Ideally, the best protection against pregnancy and infection is no sex at all.
Social scientists, finding no sexual abstinence program that could prove all participants had achieved that goal, fostered this approach: Give teenagers strong behavioral training aimed either at delaying first sexual intercourse or at turning aside unprotected sex.
By the 1990s, many such programs were available. To evaluate them scientifically, the projects were cast as experiments and written up as studies. Eleven were checked by a team of scientists and statisticians from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Their leader was Douglas Kirby, director of research at ETR, a nonprofit health education group in Scotts Valley, California.
“We were looking for common characteristics of programs that worked,” Mr. Kirby says. He adds that in half the sex education courses studied, students had changed their behavior (reduced sexual risk taking), and in half they had not. “For the first time in history,” he says, “we can pinpoint programs that delay sexual intercourse and/or inspire using safety devices, ultimately reducing the teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.”
This is a major advance. Educators now believe they know how to help students change their sexual behavior.
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