Crosstalk: October 27, 2016

Valerie Huber is President & CEO of Ascend, a Washington DC-based professional association that champions youth to make healthy decisions in relationships and life by promoting well-being through a primary prevention strategy, and as a national membership and advocacy organization that serves, leads, represents and equips the Sexual Risk Avoidance field.

For many years, the federal government has promoted sex education in public schools—specifying that the curriculum provide non-judgmental options from abstinence to abortion. In practice, however, under shat has been labeled “Comprehensive Sex Education”, abstinence has been depicted as being unrealistic, sexual activity being encouraged as normal, and abortion as a last-resort option when other methods of birth control fail.

The promise was that adopting the Comprehensive Sex Education\ would free young people—and children as young as elementary school—to experiment with sexual activity, making it less of a mystery, and ultimately reducing the amount of teen pregnancy. The result has been just the opposite.

In fact, in a recent survey, when asked how they were pressured to become sexually active, peer pressure was a factor, but one of the strongest pressure was reported to be in sex education classes!

In contrast, Sexual Risk Avoidance is an educational approach based on the public health model of primary prevention, to empower youth to avoid ALL the risks of sexual activity. It explains the advantages of being abstinent, even until marriage, thus avoiding the risks of pregnancy, STD's, and broken relationships, with continuing problems with relationships both in marriage and with others.

Federal funding has historically gone 90% for Comprehensive Sex Education programs, with very little funding for programs that seek to avoid the risks of early sexual activity.

Currently Congress is considering new funding for sex education, with the current congress voting after the election, but before the new Congress takes office. So there is an opportunity for citizens to contact their current representatives in Congress to encourage them to support Sexual Risk Avoidance Education program. In addition, citizens need to become familiar with what is happening in their local school district, and become involved locally as well.