Europe’s attitude on teen
sex:
By Ann Doss Helms
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Rocky Mountain Collegian
Here are some things you might
find difficult to imagine:
Condom billboards scattered
around the South.
Sex and contraception discussed
frankly in schools.
Teen pregnancy, abortion and
AIDS rates less than half the current
level.
Northern Europe and the
American South are two very
different places, as a group of
Charlotte-area youth advocates and
adolescent health experts are well
aware. They recently returned from a
study tour of the Netherlands, France
and Germany. Their goal was to figure
out what we could learn from
countries where, by many indications,
teen-agers are far more sexually
responsible than here.
They found cultures with a level
of comfort about contraception that
was stunning even to health
professionals, cultures where most
adults believe teens will have sex and
advise them on how to do it without
harming themselves or others.
“Their attitude toward
adolescents themselves seems
different. They seem to respect them
more as individuals and give them a
level of trust for responsibility in their
actions,” said Townley Moon,
executive director of the Mecklenburg
(N.C.) Council on Adolescent
Pregnancy. “Our expectation is no sex
until marriage. Theirs is, ‘Yes, you’ll
have sex, but be responsible.’”
That’s not an attitude likely to be
embraced throughout the Carolinas.
“They go to Europe and say, ‘Look
how enlightened they are!’ I happen
to think they’re just more immoral,”
says Mecklenburg County
commissioner Bill James.
In the Carolinas and across the
United States, teen pregnancy rates
have declined in recent years. A 1998
federal report credits abstinence and
contraception - fewer teens are having
sex, and those who do are using more
birth control, it said.
But the declines look minuscule
when compared with figures from the
countries the group visited. U.S. youth
have more teen births, more sexually
transmitted diseases and more
abortions than their European peers,
and according to one international
survey, they start having sex younger.
That is why tour participants
argue that we must find a way to blend
European openness about
contraception with American
messages about sexual abstinence.
“When we only tell our kids the
negative side, and their own bodies
are telling them the positive, and so
are the media, they’ve got to be
thinking, ‘Someone’s lying here,”’
said Linda Berne, a UNC Charlotte
Many students believe ‘Dead Roommate’
By Ralph Vigoda
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Note to college students:
Do not wish your roommate dead.
Do not encourage him to kill
himself.
Do not in any way hasten his end.
It will not get you a perfect grade-
point average.
That happens only in the movies -
as in the summer release “Dead Man
on Campus,” in which two students
with grades in the tank go looking
for a suicidal roommate. If he offs
himself, the college will compensate
the pair for their presumed trauma
with straight A’s.
The notion of a “dead man’s
clause” in any college policy would
be too absurd to bother debunking -
except that the legend has been
circulating on campuses nationwide
for 15 to 20 years and that, for just as
long, otherwise bright people have
been buying it.
William Fox, a folklorist who has
studied the myth, found that about
just right or all wrong?
health education professor and tour
organizer. “If they decide the
abstinence people are lying, they go
toward uninhibited, unprotected sex.”
Berne and Barbara Huberman, a
former Charlottean who works for
Washington-based Advocates for
When we only tell our kids the negative side, and
their own bodies are telling them the positive, and so
are the media, they’ve got to be thinking, Someone’s
lying here
Youth, organized the 12-day summer
tour to encourage academic research
and advocacy for teens. Forty-two
people, including nine from the
Charlotte area, signed on.
Most already were sold on the
notion that the European approach to
sexuality has advantages, Berne said;
that’s part of what motivated them to
commit the time and money to going.
The only members of the “abstinence
only” camp were two teen journalists,
sent by the Henry J. Kaiser Family
Foundation.
Even the veteran health
professionals were astonished by the
bombardment of safe-sex and
contraception messages they saw. As
the bus looped around Paris, the group
counted nine condom billboards. The
Dutch had massive media campaigns
with slogans such as “Your condom
or mine?”, “I’ll have safe sex or no
sex,” and “STDs are available
somewhere near you. Condoms are
too.”
In all three countries, condoms
were available from street-side
vending machines and clinics offered
free medical contraception to teens
without parents’ permission.
Emergency contraception - the
controversial “morning-after” pill just
cleared for marketing in the United
States - is widely used.
Sexuality was incorporated into
many areas of study in schools -
literature, biology, social studies. The
group chuckled a bit at one European
life-skills text: A page on doing
laundry, a page on grocery shopping,
a page on sex.
