Stressing the Importance of Abstinence : Health: Placentia educators use program to teach teens to take control of their lives and resist peer pressure to engage in sex.

Andrienne Ervin and Cyndi Watson have long worked with youngsters, helping them navigate the rocky terrain of adolescence.

They’ve witnessed the highs and lows, the successes and the failures. Throughout their careers they have strived to turn those often turbulent teen-age years into safe and productive times for their students.

Now, Ervin, an El Dorado High School assistant principal, and Watson, a teacher at Tuffre Junior High School, have found themselves on the front lines in a battle over adolescent sex in the 1990s.

They are among a growing number of educators, school counselors and health professionals across the country who are seeing teen-agers--even children in middle school--having sex at increasingly younger ages, sometimes with multiple partners and often showing scant concern for their safety.

Concerned about the threat of AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases and the increase in teen pregnancies, Ervin, Watson and others are fighting to turn back the tide of early sexual behavior and convince young people that it can be harmful to their physical as well as emotional health.

In a program called “Education Now, Babies Later” (ENBL), Watson teaches seventh-grade girls and boys at Tuffre that it is important for youngsters to postpone having sex.

The program, one of many being used nationally by schools, churches and communities to promote teen abstinence, teaches young people refusal skills that will help them resist peer pressure to engage in sex at an early age.

“My concern is for their lives,” said Ervin, who has been an educator for 26 years and a strong supporter of ENBL at her school. “We want to show them that they have a choice whether to have sex or to wait. We are saying you are in control of your destiny.”

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Doctors at the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta view early teen sex as such a health risk for adolescents that they have cited reduction of teen sexual activity as a national health objective.

Educators like Ervin and Watson see firsthand why teen sex has become a critical issue.

Adolescents “seem to be under tremendous pressure to go through the rites of passage,” Ervin said. They want to grow up so fast. They see movies, television and advertisements that are “oozing with sex. So, they think everyone is doing it. . . . They believe ‘if I don’t do it, my friends will think I’m a geek.’ ”

“We have to do more than just provide birth control information for kids,” she said. When you just “tell kids to use condoms, it’s like giving up, and saying, ‘You are going to do it anyway,’ ” Ervin said.

“It’s scary,” said Watson, who has taught youngsters for 18 years. “I am seeing a lot of girls as young as 12 and 13 having sex . . . and bragging about it. They think they are invincible to pregnancy or (sexually transmitted) diseases.”

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In California alone, a statewide study in 1992 found that 17% of girls between the ages of 12 and 14 were sexually active, according to Cynthia Scheinberg, executive director of the Coalition for Children, Adolescents and Parents in Orange County.

The state-funded ENBL program is being used in schools throughout the state, including 65 in Orange County, Scheinberg said. The coalition has the state contract to set up the program in Orange County schools.

The program is not without its critics. Those opposed to abstinence-based programs complain that it is unrealistic to believe that kids are going to stop having sex. By teaching abstinence only, they say, the programs fail to provide important information about health and anatomy. Critics also believe that such a curriculum makes kids who have had sex feel guilty and feel like failures.

This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will release results of its latest survey on teen sexual behavior in the United States. In its first national survey on risky behavior among young people in 1990-91, the study found that 40% of teen-agers polled said they had sexual intercourse by the ninth grade.

Seventy-two percent of those polled said they had intercourse by their senior year in high school. Twenty percent of the students surveyed said they had had sex with four or more partners in their lifetime.

“The results were concerning,” said Dr. Laura Kann, who helped conduct the CDC study. “The results showed there are a lot of kids who are at risk for (sexually transmitted diseases) . . . AIDS, and pregnancies.”

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Today, doctors at the Atlanta center estimate that 3 million teen-agers suffer from a sexually transmitted disease, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

Watson and other educators and psychologists who work with adolescents are particularly troubled by the cavalier attitude toward sex they see displayed by boys and girls.

For some of these youngsters, sex has become a game. Despite the threat of pregnancy, AIDS and other diseases, some of these kids are throwing caution to the wind, said psychologist Lois Raffel, who counsels students in the Placentia Yorba-Linda Unified District schools.

The reasons for early sexual activity among teens may be varied, according to experts on adolescent behavior. Peer pressure, changing attitudes toward sex, lack of adult supervision, influences by the media, a breakdown of family and community, and lack of health and sex education, are some of the explanations offered. Experimentation with drugs and alcohol also lead to early sexual activity, counselors say.

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Priscilla Hurley, executive director of Choices/Teen Awareness Inc., another educational program in Orange County that stresses abstinence to students, argues that many youngsters are hearing no guidelines about sex from society.

