Overview
The majority of teenagers in the USA begin their adolescence in a state of sexual abstinence and end it sexually active. These before and after points are known, but there is much about adolescents’ abstinence behavior and meaning-making that is not. This essay summarizes the state of scientific and scholarly knowledge about abstinence in the lives of teenagers. It places abstinence in its social and political context, discusses various definitions of abstinence, examines research on the goals of abstinence and whether it achieves them, and considers potential benefits and harms of abstinence to adolescents, while highlighting gaps in knowledge and areas of controversy.
The majority of teenagers in the USA begin their adolescence in a state of sexual abstinence and end it sexually active. While fewer than one in eight 15 year olds have ever had sex, 70% of 19 year olds have had vaginal sexual intercourse (Abma et al. 2004). Though these before and after points are known,...
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References
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Masters, N.T. (2011). Abstinence. In: Levesque, R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_341
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_341
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