Hard to believe, but the more I look into this my cynicism only increases for the male driven politics of sexuality. In looking at the science, one can only conclude that evangelical christians have had more influence on policy and program development than previously known.
There are several scientific studies used to make the convincing argument that massive amounts of federal funding is being wasted on sex ed programs that do not work.

One of the cornerstones of this religion based programming to alter adolescent sexual attitudes and behaviors is the idea of making a “virginity pledge” to abstain from sex until marriage.

In their research study, After the pledge:the STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges, the authors Hannah Bruckner, PhD and Peter Bearman, PhD evaluated the relation between virginity pledges, rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s), and adolescent risk behaviors.

You can read the entire research paper here.

Bruckner and Bearman found that there was no difference in the rates of STD’s among the pledgers and non-pledgers.

While the pledgers appeared to reduce their exposure to many risk behavior areas, the fact their rate of STD infection was equal to other adolescents suggests that the pledgers may have been less likely to use condoms during their initial sexual activity, thereby increasing their risk for STD infection.

The authors concluded that “Adopting virginity pledges as intervention may not be the optimal approach to preventing STD acquisition among young adults.”

What do you think?
concluded that adolescents making the virginity pledge had the same number of STD’s as tho

The short version of this is that all research about the impact of these programs concludes they do not alter young people’s sexual behavior.

Encouraging young people to wait until marriage until becoming sexually active has failed.

Fortunately, young people do not seem to be harmed by the requirement that these abstinence-only programs not be allowed to teach healthy information about the use of condoms in preventing HIV and other STD’s and pregnancy.

If you can believe this, the architects of these programs assume that if you give accurate information about condoms and contraception, young people will have sex earlier and more often.

All I can do here is stop and take a deep breath.

Read Debra Hauser’s article in its entirety here:
Introduction

Since 1991, rates of teenage pregnancy and birth have declined significantly in the United States. These are welcome trends. Yet, teens in the United States continue to suffer from the highest birth rate and one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the industrialized world.

Debate over the best way to help teens avoid, or reduce, their sexual risk-taking behavior has polarized many youth-serving professionals. On one side are those that support comprehensive sex education—education that promotes abstinence but includes information about contraception and condoms to build young people’s knowledge, attitudes and skills for when they do become sexually active. On the other side are those that favor abstinence-only-until-marriage—programs that promote “abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard”[1] of behavior. Proponents of abstinence-only programs believe that providing information about the health benefits of condoms or contraception contradicts their message of abstinence-only and undermines its impact. As such, abstinence-only programs provide no information about contraception beyond failure rates.

In 1996, Congress signed into law the Personal Responsibility & Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, or “welfare reform.” Attached was the provision, later set out in Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, appropriating $250 million dollars over five years for state initiatives promoting sexual abstinence outside of marriage as the only acceptable standard of behavior for young people.

For the first five years of the initiative, every state but California participated in the program.[2] (California had experimented with its own abstinence-only initiative in the early 1990’s. The program was terminated in February 1996, when evaluation results found the program to be ineffective.[3]) From 1998 to 2003, almost a half a billion dollars in state and federal funds were appropriated to support the Title V initiative. A report, detailing the results from the federally funded evaluation of select Title V programs, was due to be released more than a year ago. Last year, Congress extended “welfare reform” and, with it, the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage funding without benefit of this, as yet unreleased, report.

As the first five-year funding cycle of Title V came to a close, a few state-funded evaluations became public. Others were completed with little or no fanfare. This document reviews the findings from the 10 evaluations that Advocates for Youth was able to identify. Advocates for Youth also includes evaluation results from California’s earlier attempt at a statewide abstinence-only initiative.
Available Evaluations

Ten states made some form of evaluation results available for review. For Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, Advocates was able to locate evaluation results from state Title V programs. For Missouri and Nebraska, Advocates located evaluation findings from at least one program among those funded through the state’s Title V initiative. Finally, the evaluation of California’s abstinence-only program was published in a peer-reviewed journal and readily available.
Funding*

During the first five years of abstinence-only-until-marriage Title V programming, the 10 states received about $45.5 million in federal funds. To further support the initiatives and to cover their required funding match, these states appropriated about $34 million in additional funds over the five years.[4] In addition, California spent $15 million in state funds between 1991 and 1994 to support its abstinence-only initiative.[3] In sum, the program efforts discussed in this paper cost an estimated $94.5 million in federal and state dollars.
Program Components

