A study released by the University of Pennsylvania earlier this month that concluded that middle school students who are given abstinence-only education are less likely to have sex is correct in its narrowed verdict. The problem is that the verdict is not relevant to modern issues surrounding sexual health and it ignores the notion that safe sex practices are at all worth learning.
Penn’s experiment, which divided nearly 700 black students &- who Dr. John Jemmott III, the study’s lead researcher, said were more likely to have sex than any other group &- into different groups, concluded that students who were taught to not have sex at all were more likely to abstain than those who were taught alternate means of sex education. The study left no room for the merit of contradictory findings and pigeonholed its own results.
Clearly, teaching students to avoid the act of sex will encourage them to do just that, but that does not make adolescents more aware of the practice’s risks than those who are taught safe sex techniques, and it does not make the findings the correct ones. The study’s conclusion was derived from subjects who were observed for only two years after their experimental lectures in the sixth and seventh grades. Certainly, if they were to be contacted by the time they were married, or even 10 or five years down the line, those who were taught the basics of contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases would be better off and more adept than those who were instructed to remain in the dark.
Preaching that students should consciously ignore the risks of sex is archaic and irresponsible. Encouraging the youth of this country that abstinence is a cure-all is only preparing them for a harmful naïveté when the time for sex eventually comes. To hope that young people wait for marriage to consummate a relationship is a respectable view, but it’s never a guarantee that both parties of a relationship are virgins, and the idea that sex will be safe for the first time for those who wait is simply misleading.
Calling a spade a spade does not validate a study’s findings or make them better or worse than any other. The fundamental problem with Penn’s shortsighted research is that it fails to address a fundamental roadblock: Eventually, in spite of what they learned in middle school, humans have sex.
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