http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,577346,00.html
Faith, hope and chastity Across the US, teenagers are being taught an old lesson: that saying no to sex is the way to go and waiting until your wedding day is a good thing. And it's a message that falls all too neatly into George Bush's new rightwing Christian agenda. Zoe Williams enters virgin territory Saturday October 20, 2001 The Guardian Kid A: Do you want to go upstairs? Kid B: No. Kid A: Oh, go on. Kid B: No. Kid A: Why not? Kid B: No. No. No. This is Honeye Falls, a sleepy suburb of Rochester, New York State. Kid A is a pleasant, articulate, acned male of 13. Kid B is a sharp and friendly female of the same age, in a pink top. They are acting out a role play of what they would do should A start hassling B to have sex with him, under the instruction of two older teenagers from the high school round the corner. "That was good," says the first teen leader, "but some people won't take no for an answer. Remember that no one has the right to pressure you, and you shouldn't feel guilty about saying no. Turn it back on them. Tell them how you feel when they put you under pressure, and what it makes you think about them. Nobody can put pressure on you to do something you don't want to do." There follow suggested ripostes, such as, "When you keep pressuring me like this, it makes me feel like you want me to do something I don't want to do. That makes me feel like you don't respect my right to say no." "Right," says the second teen leader. "We need some people to do the next role play." The class tries to pretend it isn't there, by looking upwards, in the way that only teenagers and dogs think will work. "Come on, if you don't volunteer, we'll just have to pick someone." A third girl, let's call her Kid C, sticks up her hand: "Aren't you pressuring us into doing something we don't want to do?" She has a point. Training in sexual abstinence is a tricky business, educationally and politically. But before you even get to the ethics of it, you are faced with endless conundrums about its internal logic. Sex and drugs, even though they go together well, are two different things. Unlike drugs (which are just bad for you, kids, and always will be), sex is bound to wind up on a citizen's fun timetable at some point - so how do you persuade teenagers that they can't do it now, without telling them why not, or when they can? How do you impress upon them that they will get pregnant, without diminishing their faith in the contraceptive pill? How do you persuade them that they'll wind up HIV positive, without annulling their trust in the condom? How do you convince them their reputation will be damaged, without for ever associating sex with guilt, not to mention introducing misogyny (boys rarely respond to the notion that getting laid will give them a "reputation")? Teaching abstinence-until-marriage is to reject the belief system of the majority of Americans - according to the largest available study of sexual behaviour in the US, The Social Organisation Of Sexuality, 86.5% of the population has sex before marriage. Teaching abstinence-until-you-feel-ready is to recommend contradictory forms of behaviour in consecutive periods of a person's life, without even telling them when one ends and the next begins. It can't be easy. So why are so many schools attempting to teach sexual abstinence to their teenage pupils? Clearly the notion of not doing it until you're married has precisely no relevance to the bulk of the population, teenage or not. And yet America's schools are busily trying to ram home the Just Say No message. Why? The reasons are both political and financial, and date back to 1981, when Republican congressman Jeremiah Denton drafted legislation that funded abstinence programmes to the tune of $7m per year. The effect of this was not noted until 1992, when the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (Siecus), a health organisation of liberal bent, spotted a spate of sex education that dwelt mainly on disease, shame and psychological damage. Then in 1996, a Republican Congress overturned President Clinton's veto and amended the Welfare Reform Bill to make abstinence-until-marriage messages a required criterion for federal funding of sex education. Some quirk of the American political system (see popular soap The West Wing for details) meant that there was never any discussion on the floor of Congress before this legislation was passed. Fifty million dollars were allocated to programmes that "have as their exclusive purpose teaching the benefits of abstinence until marriage". The provision allowed for continued funding of programmes that made no mention of marriage, as long as they preached abstinence, but education on safe sex was thereafter either relegated to the status of special interest topic for abhorrent teens, or quashed altogether. In July this year, another $17m was earmarked for abstinence programmes that make no mention of contraception and a further $30m is slated for next year, with the same proviso. While George W Bush was governor of Texas, the state had the largest abstinence budget nationwide. "Abstinence is not just about saying no," he declared in 1996. "It's about saying yes to a healthier, happier future." Abstinence, politically speaking, is the new abortion and, like abortion, it has come to a head under the current Bush administration. According to Mike McGee of Planned Parenthood, a voluntary family planning association founded in 1916, whose basic philosophy is that every child should be a wanted child, "This administration is antagonistic to sex. The president has said repeatedly that we should be spending a great deal of money telling young people not to have sex. And he has been