Survey on Risk Behavior Casts Shadow on Condom-Based Sex Ed
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
January 3, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Christian columnist and mental health expert says a behavior survey of students in one Florida school district highlights the failure of comprehensive sex-education programs in schools. A survey of Hillsborough School District in Tampa recently found nearly half of high school students and one in five middle school students said they have had sexual intercourse. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which polled more than 5,000 randomly selected students in the district, was designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a prominent mental health counselor and psychology professor at Grove City College, says the district should reconsider using its "Abstinence Plus" program which offers students instruction on how to use condoms.
Noting that that the survey was conducted in a district offering such instruction, Throckmorton points out that one of the "other surprising findings" was that the use of condoms among youth declined over the high school years. According to the study, condom use decreases from 78 percent in eighth grade to 61.4 percent for high school seniors.
"So clearly," says Throckmorton, "the school has some evaluation to do, and that the emphasis on contraceptive-based education is not having the outcomes I'm sure that they hoped for."
The educator and counselor notes that prior to the release of the findings, parents in the district had no clue as to how bad the problem was. The results of the survey, he asserts, should be a wake-up call to parents.
"It does speak to the need for parents to be aware of these matters, and perhaps to get more involved in the lives of their kids," he says. "Those kids must have a lot of discretionary time in order to involved in sexual activity at the level they describe [in the survey]."
Townhall.com columnist Cal Thomas says sex-ed programs in government schools -- like those in Hillsborough -- "do more to promote sex than prevent it, giving lip service to chastity while spending most of the class time teaching kids how to use condoms." For parents who want to do more than just complain about such things, Thomas suggests they "radically alter" their childrearing tactics -- including pulling their children from public schools, making lifestyle changes that permit one parent to stay home, and removing television from the home. Television, he says, has become "hostile to the things most parents want their children to believe and embrace."
The Hillsborough survey found that more than 9 percent of male and nearly 12 percent of female high schools students in the district said they were physically forced to have sexual intercourse. The survey also found that a higher percentage of high school boys than girls reported being physically hurt by their "significant others."
