Abstinence is gaining in popularity: Nadine Dorries MP - and many New Statesman readers ? believe we should be teaching it to schoolgirls. But would it work? We return to the pioneering campaigns in the US
The sight of Nadine Dorries MP on the crest of a wave is never a pleasant one, for a feminist, but there she blows. Earlier this month she put forward a 10-minute rule bill calling for girls to be taught abstinence in schools (girls, mind you; the boys can just copy their homework, presumably). Rather than the rejection to which she is accustomed, with her attention-grabbing bills, it went to a second reading. That won't take place until January 2012, but she was not downhearted: this week, the anti-abortion charity Life made their way onto a government advisory sexual health forum.
It's been a good season for anti-abortionists generally, after a dry spell: Richmond Council awarded �89,000 to The Catholic Children's Society this month, to "help and support students in the borough's schools". This involves counselling children on unplanned pregnancy, contraception, abortion and homophobic bullying. And then, broadsided by our own kind, we liberals were horrified to find out that 53% of New Statesman readers were in favour of teaching abstinence to 13-16-year-old girls.
Now, leaving aside the pro-lifers for now . . . I have maybe 5% sympathy with the view that they're entitled to their own opinion, though that opinion would seem to be a bit of a time waste for a parliamentary committee unless we plan to delegalise abortion ? which we don't, do we? Tell me that wasn't in anybody's manifesto. It's this abstinence issue that interests me. We have very good, concrete evidence of what happens when you try to teach abstinence to teenagers: it has been tried, trialled, tested and analysed on a huge cohort: America.
I went over there 10 years ago, to interview those who were pioneering this stuff. I would be lying if I said I wasn't trenchantly opposed to this as an idea ? I have never encountered an abstinence programme that didn't try to make girls the gatekeepers of sexual activity, that didn't seek to make them ashamed of their own sexuality, that didn't give credence to ideas such as "reputation", that didn't misinform and, ultimately, bully girls. But it wouldn't be true either to say that everybody engaged in the just-say-no field was a religious or moral fundamentalist: I met a lot of people who were just trying to do their best by their young citizens, who faced too much opposition to be able to give out condoms in schools, whose cities didn't have the transport infrastructure that would allow their teenagers to get to a clinic independently.
I say this without agenda or chagrin: the worst thing about abstinence teaching is that it doesn't work. For a whole host of reasons, a couple of them specific to America but most of them universal across the species, this doesn't work. And we know it doesn't work: so before we spend even 50p on an abstinence programme, it's worth recapping what a total and indefensible waste of 50p that would be.
If you look for the flagship abstinence programmes now ? Not Me, Not Now in Rochester, Facing Reality in Louisiana, even True Love Waits, a national, Christian abstinence charity that never relied upon federal funding ? it's like an internet graveyard. They've all closed. Occasionally, you will find an abstinence radio station or a Christian organisation with an abstinence youth branch still in operation, but generally speaking, abstinence as a function of education has dwindled. The reason is not that Obama came in and redirected funding to a more liberal curriculum, rather, two things happened. The first was that federal funding started to come with more and more stringent requirements ? that nothing else would be taught, that no access to clinics would be available, at one point they were trying to roll out the message for everybody under 29! This put many people off who had started out cautiously in favour of the message.
More importantly, the US Department of Health and Human Services finally released, in April 2007, (there were charges that they'd been dragging their feet, but this wrangle is too convoluted to go into here), a study on the effectiveness of four abstinence-only programmes, and none warranted further funding. The abstinence-only students commenced sexual activity at the same average age as the control group, and only a quarter of either group used protection. More worrying, though, than this ineffectiveness were three other research projects ? in the American Journal of Adolescent Health and two others ? showing that abstinence programmes delayed the start of sexual activity by a small amount, but made young people less likely to use protection when they did become sexually active and less likely to seek help for STIs. It was effectively endangering the youth population by misinformation, since abstinence was never taught in conjunction with safe sex.
John Riley, who ran the Not Me, Not Now programme in Rochester, NY (it folded four years ago) told me yesterday: "No, we did not say 'gee, abstain but if you for some reason can't, then use this'. All kids are going to end up hearing is, 'OK, where do I get the condoms?'" And that curriculum was at the most liberal end ? often educators would never mention contraception, except in the context of the (often made-up) risks it carried.
