Sexual Risk Avoidance Education

Sexual Risk Avoidance Education

Sexual Risk Avoidance Education is a sex education approach based on primary prevention or risk avoidance. This approach is used to address many risk behaviors for adolescents such as smoking, drug use, and underage drinking. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, treats “Ever had sexual intercourse” as one of the risk behaviors they measure: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/YRBSDataSummaryTrendsReport2019-508.pdf.

Sexual Risk Avoidance Education emphasizes the following points:

• The holistic, individual, and societal, benefits associated with personal responsibility, self-regulation, goal setting, healthy decision-making, and a focus on the future
• The advantage of refraining from non-marital sexual activity in order improve the future prospect and physical and emotional health of youth.
• The increased likelihood of avoiding poverty when youth attain self-sufficiency and emotional maturity before engaging in sexual activity
• The foundational components of healthy relationships and their impact on the formation of healthy marriages and safe and stable families
• How other youth risk behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, increases the risk for teen sex