Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
July 2002 – Even parents who grew up in the midst of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and ’70s know that times have changed for the worse. From junior high kids having oral sex in school to date rape and porn on the Internet, our culture has become the Wild Wild West of sexuality.
Now a new interactive video series attempts to help young people and their parents meet the demands of sexual purity in an increasingly filthy environment.
Sex & Young America is a curriculum package developed by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, in partnership with a veritable “who’s who” of youth- and family-oriented ministries, including Campus Crusade for Christ, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Focus on the Family, Navigators and others.
The entire curriculum package contains four videos: one for parents, one for leaders, and a “Guys Only” and “Girls Only” video. (The parents’ video is also packaged separately as Sex & Young America – The Real Deal.) The curriculum contains a compelling Sex & Young America Leaders Guide, filled with information and ways for the youth leader or parent to interact with their young people. The package also contains a workbook for the high school student.
Completely unscripted, the videos rely on more than 600 interviews undertaken with teens in eight states and 38 different locations over a period of 11 months. The young people featured in the video discuss sex openly, and with unmistakable sincerity.
In an interview with AFA Journal, Jack L. Samad, producer of Sex & Young America, said, “The program we’ve developed is 100% youth speaking to youth, related to the issues of Internet pornography, the struggles between women and men, as well as the confusion surrounding what’s appropriate when you define sexual integrity, as it relates to purity.”
Sex & Young America does contain a viewer advisory because of the explicit language and adult subject matter, and it is not suitable for young children. At the same time, however, the language is frank and honest – not exploitative or titillating – and it represents what kids face every day.
“As we embarked on this task of just listening to the youth of America, they kept saying, ‘You need to tell our parents what it’s like living today,’” Samad said. “Kids said there was a great separation between the understanding of parents and the reality of what those young people are going through and the challenges of facing a sexualized culture.”
Strength in numbers
It is the collective voice of these young people that is the strongest element of Sex & Young America, as the unvarnished truth about the environment in which Christian kids find themselves clearly comes across.
“As we talked to them, they shared with us that they didn’t want to be lectured, they didn’t want to see the same old programs where adults would point the finger at them and just deliver statistical data that they’ve heard time and time again,” Samad said. “They really wanted some helpful tools and hints on how they could negotiate difficult dating relationships and the adolescent years. They said, ‘Give us someone who has been through the trenches as we have, and who has navigated through it safely and arrived on the other side, so that they can help us.’”
That’s why Samad chose the kids themselves as the messengers. “From our polling of young people, we discovered that peer-to-peer was the most effective way to communicate truth to kids, because 87% of the information that they get and then act on comes from their peers,” he said.
Sex & Young America is also intended to equip young Christian kids to be conveyors of sexual truth themselves, as they rub shoulders with friends and classmates on a day-to-day basis. “It is better to equip young people to have the answers when they are speaking to their own peers,” Samad said. “It has more credibility coming from peers, and so we felt we could maximize the distribution of the truth by using kids, because a lot of kids are growing up in a vacuum of silence, and the market place is feeding our young people a lot of lies.”
That does not mean that Sex & Young America leaves the job of teaching the truth to young people. There is a powerful – and convicting – segment at the end of the parents’ video in which kids implore their parents to take seriously their responsibility to convey the truth about sexuality.
“The church has failed to prepare parents to prepare their kids for living in a sexualized culture,” Samad said. “Christian adults have been largely absent in the process of equipping the kids properly to survive,” a fact that led him to call it “a crisis in the faith community.”
Sex & Young America takes a giant step in the direction of meeting that crisis. 
