Boston – Virginity pledges don’t reflect the sexual practices of young people, as many renege and others take the oath after having had intercourse, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health.
Harvard researcher Janet Rosenbaum found that virginity-pledge programs have a high dropout rate. She studied the responses of 13,568 participants, ages 12 to 18, from a 1995 national survey and compared them with a follow-up study a year later.
A virginity oath is defined as a “public or written pledge to remain a virgin until marriage.”
The results show the difficulty in accurately assessing the effects of the pledge on early sexual activity, Rosenbaum said.
“Research has to bear in mind that whenever we measure something that is sensitive behavior, there’s a lot more uncertainty than we think there is,” Rosenbaum said. “Pledge programs need to focus on quality, not quantity.”
Her study found that 52 percent of all adolescents who made the pledge in the 1995 survey denied making such a vow a year later. Nearly three-quarters of those who broke their pledge denied they had taken such an oath in the second survey.
Adolescents most likely to retract virginity pledges were those who were newly sexually active or who had renounced a previous identity as a born- again Christian, the study found.
Almost one-third of nonvirgins in the first survey who then took a virginity pledge disavowed their previous sexual experience in the second survey. Teens who admitted having sex in the first survey and later made the pledge were four times as likely to deny a previous sexual experience as those who hadn’t made a pledge in the second survey.
“The study adds to the growing body of evidence that virginity pledges have limited effectiveness in delaying sexual intercourse among adolescents and that we need to continue to look for strategies that work,” said Monica Rodriguez, a vice president at the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
The federal government is spending $178 million in the 2006 fiscal year, and the states are allocating an additional $37.5 million for abstinence education, the council said.
Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, a group that works to develop virginity- pledge programs, said she “had not had any reports from anyone in the community that their kids have been in any study.”
“The pledges that I know of aren’t done in school but where the parents are involved,” she said.
The study is published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
