Miami Herald - Monday, July 12, 1999
Daniel de Vise - Herald Staff Writer

Teen sex is declining across the nation in the late 1990s after increasing steadily every decade since the Eisenhower administration, according to an extensive survey of urban high school students by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC findings, published last month in a national medical journal, found celibacy on the rise among teens in Miami-Dade County, Broward County and six other major metropolitan areas between 1991 and 1997. Condom use also rose dramatically among teens age 14 to 18.

More conservative attitudes toward sex among young people are being attributed in part to raised public awareness of the dangers of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

"Everyone here, we all know about AIDS," said Adam Johnston, a 16-year-old junior at Fort Lauderdale High School. "They come in, and they show us graphs and how you get it. The students are knowledgeable. They're protecting themselves."

Using extensive questionnaires, the CDC surveyed high school students in the metro areas of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Jersey City, Miami, Philadelphia and San Diego. Surveys were done in odd years from 1991 to 1997.

Collecting and tabulating the data took more than a year, officials said.

Among the findings for South Florida teens:

A healthy majority of students -- 64.3 percent in Broward and 61.8 percent in Miami-Dade -- reported in 1997 that they had used a condom the last time they had sex. In contrast, fewer than half of the teens surveyed in 1991 said they were using condoms.

Just more than half of the South Florida students surveyed in 1997 said they had never had sex. Celibacy is growing more common among teens in both Broward and Miami-Dade, findings show.

Roughly a third of students surveyed in 1997 said they had engaged in sex in the past three months. Sexual activity was more prevalent in both counties six years earlier.

Researchers and educators say the improvement is a payoff from years of AIDS-prevention efforts involving schools, families, churches and health agencies, and cable TV networks such as MTV. In Florida, schools teaching sex education are required to emphasize abstinence.

Many researchers believe that public education has made teens more cautious about sex and wary of AIDS, the seventh-leading cause of death among Americans ages 15 to 24.

The federal health agency has funded AIDS education programs in Miami-Dade, Broward and other urban areas since 1987, part of a massive push to educate the young on the virtues of safe sex and celibacy.

"We haven't fixed the problem, but we're making progress," said Laura Kann, a CDC researcher in Atlanta. "We're seeing progress across all the cities in this report, fortunately. And Miami and Fort Lauderdale are right in there."

The decline may also reflect changing social attitudes about sexual activity.

The sexual revolution, which proclaimed free love for generations of American teens, is clearly ancient history today.

Between 1970 and 1988, for example, the proportion of sexually active high-school-age girls rose from 29 percent to 57 percent.

But after marching upward, the share of American teens having sex peaked at about 54 percent in 1990. Numbers leveled off in the early 1990s and have started to decline, federal officials say.

The latest statistics are based on questionnaires given to about 2,400 students randomly selected from grades 9 through 12, in each of the eight school systems.

To minimize dishonesty and exaggeration, district officials isolated students from one another as they answered the anonymous forms.

South Florida teens appeared to be less sexually active than those in other urban areas. Among the eight cities surveyed, only San Diego had a lower share of students who said they have had sex: 44.7 percent.

At the high end, 63.9 percent of Philadelphia teens said they have had sex at least once.

Questions about condom use produced even more striking findings.

Students were asked whether they had used a condom the last time they had sex. In Philadelphia, 70.5 percent of teens answered "yes" in 1997, up from only 47.6 percent in 1991. Most of the other cities reported large gains.

In South Florida, some of the success in persuading teens to practice safe sex or to abstain from sexual relations may be due to a network of health centers based at Miami-Dade and Broward schools.

The clinics educate and inform students in middle and high schools. The Miami-Dade clinics give out condoms, while the practice is forbidden in Broward schools.

"We know that they're making more intelligent choices than they did in the past, and that's only because of education and awareness," said Angela Williams-Welch, coordinator of the student health clinic at Northwestern High School in Dade.

e-mail: ddevise@herald.com
990712
MH990706

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