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"You know," Chris Lewis says. "Fast girls."

Lewis is not a longtime sex addict. He's just an honest 14-year-old African American boy from a Dallas public school. Lewis doesn't say whether he's given in to these "fast girls." If the most recent Centers for Disease Control's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance study is any indication, 29.9 percent of black boys engage in sex before they are 13 (compared to 14.2 percent of Hispanic boys and 7.5 percent of white boys), and 75.7 percent do so before they graduate from high school.

The girls sitting by Lewis, Monisha Randolph, 17, and Daketha Ward, 15, nod their heads knowingly, admitting that they also have felt the tug of Eros prematurely. Of African American girls, 11.4 percent engage in sex before 13, and 66.9 percent before they finish high school, the study says. Randolph and Ward also throw drugs, alcohol, and smoking in the mix of vices that allure them.

"If you're around that stuff all the time, you're tempted," Randolph says.

But thanks to a smart program called the Love Clinic, kids like Lewis, Randolph, and Ward find it easier to elude these lures.

"You can tell some teens about abstinence from sun up to sun down, but they're still going to have sex," says Dr. Sheron C. Patterson. Preventing teenage pregnancy is one of the reasons why she founded the Love Clinic, an institute designed to foster healthy relationships among African Americans. In some ways, Patterson resembles Dr. Laura—if you add grace and love for Christ, and subtract the combativeness. Her realism dictates the way she goes about helping teens, many of whom were born to teenage mothers themselves.

"If they're going to have sex, I don't want them to have any children. I don't want them to become parents, nor do I want them to catch AIDS," Patterson says. So the Love Clinic youth leadership camps encourage teens to refrain from sex before marriage, but they also teach participants about birth control.

The Love Clinic youth camps work, and are worth imitating throughout the country. It's hard to compute the work the Holy Spirit does in the hearts of the camp's participants. But there is at least one objective way of measuring the program's effectiveness. Of the camps 300 graduates, many of whom live in public housing projects, no one has become pregnant thus far, Patterson says.

"People become parents before they're ready," Patterson says. Most of these parents pass on their mistakes to their children. An especially painful influence is the general absence of black fathers, Patterson says. On any given day, one in three black men, ages 20 to 29, is in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole (compared to 12.3 percent of Latinos and 6.7 percent of whites).

Many of those who are not incarcerated deal drugs and belong to gangs. Seventy percent of African American babies are born to unwed mothers. A potent temptation to which many of these mothers surrender, especially in inner cities, is becoming codependent on men who lack stability, Patterson says. Consequently, many inner-city children watch, and imitate, the adults who never grew up.

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December 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 15