A new report from researchers at the University of Colorado shows that youth in Colorado’s child welfare system are receiving little to no education about contraception or safe sex until after they have become sexually active.
“There's a decent amount of research now that rates of pregnancy are quite elevated among this group,” said research associate Katie Massey Combs, with CU’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.
“And I wanted to go a little further to see if what level of access kids have to contraception.”
Research shows that teens involved in the child welfare system are twice as likely to get pregnant before the age of nineteen.
The report from CU Boulder was recently published in Children and Youth Services Review.
It surveyed 245 eighth and ninth graders around the Denver metro area with open child welfare cases, including those living in foster care or receiving services from child welfare systems.
The research found that 2 out of 3 eighth and ninth graders involved in this system had received little to no information about birth control.
Of the kids with some education, fewer than half knew how to access contraception.
Combs says that that teens in the child welfare system are learning about sex and contraception in the same way that other teens are, but they’re not getting the information in time.
“It's just a lot less or later or too late, you know, it's after they've already had sex,” she said.
The survey revealed that average age for sex among the teens in the system is around 15, younger than their peers.
The survey showed that many teens in the system don’t have good information about how and where to access contraception.
“I don't think it's that they don't know that it exists, I think it's more that there are a lot of myths about what contraception may or may not do for your body, and then there’s a really high level of lack of information of like how to go get it and where to go get it,” said Combs.
Right now it is unclear whose responsibility it is to teach teens in the care system about safe sex and contraception.
“The big thing is everybody's kind of said, ‘this isn't really my domain’,” said Combs.
“I also think that we will not reach these kids in this area without the child welfare system. So I think, you know people (are) saying, ‘hey, look, case workers have enough on their plate. You can't put this on their plate too.’ And my response and my experience has been, it's already on their plate and they don't have any tools. Right? So, you know, providing tools for them, it's not putting it on their plate, it's already there, but it's giving them some tools to deal with something that's very pressing."
This story from KGNU was shared with Aspen Public Radio via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico including Aspen Public Radio.