Sex

In Africa (at least in Namibia) sex is a taboo subject. You never talk about it except, perhaps, with your peer group. That is one, of many reasons, why the HIV infection rate is so high. No one talks about it, but everyone does it. Great article in the Sunday Magazine about several different efforts to lower the infection rate in South Africa.

In the United States sex is anything but taboo. Sex is everywhere. Songs, magazine articles, TV, movies, books... Germain's church has a "Teen Talk" they do with their kids that includes a frank discussion of sex. Sex is everywhere, even in church.

And yet the teen pregnancy rate in the Delta remains stubbornly high.

Why? It is one of the more difficult questions I've asked over the last five years. There are a lot of reasons, including many I'm sure I'm not thinking of, but the biggest one (in my opinion) is the lack of easy access to birth control.

Interesting article that links listening to songs with explicit lyrics to having sex at an early age. Like Dubner, I'm not convinced. I think that is a symptom, not the root cause. But, to be honest, I'm not sure what the root cause is.