The teen-mum phenomenon – A cultural flaw?

Unlike in most European countries, oral contraception – or the Pill – is free in the UK. So why does Great Britain have the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe?

On the face of it, Britain and its people enjoy all the benefits and comforts that come with First World wealth and modernity. But the face of it doesn’t always tell the whole story. Look beyond the traditional cultural references, and something seems slightly odd. Why so many teenage girls walking around with prams and milk formula in their shopping bags?

Even though the UK’s teenage mother rate is now at its lowest level since the late 1960s, for some reason the ‘teen mum’ phenomenon is still a prevailing part of British culture. In this sense, Britain is far behind the rest of Western Europe, where an adolescent with a third trimester belly is a very rare sight.

The latest birth rate summary shows that in 2015, the average number of babies born per every 1,000 women aged 15 to 17 years old in the UK was 21. For comparison, this number was only 3.8 in the Netherlands, which currently has the lowest teenage mother rate in Europe. Scandinavia follows with rates never exceeding six, and the EU average stands at 10. What do the Dutch and the Scandinavians do differently, and where do the Brits go wrong?

“Sex education in the UK is appalling,” says Rachael Pells, the Education Correspondent for The Independent. “It’s not effective at all. The discussion about sex is not widely encouraged in schools.”  Most state schools are not obligated to discuss relationships or anything beyond the biology of sex, so for many students this kind of information is going to be completely lost amongst other parts of the curriculum. Pells explains that the students who have questions or want to discuss relationships need more than a couple of classes to come forward. “They need to be encouraged over a series of weeks to talk about sex like adults,” she says.

In most Western European countries, sex education covers much more than the biological elements of sex. It explains it as a part of healthy relationships, and emphasises the idea of love, rather than reproduction. These classes usually take place as open discussions and stretch over the course of several years. Children are encouraged to ask questions. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are UK schools which teach girls about periods whilst boys have an extra PE lesson. “That’s completely inapplicable in life. It’s bizarre that they’d separate the two genders to teach something that affects both of them,” says Pells.

On March the 1st 2017, Justine Greening, the Secretary of State for Education, tabled amendments which made it a requirement that all secondary schools in England teach relationships and sex education (RSE). The last time RSE was addressed by the government was in 2000 with the Learning and Skills Act, which transferred responsibility for sex education to the schools’ head teacher and governing bodies. Therefore, these classes have been left out in the past. “If the school is given the option not to teach something, they take that option because it’s easier,” explains Pells. “The current curriculum is older than the age of most children in these lessons. Things like homosexuality, bisexuality or gender identity were not discussed 18 years ago.” She explains that unlike in 2000, today children are exposed to online dating and pornography. For them to get a good education, the RSE curriculum should be updated every year, not once in two decades. “I’m pleased that the government has addressed it now, but it’s been missing for a long time and I suppose that’s also why a lot of adults don’t have a good education on the matter.”

However, not all hope is lost: BigTalk Education, an organisation which delivers quality sex education to 120 schools each year, is making a significant difference in what children know about sex and sexual consent. Lynnette Smith, a Specialist Relationship & Sex Education Trainer, and the founder and Managing Director of BigTalk, says that she has seen a massive increase in children being able to talk openly about their bodies, because her team starts teaching children from the age of three. “In the past, sex education was very hit-and-miss in primaries, and then in seniors it didn’t start until students were 13 or 14 years old, which was way too late. Starting very early is more in line with the European norms,” says Smith.

But what is the reason for such poor sex education and the non-existent conversation about sex in the first place? “There is a lot of fear and misconception about what good quality relationships and sex education actually are,” says Smith. “It’s well documented that as British people we’re not very good about talking about these things.” She believes that another problem is that the media only talk about “how bad it is”. “They never showcase a really good quality sex education, like the sort we do over here at BigTalk, because it’s not sensational.” Smith believes that “with decades of no sex education, or really bad sex education, parents have had bad experiences and that doesn’t help them to know what to say when talking with their children”.

