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The Unsurprising and the Bizarre
09/23/2003

I don't find it surprising that STDs are on the rise in the United Kingdom. These are the perfectly foreseeable fruits of the combination of eroticized and accelerated sex education and an ever-decreasing age of acceptability and accessibility for birth control and abortion that I've been noting here and there for longer than I've been blogging. However, this ending paragraph (from the first link) caught my attention because it looks a little as if somebody, somewhere, might be trying to pry an opening through which the real causes of the problem may slip in order to avoid detection:

Mr Parkianthan said that five years ago 20,000 people attended his clinic suffering from sexually transmitted infections but last year this figure doubled.

He revealed one new pattern to emerge among teenagers - some as young as 12 - is that of "sex texters", who use their mobile phones to call up partners to arrange casual encounters.

Yeah. It's the method the kiddies use to arrange the rendezvous that's the culprit, not that which fosters the intention in the first place.

But then my jaw dropped when I turned to the Providence Journal and saw this report about a registered Rhode Island sex offender's accosting a 14-year-old girl:

The girl was walking on a wooded path near Narragansett High School when Eugene C. Texter, a registered sex offender, allegedly grabbed her from behind and sprayed her with a "noxious substance," the police said.

Bizarre.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:39 AM EST