Preparing young women

When it comes to health and well-being, a major obstacle young women face is obtaining the life skills necessary to make the right decisions about their lives and bodies.

“I was absolutely shocked when I asked a group of girls in a classroom what ‘sexual consent’ meant and none of them knew,” said Helen Grieco, founder of B.R.A.V.E. People, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping violence and its impact on people. (BRAVE is an acronym for Building Resources for Anti-Violence Education.)

“Young teen girls think they can’t get pregnant if they have sex in the shower or that using two condoms is safer than one. There’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

Grieco is gearing up to offer a 12-week summer course for young women focusing on health, safety, healthy relationships and economic literacy, areas of education in which she feels young women are severely lacking.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t get a good sex education and didn’t understand how my body worked,” said Grieco. “That was a dangerous situation to be in.”

While human interaction courses are taught in the sophomore year of high school, Grieco feels these classes are taught too late, and with a focus on “abstinence only,” sex education doesn’t provide the well-rounded education teen girls need to make responsible choices.

“It’s a shocker to me to learn that in this day and age girls think they can’t get pregnant by having sex in the shower,” said Grieco. “It’s sad.”

Even more frightening is how many young women and men are receiving deceiving messages about sex and body image through television, movies and magazines.

“The biggest challenge for teen girls is the media and how women are portrayed to be,” said Cheryl Negrin-Rapaport, director of the Phoenix Theater Teen Health Clinic. “There’s an expectation that their bodies have to be perfect, and if they’re not, then they have to go have plastic surgery. Women are getting ‘boob’ jobs at an earlier age. It’s a sign that they aren’t learning to love themselves for who they are.”

The health clinic at the Phoenix serves 1,000 patients, with 81 percent of its clientele young women.

After the Petaluma Free Health Clinic closed in 2002, Rapaport opened the teen clinic to fill the community’s need. She is a family nurse practitioner, a physician’s assistant, has a master’s of science in nursing, and is a certified public health nurse.

The clinic offers a wide variety of health services from reproductive health education, pap smears, disease testing and treatment, as well as counseling and referrals.

Rapaport said that the teens feel comfortable going to the clinic because of her very honest, educated and nonjudgmental approach to sexual health issues.

“I get a lot of questions about sex because they want to be able to control what happens to them,” said Rapaport. “They ask deep questions and we talk honestly about everything. Girls come in to talk about things like how to deal with a pushy boyfriend who wants to have sex and how they don’t feel ready. Those are the kinds of things that come up and we talk about.”

Armed with education, Rapaport said she sees young girls and boys making more responsible, informed decisions, with some even deciding they aren’t ready to become sexually active.

“Some schools have great human interaction classes, but many schools teach abstinence only, so the information they are getting isn’t complete,” said Rapaport. “They don’t get to ask questions. Then you have to think about where they are getting the rest of their sex education. The more you can educate them about their bodies, the better off they are.”

Grieco’s BRAVE course for young women seeks to provide education in the areas of sex as well as overall health, physical safety, relationships and finances. She also hopes to find community members willing to sponsor a girl to attend a BRAVE course.

“I want to be able to reach low-income girls who don’t have the money to attend a training,” said Grieco. “Every girl needs to have these skills in order to go out and navigate the challenges of this world and become a successful young woman.”

For more information on the Brave course, contact Grieco at (415) 531-1774 or visit www.bravepeople.org.

The Phoenix Theater Teen Health Clinic is open for drop-in from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Thursdays. For more information on the clinic, call 217-3383.

(Contact Yovanna Bieberich at yovanna.bieberich@argus courier.com.)