Half the reason certain parents object to sex education in school is a fear that this will encourage their little darlings to start shagging like rabbits. Anyone who has had sex education will know that this is patent nonsense and now a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health has confirmed that sex ed actually delays sex – but so does abstinence instruction. Laura Duberstein Lindberg and Isaac Maddow-Zimet of the Guttmacher Institute in New York found that young adults who had received instruction on both abstinence and birth control tended to be older when they first had sex and they were more likely to have used condoms or other contraceptives during their first experience. Interestingly, if perhaps obviously, women who had only received abstinence-only education were significantly less likely to use a condom during their first experience of sex, most likely because abstinence education often erroneously claims that condoms do not work.