Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 8, 1994 TAG: 9405090105
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They never go all the way.
``People try to tune the message out, but the best way is to show by example: We're dating, and we don't have to have sex to have fun,'' Corell, a senior, says.
While a majority of teens have had sex by their senior year and the number of teens getting pregnant or sexually transmitted diseases is increasing, many young people want to prove that not all teens are having sex.
They say they are pure - and proud of it.
Vocal virgins, they are called. And there are ``re-virgins,'' those who make vows to abstain until marriage, despite having been sexually active in the past.
In classrooms, church basements and around dining-room tables, many Roanoke Valley teens are being urged to resist the messages of rap lyrics and the bullying of their peers for a life of success rather than pregnancy and poverty.
``At church they tell you [premarital sex] is morally wrong, but not why. At school they say if you're gonna do it, do it safely. No one ever talks about the mental part - that if you sleep around, you get hurt,'' says Bobbie Scott, a junior at Cave Spring High School.
Scott and a dozen other Bent Mountain-area teens have taken a course designed by Scott's mother, Karen, who was concerned about the lack of abstinence education being taught in schools and homes.
``What really pushed me was AIDS,'' Karen Scott says. ``We simply laid out the advantages and disadvantages of being abstinent so they could see for themselves.
``You can teach your kids safe sex, but kids need to know the safest, which is abstinence - the only thing that's 100 percent,'' Scott adds. ``Plus, condoms can only protect you physically. They can't protect your heart.''
Though the courses were held in a local church, the practical consequences of premarital sex were stressed more than the religious teachings against it.
``I think abstinence should be thought of as more of a wider thing,'' says Anna Karr, a freshman at Cave Spring Junior High. ``I mean, I'm not extremely religious, I just think it's a smart idea.''
Scott's group and others are rebelling against what seems to be an expectation for teen-agers to have sex. They're starting their own counterculture - hoping that they can make abstinence as trendy as the media make sex.
``Teens aren't just hormonal crazy little people. We do have minds,'' says 13-year-old Erin Elisabeth Jones, an eighth-grader at James Madison Middle School. ``If only they'd teach abstinence and let us make up our own minds, I think most teens would make the right decision.''
Jones is among nearly 300 Sunday School students at Roanoke's First Baptist Church participating in ``True Love Waits,'' a nationwide curriculum for teen-agers initiated last year by the Southern Baptist Convention.
In a rare religious move, the program has since been adopted by many other churches, including Roman Catholic, Assemblies of God, Church of God and the Wesleyan Church.
The course culminates in the teens signing, along with their parents, a wallet-sized covenant card stating: ``Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and my future children to be sexually pure until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship.''
``We feel the kids are getting so much information right now on birth control, but none on the other side,'' says Rev. Allie McNider, First Baptist's Minister of Students. ``It's gotten so we're scared to death to even use the word morality. We think if we pull a condom over it all, it'll take care of everything.''
McNider and other abstinence educators feel the schools should give abstinence equal credence with birth control - not from a religious slant, but from an emotional perspective.
``When I was in school, all we heard is just don't do it; there was no discussion about the gift'' of saving yourself for your spouse, says Sonny Richards, a True Love Waits educator. ``And we're not saying sex is a bad thing. We say that if you confess that sin then God will forgive you, so it gives ... a positive option'' to those who have already been sexually active.
Jenny O'Brien, a Patrick Henry High School senior who has been dating the same guy for four years, says it's not easy saving yourself for marriage. ``We've had as many temptations as anyone else, but from day one we said we'd abstain,'' she says.
Billy Morrison, a senior at William Byrd High School, believes peer pressure makes taking the abstinence pledge particularly rough for guys. ``At my school it's a big thing for guys to talk about - how many girls they've been with,'' Morrison says. ``If you're a guy, it's uncool'' not to have sex.
And yet a double standard applies, adds Cave Spring senior Chirsty Allman: ``Guys respect girls when they haven't slept around. The girls who do sleep around, they have low self-esteem, and I feel kinda sorry for them.''
