The United States still struggles to teach teens about sex: Only 24 states and Washington, D.C., require students to take a sex education class. In some states, like Mississippi, the law mandates that schools adopt some type of sex education curriculum, which means schools can teach a strictly “abstinence-only” class. Students in abstinence-only classes don’t learn about effective methods of birth control or how condoms work — but they do learn that sex outside of marriage could have harmful emotional and physical consequences.
Nearly 40 states require schools to provide students with information on abstinence when sex education classes are offered, and abstinence must be the main focus of the course in 26 of those states.
But abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work well. In 2015, Mississippi still ranked third highest in the nation for teen births. And then there’s Texas. The Texas Freedom Network released a study recently that found 83 percent of schools in the state taught abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all last year and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s teen birth rate is nearly double the national average.
Under President Trump, sex education advocates worry that these already-fragile public-school programs may disappear entirely. So they’ve come up with websites and apps to provide crucial sexual health information to kids who might otherwise have no way to get it. The educators and advocates behind these new technologies also hope to get rid of the stigma around sex education for young people, and created some of them in direct response to the current administration’s restrictive views on sexual health.
Here are five of the most innovative:
1. AMAZE
AMAZE is a sex education video series for children ages 10 to 14. It hopes to bring a more modern, kid-friendly face to lessons that can be, best-case scenario, awkward and uncomfortable. Launched last September, AMAZE covers traditional topics like puberty and masturbation, along with more progressive topics. For example, the video Porn: Fact or Fiction, helps kids understand that pornography often presents misleading and unrealistic images of people’s bodies, objectifies women and divorces sex from intimacy. But it also reassures kids that being curious about porn is normal. Other videos explain “consent,” and talk about gender identities, including transgender and gender-fluid.
The nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., is not afraid to stray into political territory. This March, AMAZE released a video on how to combat bullying at school. Debra Hauser, president of the AMAZE partner Advocates for Youth, explained in an email why they made the video: “Bullying is extremely prevalent in schools across the country. The AMAZE team knew we had to tackle this issue, and the increase in bullying we’ve seen as a direct result of the Trump campaign and subsequent administration made the video even more timely.”
Consent is a cornerstones of AMAZE’s sex education philosophy. One lesson plan, written for kindergartners by one of AMAZE’S curriculum specialists, includes asking parents to sign a form saying if their child asks not to be hugged or touched, the parents would respect that.
“I thought we were going to get killed for that. But [the curriculum specialist] turned to me and said, ‘This is the beginning of bodily autonomy.’ Every time you say, ‘Sit on Santa’s lap,’ or ‘Go hug Grandma,’ you’re teaching them that their body isn’t their own. That’s one of the more controversial ideas, but it’s the beginning of teaching girls that their bodies are theirs,” Hauser said.
2. Crush
Crush covers the emotional aspects of sex, healthy relationships, how birth control works and how pregnancy happens. It also offers a clinic finder, and helps users choose which birth control is best for them.
It’s the first phone app developed by the sex education advocacy group Healthy Teen Network, in Baltimore, Md.
The app’s target audience is 15- to 17-year-old Latina and African-American girls.
For now, Crush is only available to the girls participating in a study of the app, but once the study concludes in August anyone will be able to use it, their director of innovation and research said.
Healthy Teen Network decided to develop several sex education phone apps (Crush is the first) because the staff worries the Trump administration will stop funding sex education in public schools. Even if that doesn’t happen Patricia Paluzzi, the organization’s president and CEO, thinks these apps could serve as supplements to schools’ sex education courses.
According to Paluzzi, time is a major obstacle to teaching comprehensive sex education. For instance, some teachers may only be able to teach sex education once a week for a set number of sessions, and their curriculum needs to be cleared by the school before it can be presented. The Guttmacher Institute reports that pregnancy prevention only gets an “average class time [of] 4.2 hours in high schools.” In many schools where there is limited or abstinence-only sex education, teaching about how birth control works may not even be allowed. In some states, like Mississippi, students can only attend sex education class if their parents give permission.
“If a teacher can’t do a condom demonstrations, she can refer her students to the app. It could also fill a space where kids aren’t getting any sex ed,” Paluzzi said. Abstinence-only education “doesn’t accept the reality that young people have sex. Those approaches do not work. Period.”
