What Is Abstinence?

Jim Burroway

January 22nd, 2008

Archives of Sexual BehaviorAn April 2007 report (PDF: 704KB/64 pages) for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed that abstinence-only education had no impact on the number of sexual partners and sexual activities among students who were in abstinence-only programs versus students in other types of sex-ed program. New research to be published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that it may also fail from an STD-prevention standpoint as well.

Canadian researchers E. Sandra Byers, Joel Henderson and Kristina M. Hobson asked 298 heterosexual Canadian college students about how they defined “abstinence” and “having sex.” Students were pretty consistent about a few things: Nobody really thought having intercourse was “abstinence”, and most students didn’t include non-genital contact as “having sex.” But there areas where the distinction between “abstinence” and “having sex” weren’t so clear:

Students were quite mixed in whether activities involving unidirectional genital stimulation (e.g., oral sex, genital fondling) constituted abstinence, having sex, or neither abstinence nor having sex. However, they were more likely to see these behaviors as abstinent than as having sex. Students were more likely to rate a behavior as abstinence if orgasm did not occur… The results indicated that male participants who were more involved with their religion and sexually conservative, less sexually experienced, and who had not received sexual health education at home were more likely to define bidirectional genital stimulation and less likely to define no genital stimulation and unidirectional sexual stimulation as sexual abstinence.

In other words, many students believe they can engage in oral sex and still be “abstinent,” and religious students in this particular sample are more likely to believe so. Since STD’s can be transmitted through oral sex, this finding represents a significant potential failure in abstinence-only education.

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