School of Hard Knox
At 15, Shelby Knox , a Southern Baptist girl from Lubbock, Texas, donned a promise ring as a symbol of sexual purity until marriage. Living in a county where 1 in 23 female teens becomes pregnant, she then spent the next two years fighting the school board in an effort to replace an abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum with a comprehensive one teaching contraception. The Education of Shelby Knox , a Sundance award-winner tracing her transformation, airs June 21 on PBS's P.O.V. Now 18, Knox is a rising junior at the University of Texas-Austin.
What's wrong with abstinence-only sex ed?
Abstinence is the only 100 percent effective way to prevent STI s [sexually transmitted infections] and pregnancy. The problem is when kids who take abstinence pledges break their pledge, they don't have much [sex] education. So those pledges are really very dangerous.
What was your school sex ed like?
Ed Ainsworth [pastor and local leader of a Christian abstinence program] comes in your seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade year and before the junior and senior prom and tells you condoms don't work, and if you have sex your life is over. We also have health classes where we're shown advanced stages of sexually transmitted disease but aren't told how they can be prevented or cured. It's all scare tactics.
Why so much controversy over sex ed?
A lot of parents think, "If my kid goes to church, they're not having sex." In reality, a lot of kids have sex in junior high and high school.
Do you still wear your promise ring?
Are you asking me if I've had sex yet?
No.
Well, I have not, but that is because I have not found the person I want to have sex with. It's not that I won't wait until marriage, I just don't know.
And your ring?
The ring got stolen. If I still had it, I would not wear it.
Did you face fallout for your activism?
A Spanish teacher called me a baby killer--evidently abortion and sex education are synonymous in her mind. The school board wrote my principal saying I was causing problems. And once someone broke my windows on my car at school. People at my church told me I was on the path to hell.
What did you say to them?
Thanks very much for your input, but I think I'll let God decide.
This story appears in the June 27, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