“Culturally, there are no boundaries in terms of sexual behavior today,” she said. “Teens are on a wide-open playing field. They are confused,” said Hurley, whose program is used at various Orange County schools, including El Dorado High.

“I was part of the ‘60s. We believed if it feels good do it,” Hurley said. But the free sex philosophy of the ‘60s does not work today and kids have to get that message, she said. They have to be taught that “if you pursue that kind of behavior, we will lose you.”

The number of babies born to young teen-agers in this country has continued to rise since the mid- to late 1980s. In 1991, 531,591 babies were born to girls under the age of 20, an increase of more than 50,000 from 1985, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In Orange County alone, 1,657 babies were born in 1992 to girls between the ages of 15 and 17. Seventy-nine babies were born to girls between the ages of 10 and 14, a 38% increase during a five-year period, according to data provided by the Coalition for Children, Adolescents and Parents.

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As some young girls have become more independent and assertive, they have become more aggressive in their pursuit of boys, notes Los Angeles psychologist Marcia Lasswell. They feel free to call boys first, ask them out on dates, initiate sex and then boast about it to their friends.

“They go after what they want. They are more overt (sexually) and sometimes it gets out of hand,” said Lasswell, president of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Lasswell said she and some of her colleagues even hear of girls “pressuring the boys to have sex and making references to their manhood” if they decline.

For some young girls, sex satisfies a desperate yearning for the love and affection that may be missing in their lives, Raffel said. For them, it is not a game, she said. They want to “be loved, touched and cared for. We all need that as human beings. But in today’s rushed and hurried world we aren’t doing that as often as we should.”

For some boys, early sex is viewed as expected behavior and a status symbol among some kids, counselors say.

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Rachel Brady, a senior at Dana Hills High School, said, “I know there are girls who are having sex starting at ages 13 and 14. It blows my mind.

“They’re having sex that early because they need to look and feel older . . . and peer pressure. When girls are younger, it’s cool to be with older guys and maybe have sex with them,” said Brady, 18, a cheerleader.

Others do it to rebel against their parents. Brady said she knew of one girl at her school who wanted to get pregnant and did for that very reason. She also did it because she thought she would have more independence from her parents if she got pregnant and had a baby.

Brenda, a 14-year-old freshman at Los Alamitos High School, said she is disturbed by how sexually active some of her classmates are.

“Some kids treat sex as if it means nothing. They don’t realize the problems it could create. They think sex is expected of them. In fact, a lot of boys won’t go out with a girl unless they will have sex,” said Brenda, who is not using her real name.

“One friend started having sex in sixth grade. It was really sad. It was obvious the boy was using her.

“In grade school, we all thought having sex was stupid. But now some of them are doing it. They think I’m really uptight. But I can’t even picture myself having sex now. Getting pregnant at 14 would be the worst.”

“I had one little girl in my class who I was 99% sure was sexually active,” Watson said. “She was 12 years old and she wrote on one of her papers, ‘Sex is great.’ ”

Watson recalled a 15-year-old girl at school who had sex with one boy to get back at another boyfriend. She got pregnant and had an abortion.

She also sees how crushed some of these girls are when their sexual relationship ends in rejection or pregnancy. “For 12- and 14-year-olds, it can be devastating. These kids just don’t understand. They cry and cry. Some of them have been suicidal.”

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Parents can play an important role in helping to turn the tide in teen-age sex, Watson and others say. The ENBL program also educates parents on helping their teens to delay sex.

But counselors complain that some parents either give their children the wrong message about sex or no message at all.

“I think a lot of parents don’t really know how prevalent sexual activity is. I think they are afraid to talk to their kids,” Watson said.

Some parents are too permissive, allowing their high-school-age children to serve alcohol at parties or failing to monitor behavior, Watson said.

Teacher Robbie Brady, who counsels students at Dana Hills High School, said she has seen 14-year-olds being left alone for a weekend, youngsters being allowed out late at night or spending long periods of time with members of the opposite sex without adult supervision.

It becomes an invitation for trouble, the experts say.

“Some parents who don’t set guidelines for their children argue that they don’t want to interfere,” psychologist Lasswell said. “Of course parents should interfere. That’s what they are there for. Parents need to keep a close eye on their children. Otherwise, they will begin trying things they shouldn’t.”

Watson, Ervin and the others hope they can give these youngsters the skills to combat peer pressure and take control of their lives. But it may be an uphill battle. “They are given information about pregnancy, AIDS” and sexually transmitted diseases, Raffel said. “But that doesn’t matter in the heat of passion. If somebody says, ‘I love you,’ and you don’t hear that very often, passion takes over and you don’t think about the health book lesson at school.”