Numbers Don’t Lie, But “Virgins” Do

We’ve all heard about teenagers becoming born-again Christians and taking virginity pledges, meaning they are supposed to remain chaste until they say “I do.” Well, we at Holier Than Thou certainly aren’t fans of teens having sex, but virginity pledges don’t seem like such an effective means of curbing sexual activity. These are teenagers we’re talking about after all. And then teaching abstinence-only sex education to these hormone-ravaged kids rather than providing them with the facts about the birds and the bees and sexually transmitted diseases, well, ignorance is seldom bliss. In fact, it often leads to tragedy. Whatever happened to “the truth will set you free” or “honesty is the best policy”?

Which leads us to a recent Harvard study that evaluated retractions of virginity pledges and reports of sexual histories among a nationally representative sample of seventh- through twelfth-grade students who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

1). Select the true statement(s):

A. Teenagers do not report their past sexual activity accurately, with virginity pledgers giving more inaccurate reports of their past sexual activity.
B. Adolescents who abandoned a born-again Christian identity were more than twice as likely as their peers to say they had never taken a virginity pledge.
C. About 13 percent of adolescents reported that they had taken a pledge of virginity. Just one year later, however, more than half of this group said they had never taken such a pledge.


ANSWER
1: A, B and C are all true. These findings imply that virginity pledgers often provide unreliable data, making assessment of abstinence-based sex education programs unreliable. In addition, these teens may also underestimate their risk of exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.

"Teenagers do not report their past sexual activity accurately, with virginity pledgers giving more inaccurate reports of their past sexual activity," said study author Janet Rosenbaum, of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.