DECONSTRUCTING THE DUTCH UTOPIA:
Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy in the Netherlands
By Joost van Loon
A4 size booklet, 68 pages. £8.50 (inc. p&p)
Family Education Trust, The Mezzanine, Elizabeth House, 39 York Road,
London SE1 7NQ.
ISBN 0 906229 17 0
Britain has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world, and the Netherlands one of the lowest. For many years, some involved in sex education in the UK have attributed low Dutch teen pregnancy rates to permissive and explicit sex education given at a young age.
This important study investigates this claim. Joost van Loon is a Dutch sociologist, now a reader in social theory at Nottingham Trent University. He shows that there is no standard model of sex education in Dutch schools, as there is no National Curriculum; that sex education does not begin at a younger age in the Netherlands; nor is it more explicit or permissive than in Britain.
Rather, the author demonstrates that a more significant factor in teenage pregnancy is family structure: the children of single-parent and non-traditional homes are more likely to be sexually active at a younger age. Children in Britain are five times more likely to be in single-parent families than their Dutch counterparts. British children are also more likely to be in third party care, and to find their mothers out when they get home from school. Moreover, the Netherlands offers much lower welfare payments to teenage mothers. These differences between the social structures are more likely to affect the teen pregnancy rates than the sex education offered.
Our government has a teenage pregnancy strategy which ignores those structural factors, and which insists on explicit sex education at an ever younger age, and on the provision of contraception (if necessary without parental consent). This carefully researched work removes a key justification for this flawed policy. No longer can it be responsibly claimed that 'permissive' sex education in the Netherlands leads to lower teen pregnancy rates.
