Abstinence pledges a miserable failure.
Virginity pledges, in which young people vow to abstain from sex until marriage, have little staying power among those who take them, a Harvard study has found.
More than half of the adolescents who make the signed public promises give up on their pledges within a year, according to the study released last week.
Ooooooh, and guess who’s pissed!
The findings have raised the ire of Concerned Women for America, a prominent conservative organization that advocates adolescent sexual abstinence.
“The Harvard report is wrong,” said Janice Crouse, a fellow at a Concerned Women for America think tank.
“This study is in direct contradiction with trends we have been seeing in recent years,” Crouse said. “Those who make virginity pledges have shown greater resolve to save sex for marriage.”
Except not.
For the Harvard report, researcher Janet Rosenbaum analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It is the only government-sponsored study that asks about virginity pledges.
The 14,000 survey subjects were interviewed in 1995 and reinterviewed in 1996 and 2001. They ranged in age from 12 to 18 and came from across the country.
Rosenbaum found that 52% of those who said they had signed virginity pledges had had sex within a year. And of those who had sex after telling the first interviewers they had taken the pledge, 73% denied in the second interview having made the pledge.
“This may indicate that they are not that closely affiliated with the pledge,” Rosenbaum said.
The adolescents also were unreliable in reporting their sexual experiences, Rosenbaum said. More than a quarter of nonvirgins in the first interview who later took a virginity pledge said in the next interview that they had never had sex.
“That puts a lot of error in these studies,” Rosenbaum said. Virginity pledgers, she concluded, “are more likely to give bad information — unreliable data — about their sexual history.”
Medical testing is a more reliable gauge of adolescent sexual activity than their own reporting, Rosenbaum said.
In fact, researchers in other studies found that the reason that kids who took virginity pledges had no great reduction in sexually transmitted diseases over kids who didn’t was that, when they did have sex in contravention of their pledges, they didn’t use condoms:
The reason for the lack of health benefit, according to an editorial summary of the study [2], seems to be that pledgers were less likely to use condoms when they did become sexually active, were more likely to have anal or oral sex (almost always without a condom), and were less likely to seek and receive medical care if they did get a sexually transmitted infection. As one of the researchers told The Washington Post (2005-03-19), “The sad story is that kids who are trying to preserve their technical virginity are, in some cases, engaging in much riskier behavior.”
{ 19 comments }
I wonder if it has occurred to the bible thumping crowd that perhaps their “pledges” and “purity balls” {god that sounds disgusting!} might actually make their children more curious about sex than if they simply let things be.
Clearly, there’s a whole ‘nother study to be done about the effects of social pressure on self-reporting…
Janice Crouse says the Harvard study is wrong and if you don’t believe her she will stamp her foot and say it is wrong again.
Hell, how can you argue with that…..
Now if I could only get it to work when I stamp my foot and demand Sandra Bullock fall madly in love with me. (sigh)
I’d like to apologize for the massive failure of the last round of Central Texas purity pledges.
Virginity pledges don’t make much sense to me, even from a promoting-abstinence-until-marriage-is-a-good-thing point of view. Getting very young people to make a public promise and assuming that means they’ll keep it just seems like the wrong emphasis. It’s a way of substituting fairy tale princess moments for serious ongoing efforts at supporting people in sexual responsibility, and, if pledges are your main focus, it even seems to me that the main effect would be to give people practice at making solemn public promises and then breaking them. Better if they can have honest and supportive mentors who’ve walked the same path already.
I took a virginity pledge about six or seven years ago, and I had absolutely no difficulties abstaining from sex with men. And then I figured out that I was queer, and the virginity pledge went out the window.
Signing a paper promising to save myself for marriage didn’t stop me from having sex, and in fact, I had completely forgotten about it.
I agree with Lynn that giving young people good role models and other forms of support might be more effective. Also, I figured that since I legally could not get married to another woman, there was little point in saving myself for a marriage that would not happen.
Also, I was explicity taught in my catholic school sex ed class that condoms and birth control were risky and ineffective. It would not surprise me that people who had religious, abstinence-based sex ed, such as I had, would not bother to use condoms.
I have managed to maintain my virginity (I’m 27) despite never having made a pledge. I generally abstain from making showy meaningless public declarations, which policy has served me well.
Could we all please quit calling CWA a ‘think tank.’ Obviously very little thinking goes on there. How ’bout pray tank?
I keep hearing this, and realizing that I must have gone to a VERY liberal Catholic school. Not only did they start sex-ed in sixth grade (and never had uniforms), but we got information on birth control in high school in BOTH health class AND biology!!
Of course, we had religion class too, where they made it clear that they would use only Catholic teaching and not discuss contraception (requirement of the dioceses for Religious Studies). But biology class/health class were made distinct from religion, and we learned actual science–yes including how the pill works.
And it was clear that most of the religion teachers believed in b/c; they just weren’t allowed to teach about it in their classes.
No, it’s a think tank. It’s where thinking is stored, far away from the public.
