Teen Pregnancy Programs Begin to Target Males

When the Valley Community Clinic in North Hollywood first opened its teen clinic to males in 1993, young men were supposed to walk through the doors for free birth control and counseling on how to prevent pregnancy and disease transmission.

“It was a disaster,” said Connie Kruzan, director of youth services at the clinic. She said the guys simply didn’t show up.

The few men who did trickle in were accompanying their girlfriends. “And what do they see when they come in? They see all girls in the clinic and Women’s Day magazines on the table,” said Demetrius Navarro, one of the clinic’s health educators. “They think, ‘This place’s not for me.’ ”

Program developers at the Valley Community Clinic learned that they need to hire young male staff members who can relate to other teenagers, and get them involved in the planning process. Outreach workers then need to go where the boys are, hanging out with teenage males at area schools during food breaks and working in discussions of sexual responsibility between shots of basketball.

Although it’s still too early to formally evaluate the program’s effectiveness, Navarro believes that the new approach works. “I go back to the schools and I hear the guys pass on the information I gave them to newer guys who don’t know,” Navarro said.

Figuring men into the effort to prevent teenage pregnancy is a surprisingly new concept and, many say, one that is long overdue. Up until a couple of years ago, almost all teen pregnancy prevention programs were targeted at women, who were traditionally told to either abstain from sex or to use birth control.

Both messages left most of the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of women, said Tim Varnum, program administrator of the Ettie Lee Homes for Boys in Covina.

Boys will be boys--or so goes the stereotype. It’s one that the California Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that administers charitable funds, wants to help change with a $1.2-million grant spread out over three years. The grant will go toward local organizations that include male-oriented programs as part of their teenage pregnancy prevention efforts. Los Angeles County, with about 28% of the state’s population, accounts for one in three babies born to teenage mothers in the state.

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The foundation’s reflect a larger statewide trend in teenage pregnancy prevention. In California, where teenage mothers give birth to 192 babies every day, targeted efforts are underway to bring men back into the fold.

Thirty percent of the $48.4 million in state funds budgeted for teen pregnancy prevention is dedicated to increasing awareness of male responsibility. Included are funds that enable the state Office of Family Planning to support 23 programs in California designed specifically for males.

Many of these programs are battling negative stereotypes of a man’s role in a teenage family, particularly in high-risk communities, said Claire Brindis, director of the Center for Reproductive Health Policy Research at UC San Francisco.

Three of every four babies born to teenagers in the United States are out of wedlock, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And figures from the California Department of Health Services show that four out of five fathers do not live with teenage mothers and their children, and only one-third of the fathers visit their children more than once a week. Those norms, said Brindis, have been partly shaped by past welfare programs that, in many states, would deny benefits to families if the father lived in the house.

Brindis said responses from the young men in the programs show a tremendous hunger for programs that redefine manhood--and fatherhood.

Con Los Padres, a teenage fatherhood program at Bienvenidos Family Services in Los Angeles, aims to do just that. Osvaldo Cruz first came to Con Los Padres when, at 15, his girlfriend became pregnant. The program emphasizes the original definition of machismo, of being a man who takes care of his family both emotionally and economically. This message was the opposite of what Cruz had learned on the streets.

“When I was growing up, the definition of being a man was to be a womanizer,” said Cruz, who joined a gang in South-Central Los Angeles when he was 13.

Although the majority of teenage pregnancies are unintended, that is not always the case in gangs, said John Williams, program officer for the California Community Foundation. “Many of these people don’t think they’ll live a long time, so having a child is their way of expressing themselves, of proving they have relevance,” he said.

Cruz said his girlfriend’s pregnancy wasn’t an accident. “There was an emptiness inside of me, and I thought if I have a baby, I could give him everything I couldn’t have,” he said.

In many gangs, having a child is a sign of prestige. “It’s almost expected of you,” said Tommy Brown, vice president of the L.A. chapter of MAD DADS, or Men Against Destruction, Defending Against Drugs and Social Disorder. “If you have a kid, he can follow in your footsteps. If you’re the child of a . . . gangster, then that gives you all kinds of free passes in the community.”

Brown said undoing the “legacy” mentality of hard-core gang members presents a big challenge in teen pregnancy prevention.

Now 18 and out of gangs, Cruz speaks to other teenagers about the destructive cycle of gang life through a teen pregnancy prevention program called Jovenes Con Palabra, or Young Men with Word.

Brindis points out that changes in the American economy have made it increasingly difficult for young men to support their families. “Twenty, 30 years ago, you didn’t need to get a college degree to get a well-paying job,” she said.

Cruz, who now lives with his girlfriend and son, said he was first drawn to Con Los Padres because the program offered job referrals. Cruz thought that finding a job and supporting his family would be easy. “But I found out that no one would hire a Mexican guy with nine gang tattoos and no high school diploma.”

While program developers focus much of their attention on young men like Cruz, reaching adult males has proved to be an equally difficult challenge. Surveys show that men over 20 father two-thirds of children born to adolescent mothers in California. According to national surveys, as the age gap between the man and the teenage girl widens, the likelihood that the girl’s first sexual encounter was unwanted increases.

To address this problem, Gov. Pete Wilson increased funding of statutory rape prosecution to $8.4 million in last year’s state budget.

Yet family planning experts say the problem goes deeper than anything criminal prosecution alone can resolve. They say that although strict enforcement of statutory rape laws may deter many men, the motivation of younger girls to seek older partners also needs to be addressed.

Patricia, of North Hollywood, first had sex with a 21-year-old man when she was only 14. “I thought it would bring us closer, but it didn’t,” she said. Now 17, Patricia said teenage girls are drawn to the money and sophistication older men seem to have. “I mean, they know more than you,” she said. “If I’m going out with a 25-year-old guy, what can I offer him that he hasn’t already had? I’m just learning the rules. I have to show him that I can give him more.”

This viewpoint, Brindis said, signals deficiencies in the community. “The question is,” she said, “why can these girls get so swept away? What is she getting out of this relationship that is not available in any other way?”

Jerry Tello, director of the National Latino Fatherhood and Family Institute in Los Angeles, said part of the problem lies in the abusive or neglectful communities where many of these teenagers--both male and female--grow up. “If you live in a violent, stress-related environment, and you don’t feel special about yourself, then being close to somebody, even for a moment, is fairly attractive,” he said.