Meet Peter Bearman

Since it was launched in 1994, Add Health has tracked more than 20,000 adolescents, exploring the causes and outcomes of their health-related behavior. The data has been used in more than 1,000 reports and articles — including a recent study in the American Journal of Public Health, which found that half of all teens who took virginity pledges withdrew them after the first year, and that many denied ever taking the pledge in the first place.

Bearman has done his own groundbreaking research on virginity pledges. Choice! Magazine spoke with him about his findings, teen sex, abstinence-only education, and sexual health.

What is the significance of virginity pledges, with respect to sexual health?

Virginity pledges have been shown to delay the transition to sex for some but not all kids. For those who do take pledges, when they do have sex, they are less likely to use condoms. Consequently, the public health benefits of delaying sex — which are reduced risk of STDs and reduced pregnancy — are lost. Pledgers have the same STD rates as non-pledgers. Pledging therefore does not offer significant protective benefit.

What should health care providers know about virginity pledgers?

Teens who take virginity pledges are less likely to think they have an STD, to be tested for an STD, and to be diagnosed with an STD. So the infections are likely carried longer in pledgers than in non-pledgers. Doctors shouldn't assume that because a kid has taken a pledge he [or she] has not had sex. First of all, pledgers are more likely to have had unprotected oral sex than non-pledgers. Second, the vast majority of pledgers have sex before they get married — we found 88 percent did so.

Are pledgers any more likely to lie about sex than non-pledgers?

In terms of secrecy, kids who take the pledge may be much more likely to keep the sex that they have secret from others in their community. But they tell the truth on well-designed surveys, otherwise we would not have learned that 88 percent have sex before marriage. So it's more likely that the sex they are having is secret. But understand here that it's not secret to us [the researchers]. It's secret in the public eye, and that means it's riskier.

So do you believe virginity pledges and abstinence-only education work?

I feel the drivers education analogy is very effective: If you imagine that kids will be safer drivers if you teach them that driving is dangerous, that it is more dangerous to drive wearing a seatbelt than to not drive at all, and you don't teach the rules of the road, how to navigate dangerous intersections — then you should be in favor of abstinence-only education. It doesn't teach kids to negotiate the healthiest relationships they can have.

Then there are the people who support the "abstinence-first" method, which is that it's better to be abstinent, but if you're going to have sex, use a condom. There are people who say that's too complicated a message for adolescents. Everything we know about adolescents is that 95 percent are smart enough to understand the abstinence-first message and not be confused by it.

Do you support the abstinence-first method?

I think abstinence first is fine. In general, we should be teaching that sex is part of a healthy, intimate relationship. It's important to focus on that as the goal. What we should do is help kids learn to have healthy, intimate relationships so they have rich, human lives.

I think it's true that the older you are, the more capable you are of experiencing the richness of human life. That's the goal, in a lot of ways, of sex education. And it's important to remember that a single message doesn't work for all kids.

We assume kids can learn to drive. If you stop and think about how to drive, and make the analogy to sex, you realize that the road out there is complicated. Driving isn't the safest thing, but you have to learn how to stay between the lines. Likewise, you have to know when to be vulnerable, how to take care of your body and health like you would take care of a car.