Earlier this week, three teenagers were arrested for having sex with a 15-year-old girl. One of the boys who was charged is 15 years old.
The report did not specify if the girl was raped but, in any case, T&T does in fact have a law on its books which makes it a crime for teenage boys to have sex with girls their own age. It cannot be argued that this law was created in order to protect girls, since the charge laid is that the boy "had sexual intercourse with a female between the ages of 14 to 16 who was not his wife." In other words, a teenage girl or boy having sex is pernicious only if they are not married.
Think about this for a moment: a guidance counsellor, say, is consulted by two 15-year-olds. One says they want to have sex. The other says they want to get married so they can have sex. Which teen do you think is more likely to be psychologically or socially maladjusted?
Of course, the root of this law lies not in effective policy, but in antediluvian morality–the same morality that sanctions the marriage of 12-year-old Muslim girls and 14-year-old Hindu ones. Sexual activity between young teenagers may not be socially desirable, but that is primarily because of the possible consequences, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
However, the correct response in a mature society would be to teach young people to take proper precautions against pregnancy and STIs, not try and prevent all sexual intercourse. This approach is not only doomed to failure, but also exacerbates the negative consequences. Tracking in the United States showed that young people whose sex education was exclusively abstinence-only programmes still had sex at the same rates as other teens, but were less likely to use condoms or other birth control. By contrast, in the Western European countries where sex between teenagers is viewed as a natural step on the road to adulthood, the rates of STDs and teenage pregnancies are much lower than in societies where sex outside marriage is considered morally reprehensible.
Nonetheless, there is a significant group of people here who talk as though sex is the root of nearly all the social problems in this place. For example, a typical line is "children having children" leads to crime. Yet the same people who proffer this argument are also very likely to talk about the "good old days," ignorant of the fact that more children had children 60 years ago –ie., there were more girls having babies in their teens then than now. Not only that, but about half of those births occurred outside marriage, as compared to just 11 per cent now, according to figures from the Central Statistical Office.
This kind of misperception is widespread in T&T. In 2011, the Ministry of Social Development released a Norms and Values Report done by the ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre. The report found that three-quarters of the people surveyed believed that the majority of couples are shacked up, and nearly all of them believed that most teenagers are sexually active and have two or more sexual partners.
But, according to a 2007 Global School-based Student Health Survey, just 24 per cent of Trinidadian students have ever had sexual intercourse. Moreover, other surveys have found that the median age for first sexual experience is 18 years, and that just half of teenagers have had sex by this age. The SSHS also found that just 17 per cent of the students had had sex with more than one person.
It therefore seems that only a minority of young people fit the sexually promiscuous image that the majority of people (including young people themselves) have. But, even for that minority which does fit the perception, most people have a completely erroneous idea as to the causes of such behaviour. The average commenter attributes promiscuity to single-parent families, rejection of traditional values, and lack of religious upbringing, while the more intellectual commentators focus on culture, values, and State funding of Carnival and race lobbyists. But each of these explanations is either merely correlative or plain wrong; and none offers any policy prescription. (Preaching and post-modernist analyses are not bases for policy-making.)
A more useful approach is demonstrated by economist Marina Adshade in her book Dollars and Sex. "In economics, people behave as if they are solving a cost-benefit problem," she writes. "They may not calculate the expected cost of promiscuity, for example, but when economic factors change costs, men and women respond by making different decisions than they might have otherwise."
Thus, in a social context where a significant number of men in their prime years are either unemployed or incarcerated, women "behave as though they have estimated the low probability of finding a husband who can afford a wife and family...and they have found that the benefits of casual, risky sex exceeded the expected costs."
Solve the economic equation, therefore, and we can start solving the social problems.
Kevin Baldeosingh in a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook