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Sexualities
DOI: 10.1177/1363460705056622
2005; 8; 481Sexualities
Judi Kidger
Stories of Redemption? Teenage Mothers as the New Sex Educators
http://sexualities.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/4/481
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Abstract School sex education in England has traditionally
reflected wider cultural norms that position teenage sexuality as
fraught with danger, and teenage pregnancy and motherhood as
symbolic of its risky outcomes. This article draws on research
exploring projects in which young mothers themselves act as
school sex educators, recounting their experiences of early
parenthood to assist pupils in making `informed choices'
regarding their own behaviour. Findings indicate that, rather
than upholding this aim, many of the young mothers shaped
their stories in order to collude with the dominant, negative
messages surrounding teenage sexual behaviour, pregnancy and
motherhood. In so doing, they were able to redeem themselves
as good, moral citizens, but this was at the price of certain truths
continuing to be concealed from the pupils to whom they spoke.
Keywords citizenship, sex education, social exclusion, teenage
motherhood, youthful sexuality
Judi Kidger
University of Bristol, UK
Stories of Redemption? Teenage
Mothers as the New Sex Educators
In this article, I examine the stories told by young mothers about teenage
parenthood in the context of the sex education classroom, and the extent
to which these challenge (or not) the dominant messages relayed within
more mainstream sex education. I begin by outlining the moralistic and
harm reductionist discourses through which sex education policy and
practice in English classrooms has been constituted, that together position
youthful sexuality as dangerous and in need of control. I then consider the
role of teenage pregnancy as the ultimate symbol of that danger, and the
resultant positioning of teenage mothers as problematic citizens. I go on
to outline a study of a particular sex education intervention, in which
young mothers themselves are the sex educators of other young people,
recounting their own experiences in order to assist others to make
`informed choices' with regard to sex, contraception and parenthood.
Article
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Vol 8(4): 481­496 DOI: 10.1177/1363460705056622
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Despite the potential of such interventions to challenge the well-rehearsed
public accounts of teenage pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality through
the telling of personal stories, I present data that suggest most of the
young mothers in fact reproduce these dominant accounts in order to
improve their own moral positioning. I conclude by considering these
findings in relation to the contradictory and contextually contingent
nature of teenage motherhood, and the role of the projects studied in
perpetuating rather than challenging the notions of danger that dominate
school sex education.
School sex education and teenage pregnancy
School sex education in England plays a key role in controlling youthful
sexuality, and in transmitting dominant cultural messages based on gender
and age appropriate norms that position all sexual activity outside the
domain of adult, heterosexual marriage as dangerous (Griffin, 1993;
Haywood, 1996; Thorogood, 1992). Discursive tensions exist as to the
exact nature of that danger, but the most dominant voices in the debate
are, on the one hand, those that emphasize the moral risk that youthful
sexuality represents, and, on the other, those that are concerned with the
public health implications of young people's sexual behaviour (Thomson,
1994). Those who consider youthful sexuality to be problematic on moral
grounds, are concerned about the threat that it is seen to pose to
traditional values such as chastity, parental authority, and the sanctity of
marriage and the nuclear family (Kelly, 2000; Nathanson, 1991;
Thomson, 1994). Advocates of this position are suspicious of sex
education, fearing that it will encourage sexual activity, and they therefore
consider the only appropriate curriculum to be one that focuses on traditionalist
values and promotes abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage.
Those approaching sex education from a public health perspective by
contrast position teenage sexuality as risky due to the negative outcomes
with which it is associated, specifically sexually transmitted infections and
teenage pregnancy (Ingham and Kirkland, 1997; Thomson, 1994). A
harm reductionist approach is therefore taken, in which sex education is
considered a necessary tool through which young people can be equipped
with enough information and skills to avoid those undesirable consequences.
Within both discourses, pupils are positioned as vulnerable and
in need of protection from the adult world of sexuality, thus reflecting
dominant cultural notions of children and childhood (Pilcher, 1997).
Both discourses are reproduced within current sex education legislation
for England as set out in the Education Act 1996, and the more recently
published guidance (Department for Education and Employment, 2000).
