Newspaper Article

'Hands Off' Won't Work for Sex Ed

SUSAN CHEEVER. Susan Cheever is a novelist and biographer

2001

Overview

Teaching kids about sex is the job no one wants. The parents say the teachers should do it. Last year's Kaiser Family Report found that 98 percent of parents want the burden of sexual education to be on the schools. Ninety percent or more wanted the schools to explain sexually transmitted diseases, teach what to do in cases of rape or sexual assault, teach how to deal with peer pressure and the emotional consequences of sex as well as covering the basics of reproduction and birth control. Because of our fears, no one is currently responsible for teaching our children what they need to know. They are learning on their own from hearsay and from the masses of fragmented, misleading sexual information provided by advertising. No wonder they are confused. No wonder the sexually transmitted diseases chlamydia and gonorrhea lead the list of reported infections in this country-with gonorrhea increasing for the first time in 20 years. Not only are more and more teenagers having sex younger and younger-31 percent had intercourse by the age of 15 in 1995, up from 25 percent in 1980, according to a Family Planning Perspectives study-but they are more and more confused about what constitutes sex. Many of them don't even seem to know what abstinence means. Doctors who specialize in adolescent medicine report that many teenagers think oral sex or anal sex is not sex at all. So it's no wonder that although the teenage pregnancy rate is falling, the sexually transmitted disease rate is rising.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC