- Sounds good, but does sex ed actually work?
- The Age
- 18/01/2009 Make a Comment
- Contributed by: The Rooster ( 258 articles in 2009 )
Teaching children about sex from an early age reduces teen pregnancies, say some experts, but others think it is a grey area. Jill Stark reports.
SEXUAL health expert Roger Short had one question for his Dutch counterpart during a recent fact-finding trip to the Netherlands.
"I said, 'Can you tell me why it is that in Australia we've got five times as many teenage pregnancies as you have in the Netherlands? What are you doing that we don't do?' She said, 'The answer's simple — in Australia you are obsessed with the sin of sex whereas in the Netherlands we celebrate the joy of sex'."
The Dutch experience — where children as young as nine are shown cartoons on how to masturbate, and girls can get the contraceptive pill from the school nurse — proves that teaching children about sex from an early age works, according to the professor in human reproduction at the University of Melbourne.
The Australian Medical Association believes it too. Its submission to the state budget advocates compulsory explicit sex education from the age of 10; it argues that such programs would reduce teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.
But the proposal, revealed last week in The Sunday Age, has sparked debate, not only about its ethics, but about what it would actually achieve.
Catholic ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini was horrified, describing the plan as "child sex abuse" and promising to call the police if any teacher dared discuss intercourse with his children at such a young age. He says there is little solid evidence that sex education reduces teen pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted infections. Of greater influence, he says, are factors such as socioeconomic status, academic ability and attendance at a church or youth group.
Indeed, some experts say the success in the Netherlands — which has one of the world's lowest teen pregnancy and abortion rates — may be influenced by the low divorce rate, fewer single-parent families and more stay-at-home mothers.
Associate Professor Tonti-Filippini is right that there is no definitive proof on the effectiveness of sex education. A World Health Organisation literature review of more than 40 studies evaluating programs from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s found that 25 had made no difference, while 17 had delayed the onset of sexual activity, reduced the number of sexual partners young people had, and cut the rate of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmissible infections (STIs).
A 2004 study published in The Lancet — one of the world's leading scientific journals — was equally inconclusive when looking at programs in Britain.
Large-scale trials charting teenagers' sexual behaviour and the link to sex education are ethically and logistically difficult to conduct, making much of the available evidence observational.
Even strong sex education advocates such as Professor Short — who wants teenage girls to have access to the contraceptive pill in Australian schools — concedes it is a grey area.
"If you really ask for hard evidence that can show that introduction of sex education has had a significant impact, it's very difficult to come up with," he says. "Australia's a bit behind the times because we just haven't had good sex education in schools and we haven't had a controlled intervention that's been monitored."
But while concrete proof is scarce, it is clear that many teenagers are bereft of reliable information about sex. Last year a survey of 1000 Australian 13-to-18-year-olds revealed that 31 per cent were sexually active but a third did not know they could catch STIs from oral sex. Commissioned by Marie Stopes International, the study found one in 10 said they had received no sex education at school.
Jill Michelson, general manager of operations at Marie Stopes, a charity providing sexual and reproductive advice and treatment to women, says the figures are an indictment of Australia's sex education. Marie Stopes has lobbied the Federal Government to make it a mandatory part of the national curriculum.
"Something is going very wrong in our system … in the Netherlands, onset of sexual activity is later by about one or two years," Ms Michelson says. "The average age in Australia is 16 but over there it's between 17 and 18. They have such a comprehensive sexual health education program that we have to think that is the major difference."
Anne Mitchell, a founding member of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, says sex education is not the magic bullet, but argues that what we're doing now is not working.
With technology providing children access to a world of sexual information at the click of a button, she says that whether teenagers should receive sex education in school has become a moot point. The challenge is to ensure the information they receive comes from a more reliable source than a pornographic website. "Intuitively we know that we can't let a health problem go when a lot of kids don't even have the basic knowledge about STIs," she says. "They need to have some sense of why they should use condoms. STIs are going up, pregnancies are going up, kids are having more and more … unethical, maybe violence-related sex. The whole area is getting away from us and we're just burying our heads in the sand." In Victoria, sex education is taught on an ad-hoc basis. State schools must teach it, but the content and timing is left to individual schools to decide.
What is undisputed is that encouraging children to "just say no" does not work. In the US, several studies have found that children who enrolled in abstinence programs are more likely to get pregnant or contract a disease than those who received sex education.
Professor Mitchell says sex education fails if it covers only the mechanics of sex, and programs must teach children about the emotional side of relationships, including peer pressure and sexual coercion.
Associate Professor Tonti-Filippini, head of bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, agrees. "The minority of sex education programs that do change behaviour are comprehensive in information and they're values-based," he says.
Professor Short says work by a medical student under his watch found that adolescent girls in Victoria described their sex education as a joke.
"Australian teenagers are saying … that in sex education, instead of telling us all about the anatomy, why don't they bring in a 13-year-old single mother to tell us what it's like to have to look after it because the father has pushed off and the parents have chucked the girl out," he says.