making moves to fund that by taking money from programmes that provide contraceptives to poor people and teenagers." The Bush administration has certainly hardened its line on abstinence. Legislation has been mooted to withdraw funding from programmes that try to skirt the marriage issue and advice has been taken from, among others, the far-right Medical Institute of Sexual Health. At a conference organised by the institute last year, a young female doctor was asked how she would apply the abstinence message to a young homosexual coming into her clinic. She said, "I would tell him that he was sinning against my Lord!" Different states have different ways of handling the issue. In some, the rightwing, abstinence-until-marriage message is so strong that parents have actually taken local educational bodies to court for violating state law; in others, including Rochester, a more low-key, liberal message is put across. The Not Me, Not Now campaign that operates in Rochester was launched in 1994 to reduce Monroe County's teen pregnancy rate, which by 1993 was the highest in New York State. The campaign consists mainly of TV and radio adverts, with some school posters. The TV ads are very positive, full of slogans such as "Because I have dreams" and "Because nothing's gonna get in the way of my dreams". They basically conflate sex with pregnancy, giving the message: don't have sex, because getting pregnant would be tiresome for you. In one ad, a girl says, "He said that if I really loved him, I'd have sex with him. But I don't want to give him something I can't get back." Otherwise, though, the idea of virginity as some kind of prize is skirted, as is HIV (of which there is a negligible incidence in the teen community). Marriage is kept separate since, as John Riley, director of communications at Not Me, Not Now, explains, "Realistically, the vast majority of divorced parents in the community are involved in a relationship short of marriage. How do you win the heart of that kid by condemning his parents? Besides, I know when I was 13, sex was the only thing on my mind and the idea of marriage was - I can't even describe how remote an idea it was. I think that would be an unrealistic message." Unrealistic or otherwise, there is no doubt that the message is confusing, both ideologically and factually. I ask Kid B how effective she thinks the pill is. "Nothing's 100% effective, unless it's not at all," she says, which is true. She then says the pill is 87% safe - if that were true, there would be an awful lot of disgruntled mothers in the world (the actual figure is over 99%). She thinks the right age to have sex is around 18 (or when you're at college), but adds, "I think kids are really misled about sex, by TV and songs and stuff. They give this image that it's clean, and it isn't. They throw a white sheet over it and it's clean, but underneath the sheet it's all nasty and dirty. They don't understand that. A lot of people don't know how you can get yourself into trouble with having sex. Just like all the sexually transmitted diseases that are going round. People don't know, when they're having sex with a person, whether they have Aids. It's just so unsafe that people shouldn't be doing it." How this dirt and disease is magically going to disappear at 18 is unclear - possibly because the adults don't know, either. Riley says: "We want to deliver a simple, clear, unambiguous message. The message is to wait before you have sex. When you wait, and how long you wait, is up to you. But the message is to wait." In other words, take the age you want to have sex, add an infinitely variable period of time, then have sex. It's enough to confuse anyone. I ask Rochester's director of health, Andrew Doniger, what the right age is. "What do you think it is?" he shoots back. "I don't know." "Neither do I." "I asked you first." "Well, I definitely think 12 is too young." "Me, too. But, ideally, what age would you like to see the kids in your community having sex?" "We don't say." (In fact, they do say: Monroe County adheres to the Healthy People 2000 Objective 5.4, to "reduce the proportion of adolescents who have engaged in sexual intercourse to no more than 40% by age 17".) "But it is working," he adds - teenage pregnancy rates have fallen by a third in the seven years Not Me, Not Now has been running. "My kids aren't having sex." "What, none of them? Not the 24-year-old?" "The 24-year-old is having sex." "What about the 21-year-old?" "The 21-year-old is not, which is shocking to me. I am a little worried about it, but not because of Not Me, Not Now. He thinks he has to find the perfect person. I don't know if he's ever going to be happy." It's possible that he thinks it's dirty and nasty beneath the sheet, but then he is too old to have been influenced by the campaign. He might just have got it from his dark psyche. "So, any time between 16 and 20 is okay?" "You're a pain in the ass, you know that? Tolerating ambiguity," Doniger continues, "is the sign of a healthy community." He's right: as confusing as the message is, without its ambiguity, the programme would be sunk. If it went any further towards explaining why sex for kids is bad - that is, if it introduced a moral agenda - it would run into the problems encountered in Louisiana. There, the original abstinence programme, Facing Reality, was overturned in 1993 for violating state law on three counts: including religious beliefs in the public school system, giving information that was factually inaccurate and giving anti-abortion views. Since then, Facing Reality has toned down its message, but it still lists the disadvantages of premarital sex thus: "Pregnancy, fear of pregnancy, Aids, guilt, herpes, disappointing parents, chlamydia, inability to