What should we tell our children about sex? For years, it seems, we have been telling them nothing very much (well, what sort of advice did you get from your mum and dad about the whens and wherefores of sexual relationships?) We managed to delegate our responsibilities to teachers, and then the Daily Mail sat on the sidelines watching what exactly was being taught during personal social and health education lessons, ready to shout the house down if it wasn't to its liking.
On the whole, the criticism has been that school sex education programmes have been too liberal: too much about oral sex, too much about homosexual relationships, too much detail, too much everything.
Now, though, we are seeing an about-turn. Next month, six mothers will launch a US-style "chastity tour" called the Ring Thing, inviting the nation's teenagers to a night of music, lights, fun and drama at which they will buy a silver ring and take a pledge of abstinence until marriage.
And that's not all. Over the past few years, 104 schools throughout the UK have pioneered an education scheme called A PAUSE (Added Power and Understanding in Sex Education) which, despite coming in for the usual tabloid flak, is actually a fairly conservative programme aimed at combating the sorts of stereotypical views and behaviours that lead teenagers to think that early sex is something they, and everyone else, has to engage in. Now a leaked government-backed report has said the programme is working: children, especially girls, who were involved in it, developed a "more mature" response to sex and were "less likely to be sexually active" than peers who received traditional forms of teaching.
What do the Ring Thing and A PAUSE have in common? For a start, both are about peer education. "I got involved in the Ring Thing after I saw a TV documentary about it," says Kathi Bellafiore, who has a daughter aged 12 and a son aged 22. "I thought the way they reach the kids is so brilliant - they relate to them. So much of it is done through peers standing up there and giving them a message. It's not about older people talking down to them, it's their own kind in their own language."
Both programmes start from the premise that the status quo isn't working: a study by a Nottingham economist this month found that extra Family Planning services have not helped in cutting the teenage pregnancy rate, and new figures out in March showed the teenage pregnancy rate up by 2.2% (although the government says this is only a blip).
But while the message may be similar, the underlying morality is different. For Dr John Tripp, paediatrician at the Peninsula Medical School and one of the architects of A PAUSE, the overriding consideration in drawing up a sex education programme is health. "We know that there are health dangers for young people who have sex at a younger age and who have more sexual partners," he says. "We also know that young people are not reliable users of contraceptives. So we don't think we are anti-liberal, but we do think young people at the moment are being pressured by the media into misunderstandings of what's normal.
"Most young people believe other young people have had sex at 16, and that therefore they should have sex by 16 - but in fact less than a third of young people are having sex at 16."
Dr Tripp says the jury is still out on abstinence programmes such as the Ring Thing. "They may be effective," he says. "But there isn't good data yet. You could say the A PAUSE programme is about abstinence until you're ready."
For Bellafiore and her colleagues at the Ring Thing, meanwhile, the message, besides health concerns, is very definitely moral. "There is nothing wrong with teaching our kids to be moral," she says. "It's not just their bodies that are broken by STDs and teenage pregnancies. Their hearts are broken too - relationships at that age don't last and the youngsters are left in a terrible state psychologically."
Other surveys bear these arguments out. Studies show that, while the average age for first sexual intercourse is 16, significant numbers of 13- and 14-year-olds are becoming sexually active - and the psychological fallout when it all goes wrong seems particularly harmful among young women. But another survey, in 2000, found 20% of young men and 13% of young women blamed being drunk for their decision to have sex, and 10% of 15-16-year-olds in this category later regretted it.
Another survey, carried out by the Institute of Education and University College London and due to be published in the Lancet, will say 36% of girls who had lost their virginity at 13 were "unhappy" about it, while 18% said it should never have happened. A third of boys also regretted losing their virginity too early.
