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Why Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Makes Kids Into Bullies

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 16:09 — Dave Culver
Section(s): 
Gender & Sexuality
Youth & Education

  • Abstinence-only programs, with their emphasis on purity, marriage, and heterosexuality, create hostile environments.
  • Rick Perry Struggles To Answer Question About Sex Ed: 'Abstinence Works'
  • Anti-gay parents' league presents demands to Anoka-Hennepin (MN) schools

Soraya Chemaly, RH Reality Check

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Abstinence-only education creates a petri dish for bullying in schools. There is always a lot of back and forth about the efficacy of these programs, and I fall on the side that they demonstrably fail to reduce teen pregnancy, the rate of incidence of teen sex, or the transmission of sexutally transmitted infections (STIs) (All you have to do is look at Texas.) In addition, however, I believe that the heyday of our federal investment in abstinence-only programs had a terrible collateral effect -- namely, kids who were "educated" in this way were more likely to bully and harass because they learned, in ways integral to abstinence provisions, outdated "traditional" ideas about gender and sexuality. Even kids whose parents talked to them at home, about contraception or healthy sex, were taught gendered rules and more and more of them appear to have enforced those rules to great harm.

To be clear, I am not saying teaching abstinence is the problem. But, teaching abstinence in the context of fully comprehensive, age-appropriate sex ed is qualitatively different from teaching abstinence-only. This is the problem. I am saying that there is something inherently harmful about cultures that insist on abstinence-only teaching.

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Related:

Rick Perry Struggles To Answer Question About Sex Ed: 'Abstinence Works', Huffington Post

  • Last summer (2011), Texas chose to pass on $4.4 million in federal funds aimed at sex education for adolescents in the state, The Texas Tribune reported.
  • But according to findings by the Guttmacher Institute, Texas is also the state with the highest teen birth rate and fourth-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.

Anti-gay parents' league presents demands to Anoka-Hennepin schools, Maria Elena Baca, Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune
The group wants Anoka-Hennepin (MN) school district) to assist students of "moral conviction" and to offer information on overcoming "sexual disorders."
 

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