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Despite occasional medium panic attack , untried adolescent are remarkably unlikely to be sexually participating , raw research notice . And even old teens are delay sex more frequently than in the past times .
The study , published online today ( April 1 ) in the daybook Pediatrics , find that a mere 2.4 pct of 12 - year - olds had ever had sex . At 16 , a third of adolescent reported sexual activity , a number that climbed to 71 percent by age 18 and 19 .
Teenagers are now more likely than previous generations to delay sex, studies find.
down in the mouth rates of sexual natural process among new stripling have been the norm for decades , study investigator suppose . latterly , however , erstwhile adolescent seem moreinclined to take it easy , too .
" Policymakers and the media often sensationalize teen intimate behavior , evoke that adolescents as young as 10 or 11 are increasingly sexually dynamic , " cogitation researcher Lawrence Finer of the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute said in a statement . " But the datum just do n’t support that concern . Rather , we are seeing teens wait longer to have sexual practice , using contraceptives more frequently when they part have sex , and being less potential to become meaning than their peers of retiring decades . " [ Teen Pregnancy Rates by State ]
The determination match earliest studies that put thecurrent teen pregnancyrate at a 40 - year low . A report released in 2012 found that teenager gestation peaked in 1990 and wane 42 pct over the next 18 age . As of 2008 , the most late year data were available , 68 per every 1,000 teens experienced a maternity .
Finer and his conscientious objector - generator Jesse Philbin , also of Guttmacher , used across the nation representative data point from the National Survey of Family Growth to track teens ' sexual histories over time . The information make out from the year 2006 to 2010 .
They find that in any give eld grouping , the likelihood of a teen being sexually combat-ready is lower than any time in the past 25 years . What ’s more , more than 80 percent of 16 - yr - old having sexuality for the first timeused contraceptives , the researchers found . A year later on , 95 percent of those adolescent had taken up contraceptive use . Those pace were similar to the numbers see in teens initiating sex after age 16 .
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Younger teens had a more troubling pattern , with adolescents who lead off having sex before age 14 using contraceptives less often and taking longer to adopt them into their sexual repertory .
Another alarming find was that of the few young adolescents who report take gender , many or most did not do so voluntarily . The researchers found that 0.6 percent of 10 - twelvemonth - old report having sex ; 62 percent of females who say they ’d had gender by that age reported that it was pressure .
likewise , 1.1 per centum of 11 - year - olds reported having sexuality , and 50 percent of the female in that mathematical group suppose their first time was coerced .
