By Deborah Whitson, CBN News Senior Reporter
WARNING: The subject material of this story is not suitable for young children.
Dating has gone by the wayside in today's culture. Instead, young people are settling on casual sex with virtual strangers. But a rise in sexually transmitted diseases among teens means there is more at stake with these no strings attached lifestyles — young people's lives.
A recent study of a thousand college women shows social dating has practically disappeared from college campuses.
Kate Kennedy of the Independent Women's Forum explained, "There is no dating scene on college campus anymore. It's an incredibly loose and free for all and an uncommitted culture that everyone is involved in."
Now dating has been replaced with "hooking-up," a term students use to describe any type of physical encounter, from kissing to sexual intercourse.
"On many college campuses it's an intentionally, intentionally vague term. They kind of find comfort and cover in the fact that it's so mysterious so that you can say, ‘Oh yeah we hooked up last night,’ and yet you're not totally responsible for your actions because nobody really knows what you did," Kennedy said.
The study commissioned by the Independent Women's Forum and conducted by the Institute for American Values found 91 percent of college women are caught up in this rampant hook-up culture on their campuses.
"And the images that are being portrayed is, this is supposed to be fun, and girls, you're supposed to have a good time with this. And it's almost as though they're chastised for waking up the next morning and feeling disappointed that they never got the call back — he just walked out of her room without even saying goodbye to her," Kennedy said.
Not only do these casual encounters leave emotional scars, but an alarming rise in sexually transmitted diseases shows these "hook ups" are not risk free.
Dr. John Whiffen of the National Physicians Center said, "It's estimated that over 50 percent of sexually active single people in the United States have a STD right now, actively are carrying one — 20 percent of the population has herpes, 20 percent of the adult population in the United States. That's an astronomic figure. So when you look at these figures, you realize that these diseases are being passed on, and most people who have an STD, have multiple STD's."
And it is not just college students who are getting STD's.
A video produced by The Medical Institute, gives the reasons behind recent findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to its recent report, more than 15 million new cases of STD infections occur in the U.S. each year. Of those infected, one in four are teenagers.
And teens are a majority of the one in five Americans with genital herpes — however 90 percent of those infected are unaware they have the disease.
Many infected with STD's fail to get tested since they often show no outward symptoms.
"So this can all happen silently without you ever really knowing it, and so you can gaily go on having sex with various partners and passing these diseases on to others," Whiffen said.
And what about safe sex? Condoms provide limited protection against the human papilloma virus (HPV) and several other STD's since the diseases are passed by skin-to-skin contact. Estimates show that about 10 percent of adults in all developed countries have some form of papilloma virus and do not even know it. The impact for some women is only felt years later — 80 percent of cervical cancer cases have been linked certain kinds of HPV.
"We've heard well meaning people say, ‘But we have to help those kids who are going to be sexually active.’ Well, the truth is that the only way we are going to help the sexually active kid is to tell him to stop being active, because the practical fact is they will get a disease if they continue to be sexually active," Whiffen said.
The Center for Disease Control reports that every day 8,000 American teens will contract a sexually transmitted disease. That adds up to over three million teens infected per year.