Summary

The Teen STAR Program takes a new look at affectivity and sexuality education, which overcomes the current dichotomy between programs that promote a mere technical solution and those that propose an authoritarian approach. Teen STAR arises from the experience of personal reality and wants to help young people discover their identity and vocation in life. For this, he uses an inductive pedagogy, based on self-discovery through personal experiences. His proposal is characterized by a reflective personalist anthropology and, furthermore, by an active presence of the monitors in the classroom or in the place where it is developed, together with personal interviews and meetings with parents or guardians. This paper analyzes the results obtained by implementing the Teen STAR Program in Chilean adolescents between 12 and 18 years of age. Among adolescents who participated in the program, only 3.4% became sexually active, compared with 12.4% of adolescents in the control group, who did not participate in Teen STAR. Among the men who participated in the program, only 8.8% initiated their sexual activity, compared to 17.6% of the men in the control group. Among the young people belonging to the program who were sexually active, 20.5% stopped their sexual activity, compared to 9% in the control group. Among the youth in the program who stopped their sexual activity, none resumed activity after one year, while 11.7% of the control youth did resume. In addition, the pregnancy rates of the girls who participated in Teen STAR versus the girls who did not (ie, control group) were studied. Mean pregnancy rates per year were 0.87% in the Teen STAR group and 4.87% in the control group during the follow-up period.