Abstinence-Only Programs Fall Short of Young Persons’ Needs

Posted on August 24th, 2008 by olga

One motivation why abstinence-only programs don’t do much to stop young person sexual activity is for the reason that abstinence can signify different things to young persons than it does to adults, in relation to a University of Washington study.

The researchers found that young persons’ attitudes and aims about sex are more powerful than their attitudes and intentions about being abstinent.

“Interventions that have been created to encourage abstinence have treated abstinence and sexual activity as opposites. Nevertheless, teenagers say they don’t think of them as opposites,” lead author Tatiana Masters, a doctoral student in social work, said in a university news release. Masters said “These (abstinence-only) interferences are less likely to work than more comprehensive sex-education programs, for the reason that they are not meeting adolescents where they are, and they are speaking a different language”.

The study contained 365 adolescents (230 girls, 135 boys) in Seattle who took part in an intervention to reduce HIV risk behavior. The participants filled out questionnaires asking them about their attitudes and intentions about abstinence and sex, and about their sexual activity in the previous six months.

In the beginning of the study, 11 percent of the boys and 4 percent of the girls had had sexual intercourse. That enlarged to 12 percent of the boys and 8 percent of the girls six months later, and to 22 percent of the boys and 12 percent of the girls one year later.

Masters said “This paper makes obvious that growing abstinence intention does not lead to less sex. In actual fact, when abstinence intention and sex intention interact with each other a teenager is more likely to have sex”.

The study was printed in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

In 2007, the U.S. government offered $176 million for abstinence-only programs, nevertheless there is no federal funding for comprehensive sex education programs. Masters and colleagues concluded this study’s findings “raise serious concerns about the abstinence-only approach as a risk-reduction method for adolescent sexual behavior”.