Youth Virginity Pledge

I will be the first to admit it: I am a celebrity gossip reader. It is a vice, but one that I have yet to kick. At any given moment, I can tell you which celebrities are on the “bump watch” and who is getting married, getting divorced or getting sued. A disgusting habit, I know, especially when some mornings I click on my gossip links BEFORE clicking on my world news links. Lately, though, I have noticed a rising trend amongst the celebrity youth: promise rings. No, not a promise ring from a fellow celebrity boyfriend or girlfriend, but promise rings to abstain from sex until marriage. The Jonas Brothers, Selena Gomez and even one of the teenagers highlighted in Trading Spouses have all taken part in this trend. Turns out, these celebrities might be on to something as a recent study from the RAND Corporation shows that young adults who make a pledge to abstain from sex until marriage may actually delay their starting to have sex.

In the study, the results showed that those young adults who vowed to remain virgins until they were married were more likely to stay sex-free during the three years of the study in comparison to the young adults who did not make the vow but had other similar qualities. The head of the research team, RAND psychologist Steven Martino, states, “These findings do not suggest that virginity pledges should be a substitute for comprehensive sexual education programs, or that they will work for all kinds of kids. But virginity pledges may be appropriate as one component of an overall sex education effort.” Many studies have researched what impact, if any, these virginity pledges have made, but this study was a bit different in that researchers looked for key differences in those youths who pledged versus those who chose not to pledge. These differences included parenting styles, friendships and religion. This information was valuable to the researchers because it gave them a baseline to compare similar youths.

Close to 1,500 adolescent virgins between the ages of 12 and 17 participated in the study in 2001 with follow-ups done one year later and then three years later. Approximately 25% of the participants responded that they had made a pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. Over 40% of the participants who chose not to make the virginity pledge but had similar lifestyles to those who did started having sex within the three year study period, compared to 34% of those adolescents who had made the pledge. Martino adds, “Making a pledge to remain a virgin until married may provide extra motivation to adolescents who want to delay becoming sexually active. The act of pledging may create some social pressure or social support that helps them to follow through with their clearly stated public intention. Waiting until you are older to have sex is good for teens from a health standpoint. There are lots of reasons for more kids to wait until they are older. Virginity pledges must be made freely for them to work. If young people are coerced or are unduly influenced by peer pressure, virginity pledges are not likely to have a positive effect.”