The sexual and reproductive health of younger adolescents

The sexual and reproductive health of younger adolescents
7. Sexual transitions and risky practices in early
adolescence
7.1 What counts as “sex” in young
adolescents’ lives?
There is little doubt that younger female and (to
a somewhat lesser extent) male adolescents are
highly vulnerable to violations of their rights to
bodily integrity. Among the many reasons for this
are the attractiveness of their developing sexual
bodies, their willingness to trust others, their sexual
curiosity and their sometimes limited capacities
to critically analyse potentially harmful situations,
foresee consequences and take a course of
protective action.
Researchers who hope to obtain sexual histories
from adolescents must cope with complicated
issues of meaning, definition, interpretation and
concealment. What counts as “sex”? Is a 14-year-old
girl who was forced to engage in fellatio with an
uncle when she was 10 years old likely to report this
as sexual activity? Is a young adolescent boy who
was penetrated by older boys (or anally penetrated
others) but now has a girlfriend likely to mark
his sexual initiation as one that began with anal
sex? Nor are young adolescents always “victims”:
stronger, early maturing or more aggressive boys
may coerce other boys or girls, while gangs of boys
(and sometimes girls) may jointly terrorize their
weaker peers into submitting to forced sexual acts.
Young adolescents may also be engaging in
voluntary expressions of their sexual impulses
and curiosity that they do not necessarily define
as “having sex”, sometimes as early as 10–12 years
of age (Eggleston et al. 1999; Juárez and Martín
2006). “Sex play” with peers is not likely to be
considered real “sex”; it may be casual, without
affect, and without personal consequence. Boys
in some settings may visit a sex worker for their
“real” sexual initiation rather than waiting until they
have a girlfriend, but this may not “count”; girls
may become involved with older boys or seek (and
be sought by) men who will buy them gifts or pay
their school fees, or be married off to a man they do
not know. Behavioural variations and ambiguities
surrounding their meaning and interpretation by
young adolescents themselves raise the possibility
that the usual research tools may be quite
inadequate to the task. It would be interesting,
for example, to ask older adolescents to reflect on
their earlier experiences from the vantage point
of their (now) advanced “maturity” – to consider
whether they felt physically, emotionally or socially
prepared, how much choice they exercised, and
whether they might have done things differently if
they knew then what they know now.
The event of first heterosexual vaginal intercourse
is often taken as a marker of becoming “sexually
active”, even though it may have been preceded by
other forms of sexual activity and, if non-marital,
followed by a series of non-sexual relationships
or only sporadic sexual encounters (Singh et al.
2000; Juárez and Martín 2006). A number of studies
document the timing of initiation of heterosexual
relationships among adolescents, such as having
“crushes” (which may begin in early adolescence),
engaging in “courtship” behaviour (flirting), having
a regular boyfriend or girlfriend (dating), going
steady, and becoming engaged, as well as the
initiation and progression of physical intimacies
such as holding hands, kissing and hugging,
intimate fondling or caressing (“heavy petting”),
and vaginal intercourse (Ruan and Lau 1997; Lam
et al. 2002; Awusabo-Asare et al. 2006; Guiella and
Woog 2006; Munthali et al. 2006; Bankole et al.
2007; Hindin and Hindin 2009; Upadhyay et al.
2006; Zabin et al. 2009). (These neat sequences
do not capture those cases where early sexual
initiation is not preceded by lesser forms of
intimacy or does not happen in a recognized
relationship at all.) Fewer studies ask about other
22