Campaigner says safe sex a myth

The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers has "shot up" over the last five years, a British campaigner against the free availability of contraceptives to young teenagers has said.

Ms Victoria Gillick, who was attending a Human Life International conference in Dublin, said the cost to the British government of treating chlamydia was now second only to HIV because of its long-term effects, which she said included sterilisation and ectopic pregnancies.

She said 10 per cent of all sexually active teenagers now had the disease. Although chlamydia was what she described as "a silent steriliser", UK Office of National Statistics had suggested four out of five girls had never heard of it. The incidence of gonorrhoea, genital herpes and genital warts had also "suddenly shot up" among teenagers in the last five years.

The pregnancy rate in Britain among girls aged 14 and 15 was "now higher than at any point this century", she added. Since 1989, the number of 14 and 15-year-olds who went to clinics for the morning-after pill had risen from just over 2,000 to just under 24,000.

There was a "serious problem of predation on young girls now" by males in their late teens and early 20s. The girls were "so young they don't know how to defend themselves or what they're supposed to do".

She argued that the effect of the safe sex campaign, which was introduced in the 1980s in an effort to reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS, was that its "broad brush approach and explicit and non-directional nature has caused maximum confusion to youngsters". Safe sex was a "myth, created by those who stood to gain most financially from both the liberation of youth and the irresponsibility of youth". Children had "understood the safe sex message to mean that sex is safe," she argued. "If you're going to teach children the facts of life, or modern sex education, you also have to give them some direction . . . The least well-educated and the least able are the ones who are going to take the safe sex message on board least of all. You've got to pitch what you're telling the children to the simplest level," she said.

"What is so sad is that children have had all their illusions blown away by a neurotic adult population that's off-loading all its problems on to young people's shoulders."

Children had to be told "quite firmly" what kind of behaviour was "sensible" and what kind of behaviour was "a no-no". It "was not fair" to leave children to make up their own minds.