Abstinence pledges
In the New Yorker Margaret Talbot has an article on abstinence that has a couple/few interesting points to make:
- More than half of those who take such pledges … end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse
- communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s
- if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses … once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost
So in general, from the article, abstinence pledges work well, if the pledgers are an embattled minority in their school and they also receive strong and realistic sex education.
Both are unlikely to happen in schools or communities where evangelical movements are in the majority. Bit of a catch-22: pledges won’t work in spite of and because of the existence of evangelicalism.
Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the source.
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