A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of attending the Justice Summit put on by the Public Defender’s Office in San Francisco. They had three panels, and one of the most interesting spoke to alternative approaches to gang prevention efforts.
One of the most compelling speeches was the “keynote” by UCLA Professor Jorja Leap, author of Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love and Redemption.
She was introduced by San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.
Jeff Adachi: I just became aware of our keynote speaker when I was Googling gang prevention on YouTube and I never forget there is a virtual video that comes up of a very a pretty woman who’s giving a presentation at a public library in Los Angeles. And she spoke so forcefully and passionately about gangs and gang prevention. I did a little more research on her and I found out that she’s a faculty member in UCLA in the department of social welfare where she’s been since 1992. But she got her start as a social worker and was trained as an anthropologist. She is an expert in crisis intervention and problem resolution. She’s worked overseas and worked for…She’s worked both nationally and internationally in treating victims of trauma.
For the past 10 years, she’s focused her efforts on gangs, gang prevention and youth development. She’s worked with the Los Angeles sheriff department as a senior policy advisor on gangs and youth development. She’s done extensive research in the area of gangs. But most importantly, she has spent the last five years researching and studying and doing evaluations of gang intervention programs to determine what works and what doesn’t. She also did a two year study of Homebody Industries which is the largest gang intervention program, a major program in the United States located in Los Angeles.
She’s the director of UCLA’s life history and social justice project and she’s the author of this incredible book called Jumped In where gangs talk about violence, drugs and love and redemption, it just came out this month and it’s a wonderful book. But what really intrigues me about Professor Jorja Leap is the fact that for the past 10 years she’s been married to a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles police department. And when I learned that I thought about how she co-exists in these two worlds. See how opposite attracts. The thing that struck me the most is that by having her feet in both roles she’s really able to bring a unique perspective to addressing gang violence, because the solution doesn’t lie solely in law enforcement, we know that. And it doesn’t lie solely in the community, we know that, the community also needs the support of law enforcement.
But what are the issues that we want to take on in this summit? How do you get law enforcement and the community to work together? Not to incarcerate individuals for incarceration’s sake because we know that that hasn’t worked, all that it does is create a void which is then filled by the next generation of folks who are coming up and that’s why we talked about the difference in approaches, Los Angeles versus New York. But beyond that, how do we as a community in San Francisco prevent kids from joining gangs, discourage people who are in gangs from committing acts of violence, but most importantly provide the kind of support and infrastructure that will make gangs unnecessary?
Jorja Leap: For the past 10 years I have been married to someone who was – for the first five years of our marriage – a deputy chief of the LAPD; I now refer to him as being in recovery. At the same time I have been working extensively with Homeboy Industries as Jeff just spoke about, and my brother said if I could ever have dreamt my sister would be married to a cop and working with the priest I would have said someone is lying.
So I have worked with gangs, been involved with gangs, tried to figure out about gangs for 34 years. I began as a young social worker in south Los Angeles in some of the most gang-infested housing projects that are now almost…Jordan Downs, Nicholson Gardens, Imperial Courts. And I worked in these projects during what is now referred to as the decade of death with crack and unregulated gun availability, and with laid waste to communities and homes.
In Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were 1000 plus homicides a year in the City of Los Angeles, not the county, city. Nowadays we are hovering somewhere between 200 and 300 homicides a year. And people talk about the gang problem having been addressed. Yes and no. And I want to share with you what I’ve experienced, what I have learned but I’ve got to give you a proviso.
I am not a typical academic. I am not going to sit here and quote statistics to you or talk to you about theory. I’m going to talk with you about practicalities. I’m going to talk to you about pragmatic approaches and I’m going to talk about reality because San Francisco, just like Los Angeles learned, will never ever solve or deal with its gang problem effectively unless there is true collaboration. And I’m going to talk to you about what that looks like and what that feels like and what that means. I’m going to speak to you about the lessons that have been learned as law enforcement had to come off its high perch – and I don’t know if that’s true in San Francisco – but in Los Angeles, law enforcement learned to its great fortune that collaboration truly is the answer. And I’m going to talk with you about some of the lessons learned.
