They Say: Promote Teen Abstinance By Removing Religion

In light of the Opposition Leader Tony Abbot’s comments last week that virginity is the ultimate gift of giving and not to give it lightly, researchers have found a new way to help prevent teens having sex. And it doesn’t involve the Catholic Church or Purity Balls.

Instead, a new scientific study reported in the Globe and Mail shows that you can successfully educate kids about abstinence, but you need to drop the religion and morality and give them negotiation skills when they find themselves in a compromising situation.

As part of the study, researchers created an eight-hour sex education course for 12-14 year olds in inner-city Philadelphia. Small group sessions focused on communication – teaching kids how to make their own decision about whether to have sex and how to respond to the pressure to have it – without “making a value judgment.”

It seems the approach was successful, with 33 per cent of course participants less likely to have had sex in the following two years than students who participated in a control program that taught about health but not about sex.

“We took the religion out of it,” says Geoffrey Fong, a health psychology professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who co-authored the study published Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. “[The program] wasn’t saying ‘you should do this.’ It was saying, ‘if you don’t want to, here’s how to avoid it.’ ”

Some of the activities covered in the course included:

• Brainstorming on the costs, benefits and disadvantages of having sex
• Discussing future goals and then considering how an unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease may affect their future plans.
• Role-playing different scenarios, such as a boyfriend pressuring his girlfriend to have sex.

“Young people want to be empowered to make decisions in the context of their lives,” Dr. Fong says. “If they don’t want to have sex, they should have the kinds of social skills to talk their partner about not having sex.”