Loretta Sweet Jemmott’s boyfriend was “pressing” her to have sex.
She was 16 and in need of information, but her friends in Philadelphia were no more sophisticated than she was. She had no sister to ask. She certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone at church, and she just couldn’t ask her mother questions about sex.
But she needed to know.
“I went to Planned Parenthood, got booklets and shared them with my friends,” recalls the woman who is now a nursing professor at University of Pennsylvania, the holder of a Ph.D. in sexuality education and the director of the Center for Urban Health Research at Penn.
Jemmott hasn’t stopped asking questions or dispensing information about sex. Now 42 and living in Princeton, N.J., she is a prominent researcher examining the sexual attitudes and actions of young people, especially black males.
As part of that research, and as part of a larger effort to improve health and safety, she is in the midst of a program in Philadelphia public housing trying to influence the sexual behavior of young men by educating their mothers.
“The moms’ homework is to teach their sons what they learned that day,” says Jemmott.
The Mother-Son Health Promotion Project began in 1996 and will not be completed until 2000, but 433 mothers and sons have been involved already in the research project. It’s too early for conclusions, but attendance at the three- and six-month follow-up sessions has been high, around 90 percent.
Black teenage males begin having sex earlier than white teens and have more sexual partners on average, according to a 1995 National Survey of Adolescent Males by the Urban Institute in Washington.
Jemmott’s first nursing job was in 1978, dealing with high-risk pregnancies at Pennsylvania Hospital’s Preston Building.
“I was seeing teenagers who were pregnant, seeing complications, seeing repeated pregnancies,” says Jemmott. “I saw a lot of that in my community.”
Then she taught teen sexuality at a Philadelphia health clinic, talking to girls about contraception.
“I was obviously missing the boat. I needed more education.”
So, to the astonishment of her parents, she went to Penn and earned a graduate degree in psychiatric mental health nursing. But she still wasn’t smart enough.
“I didn’t have any curriculum, I was getting by on my gut. And I couldn’t measure anything. I wanted to be sure. I wanted to be an educator.”
And so she went back to Penn again, this time for a doctorate focusing on adolescent behavior, especially that of black males. “There was a gap in the literature on young people of color, especially boys.”
It was during this time, about 1985, that she met her future husband, John Jemmott, a psychology professor at Princeton University and an experienced researcher. Two years later, she took a teaching job at Rutgers University and did her first funded research, studying condom use among inner-city college students.
She wanted to alter black male behavior, “but school doesn’t teach you how to do that. How do you get people to buy into it? How do you put it together?”
In 1988, she wrote a grant proposal to the American Foundation for AIDS Research and another to the National Institutes of Health, and had both funded.
Since then, she and her husband have studied whether the race and gender of the instructor teaching sexuality information are crucial to a curriculum’s success. The answer was no.
They have studied how to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted HIV infections among black junior high school students. They have measured the effects of abstinence teachings alone and abstinence coupled with safe-sex materials. Those results will be published later this month.
And they’ve studied youngsters and their mothers, focusing on teaching the youth but having trouble getting parents to attend. A few years ago, it was decided to flip that research around, in Philadelphia, in public housing.
Funded with $2.2 million by the National Institute of Mental Health, “the program has a lot of potential public health importance,” says Ellen Stover, an NIH division director. “Not all studies are done in the actual community. It’s an innovative approach to work with people in their own setting.”
Jemmott says the program is “the extension of 10 years of research. We’re trying to find the best way for parents to teach their kids.”
And not just about sex, but about health and living successfully.