Broadcaster and novelist Anne Atkins, a regular contributor to the Radio 4 Today programme’s “Thought for the Day“, says that high teenage birth rates are also linked with taboo, peer pressure, norms, religious conviction and belief. Like Smith, she says that the role of parents is very significant. “Most influential of all is probably how the parents themselves behaved when they were younger, rather than how they tell their offspring to behave now,” she explains. “It’s not got much to do with the Pill to my mind,” she says. “The ready availability of contraception to underage people gives the message that underage sex is acceptable or even expected, so it may actually contribute to rates of underage pregnancy. After all, before the Pill was available, underage pregnancy was far less ubiquitous.”

Hannah Ewens, Junior Editor for Vice, has travelled to Paris and back to buy the “morning after pill”, proving that the whole journey – including the pill – was cheaper than the pill alone in the UK. She believes that the main reason for high teenage birth rates is that there are many barriers to getting this pill for free. “The pharmacy may not have the right pharmacist in to do it. They might have someone on the desk who doesn’t want to give it to you for religious reasons. You’re obviously doing this under time constraint, so pharmacies might be shut. I know friends from school who had to get an abortion because they couldn’t actually get hold of it,” she says. Ewens reckons that the rates are not going to change until the morning after pill is free for everybody across the country. “You should be able to walk into Tesco and just pick it up and take it.”

The morning after pill is also known as “emergency contraception”. Just as Atkins believes that the free availability of contraception encourages underage sex, would the availability of the emergency pill encourage unprotected sex? Ewen argues that the idea of girls relying on the morning after pill and not taking it with caution is “really patronising”. She says that if there are warnings on the package, “girls will read them and look after themselves. You can feel the effect it has on your body when you take it. Getting hold of it shouldn’t be as big of a deal as it is”.

Ewens’ suggestion that the morning after pill should be easy to come by is perhaps synonymous of UK attitudes towards contraception: at best laid back, at worse lackadaisical. Perhaps it’s also a question of social disadvantage, or ignorance and poor education, or a mix of all three. “In areas of disadvantage there are always going to be a lot of girls that get pregnant quite young. If you live in a city, you see a much wider range of life situations, so you might not notice it. But there are pockets in the UK that are quite deprived and there is a link between that and young parents,” says Pells.

Rachael Pells went to a state school in Suffolk and admits that by the time she reached her GCSE year, there was a handful of girls who were pregnant. “I think that the fact we didn’t have sex education was certainly a factor.”

Lynette Smith, the director of BigTalk, believes that it will take at least a generation for this country to get the required standard of sex education. “We’ve been training over 400 trainee teachers, and most of them said they found the sessions hugely helpful. They hadn’t had training and weren’t sure what they could and couldn’t say,” says Smith. But she admits that even if most teachers are trained, “there is a lot of reserve within this country about talking about sex”.

Pells remembers an educational trip to a maternity and social care ward in Finland. She asked the nurses about teenage pregnancies, and they looked confused. “They didn’t understand what I was asking. I wondered if it was just a translation problem, but their English was excellent. They said: ‘No, we just don’t really have any teenage pregnancies here.’ And me and my colleagues were all shocked. We couldn’t believe it.”

That made Pells realise that people in the UK are unaware of the scale of the problem. “We live in a world where we are used to seeing young mums. There is always going to be snobbery around it, but it will never be shocking. It would be weird if someone saw a young pregnant woman and thought it was unusual. It would never occur to me to express that shock, I suppose. It’s certainly the case that if you’re in a community where it’s quite common for younger couples to have children, especially in deprived areas, then you are more likely to see it as normal. It encourages the trend. Thinking back to my school, it was girls in the same social groups who would become pregnant very young.”

There is a long way to go before the UK talks about sex openly. But there are chinks of light. Greening’s policy proposals point the way forward, and organisations such as BigTalk are doing valuable work. But getting Britain on track toward lowering the teenage pregnancy rate to modern, Western European standards remains a challenge. There is much to learn from the Nordic countries and from the Netherlands, but the real answer is closer to home: quality education is essential, especially in the UK’s many “deprived pockets”.