Could more casual sex among young people help explain the increase in teen pregnancy and STD rates?
“The numbers aren’t necessarily there,” says Foldy, the state health officer. Over the past decade or so, Wisconsin’s Youth Behavioral Risk Surveys have found that the number of kids who say they have had sex has mostly hovered around 40 to 45 percent. (This figure, though, is of kids who self-report their sexual activities, so the actual rates are probably higher, local experts say.) While there is no hard data to support an explosion in sexual activity among young people, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the nature of relationships is changing, and that this shift could contribute to an increase in more casual and risky sexual behaviors among young people. In interviews, 10 high school and college students describe a culture in which they felt pressured to just “get it over with,” in the words of one girl, a senior in a Madison area high school. “By junior year, 90 percent of kids had had sex,” agrees one recent graduate of a Madison high school, who is in colleg
