D.C. Unveils the Nation's First Sex Ed Test on Public School Students
The Washington Post reports that the fifth- and eighth-graders in the District of Columbia are not so well-acquainted with the many secretions associated with human reproduction, though high school students were far more knowledgeable about reproductive health than their more guileless young counterparts (high school students in D.C. correctly answered about three out of four questions related to sex ed). Overall, notes the Post, students in D.C. know the peculiarities of the Rube Goldberg machine that is the human body pretty well - they correctly answered an average of 62 percent of questions about nutrition, wellness, disease prevention, and sex education as part of the nation's first-ever standardized sex ed and human health test. D.C.'s Office of the State Superintendent of Education developed and administered a 50-question exam last spring to more than 11,000 students in D.C. public and public charter schools. Critics perhaps overly concerned with the prospects of recreational space travel quipped that the District might better allocate its resources improving D.C. students' lagging math and reading skills, but proponents of the exam such as executive director of the community health organization Metro TeenAids Adam Tenner praised the exam as progress in the effort to improve the city's state of public health. D.C. is plagued with high rates of childhood obesity, sexually transmitted diseases, and teen pregnancy.

Most teenagers do not experience physical aggression when they date. However, for one in 10 teens, abuse is a very real part of dating relationships. According to the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, approximately 10 percent of adolescents nationwide reported being the victim of physical violence at the hands of a romantic partner during the previous year. The rate of psychological victimization is even higher: Between two and three in 10 reported being verbally or psychologically abused in the previous year, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. At a recent workshop on teen dating violence, co-sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Health and Human Services (HHS), researchers presented findings from several studies that found that girls and boys perpetrate the same frequency of physical aggression in romantic relationships. This finding was at odds with what practitioners attending the workshop said they encounter in their professional experience. So what is the reality? Because teen dating violence has only recently been recognized as a significant public health problem, the complex nature of this phenomenon is not fully understood. Although research on rates of perpetration and victimization exists, research that examines the problem from a longitudinal perspective and considers the dynamics of teen romantic relationships is lacking. Consequently, those in the field have to rely on an adult framework to examine the problem of teen dating violence. However, the article's authors find that this adult framework does not take into account key differences between adolescent and adult romantic relationships. And so, to help further the discussion, the authors offer in this article a gender-based analysis of teen dating violence with a developmental perspective.