If all goes according to plan, this fall a girl somewhere in China’s Yunnan province will tell her boyfriend she can’t have sex with him. And he’ll have an abstinence program from the United States to thank.
In Yunnan schools this year, teachers are being trained with a sex education curriculum created by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. The agreement with the Yunnan ministry of education is a milestone for Focus on the Family, which has struggled for four years to make inroads on abstinence in China.
It is also the result of a narrow confluence of interests: Evangelical Christian groups want an entree into China. And Chinese authorities, despite the country’s official atheism, want help with controlling population growth and managing the society’s rapidly shifting values.
Read the comments to the article. Focus on the Family [i]and[/i] abstinence education sends the liberals into beserker mode.
The previous studies showed the abstinence education programs “didn’t work” because they were just as effective as condom education programs. Why didn’t we view it as a: condom education programs don’t work because they are only as effective as abstinence education programs?
The newest study, done on the hardest population, inner city African-American kids showed that abstinence education methods showed delay of first sexual encounter – something that has significant health ramifications.