For example although sex education is a compulsory part of the secondary
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school curriculum, parents are given the right to withdraw their children
from the classes, thus privileging notions of protection and parental
authority. Further indications of a concern to reinforce a traditional, moral
framework are in the high status placed on heterosexual marriage as the
basis for family life. On the other hand, a public health discourse is reproduced
through the positioning of HIV/AIDS as the only compulsory topic
within the sex education curriculum. Further topics highlighted for
inclusion in the guidance are contraception, abortion and HIV/AIDS and
STIs, thereby suggesting that the importance of sex education lies in the
prevention of pregnancy, childbearing and infection.
Although the moralistic and harm reductionist discourses contain some
incompatible concerns, making their alliance within such documentation
uneasy if not contradictory, what advocates of both do have in common
is a construction of youthful sexuality as dangerous, and a consequent
emphasis on controlling it in order to avoid the risks with which it is associated.
While these notions of risk and protection are highly visible in the
latest sex education policy documents, other messages, in particular ones
that emphasize positive and pleasurable aspects of sexuality are silenced. It
is difficult to generalize about the impact that this political agenda has on
classroom practice, as the quality and quantity of sex education provision
varies widely from school to school (Ofsted, 2002). However, ethnographic
studies, and interviews with young people have revealed accounts
of restrictive, moralistic programmes, which concentrate on reproduction,
contraception and STIs, while more controversial topics such as sexual
pleasure and desire, homosexuality, abortion and emotional aspects of
sexuality are avoided (Epstein and Johnson, 1998; West et al., 1995;
Woodcock et al., 1992).
The exact nature of the danger that sex education is attempting to
prevent has different manifestations, but one of the most prevalent images
within both the moralistic and public health camps is that of the pregnant
teenager. Anxieties over teenage pregnancy are not new, in fact it has been
argued that they are the latest expression of much more long-standing
attempts to control the sexuality of women, particularly poor, unmarried
women, and of children, along with all other forms of sexual desire and
behaviour that threaten patriarchal hegemony and traditional structures of
authority (Hawkes, 1996; Luker, 1996; Nathanson, 1991). However the
current UK governmenťs decision to set up an entire strategy dedicated
to this topic in England, overseen by a Teenage Pregnancy Unit, has
ensured its continued high profile as a major danger of youthful sexuality.
The reason why teenage pregnancy is regarded as such a problem is
constructed slightly differently depending on whether the moralistic
discourse or the harm reductionist discourse is being drawn on. For those
wishing to uphold a traditional value structure, teenage pregnancy is
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associated with immoral, sexually promiscuous behaviour outside the
confines of marriage, and concern is directed towards the fact that around
40 per cent of teenage pregnancies end in abortion (Statbase, 2004).
Those pregnancies that end in a live birth are the subject of further
concern due to the threat that teenage motherhood is seen to present to
the nuclear family and traditional patriarchal structures of authority,
leading to suggestions of an increasing underclass with questionable rules
of morality (e.g. Murray, 1994). In this way, teenage motherhood is
conflated with lone motherhood, with little attention paid to the actual
marital status of teenage mothers, or indeed to the men who fathered
their children.
For those taking up a harm reductionist view, the link between teenage
pregnancy and abortion is also of concern, although this is for health
rather than moralistic reasons. Where the pregnancy leads to motherhood,
the risks this involves are represented as a combination of health, social
and economic factors, often discussed under the politically popular but
poorly defined term of social exclusion (e.g. Social Exclusion Unit, 1999).
Thus teenage childbearing has been linked to physical complications
during pregnancy and birth, increased risk of physical, cognitive and
emotional problems for the children, and for the mother, experiences of
isolation and psychological distress, limited opportunities to enter
education and employment, and a subsequent dependence on welfare for
housing and financial means (e.g. Allen and Bourke Dowling, 1998;
Botting et al., 1998; Kiernan, 1995; Phoenix, 1991).
