Crossed this article:
Sexual coercion and “reproductive control,” including contraceptive sabotage, are a common, and devastating, facet of dating and domestic abuse.
The article basically links pregnancy among teens to partner abuse. So what is the prevailing belief over at RH Reality Check? “We need to get even more dating-violence education into the schools.” They acknowledge:
Researchers, including Teitelman, are also studying exactly how parents can best educate their kids, not just about the birds and the bees, but also about standing up to sexual coercion. (In one study, Teitelman found teen girls whose mothers had talked to them about resisting sexual pressure were twice as likely to delay sex, or use condoms during sex; when fathers did the same, they were five times more likely to have safe sex.)
I suppose if RH Reality Check is going to allude to the idea that parents should encourage abstinence, it is only fitting that the info be shrouded in brackets toward the end of the article. And yet they insist the focus should be on getting more sex ed “in the schools.”
In this same article, a nurse practitioner points out, “We’re giving teens all this information about prevention in the clinic, and yet I see them back all the time for STI testing.”
So in this article we’ve outlined that the parent thing works well, and that learning about condoms from a stranger (even if they’re a medical professional) doesn’t work well. So we need to elaborate sex ed in schools. Something about not being able to see the forest for the trees…
(Though I’m being a bit critical here, the article is worth a read. It sheds light on a topic we don’t hear enough about.)
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Rebecca adds: “Contraception sabotage” – this is an area ripe for study. I’ve never had a male friend own up to deliberately sabotaging his partner’s birth control, although I don’t suppose many men ‘fess up to it, especially to female friends. I do, on the other hand, know women who’ve quite consciously lied about birth control (explicitly, as in claiming to be on the pill when they’re not; or implicitly, when they stop taking it or “accidentally” miss a week; or say “it’s a safe time” when it’s not, or might not be) and think it was a perfectly fine thing to do, because the guys wanted to marry them, just needed a nudge, ya know? And there are many other situations where I suspect something similar might have happened.
A lot of these relationships ended badly. Not a surprise, given how little trust must exist for those shenanigans to take place. A couple of them are still married a decade later. Still doesn’t justify that kind of lying, in my opinion. At any rate, tricking a guy into fathering a child is as despicable as coercing or intimidating your girlfriend into having a child. And it’s something a lot of people condone, or turn a blind eye to, in my experience.
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