Allman says she tells her dates first thing: No kissing on the first date, and no sex before marriage. Like most people, she finds the subject awkward to bring up, ``but once you do, it's a big load off your shoulders.''
Abstinence could indeed become popular if enough teens banded together to promote the message, Allman adds. ``It's like when an adult says, `Just Say No.' You're like, `Yeah, right.' But you'll listen to your peers.''
Deneen Evans is hoping that sentiment will spread at Patrick Henry High School, where she recently trained a group of 10 students to promote abstinence as well as give out information on birth control and responsible decision-making.
The peer educators will make presentations in class, orient next year's incoming freshmen, man a teen hotline, and hand out information at public places such as malls and Festival in the Park.
``Wherever kids are, it's our responsibility to give them information - at church, in the movie theaters, bowling alleys, skating rinks, football games,'' says Evans, a counselor for Roanoke's Adolescent Health Partnership. ``Why not have information in the shopping malls? The kids tell me stories about doing it behind the stairwells there.''
Evans feels strongly that teens need both abstinence and sex education, including information on birth control and where to get it. ``From what I've seen at Ruffner and P.H., I believe that if the girls could make a choice, they'd say no. But they don't have the assertiveness skills, they're looking for the love, and the peer pressure is great.
``It's good for students to see a group of teens out there who aren't embarrassed about promoting abstinence,'' she adds. ``They're going into the middle schools, too, where they'll be looked up to as high schoolers.''
How realistic is it to expect teen-agers to abstain?
``About as realistic as AIDS,'' says peer educator Cynthia Easterling, a teen mother who tells her peers just how consequential premarital sex can be.
``We're not preaching to them like adults would. We're just trying to get a point across,'' Easterling, a senior, says. ``And we're not all goody-goody. We're just trying to help them out.''
But is it possible for the peer group to promote abstinence and educate teens about birth control without sending mixed signals?
Do the hard-line abstinence-only programs like True Love Waits do their teens a disservice by ignoring the reality that 72 percent of teens do have sex, with only 42 percent using condoms?
Family-planning educators argue that vows of abstinence break more often than condoms do.
``This is the only subject I'm aware of where we consider information to be dangerous,'' says Kathryn Haynie, executive director of Planned Parenthood. She also worries that programs like True Love Waits lob too much guilt on the teens who are already sexually active as well as place too much emphasis on the negative, unhealthy aspects of sex.
``I don't think this society understands what many other Western countries do - that if we affirm sexuality as something wonderful and good that should be cherished with women and men in caring relationships before it happens, you can achieve the same goal [of abstinence] without putting all the guilt and scare tactics on top of it,'' Haynie says.
Mary Ellen Scott, program director at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church, believes both abstinence and birth control should be taught. Scott recently led a sexuality program for at-risk middle schoolers through the Community Outreach Program at Trinity United Methodist Church.
During a recent session, Scott answered written, anonymous questions from the students, including: How do you know what bra size to wear? What is masturbation? Why do women have abortions? She also passed around various birth-control devices, explaining how they are used as well as the failure rate of each.
``God gave us a mind to make responsible decisions, and they need to have the tools for making them,'' she says. ``I think we need to inform our kids, not just tell them what we want them to hear.''
She was shocked by the naivete of the 12- and 13-year-olds, most of whom had trouble defining intercourse. ``They hear about it all the time, but they were afraid to ask. We talked about it two or three times, and the question kept coming back up so finally I said, `This is what you do!'
``Their parents should have told them because I know they hear about it. My 9-year-old niece said sex is when a man gets on top of a woman and goes `ooh baby' three times. She's got some of the concept, but she needs work. . . . I don't particularly want my niece to know about contraceptives, but she needs to - so she can make responsible decisions.''
At the same time, Scott adds, it's up to parents and churches to reach out to youth with more honest discussion, more after-school programs and more youth groups.
Making abstinence trendy ``isn't a losing battle because I think it's what kids want to hear,'' Scott says. ``I know kids who are just being torn up with the pressures [to have sex] and they're not ready for it.
``They want to be told it's OK not to have sex. They want to be kids.''
The Roanoke Times & World-News will conclude this series next month.
by CNB