Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong against that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youth are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.

The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties and an explosion of Internet connectivity, especially through Web sites like Fotolog.com, where young people trade suggestive photos of one another and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,000 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.

Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl’s school, at the Internet provider – at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video. The girl’s parents removed her from the school and even tried to change her name.

The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and escape the book-burning times of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and pregnancy among girls younger than 15 is on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.

The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile’s first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was finally introduced in the schools.

Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with an avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.