If you happened to look beyond page 6, past the sycophant details of Paris’ re-arrest and childish antics, before the latest sports headline on Barry Bond’s 747th home run, if you tunneled through all the complaints on the Soprano’s finale episode, you could find a few paragraphs on a troubling case of a boy in Georgia who’s 10 year “Sex offender” sentence was thrown out by a Judge, to be appealed by the state attorney general that very same day. That boy is still in jail. Former President Jimmy Carter appealed to the courts that the boy be released. The judge himself claimed that the sentence was a “Grave miscarriage of justice….” and former jurors claimed themselves that they felt the sentence was to harsh. The boy was 17 when the consensual act occurred, the girl, 15. Genarlow Wilson, honor student and football star, is now 21 and a part of the Georgia penal system. It would be so easy to tell you what I would do as an adult with a pre-teen daughter and even easier to divulge the age of my first experience, but then this story loses its luster and becomes a cliché. Simply put, this case posed a question to me. Why are we as a community still afraid to talk to our teenagers about the responsibilities of sex and sexual experimentation?

When I posed that same question to an old friend and taxi driver on my way home from Manhattan, I had to ask it a little differently. I abruptly asked him if he had had “The Talk” with his son. His son is thirteen years of age. Between the similes, giggles and obvious embarrassment that a woman had asked such a question, he proceeded to tell me how he relayed the message of sexual experimentation by telling his son that he should not have a girlfriend. When I asked why he told his son he should not be dating. He told him that he was too young and should be thinking about his future, not about a girl. A watered down version of the abstinence talk I surmised and I began to wonder how many more people were out there with soon to be teenage children having an abbreviated version of “The Talk” with their children to be free from their own embarrassment?
Now everybody knows that teenagers are having sex. Sex is in almost every movie, every video and every song that they are listening to on the radio. Also, if their mother’s and father’s are still together, (even if they are not) every once in a blue moon have heard the cries of passion from the “big room”. Getting together is human nature. We can’t hide that same urge from these adolescents. Just think, if we are looking at cute little Ashanti, running around high school, seeking revenge on a boy named “John Tucker” you better believe the same thing is happening in the school your teenager is going to every day. Parochial or public, the producers had to get the material from somewhere and I am sure as good businessmen, they asked their target audience.

The point is that it’s not all fun and games. Article after article notes that sexual assaults among teenagers are on the rise and teenage pregnancy is moderate. Still no one wants to have “The Talk” with their kids. Few school systems allow detailed education on these offenses, let alone condom distribution, AIDS or Homosexuality. We’re just getting by with the “How babies are born” version of sex education and making teen pair up with a partner to take care of an infant doll for a few weeks, just to get a good grade in health class. We’ve got the Amber Alert, “Officer Friendly” and parental controls for the little ones, but once they get past 12, it’s about drugs and drug dealers, the war on terror, physical abuse, and finishing high school. All those things are good. However, when it comes time for the nitty gritty, the real issues we need to talk to these kids about, some of us tread so lightly, that we end up with kids in jail that don’t need to be and states making rules for us because we didn’t stand up to the Christian right. Do we really need a group who still believes in 2007 that abstinence education is the most effective way to reach this age group, creating laws for us that end up spending our tax dollar and wasting children’s lives? Do we really need some distant, unapproachable organization making decisions for a group who is at the age where they are most vulnerable and need our help and guidance, just because we are too ashamed or don’t have enough time to have the “Talk”?

This country has open forums with debate on the issue of homosexuality, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, the popular topic of conversation when it comes to teen sex is abstinence vs. acceptance. The years go by and the same statistics rise and fall. More babies with babies, more stories of girls getting gang raped in high school bathrooms. We waste our time not talking about these issues and it leads us down a path to allowing laws to be created that do not follow the needs of the people they affect. Cheating everyone involved when the punishment is so severe. All that time and money spent to try those cases could have been used to educate that same group and keep them from making choices that could be wrong for them in the end.

I’ll bring back the cliché sentence and say “Yes, it is different then when I was a teenager.” We worried so little about the issues of sex because it was the last thing on our minds (of course I am a woman). Now we have a responsibility to protect our children from everything that is happening in this world and we should do that by taking the time to find out what is going on in theirs. Watch their movies, go out with their friends. Don’t just trade babysitting with your girlfriend so that you can have a night off with your man. As a single mother myself, I know it’s tough to get that free time, that time alone, but it’s not right if I don’t know what’s going on in my daughter’s head. It’s not just the parental controls on the remotes, or the church youth group and choir. It’s not just health class or the “What is child abuse” assembly, it’s giving them everything they need to go out in their world and make the appropriate decisions because they will definitely be different than ours. We need to tell them what the risk is, so that we don’t have another precious Genarlow in jail, another life ruined. He looks like his mother had the “Talk” with him. The truth is, if another mother had the “Talk” with her kids, and another with hers, and another, and another, someone would have known to put that video camera down.

(this is an opinion made by the writer)