Madam, – You carried a report on a High Court case relating to the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2006 (Home News, December 17th). As a witness, I gave evidence on a number of issues including recent studies of the sexual behaviour of young people in Ireland. Unfortunately, your report of what I said was selective and misleading. I had in fact placed a lot of weight on the findings of the Irish Study of Sexual Health and Relationshipsby Layte et al (2006). They found that, in a nationally representative sample, the median age at which the group of 18-24 year old young adults had experienced sexual intercourse was 17. This applied to both men and women.
The mean age for women was 17.4 and for men 16.9. The statistics you reported came from studies of non-representative groups of young people. The mean age at first sexual intercourse of 15.5 years applied to sample of young people in Galway and the figure of 13.5 applied to a study of early school leavers. I mentioned these latter studies as examples of the point that rates vary according to the circumstances of young people. However it is important that smaller and less representative studies are not seen as reflective of national averages. – Yours, etc,