Sexuality and sexual health of Canadian adolescents: Yesterday, today and tomorrow
Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON

A profile of the sexual health and behaviours of contemporary Canadian adolescents is developed based on current research and compared to adolescents in the latter half of the 20th century. While notable changes occurred in the sexual lives of youth between the late 1950s and the early 1990s, the patterns of behaviour established in the latter part of the 20th century, have continued into recent years. There is strong evidence that today’s youth are experiencing better sexual health and taking more measures to protect their sexual health than prior generations of youth did. However, problems remain. Canadian teens and young adults continue to be challenged by STIs; many GLBTQ youth continue to face homonegativity and discrimination in their schools and communities; youth living in poverty, in rural areas and aboriginal youth carry the greatest burdens of poor sexual health and are the most poorly served by sexuality education and sexual health care. Recommendations are made to strengthen both sexuality education and sexual health services to meet the needs of all Canadian youth (The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 2008; 17: 85-95).

Characteristics of Canadian youth reporting a very early age of first sexual intercourse
William F. Boyce¹, Owen Gallup¹, and Stevenson Fergus²
¹Social Program Evaluation Group, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON
² School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON

The present study examined the correlates of having experienced first sexual intercourse (FSI) at a very early age using a large, national classroom sample of Canadian adolescents from the Canadian Youth, Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Study (Boyce et al., 2003). Most of the available studies on this topic have divided adolescent respondents into categories of “early” and “late” based on the average age of first intercourse. As a result, a portion of the young people identified in these studies as having had “early” first sexual intercourse had actually done so at an age when intercourse would have been becoming normative. The large size of the present sample of adolescents (n=2301; mean age 15.8 years) provided enough males and females who had non-normative very early FSI to compare them with peers who had first intercourse later. Associations were tested on variables in four conceptual categories: family relationships; psychological factors; peers and risk-taking; and partner-related factors. A very early age of FSI (defined as 11 years or less for males and 12 years or less for females), was associated with having experienced pressure to have unwanted sex, having used drugs other than marijuana, and believing that popularity at school is dependent upon rebelling/breaking the rules. While the retrospective nature of our cross-sectional analysis precludes assigning directionality of influences, the possible predictive value of the findings, including the influence of “fitting in” with peers, is considered in relation to future research on this topic (The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 2008; 17: 97-108).

Difficulties with sexual functioning in a sample of male and female late adolescent and young adult university students
Lucia F. O’Sullivan¹ and JoAnn Majerovich²
¹Department of Psychology, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB
²University of New Brunswick Student Health Centre, Fredericton, NB

Despite the considerable research attention given to sexual health outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies among youth, little is known about either the positive or problematic aspects of sexual functioning in late adolescence and early young adulthood. The current study sought to document the experience of difficulties with sexual functioning (e.g., interest, arousal, orgasm, pleasure, pain) in a sample of 43 male and 128 female participants (mean age 19.5 years; range 17 to 21). Questionnaire responses indicated high levels of positive desire, pleasure and satisfaction, but also lifetime experiences of a range of sexual difficulties or problems. A comparison of these responses with those from an older sample of 28 male and 65 female students aged 22 to 28 years, recruited for this purpose, showed very few differences suggesting that the foundations for sexual functioning may be established early in the sexual lives of young people. In-depth interview findings from a sub-sample of 30 of the 171 younger students indicated that the sexual difficulties they experienced appeared to significantly disrupt sexual and relationship functioning. The implications of the findings for promoting healthy sexual functioning among young people are discussed (The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 2008; 17: 109-122).

Stigma management? The links between enacted stigma and teen pregnancy trends among gay, lesbian, and bisexual students in British Columbia
Elizabeth M. Saewyc¹,², Colleen S. Poon², Yuko Homma1, and Carol L. Skay³
¹University of British Columbia School of Nursing, Vancouver, BC
²McCreary Centre Society, Vancouver, BC
³University of Minnesota School of Nursing, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Over the past decade, several large-scale school-based studies of adolescents in Canada and the U.S. have documented health disparities for lesbian, gay and bisexual teens compared to their heterosexual peers, such as higher rates of suicide attempts, homelessness, and substance use. Many of these disparities have been linked to “enacted stigma,” or the higher rates of harassment, discrimination, and sexual or physical violence that sexual minority youth experience at home, at school, and in the community. An unexpected health disparity for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth is their significantly higher risk of teen pregnancy involvement (between two and seven times the rate of their heterosexual peers), especially in light of declining trends in teen pregnancy across North America since the early 1990s. What is behind this higher risk? Is it getting better or worse? Using the province-wide cluster-stratified British Columbia Adolescent Health Surveys from 1992, 1998, and 2003, this paper explores the trends in pregnancy involvement, related sexual behaviours, and exposure to forms of enacted stigma that may help explain this particular health disparity for gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in Canada (The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 2008; 17: 123-139).

Research on sexual health education has lacked a critical analysis of the implementation of curricula through the lens of human rights. Drawing on feminist theories we explore how sexual health education incorporates the intersections of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) with social structuring factors (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity and sexual identities), and the role of sexual health education in young adults’ construction and assertion of their own SRH rights. Based on 75 interviews with teachers, health partners and undergraduate university students from the National Capital Region, this paper documents the tensions resulting from a biomedical, risk-centred application of the Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum and the noteworthy absence of strategies to address SRH inequities of gender, race/ethnicity and sexual identities. Despite some efforts from the health sector to promote an SRH rights-based approach, our findings reveal that Ottawa area teachers and young adults are ill-equipped to articulate SRH rights, and may therefore be unable to prevent gender stereotypic, racialized or homophobic constructions of adolescent sexuality (The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 2008; 17: 141-159).