States that accept Title V grant money must match every four federal dollars with three state dollars, and they distribute these funds through health departments to schools and community organizations. Every state, except California, has received funding from this program at some point, and currently half of states do. Under the Obama Administration, there was a notable shift in abstinence education funding toward more evidence-based sex education initiatives.
The current landscape of federal sex education programs is detailed in Table 2 and includes newer programs such as Personal Responsibility Education Program PREP , the first federal funding stream to provide grants to states in support of evidence-based sex education that teach about both abstinence and contraception.
In addition, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program TPPP was established to more narrowly focus on teen pregnancy prevention, providing grants to replicate evidence-based program models, as well as funding for implementation and rigorous evaluation of new and innovative models. Nonetheless, support for abstinence education programs continues. Nine organizations sued in Washington, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, arguing that their grants were wrongfully terminated.
Federal judges in each of the four lawsuits ruled in favor of the organizations, allowing the programs to continue until the end of their grant cycle in At the same time, the Trump Administration announced the availability of new funding for the TPP program with updated guidelines. These new rules require grantees to replicate one of two abstinence programs—one that follows a sexual risk avoidance model, and one that follows a sexual risk reduction model— in order to receive funding.
This marks a sharp departure from the rules under the Obama administration, which allowed grantees to choose from a list of 44 evidence-supported programs that vary by approach, target population, setting, length, and intended outcomes. In , a nine-year congressionally mandated study that followed four of the programs during the implementation of the Title V AOUM program found that abstinence-only education had no effect on the sexual behavior of youth.
Among those who did have sex, there was no difference in the mean age at first sexual encounter or the number of sexual partners between the two groups. The study also found that youth that participated in the programs were no more likely to engage in unprotected sex than youth who did not participate. While teens who participated in these programs could identify types of STIs at slightly higher rates than those who did not, program youth were less likely to correctly report that condoms are effective at preventing STIs.
A more recent review also suggests that these programs are ineffective in delaying sexual initiation and influencing other sexual activity. A study that found an abstinence-only intervention to be effective in delaying sexual activity within a two-year period received significant attention as the first major study to do so. Instead, the evaluated programs differed from traditional abstinence-only programs in three major ways: they did not discuss the morality of a decision to have sex; they encouraged youth to wait until they were ready to have sex, rather than until marriage; and they did not criticize the use of condoms.
There is, however, considerable evidence that comprehensive sex education programs can be effective in delaying sexual initiation among teens, and increasing use of contraceptives, including condoms. The Trump administration continues to shift the focus towards abstinence-only education, revamping the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and increasing federal funding for sexual risk avoidance programs.
Grant Awards. Funding Opportunities. Managing Your Federal Grant. Purpose The purpose of the Title V State Sexual Risk Avoidance Education SRAE Program is to fund states and territories to implement education exclusively on sexual risk avoidance that teaches youth to voluntarily refrain from sexual activity.
Education on sexual risk avoidance must ensure that the unambiguous and primary emphasis and context for each topic described below is a message to youth that normalizes the optimal health behavior of delaying sexual activity until marriage.
What We Do. Success Stories. Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. Grant Awards. Funding Opportunities. The study is based on a final follow-up survey conducted with youth, 18 to 55 months after they began participating in the study, in three separate cohorts.
Findings indicate that the Life Skills Education Component had little or no impact on sexual abstinence or activity. Youth in the Life Skills AE group and control AE group reported similar rates of sexual abstinence, numbers of sexual partners, and ages at first sex. However, youth in the Life Skills AE group were also no more likely than their counterparts in the control AE group to have engaged in unprotected sex sex without a condom , contrary to concerns that Title V, Section programs might, through their exclusive focus on abstinence, put youth at increased risk of unprotected sex.
The Life Skills Education Component did affect certain potential mediators of teen sex, most notably expectations to abstain and views supportive of abstinence.
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