Happy Valentines Day!

Today is Valentines Day, so it seemed appropriate that this post should be somehow related to the holiday. To that end I began searching around the web for some ideas, and one of the first things I came across was a report out of Bangkok. It seems that the police are imposing a 10 PM curfew for youth under 18 in an effort to prevent sexual activity by young people.

The curfew was decided upon after an Assumption University poll found that 1/3 of teenage girls would have sex on Valentines Day if their boyfriends asked them, and a similar poll by the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce revealed that 11% were planning on losing their virginity on this romantic holiday.

My point today has nothing to do with advocating for or against teenage sex. Rather, I just want to hold this up as an example of the consistently stupid way we adults react to what we perceive as problems with teenagers. Rather than looking for ways to engage young people, or ways to seek real solutions to complex problems, we far too often simply attempt to deal with the problem by "banning" it -- as though we can "fix" things by simply ending the debate (not that we have even started one) by a decree that forbids what we don't want.

Seriously, does anybody think that a 10 PM curfew will do anything to prevent teens having sex? The teens certainly don't. One 16 year old pointed out that "they can do it in the day time or any other day if they really want to". Hmmm. Pretty good point, dontja' think? Besides, is this a "problem" or an encouraging sign? Another way to interpret these polls is that 2/3rds of teenage girls will not have sex if asked, and 89% are planning on keeping their virginity. Those actually seem like reasonably good numbers to me.