Sexual Behavior Among Teens

Sexual Behavior Among Teens

Well, that should get all sorts of visits from people who will soon be disappointed! I ran into an article by Janice Shaw Crouse touting abstinence education at Townhall.com. My sympathies are definitely with those who would like to see abstinence more strongly encouraged.

At the same time, the existing studies that I have seen, and what I have seen of how teenagers operate (and my own memories of being a hormone-crazed teenager), suggest that abstinence education alone is inadequate, or at best, its value is insufficiently proven. It certainly helps, but teenagers need a lot more supervision than they are getting--or Johnny and Suzie kissing passionately on the couch after school, likely as not, are going to get started down a path that will lead to sexual intercourse, no matter how pure their intentions. And if they aren't using a condom--or at least know where one is--STDs and pregnancy (with all the horrible choices that this leads to) are strong possibilities.

So, I looked at Crouse's article, and I tried to verify her claims:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the number of sexually active teens has declined from 54 to 46 percent and that a majority of teens said that abstinence education was an important factor in their decision to abstain from sex. Other extensive studies by the Adolescent and Family Health journal credit abstinence for a 67 percent decline in teen pregnancies. A study by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reflected a 40 percent lower likelihood of pregnancy for girls taking virginity pledges.

Look, I really want to believe this. But the best way for me to believe that this is accurate is to see what these studies reported, and how they were performed. Crouse's article has no links, no footnotes, and trying to find the evidence for these claims has not been easy.

The first claim led me to this National Center for Health Statistics press release from December 2004, which in turn led to a fact sheet as well as a detailed report, which indeed reported that the number of sexual active teens declined between 1988 and 2002. Table 1 of the detailed report shows 51.1% of females in 1988 had ever had sexual intercourse, dropping to 49.3% in 1995, and 45.5% in 2002. Among males, the respective percentages were 60.4%, 55.2%, and 45.7%.

From the standpoint of pregnancy, the good news is that those who were sexually active seem to be getting the message about contraception, with reports of the use of some method of contraception at first intercourse much more common in the latter period. If you are going to do something foolish, don't compound your foolishness!

But concerning abstinence education and its benefits? I can't find anything in the report. The closest that I can find is in Table 29, which shows that 31.4% of teenagers aged 15-19 reported that they had not yet had sexual intercourse because it was against their religion or morals. That might be because of abstinence education, but that would only be a guess--and it doesn't tell us if abstinence education is making a difference, or if the values that are being taught at home are doing this.

Table 28 shows what percentage of teens had taken a virginity pledge as of 2002: 20.5% of males, and 25.1% of females. And amazingly enough, it mostly worked. 15.8% of the males and 19.8% of females (or roughly 3/4 of those who took a virginity pledge) had successfully followed through on this. But again, this might tell us what abstinence education did, or what a strong parental encouragement did, or what their own strong moral codes caused them to do.

Most depressing is this tidbit from the fact sheet:

First intercourse was nonvoluntary for 10 percent of teen females

Maybe Johnny and Suzie are making out on the couch after school because no one's home, and they scurry off to the bedroom. But maybe Johnny doesn't take "no" for an answer. Suzie might have genuinely meant "no." She might have had mixed feelings about it, too, half wanting it to happen, and half not wanting it to happen. What was I saying about the need for more supervision for teenagers?

The journal Adolescent and Family Health I managed to find without problem, but I don't know what articles Crouse is referring to, so I can't look for them. The journal doesn't make the content of articles available except to print subscribers, so I can't really read those articles anyway. More importantly, they describe themselves as:

Adolescent & Family Health, the Journal of the Institute for Youth Development, is a peer-reviewed quarterly publication for objective, scientific research that focuses on the common factors influencing youth behavior and risk avoidance.

The Institute believes in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to the avoidance of alcohol, drugs, sex, tobacco, and violence, which includes recognition of the importance of family factors.

I cringe a little when I read this, not because I disagree with their intentions, but for the same reason that I cringe at a lot of the leftist academic journals out there: there's a bit too much "No one I no voted for Nixon!" when you aren't talking to anyone who disagrees with you.

Finally, I found the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health web page. It sounds like one of those well-intentioned research projects that produce vast quantities of data. But "a study by" (as Crouse describes it) doesn't help me find the study. It would appear that the data coming out of this organization is used by a lot of different academics studying various problems.

Footnotes: there's a reason that academics (and anyone else that wants to be taken seriously in the battle of ideas) uses them: they make it possible to see if you know what you are talking about or not.