Kids more inclined to 'bed' with others

By GEOFF BOTTING
Shukan Bunshun (Dec. 23)

Ask a group of girls in their early teens about their views on sex, and you'll get some alarming responses.

"The younger you are when you have sex, the more status you get," pronounces a second-year junior high school student in Hyogo Prefecture.

A fifth-year elementary school girl says, "Girls who have sex when they're young get larger breasts."

"It's more fun that any game or video game," a second-year junior high school student confides.

No doubt about it, more and more early-teen females have few reservations about having sex, according to Shukan Bunshun.

A 2002 survey of girls in the third grade of junior high school found that 9.1 percent were sexually experienced. The rate had nearly tripled from the findings of a similar poll conducted in 1991. What's more, the rate has accelerated at breakneck speed in just the last couple of years.

"At the moment, we're dealing with a 12 percent rate," says Tsuneo Akaeda, a prominent gynecologist. "The decrease in the ages of youngsters having sex for the first time is a nationwide trend, to the extent where we can no longer say 'at least it's not my kid.' "

Why are more and more girls having sex at younger and younger ages?

The simple answer is that sex has become trendy among junior high kids, and even those in the last couple of grades of elementary school.

"It feels like nothing but a game or a fashion for them," says Fusako Araki, who is in charge of puberty issues at the GS Clinic in Chiba Prefecture.

Young girls have told her that the number of times they have sex is an index of their worth in the eyes of their peers.

"They do it in such unsanitary places as karaoke cubicles," Araki says. "Too many of these kids don't have a lot of respect for their bodies."

The problem starts with the pressure to be cool. For low teens and even younger kids this pressure has never been more intense. A big part of being cool is wearing the right clothes and looking the right way. So fashion- and cosmetic- makers, recognizing this, have responded by marketing products exclusively to pre-adult age groups.

The result is that kids barely out of puberty are forced to look, and even act, not as kids but as "small adults," in the words of Shukan Bunshun.

"That interim period when girls actually look pubescent has become extremely short nowadays," says a 42-year-old teacher at a junior high school in Kanagawa Prefecture. "Yet at the same time, these kids are psychologically weaker than their counterparts have been in previous years." It's a dangerous imbalance, the teacher says, that creates a host of insecurities for the youngsters, including those concerning sex.

What these kids need, of course, is better advice and guidance. Unfortunately, they can't rely on their parents for that.

"Even though in Japan we know that children must be properly taught about sex, most parents just don't bother," says Yukio Takekawa, a member of the Children Sex Education Research Network. "If they're silent on the topic, believing that their kids will somehow just pick up the knowledge or hoping that the teachers do all the teaching, then the young girls will just take in all the information that is available out there, including all the misinformation. No wonder they're out of control."


The Japan Times: Dec. 26, 2004
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