Study: Virginity Pledges Help Teens

N E W   Y O R K, Jan. 5, 2001 -- Pledging “I won’t” until swearing “I do” is helping teens say “I don’t.”

Those teens who sign on the dotted line, vowing to abstain from sex until marriage, delayed having intercourse about 18 months longer than those who didn’t, a new study says.

These abstinence pledges usually occur at a public event in a church or a school, where the teens make a commitment as a group.

“Our findings surprised us because we didn’t expect to see any effect from these pledges,” says lead investigator Peter S. Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist whose work will be published in the January issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

But the pledging apparently worked: Fifty percent of those who pledged stayed virgins until about age 20, while 50 percent of non-pledgers lost their virginity by age 17.

“This analysis shows that virginity pledges can be an effective tool for delaying sexual intercourse in the teenage years,” says Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

Alexander says educators and others who work with young people now have sound data to back abstinence approaches when helping teens to avoid early sex and its associated risks.

Analyzing Survey of 90,000 Teens

Bearman and Hannah Bruckner, a sociologist at Yale University, made their conclusions based on data analyzed from the federally sponsored National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a comprehensive survey of approximately 90,000 seventh- through 12th- graders at 145 schools around the United States performed between 1994 and 1996.

The congressionally mandated project involved asking the students questionnaires about their health and beliefs, and in 1994 and 1995 the survey included questions about virginity. Researchers also performed detailed interviews of 20,000 of the teens and their parents in their homes.

Based on the survey, the researchers found that 2.5 million teens — including 10 percent of adolescent U.S. boys and 16 percent of girls — had taken the virginity pledge in the mid-1990s, when it became something of a cultural groundswell. The Southern Baptist Church began the movement and it has since grown to include hundreds of church, school and college chapters. Non-religious abstinence programs exist, too.

Pledging Becomes Part of Teen Identity

The success of abstinence, however, depended on the age of the teens and the social environment of the teen’s school, the study found.

“Among adolescents aged 18 and older, pledging makes no difference,” Bearman says. “Among 16- and 17-year-olds, pledgers delay sex significantly.”

Among the youngest teens, the effect of pledging was closely related to the relationships within and outside of the school. The effectiveness of pledging increased in those schools where students had significant social and romantic ties outside the school. A 1 percent increase in the proportion of students pledging resulted in a 2 percent increase in delaying sexual intercourse, Bearman says.

If students maintained relationships mainly within a school, however, pledging was not as effective, unless comparatively few students pledged.

In either type of school, once 30 percent or more of students pledged, pledgers were no more likely to delay sexual intercourse than were non-pledgers. The researchers theorized the pledge might appeal to some students because it gives them a unique identity, apart from the crowd.

“Once the pledge becomes widespread, it ceases to have an effect,” Bearman says.

Pledge Breakers Don’t Use Protection

Bearman and Bruckner also looked at the consequences of breaking the pledge. Those who broke their vow were a third less likely to use contraception during their first intercourse than those who never promised to remain virgins, the study found.

The reason? According to some sex education experts, abstinence programs may neglect to teach youngsters appropriate skills to deal with sex if they break their pledges.

“The study found that those who failed to keep the pledge did not use contraception, increasing their risk of having an unwanted pregnancy and of contracting a sexually transmitted disease,” says Jacqueline Darrock, senior vice president for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reproductive choices.

Darrock says there is no way of knowing if the teens involved in the pledging programs also were receiving education about contraception and STDs or if the abstinence programs only focus on not having sex without providing any additional information.

The Guttmacher Institute has performed surveys indicating that an increasing number of sexual education programs in the United States focus on abstinence without providing information about birth control and disease. Darrock also suggests more and more youths are engaging in other types of sexual behaviors besides intercourse that might also be putting them at risk — activities this study did not measure.

Part of Larger Sex Ed Program

Darrock says the study shows abstinence can be effective in helping young people delay sex, but it should be part of a comprehensive sex education program.

Paul Turner, a spokesman for Ture Love Waits, a 10-year-old abstinence program of the Southern Baptist Convention, says he is encouraged by the study findings. “Students can put off sex and enjoy a wholesome life,” Turner says.

But he says he is concerned that teens aren’t “being smart” when they break their pledges. His program, however, does not provide birth control or STD information.

“We thought teens were getting that information from other sources,” Turner says. “We just wanted to focus on abstinence as a viable option since that message was not being stressed enough.”

ABCNEWS’s Melinda Willis contributed to this report.