Alabama has a sexually transmitted disease problem. The most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show higher than average, and, in some cases, rising STD infection rates. Alabama has the nation’s third highest rate of chlamydia infections and a large number of syphilis, gonorrhea and HIV cases.
It’s especially bad among young adults. In 2013, people aged 13 to 24 accounted for just under half of the state’s new HIV infections. This got WBHM’s Ashley Cleek wondering about sex education in Alabama schools. She recently wrote about her findings in Al Jazeera America, and she tells WBHM’s Rachel Osier Lindley that students say a lack of information can be dangerous. Listen to their conversation above. Some key excerpts are below.
Sex Ed Not Required
“If a public school chooses to teach sex ed, there’s a set of loose guidelines, but really, schools can do what they want,” says Cleek. “They can pick and choose how they teach and what they teach.”
If a student does have sex education classes in school, Cleek says they’d learn about what STDs are and how they’re transferred, and, most likely, students would learn about some birth control.
“They would probably learn what condoms are, but not how to use them,” Cleek says, adding that they’d likely learn about abstinence as the only socially acceptable and completely safe option for young adults.
Little Information, or Misinformation
Cleek says students vividly recall what they did hear in sex ed classes, even many years after the fact, but, as she writes in Al Jazeera:
When Ali Simpson attended Vestavia Hills High School, a public school in an affluent neighborhood outside Birmingham, sex education was “100 percent abstinence only.” She graduated in 2011, and the last time she remembered a discussion about sexual health was in middle school. Her class gathered in the wrestling room. She said a woman entered and told a story about how she remained a virgin until marriage. Her husband, however, had had sex with one other person. “He gave her an STD that made her infertile, and that was her story about why not to have sex until marriage,” Simpson recalled many years later.
“It’s these kind of anecdotal stories that I think really stick with students,” says Cleek. Simpson said her classes didn’t provide her with education, “just fear.”