In fact this second construction of teenage pregnancy and motherhood
is connected to the first, in that the economic risk with which it is
associated often leads to the moral character of the young women
concerned being questioned. An example of this can be found in the
persistent myth that young mothers deliberately plan to have children in
order to obtain social housing for themselves, despite there being little
evidence of this (Allen and Bourke Dowling, 1998). Thus, both
discourses construct teenage pregnancy and motherhood as risky not
only for the individuals involved, but for society in general, either due to
the threat posed to traditional value structures regarding sexual behaviour
and family life, or due to the individuals concerned failing to be
economically independent. This results in the young mothers themselves
being positioned as dangerous citizens.
In arguing that teenage pregnancy and motherhood are representations
of the dangers of youthful sexuality, I do not wish to deny that those who
give birth relatively early often do experience the sorts of difficulties just
outlined. However, the extent to which teenage motherhood actually
causes those difficulties, and indeed the extent to which it is problematic
at all are matters of some debate, with much evidence suggesting
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otherwise (e.g. Geronimus, 2003; Kiernan, 2002; Smith and Pell, 2001).
Despite this, the dominant story that is told within political and media
arenas is one of danger, with sex education the proposed method of
controlling that danger. The remainder of this article focuses on a particular
sex education intervention that has teenage pregnancy and parenthood
as its subject, but is unique in that it involves young mothers themselves
as the educators, recounting their own stories of parenthood. Previous
research investigating the personal stories of young mothers has revealed
a greater heterogeneity of experience than a single phrase implies, including
examples of positive aspects and outcomes (Ball et al., 2000; Phoenix,
1991; Schultz, 2001). The projects therefore have the potential to challenge
the dominant account of teenage parenthood as dangerous and
something to be prevented, through the privileging of individual voices.
How far this is achieved is explored in the following sections.
Young mothers as sex educators
The study on which this article draws set out to examine the extent to
which sex education programmes involving young mothers were useful for
the pupils receiving the education, and for the young mothers who participated
(Kidger, 2002). Four projects took part, three of which developed
out of and recruited from support groups for young mothers. These three
were funded by local youth and community services and were managed
by youth workers. The fourth project was the only one to exist purely as
a sex education project, and was funded by a combination of the Teenage
Pregnancy Unit and charitable sources. Members were recruited from
local antenatal and postnatal support groups, and a trained youth worker
co-ordinated their activities. In each case, the idea for the projects arose
out of discussions between youth or health staff and young mothers about
the inadequate information regarding sex and parenthood the latter felt
they had received prior to their pregnancies. Each year, the projects
approached the secondary schools in their area and offered to deliver sex
education sessions as part of the wider sex education curriculum, and it
was then up to the schools' Personal Social and Health Education co-ordinators
to organize this.
All the projects conceptualized their aims as being to educate pupils
about the realities of teenage parenthood, in order to assist them in making
`informed choices' about their own sexual and contracepting behaviour:
`Our aims have always been the same in terms of iťs about young parents
sharing their experiences, which will lead to better ability of young people
to make informed choices' (Project Co-ordinator). This aim can be
considered empowering in the sense that it is concerned with increasing
young people's control over their own lives (Gore, 1993), and it therefore
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stands in contrast to the harm reductionist and moralistic tone of most
mainstream school sex education.
It was also anticipated by the projects that the young mothers themselves
were likely to benefit from participation, although this was not seen
as the principal aim: `Who's getting more out of it really? Iťs difficult to
tell isn't it, is it the people who do peer education or the people they're
talking to?' (Project Co-ordinator).
Creating the potential for young mothers to be heard, and to challenge
their problematic public status has been identified as an important first step
in supporting them (Bullen et al., 2000; Schultz, 2001). Indeed Plummer
(1995) argues for the key role that storytelling can play in empowering
sexually deviant and/or victimized individuals and groups, through challenging
the more dominant stories that exist. The benefits experienced by
the young mothers through their participation in these projects are
explored more fully elsewhere (Kidger, 2004). However, the key question
in relation to this article is the extent to which the kinds of stories that
benefited the young mothers were the same as or differed from the kinds
of stories that provided the pupils with informed choice.
