Abstinence in Adolescence

Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Sexuality Education

Contemporary U.S. culture is wrought with confusion and conflict surrounding sexuality in general and is especially so as regards adolescent sexuality. Deeprooted tensions resound within communities about what constitutes appropriate and acceptable sexual behaviors and values for young people (Russell & Sigler-Andrews, 2003). Adolescents are given inconsistent messages about sexuality as they negotiate between opposing viewpoints. On one hand, being sexy is highly valued in the media, yet young people hear repeated warnings that sex is dangerous. Parents erroneously fear that teens' peers have a stronger influence on teens' values than they do, and adults generally fail to recognize that young people are capable of making their own decisions about sexuality.

Within the Unites States, adolescent sexuality has been and continues to be primarily interpreted as a dangerous social problem and is typically narrowly defined as a dichotomous choice between chastity and heterosexual intercourse. Sexuality education in the first part of the 20th century was one manifestation of a broad strategy to reform and regulate this adolescent “problem behavior,” and it is still largely driven by U.S. society's fear of youthful sexuality and its consequences (Moran, 2000). Today, a significant number of modern sexuality education programs remain predominantly concerned with “dispensing sexual knowledge as a prophylactic for the unwelcomed consequences of freewheeling sexual behavior” (Sears, 1992, p. 17) rather than promoting healthy sexual development.

Amidst this cultural ambiguity and contention, efforts to provide young people with the information, skills, resources, and motivation they need to develop into sexually healthy adults meet with a number of barriers. Clearly, an open discourse on sexual health is desperately needed, not only in light of the aforementioned confusion but also because the United States continues to have the world's highest rates of teenage pregnancy and 4 million new cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) occur among teens yearly [Page 2](Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2001). However, forthright discussion is increasingly prohibited by federal “abstinence-only-until-marriage” policies that forbid references to contraceptive use in sexuality education programs except in terms of failure rates (Dailard, 2002). This serves to perpetuate a harmful “selective silence” (Satcher, 2001) within communities that deters the use of contraceptives among sexually active teens and places them at greater risk for negative health outcomes (Dailard, 2002).

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