For teens watching television and movies, listening to music, or hitting the Internet, it may seem that the main reason to have moral codes is to break them. But most teens still feel a sense of guilt about doing things that American society traditionally perceives as "immoral." When asked in a Gallup Youth Survey* last year about a list of nine circumstances generally considered to have a moral dimension, a firm majority of teens said they would feel guilty about doing every single one of them.
Given the current controversy over sex education -- the Bush administration seeks to increase funding for "abstinence-only" sex ed programs by one-third -- one question that arises is how teens currently view the morality of sex-related issues in the context of other moral questions. Another is whether boys and girls have differing moral perspectives when it comes to sex.
The first thing to note is that the sex-related questions rank at the bottom of the list of moral issues measured in the poll, suggesting that most teens do not view these matters as morally egregious as neglecting their parents or stealing.
Boys and girls are equally likely to say they'd feel guilty about most moral transgressions. However, the two items for which there are significant gender differences concern sex. Two-thirds (66%) of girls aged 13 to 17 said they would feel guilty about having sexual intercourse before marriage, compared to only 53% of boys. And girls were also more likely than boys to say they would feel guilty surfing the Internet for pornography by a 17-point margin -- 86% of girls versus 69% of boys.
Teen Sexual Activity Declining
It should also be noted that the fact that teens give relatively low moral weight to sexual matters doesn't necessarily mean they are behaving irresponsibly when it comes to sex. In fact, as noted in a recent Newsweek cover story (see Related Sites) new CDC figures indicate a decline in sexual activity among teens over the last decade: 54% of high school teens reported having had sexual intercourse in 1991, compared to 46% in 2001. The largest reduction in sexual activity is among black teens: 81% said they were sexually active in 1991, 61% said so in 2001. White teens decreased their reported sexual activity from 50% in 1991 to 43% in 2001, and Hispanic teens' percentage dropped five points, from 53% in 1991 to 48% in 2001.
But as a factor in that drop, the moral dimension may be matched by other considerations, such as health concerns, or a desire among teens for greater control over their own futures. (Indeed, given the Gallup and CDC numbers, at least some percentage of teens who say they would feel guilty about having sexual relations are having them anyway.) The prevalence of sex education classes in American high schools may have had an effect -- 89% of students in America's public schools take a sex education course between 7th and 12th grade. Currently, one-third of schools in the United States teach abstinence-only sex education, and Congress has committed $100 million for similar programs in 2002.
Church Attendance
Furthermore, despite the low ranking of sex-related issues on the teen "guilt list," it's evident that moral concerns continue to be strongly related to teens' views of sex. That relationship can be seen in the fact that those views differ significantly by religious participation. Those teens who said they had attended religious services in the past week were far more likely to say they would feel guilty about all the items discussed in this survey than were teens who did not attend services, particularly the items regarding sexual behavior: 79% of teens who attended religious services said they would feel guilty about sex before marriage, compared to 44% of teens who did not attend.
*Findings are based on telephone interviews with 454 teens, ages 13 to 17, conducted June through September 2001. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±5%.