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One in five 14-year-old girls 'has had sex'
By Alistair Foster, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 23.03.05One in five 14-year-old girls is sexually active and says they have had an average of three partners, a survey claims today.
Half of the girls who have had sex admit to having had a one-night stand.
The survey of 2,000 girls with an average age of 141/2 shows that of the 22 per cent who claim they have had sex, two-thirds say they have had unprotected sex.
Half of those girls either turned to the morning-after pill or took a pregnancy test. About 50 per cent of the girls questioned for the Bliss magazine survey say they have had a sexual experience they regret.
The girls say that alcohol is one of the major causes of teenage sex. Almost two-thirds of the sexually active claim they had intercourse when they were drunk, 30 per cent say they did not even like their partner and a quarter revealed they were forced into it.
The number of teenage pregnancies in the UK is on the rise. Figures released last month revealed that 42,200 girls under the age of 18 conceived in 2003 - a rise of 200 on the previous year.
In London, the number of pregnancies among girls aged 15-17 is 51.1 per 1,000 - compared to the national average of 42.7 per 1,000.
Tina Radziszewicz, from the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy, said: "A high proportion of sexually active teenage girls would not be having sex if they were taught how to negotiate what they want from a relationship. This should be the responsibility of parents but with family break-ups at an all-time high, adults no longer have the communication skills to hold their own relationships together, let alone help their children.
"Society's constant bombardment of sexual imagery reinforces the idea that everybody's doing it, yet we expect teenagers to say no."
Despite the survey figures, 94 per cent of girls said love, affection and romance are more important to them than sex, although 84 per cent think boys are only interested in the latter.
Bliss editor Lisa Smosarski said: "These findings are extremely worrying. So many girls struggle to cope with the emotional fall-out from having had sex too young and wish they had waited. A lot of these incidents were spur-of-the-moment things which the girls often regret later.
"Peer pressure from their friends plays a great role. The fact is, there's nothing wrong with still being a virgin at 21 if it's right for them."
