… go together like, well, err … rutting animals?

Well maybe not so much.

I’ve written several times before (eg. here and here) although not recently.

Regular readers will know that I’ve long advocated the more liberal Dutch approach rather than the American (and British) proscriptively controlling approach. So I was interested to see yet more expert opinion and research supporting this view under the title “What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex“. The article is inevitably American, but in my view it is just as applicable to the the Vatican, the UK or indeed any culture.

I’ll leave it to you to read the complete article and, I suggest, some of the linked items therein. What interesting is that Amy Schalet (author of Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex) who is being interviewed has experience of both the Dutch and American systems, and based on that experience is firmly of the Dutch persuasion. Here are a few quotes which struck me.

Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch. What are they doing right …
[What] I’d noticed with my American friends is that there wasn’t a lot of conversation between parents and teens about sexuality and there was a lot of discomfort around the issue …

Coming out of the sexual revolution the Dutch really decoupled sex from marriage, but they didn’t decouple sex from love. If the first piece is that there weren’t these immediate associations of teen sex with danger, the second is that it remained anchored in the concept of steady relationships and young people being in love …

[The Dutch] say ‘We permit so we can control’ and that’s also their attitude toward drugs and prostitution. It’s worth pointing out that US teens are more likely to use drugs than the Dutch, even though there are more liberal policies [in the Netherlands].

That idea of ‘It’s actually a form of control’ is for most people in the US counter-intuitive. But if you expect self-control and give people an opportunity to exercise it, you might get more of it …

Something that did strike me when I came in early ’90s to this country [USA] is that one of the differences in the aftermath of the sexual revolution is that Dutch society became a lot more secular.

What stood out to me was that so often [in the US] people seemed to think you can only have morality and a strong social fabric if you believe in a higher authority, a God that would otherwise punish [people]. There isn’t a belief that people are naturally cooperative, which lots of research suggests they are.

Schalet then goes on to expound her ABCD approach. Here are the one-liners.

A is autonomy. A lot of times people do realize that adolescents are supposed to develop autonomy during that phase of life, but that doesn’t get applied to sex …
B is build good, positive relationships. We need more emphasis on healthy teen relationships …
C is connectedness. It’s possible to really challenge the assumption that teens and parents have to be at loggerheads …
D is diversity. A lot of sex education doesn’t recognize diversity [and] I don’t just mean differences in orientation …

I wish I knew how we could change the prevailing ethos. It would be so much better.