Lottery pays for girls aged 12 to be quizzed about their sex lives

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Girls were encouraged to discuss their favourite sex acts in a lottery funded study

Girls of 12 were questioned about their sexual preferences by lottery-funded researchers, it has emerged.

Participants were encouraged to discuss their favourite sex acts and positions as part of a £242,000 study.

The initiative, financed by the Big Lottery Fund, was aimed at exploring young women's attitudes to safe sex.

But the project has come under fire for involving girls up to four years below the legal age of consent.

Campaigners hit out at "crude" exercises which involved asking participants to create posters describing "What I do and don't like about sex".

They also questioned the use of National Lottery cash to fund the project, reigniting the row over the payment of grants to obscure or unpopular causes.

In one activity during the project, run by the charity YWCA which works with disadvantaged young women, the word "sex" was written at the centre of a flip chart.

"Participants suggest all the words they can think of that are related to sex, from parents to sadomasochism, explaining them to each other if that is needed," said a report on the project.

Girls were also asked how far they agreed with statements such as "girls should not carry condoms".

One game involved running around a room saying sex-related words. Another involved writing "rude" and sexual words on male and female body maps.

For the "Is it a sex thing?" project, YWCA workers recruited 49 girls aged between 12 and 30 to take part in regular discussion groups at four locations.

In Carlisle, 18 girls aged between 12 and 16 took part. Most were sexually active.

A report into the project, unveiled at a conference on sex education in London said: "The group carried out an exercise in which they defined sexual acts that they liked and did not like."

The researchers concluded that girls in the Carlisle study group often engaged in sexual activity "for fun", a "dare" and "a laugh" - and not as part of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.

The other groups consisted of ten women aged between 15 and 17 in Acton, West London, young mothers in Northampton and lesbian or bisexual women in Bristol aged 23 to 30.

Some participants were already attending YWCA centres while others were recruited using poster campaigns. The YWCA said parental consent was obtained for under-16s.

The findings prompted the YWCA to call for sex education lessons to be made compulsory in schools - and that the classes must take into account "sex as a laugh" attitudes. Although set up by Christian founders, the YWCA no longer has a faith affiliation.

Norman Wells, director of the pressure group Family and Youth Concern, said: "In trying to break down young people's natural inhibitions about sex by means of such crude and voyeuristic exercises, sex educators are breaking down one of the most powerful disincentives to underage teenagers engaging in sexual activity.

"It's hard to see how an approach which could lead to more casual sex, more unmarried teenage pregnancy, more lone parenthood and more sexually-transmitted infections has been deemed a good cause and worthy of lottery funding."

The YWCA insisted the participants had chosen which issues they wished to discuss and workers merely acted as "facilitators". Colette Jones, YWCA research manager, said: "If we don't understand what young women are getting up to, how can we intervene?"

 

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