While Europeans have long had
a more liberal attitude toward sex than
Americans, the current safe-sex
campaigns are a response to AIDS in
the 1980 s, Berne said.
Contraception is treated as a
public health issue; parents and
churches are free to teach their own
values about whether to have sex but
generally, they don’t block efforts to
teach contraception.
“Some of them were sort of
astonished at our abstinence
campaign,” said Chan Roush, a
UNCC graduate student in health
two-thirds of the students he
questioned at two New York state
colleges believed it.
Listen to W. Richard Ott, the
provost of Alfred University in
western New York state:
“Last semester, a young man
hanged himself in one of our resident
suites, which housed five other
students. The mother of one of them
called me, the president of the school
and the dean, insisting that her son
was entitled to a 4.0 based on what
she thought was common
knowledge.”
Hear it from Phillip Jones, the dean
of students at the University of lowa,
where a fraternity pledge died of
alcohol poisoning a few years ago:
“The student government office got
numerous calls about the policy on
this. It got to be a discussion of who
would get all A’s, his roommate in the
dorm where he lived or the other
people in the fraternity.”
And this from David Sacker, a 1997
Swarthmore University grad:
“The situation came up with a
National Campus News nursil „ Mtr!4
administration. “They think it’s pretty
naive. There were kids that we talked
to that weren’t going to have sex, but
if they were, they darn well knew
what to do.”
To James, the county
commissioner, claiming to separate
Linda Berne, UNC Charlotte health education professor
health issues from morality is a
deception.
“Comprehensive sexuality
education is many things, but one of
the things it is is moral indoctrination:
‘Kids are gonna have sex, go ahead
and do it, grab a handful of condoms
and have fun,’ “ he said.
Gaston County, N.C., school
board member Brenda Hamilton
agreed, saying pregnancy rates are
insignificant compared with values.
“It may lower the birth rate, but
the morality and self-esteem, I can’t
imagine how low that would be,” she
said.
Tour participants said the
European approach does teach values:
Responsibility, love and respect for
oneself and one’s partner.
European teens tend to practice
“serial monogamy” - a sexual
relationship with one partner at a time,
which is taken seriously and tends to
last a year or two, said tour
participants, who talked to European
experts, teens and parents.
They frown on relationships
between older men and teen-age girls,
a source of many U.S. pregnancies.
Abortions and unwanted pregnancies
are viewed as irresponsible, tour
participants said.
"Both the liberals and
conservatives were so opposed to
abortion that they met in middle
ground,” Berne said.
LaCole Fender, a neonatal nurse
who lives in Gaston County, joked
that she felt like she was going into
Babylon when she got to Amsterdam.
But something struck her as a mother:
While American parents live in fear
of kidnappings and child abuse, Dutch
moms would leave their babies sitting
in strollers outside shops, apparently
without fear.
“There’s a sense of the
community taking care of all the
kids,” she said. “Yet we feel like we’re
so much more moral and have a
handle on the kids because we tell
them ‘Don’t do it.’”
Melissa Harris, 17, a Teen People
reporter from West Chester, Ohio, is
a self-described conservative who
signed an abstinence-until-marriage
friend of mine. His roommate had a
heart attack. Immediately, the rumor
started circulating that he was going
to get a 4.0. ... I remember people
saying it sort of made sense.”
So, with one movie out and another
similarly themed film, “Dead Man’s
Curve”, on the way, it is time to state
firmly the not so obvious: You can
search your college handbook from
table of contents to index and not find
a dead man’s clause.
“We check all these things out and
have found no school with such a
policy,” said David Mikkelson, who
runs an urban-legend Web site
(www.snopes.com) and gathers such
stories for the San Fernando Valley
(Calif.) Folklore Society.
The most prevalent version is this:
A student whose roommate commits
suicide automatically receives a 4.0
for the current term. According to
Mikkelson, however, there are other
morbid provisions: The death must
occur in the dorm room or during the
last six weeks of the term - when,
under typical school policies, courses
vow. She told The Cincinnati Enquirer
she was both shocked and enlightened
by what she saw on the tour. While
she didn’t shift her personal values,
she said she became convinced that
American youths and parents need
more information about
contraception.
“Sex is a positive thing over
there. Everything about it is negative
here,” she told The Enquirer. “I don’t
want people to think I’m liberal
because I’m not... but when you go
to a country and realize how much
your country is failing in what they’re
doing, you have to change a little bit.”
