There is some standardized information about sexual health and intimate relationships that adolescents are entitled to receive, regardless of the race, religion, or the personal views of their parents and/or guardians.
Sexual-education programs attempt to do this, but in most Arizona schools they are failing miserably and are in need of serious reform.
Sexual education as part of public school curriculum began in the 1970s as a way to combat growing rates of teenage pregnancy and the spread of STDs, particularly HIV. However, these programs have in many school districts become monopolized by the promotion and enforcement of abstinence-only curriculums.
The Arizona Republic wrote in April about how abstinence-only programs have manifested in Valley school districts; the federal government has funded these programs for about 20 years, but the “approach also included inaccurate, misleading or religiously slanted information.”
In some middle-school programs, such as those in the Kyrene School District cited in the Republic article, it’s considered comprehensive to mention condoms as somehow related to preventing STDs and pregnancy. However, teachers stop there. No demonstrations, no details, no distribution of a product that could spare someone countless life threatening illnesses and unplanned pregnancies, and no actual information that a student could use is really made available to our teenagers in regard to their sex lives.
School districts and educators need to start acting like mature adults and create a decent system that prioritizes discussion and demonstration of the use of contraceptive options and local sexual health resources. A teenager needs to know what condoms are, where they are available, how to use them, where to go to get tested, and who to talk to about prescriptive contraceptives.
"The issue here is clearly that we have a lot of teenagers who are having sex, but they aren't careful enough at contraception to avoid pregnancy," Sarah Brown, executive director of the nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told USA Today.
As the state with the third highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the country, there is a lot of work ahead of us if we decide to take more of an interest in the sexual health of our communities.
Should adolescents’ parents and guardians be teaching about sex? Yes, probably. But we can’t and shouldn’t rely on them to do so, and a student has a right to know information about sex that their families might be unable or unwilling to offer them. While sex is a private act, it has very real and very public consequences. Therefore sex ed is an issue to be dealt with in community.
There are a lot of benefits to abstinence, especially for teenagers, but it’s not a comprehensive basis for sexual education curriculum because it doesn’t actually teach anyone about sex; it only mandates not having it.
The diseases and pregnancies that a person incurs as a result of having sex affect others and so it is in our best interest as a society to give adolescents the tools to have healthy intimate relationships, whether they choose to use those tools at 16 or 30 — rest assured they will come in handy.
Send your sex ed misinformation stories to anna.bethancourt@asu.edu
