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· Incidence of sexually-transmitted diseases amongst young people is growing
· Schools and public bodies should challenge the underlying culture, rather than encourage or tolerate it
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Disease on the rise
Incidences of of sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) amongst young people are growing. HIV-AIDS receives most attention but other diseases are increasingly common, too. Chlamydia affects 40% of sexually active adolescent females in the USA. UK rates are likely to be very similar. Although over four-fifths of women will show no symptoms, chlamydia causes infertility because of damaged fallopian tubes. Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is the most common STD. Condoms provide little protection and HPV causes the vast majority of cervical cancers and pre-cancerous growths found of Pap smears. Genital Herpes is one of the fastest growing STDs. Eight new STDs have been identified since 1980. Teenage females are particularly vulnerable to STDs because of their immature immune systems, vulnerability to infection of the cells of the teen cervix and their preference for high risk social partners. False confidence in the reliability of condoms has also contributed to the growth in STD infections.
In addition to the STD problem is the growth of teenage and unwed pregnancies. The life chances of women caught in these situations are hugely reduced and the same is true for the children they bring in to the world. In addition to killing the unborn child, a growing body of evidence shows that abortion also damages the physical and emotional health of the woman.
Sexual risk-taking is closely associated with other risky behaviours - not least drug and alcohol consumption and anti-social, even violent, conduct. Risky behaviours are most common amongst children where family or educational role models are weak and where society constructs perverse incentive structures in such areas as family life, work and juvenile delinquency.
Education
In 'How Now Shall We Live?' Charles Colson discussed the extent of the problem in our schools:
"Whereas in classical education children are taught to imitate the best of the past, in utopian education they are told to reject the past and create something new. Whereas classical education teaches children to adapt their lives to eternal principles, utopian education seeks to free them to unfold and develop new ideas and ways of living out of their own experience.... The rejection of the biblical view of the Fall has led to unrealistic and unworkable educational methods that are blind to our children's need for moral direction.... Students who are taught to look only to their own feelings soon lose all sense of accountability to any external moral standard. One teacher found this out when she used a values-education programme with her low achieving eighth-graders. The programme required students to list the things they loved doing, which turned out to be "sex, drugs, drinking and skipping school". The teacher was horrified but powerless. Her students had clarified their values, and the non-directive programme gave her no way to challenge them to aim for something higher."
Schools cannot compensate for the failure of families and public policy to uphold truthfulness, loyalty, faithfulness, compassion, restraint and other great virtues. But they can do more - and so must other publicly-funded youth services. Otherwise we are in serious danger of giving great delight to Screwtape, a devil in C S Lewis's 'The Screwtape Letters':
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And it is not pretty to notice how "democracy" (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships?"
Related links
Abstinence education in Kenya
See the character education section of the Renewing One Nation website
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