Mixed messages: Is the controversy over sex ed just confusing kids? 

Sometime between the fifth and seventh grades, most public school students in California get their first dose of sex education. And most respond, at least initially, with nervous giggles and whispers.

For many, “sex ed” is a topic they haven’t really discussed with their own parents, let alone in a classroom among peers. It’s scary. It’s embarrassing. It is, in the words of one 13-year-old, “kind of gross.”

But if sex education elicits giggles and whispers from kids, it provokes an altogether different reaction among adults who, by and large, find the subject to be no laughing matter, a topic that is more likely to evoke shouts than whispers.

Sex education has always been controversial. The first lessons debuted in the 1940s, part of a public effort to reduce the rate of teen pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis.

Ever since, there has been an on-going debate over the propriety – indeed the need – to teach about sexuality in schools. Arguments have waxed and waned over the years, raged in some parts of the country more than others, ebbed and flowed depending upon public priorities and concerns. But the debate has never fully disappeared nor has it ever been fully resolved.

The two opposing sides are well-known:

At one end are supporters of “abstinence-only” education, an approach that encourages teens to postpone sexual relations until adulthood and marriage, period. End of discussion.

“Abstinence is the only 100 percent guaranteed method to avoid pregnancy and STDs,” says Libby Gray, director of Project Reality, an Illinois-based private organization that develops and promotes abstinence-only curricula for schools, public and private.

It’s hard to find anyone who would disagree. Indeed, proponents of comprehensive sex education – the other side of the debate – say that teaching teens to abstain from sex until they are mature, responsible, committed adults is their first priority.

“Nobody disputes that abstinence should be promoted, especially in the early years,” says Pamela de Carlo, dissemination manager for the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco. “But something more is needed later on, when kids are becoming sexually active. It’s pretty much a given that abstinence-only doesn’t work for kids who are already having sex, and studies show that by the end of high school, most teens have had or are having sex.”

“Something more,” in the view of comprehensive sex education advocates, means teaching students about contraception and the most effective methods of preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. It means teaching them how, if they’re bound and determined to have sex, to do it safely and responsibly, based upon the latest scientific and medical knowledge.

Politics and accuracy

If the debate over sex education in public schools was simply a matter of good science and public health policy, there probably wouldn’t be much of a debate. The vast majority of health and medical organizations, from the American Medical Association to the National Institutes of Health, have all issued public declarations in support of science-based, comprehensive sex education.

The debate over sex ed is, as much as anything, political. It is a confrontation between sometimes starkly different philosophies and ideas about what is right and wrong.

“It’s a division between people who say it’s OK to teach students how to put a condom on a cucumber and people who say that’s totally inappropriate,” says Gray at Project Reality.

Such talk infuriates supporters of comprehensive sex ed, who complain that abstinence-only programs seek only to scare and shame teens from having sex, often employing arguments and statistics that are confusing or worse.

Case in point: A report released by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, last year that found more than 80 percent of abstinence-only curricula contained distorted, misleading or false information about reproductive health. Some examples:

• Condoms do not protect against HIV, which can also be transmitted via sweat and tears.
• Pregnancy occurs one out of every seven times couples use a condom.

In fact, public health agencies and the medical profession have long advocated the use of condoms as a protective measure against the transmission of HIV. There is no scientific evidence showing that sweat and tears are risk factors for HIV transmission.

The average failure rate for condoms is roughly 12 percent. That is, 12 percent of condoms break during use or are used incorrectly. Less than half of these failures, say health experts, actually result in a pregnancy.

As maddening as these errors are, say proponents of comprehensive sex ed, they are trumped by the fact that there’s just no proof abstinence-only programs actually work.

“There’s no research to date that shows abstinence-only programs are especially effective,” says Cynthia Dailard, a senior public policy associate at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York City-based, nonprofit organization that conducts sexual and reproductive health research.

Indeed, a report on the efficacy of abstinence-only programs, ordered by Congress, remains to be seen. “The interim report was supposed to come out in 2003 but it’s still locked up at the Department of Health and Human Services,” says Dailard. “The final report was supposed to be published this year; now it’s delayed until 2006. No one’s said why.”

Local call

How all of this plays out in public schools depends mostly upon where you live. Sex education has historically been a local issue, a matter defined by local concerns, perceptions and values.

Nonetheless, until fairly recently, comprehensive sex education programs seemed to be fairly well established in most areas of the country, particularly in the west and northeast.

“I think what you saw in the 1980s and early 90s was a big push for the comprehensive approach, primarily as a reaction to the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” says Adrienne Virelli, director of communications for SIECUS, the Sexuality Information Education Council of the United States. “People were willing to break out of their safety mode and make a push so that young people would have the information they needed to protect themselves.”

Then, in 1996, conservative politicians inserted a provision in the massive welfare reform bill that called for the federal government to spend $50 million a year for five years on abstinence-only programs in schools.