First and foremost I can tell you that the people we have learned lessons from have been gang members themselves. My research is engaged with talking with both current active gang members and former gang members. I worked to collect their life histories. We have now collected over 300 live histories and still stories do not stop, they do not stop.
What do we learn about people in gangs? I recall earlier on when I was sitting down with someone whose gang name was Smiley, his real name was Erwin Ponnamero. He’s written about in my book. And Smiley was a young man of 19 when I first sat down with him at Homeboy Industries. And one of the things he said to me plaintively was. “Why was no one there for me? Why did no one speak to me? Why did no one try to stop me?” Smiley was arrested when he was 16 years old. His big homies told him to lie about his age and say he was 18 because they could be together in jail and from there his story unfolded.
There were different social interventions, different things were done with him and ultimately Smiley was helped. But his words haunted me; “Why did no one speak to me? Why did no one try to stop me?” And I began to listen to the stories of gang members
and former gang members and my research team at UCLA discovered some startling truths. Gang members do leave the gang and they leave the gang for a variety of reasons. They all have a turning point when they decide to leave, that changes them. The turning point will be something any of you will logically imagine.
For female gang members – and by the way we didn’t see many of them on that video but they are out there and they are not baby mamas, they are active gang members. Female gang members, the turning point most often came with the birth of a child. For male gang members the picture is much more complex. It might be surprisingly, because I’m not a big fan of the law, it might be because they got their second strike and they are frightened of getting the third. It might be because of the birth of a child, usually a son. Somehow the gang role has not quite caught up with post-feminist theory.
Or it might be like the story a gang member named Maniac told me when he decided to leave The Rolling 60s after 20 years and after achieving shot-caller status. He was in the back seat of a car being driven by one of his underlings in the front seat. And one of his fellow gang associates got in the back seat with him and the associate said move over. And Maniac didn’t want to move over, the associate said move over, Maniac didn’t want to move over. The associate shoved him over and about 10 seconds later a gun was shot, a bullet came through the back of the car, pierced the associate through the neck and killed him instantly. And Maniac said, had the guy not shoved me aside, I would be dead, I’m done. That was his turning point.
Now, call it turning point, call it teachable moment, use whatever terminology you want. That is the point we need to be present. And when I say we, I mean we. At that moment, at that turning point, at that moment of truth, at that teachable moment, it is imperative that resources be brought to bear.
Now, what are the two most impressive resources that are brought to bear at that moment? There are two major forces that help gang members change. One is tattoo removal. Tattoo removal is the first major force, and it is the denunciation of an identity. The second is legal assistance and legal expungement. Surprising, you didn’t see it on the video, I never thought of it.
The first thing individuals need not to feel like gang members is to erase their past, they erase it, literally they talk with me about it feeling like it was a baptism, removing your tattoos, legal expungements, but it’s not that simple. Changing from being a gang member to a former gang member involves a change in identity and that’s a tricky, tricky process. It is slow, it is sturdy, it is fraught with frustration, the gang is most commonly replaced with drugs, there are also fall backs, relapses, connections with homies, there are struggles. And this is where collaboration needs to take hold.
It has now become a cliché to say we cannot arrest our way out of this problem. I am tired of those words, I no longer want to hear those words. And that is not to give law enforcement a short strip. I can tell you categorically I’ve had an impact on my husband’s life, some of it unwanted and yet he has had an impact on mine. And I have done extensive work with law enforcement, both with the LAPD and with the Los Angeles County Sheriff. And I am here to tell you that crime has been driven down in Los Angeles because of their efforts, but not only because of their efforts.
So what does the collaboration look like? I want you to keep some ideas in mind. First of all, there is no first among equals, what we’ve learned in Los Angeles was suppression alone was absolutely not the answer; it didn’t work. There were record highs in gang violence in 2005. You saw that in the video. I won’t tell you what’s happened between 2005 and 2012.
Number one, the grassroots, the disorganized fragmented passionate grassroots must be part of the effort. The community members who go to County Supervisors meetings, the community members who pass out flyers, the youth who have been in the juvenile justice system that are now part of Youth Justice Coalitions, those individuals must have a seat at the table, number one.
Number two, community-based organizations that operate on shoestrings and often without any kind of coverage anywhere at all must be legitimized and made part of the conversation. I have witnessed this with Homeboy Industries.