This is also a public health issue. Virginity pledges shame young people out of both planning for and admitting to having sex. As the article says, virginity pledgers are giving bad information about their sexual histories, and it’s probably safe to assume that they’re not even telling their personal doctors the truth. So they’re sexually active but not preparing to be safe about it, not telling their doctors the truth about their choices, and probably not all that equipped to discuss sex with their partners, either.
That’s a pretty substantial problem.
My Catholic school also gave complete instruction in birth control, etc. It was also the first school I ever heard of that made the boy stay home as well as the girl after the fourth month. (Not that I agree with the staying home necessarily, but at least it was evenly applied).
Catholic schoolgirl here too – although I don’t remember a birth control discussion I remember lots of STD discussions, presentations and projects. Oh, and the day this girl brought in Seventeen magazine and asked our health teacher what blue balls were. Now THAT was riotous.
Well, I’m not surprised. I got one of those things when I was maybe fourteen or fifteen, at this big Christian rally thing that I was into at the time, and was too frightened not to sign it, thought it was mandatory, so I did. And I’m certainly not crediting it one bit; I was coerced and uninformed and had barely the faintest idea what all the fuss was about.
I’d imagine that an abstinence suggestion based on waiting until you a) know yourself well enough to avoid negative emotional consequences, b) are assertive and self-confident enough to expect and demand both safety and pleasure from a partner, c) possess the self-esteem to avoid self-loathing and stand up to the “slut” double standard from society and peers, d) have attained access to birth control and found health care and STI testing facilities you are comfortable utilizing, e) have considered the various possible consquences and how you will react to them (decide whether you’d have an abortion or not before it becomes an issue; have access to EC; have money available for treatments and emergencies), and f) have found someone interested whom you desire and truly want to have sex with, would be a lot more useful at getting young people to delay sex than any moralizing “save-it-for-marriage-’cause-you-don’t-deserve-pleasure-beforehand” types.
Focusing truly on “you’re worth it” without the negative qualifier “you have to wait,” (which sort of undermines “you’re worth it” by badly attempting to repackage a sacrifice as a reward), and allowing a potentially-very-soon payoff, with the timing ultimately up to the student rather than an ages-away wedding night, will not only make waiting less of a burden, but also avoid the stigma of virginity as something you are forced into choosing.
I spent several years in middle and high school ashamed to be a virgin, because it felt like giving in to the pressure and coersion from family and church and so forth. It took quite some time before I managed to claim the decision as my own, based solely on the fact that I hadn’t met anyone worth fucking, rather than choosing to have sex with someone I wasn’t interested in, solely to feel like I had made my own choice, which I probably would’ve done if I hadn’t realized that I could make the pressure irrelevent, that my own choice should be in spite of that pressure, and not because of it. No thanks to family and church on that one.
Virginity pledge be damned. MY choice, thank you very much.
That’s a pretty substantial problem.
really? the core goals of instilling shame and fear about sex have been accomplished, and when the kids screw up, they serve as an example to others.
Yeah, but it’s a problem for the rest of society, and for all those kids’ potential partners.
Kyra – my story’s like yours minus the pledge. Still a virgin, don’t really care, because I haven’t found anybody I want to have sex with. It’s not a matter of waiting for True Love or marriage; it’s waiting for someone I like and trust enough.
I’ve lost track of the number of Christian teenagers who have pompously told me that waiting for marriage is “easy”, that you just have to have “self control”.
I generally raise my divorced eyebrow and say nothing. I save my energy for the bit where they tell me that condoms are rubbish and don’t stop anything, and that there’s no need for STD tests if you’re having sex (after marriage, of course) with a “good Christian you can trust”.
Backing up m. luminous, I just did a little study on local Crisis Pregnancy Centers/Abstinence Ed centers (double the government funds, don’t ya know), and the information disseminated to these kids is misrepresented data, close but still scientifically false biology, or just plain imaginary horse-product most of the time. The whole program is designed to frighten them away from sex AND birth control. Of course they don’t use condoms when they’re regularly told that condoms have a 31% failure rate “with scrupulous and correct” use. Besides, owning birth control measures means that you’ve actually thought about having sex, and planned for it … that’s two sins that mark you a dirty whore before you even kiss.
So, yeah, according to these places, the sexual partner one should least trust is the one who mentions birth control.
I’ve lost track of the number of Christian teenagers who have pompously told me that waiting for marriage is “easy”, that you just have to have “self control”.
Andrew Greeley once said, in defending clerical celibacy, that he thought it was no harder to live up to than marriage vows – sometimes easy, and sometimes nearly impossible.
I’m not convinced that his equivalence between the difficulty of celibacy and the difficulty of marriage is quite on track, but the business about celibacy being sometimes easy and sometimes nearly impossible has the ring of truth to me.
It was easy for me to graduate high school still a virgin. Being not all that popular was part of it, but not all of it. I really wasn’t dying to lose my virginity, or requiring lots of self-control to maintain it. “Not me, not now” was what I wanted, and I never regretted waiting.
Staying virginal until I married at the age of 27 was another matter.
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