Scare Tactics & bad science (and writing too)

http://www.mspmag.com/features/features/181122_1.asp

The article I found in Minneapolis + St. Paul Magazine, "Teen 3.0" was about the sex lives of teenage in the modern age of technology. The article cites how facebook, texting, and porn have affected our teens today, saying that technology has made sex more easily accessible, and have changed the relationship teens are having today.

I'm not quite sure where I want to go with this article yet, my thoughts are still jumbled as of now.
I will spell out some of the ideas that have been floating around in my head.

But I do have many issues with the execution of this article.
To name a couple there are multiple typos, and in general the article seems to be unorganized and all over the place. It is also the epitome of bad science. The article makes references to many "studies" and using phrases often such as "Most experts would agree.." but does not provide the actually reference to these studies or who these experts are.


Further more the content of the article is pretty unoriginal, and not something I would consider very good journalism.

The ideas that the author, John Rosengren, presents in his piece is something that society and parents have been struggling with since basically forever-- How do you stop young adults from having sex? The answer to this question has a lot of the time been to scare the life out of the children and parents. With every wave of new technology there has been up-roar from parents and society. Probably the best example are the 60's with the invention of the oral contraceptive and the notion of free love. Society during that time was in an upheaval, as fundamentalist raged that this would lead to increase in female sexual promiscuity, and the demise of monogamous marriages. This article uses the same sort of scare tactics to shock and ignite fear within parents. The problem with scare tactics is that they never work. They don't work on teenagers because teens often exclude themselves from statistics given, flying high on the belief that "it won't happen to me." While parents often become so overbearing after "learning" the facts, that they drive a wedge between their children and themselves, and strain communication lines. The article even alludes to this fact saying that based on some ambiguous study that “Only 17 percent of American teenagers report that they have good enough communication with a trusted adult to talk about sex with them."

I think the most vexing issue I have with this article is the affect of these projections of sexual behaviorism of youth today on teenagers. How does these supposed statistics affect the opinions and decisions of teenagers? I mean if 48% of teens now a days are having sex, why should I? Also, even if you set aside the negative affects of categorizing an entire group under one all-encompassing label, the content presented in this article is extremely detrimental to young adults, who can very easily access this online or within their parents magazine. By reporting on all of these sick and twisted things, that perhaps a very few amount of teenagers are doing, such as violent pornography, could perpetuate the very issue at hand. It is similar to the controversy surrounding shows about Anorexia Nervosa where some believe that these shows teach young girls how to be Anorexic, rather than being a warning sign of the dangers of the disease. By going into gross detail about these pornographic images, they are idealizing it and creating a wow-factor about it.


This is a very rough draft, but that's what I've got so far.