How many people in the audience have heard of Homeboy Industries? Okay. In California, I rarely have to worry, I speak across the country and sometimes I’ll get to a state…like I was in Green Bay, Wisconsin and I started to talk about Father Greg Boyle and no one had any idea of what I was talking about. Now, I’ve known Greg Boyle for 25 years. I worked with him when he routinely received calls with death threats because people believed he was trying to help gang members.
The LAPD used to call him a fag hugger and that was the lightest name they called him. I’m not going to repeat everything they have said not because I’m afraid of using profanity but because it was a different LAPD. He was seen – it was rumored that the Mexican Mafia was allowed to meet in his church. It was rumored that he helped gangs recruit gang members, it was rumored that he was helping gang members cross the border and evade arrest. I’m sure he knew where the body of Jimmy Hoffa was buried; by the time you got down listening to the rumors.
Nowadays the LAPD views Homeboy Industries as integral to its anti-gang efforts. Not all of them, not 9,000 members, but I can tell you this. When Homeboy Industries had its annual benefit to honor people in the community as well as former gang members, the person they honored was Chief Charlie Beck, the chief of the LAPD. Unless you think that was an anomaly, the year before they honored Sheriff Lee Baca. There is an alliance between community-based organizations and law enforcement. That’s not enough. There has also been in the streets, ongoing, a relationship, a tricky one, a delicate one, a thoughtful one between the Los Angeles Police Department and gang intervention.
Why is it tricky? Because interventionists are former gang members and they have to be very careful about how they play out their relationship. They do not want to be known as snitches and yet they want to stop the bleeding. I cannot tell you the complete shock I have felt as I have sat down with varying members of the LAPD staff and they have talked about the important work of gang interventionists. This is not lip service, this is reality.
And then that bring us to the most important part of collaboration. It has to do with helping young people whether they are at risk of joining gangs or they want to leave gangs; either one, they need help building their identities. They need help with seeing an alternative to gang life. They need someone who is interested in them. I’m going to tell you a story and then I’m going to talk about who those people are.
When I was a sweet young fan of social work in Nicholson Gardens, I had that one kid, every single public defender, every gang interventionist, every prosecutor, every person in this room knows about that one kid. All of us have that kid. They touch us, they touch us for reasons we cannot articulate. I don’t know why Bobby touched me, his name was Little Devil. But I never wanted to call him by that name, although when I think about my personality that name in fact might be the exact reason why he touched me. But he affected me – he was 14 years old, he had been abused, he was in foster placement with his aunt in Nicholson Gardens and I had to go visit him. And I fell in love with him in the most proper loving maternal, big sister way. I loved him and I would say to him with all the zealotry and ignorance of a young social worker, “I’ll always be here for you, always, I’ll always be here for you.”
Now, it was a Friday night, I had gone on what was one in a string of many disaster dates – this is back in the 1980s when people still dated, we did not yet hook up or we did but we didn’t say we hooked up – and it was about two in the morning and I was getting home. And I lived in an old wood frame house in Venice, California. I’m sure everybody here has heard of Venice. It was a funky house, the rent was affordable, but it was two in the morning. And the house had a wraparound porch. And I was walking up to my house – there’s no garage, parked on the street – walked up to the house and there was a shadowy figure on the porch.
So I did what any God-fearing young woman did in the 80s, I unzipped my purse, reached for my can of Mace. Yes I had taken the training, I was prepared and I looked at the shadowy figure and he said, Jorja, and I heard the voice and I knew it was Bobby. And I, with all the sensitivity of a newly-minted social worker said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” And he spilled out the story that his foster uncle, his uncle worked at Martin Luther King hospital where I was a social worker. He managed to convince his uncle to break into my personnel file, no computers then, only hard copies, he got my personnel file, he got my address, there’s no public transportation in Los Angeles, not now, not then, there’s no bus, no nothing. He took three buses and hitchedhiked and made it to my old framed house in Venice.
