Cover Story
Virgin territory
by Nick Smith
While New Zealand grapples with a teenage sex crisis, government agencies sit on their hands and Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church makes a bold bid to control sex education.
Teenage brains are geared for sex. Even if they’re not doing it, teens still obsess about it. But Kaleb Cave doesn’t want sex. He’s had it, lost his virginity at 15 in a haze of drugs and alcohol, and declares “no good has come out of that for me”. He doesn’t want sex again. At least not until marriage.
The 19-year-old Aucklander joined Destiny Church and its abstinence programme to get his life back on track. Cave is, in essence, a born-again virgin; he has signed the pledge, along with some 202 fellow Destiny virgins, to abstain from sex until marriage.
The word “virginity” is, Cave says, back in fashion. “It’s not something geeky.
Principals say there’s not enough sex education in schools. Nah, they’re wrong. They are way off track. The sex education they have in schools is just not hitting the mark. It’s just a good giggle session. The only way to keep safe is to abstain. Condoms won’t do the trick. It’s been proven you can still get STDs and stuff like that using condoms and there’s still a chance of having a baby.”
The abstinence movement, which urges teens to take virginity pledges and mentions condoms only to emphasise their failure rate, is sweeping the world. In the US, an astounding one-third of all secondary schools now have abstinence-only programmes. These programmes are being exported to the UK, Ireland (where an “abstinence-plus” programme now operates in 60 percent of schools), Australia and New Zealand. Here, Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki wants virginity pledges in every state school. And to that end he is urging his members to contest school mid-term elections. “I’m encouraging our members to get on school boards, most definitely.”
More than 800 positions are up for grabs and, with control of boards, Destiny aims to control sex education, since boards essentially decide what is taught. “We believe in self control, not birth control,” says Tamaki. “Absolute abstinence. It’s the best way to go.”
He wants equal funding – he cites the figure of $1 million for the “hubba-hubba” condom campaign – to promote abstinence education in schools; starting in intermediate schools. Abstinence, he says, cuts down on abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, fatherless kids. “I’m not enforcing abstinence. I’m putting it out there as viable and very relevant,” he says, adding that “abstinence is really the best way. Do it one way and do it right.”
At a time when half of all New Zealand kids have had sexual intercourse by 17, Tamaki is highly critical of liberal sex education. He talks of advertising showing two girls kissing. “Visitors can’t believe how liberal we are, and I say, ‘Yeah, we’re a dirty little place.’” Tamaki cites the success of Destiny’s controversial virginity pledges. There have only been about seven “casualties” out of 203 children who took the pledge last November. Although three have decided to exit the abstinence wagon, four are in “recovery”.
Cave adds, “If it does happen, it’s not, ‘you’re going to go to hell’. We get beside them and nurture them back in. They already know what they’ve done is wrong.”
Wrong? Welcome to the new sexual revolution. But does it serve young teenagers raging with hormones any better than the last one?
Abstinence-based education can come with a host of faith-based misinformation. Despite the claims of abstinence proponents that research supports their strategy, New Scientist last month reported that there have only been three well-designed trials where participants are tracked over time and compared with a control group.
The first, published in 1997, reported the results of a five-session abstinence-only initiative in California. The trial tracked 10,600 teenagers for 17 months. The researchers “found it had no impact on the sexual behaviour or pregnancy rate of teenagers”. Nor did the other studies show that abstinence-only programmes had any impact on behaviour.
And yet it’s not all bad news. One of the largest studies on the effect of abstinence pledges was led by Peter Bearman, a sociologist at Columbia University in New York, and it tracked the sex lives of 12,000 US teenagers aged between 12 and 18. Although not a controlled trial, it does show that taking a virginity pledge delayed the age of first sex by an average of 18 months. Pledgers reportedly married earlier and had fewer partners overall.
But the surprise came when Bearman looked at the STD rates for the same people six years later. Now aged between 18 and 24, the pledgers were just as likely as non-pledgers to have an STD. At the National STD conference in Philadelphia last year, Bearman explained why. “Pledgers use condoms less,” he reported. “It’s difficult to simultaneously imagine not intending to have sex and being contraceptively prepared.”
Nor do pledgers always even have facts right – for example, Destiny’s apparent dismissal of the proven ability of condoms to dramatically reduce sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and prevent pregnancy. The Washington Post reports that a US House of Representatives survey last December found that 11 of 13 federally funded abstinence-based programmes contained “unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods”. This included the misconception that a 43-day-old fetus was a “thinking person” and that HIV can be spread through tears and sweat.
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