Joint release adds to confusion

According to the release from the Joint Abstinence Committee, which was sent out earlier this week, "The programme does not do away with the activities of the NGOs in schools or replace the professional judgment of guidance counsellors and school principals." But what activities and professional judgments is the committee referring to? Have NGOs been providing sex education to secondary school students, including information about condom use and birth control pills? If so, another paragraph of the release seems to contradict this, since the committee argues that the onus is upon those who wish to promote "comprehensive sex education" to demonstrate that their programmes will not compromise "the actual or possible gains of the abstinence programmes nor increase the undesirable consequences of early sex on communities."

But how is any organisation to do this? Indeed, shouldn’t the onus be on the Education and Health Ministries to find this out for themselves? When the Abstinence-Only programme was introduced in the United States, that country’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and its National Institute for Child Health funded studies of 12,000 adolescents to see if the programme were effective or not. Is the Joint Abstinence Committee doing anything similar here? The US studies found that, although those involved in the programme had sex later than those who did not, the rates of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) amongst both groups were the same.

Moreover, many different studies have shown that countries with comprehensive sex education programmes — where young persons are educated about contraception and fidelity and abstinence — have lower rates of STDs and teenage pregnancies than countries which do not have such programmes. So the insistence that organisations outside the government must prove their case seems curious.

The release also says that criticisms that the Abstinence Only programme reinforces ignorance about the proper use of contraceptives is a "contrived argument manufactured to obscure the reality." So what is the reality? The very title of the Abstinence Only programme implies that no other method of preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancy will be taught. So is it that students are separated into groups, with only those interested in abstinence going to those lectures while those who want information about contraception go somewhere else? And, if the ministries are being even-handed, do both types of sex education get equal funding, exposure, and school time?

It seems not, since the release argues that "information on contraceptives. particularly mass condom promotion, has been around for at least 20 years, during which time scant respect was paid to abstinence or fidelity." But who was doing this promotion? Certainly not the Education or Health Ministries. In any case, the "mass condom promotion" has clearly failed, since so many Trinidadians and Tobagonians still think that pregnancy can be avoided by the girl jumping up and down after sex and that scrubbing with blue soap will prevent HIV.

The fact is, it is the Abstinence Only programme which is exclusive, inasmuch as a comprehensive sex education programme must include abstinence as an option for young people. But, since the Education and Health Ministries is promoting this policy, then the responsible thing to do is to track its effects in order to see if the programme works or not. Doing otherwise in this time of AIDS and other STDs means playing with young people’s lives.