"That's the sort of sex education we really need to be thinking about because that's what impacts on these kids' lives."
SEXUAL health expert Roger Short had one question for his Dutch counterpart during a recent fact-finding trip to the Netherlands.
"I said, 'Can you tell me why it is that in Australia we've got five times as many teenage pregnancies as you have in the Netherlands? What are you doing that we don't do?' She said, 'The answer's simple — in Australia you are obsessed with the sin of sex whereas in the Netherlands we celebrate the joy of sex'."
The Dutch experience — where children as young as nine are shown cartoons on how to masturbate, and girls can get the contraceptive pill from the school nurse — proves that teaching children about sex from an early age works, according to the professor in human reproduction at the University of Melbourne.
The Australian Medical Association believes it too. Its submission to the state budget advocates compulsory explicit sex education from the age of 10; it argues that such programs would reduce teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.
But the proposal, revealed last week in The Sunday Age, has sparked debate, not only about its ethics, but about what it would actually achieve.
Catholic ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini was horrified, describing the plan as "child sex abuse" and promising to call the police if any teacher dared discuss intercourse with his children at such a young age. He says there is little solid evidence that sex education reduces teen pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted infections. Of greater influence, he says, are factors such as socioeconomic status, academic ability and attendance at a church or youth group.
Indeed, some experts say the success in the Netherlands — which has one of the world's lowest teen pregnancy and abortion rates — may be influenced by the low divorce rate, fewer single-parent families and more stay-at-home mothers.
Associate Professor Tonti-Filippini is right that there is no definitive proof on the effectiveness of sex education. A World Health Organisation literature review of more than 40 studies evaluating programs from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s found that 25 had made no difference, while 17 had delayed the onset of sexual activity, reduced the number of sexual partners young people had, and cut the rate of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmissible infections (STIs).
A 2004 study published in The Lancet — one of the world's leading scientific journals — was equally inconclusive when looking at programs in Britain.
Large-scale trials charting teenagers' sexual behaviour and the link to sex education are ethically and logistically difficult to conduct, making much of the available evidence observational.
Even strong sex education advocates such as Professor Short — who wants teenage girls to have access to the contraceptive pill in Australian schools — concedes it is a grey area.
"If you really ask for hard evidence that can show that introduction of sex education has had a significant impact, it's very difficult to come up with," he says. "Australia's a bit behind the times because we just haven't had good sex education in schools and we haven't had a controlled intervention that's been monitored."
But while concrete proof is scarce, it is clear that many teenagers are bereft of reliable information about sex. Last year a survey of 1000 Australian 13-to-18-year-olds revealed that 31 per cent were sexually active but a third did not know they could catch STIs from oral sex. Commissioned by Marie Stopes International, the study found one in 10 said they had received no sex education at school.
Jill Michelson, general manager of operations at Marie Stopes, a charity providing sexual and reproductive advice and treatment to women, says the figures are an indictment of Australia's sex education. Marie Stopes has lobbied the Federal Government to make it a mandatory part of the national curriculum.
"Something is going very wrong in our system … in the Netherlands, onset of sexual activity is later by about one or two years," Ms Michelson says. "The average age in Australia is 16 but over there it's between 17 and 18. They have such a comprehensive sexual health education program that we have to think that is the major difference."
Anne Mitchell, a founding member of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, says sex education is not the magic bullet, but argues that what we're doing now is not working.
With technology providing children access to a world of sexual information at the click of a button, she says that whether teenagers should receive sex education in school has become a moot point. The challenge is to ensure the information they receive comes from a more reliable source than a pornographic website. "Intuitively we know that we can't let a health problem go when a lot of kids don't even have the basic knowledge about STIs," she says. "They need to have some sense of why they should use condoms. STIs are going up, pregnancies are going up, kids are having more and more … unethical, maybe violence-related sex. The whole area is getting away from us and we're just burying our heads in the sand." In Victoria, sex education is taught on an ad-hoc basis. State schools must teach it, but the content and timing is left to individual schools to decide.
What is undisputed is that encouraging children to "just say no" does not work. In the US, several studies have found that children who enrolled in abstinence programs are more likely to get pregnant or contract a disease than those who received sex education.
Professor Mitchell says sex education fails if it covers only the mechanics of sex, and programs must teach children about the emotional side of relationships, including peer pressure and sexual coercion.
Associate Professor Tonti-Filippini, head of bioethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, agrees. "The minority of sex education programs that do change behaviour are comprehensive in information and they're values-based," he says.
Professor Short says work by a medical student under his watch found that adolescent girls in Victoria described their sex education as a joke.
"Australian teenagers are saying … that in sex education, instead of telling us all about the anatomy, why don't they bring in a 13-year-old single mother to tell us what it's like to have to look after it because the father has pushed off and the parents have chucked the girl out," he says.
"That's the sort of sex education we really need to be thinking about because that's what impacts on these kids' lives."
Source: https://www.theage.com.au/national/sounds-good-but-does-sex-ed-actually-work-20090117-7jmb.html?page=-1
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