I'm not sure why I found this story unbelievable but I did. First, the US government and many states combined have spent almost $1 billion since 1996 on abstinence advocacy programs for school aged kids. Secondly they they paid someone to find out if it worked. Third and least surprising of all is that it didn't work at all. I'm frankly surprised it didn't actually increase sexual activity amongst teens but we'll call it even.
Apparently, a survey of 2,000 youths found exactly NO difference between those who had been exposed to the abstinence program and those who had not.
Once again, I'd like to apply for a grant to study the correlation between taxpayer cynicism and the amount of money spent by well meaning bureaucrats on social engineering. Instead of spending money on pamphlets, workshops and Mom and apple pie advertising maybe we should be paying kids not to have sex and buying them condoms if they decide to forego the financial incentives.
Unfortunately one more potential topic to cross of my dissertation list.
A Summary
http://www.mathematica.org/abstinencereport.asp
The report
http://www.mathematica.org/publications/PDFs/impactabstinence.pdf
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment