A new study of NYC high school students' attitudes towards and usage of topics like sex, drugs, and alcohol has been released. Interesting, the Daily News calls it an alarming study while the NY Times leads with students being "less likely" to indulge in risky behavior. The study of over 7,000 randomly selected students showed the following facts:
- More kids are drinking, smoking or engaging in sex before age 13.
- One in six students said they smoked marijuana in the past month. Another 16% said they went binge drinking in the past month.[NYDN]
- 17% of students said they have had four or more sex partners and 24% said they didn't use condoms the last time they had sex.[NYDN]
- About 15% of students said they smoke cigarettes. But those numbers more than double among white girls.[NYDN]
Students in Staten Island are most likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and students in Brooklyn and the Bronx are most likely to have multiple sex partners. Manhattan students are most likely to have considered suicide, and students in Queens, more than in any other borough, consider themselves overweight. [NYT]
Of course, parents, teachers, and health officials are concerned (white female smoking, borough-by-borough stats, unprotected sex), but students seem blase. One student told the Daily News the numbers seemed low while a 14 year-old stated his knowledge of the birds and the bees, "Protected sex doesn't do harm, but unprotected sex isn't good."
The City will follow up the survey with focus groups. You can read the whole survey, "Risky Business? Health Behaviors of New York City Public High School Students," in PDF from the City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. And can you believe the movie Kids came out in 1995?
