By Greg Reeves
That's just our favorite old newspaper headline, but it fits - The CDC today released advance data from a massive study of sexual behavior of persons 15-44 in the U.S. Whew! What you may or may not want to know is here.
Since this is a crime blog, we have focused on sexual behavior known to be criminal. Age-of-consent laws vary from state to state, but nowhere is it less than 16, according to this guy and a 3-minute look at Wikipedia's exhausting age-of-consent page.
So here are the numbers on 15-year-olds (and sometimes underage 16- and 17-year-olds) having (criminal) sex: (Table may appear far down in some browsers)
| Age | Vaginal Intcrs | Oral sex only | Other kind of sex only | No opp-sex contact | ||||||
| Boys | ||||||||||
| 15 | 24.9% | 13.3% | 5.0% | 56.8% | ||||||
| 16 | 37.3% | 11.7% | 4.3% | 47.0% | ||||||
| 17 | 46.4% | 14.2% | 2.9% | 36.5% | ||||||
| Girls | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | ||||||
| 15 | 26.0% | 7.9% | 0.0% | 66.2% | ||||||
| 16 | 39.6% | 10.0% | 0.0% | 50.4% | ||||||
| 17 | 49.0% | 14.6% | 0.0% | 36.0% | ||||||
| Source: CDC Advance Data www.cdc.gov | ||||||||||
