London , Jan 6 (ANI): No one can match British teenagers, when it comes to under-age sex, for figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) have shown that teens in the UK indulge in sex quite younger than their European counterparts.

The WHO report shows that 4 out of 10 girls in England have underage sex, beating all other European countries as well as their male counterparts.

According to the report, 39.9 percent of girls in England confessed that they had sex at the age of 15 years or younger, which is the highest of any of the 24 European countries surveyed.

England is followed by Wales , at 38.5 percent, and Scotland with 34.1 percent.

Even the number of boys in the UK having sex before 16 (at 34.9 percent) is also higher than all other European countries excluding Ukraine, where 47.1 percent of teenagers insisted that they had lost their virginity before 15.

More than two-thirds of women in the 1950s had their first sexual experience with someone they were married or engaged to. In 2000, this was under 1%, Times Online quoted Kaye Wellings, an expert in reproductive health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as saying.

The report revealed that 15 percent of the sexually active teenagers in England didnt use contraception.

It is depressing that so many young people are losing out on childhood by becoming parents too soon, and this becomes a vicious circle because there is a greater likelihood that the family will break up, said Jill Kirby, director of the rightwing think tank the Centre for Policy Studies.

The WHO report will be published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. (ANI)