I see people below the age of consent have been having sex. Tsk! Will they ever learn? Except that, it seems, some of them have learned something.

Picture credit: Rex Features

About 770 of them have learned to access the sexual health clinic programmes recently rolled out across nine schools by the Solent NHS Trust. Thirty three of them were fitted with contraceptive implants, and at least one of them was just 13 years old (the patient, not the implant). It was, naturally, this patient, on which the subsequent furore focussed. Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, summed up the objections of those ranged against the NHS Trust, describing its actions as “fuelling the flames of the sexual health crisis with schemes that treat parents and moral principles with contempt.”

Ah. So many issues, so little time. But let’s do what we can. Let’s think, for example, who is likely to be having sex in their very early teens. Remembering from my own school days, the girls who fell into this category and even more so the thousands of examples which reached my ears during later years courtesy of my mother (a family planning doctor for 35 years in some of the most deprived areas of south east London), the evidence is that such early-onset sexual activity is rarely a sign that everything has gone superbly right for the girl in question. It tends not to be the case that she has accrued so many sociocultural, intellectual and emotional benefits in her short life that she is genuinely free, genuinely willing and genuinely able to make the decision to have sex and to comprehend and cope with any emotional or physical ramifications it might have. It really tends to be quite the opposite. If a 13-year-old is having sex, it is generally a sign that many things have gone wrong.

"The problems with under-age sex"