CYP Now isn’t afraid to get controversial, no sir. This year’s Positive Images awards saw a slightly surprising winner – a teen girls magazine.
These mags get brought up again and again as being negative influences on young people – especially young girls. They’re almost universally panned in certain circles (my dad, for one) for encouraging teenage promiscuity, frivolity, and wrecking young girls body image by bombarding them with photos of skinny models and celebrities.
They’re labelled vacuous. They’re accused of promoting negative behaviours like dieting, keeping up with fashion, relationships, sex….always back to sex.
But hang on. Don’t teenagers already have sex? With or without the aid of Sugar magazine and it’s ilk?
A second winner in the Positive Images awards was the UK Youth Parliament’s (UKYP) excellent campaign on sex and relationships education.
You may remember their study hit the headlines late last year when, after surveying more than 20,000 schoolchildren, the UKYP revealed sex education in schools was so bad half the teenagers surveyed were left in total ignorance.
Furthermore, it’s universally known and proved that countries with low rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) and teenage pregnancy, adopt the attitude that guess what? Sex among teenagers happens, and depriving them of information and advice about it is counter-productive.
What a contrast to the UK, where our continually worrying rates of teenage pregnancy and STD’s among young people go hand-in-hand with ghastly rants from the right-wing press about the scandal of some (not nearly enough) teenagers being able to get condoms at school and other such chuntering.
CYP Now rightly salutes Sugar magazine for its wise, warm and inspirational way of connecting with young girls. In fact CYP Now salutes all its Positive Images Award winners and hopes you’ll log in over the coming weeks to read more about these wonderful projects, publications and campaigns that help celebrate our young people for what they really are – the future.