Sex: The Delinquency Antidote

There are few things in the world that get me as excited as the Findings section of Harper's Magazine. Each month, Findings is an amazingly constructed list of segue-less scientific findings taken out of their original context. (I'm typing faster just thinking about it.) In this month's issue they published the following finding and it is really something to chew on:

"children who engage in consensual sex in their early-teen or pre-teen years are less likely to become delinquents than children who are not sexually precocious."
The thing about Harper's Findings is that they don't provide supporting evidence or even footnotes to suggest where this finding came from or even how this conclusion was drawn. And whose to say what is meant by the word 'delinquent' in this sentence, but for the moment I say to hell with proper documentation and supporting arguments (I can feel my English teacher mom cringing.)

Could early understanding and consensual exploration of sex possibly not cause irreparable damage to kids? This is a hopeful thought. I happen to spend a considerable amount of time reading a host of online teen forums concerning sex and sexuality. In these forums you can see that a lot of teens are sexually precocious and curious. Using the submission to our Fresh Focus Video Contest as evidence, teens don't feel that they have been given adequate adult guidance about sex and they are looking for it other places. The Internet is providing places and avenues for teens to connect with each other and ask questions about sex and their bodies with out worry or pressure. At our January 22-23 Sex::Tech Conference we will be discussing ways to make sure that when young people use technology to figure out how to lead sexually healthy lives there will be good, correct easily accessible information there for them.