Sexual Health (young people)
Overview
In this section you can find out about the experience of sexual health by seeing and hearing young people share their personal stories on film. Researchers initially travelled all around the UK to talk to 47 young people in their own homes. Analysis of 9 new interviews were added in 2012 and another 4 new interviews were added in 2014 to help keep the site up to date. Find out what people said about issues such as having sex for the first time, contraception and being lesbian, gay or bisexual. We hope you find the information helpful and reassuring.
Sexual health site preview
Sexual health site preview
Interview 5: Also, when I lost my virginity, you'd seen sex, sexual scenes on TV, and you’d seen them in films and you were like, wow, you know, this looks fantastic and it looks amazing. And you have sex and you think god that was very boring, and where does all the noises come from? Where do, you know, who makes the noises?
Interview 45: That it’s difficult to show, you know, that I like sex because, you know, it's-, it's just some men kind of find it quite intimidating.
Interview 40: You know, growing up in a in a strict Bengali family it's taboo to talk about sex. Taboo to talk about pregnancy, STIs, anything.
Interview 17: Because I think a lot of people would be nervous to access sexual health websites in school. So I think if there was like a little room allocated within the school that you could shut the door and you could use maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes on the computer, on your own. I think a lot of people would use the resources more than if it's a big open plan class room, and there's 30 kids in the class and you're trying to look up sites about gonorrhoea.
Interview 37: We were young of course, but I always used something, I always had to use something. So I haven’t got children all over the place or nothing like that, you know. I mean, I was really wrapped up in my education so.
Interview 32: And it's really like harsh to think that anybody, you know what I'm saying, like in a one night stand someone could get pregnant and be like, “oh no darn it”, and I’m just gonna be like my whole life well I wish like, you know what I'm saying, I really love this person, why can't we be able to have kids?
This section is from research by the University of Oxford.
Publication date: February 2005
Last updated: January 2016
Copyright © 2024 University of Oxford. All rights reserved.