The research was conducted using a multi-method design, involving
pre- and post-session pupil questionnaires, semi-structured interviews
with a selection of pupils, teachers, young mothers and project coordinators,
and observations of the sessions delivered by the young
mothers. This article will draw specifically on the semi-structured interviews
with the young mothers, and the session observations, in order to
explore the extent to which the stories that were told challenged dominant
accounts of teenage motherhood, and therefore broadened the sex
education messages that the pupils heard.
The observations were conducted in 17 sex education sessions delivered
in five schools, to pupils aged between 14 and 16 years. In each case, the
stories told by the young mothers, and the messages that those stories
appeared to convey regarding teenage sexual behaviour, pregnancy and
parenthood were noted. The interviews were conducted with 14 young
mothers, and focused on the interviewees' experiences as young mothers,
how they felt participation in the projects had impacted on that, and what
they felt was good about the projects for the pupils. The age of the
mothers ranged from 17 to 25 years, which reflects the age range of the
projects, and their ages at conception were between 15 and 21 years.
Although not all the mothers were teenagers at the time of conception, it
has been found that mothers in their early 20s encounter similar problems
and have similar experiences to those in their teenage years (Hobcraft and
Kiernan, 2001), so their stories were still considered relevant.
All interview and observation data were analysed qualitatively, following
an abductive strategy (Blaikie, 1993). This involved a two-way analysis, in
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which themes were identified from the data and used to build up theory,
and theory was tested against the data in order to be refined and expanded
in an ongoing cyclical process. The account of the stories that the young
mothers told that emerged from this process is given in the next sections.
Where interviewees are quoted, pseudonyms are used to ensure anonymity.
`I'm going to tell you what iťs really like'
When discussing the projects, the young mothers interviewed initially
appeared supportive of the `formaľ aims of presenting an uncensored view
of teenage parenthood, in order to increase the pupils' ability to base their
own actions on informed choices:
I want to go in there and say look iťs been really, really hard but there are good
bits and bad bits, and to just give them an insight into something I never had
when we were growing up. (Naomi)
I don't think iťs to prevent them from having children, I think iťs just to make
them aware of the realities of life . . . it works well if you're honest with them,
I would say I'm not going to lecture you, I'm going to tell you what iťs really
like. (Marcia)
Such comments do not reproduce either the harm reductionist or the
moralistic discourses that position teenage motherhood as solely negative,
and young people as children in need of protection from sexual activity and
its dangerous outcomes. Rather, they emphasize the notion of empowering
young people to make their own choices regarding sex and reproduction,
through providing them with reliable, balanced information.
However, as the interviews progressed to a consideration of the young
mothers' personal motives for taking part, several of them made comments
that were more in keeping with a desire to prevent teenage pregnancy.
Indeed 11 of the 14 interviewees made one comment or more indicating
a personal aim to prevent other young people from becoming pregnant
or parents:
We don't go out there and say don't get pregnant, but if you stop one girl from
getting pregnant then you've achieved something. (Marcia)
We'd feel really happy if we stopped at least one teenage pregnancy in every
school, you know thaťs it really, just to stop unwanted pregnancies. (Bev)
Such comments imply a greater affiliation with notions of protection, risk
and danger, that is the dominant themes within mainstream sex
education, than with the more radical ideals of `informed choice' and
empowered agency.
