This project analyzes abstinence-only education from the federal to the local level, with a primary focus on the implementation activities of local organizations. This federal program aims to prevent teen pregnancy by focusing exclusively on sexual abstinence until marriage. In addition to a discourse analysis of the federal policy and legislative debates and a quantitative analysis of the statewide programs, ethnographic analysis will examine two local programs in the outer-boroughs of New York City, including a nonprofit organization and a faith-based charity group. The research considers the impact of devolution on the implementation of social policy. Looking specifically at agendas on gender and sexuality, how are these agendas transformed as they move from the federal to the local level? What factors explain divergence in program implementation? The government is increasingly relying on nonprofits and faith-based organizations to deliver direct services, but to what effect? This question gains immediacy, as the federal government actively seeks an expanded role for the faith-based community in social service provision, from abstinence programs to job training. This research argues that there has been a fundamental shift in the scale of government, from the federal to the local through the processes of devolution. This has occasioned a shift in the means of governance, increasingly done through community self-regulation and community actors such as nonprofit and faith-based organizations. These trends affect an array of social programs and impact society more broadly. Abstinence-only education is part of an overall shift in the federal agenda towards family values social programming, including responsible fatherhood and marriage promotion programs. The abstinence program has grown by 1,500% over the last decade. We have little idea what constitutes an abstinence program in practice, nor if successful abstinence programs are replicable. As a new generation of youth grows up under an abstinence agenda, we need to know what kinds of messages are being transmitted through these programs and how these messages are incorporated in the understandings of youth about themselves, their sexuality, and the appropriate role of men and women in U.S. society. Thus the broader impacts of this project stem from its contribution to academic, policymaker and practitioner understandings of the specific activities of abstinence programs and the types of organizations involved in youth education and sexuality-related programs. This study has social policy relevance outside of academic debates as it examines the intersection of two major trends in direct service provision: an explicit emphasis on moral values in social programs and the role of faith-based and nonprofit organizations in service delivery.
