This article highlights research findings derived from focus group discussions as well as field survey. The 13 focus group sessions involved 84 adolescents from across six parishes while for the survey there were 447 respondents to the closely supervised, largely self-administered questionnaire.

These respondents were randomly selected from 21 schools across five parishes. Both research methods aimed at a balance in terms of male/female and urban/rural distribution of participants.

The socio-economic standing of participants (10 to 18 year olds) was also factored into the research design. Schools which participated in the survey were mainly randomly selected and included the various types available in Jamaica, ranging from all-age to traditional high schools (Government-aided as well as private institutions). Two same-sex schools were purposively selected as was one school which caters only to upper-income Jamaicans. The research is still work-in-progress toward a PhD. Comments would be appreciated.

In focus group discussions, many participants, particularly the girls, reported being drawn to a piece of music because of the rhythm. They said they sometimes had little idea what the lyrics were saying at first.

One young girl remarked that, “It’s like when I’m watching music videos .I focus on the rhythm and then the words come to me later. I could just tune out the words and just listen to the beat.” Even the boys, who mostly see the DJs as role models, are at times confounded by the lyrics. As one 16 year-old boy noted, “It’s just the boom, boom, boom”. But with repetition of the songs on radio and TV and at parties, they all get it, since in truth repetition is the essence of learning. With time, boys and girls learn the lyrics and internalise the messages.

In the survey, adolescents were asked if they learnt about a number of sexually related matters specifically from watching music videos and not other shows. These were the number of sexual partners it was permissible to have at the same time, how to protect themselves against sexually transmitted infections, the age to start having sex and how to treat their girlfriends or boyfriends.

Their responses were very interesting. Although the vast majority (77.4 per cent) said music videos did not teach them about the number of sexual partners that it was OK to have, almost a quarter of them (about 100) said they did. Most were boys, 25.3 per cent versus 19.4 per cent of girls.

I decided to probe further to determine which boys were learning this lesson from music videos. Was it younger or older boys? And what about the girls, what was their profile?

Table 1 displays the findings. Early adolescence is defined as those girls and boys 10 to 12 years old, middle those 13 to 15 years and late those 16 to 18 years of age.

From this we see that although overall males outnumbered girls in learning from videos about the number of sex partners it was OK to have, it was the older boys (16 to 18 years old) who mostly learnt this lesson. Since we know that older boys are the ones more likely to be sexually active, how are they implementing this music video lesson? From the research findings, we know that these older boys are the ones who are more likely to have multiple sexual partners.

With respect to the girls, what is instructive is the extent to which older girls (33.3 per cent) were just like the older boys (33.8 per cent) in saying that they learnt about the number of sex partners to have from watching videos.

With females we see a massive difference between younger girls (10 to 12 year olds) and the older ones (16 to 18 year olds) in learning about permissible number of sex partners from music videos (9.0 per cent versus 33.3 per cent).

Like the boys, we know the older girls are more sexually active than the younger ones. What we do not know and can’t say for either girls or boys is that watching music videos will cause them to have many concurrent sexual partners.

There may be a correlation, but causation is not easy to establish. Cause/effect relationships usually depend on experimental research designs. When in comes to matters of sexuality and sexual practices, designing experiments to learn things about adolescent behaviours would just not be allowed. Ethical and moral issues would intervene.

Suffice it to say, however, that where we have almost a quarter of adolescents – boys and girls combined – saying that they learn about the number of sexual partners that it is alright for them to have based on what they see in music videos, then we need to examine what it is that these videos are showing.

What messages do videos portray when it comes to sexual relationships? Without a doubt we all know the answer. Many videos highlight and normalise men with many girlfriends.

Increasingly, videos are also portraying girls with many boyfriends. These are mainly material girls who ‘have what it takes’ to ‘catch a man and hold him’. As the Lady says, “I’ve got your man and you can’t do anything about it!” while the men who attract the most girls are the ones with Benzes, Bimmas and Bling.

Moving to another aspect of the question, I examined responses to whether or not adolescents believed music videos taught them the age at which to start having sex. Again, boys outnumbered girls in positive responses. Over one-third of boys (36.9 per cent) and just under one-third of girls (30.6 per cent) said yes. Again, I explored which boys and which girls in terms of their stage of adolescence.

Here it was different. It was the younger ones who were learning the age at which to start having sex from music videos. Perhaps the older ones had long forgotten where they picked up this information. Or perhaps music videos have become increasingly sexualised over more recent years. Or it may just be that with the proliferation of local music video cable channels over the past six or so years, the children are much more exposed to videos. Then again, it’s likely to be a combination of all three factors.

Almost half of the boys who said they learnt the age to start having sex from watching music videos were 10 to 12 years old (46.8 per cent). The length of the questionnaire restricted me from probing what age that was. One-third of the females who said yes were in early adolescence, while a little over one-third were in mid-adolescence.

These findings highlight the influence music videos exert over sexual matters and decisions pertaining to them during adolescence. The age at which they start having sex as well as the number of sexual partners they have are key variables in the subject area of high risk behaviours among adolescents.

As adults, we need to begin to make it our business to get beyond the ‘boom, boom, boom’ and rhythms and to focus on knowing and understanding the lyrics while paying attention to the images. It’s a tall order, I know, but well worth the effort.

Marcia Forbes is a PhD candidate at the University of the West Indies and a former general manager of Television Jamaica

marciaforbes@hotmail.com