What�s it all about, Alfie?
What's it all about, Alfie? Regardless of whether 13-year-old Alfie Patten is or is not the father of 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman's baby daughter, the story has set the hare running on the issue of teenage pregnancy. The story has drawn a typically partisan response.
The left is quick to draw on the still lamentable quality of sex education in Britain and the patchy quality of what are optimistically called "family planning services". And it tends to draw straight lines between the sorry number of British school-age mums and the lack of progress on tackling childhood poverty. Yesterday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that, despite putting £2bn into this area in each of the previous two budgets, the Labour government will need to pump in at least £4bn more if it is to meet its ambitious target of halving child poverty by 2010. There's no shortage of evidence linking poverty with premature parenthood: in Scotland, teenage girls from the most deprived homes are 10 times more likely to have a baby and are twice as likely to have an abortion than girls from the least deprived backgrounds. So the left's equation goes something like: less poverty, plus more social mobility, plus better sexual health services, plus better sex education equal fewer teenage pregnancies.
The right blames moral decline: "broken Britain". This story plays into its hands beautifully with its fractured and morphed families, other local boys claiming to be the real father and the dramatis personnae rushing off to Max Clifford to cash in on the whole sordid saga.
Poor Maisie. What a terrible world to be born into: devoid of morals and awash with greed and "sexploitation". The right contends that the trashing of family values and the growing number of single parents underpin this change, while sexualised goods and entertainment are aimed at an increasingly young age group. It is part of this thesis that, far from too little sex education and inadequate access to contraception for teenagers, there's far too much of all this stuff.
Before we all fly into a moral panic, we should take a cool look at the facts because some of the use of statistics has been either ignorant or disingenuous. It's true that Britain has the highest level of teenage pregnancy in Europe but the rate is not rising rapidly, as some reports imply. Nor are Scottish figures worse than English ones, a common fallacy arising from slightly different counting methods. Like-for-like figures show the Scottish teen pregnancy rate is actually slightly lower. As the number of teenagers fluctuates, the only accurate way to gauge whether we're making progress is to look at proportionate figures. By that measure, the number of under-18s giving birth or having a termination in Scotland in 2006 (the last year for which we have figures) was 41.5 per 1000 girls. The figure had been virtually static for three years and compares with a peak of 44.9 in the 1990s. Similarly, the under-16 pregnancy rate in 2006 was 8.1 per 1000, compared with nine in 1996.
In policy terms, what has been done and what, realistically, can be done? Phil Hanlon, professor of public health at Glasgow University, who chaired the expert group that drew up Scotland's sexual health strategy in 2003, is cheerful on one front. There has been a vast improvement in the quality and level of sexual health services available to Scottish teenagers. The review of progress on the Respect and Responsibility action plan last year is packed with encouraging examples of new services and outreach, with special consideration given to groups such as the disabled, drug-users and youngsters from rural communities.
But any sexual health strategy ought to be a three-legged stool, of which services are only one. The other two are sex education and cultural change. Sex education used to be dire or non-existent. Mine never got beyond "the naming of parts" by a red-faced biology teacher, amid much sniggering from the boys at the back. Now it's a curate's egg - good in parts - though given the history of the Roman Catholic Church in this area, a secular metaphor might be more appropriate.
Respect and Responsibility neatly body-swerves sex education, leaving the onus on local authorities to provide what they see fit. A Scottish Government booklet talks vaguely about the importance of relationships based on love and respect, and "respecting the different cultural, ethnic and religious environment of the home". Last year a moral education programme entitled Called to Love was finally rolled out to Catholic secondary schools but, despite some examples of good practice, there's still a huge gap between what children ought to know about sexual relationships and what they're taught at school. It's still an unpopular area with teachers.
No wonder, given the continuing coyness about sex. Yet that old Calvinistic reserve, played out in sniggers and euphemisms, is combined with a popular culture that has been increasingly saturated with sex for the past 40 years. This is a disastrous combination and helps explain why Britain is in such a bind. We should all be worried about the normalisation of ever-earlier sex, especially when evidence shows many, especially girls, later regret it and when unprotected sex is resulting in alarming levels of sexually transmitted disease.
Though the highest teen pregnancy rates are in the poorest communities, it does not follow that simply pumping more money into these communities will sort out the problem. This story is as much about poverty of aspiration as poverty per se. Illegitimacy has lost its stigma in these communities and, for many girls, motherhood represents their best hope.
Changing that culture is the challenge. Politicians imagine that complex social issues have simple answers such as more clinics or tax breaks for married couples, but they're wrong. Health Minister Shona Robison is quite right to say Scots need to learn to talk about sexual health more openly, and the Scottish Government's £1m forthcoming sexual health advertising campaign is welcome, but the whole issue of when and with whom people have sex is an area of our private lives that is least susceptible to government action. That's why teenage pregnancy targets may be a pipe dream.
The Dutch teen pregnancy rate is less than one-fifth of that in Britain and abortion rates are low. Both left- and right-wingers claim Holland as an argument. The left points to higher living standards and frank, albeit contextualised, sex education. The right attributes the difference to the strong Dutch family structure and active parenting style. Who's right? "No contest," says Phil Hanlon. "They're both right."
The tragedy about Britain's teenage pregnancy debate is that it is so polarised, while both sides wring their hands about 12-year-olds having sex. Hanlon's tour around Scotland to investigate this issue turned up places where teenage pregnancies were far lower than might have been expected. Their secret? "Strong communities prepared to talk about the issues, good local services and good sex education. You need all three." That's what it's all about, Alfie.