concentrate on school, syphilis, embarrassment, abortion, shotgun wedding, gonorrhea, selfishness, pelvic inflammatory disease, heartbreak, infertility, loneliness, cervical cancer, poverty, loss of self-esteem, loss of reputation, being used, suicide, substance abuse, melancholy, loss of faith, possessiveness, diminished ability to communicate, isolation, fewer friendships formed, rebellion against other familial standards, alienation, loss of self-mastery, viewing others as sex objects, difficulty with long-term commitments, other sexually transmitted diseases, aggressions toward women, ectopic pregnancy, sexual violence, loss of sense of responsibility toward others, loss of honesty, jealousy, depression, death." Phew. It sounds like a song by Nine Inch Nails. Siecus has pointed out that there is no scientific proof of a loss of self-mastery or fall in friendships formed after premarital sex. Or depression, jealousy, loss of honesty, poverty or melancholy. There is not an awful lot of death, come to that. Its main concerns about the abstinence-until-marriage brigade are that they present homosexuality as abhorrent and reinforce gender stereotypes. Take this from Wait Training's "love education" lessons: "Men sexually are like microwaves, and women sexually are like crockpots. A woman is stimulated more by touch and romantic words. She is far more attracted by a man's personality, while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is attracted." "A young man's natural desire for sex is already strong due to testosterone," one abstinence education programme, called Sex Respect, says. "Because they generally become aroused less easily, females are in a good position to help young men learn balance in a relationship by keeping intimacy in perspective." Oh, and, "Watch what you wear - if you don't aim to please, don't aim to tease." More worryingly, Siecus believes such programmes feed teens misinformation about contraception. One, Teen-Aid, puts condom failure rates at preventing STDs at 10-30% - yet two recent studies record the incidence of HIV transmission via properly used condoms as 0.04% and 0%. Another programme, Clue 2000 (the Clue stands for Creating Love and Uplifting Esteem), states: "47,393 Americans were killed in the Vietnam war and 42,420 were killed on the US highways in 1997. Three million teenagers are infected with STDs each year." It fails to mention that the vast majority of those can be treated with antibiotics. The whole function of such teaching, in fact, seems to be to scare the bejesus out of teenagers. In spite of the fact that, after hepatitis C, HIV is the least frequently occurring STD in America, and that rates of syphilis are at their lowest since 1959, much of the literature boils the risks down to "sexually transmitted diseases, like HIV". In a public health video called No Second Chance, a student asks, "What if I want to have sex before I get married?" The nurse replies, "Well, I guess you just have to be prepared to die. And you'll probably take your spouse and your children with you." Pointing a gun at the camera, No Second Chance likens condom use to playing russian roulette. The nurse tells her students, "The next time somebody wants you to go to bed with them, with or without a condom, picture that... it's not just you and him or you and her: it's that you're packing a loaded revolver when you go." At their 20-year high school reunion, she adds, there will be empty chairs as a result of Aids. The practical fears about teaching such lessons to teenagers are obvious: if they think contraception doesn't work, they won't use it. This is of particular concern to Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has found that increased scepticism about condoms leads to decreased use of them, but does not lead to a decrease in sexual activity. In addition, STDs such as syphilis and chlamydia become serious only if they are left untreated - and the more terrified people are made of them, the later they will leave it before having them examined. Educationally, the main problem is that the message isn't consonant with anything approaching a didactic ideal. Rochester kids are shown a video in which they are told simply to say no: "Keep saying no firmly enough and the other person will soon get the message. Whatever you do, don't get tricked into giving them a reason. This will give them the opportunity to argue with you." This, clearly, is counter to the overall purpose of education which, in its most general terms, would be to learn how to express oneself properly and to listen with respect to the self-expression of others. The posters on the classroom wall say, "Come to terms with your sexuality - Abstain." Yet if you were asked how you might come to terms with the death of a pet, say, or the loss of a friend, "I'm going to ignore it" would probably be the wrong answer. Homework booklets refer to a student's "reputation" as a good reason to abstain from sex, but two pages on comes the line, "You won't always be respected for your beliefs and opinions. You should feel good about yourself for standing up for what you believe in" - provided, presumably, that you believe in virginity, rather than promiscuity. Ultimately, abstinence messages and safe sex messages are in direct conflict. As Teen-Aid says, "Teaching children about both abstinence and condoms sends a mixed message similar to suggesting they should not smoke, but recommending filter-top cigarettes for those who do." This is a fair point, but it does deny teenagers the information they need to avoid STDs. In the 17 states in which safe sex education is mandatory, it is baldly contradicted by the abstinence message, which is that nothing's safe, apart from not at all. Ethical fears