'I had found someone I liked and I just got on with it'

Teenage sex and pregnancies are back in the spotlight. But, as DAVE HILL discovers, the story isn't as simple as we tend to imagine "Sex just happened. I never thought anything about losing my virginity, it wasn't a big thing with me": Mya Elmalem with son Jake MYA Elmalem, a north London girl, was 12 years old when she met the father of Jake, her son. She was 13 when she started "seeing him", to use her quaint, old-fashioned phrase, 14 when she first had intercourse with him, 15 when she became pregnant by him, 16 when she gave birth. He is six years older than she, and out of jail at the moment after a few stretches inside. Fellow prisoners have called him a "nonce" - a child-abuser - for having an underage girlfriend, though he has never been investigated for that particular offence. Fellow school pupils of Mya called her a "slapper" for being so sexual so young, although she never slept around. "I was madly, passionately in love with him," she says.

Already, this is a story of teenage sex and parenthood that doesn't conform to the usual clichs. While others might think of Mya as anything from the innocent victim of a predatory male to just a little tart, she rightly sees herself quite differently. "He'd never had anyone to look after him," she says of the man she so adored. "I wanted to be that person. I had found someone I liked and I just got on with it."

And sex? "That just happened. I never thought anything about losing my virginity, it wasn't a big thing with me."

Nor was Mya reckless about using contraception, as sexually active youngsters so often are: "I went on the Pill straight away, and I told my mum about it. She wasn't very pleased that I was having sex, but she was glad I'd been responsible about it." Responsible, perhaps, but still a bit nave: "I missed taking my pill a few times when Jake's dad was in jail and then I fell pregnant." Then came a big decision: "I was going to have an abortion, and even got myself booked in. But

then I changed my mind." There were a couple of reasons why: "Maybe I wanted roots," she says - she'd had an itinerant life - "and I know I hoped that it would be a long-term relationship." Also, Mya had resolve: "I'm the sort of person who likes to see things through."

Stories like Mya's send shudders of anxiety throughout adult society, from inner-city streets and suburban living rooms all the way into the corridors of political power. And not without some cause: Britain, notoriously, has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in western Europe - around 90,000 cases a year - and the Government's Social Exclusion Unit, presided over by the PM himself, has made tackling the matter a priority. But concern about the incidence of sometimes startlingly young mums and dads is only part of what disturbs the public's peace of mind. There is, too, a deep- seated unease about the whole business of children - for that is what they are - engaging with each other in the way required for conception to occur: indeed, with the very idea of adolescent desire.

Triggers for such disquiet are in plentiful supply. Anyone can see that little girls and little boys are beginning their bodily transformations into young women and men sooner than ever. This seems sure to have contributed to the steady fall in the age at which members of both sexes have heterosexual intercourse for the first time: the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, published in 1994, found that since the Forties the median age at which virginity was lost had dropped for females from 21 to 17 and for males from 20 to 17, with far more youngsters, particularly girls, doing so before they were 16.

But can such a dramatic shift be entirely explained by the tendency of hormones to kick in more early? Or has sexual morality got something to do with it as well? This is where the consternation really gets a hold, with liberals and conservatives trading accusations and jostling for policymakers' ears. Yet amid the clamour there is one group of voices we very rarely hear: those of young people themselves, especially those whose sexual exploits get them into difficulties of one kind or another.

Mya's story is one powerful example of what might be discovered if such experiences were aired more frequently and listened to more carefully. "I was more mature than other kids of my age.

Not just because of my body, but because I'd travelled a lot and seen a lot.

I had friends in my own age group, but I always went around with people older than I was. I don't believe I started having sex too early. I've got regrets about the past, but that's not one of them. You know when you feel ready to have sex.

It's your body, and if you want to go to bed with someone you should be able to.

It's the emotional side of relationships you can't handle at that age. If someone treats you like dirt, you don't have the strength to walk away." Mya is 20 now.

She works in a community centre and is studying for a degree.

JAKE, meanwhile, isn't far off starting school, and still sees his father when the man isn't behind bars, even though Mya ended the relationship two years ago ("I want Jake to know his father and I do still love him, though not in the same way"). Money is tight, and life has been a struggle in a lousy council flat. Mya, though, is nothing if not a survivor. A few more years of study, and things should start looking up.

But can the same be said of 14-year-old Marie, the lively, cheery mother of a baby boy called Jordan who used to pass her spare time giggling with delinquents on a shabby London estate? Marie is one of the subjects of a series of documentaries forming part of Channel 4's Generation Sex season on teenage sexual culture, which begins next week. On paper, she resembles the caricature teen mother: a truant from a hard-up, divided family, her dad a kindly, self-styled "social misfit", her loving mum doing her best.

On film, though, Marie becomes a real person, full of tenderness, but short on confidence, cared for by her parents, but caring little for herself.

She first had sex when she was "about 11". The father of her child is a boy of only just 15. He lives in foster care 30 miles away. Marie says he's "an asshole," though when he comes in to the hospital to see her and their tiny son, they cuddle and they cry.

Another of the documentaries, set in north Manchester, is specifically about promiscuous boys. "I'm just a 16-year-old," shrugs one of them, Toby, furrowing his brow and working out he's done it more than 200 times. "Not all with the same person, though. It gets boring with the same one after a while.

You chop and change." And romance?

"There's no such thing as romance - not round here." Toby has sex for fun, sometimes without a condom. Result?

Two pregnant girls. Toby's mate Dean, aged 18, has passed that way before.

He split up with the mother before she came to term, but was present at the birth and sees young Ryan once a week.

Is he an unfeeling oaf? Well, not entirely. "You don't realise how much your mum and dad love you till you have one of your own," he says, peering into a pram.

WHAT do these stories reveal about teenagers' sexual lives? They show that plenty of them like sex and feel entitled to its pleasures, but too often end up trying it half-cut behind a bush or in the back seat of a car. They also show that boys don't seek advice on sexual health and contraception, because real men-in-the-making are meant to be sexual maestros and that's all. And, finally, that although those same boys usually leave the girls holding their babies, they also turn to mush when they take the little bundles in their arms. Then there is the pain behind the appearance of indiscriminate passion.

"Driving down the motorway, that's when I lost my virginity," recalls Clare, just 14. "It was all over in 30 seconds."

During the next five months she slept with a string of boys, never using any contraception. Concerned by her own conduct, she saw a counsellor and revealed that when she was younger she'd been abused by someone close to the family whom she'd trusted. Clare is clear about her life in one way: when she finishes school she wants to join the army, see the world. But what is it she wants from all those boys? "I just want to feel loved," Clare eventually replies.

"What do you think that would feel like?" the counsellor enquires.

Clare doesn't know. Clare cries. Then she lets it known why she has agreed to such exposure on TV: "Everyone just thinks I'm a slag. I want them to know there's a different Clare underneath."

lGeneration Sex starts on Channel 4 next Thursday at 9.30pm. A website for sexual advice and information is also being launched: www.channel4.com/gensex.

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