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Comprehensive Sex Education

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Comprehensive Sex Education

A Multi-Targeted Approach
By its very nature, sex education is an emotional subject. Infuse it with politics and cultural values, and you get a sense of what schools face in defining their role in an increasingly high-stakes undertaking. Recent federal funding for abstinence-only education has many communities questioning whether students are being short-changed on information that could literally save their lives.

A national task force of health, education, and sexuality professionals believes that an issue as multi-faceted as sex requires a multi-targeted approach. Teaching abstinence is a significant piece of the puzzle, but "just say no" may be lost on students who are already sexually active. "Teens don't all behave the same way," says Claire Brindis, an internationally recognized expert on adolescent sexuality. "We have to give all kinds of kids all kinds of information."

Character and Condoms?
For most professionals, "all kinds of information" means a comprehensive health-education program that addresses all aspects of sex. Such a program would provide accurate information about human anatomy. It would review reproduction and contraception, along with protection against disease. Whether it's called "abstinence-plus" or "comprehensive," this approach raises questions: "Character and condoms in the same context?" asks one parent of an eighth-grader. "What kind of mixed signals does that send?"

"Developing a strong character needs to be at the core of all education programs," says Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University. There are ways, he says, "to strongly urge young people to defer sexual behavior and still provide information for those who proceed anyhow, without making these two messages cancel each other out. In dealing with other topics -- divorce, for instance -- religious groups have found ways to extol the importance of preserving marriage, and still counsel those who divorce. The same can be done for sex education."

Some parents feel that giving kids detailed information about safe sex will encourage promiscuity and drown out the abstinence message altogether. "Do you go out and wreck your car just because you have insurance on it?" former Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders once said. "Why do we feel that children are so stupid? Just because you talk to them about condoms, does that mean they're going to go out and have sex?"

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Models for Success
One promising initiative that's been enthusiastically received by parents and educators is the Teen Outreach Program, a private-public partnership originally developed by the Junior League in the St. Louis schools. Based on a ten-week curriculum for middle-schoolers, the program takes place both in and out of school. Weekly classroom sessions cover everything from setting goals and managing personal problems to discussing what marriage and commitment mean. The after-school component introduces students to the idea of community service. To date, the program has been implemented in 120 cities across the country.

Information about sexuality and health is only one dimension of Teen Outreach. Its larger purpose is to raise self-esteem and give adolescents a sense of issues in the larger world. To expand their awareness of what's happening "out there," student teams volunteer two or three times a month in community locations such as child-care centers and homeless shelters. "It's pure common sense," says one father. "You don't have to be a social scientist to know that when kids are doing something useful and personally satisfying, they're less likely to mess around with sex." Indeed, research shows that most teen pregnancies are conceived between the hours of 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., when kids are unsupervised.

Another exciting initiative, says Claire Brindis, is the Program Archive on Sexuality, Health & Adolescence (PASHA) -- a collection of successful sex-education curricula developed over the years in different communities. Conceived by Sociometrics Corporation, it's marketed to schools and youth organizations. Each program in the PASHA collection has been selected for its demonstrated effectiveness in changing teen behaviors related to fertility and overall health. The programs are packaged for distribution and include games and videos as well as curricula and training manuals.

Beyond the Birds and Bees
Many parents who favor a comprehensive approach to sex education want their children to move beyond the basic reproductive facts. They want kids to understand and discuss the effects of drugs and alcohol -- how they can lower a person's ability to deal with urges and what the consequences are likely to be. Some worry about the sexual exploitation of teenage girls by older men. According to one study, 75 percent of teenage pregnancies and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) would still occur if all teenage boys refrained from having sex; 51 percent of pregnancies in junior-high school would still occur if all teenage boys refrained from having sex.

Such statistics, these parents maintain, point to the need for accessible information about tough questions: How do I resist pressure to become sexually active? What can I do to protect myself from pregnancy and disease? Where can I go for support or counseling? In this broader context, the specific topic of sex becomes just one element in an ongoing emphasis on character and personal responsibility.