For the most part, Title V funds were administered through states’ departments of health and then sub-granted to abstinence-only contractors within each state. Program components varied from state to state and from contractor to contractor within each state. However, all programs discussed in this document included an abstinence-only curriculum, delivered to young people in schools or through community-based agencies. Popular curricula included: Education Now Babies Later (ENABL), Why Am I Tempted? (WAIT), Family Accountability Communicating Teen Sexuality (FACTS), Choosing the Best Life, Managing Pressures before Marriage, and AC Green’s Game Plan, among others. Some programs included peer education, health fairs, parent outreach, and/or Baby Think it Over simulators. Some states supplemented their educational programs with media campaigns, also funded through Title V.
Evaluation Designs

The 11 evaluations summarized in this document represent those Advocates for Youth could uncover through extensive research. The quality of the evaluation designs varied greatly. Most evaluations employed a simple pretest/posttest survey design. Slightly fewer than half (five) assessed the significance of changes from pre- to posttest, using a comparison group. Additionally, seven evaluations included some form of follow-up to assess the program’s impact over time, although results are not yet available for two. Three of these seven also included a comparison group. For those programs that included follow-up, surveys were administered at three to 17 months after students completed their abstinence-only-until-marriage program.

Evaluation results are summarized in Table I, which also includes studies’ design elements. Because the quality of the evaluation designs varied from state to state, Advocates relied heavily on the evaluators’ own analyses and words to describe each program’s impact.
Summary of Results

Evaluation of these 11 programs showed few short-term benefits and no lasting, positive impact. A few programs showed mild success at improving attitudes and intentions to abstain. No program was able to demonstrate a positive impact on sexual behavior over time. A description follows of short- and long-term impacts, by indicator.
Short-Term Impacts of State Abstinence-Only Programs

In 10 programs, evaluation measured the short-term impact of the program on at least one indicator, including attitudes favoring abstinence, intentions to abstain, and/or sexual behavior. Overall, programs were most successful at improving participants’ attitudes towards abstinence and were least likely to positively affect participants’ sexual behaviors.

Attitudes endorsing abstinence—10 evaluations tested for short-term changes in attitudes.

* Three of 10 programs had no significant impact on attitudes (Maryland, Missouri, and Nebraska);
* Four of 10 showed increases in attitudes favorable to abstinence (Arizona, Florida, Oregon, and Washington);
* Three of 10 showed mixed results (California, Iowa, and Pennsylvania).**

Intentions to Abstain—Nine evaluations measured short-term changes in intentions.

* Four of nine programs showed no significant impact on participants’ intentions to abstain (California, Maryland, Nebraska, and Oregon);
* Three of nine programs showed a favorable impact on intentions to abstain (Arizona, Florida, and Washington);
* Two of nine programs showed mixed results (Iowa and Pennsylvania).**

Sexual Behaviors—Six evaluations measured short-term changes in sexual behavior.

* Three of six programs had no impact on sexual behavior (California, Maryland, and Missouri).
* Two of six programs reported increases in sexual behavior from pre- to posttest (Florida and Iowa). It was unclear whether the increases were due to youth’s maturation or to a program’s effect, as none of these evaluations included a comparison group.
* One of the six programs showed mixed results (Pennsylvania).**

Long-Term Impacts of State Abstinence-Only Programs

Seven evaluations included some form of follow-up survey to assess the impact of the abstinence-only programs over time. Results from two of these are not yet available (Nebraska and Oregon). Of the remaining five, three were of statewide initiatives (Arizona, California, and Minnesota). Two were evaluations of programs within statewide initiatives (Missouri’s Life Walk Program and Pennsylvania’s LaSalle Program). All five evaluations included questions to assess changes in participants’ attitudes and behaviors between pretest/posttest and follow-up. Four also measured changes in intentions to abstain. Three evaluations included a comparison group.

Attitudes Endorsing Abstinence—Five evaluations included assessment of changes in attitudes.

Four of five evaluations showed no long-term positive impact on participants’ attitudes. That is, participants’ attitudes towards abstinence either declined at follow-up or there was no evidence that participating in the abstinence-only program improved teens’ attitudes about abstinence relative to the comparison groups, at three to 17 months after taking the abstinence-only program (Arizona, California, Missouri, and Pennsylvania’s LaSalle Program).

Follow-up surveys in Minnesota showed mixed results.

Intentions to Abstain—Four evaluations measured long-term intentions to abstain.

Three of four evaluations showed no long-term positive impact on participants’ intentions to abstain from sexual intercourse. That is, participants’ intentions either declined significantly at follow-up or there was no statistically significant difference in participants’ attitudes relative to controls at follow-up (Arizona, California, and Minnesota).

In one of the four (Pennsylvania’s LaSalle Program), evaluation showed a positive impact at follow-up on program participants’ intentions to abstain relative to comparison youth.

