Greetings to the teen pregnancy prevention community!
As you will quickly realize by my informal tone, this blog post is specifically written for the teen pregnancy prevention community. I consider myself a part of that community for the past ten years. I’m known for a few trainings that I offer: We’ve Been Framed! Secrets from the world of advertising that build public support for young people and A New Vocabulary for Teen Pregnancy Prevention. I’ve conducted these workshops over 120 times since 2001 in 19 states. While I’ve maintained contact with a lot of individuals and organizations that I met along the way, I’ve never actually communicated with them as a group. I conceived of this assignment as the beginning of a dialog with the community about a little discussed ethical dilemma. I would imagine sending them all an email inviting them to read and react to my blog post. With any luck, a conversation would ensue. With this as a goal, I needed to be more provocative and pointed than I would usually be in written correspondence – thus my choice of the first person and my use of (too many) parenthetical comments. Following is a draft of the email:
Greetings from Minnesota!
You are receiving this email because at some point in the last few years, you attended a framing or communications workshop conducted by me – Glynis Shea.
I’ve been thinking a lot about our challenges now that we have more funding and political influence than ever before. In the training I challenged you to think about your language. These days, I’ve been wondering how we can take it to the next level and move beyond language.
Please visit my blog
and share your thoughts and ideas with me. As always, let me know how I can help support your marketing and communications efforts. Take care and good luck with your grants!
g/
gaping ethical hole
Our community can be very righteous in our moral stance towards sex ed. We characterize a lot of our work as being about young people’s “rights” despite the fact that they aren’t very well defined. I thought this assignment would be a good chance for me to explore the ethics of the community claiming to be advocates for the rights of young people while denying some of those rights because they make us uncomfortable or are not politically expedient.
Both sides claim to represent a moderated approach.
When I was describing how the two “camps” are polarized, criticize each other and defend their own positions, I realized that Aristotle’s mean offered some insight. Neither camp would see them selves as either excessive or deficient, but our conflict forces us to the extremes. When we persist in making these contrasting points (us vs. them) we reinforce that position to the public.
| | Excess | Mean | Deficient |
| Values | Ab-Ed | ? | CSE |
| Science | CSE | ? | Ab-Ed |
| Youth Rights | CSE | ? | Ab-Ed |
| Parents Rights | Ab-Ed | ? | CSE |
…modified by a moralistic one.
The discussion about the “religious right’s” ownership of morality when it comes to adolescent sexuality (perhaps all sexuality?) is well trod ground and I chose not to stomp through it again. It bears mentioning that some of the more classic virtues (purity, chastity) are shared by both the CSE and Ab-Ed communities, but legislated and narrowly defined by the Ab-Ed advocates. I will likely never include either purity or chastity on my own personal ethic list!
They want to know how to tell when they are in love.
I’m not sure Aristotle would be as immediately relevant to the young people in sex ed classes, but surely Gilligan’s discussion of caring would contribute a lot to their discussions about positive relationships.
And we’ve got to infuse this orientation into everything we do.
While I was consistently frustrated by my struggle to read Aristotle, I did appreciate his emphasis on the practical and observable. Part of my job is to take research and theory and apply it to the work of the youth-serving community. I wanted to be clear, in this blog post, about ways we could actually practice the virtue I propose.
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