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April 18, 2013

High Schooler Protests ‘Slut-Shaming’ Abstinence Assembly Despite Alleged Threats From Her Principal

A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”

George Washington High School recently hosted a conservative speaker, Pam Stenzel, who travels around the country to advocate an abstinence-only approach to teen sexuality. Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire consequences for becoming sexually active. At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection.


Campbell refused to attend the assembly, which was funded by a conservative religious organization called “Believe in West Virginia” and advertised with fliers that proclaimed “God’s plan for sexual purity.” Instead, she filed a complaint with the ACLU and began to speak out about her objections to this type of school-sponsored event. Campbell called Stenzel’s presentation “slut shaming” and said that it made many students uncomfortable.
GW Principal George Aulenbacher, on the other hand, didn’t see anything wrong with hosting Stenzel. “The only way to guarantee safety is abstinence. Sometimes, that can be a touchy topic, but I was not offended by her,” he told.
But it didn’t end with a simple difference of opinion among Campbell and her principal. The high school senior alleges that Aulenbacher threatened to call Wellesley College, where Campbell has been accepted to study in the fall, after she spoke to the press about her objections to the assembly. According to Campbell, her principal said, “How would you feel if I called your college and told them what bad character you have and what a backstabber you are?” Campbell alleges that Aulenbacher continued to berate her in his office, eventually driving her to tears. “He threatened me and my future in order to put forth his own personal agenda and make teachers and students feel they cant speak up because of fear of retaliation,” she said of the incident.

Despite being threatened, Campbell is not backing down. She hopes that filing this injunction will protect her freedom of speech to continue advocating for comprehensive sexual health resources for West Virginia’s youth. “West Virginia has the ninth highest pregnancy rate in the U.S.,” Campbell told . “I should be able to be informed in my school what birth control is and how I can get it. With the policy at GW, under George Aulenbacher, information about birth control and sex education has been suppressed. Our nurse wasn’t allowed to talk about where you can get birth control for free in the city of Charleston.”

Campbell’s complaints about her high school reflect a problematic trend across the country. There are serious consequences when figures like Stenzel repeatedly tell young Americans that contraception isn’t safe. Partly because of the scientific misinformation that often pervades abstinence-only curricula, an estimated 60 percent of young adults are misinformed about birth control’s effectiveness — and some of those teens choose not to use it because they assume it won’t make any difference. Predictably, the states that lack adequate sex ed requirements are also the states that have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs.
Some of Campbell’s fellow students at GW High School are also rallying for her cause. They plan to take up the issue at a local board of education meeting.

7 comments:

  1. What was a tax-payer funded public school doing hosting a religious gathering in the first place..? “God’s plan for sexual purity"..??? Isn't that something to be discussed in Church? The principle of this school should be fired, stripped of any educator's credentials, and prosecuted as a government agent intent on suppressing our Constitutionally-guaranteed right to separation of our democratic republican government from bigoted religious institutions. America is a free and secular society - love it, or gtfo.

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  2. Uh, yeah, West Virgina is all about abstinence, if ya don't count yer kinfolk!

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  3. WELL First off, on the birth control, go look up the lawsuits of various "pills" and patches causing strokes or Trans Ischemia Attacks TIAs whether smoking or not. Then there are other problems with being exposed to hormones in addition to girls starting their periods years earlier than they did just 50-100years ago perhaps due to lack of sleep and estrogen like compounds from every direction. There are many many retro-viruses that science does not understand. New versions of Hepatitis being found and theorized there is more. Active teens often are not just limiting themselves to teens but may stray up to college partners who are then in turn messing with professors and others so that when you fornicate with another teen you really do not know who else is in the room with you, so to speak. It permutates out to potentially having sex with hundreds of other people and any number of their pathogenic microbes.... If you want to get into uncharted theory I suspect there is a cyctic mode to women's eggs that can store sperm DNA from various suitors if there is no mate around for over a decade a egg that was pre-fertilized can have a chance at implanting, resulting in a seemingly 'miraculous' birth. This has been demonstrated in other animals, just not mamals (yet). Hows that for making virginity more valuable to a husband?

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  4. Thou reserves the right to censor comments eh?

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  5. children have no business having sex. they have no idea of the potential consequences, nor are they mature enough to handle sex.

    I agree that the kids in high school need to be told the real deal, that just once can lead to AIDS or pregnancy. 3 out of 4 people in my small town have STDs.

    this girl has no idea what she is talking about. she needs to stop defending the degradation of women into nothing more than sex object bc of slut behavior.

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  6. If she want to be a "slut", let her be!

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  7. Or if you want the kids in public schools to be uninformed idiots, great. Because the "abstinence" approach is working so well in WV ( the 9th highest teen pregnancy rate in the country). Yeah, keep pushing THAT way. Teens, like all humans for the last , well, FOREVER, have raging hormones, and yes, should be told the dangers. And they should ALSO be told how to do it in a safer manner if they absolutely have to. Because if you tell all teens about abstinence being THE answer, then we will have NO teen pregnancies, right? Jeez, what a bunch of morons.

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