And I said, “Why are you here?” And he said, I was in a car, we did a drive by, I don’t know what to do, you said, “you’ll always be there for me.” Now there is the answer and there is the question. How are we always going to be there for Bobby? How are we going to help young people at risk or young people who are actively build new identities? We begin with tattoo removal, we begin with legal expungements and we work on attachment. Every individual who wants to avoid being in a gang, who wants to leave a gang, needs a role model, needs a mentor, needs someone to kick their ass, needs someone to be there. And let me tell you, there is no one type of person.
We need the merging of former gang members, of prosecutors, of social workers, of public defenders. You have all had that kid. That kid needs role models, they need job training and they need real jobs. Yes, I was heartened to hear that in the video, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And we need to provide them.
Bobby did not ask for his fate, Smiley did not ask for his fate, the young woman I work with, Dark Eyes, who has five children and has been a member of Florencia 13 and finally, finally wants to leave the gang, she did not ask for her fate. We need to be there for them, we need to listen to what their needs are, and we need to provide them with jobs and dear God, the law enforcement and the community and the grassroots need to merge. You cannot meet. You need to collaborate. You cannot just speak to one another, you need to talk together. That is our challenge and I want to urge everyone in the audience, just like myself, I take strength from those words, from that question as Bobby threw down the gauntlet to be me 30 years ago. “You said you would always be there for me.” We need to be there, in force, together with understanding. Thank you so much.
[quote]There were different social interventions, different things were done with him and ultimately Smiley was helped. But his words haunted me; “Why did no one speak to me? Why did no one try to stop me?” [/quote]
And my comment to Smiley would be “Do you honesly think you would have listened to anything anyone said advising you not to join a gang?”
When do females decide they should not be in a gang?
“Female gang members, the turning point most often came with the birth of a child.”
When do males decide they should not be in a gang?
“The associate shoved him over and about 10 seconds later a gun was shot, a bullet came through the back of the car, pierced the associate through the neck and killed him instantly. And Maniac said, had the guy not shoved me aside, I would be dead, I’m done. That was his turning point.”
It is highly doubtful that anything anyone said would have had a salutory effect on these hard-headed kids. Better to keep them occupied with healthy activities so they don’t have so much time on their hands to be led by the nose into gangs…
[quote]Why is it tricky? Because interventionists are former gang members and they have to be very careful about how they play out their relationship. They do not want to be known as snitches and yet they want to stop the bleeding. I cannot tell you the complete shock I have felt as I have sat down with varying members of the LAPD staff and they have talked about the important work of gang interventionists. This is not lip service, this is reality.[/quote]
This idea is nothing new and was going on in my day. They were called the Guardian Angels – former gang members who patrolled NY City’s subways.
[quote]We need the merging of former gang members, of prosecutors, of social workers, of public defenders. You have all had that kid. That kid needs role models, they need job training and they need real jobs. Yes, I was heartened to hear that in the video, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And we need to provide them.[/quote]
We don’t have jobs for the “good” kids, let alone for kids from gangs who want to get out!
[quote]I don’t know why Bobby touched me, his name was Little Devil. But I never wanted to call him by that name, although when I think about my personality that name in fact might be the exact reason why he touched me. But he affected me – he was 14 years old, he had been abused, he was in foster placement with his aunt in Nicholson Gardens and I had to go visit him.[/quote]
And the decay of marriage and the notion of “free sex” has contributed to a generation of parentless children w no sense of direction…
Elaine: According to some of the other panelists, (hopefully I will have that in a few days), some of these efforts have had some promising successes.
You should look up Homeboy Industries, it’s an interesting concept.
“We don’t have jobs for the “good” kids, let alone for kids from gangs who want to get out! “
That’s a really strange comment – who are you to decide who gets a job?
Ms Musser – I am struggling with this comment:
“And my comment to Smiley would be ‘Do you honesly think you would have listened to anything anyone said advising you not to join a gang?'”
You seem to be able to judge Smiley’s intents and motives in a way that I do not think is possible. I have talked to service providers and work myself with homeless individuals–many of whom struggle with addictions. Smiley’s comments reflect what we often see in this community as well: there are moments of “lucidity”, of honesty with self, of desperation for change to occur among many people struggling with these things. If, in those moments there is a trusted and caring voice to offer an alternative then change can occur. I find a great deal of “face validity” in what he says and I think it points to a need for a relational approach to dealing with situations like gang affiliation and other challenges like drug and alcohol addiction.
