Vulnerable Adolescent Girls: Opposite‐sex Relationships

This interview-based study compares the opposite-sex relationships of 50 girls, aged 15-16, identified as being at risk for difficulties in early adult partnerships, with 50 girls of the same age from an inner-city school. The high-risk girls had begun solo-dating earlier than the school girls, were more likely to have had a sexual relationship, to have had more sexual partners, to have been pregnant, and to have had a child. A third of the girls in both groups were solo-dating at the time of the interview. In contrast to the school girls, the high-risk girls attached a prominence and permanence to their current dating relationships, which already bore the hallmarks of later unsupportive partnerships.