Of the remaining three interviewees, two appeared to hold personal
aims for the sessions that matched the `informed choice' ideal more closely,
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although they shared the assumption just illustrated by Bev, that young
people would not want to have a baby if given the facts:
Iťs not about telling people not to do it, iťs not about not having sex, iťs about
being safe with yourself, able to stand up for yourself and say no and, you know
be responsible for what you're doing, so if you don't want a baby you've got a
responsibility to take actions not to become pregnant. (Sian)
Only one interviewee not only wholeheartedly supported the `informed
choice' ideal, but also did so without assuming that this would mean
young people choosing to avoid parenthood. As a result, she provided the
least contradictory account of the sessions' aim to equip young people to
make their own decisions:
We're not there to put people off, but if iťs made them think about being a
parent at whatever age then thaťs good . . . they may even decide that after
hearing all that they do want to have a baby at fifteen or sixteen and I think if
they're going into it, eyes open, you know, thinking about the choices, then fair
enough. (Rosie)
These tensions regarding the aims of the projects had a direct impact
on the accounts of teenage motherhood that the interviewees gave within
the classrooms. Thus, far from always `telling pupils what iťs really like',
several of the young mothers provided examples of ways in which they
shaped their stories, omitting certain aspects, or even changing them quite
substantially in order to present a bleaker picture of teenage motherhood:
When I go into peer education I say that I don't go out at weekends but I
do. My Mum has the baby every weekend so I can go out and just enjoy
myself. (Ali)
I just say the complete truth about how Chloe throws paddies, all stuff like that,
but I don't tell them the good bits as well, when she's laying in bed cuddling,
and saying `I love you'. (Kathy)
I think for some girls, and I would never say this in a talk, but for some people
having a baby is the best thing that can happen, it gives them a reality check
really. (Deborah)
The observations of the sessions revealed similar inconsistencies between
the negative stories that were told in the classroom and the more balanced
version of events told to me. So for example one young woman, Nicola,
talked unprompted and at length when she first met me about what a lifechanging
and generally positive experience she had found motherhood.
Despite this, each time I visited a session delivered by her, she framed
teenage pregnancy and parenthood in a much more negative light, making
comments such as:
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My life went downhill from there.
We're not here to tell you not to have sex, but to do it safe 'cause it will mess
your life up.
I wouldn't recommend young pregnancy, iťs very difficult.
It must be acknowledged that every story is a reconstruction that is
inevitably shaped by the context in which it is told (Cornwell, 1984;
Plummer, 1995), therefore the stories that the young mothers told me are
also just one particular version, rather than a representation of an unchanging
truth. However, in all the examples where an individual gave different
accounts of her experiences, the stories that were told in the classroom
were shaped more negatively; there were no examples of a story being
changed to be more positive. Indeed there was only one suggestion in all
the interviews and observations of an individual attempting to tell things
exactly as they were, regardless of how positive that made her story, and
this again came from Rosie:
Some of them [teachers] have said afterwards, oh, but that was so positive, I
was like, well, thaťs how I feel about my life, you know I can't come in here
and lie.
In other words, far from using their personal stories to create new
discourses regarding teenage motherhood that might provide young
people with fresh insights into their own sexual behaviour and choices,
most of the interviewees reproduced the public, negative accounts that
pupils are likely to have heard before. This often meant colluding with
rather than challenging the negative stereotypes of young mothers that
abound in much political, media and academic writing, as exemplified by
Bev earlier, who equated teenage pregnancies with unwanted pregnancies,
or Christine who associated teenage mothers with single mothers, and
with `improper' behaviour:
I sort of said to them well I'd do it properly if I were you, I'd try and get yourself
sorted, you know settled, get yourself married and be in a position to do it.
A key question is why most of those interviewed retold these public stories,
and it is here that I return to the issue of how far the young mothers themselves
benefited from their participation in the sessions.
`I like to know I've done something gooď
I have already discussed the way that the dominant accounts of teenage
motherhood position teenage mothers themselves as problematic citizens,
a danger to society in terms of the moral, health, social and economic risks
that they represent. One might therefore have expected more of the
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project members to take up the strategy that Rosie did, and to challenge
those accounts, creating more desirable identities for themselves through
telling more positive stories. However, the young mothers who colluded
with these dominant accounts appeared to have come up with an equally
effective, albeit more complex way in which to create these more favourable
self-identities. For these young women, the belief that the projects
were beneficial for the pupils was key, as it enabled them to feel they were
doing something `gooď:
Iťs good for us as well because we can sort of go and feel like we're doing our
bit for the community. (Christine)
It gives me a bit of self-respect, you know that you're not all bad, you know
when someone's putting all single mums down, I like to know I've done something
good, I've done something that benefits someone else, that makes me feel
happy. (Naomi)
I thought it would be a really good thing to do, because I find it frustrating the
way the government and society classes people if they have a baby young, so I
was thinking just the general idea of doing something good, doing something
better. (Sian)
As these quotations illustrate, this belief in the value of what they were
doing enabled these young mothers to challenge their problematic identities,
and create new identities for themselves, not only as `gooď individuals,
but also as `gooď citizens. They did not need to challenge the
existing negative stories surrounding teenage parenthood to do this, in
fact the process of colluding with those stories is likely to have made it
easier for them to take up the role of `good citizen', as they ensured that
the dominant value system remained in place. Although these individuals
were treading a fine line between the contradictory positions of teenage
mother and therefore bad girl, and sex educator and therefore responsible
citizen, this strategy is likely to be less risky than Rosie's attempts to rewrite
those dominant, negative stories of teenage motherhood, as she could
perpetuate her own problematic status as a `bad influence' by doing so.