[quote]ERM: “We don’t have jobs for the “good” kids, let alone for kids from gangs who want to get out! ”
DMG: That’s a really strange comment – who are you to decide who gets a job?[/quote]
It is not a question of me deciding, but a question of a perspective employer deciding. The reality is if an employer has a job opening, and has two candidates to choose from, one having had gang affiliations and one w no gang affiliations, who do you think the employer is going to choose? Secondly, current job availability is at an all time low. So to advocate jobs for former/current gang members sounds nice but is a nonstarter from a practical point of view…
[quote]Ms Musser – I am struggling with this comment:
“And my comment to Smiley would be ‘Do you honesly think you would have listened to anything anyone said advising you not to join a gang?'”
You seem to be able to judge Smiley’s intents and motives in a way that I do not think is possible. I have talked to service providers and work myself with homeless individuals–many of whom struggle with addictions. Smiley’s comments reflect what we often see in this community as well: there are moments of “lucidity”, of honesty with self, of desperation for change to occur among many people struggling with these things. If, in those moments there is a trusted and caring voice to offer an alternative then change can occur. I find a great deal of “face validity” in what he says and I think it points to a need for a relational approach to dealing with situations like gang affiliation and other challenges like drug and alcohol addiction.[/quote]
Here is where I am coming from in my reasoning. First, how many lucid moments versus stubborn moments is it likely a gang member or wannabe gang member has relatively speaking? I suspect that more often than not the gang member/wannabe gang member is most often in stubborn mode, and is not likely to listen to anyone other than other gang members. Secondly, I think the better approach is to discourage the circumstances that tend to lead to kids joining gangs – prevention to whatever extent possible. For instance, create more programs that keep kids active, socializing positively and interested after school, so they have no desire to join a gang. Kids with too much time on their hands are bound to find trouble. We need to tone down advocating “free sex” in the media which discourages the family unit. As the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I would prefer to get to these kids long before they are enticed by gangs if at all possible. My sense of things is if we wait until kids are already headed towards gangs, it is much more difficult to reach them and effect change…
ERM,
[i]The reality is if an employer has a job opening, and has two candidates to choose from, one having had gang affiliations and one w no gang affiliations, who do you think the employer is going to choose? [/i]
How would employers know if the job candidate had prior gang involvement? Criminal background check or visible tattoos? Or are we assuming the employer would be made aware of the candidates background as part of a jobs program? I would support such a program. It could be that these young people could receive unpaid work and progress toward paid work based on job performance.
[i]So to advocate jobs for former/current gang members sounds nice but is a nonstarter from a practical point of view… [/i]
If it means breaking the cycle of violence, poverty, incarceration, etc., I say we’d benefit by creating more job opportunities for the at-risk kids. We will pay for it down the line if we do nothing or don’t strive to do more.
[i]I suspect that more often than not the gang member/wannabe gang member is most often in stubborn mode, and is not likely to listen to anyone other than other gang members.[/i]
I think the point that’s being made is not with what frequency a lucid moment occurs, but that there needs to be someone around during those moments, as rare as they may be, to capitalize on it and get these kids out of gangs and interested in their futures.
[i]For instance, create more programs that keep kids active, socializing positively and interested after school, so they have no desire to join a gang. Kids with too much time on their hands are bound to find trouble.[/i]
I don’t think many will argue that this should not be an integral part of whatever is being done in these communities to help these kids.
[i]We need to tone down advocating “free sex” in the media which discourages the family unit.[/i]
How do you propose doing that? I think discouraging practices that lead to unplanned pregnancies and a substantive education on sex is necessary.
“How do you propose doing that? I think discouraging practices that lead to unplanned pregnancies and a substantive education on sex is necessary. “
Over the past few years the rate of births to teenage mothers has been decreasing. There are a number of reasons postulated including both an increased age of first sexual relations but also an increased use of effective contraceptives. I suspect that the increasing use of long acting statistically effective contraceptives is playing a role in this decrease as it has in European countries which have much lower unintended pregnancy rates than we do in the US. I am uncertain how realistic it is to “tone down advocating ‘free sex’ since much of our entertainment industry is based on an unrealistic portrayal of sexuality. However, I would certainly be interested in hearing your thoughts about how this could be accomplished.
