In Juvenile Hall, Youths Get Some Straight Talk on Sex

Carlos is 15 years old. He’s not in regular school now because he’s jailed in Juvenile Hall. He’s got a girlfriend who’s 17.

“You don’t think about birth control,” Carlos says. “I don’t know if she does. I don’t ask her. I don’t think about it.”

Carlos’ girlfriend is pregnant now, going on four months.

Macario is 15 too, except he’s already a father. His baby boy is 11 months old. His girlfriend’s 16. Macario says he liked the idea of having a child.

“Yeah, but I was thinking wrong,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was getting in for.”

Still, birth control’s a hassle. It slows you down. It’s a pain in the you-know-what.

“When a guy sees a girl with a condom, she looks like a slut to him,” Macario says.

It is evening at Juvenile Hall. These are tough guys in front of me, none of them over 17 years old. Mostly they’re gangbangers. A few of them have tattoos showing on their arms. They’re all pretty quick to smile.

The crimes keeping them here, until they are sent someplace else, range from probation violations to burglary to murder.

Carla Furtado, a community educator for Planned Parenthood, is giving them her rap.

She’s got charts, a model of a woman’s reproductive tract, a veritable rainbow of condoms, a diaphragm, foam. She even walks around to let the guys feel the Norplant contraceptive surgically implanted in her own arm.

So Carla’s pretty cool. She can joke, get serious, offer advice, and she does a mean imitation of a sperm shimmying toward an egg. The guys can talk to her. No question--and there are lots of them tonight--is too dumb.

This, for the time being, is a safe place--to talk about things that usually go unsaid, to hear the answer to the “stupid” question you were afraid to ask.

Maybe then some of these boys will figure out that just having sex doesn’t prove them a man.

“What are other ways to express affection?” Carla asks.

“You can give your girlfriend a kiss,” one boy says.

“You can have oral sex,” another volunteers.

“But can that give you a sexually transmitted disease?” Carla asks.

“Yes!” someone responds. And then these kids think on that a bit.

These children are under the jurisdiction of the court. No parental permission slips are sent out to attend the Planned Parenthood class, one in a series of six. Attendance is mandatory; there are separate sessions for girls.

The classes are often the only formal sex education that these children get. And at this age, in these times, that usually means it is coming too late.

There are 19 boys here tonight, a lot of them looking hardened beyond their years. They are all dressed in the navy blue standard issue; even their sneakers match. Most, maybe all of them, have had sex. Many times.

Only three say their parents have sat them down to talk about sex and the responsibilities that entails. That includes Seth, whose mother did so only after he told her he was going to be the father of a child.

Seth is 15 years old.

“But it worked out fine,” Seth says. “My ex-girlfriend’s father has a lot of money, so I barely have to pay anything. It worked out fine.”

Four boys say they’ve heard something about sex from instructors at school.

State law leaves such instruction up to local school districts, provided students have parental consent. Some districts call in outside groups, such as Planned Parenthood and the Coalition for Children, Adolescents and Parents, to lecture children beginning in junior high.

But adolescent sexuality is a very hot potato for parents and administrators worried about their jobs. Many school districts just don’t deal with sexuality at all.

Yet national statistics show that more than half of the nation’s teens are already having premarital sex.

Seven boys here tonight say they’ve already gotten a girl pregnant. The guys shrug about that.

“A lot of it has to do with planning,” Carla tells me after class. “Adolescents live for here and now. Their thinking is very short-term.”

Something, however, does seem to be getting through. Mike Stark, a deputy probation counselor, says the guys talk about the classes a lot. Some will stop by Planned Parenthood after they are released from jail to pick up condoms for free.

The idea is not to preach, but to teach common sense: If you are going to have sex, you had better be prepared, in every sense of the word.

“What is the only thing that is 100% sure?” Carla asks these kids.

“Not having sex!” one boy says.

Yet a few of the kids smirk when they hear that. Their eyes say, “Get real.” One says he thinks they are all lying when they say that they will think about practicing safe sex.

George, though, says something else. Maybe a girl will think he’s intelligent if he suggests using birth control. He is 16 years old.

Then he thinks about the homeboys who will greet him when he gets out of jail. Having a baby, George says, wouldn’t be so bad.

“It sometimes helps you keep off the street,” he says. “You think about it. It gives you something to care for. That’s for me.”