about current sex education are more diverse and more complex. Susie Bright, a feminist author and teacher, has noticed a change in attitudes since abstinence began to rear its head. "In 1990, I started a series of lectures to and surveys of undergraduates at universities across the country. I would give a brief list of questions to groups of 100-300 students, including, 'Do you masturbate?', 'Do you experience orgasm?' and, 'Have you had an intimate sexual experience with another person?' At the end, I asked them to write down a sex question; when I collected their (anonymous) responses, I would read and answer some questions on the spot. Question, 1990: How do women ejaculate? Question, 2001: Why is it bad to be a tease? Question, 1990: How do you maintain sexual tension in a long-term relationship? Question, 2001: Is it bad to masturbate before marriage? "This is poignant evidence of serious sexual ignorance. They may use the blunt language of MTV antiheroes, and dress as if they're co-starring on Temptation Island, but if they don't know what a clitoris is and they haven't had their clothes off around another person since nursery school, it's clear that all that neon-sexy attitude is one scared-stiff little act." While one would imagine abstinence slogans such as Sex Respect's "Control your urgin', stay a virgin" and "Don't be a louse, wait for your spouse" would simply sound ridiculous to most young adults, the message is clearly getting through. In the past five years, more than 2.5m teenagers have taken the Virginity Pledge, a million of them affiliated to True Love Waits, a kind of evangelical roadshow for teens launched in 1993. While the American Journal of Sociology estimates that teenagers who have taken the pledge delay their first intercourse by as long as three years, Dr Douglas Kirby, who has been researching the area for 22 years and works for ETR, a non-profit sex education council in California, says there is no evidence for the efficacy of pledging. Nor is there any for the efficacy of abstinence education as a whole. "We should not conclude that abstinence-only programmes do not work," he points out. "Rather, we do not know if they work." Nobody denies that teen pregnancy figures are going down: according to CDC, in 1997 they stood at 94.3 per 1,000 women aged 15-19 - their lowest level since 1976, when national data on pregnancy rates first became available. Where the argument arises is in the interpretation of these figures. Proponents of abstinence claim a victory for the Just Say No strategy - a claim that gleans credibility from the fact that contraception has been around for a long time, whereas abstinence programmes, in the main, date from the early 1990s. More liberal commentators would counter that, generally, the standard of living among the poorest social percentile went up under Clinton and increased affluence always leads to a fall in both teen pregnancy and early sexual involvement. They might also point to CDC figures which show that, in 1997, 54% of high school students had had sexual intercourse - a rate virtually unchanged since 1990. In Rochester, meanwhile, teen pregnancy rates had dropped by a third in the same period, making it the jewel in the country's crown as far as abstinence goes. However, as the head of its health department would be the first to admit, this is not simply attributable to Not Me, Not Now - school-based programmes teach safe sex in areas where early sexual activity is high and a few sexual health clinics have been set up in schools. There has been no research into what is having the biggest impact, safe sex or abstinence, and the department's interest is in any case purely pragmatic: if it works, it will try it. So its policy is pretty catholic. (That's with a small c. Obviously.) The whole muddled issue of sex education and abstinence is clearly not a case of like-minded individuals trying to find the best possible solution to a problem. It is an ideological battle between the predominantly Christian right wing and the secular left wing. One side believes that sex before marriage is evil. The other side doesn't. Trying to find a compromise would be like agreeing to differ over whether there is a God. To understand the rightwing view here, one has to consider the fact that many on the right feel as if education has been under a liberal siege for the past 50 years. Conservatives like popular radio agony aunt Laura Schlessinger believe "liberal forces" in education "have tried to sexualise our children. My son goes to a Jewish orthodox school. Boys and girls form friendships, play ball together, but there is no male-female socialising. They get to know each other as people, rather than as sex objects. I'm sure they get warmies for each other, because they're all normal. But they don't do anything disgusting about it. In public school, kids are forced to think licentiously." It is certainly true that liberal opinion has prevailed in much of the sexual legislation of the past 40 years. There are laws against sleeping with anyone under age (which varies from 16-18) if you are over 18, and laws against getting married below a certain age. For under-18s, there are laws against sexual congress with anyone five years younger than you (so a 17-year-old couldn't sleep with a 12-year-old), but there are no laws, generally, prohibiting sex between 12-year-olds. Many states don't even have an age of sexual consent. All this may have contributed to the current proliferation of scare stories about the sexualisation of minors. Rochester is alive with anecdotal evidence of alarming pre-teen debauchery. Michelle LoMaglio, of abstinence group Prevention Partners, tells of a seventh grader (12 years old) who was caught in a high school corridor giving a blow job to two people at the same time. Alison Miller, from Not Me, Not Now, isn't surprised. "That's what came out in our focus groups. Oral sex is a huge thing now. They feel like they can't get pregnant, or can't get someone pregnant, so it's okay. We're really going to have to work on that." An article in Family Voice tells the story of an orgy, including all varieties of sex, involving seven nine-year-olds who had been sent out of class for being naughty and went off to be much, much naughtier. Even more outlandish is this interview, reprinted in the Georgia Association of Educators. "Richard Nadler, in The National Review, wrote about Carol Everett, a former manager of several abortion clinics in Dallas, Texas. Nadler reported that Everett said she often went to local schools to discuss sex ed. 