SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2002
Thai teens having sex sooner: Survey
AFP
BANGKOK: Thai teenagers are having sex earlier, more frequently and more irresponsibly than their parents have believed, a new poll revealed on Saturday.
Results of a survey of 1,330 high school and vocational students showed that teenagers were having sex for the first time at an average age of 16, and that just one in five of them used condoms, the Bangkok Post reported.
The survey conducted by the Abac Polling Institute and the Thai Health Promotion Foundation found that 31.3 per cent of young men and 9.9 per cent of young women had already had sex, the English-language daily said.
The Nation newspaper cited the survey's results in which more than half of parents and 60 per cent of teachers polled found the sexual behaviour of today's teenagers alarming.
"In the past few years, drugs were the most serious problem among our youngsters, but sex problems are now rising to the point of crisis," Chulalongkorn University lecturer and psychiatrist Sompong Jitradub was quoted as saying.
Despite the tattered image of Thailand as a haven for prostitution, strip bars and underage sex, the kingdom is in fact extremely conservative.
But Thai society and government has been struggling to cope with what is perceived as the rapidly liberalising attitudes of the kingdom's youth.
Sompong said part of the concern could be traced to the explosion of pornographic sites on the Internet, as well as to the revealing fashion trends of highschool girls who often wear extraordinarily tight-fitting uniforms.
Last January, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra stopped the distribution by his office of a sex manual for teenagers, saying it used inappropriate language.
Some 100,000 copies of the manual were shelved when criticism by officials reportedly took aim at certain slang phrases in the manual such as "chuk wao" (flying a kite) and "tok bet" (hooking fish) were deemed unacceptable.
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