Precocious Pregnancy, Sexual Conflict, and Early Childbearing in Remote Aboriginal Australia

Ideas from evolutionary theory and a consideration of social and cultural factors are used to argue that teenage pregnancy in three remote Aboriginal communities represents a strategic response to current environments characterised by pervasive and sustained risk and uncertainty. Ethnographic studies of the communities find that these environments both provoke and enable the reproductive strategies of adolescent boys and girls but raise the question of the effects of father absent socialisation.