Statistics compiled in recent years suggest why American schools cannot easily ignore students’ sex lives.

• Around half of all Americans ages 15 to 19 have had vaginal intercourse, and more than half have had oral sex. Whereas by age 15 only 13 percent of teens have ever had sex, 70 percent have engaged in sexual intercourse by the time they reach age 19.

• Every year 3 million teens—about 1 in 4 sexually active youths—get a sexually transmitted disease, with chlamydia and gonorrhea more common among teens aged 15 to 19 than in any other age group. Each year, hundreds of adolescents also become infected with HIV
(human immunodeficiency virus), which can destroy their body’s protection against serious infections.

• Between 1990 and 2004, the pregnancy rate for America’s 15- to 19-year-olds decreased by an average of 3 percent a year; an estimated 11.7 percent of teenage girls were pregnant in 1990 compared with 7.6 percent in 2002. By 2004, about 31 percent of teenage girls had become pregnant before they were 20 years old. A sexually active teenage girl who did not use contraceptives had a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year. By the mid-1990s, the rate in the United States had become the highest of any of the world’s industrialized democracies—twice as high as that of England, France, and Canada, and nine times as high as the Netherlands and Japan (Bailey & Piercy, 1997). The decline in teen pregnancies from 1990 to 2005 reversed in 2006 when the teen birth rate began to rise,
and unmarried childbearing increased significantly (Ventura, 2007).

About one quarter of Americans have been victims of some form of child sexual abuse, ranging from unwanted touching to sexual intercourse. Some of the abuse has occurred in schools.

Such numbers reflect conditions that impose on students and school personnel the need to decide what to do about matters of sex in schools. Typical kinds of decisions are illustrated in the following sampling of incidents that students and school personnel can face.

Among sexual episodes that require student decisions, some concern (a) joining the crowd, (b) interrupting schoolmates’ sex acts, (c) serving as a lookout for classmates who engage in sexual behavior, (d) objecting to condoms, and (e) avoiding embarrassment.