[quote]Or are we assuming the employer would be made aware of the candidates background as part of a jobs program? I would support such a program. It could be that these young people could receive unpaid work and progress toward paid work based on job performance. [/quote]
Now that’s an interesting idea!
[quote]I am uncertain how realistic it is to “tone down advocating ‘free sex’ since much of our entertainment industry is based on an unrealistic portrayal of sexuality. However, I would certainly be interested in hearing your thoughts about how this could be accomplished. [/quote]
I’m not sure you should even get me started on this one, as I have such strong feelings on the subject! But here goes for starters! It is high time for parents to stop taking their kids to R rated movies, and start supporting movies that are healthier for kids to watch. Parents need to start viewing some of the crap their kids are watching on television, and start having some heart to heart discussions about how warped some of the attitudes are coming out of Hollywood. If young girls didn’t buy the sexy clothes sold at stores, they wouldn’t look so much like hookers. I just saw a girl today, just graduated from high school at a restaurant. She had on a skin tight white dress so short it was practically up at her crotch, and it looked as if she had literally poured herself into it. The entire thing was see through in places. Egads! Oversexed clothes and movies would be a thing of the past if there was no market for it. Society is oversexed, and cares not a whit about the family unit when it institutes no fault divorces as a substitute for holding cheating spouses responsible for their actions. The subliminal message being sent is that sex outside marriage is okay, adultery is no big deal, marriage and the family unit is not necessary to raise children, porn is an art form rather than a destructive force to the social fabric of society…. well, you did ask!
ERM: how dare you introduce common sense, logic, and personal responsibility into this thread!
(keep up the good work!)
Elaine: I do find it interesting that here is a person who has spent 30 years working with these kids, she’s not hulled up in a lab, she’s working hands on, and yet somehow you, without having even researched Homeboy Industries or the work they do, someone how know more than her.
EMR
I largely agree with the points that you have made and feel that you are leaving out one very important factor. Biology. Sex is a universal and extremely powerful biological urge in humans.
I think that our society has done two things that have been enormously destructive in terms of how we view sexuality. The first is the side that you point out, the ubiquitous and unrealistic portrayal of sexuality in the media and throughout the society. However, I do not believe that European countries have less exposure to hyper sexual media messages and yet they manage to avoid our extremely high levels of unintended pregnancy, both in and outside marriage. I believe that they avoid this by not equating sex education with advocacy. Acknowledgement of the physiologic urges experienced by adolescents instead of pretending that they do not, or should not exist would go a long way towards dealing with this issue. While abstinence is the 100% solution to unintended pregnancy, it is not, and never has been a realistic solution, not even before Father Knows Best was replaced by Sex in the City. I have spent a large part of my career attempting to help young women who had already made the decision to have sex prior to marriage do so in a responsible manner. With marriage delayed for many women, who rightfully recognize that there is no guarantee ( as some of us found out the hard way) that the man we married and believed would be around to help us will actually do so there is a need for effective contraception. Luckily we have it in the form of long acting reversible contraception which is statistically equivalent to sterilization and allows the woman who has not had the good fortune to meet the man who will stand by her, often even in to her thirtys and forties to experience the full range of human experience without the fear of an unintended pregnancy. For me, it is not sex per se that is the problem. The problem is irresponsible sex whether or not the participants are married.
[quote]Elaine: I do find it interesting that here is a person who has spent 30 years working with these kids, she’s not hulled up in a lab, she’s working hands on, and yet somehow you, without having even researched Homeboy Industries or the work they do, someone how know more than her.[/quote]
I am not/nor have I ever suggested that I “know more” than this woman. I am merely suggesting her methods need to be supplemented with prevention as well, so hopefully kids never get into gangs in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure…
And by the way, I have worked with at risk youth as a teacher. Kids of alcoholic parents, kids in gangs, kids whose parents were dysfunctional and abusive…
To medwoman: On the subject of what goes for “sex education” these days, what is taught in our schools is atrocious. You probably shouldn’t get me started on this subject either, but since you asked…
If I had it to do over again I would not have my children subjected to what passes for “sex education” today. Students, both male and female, are placed in a room together, and told to ask any questions they want. Invariably the class clowns ask provocative, shocking and disgusting questions to get a rise out of the teacher, and to embarrass the girls, particularly the shyer ones. Students are graphically shown how to use birth control, but abstinence as a concept is hardly mentioned, if at all. Personal responsibility and the possible consequences are steered clear of as moral preaching that cannot be tolerated. It is positively disgusting. As my son said to me years later, he most definitely felt the message he was getting from his sex ed class was “ambiguous” about premarital sex AT BEST. Subliminally he felt it encouraged experimentation.
