Teenage Sex: Just Say 'Wait'
The search is on for new and more effective ways to teach teens about the facts of life
Amid such statistics, America has been bombarded recently with harrowing scenes that confirm something is out of control when it comes to the way many teens think about sex. Most disturbing is the involvement of the youngest teens and even preteens. The molestation of a 10-year-old girl led to arrests in March of members of the Spur Posse, a group of middle-class boys in Lakewood, Calif., who proudly bragged of sex-for-points score keeping. In Yonkers, N.Y., last month, police charged nine elementary-school pupils, ages 9 to 13, with sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl. School officials had casually dismissed the incident as a "let's play rape" game. In most schools, sex education begins too late to instruct such young students--or even many older ones. One survey shows that among sexually active 15-year-olds, only 26 percent of boys and 48 percent of girls had had sex education by the time they first had intercourse.
Finding an answer. That it is the youngest who most need the abstinence message was clear to two Cincinnati doctors. For Dr. Reginald Tsang, the moment of recognition came as he watched a 13-year-old mother and father--who could have walked out of any junior-high school in America--peer over the rim of an incubator at their baby, no bigger than Tsang's hand, and confide they had no idea what to do next. Tsang began to think about how "our societal chaos has overwhelmed our technological advances." After all, a computer-controlled neonatal unit like Tsang's at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center now almost routinely saves 9 of every 10 babies born weighing as little as 2 pounds. At the same hospital, Dr. Joseph Rauh, an adolescent-medicine specialist, was similarly frustrated. He provided birth control to teens, but, he noted, 13- and 14-year-old girls were coming back pregnant, "bewildered and confused."
So, in 1991, Tsang (conservative and opposed to abortion) and Rauh (liberal and in favor of abortion rights) joined forces to find local funding for a new kind of sex-education program. The one they brought to Cincinnati grew out of a surprise discovery by Dr. Marion Howard in the late 1980s while she was surveying teens who received birth control information at her Atlanta clinic. Her clients wanted birth control, she says, but "84 percent wanted to know how to say no to someone pressuring them for sex--and to say no without hurting their feelings."
As a result, Howard developed a curriculum called Postponing Sexual Involvement. Discarding the old-fashioned approach--a gym teacher with a pointer and a reproductive-system poster giving rote lectures on sexual plumbing--Howard opted for a peer system that relies on teens as teachers. In PSI, older teens--especially school leaders and athletes--are chosen as believable messengers for the spiel: "I can postpone sex and still be cool." And teen leaders must also embrace abstinence themselves. "I'm happy because of my beliefs," says Monique Chattah, a Cincinnati peer leader. "I have a better self-image."
The heart of PSI is role-playing. In a recent PSI class in Cincinnati, seventh graders played out a classic confrontation: Boy takes girl on an expensive date and then insists on sex. The girls practiced handling the pressure, then the exercise was reversed, with the girl as the aggressor. This led to an open discussion of respect, values and even the way sex is glamorized in the media to sell products.
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