Sexual Behavior—Five programs measured long-term impacts on sexual behavior.

No evaluation demonstrated any impact on reducing teens’ sexual behavior at follow-up, three to 17 months after the program ended (Arizona, California, Minnesota, Missouri, or Pennsylvania’s LaSalle Program).
Comparisons of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage versus Comprehensive Sex Education

Two evaluations—Iowa’s and the Pennsylvania Fulton County program—compared the impact of comprehensive sex education with that of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

* In Iowa, abstinence-only students were slightly more likely than comprehensive sex education participants to feel strongly about wanting to postpone sex, but less likely to feel that their goals should not include teen pregnancy. There was little to no difference between the abstinence-only students and those in the comprehensive sex education program in understanding of why they should wait to have sex. Evaluation did not include comparison of data on the sexual behavior of participants in the two types of programs.
* In Fulton County, Pennsylvania, results found few to no differences between the abstinence-only and comprehensive approaches in attitudes towards sexual behavior. Evaluators found that, regardless of which program was implemented in the seventh and eighth grades, sexual attitudes, intentions, and behaviors were similar by the end of the 10th grade.

Discussion

These evaluation results—from the first five-year cycle of funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage under Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act—reflect the results of other studies. In a 1994 review[5] of sex education programs, Kirby et al assessed all the studies available at the time of school-based, abstinence-only programs that had received peer review and that measured attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Kirby et al found that none of the three abstinence-only programs was effective in producing a statistically significant impact on sexual behaviors in program participants relative to comparisons. In a 1997 report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Doug Kirby reviewed evaluations from six abstinence-only programs[6], again finding no program that produced a statistically significant change in sexual behavior. This was again confirmed in 2000[7], when another review by Kirby found no abstinence-only program that produced statistically significant changes in sexual behaviors among program youth relative to comparisons. This failure of abstinence-only programs to produce behavior change was among the central concerns expressed by some authors of the evaluations included in this document. [For examples of authors’ remarks on behavior change, see quotations under Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and Pennsylvania in the state-by-state analyses that follow.] It is important to note that a great deal of research contradicts the belief that changes in knowledge and attitudes alone will necessarily result in behavior change.[8]

A few evaluators also noted the failure of abstinence-only programs to address the needs of sexually active youth. Survey data from many of the programs indicated that sexually experienced teens were enrolled in most of the abstinence-only programs studied. For example:

* In Erie County, Pennsylvania, researchers found that 42 percent of the female participants were sexually active by the second year of the program.
* In Clinton County, Pennsylvania, data collected from program participants in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades showed a dramatic increase in the proportion of program females who experienced first sexual intercourse over time (six, nine, and 30 percent, respectively, by grade).
* In Minnesota, 12 percent of the eighth grade program participants were sexually active at posttest.
* In Arizona, 19 percent of program participants were sexually active at follow-up. Concurrently, Arizona’s evaluators found that youth’s intent to pursue abstinence declined significantly at follow-up, regardless of whether the student took another abstinence-only class. Eighty percent of teens reported that they were likely to become sexually active by the time they were 20 years old.

Abstinence-only programs provide these youth with no information, other than abstinence, regarding how to protect themselves from pregnancy, HIV, and other STIs.

A third, related concern of evaluators was abstinence-only programs’ failure to provide positive information about contraception and condoms. Evaluators noted more than once that programs’ emphasis on the failure rates of contraception, including condoms, left youth ambivalent, at best, about using them.

* In Clinton County, Pennsylvania, researchers noted that, of those participants that reported experiencing first sexual intercourse during ninth grade, only about half used any form of contraception.
* Arizona’s evaluation team found that program participants’ attitudes about birth control became less favorable from pre- to posttest. They noted that this was probably a result of the “program’s focus on the failure rates of contraceptives as opposed to their availability, use and access.”

Table I follows on the next page. It includes information about the evaluation design, short-term impacts, and long-term impacts of the 11 programs summarized in this document. After Table I, individual state-by-state summaries follow, ordered alphabetically by state.
Conclusion

Abstinence-only programs show little evidence of sustained (long-term) impact on attitudes and intentions. Worse, they show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse. Importantly, only in one state did any program demonstrate short-term success in delaying the initiation of sex; none of these programs demonstrates evidence of long-term success in delaying sexual initiation among youth exposed to the programs or any evidence of success in reducing other sexual risk-taking behaviors among participants.

______________________________
* In federal fiscal year 2003, the 10 states discussed here with evaluations of Title V programs received $8,810,281 in federal funds. Under the law, states are required to provide matching funds of three state-raised dollars for every four federal dollars received. Thus in 2003, the 10 states supplied $7,268,060 in state dollars, bringing the total of public monies to Title V funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs to $16,078,341.

