Sex education has always been a contentious subject.

Religious conservatives have been preaching for the longest time that the media is destroying our youth and poisoning their minds with sexually explicit and violent lyrics, films and computer games.

Now researchers at Pittburgh University found a link between teenagers' sexual and music listening habits.

"They found those who regularly listened to music with explicit and aggressive sexual phrases were twice as likely to be having sex."

I can already hear those favouring abstinence and chastity shouting "We told you so!".

But is it really that simple?

The attempt to censor explicit music has failed and rightly so. In a free country you should be able to produce and buy music, explicit or not as long as it does not promote racial hatred.

So the alternative would be to promote abstinence and just ignore that nasty business of sex.

Unfortunately, promoting abstinence does not work.

Kids will be bombarded by nudity, sexual innuendo and talk, images and videos of sex from an early age. How long you can and should protect from it until they are capable of making a sound judgement on it is another matter.

But it is a matter that should not be ignored by the educational system because more often than not, schools are not just there to feed the minds of young people with science and factual knowledge, but also to prepare them for life out there in the real world.

And sex is a very important part of that.

It isn't so much about the how you do it, which is more of a question of trial and error; but rather it's a question of the facts associated with it. The consequences, both physical and emotional.

Youngsters should know what really gets a girl pregnant and what doesn't. Equally they should know about sexually transmitted diseases and how to protect from them.

Ignoring teenage pregnancies and high levels of STDs among youngsters and preaching that not doing it is a better solution is not going to stop them or even reduce the number of those becoming sexually active.

Kids will always want to rebel, cave into peer pressure or simply be curious about what it's like.

The least we can do as adults is tell them that it's not what they show in porn or sing about in abusive, explicit music.

We should tell them that making love when you're ready for it and with the right person is a wonderful thing. In doing so we might help them make the right judgement on when the time is right.