When Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia, read a study last year that said early sex leads to juvenile delinquency, it did not sound right to her.

Using the same data from February 2007's Ohio State University study, she found that teens who have consensual sex in their early teens or even preteen years are actually less likely to engage in delinquent behaviors later on.

Harden went through data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a federal survey of 7,000 children in grades 7 through 12. She took out the data on 534 same-sex twins included in that study because by using twins, she eliminated genetic and socio-economic factors that skew research results.

Twins who had sex at younger ages than their twin brothers or sisters did not mean that have better odds of becoming delinquents. In fact, the odds were actually somewhat lower.

"I wouldn't be focusing on early sex to lower the rates of delinquency," Harden said.

Her study appears in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Labels: delinquents, sex