** Mixed results indicated that attitudes changed in both desired and undesired directions, either by survey questions within one initiative, or by individual programs within an initiative.

Next Section >>

Table I: Short- and Long-Term Impact of State Abstinence-Only Programs

Source/Citation:
Hauser D. Five Years of Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education: Assessing the Impact. Washington, DC: Advocates for Youth, 2004.

Click here to view the Publications Catalog and/or to order this publication.

It’s pretty simple. Power politics. Dominated by men and influenced by conservative male religious leaders with a political agenda to control the sexuality of our children.

Purity Ball anyone?
Not only do these power driven men seek to control the sexual behaviors of their children (and our children), but they want to propagate (my word) the political opinion that sex should only occur between a man and a woman in the context of a marriage.

Implicit in the message required to be taught is that any other sexual behavior between consenting same sex partners is not normal.

Wow, do you think they wanted to make sure that all those young people would believe that homosexuality or bi-sexuality was not normal.

Gee, why do they think that the rate of suicide for adoscents is so high?
This is a brilliant idea, given that after 10 years of religious pressure to create abstinence only programs for youth, they made no difference. Over half the 2000 young people studied were having sex just before their 17th birthday. The sexually active teens had sex for the first time at age 15.
And here is the other news, only about 25% of them used condoms when they had sexual intercourse. Just fantastic.

How stupid can our political leaders be? Separation of church and state means something only if you don’t have a political agenda to push onto impressionable young people.

When I taught my course on adolescent and family therapy, I used data from the Center for Disease Control that showed that there were about 1 million pregnancies and 3 million STD’s among young people in our country.

I don’t have time right now to check these figures, but will later. Or you can check yourself…go to cdc.com, youth risk behavior studies.

However the important point is millions of young people are having many, many millions of sexual experiences and without the life saving protection of condoms.

Oh, I forgot, it was a requirement of the abstinence only programs to not teach the young people about the value condoms and other contraception methods.

What were they allowed to teach?

Only the problems and rate of failures with contraception.

What country and what elected leaders chose to waste money trying to control the sexual behaviors of our children?

To me, the funding of programs with no scientific support for purely political purposes raises serious ethical concerns for all of us.

“I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before god to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband, and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by god to influence generations to come.”

(Qouted verbatim from the Generations of Light website)

There are several problems with this perspective. First of all, the concept of fathers as a high priest is a bit scary. High priest is a term reserved for leaders in various religious organiztions. Roman catholics might refer to the pope as their high priest.

Is a father the equivalent of the pope or other religious leader from other churches, synagogues, or other religious organizations?

I am also very uncomfortable with the fact that the Fundalmentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS) also refer to the husband/father in their families as the high priest.

It is through the high priest or husband/father that the wife/wives and children all are able to gain entry into heaven.

We also are learning more about how FLDS has systematically abused women and children, including their religious leader and prophet, Warren Jeffs, being convicted and sentenced to at least ten years in prison for sexual abuse related crimes against women and children in his own church.

There is a lot of power in that role as high priest, prophet, religious leader. And power is the dimension most often associated with the sexual abuse of children.

A settlement in Chicago this week led one of the victims of the sexual abuse by the priest to talk about the damage this abuse did to her trust in the world.

She referred to the priest who abused her as a “friend of her family”, someone who was often over their house, who was the priest presiding over the marriage of her sister, and someone she thought of as like “Jesus Christ.”

This is a lot of power to bestow on a religious leader. It helps to understand the power these men have had to control, abuse and manipulate their victims.
In her scholarly article, “Power, Patriarchy, and Sexual Abuse in the Christian Church, Thaeda Franz makes a compelling argument that the Christian church is structured in a way to support and maintain the abuse and sexual abuse of girls and women.

She offers six beliefs encouraged in the subtext of Christian teachings, bible studies and lectures held in church related settings.

Click here for the entire article. I am listing them as a summary. The author describes the research used to substantiate the beliefs and I encourage you to read the entire article. It is compelling reading.
Here are the six beliefs as described by Franz in her article:

1. God intends men to dominate and women and children to submit.
2. Women are morally inferior to men, as evidenced by Eve’s role in the fall. It was she who took the bite from the apple.
3. Children are inherently evil and must have their will broken.
4. Marriage should be preserved at all costs
5. Suffering is a Christian value.
6. Christians must quickly forgive those who “sin” against them.

With a quick glance at these beliefs, of course not held by all Christians, one can see the subtle and not-so-subtle biase against women and children, especially female children in these beliefs.

