consequence credibility

In any society, individuals rely, for their safety and social acceptance, on the information given to them from others (especially higher-status others) about what risks are involved in the activities of life, and what consequences are likely to arise from wrong actions. I think one important component of pervasive and persistent ideologies entails the capacity of such to convincingly persuade potential adherents of a) the undesirability of the consequences they warn of, and the inevitability of those consequences following the wrong acts which are proscribed under that system.One of the ways in which such controlling ideologies engender and maintain the credibility of claims about consequences is through the management of information sources; for example, recently in the United States, a certain segment of society has become deeply and increasingly interested in restricting information about sexuality and birth control to young people. They promote the idea of sexual education per se, like most Americans, but their conception (heh) of sexual education is defined by its complete reliance on the supremacy of an abstinent paradigm to successfully guide young people. Empirical studies have shown that this method, whatever other merits it may have, is, at the very least, no more effective than others at inculcating abstinent behavior; in fact, it has been correlated with higher rates of teenage pregnancy and STD transmission than other methods which aim to educate by providing information rather than what amounts to a prohibition on the transmission of information. This radical restriction of information serves two purposes: it creates a situation where many disenfranchised, uninformed young women become pregnant, and it limits the capacity of young people to question the information, or lack thereof, being presented by eliminating awareness of divergent or contradictory information, thereby enhancing the credibility of the consequences, real or otherwise, associated with, for example, pre-marital, protected sex.In my opinion, the worst part of this is the disingenuous faux-concern with stopping teenage, non-marital pregnancy and STD transmission. The proponents of this pedagogical strategy are either unaware of its inefficacy or dishonest about their intentions, and society as a whole can ill-afford to suffer the effects of either mass-scale ignorance or fraud when the health, happiness, safety, and success of an entire generation, and especially the female portion of that generation, is dependent on the good faith and honesty of its elders.