At the time, it seemed a rather modest amount, but in the years since, Congress, encouraged by the White House, has become a serious financial booster of abstinence-only programs. In just the last five years, it has allocated more than $900 million for the development and dissemination of abstinence-only programs.

But not in California. From the beginning, the state has refused abstinence-only federal grants. “The state has been an amazing, if uncommon, model,” says Virelli. “It has rejected the abstinence money because officials know the approach doesn’t work and isn’t good for kids.”

It’s not quite that simple, of course.

In 2003, the state Legislature passed Senate Bill 71, the California Comprehensive Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Act. The bill, authored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, consolidated and clarified what could and could not be taught regarding sexuality education in public schools. The California School Boards Association supported the bill.

The law consists of two basic parts:

1. Public schools are required (as they were even before the passage of SB71) to teach HIV/AIDS prevention education at least once in middle school and once in high school. Lessons must include discussions of the nature of the disease, modes of transmission, strategies to reduce infection risk and related social and public health issues.
2. Public schools are not required to teach sex education, which the Education Code defines as comprehensive lessons about human development and sexuality, pregnancy, family planning and sexually transmitted diseases.

But if districts do opt to teach sex ed, it must be age-appropriate, medically accurate and objective and available to all students. It may not teach or promote religious doctrine or promote bias against any person or category of person.

And parents must have advanced opportunity to review the curricula and, if they choose, be able to pull their children from such lessons.

The debate continues

In the view of many, this approach seems to be working. A statewide survey in 2003 by PB Consulting found that 96 percent of school districts in the state provide sex education.

More importantly, key statistics appear to indicate comprehensive sex ed works. Condom use is up among teens and teen pregnancy is down. According to Planned Parenthood, the state’s teen pregnancy rate has dropped more than 40 percent in the last decade – the largest decrease of any state other than Alaska. California now ranks 21st in the country in teen pregnancy rate (based on 2002 numbers), down from 11th in 1991.

“I think California does a good job,” says Sharla Smith, a consultant on HIV/AIDS issues to the state Department of Education.

“We talk about abstinence. It’s the first line of defense and the primary message in middle school. But as students get older, as the pressures become greater, we talk about other issues, about realities.”

Still, Smith says the state can do better. “I’d like to see more coverage of STDs,” she said. “One in four sexually active students has an STD.”

Koreen Corbett, a science teacher in the 14,300-student K-8 La Mesa-Spring Valley School District east of San Diego agrees: “I would be very much opposed to restricting the already too restricted curriculum (in sex ed). I’m not allowed to give homework or tests. There are too many topics that are taboo.”

Not according to Tony Andrade, a civil engineer who helped lead the successful drive to put Gov. Gray Davis’ recall on the 2003 ballot. Andrade and his group “Civil Rights for Families” have launched a petition drive to significantly restrict sex education in California public schools.

“Our kids are under attack,” he said. “Sex addicts are targeting our kids.”

Andrade’s petition is provocative. It infers that schools are teaching bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia and other sexual perversions.

“Schools are promoting homosexuality. They’ve gotten into the sex business,” Andrade said.

It’s not clear how far Andrade’s petition will go. He admits that he’s had organizational problems and that the drive is well short of the required 373,000 signatures needed by June.

Still, his hyperbole is probably not helpful. The debate over sex ed is already too often more emotional than logical, more rhetorical than reasonable.

In 1995, for example, the school board of the 20,000-student Hemet Unified School District in Riverside County found itself bitterly split over whether to replace a comprehensive sex education program with one that stressed abstinence only.

“It was a very divisive thing,” recalls school board member and CSBA delegate Marilyn Forst. “The board was pretty conservative at the time. Some of the members felt strongly that parents needed to talk to their kids about sex. That it was their job, not the school’s. Others felt the lesson was never going to be heard by students unless they heard it at school.”

When a handful of parents, supported by Planned Parenthood and other pro-comprehensive sex ed groups, threatened to sue, the board reportedly considered dropping sex education entirely. Gary Young, the school board president at the time, was quoted saying, “If we can’t teach it right, we won’t teach it at all.”

In the end, however, the board found a compromise, one that stressed abstinence but still met all state requirements, according to Forst. “It’s worked pretty well. There’s been no more trouble.”

Hemet’s experience is, perhaps, a cautionary tale for school boards and administrators across the state. Sex education will always be a “hot button” issue, with lots of passionate advocates on both sides. The smart educator, say experts, finds the middle ground.

“What everybody should take away from this debate is that both abstinence and knowledge are critically important,” said Dailard at the Guttmacher Institute.

Smith, the state DOE consultant agrees: “Abstinence works great until the day it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t work, students need to have other tools, skills and knowledge at the ready.”

Scott LaFee is a contributing writer for California Schools.