Lack of sex education in classrooms putting teenagers at risk

The purpose of school, most of us would agree, is to educate.

Why, then, are some of us OK with policies that allow public schools, in one specific area, to choose abject ignorance over knowledge?

Why are we OK with policies that waste taxpayer dollars, handicap our young people, send them ill-equipped to face inevitable risk, and leave them vulnerable to life-altering consequences that could jeopardize the very potential in which their parents and taxpayers have invested?

Because the one specific area we’re talking about is sex education.

And when it comes to sex, we Americans lose our minds.

Well, that and the fact that many Americans are afraid of the term “sex education” because we never had it ourselves.

“What we basically have is generation after generation after generation of sexually illiterate adults because nobody ever talks about it,” says David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University in San Marcos, and founder of the nearly decade-old Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

That’s how America ended up with the shameful distinction of having the highest unplanned pregnancy rate in the civilized world.

And here’s how we keep it: Last week, the Trump administration issued new rules for funding programs aimed at preventing teen pregnancy, favoring those that promote abstaining from sex and dropping previous requirements to show evidence that the programs actually work.

With the change, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services isn’t excluding programs that provide students information about condoms and birth control, but it’s encouraging those that emphasize no sex, known as “sexual risk avoidance,” and “cessation support,” the New York Times reported.

It’s unclear what practical effect this would have in Texas, where sex education is nonexistent in many schools and really bad in others. Community-based organizations that have been drawing federal funds for effective, evidence-based programs may feel a pinch.

But the shift wasn’t a surprise after the leader of an abstinence advocacy organization was named chief of staff to the DHHS officials who oversee adolescent health. Before taking the post, Valerie Huber wrote about one problem with the Obama administration’s approach on sex education: it “normalizes teen sex.”

Teens actually don’t need the government to do that for them.

In Texas, 70 percent of high school seniors have had sexual intercourse at least once, Wiley says. In a state that consistently ranks in the top five in the nation in the teen birth rate, Texas is No. 1 for repeat births. An astounding 25 percent of girls who got pregnant as a teen become pregnant a second time while still a teen.

How can this be in a state that has been considered the poster child of abstinence-only sex education? A study last year by the Texas Freedom Network showed that 60 percent of Texas public school districts used abstinence-only sexual education, and a quarter taught no sex eduction at all.

It’s simple. Abstinence-only education does not work.

Stigmatizing behavior

It’s a fact made explicitly clear in Peggy Orenstein’s book “Girls & Sex,” which is based in part on frank anonymous interviews with dozens of girls about sexual encounters which often go underreported in official surveys. Orenstein reports that education and open conversations with parents about sex are the most effective ways to prevent rape, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. They also increase girls’ confidence about their bodies, empower them to expect pleasure, reciprocity and respect from sexual partners.

An insecure girl can’t express what she wants or what she doesn’t want, so she sometimes ends up doing what a boy wants. It turns out that stigmatizing a behavior as natural as sex can lead to very unnatural behavior. One consequence of focusing only on pregnancy prevention and abstinence is that girls began performing oral and anal sex as an alternative to intercourse, seemingly not aware that those forms of sex carry risk as well. Bottom line: the less education and communication, the more kids are likely to engage in high-risk sexual behavior.

Education, as it does in many other aspects of life, leads to smarter decisions.

It’s a fact that many Texans seem to understand. In 2013, a poll of registered Texan voters by the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for comprehensive sexual education, showed that 84 percent supported “teaching about contraception, such as condoms and other forms of birth control, along with abstinence, in high school sex education classes.”

It would seem that the main opposition to comprehensive sex education comes not from parents and regular folks, but from politicians under the influence of religious-right groups who claim it encourages teens to be sexually active.

“When you say comprehensive sex education, a lot of people think you’re handing out condoms to first-graders and that’s absurd,” Wiley said.

Too many people don’t understand that effective sex education programs discuss the abstinence option first and do a far better job accomplishing the goals that the abstinence crowd so desperately wants to achieve.

Research shows the earlier you provide sexual education to students, the older they are when they have intercourse, Wiley said. For kids who are abstinent, it reinforces their decision to remain that way. For kids already sexually active, comprehensive education makes them much more likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control and more likely to reduce their sexual partners.

And for those grown-ups who simply don’t believe public school is the best venue to have deep conversations with impressionable youth about sex, I hear you. Clearly, parents and primary caregivers play the most important role in talking with kids about deeply personal issues carrying moral and religious implications.

When the time comes, I want my daughters to come to me and their father to have the uncomfortable conversations about relationships and sex, when to wait, when the time is right, and all the rest. But in many homes, including the one I grew up in, those talks don’t happen.

Kids will fill the void

The fact is that any teen benefits from an effective, medically accurate course on the basics of sex, birth control and avoiding sexually transmitted diseases, taught by a trained instructor. Any teen benefits from sex education that is taught without stigma and judgment, in the same manner as schools teach diet and hygiene.

“We get nervous when kids say penis and vagina. Nobody gets nervous when we say elbow,” Wiley says. “This whole thing is wrapped up in this puritanical modesty.”

But even more uncomfortable than the notion of high school sophomores learning about sex in school is the alternative.

Leave a void, and kids will fill it on their own. Leave questions unanswered, and they may seek answers from a source far more sinister than Mrs. Smith in second period health class. With a few taps of a smartphone, teens have access to all the “sex ed” they want – courtesy of the booming and dangerously addictive global porn industry. lisa.falkenberg@chron.com twitter.com/chronfalkenberg