Breaking the Silence: Young people, sex information and the internet in Italy and Portugal

In this chapter we will focus on teens’ use of internet resources to look for
and find information related to sex and sexuality. To do that we will analyse
the results of two different projects carried out in two different, but culturally
similar, European countries: Italy and Portugal, by means of discourse analysis
of semi-structured interviews.
After a brief comparison of the contexts, we will analyse the roles of family,
school and peer groups as sources of sexual information for young people, and then
we will focus on the internet and the practices of using different sources by young
people. As the two main foci of analysis, we address how online search for information about sex and sexuality relate to other social groups and spaces that are part
of young people’s lives and how young people talk about the roles the internet
plays for them, including the negotiation of gender dynamics