Recanting Virginity (Pledges)

Tuesday May 2, 2006

Teens who take virginity pledges are likely, within a period of one year, to either disavow the pledge, or, if they end up having sex during the first year, claim they never made the pledge in the first place.

On the other hand, teens who have had sex and then take a pledge of virginity (I'm still trying to figure out how that works...) are more likely to claim they've never had sex at all, than teens who are actual virgins when they take the virginity pledge (who later go on to have sex).

If you're confused, you're not alone. A study being published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health by Janet Rosenbaum, a researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health, details the many problems both with the idea of virginity pledges, and our ability to ever know if they are effective.

Roesenbaum used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the only large national study of its kind that has asked questions about virginity pledges, defined as "a public or written pledge to remain a virgin until marriage."

Her findings include:

52 percent of adolescent virginity pledgers in the 1995 survey disavowed the virginity pledge at the next survey a year later and 73 percent of virginity pledgers from the first survey who subsequently reported sexual intercourse denied in the second survey that they had ever pledged.
Almost one-third of non-virgins in the first survey who later took a virginity pledge recanted their experience with sexual intercourse in the second survey. Of teens who reported a sexual experience at the first survey, those who later took a virginity pledge were four times as likely to retract reports of sexual experience as those who still had not taken a pledge at the second survey.

Basically the research shows that teens who promise to be virgins aren't keeping that promise, and teens who have had sex and then promise to be virgins may be behaving as if they've never had sex at all. Which raises the obvious concern that their new "re-virgined" status may make them believe they couldn't have an STD (or at least may make them unlikely to be tested for or talk to a potential sexual partner about STDs).

All of which makes you wonder why we're having teens go through the process in the first place. This reseach seems to support the majority of scientific research that suggests that virginity pledges don't work. But it also highlights a general problem in studying teen sexual behavior (not that researchers are really allowed to study much of it), which is the possible lack of reliability of the data. In a prepared statement the author of the study suggests that asking teens about their sexual behavior may not provide the best data and "a better and more reliable measure than adolescents' self-reported sexual history might be the straightforward results of medical STD tests."

In a funny-because-it's-sad side note (via Feministing) the Abstinence Clearinghouse released a statement (prior the actual release of the study) telling us that regardless of the science behind Rosenbaum's study, it "gives health advocates no useful information in helping youth choose healthy behaviors." As Feministing so eloquently put it, for these folks healthy=hymen.

Read more - Reborn a Virgin: Adolescents' Retracting of Virginity Pledges and Sexual Histories (abstract only, you have to pay for the full article)