Harmful To Minors: The Perils Of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine

Author:Judith Levine [Levine, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2002-03-26T07:00:00+00:00

Regret

Of at least one phenomenon we have plenty of evidence: kids are having sex they don’t want, and the ones who say they don’t want it tend to be girls. In the late 1980s, the prominent sex educator Marian Howard announced that the greatest wish expressed by the eighth-grade girls entering her Atlanta sexuality-ed program was to learn how to say no without hurting a boy’s feelings. In the two decades that have followed, study after study has been released demonstrating that girls are having sex they don’t want, that girls who feel good about themselves don’t have sex, and that girls who have had sex don’t feel good about themselves. In the mid-1990s, it was reported that one in four teenage girls said she’d been abused or forced to have sex on a date.15

Girls are indisputably the more frequent victims of sexual exploitation and violence. But the gender assumptions articulated by Fine play not only into young people’s feelings about themselves and sex but also subtly into the ways these research data are obtained and interpreted. One way gender biases are smuggled into research is under cover of a study’s definitions, or lack thereof. In one of the above studies, conducted by the prestigious Commonwealth Fund, the questionnaire the girls answered did not define “abuse” at all. The other, from the highly respected Alan Guttmacher Institute, described abuse as “when someone in your family or someone else touches you in a sexual way in a place you did not want to be touched, or does something to you sexually which they shouldn’t have done.”16 These studies, in other words, left about an acre of space for unarticulated cultural assumptions to creep in, both the subjects’ assumptions and their interpreters.’

If girls are not supposed to feel desire and are charged with guarding the sexual gates, were Marian Howard’s students able to conjure any self-respecting, self-protective self-image besides saying no? What, to the Guttmacher respondents, was “something. . . they shouldn’t have done”? Nancy D. Kellogg, at the pediatrics department at the University of Texas, San Antonio, has pointed out that teenagers may use the term abuse for wanted but illegal sex, such as that between an adolescent girl and an adult man.17 Or might these girls desire to be touched by a boy but worry that if it comes to intercourse he won’t put on a condom? If he forces her anyway, it is rape. But fearing the consequences of arousal is not the same as not wanting to be touched.

In 2000, a poll of five hundred twelve- to seventeen-year-olds conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy found that nearly two-thirds of those who had “had sex” wished they had waited (the report used the unclear terms had sex and sexually active). Of the girls, 72 percent had regrets, compared with 55 percent of the boys. More than three-quarters of the respondents thought teens should not be “sexually active” until after high school.18 A spokesperson for the campaign said the poll was evidence that “many teens are taking a more cautious attitude toward having sex.

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