- WASHINGTON -- American teenagers
who take the pledge to remain virgins until they marry have almost the
same rate of sexually transmitted disease as other young people, a new
study of adolescent behaviour says.
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- The finding destroys a key rationale for the abstinence
crusade - that it prevents disease - and poses a strong challenge to a
social engineering project that has been embraced by the White House.
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- The eight-year study of 12,000 young people by two American
sociologists found that the graduates of abstinence programmes were nearly
as likely as other young people to catch sexually transmitted infections
such as gonorrhoea or chlamydia.
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- Other findings, yet to be published, also suggest that
abstinence programmes do not prevent early pregnancy, Hannah Bruckner,
a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of the study, said.
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- That challenges the very underpinnings of a movement
that has attracted 2.5 million American teenagers in recent years, and
which is endorsed by church organisations and the Christian right.
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- Few of those teenagers continue to save themselves for
marriage - 88% have sex before they reach the altar. However, the study
found they start having sex later and have fewer partners than other teenagers.
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- Even so, Dr Bruckner said she was initially surprised
to discover that there was virtually no statistical difference in their
susceptibility to infection. That was because such teenagers are less likely
to use condoms, and are less aware of sexually transmitted infections,
largely because they have been indoctrinated to believe they are not going
to have sex.
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- Under US law, abstinence programmes risk losing federal
funding if they stray into the realm of sex education. Church-based abstinence
programmes are openly hostile to condoms and preach that they do not guard
against disease.
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- "Teens who pledge are less likely to get tested
for STDs, are less likely to see a doctor if they are worried about STDs,
and also less likely to know that they have an STD," said Dr Bruckner.
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- Those teenagers, because they were less likely to seek
treatment, could also more readily spread sexually transmitted infections
to other people, she added.
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- The study found that STD rates for whites who pledged
to stay virgins was 2.8% compared with 3.5% among other teenagers. Among
African-Americans, the rates were 18.1% and 20.3%. Among Hispanics, they
were 6.7% and 8.6%.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1166168,00.html
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