Universite Laval researchers combined with the Association des Centres Jeunesse du Quebec to interview 3807 students in the spring of 1994 for a study on how they live.
The goal was to see the differences between 602 troubled teens and 3,205 other kids of their age.
The conclusion showed that yes indeed, the troubled teens had been traumatized by a lot of bad experiences, but what's interesting is that the normal teens were also pretty messed up.
* About 37 per cent of the troubled adolescents said they had attempted suicide, compared with about 12 per cent of the general secondary-school population.
Twelve percent of normal Quebec teenagers in the mid-90s had tried to committ suicide? Yikes!
* The average troubled teen had his or her first sexual relationship in their 14th year; the other teens were, on average, two years older when they had sex.
Normalz were having sex for the first time at 16. Seems young. (Always suspicious of that question, as girls probably deny having had sex and boys likely lie to say they did when they didn't).
* Almost 47 per cent of the troubled females said they had a "sexual relation against their will," while that figure was 18 per cent for girls in the general population.
Almost one in five normal teens reports to have been raped?
* About 27 per cent of the troubled teens said they had had more than three sexual partners; in the general population, that percentage was less than 10.
* Almost 40 per cent of the troubled teens had drug problems and almost 23 had alcohol problems; those percentages were 8 and 5, respectively, for the general population.
Suicide is not that far-fetched for many people.
ReplyDeleteA cow-orker who is treated for depression told me that, very often, the only thing that keeps him from killing himself is a lottery ticket, and when he is extremely depressed, once the draw has been done, he will wait until he get another ticket before checking it.
Nothing in that seems unusual. Of course, I was just out of my teens when that report came out, so...
ReplyDelete-Kevin
As for the age of first sexual intercourse, the statistics are flawed by methodology, since only teens who DID have sex enter the data. So if you do a survey only amongst teens, of course the average will be surprisingly low.
ReplyDeleteI suspect this particular report fueled a lot of the current "hypersexualization" scare, but I've seen recent studies measuring the age where more than 50% of people had had their first sexual relation, and it was close to 17, meaning at 16.5 years old, more than half of the kids were virgin. And we must remember that some percentage will never have sex in their whole life.