ALL MEDIA must be subject to strict monitoring to prevent highly sexual content from encouraging teenagers to indulge in increasingly promiscuous lifestyles, campaigners said yesterday.

The dramatic rise in cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among the young, including reports of increasingly high risk behaviour among schoolchildren such as group sex, needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency, they said.

A spokesman for Life, the anti-abortion charity, said that television programmes, such as soap operas, and magazines needed particularly close monitoring to curb their sexual influence on teenagers.

Rates of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and other such diseases have soared in recent years, a trend in part attributed to teenagers becoming sexually active at an increasingly young age.

School nurses addressing the Royal College of Nursing’s annual congress gave a warning this week that there was evidence of growing hedonism among teenagers, including alarming new trends such as “daisy chaining” — where groups meet outside school to engage in sexual activities.

“Increasingly children are finding themselves without family support and turn to their peers and popular culture for guidance,” a Life spokesman said.

“The Government has a responsibility to monitor the media for inappropriate content for children. Magazines aimed at children as young as 12 often contain sexually explicit information . . . We urge a change in (the Government’s) approach to the problem.

“Young people should be encouraged to value their childhood and pursue activities in keeping with their age. A generation is growing up . . . with little or no notion of the true value of sex in a committed relationship such as marriage.”

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