Now, of course we don't have to teach abstinence like that, here, but Riley is right: a message of abstinence doesn't coexist very convincingly with a message about safe sex, especially to a young audience. I saw it in action in Rochester, and the lessons themselves were quite droll. Kids of 15 would lead younger ones of 13 in a role play, where one would say "let's go upstairs" (they were quite prudish about saying "let's have sex", which dented its credibility a bit) and the other would go "No." A teen leader would critique their performance at the end. "That was good," said one. "but some people won't take no for an answer. Remember that no one has the right to pressure you, and you shouldn't feel guilty about saying no. Turn it back on them. Tell them how you feel when they put you under pressure, and what it makes you think about them. Nobody can put pressure on you to do something you don't want to do."
This all seemed pretty reasonable: talking to teenagers afterwards, though, I was struck by how much they talked about shame and guilt. One told me: "I think kids are really misled about sex, by TV and songs and stuff. They give this image that it's clean, and it isn't. They throw a white sheet over it and it's clean, but underneath the sheet it's all nasty and dirty. They don't understand that. A lot of people don't know how you can get yourself into trouble with having sex. Just like all the sexually transmitted diseases that are going round. People don't know, when they're having sex with a person, whether they have Aids. It's just so unsafe that people shouldn't be doing it."
It's open to interpretation, but I think this is how you get from the abstinence message to a group who will have sex but won't use contraception and won't seek medical advice for STIs ? you cannot teach chastity without attaching a stigma to sex, and once you do that, you chase adolescent sexual activity underground. Which is ridiculous, because they're going to have sex anyway. Even if only 10% of them had sex (in your dreams, Nadine Dorries!), we still have a public health duty to those kids.
Aside from the fact that it was ineffectual, abstinence ran into other problems, which may actually have been more instrumental in its failure. You're not allowed to mix religion and education in the US, and it's incredibly difficult to teach sex-only-within-marriage, unless it's from a religious perspective. Some programmes decided to leave marriage out of it, but they ended up saying words to the effect of "don't have sex, until you want to; but don't want to, until you really, really want to". It was confusing. It's unclear at this stage what kind of objections parents would lodge in the UK to an explicit Christian message from a national curriculum, but I think we'd have to assume "quite a bit". Even when they made no mention of Christianity, though (sometimes, as in the case of Louisiana, following a court injunction telling them not to), these courses were unable to avoid concentrating on the nuclear family as the ideal, and castigating any alternative. This alienated single parents, who were outraged at their children being explicitly taught to avoid at any cost ending up like their own families.
On the issue of homophobia, and an upswing of homophobic bullying in schools, again there was significant upset in America that the abstinence message seemed to take as its starting point that heterosexuality was the only acceptable outcome. The connection isn't inevitable: you could go around preaching abstinence in an even-handed way, but the kinds of people who think teenagers can stay pure tend to be the same people as think homosexuality is aberrant. At a conference organised by the Medical Institute of Sexual Health in 2000, a young female doctor was asked how she would apply the abstinence message to a young homosexual coming into her clinic. She said, "I would tell him that he was sinning against my Lord!" A satirical chastity website, Iron Hymen, has T-shirts saying "sex is for fags; abstinence rules". That last point is not evidence of anything. It's just a fashion suggestion.
I kept coming back, though, to the problem of misinformation about contraception: even a failure to tell young people about condoms and contraceptive pills would be to booby trap their sexual health, and the curricula rarely stopped there. Everywhere you looked, there would be a deliberate lie ? that HIV was always fatal, that HPV always led to cervical cancer, that the pill was only 80% effective; that there was "no failsafe way to avoid syphilis". The melodrama of adolescence turned the atmosphere more febrile still, so I heard teenagers genuinely speculating about cousins who'd said yes to their boyfriend and "probably had Aids". The other finding is that an active abstinence programme increases the incidence of anal and oral sex, as teens look for an alternative to vaginal sex, with all its apocalyptic outcomes. I mean, look, I have nothing against anal sex, but it should be a black run more than a nursery slope, no?
You could argue that we don't have to do it like that: that we can do it without attaching gender stereotypes, without suffusing the conversation with shame, without attacking single parents and homosexuals, without pedalling untruths about contraception, without any of these didactic, misleading manoeuvres that run so counter to the aims of education. Good luck with that. But even if you manage it, it still won't work. That's the funny bit.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/28/abstinence-a-question-of-restraint
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