So what about these Christian Purity Balls? Most therapists and educators I know can see the biase against girls in this program. There are psycho-sexual boundary violations all over the place.

It is very inappropriate for these fathers to use their relationship to manipulate their daughters into making a promise about remaining virgins.

Does a father have the right or authority to try to exert control over his daughter’s sexuality?

These fathers would probably say, not only do they have the right and authority, they have the responsibility.

RAndy Wilson, a founder of the Purity Ball movement, told the fathers at one event, “…our daughters are waiting for us. They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”
Randy Wilson is the national field director of church ministries for the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group.

If you look at the website for the Family Research Council (click here), you can see that the Purity Ball movement is just part of the political effort to influence public policy.

What happened to the separation of church and state? Well, it has been expedient for these religious leaders to turn political advocate.

I suppose I can not blame them. If they can find politicians to contaminate the intentions of our constitution’s founding fathers to keep church and state separate, it makes political sense to do that.

These leaders have found support from the federal government to fund religious based abstinence programs. This is the point of this essay.

However, what are these programs teaching and what are they accomplishing?

That’s the focus of the next post. Stay tuned.

The reason talk therapy is so effective is related to the fact that the brain continues to evolve and change throughout our lifetime. This is referred to as neuralplasticity.

This means the brain has the capacity to grow and expand, correlated with people of all ages learning new things, like playing the piano, learning a language, or some other complicated process involving learning.

So, the person in therapy has a brain that is growing, building neurons and neural circuits that create the circuitry for new feelings and behavior.

Anti-depressant medication does the same thing by allowing the person to “feel better” and thereby behave in ways that influence neural development.

Sometimes, both meds and therapy work really well together, especially when someone is under tremendous stress or severely depressed.

As a result, these adults can spend their lifetime trying to replace that lost love by unhealthy attachments with other adults, and yes, even therapists.

Whatever the therapeutic orientation of the therapist, it is very important for the client to realize that the ideal parent relationship they needed was not available then and can not be replaced by another relationship.

The client needs to grieve their losses and not “replace” their lost relationship with anyone, including a therapist.

Clients need to have a warm, accepting relationship with their therapist, but also begin to challenge their automatic thinking that they can skip the grieving part. No gain without pain.

Therapists can be faulted for not understanding how to help clients with their negative, automatic thinking.

It doesn’t work to just say, “Hey, you have irrational thinking!”

It also does notwork to not deal directly with clients thinking and spend a lot of time with positive regard, or worse those long therapist hugging their client at the therapy office door before they leave.

I am not against hugging clients per se, just where thats all the therapist thinks is needed.

When a client who has issues related to early childhood relationship problems, it is crucial for them to understand that their need for “love” can really get them in trouble.

They are shocked when the same disastrous result occurs even after they have tried and tried to do it differently.

After clients begin to grieve their losses, connecting the dots between their earlier abuse or neglect, it is important to begin to help them understand how the brain works, how feeling threatened can result in intense cardiovascular activation, and how automatic thoughts are involved in the escalation of their emotional states.

Cognitive restructuring can do this. Is your therapist using this at all? Check with them, it can help.

If so, you should read Albert Bernstein’s book, Emotional Vampires… so you can learn to spot a narcissist quickly. Here are some of the characteristics to look for in emotional vampires…

• Vampires are different than you. You may be sensitive to other peoples feelings. Vampires have little to no empathy. They are really only concerned about what they can “take” from you, in terms of money, work, recruitment for their cause, and even sex.

• Vampires believe their needs trump everyone elses’ needs. They often may claim to be driven by lofty principals, but when it comes down to it, they are only motivated by their own selfish desires in the moment.

• Vampires really don’t apologize ever, because they believe they are never wrong. The best you may get sounds something like, “It is regrettable that you feel that way…let’s try to meet sometime in the next few months and we shall talk about this…”

• What the vampire really means is, “I am not really sorry for anything, because you caused whatever upset occurred and I will allow you to apologize to me sometime down the road…”

• Vampires do not observe rules. Whatever they want to do, they do. Rules or expectations are for everyone else. Great examples of this are those vampires who spend a lot of time telling others to do charity work or concerned about the needy…then do the exact opposite.

• For specific examples of emotional vampires, think religious leaders and politicians…for some of them..“a sense of entitlement, rules don’t apply to me and I don’t really have to apologize, in fact I am the one who was injured” seems like the common course of action in their lives.

Remember, learn to spot the emotional vampires in your lives.

Test the ones you know to see if they have any potential for change, and set limits with the others.

They will not help you, no matter what they say.