`They're still babies themselves'
A second reason for many of the young mothers reproducing the
dominant accounts of teenage motherhood, also emerged from the data,
and that was in relation to their perceptions regarding what was in the best
interests of the pupils. Given that young motherhood is associated with a
range of socio-economic difficulties, and that those difficulties may be
compounded by the status young mothers face as morally questionable
and a risk to society, it is perhaps not surprising that most of the interviewees
felt that other young people would be better off avoiding teenage
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pregnancy and parenthood. However, what was interesting was the way
they framed this in terms of needing to protect the pupils because they
were still children. Despite the projects being labelled as peer education,
nine of the interviewees referred to the pupils as `kids' or `children', or
described them in ways that suggested a perceived age gap:
Thirty fifteen year olds can be scary . . . you know they've got their own ways,
their own thoughts and iťs just that age. (Sian)
As a result, several interviewees suggested that their role was to protect
the pupils from certain truths and experiences, thereby positioning them
as children, while taking on an adult role themselves:
Sometimes I think 13-year-old girls and that, they're not ready to be responsible
you know, they're just little girls, they're still babies themselves . . . if my
son was sitting here I wouldn't want her [another project member] saying that
to my son. (Naomi)
Mainly I want to get across to them to be sensible, and you don't have to have
a sexual relationship in the first place because you're quite young and you need
to think about it and stuff. (Leanne)
I don't want to put them off forever just put them off until they're old enough
to sort of [pause] appreciate it really . . . I sometimes feel that we should be
deterring them from having sex. (Deborah)
The above quotations once again illustrate an undermining of the ideal
of empowering pupils with informed choices. Further, they reveal the
speakers' desire to protect the pupils not only from pregnancy and parenthood,
but also from the experience of sex more generally, thereby reproducing
the discourse that positions teenage sexuality itself as dangerous.
The justification for this comes from the perceived youthfulness of the
pupils ­ indeed Naomi likens the pupils to her own child rather than to
herself ­ which reproduces this discourse's construction of teenagers as
innocent children who need to be shielded from sexual matters. As a result,
the kinds of messages commonly omitted from mainstream sex education
that I identified in the introduction, such as sexuality as pleasurable, and
abortion as a possible alternative to parenthood, as well as more positive
stories of teenage parenthood itself, remain invisible in these lessons.
Stories untold
This article began by setting out the dominant messages reproduced
within school sex education in England, that is that teenage sexuality is
dangerous, and that pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers personify the
disastrous outcomes that might occur if that sexuality is not controlled.
The sex education interventions on which the article focused potentially
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provided a unique opportunity for different, more positive messages to be
created regarding teenage sexuality and teenage parenthood, as they were
based on the personal stories and experiences of young mothers themselves.
However, the data collected through interviews and observations
indicated that, more often than not, the young mothers involved reproduced
the dominant accounts, in order to distance themselves from the
morally problematic identities gifen to young mothers, and to create good
citizen identities for themselves instead. As a result, the pupils were
continuing to hear the same moralistic and harm reductionist messages
regarding sexuality, while alternative, more positive messages that challenge
dominant norms remained silenced in the classroom.
The interviewees' reasons for shaping their stories in this way stemmed
from two apparently contradictory, yet, in the end, mutually reinforcing
ways in which they are discursively positioned as young mothers. On the
one hand as young women, they are subject to the surveillance to which
all adolescent girls are subject, and the expectation that they will be chaste
and therefore good (Holland et al., 1998). Although the fact of their
motherhood shows them to have previously failed in this regard, these sex
education projects provide them with a chance to redeem themselves,
through warning other young people of the dangers of sex. On the other
hand, as mothers, they are positioned in a role that is socially constructed
as having the nurture and guidance of innocent children at its heart
(Phoenix and Woollett, 1991), a discourse that many of them reproduced
through the notion of protecting the `children' to whom they spoke.
