More than three-quarters of teen girls who have lost their virginity say they’ve engaged in sex without a condom and most moms are in the dark about it, a survey from Seventeen and O, The Oprah Magazine finds.
But three in five of respondents who had “The Talk” with their mothers said it “influenced” their sexual choices positively.
The Sex Talk Survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf the magazines. It included 1,122 girls ages 15 to 22 and 1,098 mothers who have daughters ages 15-22.
Most of the statistics from the survey, which appears in the April 7 issue of Seventeen and April 14 issue of O, were bleak.
— Fifty-six percent of the girls who are no longer virgins said they’ve had sex without any form of birth control and two-thirds of them (66 percent) kept it a secret from their mothers.
— Nearly one-third (30 percent) of the 15-18 year olds in the survey said they had oral sex; about double the number mothers of girls in that age group know about—or even suspected (14 percent).
“Teens need to understand sex, pregnancy and STDs in order to make smart decisions,” Seventeen editor-in-chief Ann Shoket said in a news release. “A lot of girls are hiding important information from their moms, or avoiding the subject completely. But girls who talk to their moms are half as likely to get pregnant. The mother-daughter talk is more important now than ever.”
