A nationwide study of African-American teens has found that those who live in small towns have a riskier sex life than their urban counterparts. They have more sex and are less likely to use protection.
Rural black girls were 46 percent more likely to say they'd had sex than black teenage girls from the city. Boys in the country were 65 percent more likely to have had sex than their urban counterparts. Teens in the boonies also tended to shun contraception: teen females in the country were 34 percent less likely to use contraception, and rural teen males were a whopping 96 percent less likely.
The rural teens also had more sex partners: girls were more likely than their urban counterparts to have had three or more partners or to have had more than one sexual partner in the past three months.
Health behavior doctoral student Robin Millhausen and colleagues surveyed over 4000 teenagers. The study was sponsored by the Rural Center for AIDS/STD Prevention and published in the American Journal of Health Behavior. Millhausen and colleagues hope that their research will emphasize that sexually transmitted diseases are not just a problem of the big city.
