Kids Today Don't Stand a Chance

On March 11, 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the results of a study which found that nearly 26% (1 in 4) of American teenage girls ages 14-19 have at least one sexually transmitted disease. This report and its ramifications, however, were quickly shelved so that the media could provide us with non-stop coverage of the New York governor's sexcapades with a prostitute.

As titillating as the Spitzer scandal might seem, its impact is fleeting when compared to the fact that approximately 3.2 million young women in the United States are estimated to be infected with a wide range of sexually transmitted diseases. Of the 838 teen girls surveyed, approximately 50% admitted to being sexually active. Of this 50%, an overwhelming 40% tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease.

In addition, the study found that 48% of African-American teenagers were infected with a sexually transmitted disease and that 15% of the teenage girls who had an infection had more than one. The CDC also claims that the prevalence among teenage girls may actually be higher than their report indicates, as the study fails to include sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, HIV and syphilis.

These statistics should have sent shockwaves across the nation. Instead, they were greeted with a lack of surprise by groups like Planned Parenthood. And although few people had much to say about why the numbers are so high, Dr. Dorothy Ferguson, medical director at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, attributes the rise in sexually transmitted diseases to the fact that we're not teaching our young people enough about sex, specifically safe sex practices.

Yet I would suggest the very opposite: Not only are we teaching our young people too much about sex, we're teaching them all the wrong things.

When I was growing up, corporate America didn't sell sex the way it does today. But for corporate America today, the only bottom line is money. Today's world is one in which sex sells -- where images regarding sexuality are continuously discussed and propagated through print and television media, as well as the Internet.

Advertisements bombard our young people's minds with messages that either overtly or indirectly strive to sell merchandise through the promotion of sexuality. For example, the clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch has been under constant fire for its catalogs and advertisements which depict scantily clad individuals engaging in what critics have labeled "group sex." Even advertisements for more innocuous products such as toothpaste and acne medication imply that their products will help the guy "get the girl" and be more successful sexually.

Furthermore, our movies, music, celebrities and pop culture all portray sex as glamorous and lacking real-life consequences, such as disease and pregnancy. A study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that "more than half of all television programs, excluding news, sporting events, and children's programming, contained sexual content, incorporating an average of more than three scenes per hour. Less than 10% of the programs with sexuality themes incorporated any reference to the consequences of sexual activity."

There can be no mistaking the fact that our children are modeling their behavior after our own. Accustomed to living in and for the moment, we fail to consider the consequences. We have adopted the motto, "if it feels good, do it." We have become a nation of people without limits -- a people with no moral compass.

Yet it was not always this way. Religion and moral values were once the glue that held our communities and families together. They taught us that there must be internal limits in each of us -- lines that must not be crossed. Throughout our history, churches, synagogues, families and schools worked together to teach children right and wrong. And for the most part, we lived within those limits.

Today, our children are stuck in a moral vacuum of our own making. Our religious institutions have lost the moral high ground and, thus, no longer speak with authority. And teachers refuse to mention the word "morality" in the classroom out of fear of a lawsuit. Worst of all, the traditional family is in a shambles. The picture of the American family shows a broken home, shattered by divorce, infidelity and distrust. America's divorce rate hovers around 50%, and not even religious leaders are immune. According to a survey, one in five adults in a monogamous relationship has cheated on his/her partner. The rate is even higher among married men. Perhaps most disturbing, surveys have found that "married folks with kids -- including women with very young children -- are nearly as likely to commit adultery as childless couples."

As a consequence of our rash behavior, our children have learned that they can have sex whenever and with whomever they want. After all, they can just take a pill to prevent pregnancy. And if they do get pregnant, all they have to do is head down to the local abortion clinic for a quick fix. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading tracker of abortion statistics, 24% of all pregnancies end in abortion. In 2002 alone, 1.29 million abortions occurred. And now we're looking to vaccines and other prevention strategies to "fix" the high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among young people.

However, handing out condoms and IUDs to kids will not alleviate the problem because the real issue goes to the very heart of our system of values and the way we view one another. When we reduce sex to nothing more than a biological act, of course we're going to find ourselves riddled with diseases, unwanted pregnancies and failed relationships.

If we really care about our children, we had better take a good look in the mirror. Our kids don't stand a chance unless we can shore up the family structure, restore a sense of community and teach them morality, values and respect.

Comments

[jhNY]

Crusaders advocating crusades to shore up morality in society very often have very little to show for their efforts except repression. And look at the study. Fewer than a thousand participants. It doesn't even track what most of us would consider to be the most serious of the STDs: AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea. So what are the diseases exactly that they do track? You don't see fit to name them, so it's a little harder to get alarmed...

But Herrington (see his comment above) is in to something: hopelessness. A pervading hopelessness dominates our national discourse, not just on news shows. Every program about the natural world contains a reminder that time is running out not just for certain species but for entire ecosystems, every article on the fossil fuel debate contains a comment about looming scarcity and rising pollution, every blog about global warning cites loss of glacial ice and rise of violent weather incidents. The global economy on view in print and onscreen is a burning house of cards from which none of us can escape, all while prices rise, wages stagnate and the interest rate on borrowed money climbs up beyond the dreams of avarice. And the American political landscape, while littered with good intentions, labors mightily and gives birth to debt, endless war and the evisceration of what were our constitutional rights.

If you were young today, what career would you train for? What jobs are secure? Which fields will experience steady growth and thus rising wages? Whatever your answer, would you be willing to bet $60,000 of borrowed money that your choice is correct?

If you were young today, would you think it reasonable to believe your children would live to maturity, much less a ripe old age? Would they have clean water to drink? Would their food be safe? The air they would breathe?

Hopelessness drives people to do terrible empty things. Young people are at least as likely to react that way as any population group, maybe even more. And irresponsible sex may well be one of the forms that their hopelessness takes. But we don't need to drive teenagers back into church or start a reform movement to institutionalize nostalgia. We need to fix the problems that create the pervading hopelessness. Or more realistically, we need to to expect to get used to lots of folks of all ages acting out, and doing terrible empty things.

[Phaedrusnyc]

Or, I dunno, we could make sure that sex education classes aren't hamstrung by religious rightists and are allowed to talk about the full consequences of sex and the ways of preventing STDs. What is remarkable to me is that I went through junior high school twenty years ago and apparently was taught more than kids are today. We learned about the full gamut of STDs, including all the ones that people didn't seem to worry about anymore, and we were taught about condoms and other remedies that acted as prophylcactic devices to defend against those diseases. We also were taught how to recognize the symptoms of these diseases and get treatment. Blaming the culture is such an asinine, ill-informed thing to do. There have been numerous times in history where STDs ran rampant, infecting many of our most famous historical figures. This is hardly a "new" thing- the difference is that, after centuries of ignorance and a period of relative enlightenment, we have entered another period of ignorance- this time willfully enforced.

[Herrington]

If you are looking for answers, look to the prospects of the young for a future. They are not a blank slate at fifteen, they hear and see all that you do. They see the prison's filling past capacity and new ones being built. The old juvenile life projection was that they did not every want to get old. Now it is that they will not live to be twenty. It is not a lecture they need, it is a future free of dispair.

Sexual promiscuity, like crime, like drug addiction, like suicide, follows economic prospects. Poverty, real or an imagined future of it is the cause.