HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Mar. 31, 2005 In the year of 2001 in Victoria alone 246,393 women gave birth to healthy children, this should be a happy time with celebrations all around. The statistics however say that out of the total number of women that gave birth in 2001 almost twelve thousand of these were under the age of nineteen. This to me is an alarming number of children throwing themselves into parenthood at younger and younger ages. So young in fact that it was seen that 2 twelve year olds in Victoria in the year of 2003 underwent a Medicare funded abortion. This raises the question of why children as young as twelve are having sex and conceiving? What is wrong with our society that girls of twelve feel the need to have sex? My belief is that this comes down to two majoring factors, one is that this is a girls way of feeling the love and acceptance that she craves and secondly parents have their heads stuck in the sand and are not educating their children about the facts and myths of sex. I believe that in majority of cases it is probably a combination of both problems. However I want to concentrate on societies obligation to protect our teen girls, and help prevent this ever-growing problem. Society today says that girls have to be thin, beautiful, wearing designer clothes, shoes, and accessories, have the latest hairstyle and be with the sexiest boy. This opens children up to major self-esteem problems, hence the reason for many teenagers suffering from diseases such as anorexia or bulimia. However it has also the effect of girls craving to feel beautiful. Craving to be wanted, to be romanced, to be made feel special. Sex being the act of intimacy fulfils this craving. Unfortunately if a teen isn’t instructed by parents, schools or society the end result is an unplanned pregnancy, or worse a deadly disease. So what is the answer to this problem? Well first as society we need to look at how we view each other, is it normal for a girl of seventeen to be a size six, with d cup breasts, and a perfectly rounded bottom? Or should a child be allowed to develop in a healthy manner, no matter where their curves are? As society we are as much to blame as the parents. Teenagers need to feel beautiful, just as adults we need to feel beautiful; we shouldn’t have to feel that we must lie on our backs to receive that result. We should not have to feel that to conceive a child is the only way that a living thing will love us. Instead as a society our love should be made unconditional, to all people, fat, skinny or average. Unfortunately this is not the way that society is set up. Look on the catwalks, in major magazines; on video hits what do we see? We see women who are abnormally thin, and have dieted to a drastic point where they are no more than simply twigs. For once I would like to watch television and see a large girl do the Brittany Spears moves. In tabloid magazines we here about Posh Spice, Lara Flynn Boyle and Calista Flockhart becoming too thin, is this not just peer pressure to be the most gorgeous of all? Yet in saying this if someone like Kirsty Alley, Kate Winslet or Renee Zelwegger puts on weight there are incriminating photos of added rolls around their stomach. Or them eating food that everyone would actually consider normal. It is no wonder girls are so incredibly confused as to who they are and what they want. It is also no wonder that teenage girls fall immediately for the first man that shows them that they are beautiful. I was saddened not that long ago to meet a girl who felt she was ugly because she claimed she was fat, this girl was barely in a size 8 she was sixteen years old. Her reason for thinking she was fat was because her hips had become wider, a natural part of puberty. Unfortunately this girl fell into the same trap of when she found a man that she believed loved her and told her she was beautiful fell pregnant to him. She is now an eighteen year old single mother, having dropped out of school and with no baby sitter to go back is regretting her decision to have sex just on the words of one man because she couldn’t see her own beauty. She doesn’t regret having her daughter but she wishes desperately she had waited until she had a career and was able to support her daughter sufficiently. As a society we have to start to make a change, it may take many years for this change to happen, but at fifteen years old girls should be experimenting with makeup and hairstyles, listening to the latest boy bands. Not worrying about whether they took their pill and trying to work out a way to tell their parents and boyfriend’s that they are expecting a child. I believe that once as a society that we are able to do this one small gesture of letting people know that their beauty does truly come from the person they are as a whole rather than what the outside core is, then we can begin to see a healing in the problem of teenage girls producing children cease. ------------ Email Samantha King: kingy351@bigpond.net.au Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
