Some insights into questions teens and young adults ask about sex

Blog #3
By: Joan Tabachnick, MBA with review by Jenny Coleman, LMHC

Over the last 10 years, the Stop It Now! helpline for adults started to field more and more questions from teens and young adults (ages 14-22) about safe and unsafe sexual behaviors such as: 

How much is too much porn?
I may be attracted to children—is there help for me?
What do I do if I crossed the line with someone I care about? 

This pattern inspired the expert sexual abuse prevention team at Stop It Now! to launch What's OK?: a chat, text, email, and phone helpline that offers a free, anonymous, confidential, and safe space for teens and young adults to ask sex-related questions. Data received from the helpline offer important insights into what kinds of questions teens and young adults have about sexuality, and can be used to promote prevention and reduce harm by and between youth.

Research by Dr. Melissa Bright Reveals Questions Teens Ask About Sex

This engaging One In Ten podcast interview, When the Help You Seek is for Yourself, will give you a deeper sense of WhatsOK and the emerging research findings for this groundbreaking project. Teresa Huizar, the Executive Director of the National Children’s Alliance talks with Dr. Melissa Bright, founder and executive director of the Center for Violence Prevention Research.
  
Melissa offers her accessible insights into the research about the surprising number of youth who reach out for free and confidential information about their own sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The majority of youth who reach out for help are between 14-17 years of age and WhatsOK offers them a safe middle ground to get information as varied as:

“How many times a day is too much masturbation?”

“Is it okay that my sibling and I shared a bed when we were younger?”

“How or if to bring up that a teen may have touched their sibling inappropriately in order to apologize.”

Melissa describes the opportunity to look at “mounds of data—that is so essential in understanding the youth who are reaching out for help—in order to fine tune resources and outreach to the teens we care about.

How Addressing Teen and Young Adult Questions About Sex Promotes Prevention

Most people still think about people at-risk to sexually abuse as adult monsters lurking on the edges of our lives. Melissa counters this image and describes how the research from WhatsOK  is such an essential conversation starter for real child sexual abuse prevention by and between youth. When most children who are sexually abused are harmed by another child or teen, WhatOK’s research is imperative to preventing and reducing child-on-child sexual abuse (COCSA). The program offers youth a new pathway to prevent sexual abuse of children.
 
If you want to read more, check out the article: Groundbreaking research on sexual harm caused by youth will strengthen prevention strategies.