Sexual activity

The facts and figures below, and the factsheet that you can download, offer some information about young people's sexual activity.

The age at which the majority of 16-19 year olds today first have heterosexual sexual intercourse is 16.

Almost 30% of young men and almost 26% of young women report having had intercourse before their 16th birthday. By the age of 20 the vast majority of young people today will have had sex.

Among 16-24 year olds, 4% of men and 9% of women report some homosexual experience with 5% and 10% respectively saying they have experienced homosexual attraction.

There has been a sharp drop in the age at first intercourse over the last fifty years. 26% of young women today experience sexual intercourse before the age of 16 compared with less than 1% in the 1950s. Among young men, 30% report intercourse before 16 compared with 6% of men in the 1950s.

The biggest drop in age at first intercourse, from 21 to 19, was in the 1950s. The age of first intercourse fell as much during this one decade as it did over the next 30 years. This was before the introduction of the pill in 1961, which did not become widely available to unmarried women until 1972.

For more information, download the Brook factsheet Teenage Sexual Activity