When it comes to sex, British Columbia’s teens can point to evidence that adults may be wrong about teens engaging in riskier behaviours at younger ages.

Youth are waiting longer to be sexually active, according to a B.C. Adolescent Health Survey, released last week in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, which looked at province-wide trends in data from Grade 7 - 12 students in 1992, 1998, and 2003.

The data also shows that among those who have ever had sex, more youth are practising safer sex. As well, sexual violence is less common, and teen pregnancy has declined.

B.C. is currently the only province with a large-scale school health survey that has included questions about sexual health for more than a decade, according to lead author Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, Research Director at the McCreary Centre Society and Associate Professor in the School of Nursing at the University of B.C.

"This is good news about young people, and should be reassuring for parents and health care providers," says Saewyc, who also holds a CIHR/PHAC Applied Public Health Chair in Youth Health. "Contrary to popular impressions, everyone isn’t doing it, nor are they starting younger: even among the oldest high school students, fewer than half of them had ever had sexual intercourse, and among the youngest teens, that number is less than one in 10. And rates have been declining since the 1990s."

The number of teens who report ever having sexual intercourse declined by a third between 1992 and 2003, from 34 per cent down to 23 per cent of males, and from 29 per cent down to 24 per cent of females.