The condom melee

Ah, the Pope and condoms.  I first publicly criticized the Pope’s views when I was a teenage columnist for a Gannett newspaper, but my editor censored the piece.  The Pope was on a U.S. tour and the paper was worried about reader backlash.  Not much has changed since, except now my daughter is the teenager.  The Pope has ratched up his attack on condoms (claiming they aren’t effective at preventing HIV), and lots of parents and the media are still treating condoms like a four-alarm scandal.

Last week about a dozen students at my daughter’s middle school were inadvertently given condoms during a celebration of “National Women and Girls HIV Awareness Day”.   A 48-hour morality melee ensued.  Some parents of the condom kids were shaken and angry, multiple apologies from school and public health officials were rushed out over two days, news media descended on the school, and teachers gave their students impromptu lessons in how to say “no comment” to aggressive reporters.

Exactly one year ago the CDC released startling findings: one in four adolescent girls has a sexually transmitted infection.  Another study found that by 9th grade, 32% of teens were sexually active.  This year school officials teamed up with public health advocates to conduct an HIV awareness poster contest and a health fair to help prevent these middle school kids from becoming part of this statistical nightmare.

The school didn’t intend to distribute the condoms – some health fair bags from a high school event got mixed up with the middle school bags – but the incident raises the uncomfortable question about what messages and information ought to be shared with this age group.  Statistically, a third of these eighth graders will be sexually active within a year.  When and how should they get access to condoms?

On the afternoon that ABC camped out at the middle school for at least four hours, the principal asked those of us who worked or lived nearby to help shield the students from the cameras as they left school.   Many of the parents and security staff  were furious that ABC news was filming kids.  The sensationalist media had turned the  lesson about disease prevention into a real life display of the taboo nature of dealing with emerging sexuality.   Any middle schooler who thought  they could safely engage the subject of sex with adults at Thursday’s health fair learned by Friday that the subject was wildly explosive.

When the cameraman began filming the students exiting school, a number of adults were on hand to help the kids move down the sidewalk without being filmed. I began taking pictures of the ABC crew.  The ABC reporter screamed at me from across the street, punching his finger in the air, “this borders on harassment!”.  That’s when I got mad.  I couldn’t film him while he filmed my kid?

I calmed down and respectfully called the ABC producer in charge of the story, who apologized for the reporter’s behavior.   I explained that I had been positioned across the street with my palm sized digital camera and he said it wouldn’t have mattered if I were inches away, anyone has the right to film the activities of his crew.

Then the producer and I had a good discussion about the impact of sensationalizing condoms. What lesson, if you were thirteen, would you walk away with as you watched the media treat the mistaken condom handout as a major scandal?  Through the eyes of a middle schooler it’s not so different from the Pope’s rigid position: condoms are risqué and most definitely off limits.  His focus had been on whether ABC was adhering to journalistic standards; he hadn’t been focused on the impact of the coverage on area teens.

I didn’t expect the editor to kill the story – four hours of a stakeout by ABC, complete with dozens of interviews in half a dozen locations, was too much of an investment to throw away.  But the end result was a very, very brief story and modest footage.  I’m convinced that the editor paid attention to the community impact of ABC’s news decisions, as well as to the anger of the community that had been targeted.

Making your voice heard in the media can help soften the sensationalist treatment of adolescent sexual health.  But you don’t have to wait for a media moment to be influential.  If  you’ve got kids in your life and you’d like to be proactive in promoting sexual health, here are some resources you might offer them:
Sexetc.org (for teens)
Teenwire.org (for teens)
A reference book titled “It’s Perfectly Normal” (for kids and young teens)
A reference book titled “It’s So Amazing” (for kids and young teens)