How Screen Sex Impacts Teen Sexual Behaviour

Watching steamy scenes in films can turn children sexually active prematurely

A new study has found that teenagers exposed to sex on screen are likely to engage in sexual relations earlier than others, with more people, and without using contraceptives.

The findings of the research were published in Psychological Science, a journal of the US Association for Psychological Science. For the study, researchers at Dartmouth College surveyed 684 top-grossing Hollywood films from 1998 to 2004, and coded them for seconds of sexual content. This work built on a previous survey of movies from 1950 to 2006 that found that more than 84 per cent of these movies contained sexual content, including 68 per cent of the G rated films, 82 per cent of PG movies and 85 per cent of PG-13 movies. Most of the recent films do not portray safe sex, with little mention of using contraception.

A total of 1,228 adolescents between the age of 12 and 14 years were then recruited for the research. Each participant reported which movies s/he had seen from a number of different collections of 50 that were randomly selected. Six years later, the participants were surveyed to study their sexual behaviour—how old were they when they became sexually active? How risky was their sexual behaviour? Did they use condoms consistently? Were they monogamous or did they have multiple partners?

The researchers found that greater exposure to sexual content in movies at a young age actually led to that much more sensation-seeking during adolescence. According to the researchers, there is also a strong indication that adolescents learn specific behaviours from sexual messages in movies. ‘Many adolescents turn to movies to acquire ‘sexual scripts’ that offer examples of how to behave when confronted with complicated emotional situations.’

However, as the researchers admit, their research cannot establish a direct causal effect of movies on sexual behaviour. Nonetheless, they claim that the study strongly suggests that parents need to restrict their children from watching sexual content in movies at tender ages.

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