The Healthy Teen Network has also taken part in Twitter campaigns. They promoted the Week of Action from March 6 to 10, which encouraged supporters to use the hashtags #DefundAbOnly and #RealSexEd to counter efforts by abstinence-only advocates to lobby Congress.
3. 1 in 3
The 1 in 3 Campaign, launched by Advocates for Youth back in 2011 to respond to restrictions on abortion rights, feels a renewed sense of urgency about its mission.
“We are seeing a new administration that continues to propagate fear and intimidation and stigma around access to abortion,” said Julia Reticker-Flynn, the campaign’s director. “We are feeling now more than ever our country needs to be reminded to foster a culture of empathy and support.”
1 in 3 will hold an Art Week from April 17 through April 21. Activists will be able to create “pop-up sticker art displays,” using packs of stickers in the shape of women and printed with excerpts from real abortion stories. The 1 in 3 campaign encourages students to put them up around their campuses.
The campaign has also held several “Speak Outs,” in which people come together over a period of several hours to tell their abortion stories either on a recorded video, Skype call or in previously submitted written form.
At this year’s Speak Out event on March 21, 100 people shared their experiences with abortion throughout a six-hour period, live-streamed on the 1 in 3 website. For the first time, 30 people also went to Capital Hill to tell their stories to members of Congress.
“We also want to bring these stories directly to congressional leaders, to have them understand the impact of these laws on people’s lives,” said Reticker-Flynn.
Stories from this year’s Speak Out are available to watch and read in both English and Spanish. People can submit their abortion stories to 1 in 3 to be posted online (they’ve already published one book of stories, in addition to those on the website).
4. Reach Out
The Reach Out Editions app provides overall health and wellness resources to high school and college students, as well as students in trade schools and soldiers and their families on military bases.
Users download the app, choose what type of school they attend and search for their school. Clicking on the school will allow them to look for services within categories ranging from sexual and mental health to eating disorders and bullying.
Once the school agrees to have its resources available on Reach Out, it can turn on a feature called CATT mail, which allows users to anonymously email a school’s Title IX coordinator with questions and concerns.
“A (rape) survivor who doesn’t want to reveal her identity, but she wants to get a forensic exam, can ask the question, ‘If I get an exam will you notify my parents?’ Otherwise, they’re going to spend an hour on Google looking for this information,” said Richard Zandi, one of the company’s founders. “If you call 311, you are getting splashed with a million things, and if you’re suffering after a sexual assault, you don’t want to spend five hours figuring it out.”
Though the current version of Reach Out is tailored largely to students, the organization is working to expand its network to include off-campus services as well. Under the “Sexual Health” tab of their institution’s edition of the app, for instance, users can find contact information for HIV testing centers, local social workers and family planning centers.
“We try to add every hospital where you can get a forensic exam, every shelter, rape crisis center,” Zandi said. “We don’t want young people to sit there and worry that they have an STD because they don’t know where to go to find out.”
5. It Matters
Aimed at 14- to 24-year-olds, this app contains a “common questions and answers” section on sexual health topics, healthy relationships, birth control options and what to expect in terms of cost and insurance coverage when visiting a doctor or clinic. Other sections cover sexually transmitted diseases and LGBTQ health. Users can also ask questions, which they submit to trained counselors. The counselors answer the person directly, either by text or email.
The Pennsylvania nonprofit AccessMatters, which advocates for equal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, created the It Matters app because young people rely mostly on technology to get information.
People living in southeastern Pennsylvania can enter their zip code to find contact information for AccessMatters’ network of federally qualified health centers, small community providers and hospital-based providers. For those living either in other parts of the state or outside Pennsylvania, the app offers links to the U.S. Office of Population Affairs, where they can search for providers in their area.
“The goal was to meet teens where they are. They’re looking for quick and easily digestible information,” said Audrey Ross, communications and policy manager for AccessMatters.
Though only 700 people have downloaded the app so far, AccessMatters will soon run online advertisements to attract new users.
“In the past few weeks we have seen, through the health care repeal-and-replace proposal, threats to funding for our providers, like the efforts to remove Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program, as well as other programs that our consumers really rely on,” Ross said. “We will continue to advocate loudly to protect and expand funding for sex ed and oppose abstinence-only education.”
