news out of milwaukee.

obviously i should be spanked for my blogging truancy, but moving right along to the reason i was compelled to write is the news out of milwaukee that teen pregs between the ages of 15 and 17 has dropped to a 28-year low of 50 per 1,000 [still well above the national average, 22.0, but down from 95.8, the high water mark from 1991].

notice i didn't quote the article. go ahead; notice. i think i mentioned in a previous post that i don't like the essentialism that surrounds teen pregnancy. i don't think it's good that we as a society have decided to problematize these girls, question their morals or their upbringing, label them an "epidemic". the goal of eradicating teen pregnancy assumes that none of the young women who got pregnant wanted to become pregnant [look up arline geronimus's weathering hypothesis before you yell at me for this one.].

now, i'm not holding my breath waiting to hear news about a teen pregnancy prevention program that tries to get to the bottom of these desires in a compassionate, culturally competent way. i get that i'm in the minority on this one. but this assessment of the drop in teen pregnancy was just offensive to me:

A variety of explanations - including awareness campaigns, greater use of condoms, less sexual activity and welfare reform - all may have contributed to the drop, experts said. [emphasis added]

oh, really. but wait, there's more!

The numbers dropped a little over the next few years but hovered around that rate until about 1996, when federal welfare reform legislation created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which promoted work and marriage and tried to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Participating minor teens had to live at home with a parent or guardian and were limited to 60 months of assistance.

In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Works program and its predecessor, Pay for Performance, already were in place.

i certainly can't speak to the efficacy of the wisconsin works program, but i can get pissed that we're praising TANF for the drop, since this particular piece of legislation is what ushered in the era of abstinence-only programs that my generation has come to know and love [title V, what what!]. its moralizing and heterocentricity are blatant, as you can probably tell by the emphasis on MARRIAGE and not having babies outside of MARRIAGE, not to mention the requirement that pregnant teens live with their parents [can anyone spot a problem with that?]. i have to wonder who decided to put this into the article in the first place, since the graph that accompanies this article shows not one but two spikes in the teen pregnancy rate since '96. oops.

now, after all that ranting and raving, what i really wanted to draw attention to was actually this article about a peer education program that probably had a lot more to do with the drop in the rate of unwanted teen pregnancy.

Some local teen pregnancy reduction efforts are based on the premise that youths listen to their peers more readily than they listen to adults, especially when it comes to sex.

So when a group of peer educators at Pearls for Teen Girls heard the news that Milwaukee's teen birth rate had hit a 28-year low, they felt proud.

"I feel like our work is actually paying off," said 17-year-old Shaqueda Jenkins, who works with the youth development organization.

Jenkins is one of 11 Pearls for Teen Girls program participants and alumnae - teenage girls and women in their early 20s - who carry a message of sexual health and abstinence into middle and high schools and YMCA sites around the city.

The evidence-based curriculum they use, called Making Proud Choices, works to reduce youths' risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases through discussion, games and role playing.

The United Way funds Pearls for Teen Girls' sex education programming, with annual grants ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 in recent years.

now, i know that there are only 11 of them and they they couldn't possibly have single-haldedly lowered the teen pregnancy rate in milwaukee. but everything in this quote is awesome - an evidence-based program, adequately funded, with trained, local people doing the educating. full disclosure: i love peer ed programs, so much that they'll probably be my primary research interest in grad school next year [assuming i get in...]. i mean, really, what makes more sense to an adolescent than talking someone about sex who's like your older brother or sister, but smarter? the article goes on to talk about how these types of programs create a safe space for participants, which in turn leads to honest questions honestly answered:

An important component of that education is creating a space for honest dialogue and not judging the younger girls they work with, she said. That blame-free environment allows them to effectively counter the myths girls bring into the classroom: that they can't get pregnant if they have sex underwater or while they're menstruating. They talk about how to use condoms and other contraception, and how to resist pressure to have sex.

no scare tactics, no hellfire and damnation, just dialogue. imagine something like that being efficacious.