Teen Sex Statistics

All sex statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt, and understood for the imperfect measurements they are. Because society has a conflicted and often controversial relationship to sex, getting people to answer questions about their sex lives honestly and clearly is a much more difficult task than it may appear. This is doubly true when you are trying to research a group that is in any way marginalized, as teens are. Because teens are routinely denied basic sexual rights, they have many reasons to hide their sex lives from adults, and few reasons to be honest about them.

But none of this should stop us from trying to describe and understand the sexual behaviors of teens or any other group. Here are some statistics on teen sexual behaviors.

The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on sexual and reproductive health research, policy analysis and public education, reports that:

• In most of the developed world, the majority of young women become sexually active during their teenage years, the proportion who have had intercourse reaches at least three-quarters by age 20.
• Levels of sexual activity and the age at which teenagers become sexually active do not vary considerably across comparable developed countries, such as Canada, Great Britain, France, Sweden and the United States.
• Teenagers in the United States are more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 15 and have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships than teenagers in Canada, France, Great Britain and Sweden. As a result, they are more likely to have more than one partner in a given year.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that the fear of increasing rates of teenage sexual behavior may be unfounded. For example:

• Teenagers seem to be waiting longer to have intercourse. For example, the percentage of 12th-grade U.S. students who reported having had intercourse declined from 66.7% in 1991 to 60.5% in 2001.
• Teens may be replacing intercourse with more alternatives they perceive as safer. For example more than 50% of U.S. teens ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex. This number increases to almost 70% for those who are 18 and 19.

These findings are similar to numbers among Canadian teens.

More recently several media reports have suggested that there is an increase in anal sex among teens, but the data don’t support this:

• In a 1995 survey of teen males 15-19 years of age, 11% reporting having engaged in anal sex at least once.
• In a 2002 study of males and females aged 15-19, 11% of both reported having engaged in anal sex at least once.

These two studies suggest that the frequency of anal sex is not increasing.

In a more recent 2008 survey of 1300 at risk youth aged 15-21 16% of the respondents reported having had anal sex in the previous three months.

The most recent data from the CDC (released in June 2007) compiled sexual behavior data from adults (aged 20-59) but asked a few questions about teenage sexual behavior. Results include:

• 16% of adults reported first having sex before they were 15 years old.
• 15% of adults said they abstained from sex until they were 21 years of age.

Read more about teen sexuality

_Sources:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Trends in Sexual Risk Behaviors Among High School Students – United States, 1991-2001." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Volume 51 (2002): 856-859.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors Reported by Adults in the United States, 1999-2002." Advanced Data from Vital and Health Statistics No. 384. June 28, 2004. Accessed July 8, 2007. <http://public.cq.com/public-content/sexcdc.pdf>

Gates, G.J. & Sonenstein, F.L. “Heterosexual Genital Activity Among Adolescent Males: 1988 and 1995” Family Planning Perspectives Volume 32, Issue. 6 (2000).