Figuring out how to meld the two
messages - safe sex and no sex - is
the biggest challenge the tour
participants see ahead.
U.S. pregnancy-prevention
media campaigns pale beside those in
Europe - they’re not as catchy, not as
informative and not nearly as
widespread, the Charlotte-area tour
participants said. They’d love to see
better access to contraception and a
massive education campaign in the
Carolinas, one that unites the people
who emphasize use of contraceptives
and those who favor abstinence.
“That’s going to be the tricky
part, getting both groups to say,
'We’re going to let you in,”’ said
Roush, the graduate student.
Tricky indeed. Moon, the
Mecklenburg Council on Adolescent
Pregnancy director, said she’s heard
people say there’s no need for change
here, that higher American pregnancy
rates are caused by greater acceptance
of young, unwed pregnancy among
African Americans and Hispanics.
In fact, while national teen birth
rates are twice as high for those
minority groups as for whites, white
American teen-agers still had 39
babies per 1,000 girls in 1995 - three
times the rate in Germany, the next
highest country.
“It is not a race problem,” Moon
said. “It is an economic problem.”
North Carolina law requires
abstinence-based sex education in
public schools and plenty of public
officials in North and South Carolina
say that’s the only message kids
should get.
South Carolina Gov. David
Beasley is a strong advocate of the
abstinence-only approach, saying
contraceptives give teens false
confidence.
“A condom gives you the
courage to get in the back seat, but
you don’t use it once you get back
there,” he once said.
Mecklenburg commissioner
James says he has no quarrel with
local advocates going overseas to
study teen sexuality. But back home,
he said, their job is to live by the law,
including a 1997 ordinance James
introduced that forbids counseling
young people about sexuality without
parents’ consent.
cannot be dropped.
Another variation includes a sliding
grade scale: To get the 4.0, the death
must be witnessed by the roommate.
Otherwise, the GPA drops to a 3.4.
And if there is more than one
roommate, the best the school can
offer multiple survivors is 3.5.
As nutty as legends may be, say
those who track such things, most
have some basis in fact, and this one
has. Schools usually have policies that
deal with bereavement, and students
who suffer trauma can drop classes,
postpone exams, or take incompletes
without penalty.
Alfred University’s Ott said his
school has an extensive array of such
support services.
“But there is no 4.0 rule,” he said,
“even though the rumor is quite
persistent.”
And extraordinarily long-lived
“I first heard about it when a fellow
gave a paper on it at a folklore
conference in 1985,” said William
Ellis, a professor of English and
American studies at Pennsylvania
Brethren Cult seeks
members from colleges
By Allison Sherry
Colorado State University
Rocky Mountain Collegian
FORT COLLINS, Colo. In
front of a camp-style dinner at
dusk with Horsetooth Reservoir as
their backdrop, four members of a
Bible-toting cult called the
Brethren sat thoughtful and
somber, carefully choosing words
to express their admittedly extreme
spiritual lifestyle.
“We believe that Christ lived
the purest example of Christian
life,” said member Jerry Williams.
“We live like him ... we wish
everyone could be this happy.”
Williams, along with about 110
other Brethren members
nationwide, live a nomadic life.
They travel around, mostly to
college towns, striking up
conversations with young adults
about right and wrong and God’s
word, With hopes of finding
rtcnillf for their “church.”
Their lives are simple, and ’
their quest is to abstain fjtoht tihat
they call the * ‘complications” of the r
real world. They do not work or
own many material possessions.
They claim to have nd income and
say they live day-to-day knowing’
that God will provide for them.
The few members now living
in Fort Collins, Colo., are in town
primarily looking to recruit
Colorado State University students
to their ranks. They say other
group members are camped out in
other college towns doing the same
thing.
Experts on cults and parents
of recruits are fighting the group’s
efforts with waves of bulletins
warning college students not to
associate with the Brethren. They
say the group destroys its members
psychologically, coercing them into
cutting ties with family and friends
and into sorting through trash bins
for food.
“They (The Brethren) are
extremely dangerous,” said Hal
Mansfield, director of the Religious
Movement Resource Center, an
organization that follows the
movements of religious cults.
“They are based on deception and
mind control ... It’s very
troubling.”
