Unprotected Group Sex Among Adolescents a Public Health Concern

In a startling report, a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher says that adolescents are increasingly engaging in unprotected group sex which could potentially lead to large outbreaks of sexually transmitted diseases. In the study published in the Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, researcher Emily Rothman, associate professor of community health sciences at BUSPH, and her colleagues report that according to their research, one in thirteen adolescent (under age) girls report having been involved in sexual relations with more than one other person at the same time.

Rothman and her team surveyed 328 girls between the ages of 14 and 20 in order to learn more about sexual trends among the under age population in the Boston metro area. The hope was that the team would be able to find gaps in sex education, particularly involving the use of condoms among teens. What they found however, suggests a new, disturbing trend, and that is, more teens than ever are apparently engaging in unprotected group sex, and worse, that nearly half of those girls that reported at least one such occurrence, also reported that they had felt pressured into it either by peers or by a boyfriend.

They found that out of all those surveyed, 7.3 percent said they had engaged in some form of group sex, and nearly half of those encounters involved unprotected sex.

The team also found that those girls that reported engaging in group sex, also showed higher rates of cigarette smoking, higher rates of date violence and higher rates of STD infections. They also found that the same girls also reported higher rates of pornography viewing; in some cases, five times as high as those who did not engage in group sex.

Also, the statistics showed that the average age of the girls when engaging in their first group sex encounter was just 15. 6, though the vast majority of them said they had only done so once. Just twenty one percent reported doing it more than once.

Not surprisingly, the surveys revealed that alcohol was a factor in nearly a third of such encounters and of those, half reported being forced to drink before the encounter began.

Rothman writes in the report that such high rates of unprotected sex indicate a major health problem is likely brewing in the Boston area, and probably in other areas around the country as adolescents put themselves and others at risk by engaging in a form of sex that has a much higher potential of infection due to the increased number of people involved in each encounter.