Abstinence Education pt.2 - Federal Funding

The first federal funding of abstinence programs was created in 1981 with the Adolescent Family Life Act as Title XX of the Public Health Service Act. According to the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, the Adolescent Family Life (AFL) program supports demonstration projects to develop, implement, and evaluate program interventions to promote abstinence from sexual activity among adolescents and to provide comprehensive health care, education, and social services to pregnant and parenting adolescents.
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The program supports two basic types of demonstration projects: (1) prevention demonstration projects to develop, test, and use curricula that provide education and activities designed to encourage adolescents to postpone sexual activity until marriage; and (2) care demonstration projects to develop interventions with pregnant and parenting teens, their infants, male partners, and family members in an effort to ameliorate the effects of too-early-childbearing for teen parents, their babies, and their families. The AFL program also funds grants to support research on the causes and consequences of adolescent premarital sexual relations, pregnancy, and parenting. The Title XX funds not only help the teens and families they serve directly, but they also provide valuable information and evaluation findings that can serve as a basis for future strategies. Every program that receives AFL grant funds is required to include an independent evaluation component. This ensures that the lessons learned by each community will benefit others in the future.
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In 1996, federal abstinence education programs narrowed the definitions of abstinence when Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, P.L. 104-193 was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The abstinence-only federal funding was created as part of "welfare reform," or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF). This third funding stream provides grants to states for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The absti-nence-only-until-marriage educational or motivational programs must adhere to the following eight criteria as established by law:
1. Has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social,
psychological, and health gains to be realized by
abstaining from sexual activity
2. Teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside
marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children
3. Teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the
only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually
transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems
4. Teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship
in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity
5. Teaches that sexual activity outside of the context
of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological
and physical effects
6. Teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is
likely to have harmful consequences for the child,
the child's parents, and society
7. Teaches young people how to reject sexual
advances and how alcohol and drug use increases
vulnerability to sexual advances
8. Teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency
before engaging in sexual activity
As of 1997, all abstinence projects funded under the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention must adhere to the eight criteria. The funded projects must be evaluated, and the curricula must be medically accurate.
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Title V grantees cannot provide educational programming that goes against any one of the criteria listed previously in this section, but the states have the latitude to focus on only a few of the criteria. The states can direct the funding to schools, community-based organizations, health districts, media campaigns, or faith-based entities. Each state has the discretion to decide who receives the funding, how programs are delivered, and if and how they will be evaluated.
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In October 2000, the federal government expanded the abstinence-only projects and created Special Projects of Regional and National Significance-Community-Based Abstinence Education (SPRANS-CBAE). The SPRANS grants are awarded to states and community organizations and can fund only abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. In 2005 oversight of the SPRANS-CBAE grants was moved from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to the Adminis-tration for Children and Families (ACF); both are within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This program is now known as Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE). The program requirements have been tightened; to receive funding, each program now must adhere to all eight criteria. Process evaluation is now required for new grantees, but programs do not have to measure impact on program participants. So how does one select an abstinence program?
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Selecting and Evaluating Programs
Abstinence education programs are evolving, and the types of programs offered are vast in terms of quality, cost, and effectiveness. When choosing a program, educators can look for teacher training, medical accuracy, evidence of effectiveness with similar populations, costs, whether the program is theoretically based, and how it fits with community guidelines. Other considerations include whether the program is taught by a teacher or peers and how much time can be devoted to the program. Programs can range from a single 1-hour presentation to 25 sessions over 5 weeks. The curricula and desired learning outcomes should coincide. A final component is the effectiveness of the program; currently, long-term research on the effectiveness of abstinence education is limited to a few programs, and the results are mixed.
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Few rigorous, long-term studies focusing on behavioral outcomes have been conducted on specific abstinence-only programs. The Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP) does require all of its abstinence programs to be evaluated, and most of the published abstinence evaluations are former OAPP projects. Most of the programs have shown immediate differences in attitudes and intent to remain abstinent. One problem with the evaluations of many abstinence programs is the limited ability to assign students to experimental or control groups, the presence of follow-up evaluations, and the limited sample sizes.

Research is needed to determine the long-term impacts on behavior.
Caile E. Spear

EDITOR Neil J. Salkind
Copyright © 2008 by SAGE Publications, Inc.