CHASTITY IN CHILDREN

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29990, 27 November 1962, Page 18

CHASTITY IN CHILDREN

Class StudyIn U.K. (N.ZJ’.A.-Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, November 25. Children from workingclass backgrounds tend to have sexual experiences earlier and more often than middle-class children, a professor of psychological medicine said today. Professor George M. Carstairs, of Edinburgh University, said this in a broadcast tonight in which he posed the question: “Is chastity the supreme moral virtue?”

He said that if a Kinsey survey were carried out in Britain one of its findings would probably be that “young people from middleclass and from working-class backgrounds—deal with their sexual urges differently. “Middle-class youths try to practise prolonged sexual restraint while young people of the working-class tend to have sexual experience more often and from an earlier age,” the professor said. Biologically and emotionally children were capable of enjoying sexual relationships from the age of puberty. “I believe we may be quite mistaken in our alarm over young people's sexual experimentation. Many societies get on quite well without premarital chastity. “But is chastity the supreme moral virtue? Surely charity, consideration of others, comes first,” the professor added.