Sex Matters: Virginity study bashed
A report released by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, spurred another skirmish this week in the battle over what teens should be taught in sex ed class. The report criticized a study published in April in the Journal of Adolescent Health, by Hannah Bruckner and Peter Bearman, which found that teens who take virginity pledges have the same rate of sexually transmitted diseases as those who do not take the pledges. Made popular by programs such as True Love Waits, virginity pledges, which encourage teens not to have sex until marriage, are a big component of the Bush administration-backed abstinence-education programs.
The Heritage study calls Bruckner and Bearman's findings "problematic" and suggests that they "deliberately misled the public." However, independent scientists are not so sure about the methods employed by Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, authors of the Heritage report. "It needs to be carefully reviewed," says Freya Sonenstein, the director of the Center for Adolescent Health at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Rector and Johnson's study has not gone through the peer-review process that nearly all studies published in scientific journals do. Independent scientists also had a problem with the rigor of the study's statistics.
Rector says that they will submit the paper to an academic journal this fall. He says that he was bothered by the type of media attention the earlier study had gotten and particularly by Bruckner and Bearman's conclusion that teens who took virginity pledges and remained virgins were more likely than nonpledging virgins to engage in "alternative practices" such as anal or oral sex. While the Heritage report did not challenge that finding, the authors emphasized that, overall, pledgers were less likely to engage in oral and anal sex than those who didn't.
Rector and Johnson also took aim at the study's main finding, that teens who have taken pledges have a rate of STDs similar to those who haven't. The earlier study used a urine test to determine whether a person was positive for an STD, and the Heritage report combined that measure with teens' answers to surveys asking whether they had an STD. Using those measures, Rector and Johnson found that virginity pledges lowered the risk of a sexually transmitted disease. However, says Sonenstein, "there's almost no overlap between kids who test positive on a urinary test and those who report having an STD. It's comparing apples to oranges." One of the major problems is that teens who take virginity pledges may be less likely to go to the doctor for sexual problems (since they have promised not to be having sex) and so may not know they have a disease.
Using self-reported data to determine STD status is "stupid," says Bearman. "It makes no sense to do something like that."
For all the verbal barbs exchanged this week, no one is arguing about the fact that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of teens who take virginity pledges break them.