The British Medical Association has just released a rather morbid report, “Adolescent Health.”

If I might be more blunt than the Brits, their youth are increasingly icky — overweight, stupefied by drink and drugs, and epically promiscuous.

Line up a random sample of 10 British youth. Two of the 10 will be overweight or obese, two or three will have had an alcoholic drink in the last week and one of them will have used drugs in the last month. If you line up just the girls, one of the 10 will have the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia. Rather icky, to say the least, and if we burrow beyond these general statistics and into the details of the report, things get even ickier.

Just so our American heads do not swell, the American Obesity Association reports that the “percentage of children and adolescents who are overweight and obese [in the United States] is now higher than ever before. … Today's youth are considered the most inactive generation in history. … Approximately 30.3% of children (ages 6 to 11) are overweight and 15.3% are obese. For adolescents (ages 12 to 19), 30.4% are overweight and 15.5% are obese.”

Need a bit more humility? Well, our own Centers for Disease Control informs us that “between 15% to 20% of young men and women [in the United States] have become infected with herpes by the time they reached adulthood.” Although the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases has been in a slight overall decline recently, “genital herpes continues to increase, spreading across all social, economic, racial and ethnic boundaries, but most dramatically affecting teens and young adults.”

So, you get the point. The British teens are badly off, and ours are hardly (if at all) better. If youth are the hope of the future, then we have cause for despair on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not wanting to give in to despair and also being rather old fashioned, I searched the British Medical Association report for the word “virtue” and was informed by the impartial computer that “no occurrences of virtue were found in the document.” Ditto for “vice.” Needless to say, neither do we find the words fortitude, temperance, chastity, sloth, avarice, lust, gluttony or indeed any of the classical vocabulary of character by which the virtues and vices are identified and categorized.

The lack of the language of virtue in the report is not merely a matter of semantics.

The loss of the language of virtue is a sign of the neglect of virtue in the society, a neglect that has led to the prevalence of vice among the youth. Perhaps “neglect” is too charitable a word. Reading through the report's recommendations, some of the proposed cures betoken a barely suppressed hostility to the language and practice of virtue.

Allow me to focus on one glaring example — sexuality. Rather than speaking of sexual temperance or intemperance, the report gauges sexual activity in terms of “competence.” Thus, the authors lament the fact that “91% of girls and 67% of boys aged 13 to 14 at first intercourse were not sexually competent.”

What criteria define sexual competence for the British Medical Association? Thirteen-year-old boys and girls are sexually competent if they have sex, do so willingly and autonomously, experience no regret and use a contraceptive.

Clearly, their proposed cure is only one more symptom of the disease: A society that seems to have eliminated, by and large, the most important distinctions in regard to sexual good and evil except the most utilitarian. In such a society, youth have nothing to strive for in regard to their sexuality except the more and more frequent “expression” of it. Such aimless sexual expression is the direct result of having nothing at which to aim.

Should we blame the youth, Brit or American, for this? I think not. Before today's youth came on the scene, the natural and proper target for sexuality, marriage, was well on its way to being dismantled. With no defined goal for sexuality, all distinctions between good and bad were removed as well.

Imagine trying to judge an archery contest in which there are no targets. The only criterion of judging left is limited to keeping the contestants from shooting each other or themselves.

There is some cause for hope in the document, however. In regard to the other maladies, it is interesting to note that the British Medical Association has less of a problem with virtue-friendly language. They recognize physical health as the goal of eating and that eating from the contemporary cornucopia of junk food both establishes bad eating habits and leads to bad health. But the definition of a virtue is an excellent habit that contributes to our perfection, and so, recognize it or not, they have stumbled upon the necessity for the virtue of temperance in regard to food.

The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, in regard to drinking and drugs. In regard to drinking, the British Medical Association recognizes that the continual activity of indulgence establishes a habit of indulgence, a habit that leads quite quickly to harm. As for drugs, they also recognize that some substances cannot be ingested at all but cause immediate harm. In both cases, a little nudge and they would be speaking the language of virtue again.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the recognition of the need for virtue in these areas might lead the Brits — and we Yanks as well — to reconsider the need for virtue in regard to sexuality as well. For the sake of our youth, let's hope so.

Ben Wiker writes from Steubenville, Ohio.