'My agenda was very clear. The first thing was to get the students to laugh at their parents, because if they laughed at their parents with me, they would not go home and tell their parents what I told them. I'd say, Would your parents help you get on a method of contraception if you decided to become sexually active? Don't worry about that, here's a card, come to me.' She said next day the phone would start to ring. Everett said school-based programmes were an investment - more pregnancies meant more abortions." The idea of an evil abortionist travelling the country preaching safe sex as a sales technique for terminations seems frankly absurd. But, as with any issue on which irreparably dissonant views are ranged against each other, it is becoming impossible to separate the truth from the nonsense, to shed light on the confusion. On the one hand, adolescents are being given advice like this, from Clue 2000: "We are not free when we choose to murder, steal or cheat. Just as we make choices in academics and sports, we make moral choices. And just like in reading, writing and basketball, true freedom depends on making the right choices. The most important moral choice is whether or not to have sex before marriage." (Since when did true freedom depend on making the right choices? And what's basketball got to do with it?) On the other hand, there are still 12-year-olds having sex. CDC's most recent figures for teenage sexual involvement reveal that, in 1999, 39% of 9th graders (14 year olds) were at it, 47% of 10th graders, 53% of 11th graders and 65% of 12th graders. To understand the scale of the problem, it is useful to compare it with our own situation, which we are constantly told is the worst in western Europe. According to the Office for National Statistics, teenage pregnancies here last year were just under 63 per 1,000 teens - roughly two-thirds of US rates since their recent, dramatic reduction. Furthermore, over half of those ended in abortion, compared with 31% of US teen pregnancies - whatever the other consequences of that may be, it's certainly cheaper, from a government point of view. And while our own policy has a double aim, to halve teenage pregnancy rates by 2010 and to reduce the risk of long-term social exclusion for teenage parents and their children, partly by improving opportunities for young mothers, this last objective is absent from US discourse on the matter. The Bush administration's current drive, to withdraw funding from programmes that don't explicitly mention marriage as the only end to abstinence, will have the concomitant result of ending, or at least drastically reducing, safe sex education. Not Me, Not Now, with its refusal to mention marriage, will probably maintain its standing, as it is the only group so far proven effective, but it will not be a model. And how can it be? Without an abiding moral framework, the Just Say No message is either completely arbitrary or based on medical scare tactics. But if you look for a moral framework, it is hard to find one that doesn't include homophobia and misogyny, and doesn't ignore the actual behaviour of the majority of the population. Like serious drug abuse and criminality, teenage pregnancy is usually caused by poverty and inexorably leads back to poverty. Tackling poverty has never featured on Bush's agenda. If you don't want to spend money combating poverty, but you don't want to spend money on the results of it either, what are you left with? Terrifying the kids into chastity. The downside of all this, of course, is that you wind up with a generation that is woefully undereducated about sex. You propagate ideas that are Victorian in tone, create retrogressive gender divisions (women are like crockpots, remember - how can they be expected to have mutually sustaining relationships with microwaves?) and re-establish taboos that generations of thinkers have fought to overturn. The misinformation will, in all likelihood, lead to an explosion of STDs among teens. And for what? To bring down a teen pregnancy rate that is, granted, extremely high. Just in passing, John Riley of Not Me, Not Now pondered the logistics of getting hold of condoms. "You're 13 years old. How do you get to the store? Well, your mother drives you there. This is not as easy as people think it is. Yes, there are plenty of clinics that will give you condoms, but they're downtown. Most teenagers in suburban communities never come downtown, and they certainly never come downtown alone. So safe sex may apply to urban kids, but it certainly doesn't apply to suburban kids." This whole issue might be as simple as the fact that America is very big and kids can't get to the shops on their own - a theory borne out by the fact that no itsy-bitsy European nation, not even us, has a problem anything like as bad. If I were leader of the free world, I'd be thinking about public transport. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
