Engaging the Media as Partners in Teen Pregnancy Prevention

"Despite recent encouraging declines, the rates of teen pregnancy and birth in this country remain very troubling. Every year, almost one million teenage girls become pregnant, with four in ten girls experiencing at least one pregnancy before age 20. The teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States are the highest of any fully industrialized nation. Simply put, too many young people are having babies they are ill-prepared to raise - a burden that limits their ability to participate fully in American life and places their children at greater risk from the beginning.

With this sobering backdrop, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy was organized in 1996 by a diverse group of individuals who concluded that reducing the nation's rate of teen pregnancy was one of the most strategic and direct means available to improve child well-being and reduce persistent child poverty. In an effort to provide a benchmark against which progress could be measured, the Campaign set a specific goal of reducing the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. by one-third by 2005. To achieve its objectives, the Campaign adopted a two part strategy: (1) Building a more coordinated and effective grassroots movement by working with states and local communities and (2) influencing cultural values and messages by working with the entertainment media, parents, faith communities, teens and others.

Campaign Strategy

The first strategy centers on working with people in states and communities. We provide research and data they can use in their programs or coalitions and direct technical assistance through site visits and regional conferences. We give them new ideas and contacts and help them find effective ways to reduce teen pregnancy in their unique settings. The second strategy is more visible and highly-leveraged, involving a broad scale effort to influence social norms primarily through the entertainment media viewed by teens and their parents. Our rationale for targeting the entertainment media is based on a straightforward idea: no small non-profit group - or even large non-profit - will ever have the resources to communicate its core ideas powerfully and frequently enough to its target audiences through the usual method of programs and pamphlets. The problem of teen pregnancy is simply too big and diverse. Therefore, enlisting the help of entertainment media is essential to conveying important ideas often to an audience that is paying close attention.

It's fine to work with states and communities to make their efforts more research-based, more media savvy, more tolerant of differing views and diverse in the types of remedies offered. But doing so will be a hollow exercise if the entire culture, especially popular teen culture, is sending kids messages that getting pregnant at a young age is no big deal, that having sex rarely has consequences and that parents can't do anything about their children's sexual attitudes and behavior. Although the media cannot solve the problem of teen pregnancy alone, we know that we can't solve it without them...."