as the girls are to abstain.
‘Nowadays there’s a thing called an F-boy,’ explains Brooke. Endearingly, she refuses to swear, but it’s plain what the F stands for: ‘It means you’re a player — one of the popular boys who get the most girls. F-boys make girls think they like them by saying they love them and they’re beautiful, so they can have sex and then leave afterwards.’
The girls they fool into physical relationships are dubbed ‘ Beat and Deletes’ — a term requiring little explanation.
Claire, who lost her own virginity at 16 to a boyfriend of six months, discusses sex openly with her daughter and lets Brooke watch 18-rated films and the reality TV series Love Island, in which contestants can be seen in bed with one another. ‘When I was a teenager the most risqué thing on television was people kissing,’ Claire says. ‘ Love Island is very graphic but she knows everything anyway. What’s the point in hiding it from her?’ While teenagers are increasingly clued up about sex, their social landscape rarely permits them to actually have it.
Increased health awareness and parental concerns over safety mean girls are less likely to sneak into pubs under age and are drinking less alcohol than ever — just 9 per cent of teenagers said they’d had alcohol in the past week in 2013, compared with 25 per cent in 2003.
It is harder to forget about contraception when you’re sober — and harder still if you never meet in person at all.
Brooke conducts most of her relationships on social media.
‘I’ll send boys I like emojis and videos of myself looking pretty and pouting on Snapchat — you can get away with flirting more online as it’s not as embarrassing,’ she says.
Brooke doesn’t want to become a mum until her late 20s.
For older teenage girls, the prospect of getting pregnant is in some ways more daunting still. ‘Now there would be more pressure on me to go through with a pregnancy, as I’m technically an adult,’ says Eleanor Bailey, 18, an A-level student from hereford who started having sex with her boyfriend Zachary, also 18, a year and two months ago. ‘But I don’t want a baby until I’m in my mid-20s.’
Eleanor has been on the Pill since she was 16 — this is her second sexual relationship — but says her college, which has a sexual health counsellor, supplies condoms.
‘This is the age at which a lot of people are experimenting,’ she says. ‘ Our college knows we’re going to have sex and want us to do it safely.’
Nonetheless, she believes casual sex is less common for her generation because they are concentrating on their futures.
‘We’re focused on getting into university and finding a job. We rarely go to parties. Sex is a distraction we can do without.’
And Eleanor is all too aware that indiscretions can easily end up being flaunted to the world.
‘There is a real threat of boys posting naked photos of girls on social media — it happened to a girl in my school when I was 14 and she was mortified. It creates longterm trust issues.’
Teenage pregnancy rates may continue to fall, but underage sex still causes worrying problems.