Britons' secrecy and embarrassment over sex helps explain the failure to control the high level of births among teenagers, a United Nations report suggested yesterday.
The US is the only developed nation with a higher proportion of teenage mothers than the UK but both are failing to prepare young people for the world they are growing up in, with its increasing number of sexual images in the media.
Contraceptive advice and services might be formally available in Britain, but as one teenager told Tony Blair's social exclusion unit: "It seems as if sex is compulsory but contraception is illegal."
The report, compiled by Unicef's Innocenti research centre, in Florence, Italy, is a boost for those who argue too little rather than too much sex education lies behind Britain's failure to deal with the social problems that face poorly-educated young mothers.
Figures in the report revealed that in 1998 16.6 births per 1,000 women in the UK were to women aged 15-17 and 51.8 per 1,000 were to 18-19-year-olds. Only the US, with 30.4 births per 1,000 and 82 per 1,000 respectively, had higher rates. The British rate for the younger group was 10 times that for Japan but also nearly eight times more than in Sweden and the Netherlands, where there is a more open attitude towards sex.
Only 50% of Britain's under-16s used contraceptives during their first experience of sex.
Research for the Unicef report by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University suggested that British women who had their first child under 20 were twice as likely to be without a partner in their 30s than women who gave birth for the first time in their 20s. The former teenage mothers were also three times more likely to be in a home where neither they nor a partner was working.
The Dutch example of a low teenage birth rate indicates that sex can be discussed before "barriers of embarrassment can be raised and before sex education can be interpreted as sending a signal that the time has come to start having sex."
But countries like New Zealand, Britain and the US have more of a rich/poor divide and relatively fewer teenagers in higher education.
More on sexual health and pregnancy at SocietyGuardian.co.uk/publichealth