What kids need to fully understand is the devastating consequences of engaging in premarital sex – the “risks” as it were. To illustrate the point, I will explain by relating an incident that happened in my neck of the woods outside of Baltimore, MD. A young pregnant teen and her friend got a hold of a bottle of vodka. The pregnant teen downed the bottle, laid on a set of railroad tracks, and waited for the train to come and assist in her suicide. The friend stood and watched. The pregnant teen got her wish for death. She could not face her parents with the news she was pregnant. That is the sort of sobering reality our kids need to be exposed to early on, as part of sex education. It is harsh, cold real life. There are consequences to engaging in premarital sex, very serious consequences. Look at the guy that just was freed from jail after serving five years, who was wrongly accused of rape. The girl finally recanted, but more than likely the two had had consensual sex, altho it is not perfectly clear that was the case. However, when young males engage in premarital sex, they do run the risk of being accused of raping the girl they are having sexual relations with. What about the young man who gets a girl pregnant, and both are short-circuited from going on to college bc now they have to get low paying jobs to support the baby. These are not things taught in sex ed; are not things shown in movies or on television when the hero/heroine engage in “free sex”; are not things shown in magazines that sell everything w sexual overtones.
This is not a question of “teaching abstinence only” in sex ed classes; this is a question of teaching about responsibility and consequences. I have no problem teaching both abstinence and birth control. But it needs to be also accompanied by teaching basic ethics, morality, responsibility and consequences for foolish decisions.
Elaine
“She could not face her parents with the news she was pregnant. ‘
As someone who has dealt with these issues daily for my career of almost 30 years, I am well aware of this situation and the tragedy it represents. I do have a different perspective on the situation than you seem to be offering. This particular situation is not a failure of the school education system any more than it is a failure of the driving education system if a kid sneaks out with the family car while drunk and is killed in an accident. We wouldn’t blame his driving instructor for this event. The failure here, in my opinion is on the family level. Your are describing a situation in which a teen feels that she cannot, because of fear of her parents anger, or disappointment, or what ever emotion on their part that she feels is less preferable than death, that she cannot go to them. This is failure on the part of the parents, not the school.
I could not help but note a discrepancy in tense in your assessment of the current sex education program in our schools. You stated instances from your own child’s experience, but then stated “years later” when you were discussing this. I do not believe that either of us know what the current situation with sex ed is in the schools. I do know that I was extremely frustrated when my own children were in school. I offered on a regular basis to be a volunteer parent in the class to present factual information based on my field of work.
Year after year, business folks, artisans of various types, gardeners, etc….were invited to come in and give presentations. Yet, I was declined every time. The reason given ? The teachers would have been delighted
for me to come in and do a presentation regarding an area in which I have so much more information and knowledge. So what was the problem ? The parents did not approve.
It is my opinion that presented with factual information presented in an open, non provocative, comfortable manner, most adolescent women ( can’t speak for the men since I don’t work with the directly)
will make responsible choices. The problem is that we do not handle sexuality in this society the same way that we handle any other critical piece of information necessary to safely navigate one’s life. To me the way we handle sexuality( to go back to my car analogy) is to pretend that if we know the car keys and a bottle of alcohol are available, and we know that our teen will be tempted to experiment, and we place the blindfold of lack of information on them, that we can expect that there will be a safe and happy outcome.
I know we have made some progress in recent years in reducing teen pregnancy. There are probably many factors involved. But I can state with confidence that one of these factors is not ignorance. Until we start treating sexuality factually, realistically and responsibly and as much a part of life as driving a car, we will not see improvements in our unintended pregnancy rate, and we will continue to see tragedies such as the one you described.