The lives of teenagers are a battleground for sexual pressures and political agendas. Mike Farrington interviewed Romance Academy, who are raising up a new voice.

It was lunchtime on Tuesday 12th January, and the national media were reverberating with news and comment on the Prime Minister's 'Respect' initiative, launched that morning. At Cross Rhythms City Radio, although I had received no prior knowledge of Mr Blair's announcement, it just so happened that my telephone guest after 1 o'clock was talking on a subject very relevant to the Prime Minister's campaign: teenagers and sex.

Dan was speaking on the phone from 'Romance Academy'. This had been the subject of a BBC 2 series in the autumn entitled, 'No Sex Please, We're Teenagers!' The concept: 12 teenagers from different backgrounds were asked to make a pledge of abstinence from sex for 15 weeks. In addition, they had to commit themselves to meeting regularly as a group to discuss issues such as sex, relationships and wider questions of life. Dan and Rachel, two youth workers, acted as 'comperes' for the 15-week experiment. And the whole thing was filmed for BBC TV.

An amazing journey

Let Dan take up the story:

"It was an amazing journey. Most of the teenagers were sexually active young people. They were all very challenged at the beginning and they all said, 'I don't know if I can do this.' We said, 'If you fail, don't worry, we won't kick you out, but what we want you to do is for 5 months try life without having sex, and see what difference there is; if we take that away and you have to communicate through conversations, and maybe going back to doing some dating, and getting to know each other a little bit better, see how it would challenge you.'

"For a lot of young people in our society," Dan commented to me, "the only way they communicate with each other, certainly for intimacy, is sex." And if that seems a bit of an exaggeration, how about a statistic quoted in the Guardian on 16th January, that three in four men and women now agree that sex on a first date is acceptable (survey commissioned by the FX Channel). And that's not even talking about teenagers.

'For the first time, I felt respected'

Anyway, back to Dan:

"Within 3 weeks, one of the girls who was sexually active beforehand, was at a party, where most of her other friends went off and were doing things with the other sex or they were having sex. She said, 'You know, for the first time, because I was just talking with these guys, because I was just having a laugh, I felt respected.' She was someone who was 16, and she'd never felt really respected by the opposite sex before. And it was only when she actually said 'No,' that she suddenly realised, 'Wow! I feel respected! I feel that actually I'm really having a good time and I'm not feeling I've gotta do something.' That just blew us away."

"It was an amazing watch, and we had hundreds and thousands of emails coming back really relating, saying, 'I want this experience.' More stories were coming in where young people were saying, 'This is really amazing. I'm really understanding who I am. I'm really understanding that if I say 'No' to things, actually that gives me more confidence and doesn't make me feel stupid, which I thought it would do.'"

Boundaries gave Freedom

For Dan, the making of the series unravelled some deep principles about life.

"One of the big things we found was that actually giving people boundaries gave them freedom to really find out who they were. It gave them opportunities to not just respect themselves, but most of them say, 'I wanna challenge society now! Everyone should have this experience, because my life would be rubbish if I hadn't had it.'

"Instead of saying, 'OK, now we've got to teach respect,' actually we said, 'Let's just find out who you are, and then we believe you'll respect yourself, and in turn you'll respect more things around you - you'll enjoy more things around you.'"