Telling their stories in the way that they did, therefore enabled the interviewees
to reinvent themselves as both good girls and good mothers at
one and the same time.
Yet while these young mothers gave negative accounts of their experiences
in the public, child-centred context of the classroom, the same individuals
did tell more positive stories, in the private, adult-to-adult context
of the research interview. It has long been noted that becoming a mother
at a young age may hold value and status as a route to female adulthood,
in the local contexts in which it takes place (e.g. McRobbie, 1991;
Thomson, 2002). Similarly, it was clear during my interviews that these
young women had experienced a large amount of pleasure and fulfilment
through being a mother to their children. However, what they had to try
and do was make sense of these personal stories in the public context of
the sex education classroom, where there is only one morally approved
story of teenage motherhood, and that is one of danger. Thus, just as the
experience and consequences of teenage motherhood are context dependent,
so are the stories that young mothers tell, as they seek to forge a path
through these contradictory positions, towards a morally worthy adult
female identity (Walkerdine et al., 2001). The projects therefore enabled
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the young mothers who participated to `become somebody', but for most
of them this was not, as originally expected, because they were empowered
to tell their own stories and be accepted on these terms. Rather, it
was because they chose to re-create their identities to better fit dominant
expectations, a process of negotiation and collusion on the route to female
adulthood described elsewhere (Thomson et al., 2001).
The young mothers that took part in this study genuinely appeared to
believe that it was in the best interests of the pupils to tell the stories that
they did, and I do not wish to argue that they were necessarily wrong, at
least in their assumptions that many young people might be better off
delaying pregnancy and parenthood in today's socio-economic and moral
climate. However, the process of reproducing only the negative messages
that surround teenage pregnancy and motherhood created a tension
between what the projects said they aimed to do ­ empower pupils
through telling them new, `real life' stories ­ and what they actually did ­
present mainstream preventative messages about teenage parenthood.
This meant that the pupils were potentially being misled about the nature
of the stories they were hearing, and were being denied the chance to make
their own minds up regarding their sexual and contracepting behaviour on
the basis of uncensored information. Further, there were likely to be
negative repercussions for other young women having children, in that the
negative discourses that surround teenage pregnancy and motherhood,
and that position young mothers themselves as problematic citizens
remained unchallenged.
One lone voice, that of Rosie, did appear committed to telling the pupils
a new story, despite the personal risks involved in this strategy. This highlights
the potential of the projects to challenge and disrupt dominant
accounts of youthful sexuality and parenthood, and introduce elements of
pleasure. However, given the power and tenacity of such accounts, and
the low moral, social and economic status faced by young mothers, it is
perhaps too difficult a task to expect them to perform, without more
support from those policy-makers, researchers and practitioners whose
stories about the dangers of teenage sexuality, pregnancy and parenthood
are more commonly heard.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Dr Sara Meadows and Jackie West for their invaluable guidance
during the study, and to Professor Rosemary Deem and the two reviewers for
their constructive comments on this article. Thanks are also due to the
Economic and Social Research Council for funding both the research and the
subsequent postdoctoral fellowship, reference T026271226.
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Biographical Note
Judi Kidger is currently a Teaching and Research Associate in the Department of
Social Medicine in University of Bristol. Her research interests are young people
and health education, teenage pregnancy and parenthood, and treatment
decision making in cancer. She is currently researching the range and
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effectiveness of emotional health interventions in secondary schools in England.
Recent publications include: (2004) `"You realise it could happen to you": the
benefits to pupils of young mothers delivering school sex education' Journal of
Sex Education 4(2) pp. 185­97 and (2004) `Including young mothers: limitations
to New Labour's strategy for supporting teenage parents' Critical Social
Policy 24(3) pp. 291­311. Address: Graduate School of Education, University of
Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA. [email: Judi.Kidger@bristol.ac.uk]
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