Elayne Bennett - Daughters in Danger: Helping Our Girls Thrive in Todays Culture

Praise for Elayne Bennett and Daughters in Danger

In her widely admired Best Friends and Best Men programs, Elayne Bennett has achieved remarkable success in helping inner-city boys and girls support each other in avoiding sex, drugs, and drinking and in building a strong character and positive future. In Daughters in Danger, a personal and passionate call to action, she lays bare the cultural roots of our current scourge of dating violence and sexual assault and spells out what all of usparents, schools, universities, and young people themselvesmust do to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

THOMAS LICKONA, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION EMERITUS, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT CORTLAND; AUTHOR, CHARACTER MATTERS

There is no higher calling than protecting Americas children. In Daughters in Danger Elayne Bennett does just that in a vivid way.

BILL OREILLY, ANCHOR, FOX NEWS CHANNEL

Elayne Bennett has done more to improve the lives of young girls and boys in Americaparticularly those from poor neighborhoodsthan anyone in America. Best Friends and Best Men have provided practical guidance about avoiding pitfalls like early sexuality, drug use, and alcohol abuse. Both programs go far beyond abstinence education, offering life coaching, a caring community, and college scholarships. These programs dont just warn, they inspire. The light Bennett kindles illuminates whole communities.

MONA CHAREN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

2013 Elayne Bennett

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Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Nelson Books and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

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Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

ISBN: 978-1-5955-5451-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013930492

Printed in the United States of America

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To all the Best Friends and Diamond Girls everywhere.
You enriched my life immeasurably.

Contents

by Meg Meeker, MD

America has a brilliantly kept secret: our teenage daughters (and sons) are living in the midst of an epidemic which threatens their physical, sexual, emotional, and mental health every day. No one can see it because it hides behind smiles and clothing. Even many who are infected dont know it because the majority of the time it has no symptoms. What is this epidemic? It is the epidemic of sexually transmitted infections among our youth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 20 million Americans contract a new infection every year and almost half of those infections are in our young people. The fact that most Americans dont know about it poses a serious problem, because we cant fix a problem we dont see.

The great irony, however, is the fact that while we live with this epidemic, we allow the aggressive and unparalleled use of sex in the marketing of products to our children. Every day our daughters are barraged with sexual messages through music, clothing stores, computers, in movie theaters, and on television. Our daughters learn through the constant stream of these messages that their identities and values stem from being sexy to boys (and other girls) from the time they are in elementary school through college. As adults, we see the same sexual messages and are bothered, but dismiss our discomfort. We rationalize that free speech is important, and furthermore, we convince ourselves that sexually charged messages arent going to change our daughters behaviors. How wrong we are.

In Daughters in Danger, Elayne Bennett brilliantly traces the roots of this sexualization of our daughters. She describes how well-intentioned feminism paved the way for the degradation of women (particularly young girls) and then meticulously elucidates the fall-out. With unnerving clarity, she educates us about the price that our daughters are paying and substantiates her teaching with solid research. She exposes the disturbingly high rates of sexual and physical assaults young women endure on even the most prestigious college campuses. She discusses the disintegration of morality and teaches us why our girls suffer from unacceptably high rates of low self-esteem. As you read Daughters in Danger, prepare yourself to be disturbed. The hard part in knowing the truths that Bennett outlines is that they hurt. But this is a time when parents, educators, and physicians must hurt; because our daughters need our help and the only way we are motivated to act is to be shaken by the real dangers they face.

Physicians and medical organizations have not adequately educated our young girls because many believe that the answers for those who may be sexually active is to give them birth control and condoms. They know that this is not the best answer, but physicians live with a bias. Many feel that they are dealing with a runaway train. They perceive that all teens will be sexually active because of the highly charged sexual culture impacting teens. And while physicians know that their teen patients face serious health dangers if they have sex, they feel that they have little influence over helping their patients. So, many physicians, like sex educators, simply opt for damage control. That is, they teach our daughters to make sure they insist their boyfriends use condoms.

Politicians dont let the secret out because having a platform promoting abstinence from sex, drugs, and alcohol garners very few votes. Furthermore, companies earn billions of dollars using sex to sell their products and any politician who stood up to these giantsthe movie industry, clothing companies, and the magazine industryand told them to stop using sex to entice our kids to use their products would lose the support of those companies. Besides, supporting abstinence makes politicians appear prudish, outdated, and fanatical. The irony is that if a politician spoke out to companies who sexualize our daughters they would be anything but those things. It is the politicians who support Planned Parenthood, who push condom use on kids, who are really medically outdated. According to the NIH, condoms dont do a good enough job against preventing STIs in kids. (You can read about this online under NIH condom report.) But politicians dont know that.

Parents, unfortunately, remain in the dark as well. We are busy raising our kids and trying to figure out which schools our kids should attend, what age they must be to have a cell phone, and how to get them motivated to study. We are so overwhelmed with the choices we face in parenting that paying attention to the very real, but ugly dangers our daughters face is easy to overlook. We dont want to know how tough the world can be for our daughters, so we subconsciously avoid looking. And many parents erroneously believe that we have little influence over our daughters behaviors. Many believe that when our daughters hit their teen years, we lose them. We are taught that since peers influence their decisions more than we do, we must simply hover in the background and wait until the teen years pass. When they are older, we are taught, our daughters might want to listen to what we have to say. So we stay silent on the important issues our daughters face because we believe what we hear. The truth is, however, that parents (or parent surrogates) hold all of the power in our daughters lives.