2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumElizabeth Smart: Pro-Abstinence Sex Ed Harms Victims of Rape
In 2004, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home, held captive in the mountains, and raped repeatedly for nine months. Since her escape, she has emerged as an advocate for human trafficking victimsand recently, a critic of abstinence-only sex education. When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.
I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence, Smart told the panel. And she said, Imagine youre a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, thats like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, youre going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that? Well, thats terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, Im that chewed-up piece of gum. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And thats how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.
As Jessica Valenti points out, the chewing gum analogy is a typical tactic employed by abstinence-only advocates to try to scare teenagers away from having sex. And while stunts like those are often delivered to coed groups, the messaging falls harder on girls: If one person is the gum, the other person chews. Its difficult to add a rape exemption to that kind of visual. In the case that youre abducted, does God lend you a fresh stick?
In the sex ed wars, we spend a lot of time crunching statistics to determine whether abstinence-only education is effective in encouraging teenagers to delay sex. We spend less time discussing its effectiveness in making teenagers feel like worthless members of society when they do decide to have sexor, in the case of too many teenagers, when they are assaulted against their will. Forty-four percent of rape victims, like Smart, are under the age of 18 when theyre assaulted. The best thing we can do is educate young people as young as we can reach them, Smart said later. Survivors of rape and trafficking, she said, need to be given permission to fight back, and that requires them to know you are of value. Teachers cant start early enough.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/05/06/elizabeth_smart_abstinence_only_sex_education_hurts_victims_of_rape_and.html
PDJane
(10,103 posts)It's one of the reasons that I hate the pro-abstinence stuff. There are others.
SharonAnn
(13,780 posts)things I learned when helping with an education program for teacher's about "good touch, bad touch" stuff. The counselor's talked about being careful about promoting "purity" because the teachers have no idea how many of their students have been or are being sexually abused and will internalize that to thinking that they're impure and worthless. It was heartbreaking to think about how that could be occurring.
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)She has the potential of becoming a great advocate for young women.
Warpy
(111,383 posts)since the whole thing was written by medically ignorant right wing Christians who feel it's just fine to lie to children who really need the truth.
There has to be a special circle of their hell for them.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)Right there on the second page, in fact
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)Rape and she doesn't get pregnant. I had not thought like Elizabeth Smart but she has a very valid point. It is punishing the victim again and again, for the teachers does not know whether some have been abused or not. It is time for new thinking, just as in cases of rape and a young girl becomes pregnant, she should not be forced to have the child.
sakabatou
(42,186 posts)It doesn't work and can harm people.
enough
(13,264 posts)"Men don't like shopworn goods." She was speaking to a bunch of 7th-grade girls. This was off-the-cuff, during some sort of cooking lesson. We barely had any idea of what she was talking about, but the MESSAGE came through loud and clear.
I never thought before today what the effect of this kind of message must be on victims of rape.
Manifestor_of_Light
(21,046 posts)They made us watch a movie in high school where Ann was spouting her abstinence only BS.
She was talking through her badly fitting dentures.
Boys only want one thing, and when they get it, they will drop you like a used Kleenex.
You're worthless if you're not a virgin. If you go on a date, talk, bowl, do anything except kissing, because that leads to the ultimate horror--sex without the State Issued Official Screwing License!!! Quel horreur!!!
I guess middle America loved her crap.
I got NO accurate sex education in high school. I graduated in 1972.
Like the movie where 2 virgins have sex in the back seat of a car, feel guilty and horrible and give each other VD???
Also, they walk around the school with white spots floating over their bodies, implying that they could sneeze on somebody and give them VD like it's a cold.
Nobody told me anything differently, so I believed I would be horrible and loathsome after I had sex for the first time. It happened after I got to college. Then I realized that was BS and I didn't have to feel guilty.