During a recent interview,
members of the Brethren said all
they do is seek peace and promote
God’s love and will among his
people. Don Busweiler, a member
of the group since June of 1995,
said the people who are the most
offended are the people who don’t
understand them.
“It’s bogus,” said Busweiler, a
former fashion designer from Long
Island, N.Y. “The parents will try
to get a hold of their kid (who is
with us) and ‘de-program’ them
from thinking the way they do.
They are doing exactly what they
are accusing us of doing.”
Both Busweiler and Dan
Garcia, who is also with the group
State University, Hazelton, and
president of the International Society
for Contemporary Legend Research.
“At that time, it was presented as
extremely commonplace on
campus.”
La Salle University's new dean of
students, Joseph Cicala, who has
worked at three colleges in
Pennsylvania and two in New York,
said he had heard students talk about
the “policy” everywhere he has been.
“It gets in the groundwater and just
spreads,” he said. But, he added, “a
policy like that is philosophically
impossible, because grades are not
regulated by the institutions but by
professors.”
Catrin Einhorn, a senior at
Haverford College, learned of the
supposed rule during her last year in
high school in Chicago from two
friends who were at college. She
heard it again when she arrived at
Haverford.
“I don’t think I believed it,” she
said, “but I didn’t totally disbelieve
it. College is so mythological, you
hanging out in Fort Collins, said
they have spoken with their families
- but they conceded that such
communication does not have high
priority in their lives.
“Relationships have a certain
pull,’’ Williams said, thoughtfully
scratching his beard. “But they can
be used as a tool to pull you away
from God.”
Busweiler agreed, saying, “If
it’s God’s will, I will see my mom.”
While the cult has more men
than women, there are about 40
“sisters” scattered in groups
throughout the United States,
Williams said. Often times, he
added, men and women who travel
together distract each other from
God’s word. For that reason, the
groups usually travel in single-sex
groups.
Mansfield said members of the
Brethren are especially dangerous to
unsuspecting college students
because they come off as normal and
innocuous.
* “You don’t say (to a new
recruit): ‘Come in so we can
brainwash you,’” Mansfield said.
“They are not dumb ... I can see
them being harmless if there was
one set of parents that was upset or
one former member speaking out,
but there are dozens and dozens of
families upset There are so many
former members saying this is a
lifestyle of destruction.”
Larry Wilcox counts himself
among the Brethren’s victims. He
has been trying to track down his
son, Bart, with whom he hasn’t
spoken in seven years. Bart Wilcox
joined the group in 1991 while he
was a sophomore at the University
of Idaho. Larry Wilcox said his
family found out Bart's decision
after receiving a letter from him that
stated he had asked his roommate
to dispose of all his “worldly goods.”
The family received two more letters
from Bart, but nothing more.
“(Members) are indoctrinated
to run from their parents,” Larry
Wilcox said. “I don’t want to tell
Bart what to d 0... but we just expect
communication.”
Wilcox said he spends several
hours each week talking to a vast
network of parents whose sons and
daughters are also members of the
Brethren. With help from officials
at the American Family Foundation,
the parents communicate via e-mail
and telephone, warning colleges and
media organizations when the
Brethren arrives in their towns. The
network also attempts to track each
of the group’s nomadic members.
Williams said such parental
worries and the accusations often
attached to them are unfair.
“We’re just radical,” he said.
“They are saying our most cherished
beliefs are programmed ... it’s very
offensive.”
Busweiler agreed.
“I needed a good
brainwashing,” he said, noting that
his former fashion designer life was
self-righteous and evil.
legend
hear so many things about it, that I'd
say a lot of kids accept it as true"
Charlie Kovas, a 1997 graduate of
Vanderbilt University in Nashville
who now works in Washington,
remembers a tragedy in which the dead
man’s clause was all the talk on
campus. A football player, after a light
with his girlfriend, fell to his death
through a dormitory window.
“People said. Oh, that’s awful,' '
Kovas said. “Then they said,' 1 wonder
if his roommate will get straight As?'
We heard that the girlfriend got all A s,
and I can tell you with certainty that
people believed it"
According to Fox, the folklorist, the
rumor speaks to an obsession with
grades and the feeling that they often
are arbitrary, a matter of luck rather
than merit.
But it also is a slap at college
administrators, argues Simon Bronncr,
a professor of American studies at
Pennsylvania State University,
Harrisburg, and author of “Piled High
and Deeper”, a book about the folklore
of student life.