C. Education

Sex-ed landscape shifting across the nation - Pauline Vu, MCT NEWSPAPERS, June 5, 2007

While a majority (of the states) still requires that abstinence be stressed in sex education, lately there has been a movement toward comprehensive education that teaches about contraception along with abstinence.This shift has been bolstered by Democratic gains in statehouses and Congress.
[...]
The April study, which tracked 2,000 children, half of whom took abstinence-only classes, found that students in those classes were just as likely as their peers to have premarital sex. But the study also reported that teenagers in the abstinence classes weren't less likely to use condoms, something critics of abstinence-only programs have claimed would happen.

We're here. We're sexual. GET USED TO IT - Barbara Miner, Color Lines, May-June 2008

For the last decade, schools around the country have been badgered and bribed into pumping these sorts of ideas into students’ heads through abstinence-only programs — that is, those relatively few schools that teach sex education in the first place. [...]
Over the past year, this surging abstinence-only education movement has finally shown signs of retreat. 
Numerous studies have proven it to be ineffective, even harmful [...] But as abstinence fades, the increasingly pressing question is this: What will rise in its place?

Abstinence education does not reduce sexual activity in teens - Sue Mueller, foodconsumer.org, April 14, 2007

A new study authorized by US Congress has found that the federal abstinence education programs that encourage adolescents to abstain from having sex during their early years proved ineffective. 
The abstinence program did not persuade youth from having sex, nor change their other sexual behavior including condom use [...]. 
Teens who had sex started having sex at a mean age of 14.9 years. [...]

Teen magazine with nude pics? Yes, in Germany - Elisa Ung, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13, 2006

The column highlights a basic cultural divide between much of Europe and the United States when it comes to sex. 
And Gernandt points to Germany's lower teenage pregnancy rate as proof of which approach is better.
About 85 of 1,000 U.S. young people ages 15 to 19 become pregnant, compared with 16 out of every 1,000 in Germany.

Mentors for boys difficult to enlist - Lisa Grzyboski, Courier-Post Online, January 20, 2008

Every year the Volunteers of America youth services director enrolls 80 Camden teens who have served time in juvenile detention in a program aimed at helping them turn around their lives. Each of the mostly male teens is supposed to receive an adult mentor of the same gender [...].
But sometimes it's the prospect of a one-on-one relationship that keeps people, especially men, from mentoring, Jakubowski said. At a time when the media is dominated by stories about sex offenders and child sex abuse, some people worry about being unjustly accused of inappropriate touching or worse.