I am sure we all have our own funny stories about sex ed class. But they really aren't so funny when we think about the fact that many of us got our (mis)information about the birds and bees from halted conversations with our parents, from gossiping with our friends, or from reading the bathroom wall.
Despite today's availability of information about sex and abstinence, things haven't gotten much better for adolescents. Ask a kid what "not having sex" means and you'll get a million different answers.
Legislation like the recently introduced REAL Act (The Responsible Education About Life Act) aims to end such misinformation by providing federal funding for comprehensive sex education in schools. (For the last 10 years billions of dollars have gone to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs while zero dollars went to what is known as comprehensive sex education.)
Informing policy initiatives, the actual design of sex education curricula, and activist interventions, is a body of knowledge produced by nonprofits and university based research centers that aims to answer critical questions about sex education.
What should kids know about sex and at what age?
What effect does knowing about sex have on adolescent sexual behavior?
Who is responsible for teaching kids about sex? parents, gym teachers, health teachers?
Are LGBTQ teens being left out of sex ed?
What can we do to prevent teen pregnancy?
What works best in HIV prevention education?
This is an issue that affects everyone, yet because the issue is often cast as being a moral issue it is tempting to avoid it altogether or to even imagine that the debate about sex education is a thing of the past. We encourage you to take a minute to explore some of the research collected here and get a different view on sex ed.
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Why is Teenage Pregnancy Declining? The Roles of Abstinence, Sexual Activity, and Contraceptive Use
Contributing Organization(s): Guttmacher Institute
Publication date: 1999-12-17
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Declines in teenage pregnancies can be achieved through two mechanisms -- changes in sexual behavior and changes in contraceptive use. Some observers have claimed that the declines are the result of increased abstinence. Others credit both greater abstinence and increased contraceptive use, especially condom use, among teenagers, but have not quantified their specific contributions to the falling rates. This report presents results of analyses that used the most current data to document the breadth of drops in teenage pregnancy and to examine the contributions to these trends of changes in abstinence, the sexual behavior of those who ever had intercourse and contraceptive use. The analyses were based on information from the 1988 and 1995 cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and recent information on rates of teenage pregnancies, births and abortions. Complete listing and access info » |
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Why Should We Invest in Adolescents?
Contributing Organization(s): Urban Institute
Publication date: 1998-07-01
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Too often in the past, public policy has either ignored adolescents or focused on them only when they behave in ways that trouble their elders. Compared to very young children and to the elderly, adolescents suffer from few life - threatening conditions. The formation adolescence of certain health habits with long-term negative consequences (such as smoking tobacco products, use of other addictive substances, or sexual activity without protection from STD and AIDS) often does not produce morbidity or mortality in adolescence itself. Rather the effects, and the costs, develop over a lifetime. Thus, when societies face decisions about where to invest significant health and other supportive resources, attention to adolescents often receives short shrift, despite the fact that after early infancy, adolescence is the period of greatest vulnerability until one gets to the diseases of old age. This work focuses on youth in Caribbean and Latin American Countries. This work contains both English and Spanish versions. Complete listing and access info » |
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Youth Development Approaches in Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Projects
Contributing Organization(s): Urban Institute
Publication date: 2005-09-22
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Youth development (YD) strategies in conjunction with appropriate age-graded sexuality and family life education programs/curricula may have an important role to play in formulating convincing answers to these questions. Youth development approaches help youth enhance their assets rather than concentrating on their difficulties. They focus on where youth are going, helping them develop a belief in a viable future and in their ability to take actions that will bring that future about. The commitment to a future that would be disrupted by a pregnancy during adolescence is about the only thing that Zabin and her colleagues (1986) found to differentiate among Baltimore adolescents using teen clinics who did and did not get pregnant. Teens without a strong reason to avoid pregnancy got pregnant at the same rate as those who wanted to get pregnant; the only teens who were successful at avoiding pregnancy were those who had a future goal that a pregnancy would disrupt. Thus, incorporating youth development principles along with some specific techniques into the work of the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs' (OAPP) abstinence-oriented programs would seem to be an important program enhancement with potentially valuable impacts. Complete listing and access info » |
Available for your listening pleasure: a podcast on the issue of adolescents and reproductive health. Stacy Kessler, IssueLab's Collections Assistant, chatted with Laura Lindberg, Senior Research Associate at the Guttmacher Institute about the role of nonprofit research in the debate about comprehensive sex ed and abstinence training.
