Been there, done that

Would teenage pregnancy rates improve if students simply heard about the reality of young motherhood from those who know? Wendy Berliner reports

Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian

Bianca Carnegie has got a thing or two to say when it comes to teenage pregnancy. She was 14 when she became pregnant by her first boyfriend. She was 15 when she moved into a mother and baby hostel. Her boyfriend used to beat her up in front of their child. Once he beat her up so badly that she ended up in hospital with water on the brain.

"It was my first boyfriend. I knew what I was doing but I turned a blind eye to it and thought I would deal with it later," she says. "When I realised I was pregnant, I thought 'wow'. I didn't tell anyone or go anywhere until I was six months pregnant. My mum had asked if I'd got a boyfriend and I said 'yeah' and she'd talked about getting me on the pill but I'd said I'd never do anything without talking to her first. So she thought I was putting on weight and should get into healthy eating.

"They wanted me to have a termination but I said I wanted to keep the baby and my mum supported me. My dad said, 'You will never get a job and always be a statistic. You've thrown your life away'. He was so angry he left home. They'd been married for 24 years and he left home and didn't come back for four months."

But Carnegie did get a job. She went to college and qualified as a legal secretary and has been working as a health and safety officer for the BBC. She met another man - a decent one this time - and had his son. She is planning to set up her own sexual health clinic for young people and is in touch with the National Lottery and the Prince's Trust over possible funding. But first she is training with Southwark council as one of a group of young mums who will go into the borough's schools to talk about their experiences in the hope this will help reduce teen pregnancy levels. And she's still only 20.

She is one of the lucky ones. Research extrapolated from the National Child Development Study shows that having a baby while you are still at school reduces your chances of going into further or higher education by 24% and that women who have children while still in their teens earn up to 22% less than women who don't.

Southwark, one of London's most deprived boroughs, has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the UK, and the UK has the worst teenage pregnancy rate in western Europe - six times the rate in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Local education authorities throughout the country are working with health services and voluntary agencies to get the message home that pregnancies should be delayed. Local government has a target to reduce under-18 conception rates by 50% between 1998 and 2010 under a national public service agreement.

Southwark has a raft of measures to cut its teenage pregnancy rates, including local media campaigns, dedicated clinics and special training for GPs and their receptionists. But they are also pushing the message hard in their schools way beyond the confines of teachers talking in personal, social and health education. For example, year 9 students - 13- and 14-year-olds - are trained as mentors in sexual relationship education for younger students, some as young as 11, in PSHE classes supervised by teachers.

One of the big success stories is a programme called Teens and Toddlers, in which 14-year-olds are twinned with toddlers in a local nursery. For 20 sessions they go in and are exposed to the realities of dealing with a very young child. Of the 300 boys and girls who have been through the programme so far, no girls have become pregnant. Statistically, 26 would have been expected to.

But the newest strategy is to put young mums who had babies in their teens into schools so they can relate their own experiences and banish any lingering thoughts that bringing up children is easy.

Which is where Carnegie and Shenaiye Brown, now 21, come in . She was 17 when she became pregnant with D'Shaun. "I had been dating my boyfriend for three or four months when I got pregnant. It wasn't planned. I was a street dancer and I'd just got an agent. I'd be in America now if I hadn't got pregnant. I know that for a fact because I was going to get work as a backing dancer for an R 'n' B singer. I found out that I was pregnant when I was at an audition for a new children's TV show.

"At the time it was exciting. You don't think about what's going to happen afterwards. My mum was very disappointed because my older brother and sister were at university. I wanted to move into a hostel, to show I could be responsible, but when I tried I was told to get rid of the baby.

"Eventually I got a place in a mother and baby unit. The birth took 17 hours and I was stitched and could barely walk afterwards. I had to go home to my mum. My boyfriend wouldn't come and help. It would take me half an hour to get downstairs to go and make a bottle for the baby because it was so hard to walk. When I went back to the mother and baby unit I was having to manage on £45 a week and some days I couldn't eat because there was no money for food. I couldn't get enough sleep because he woke every two or three hours. I was so depressed I just stayed in my room. By the time he was one he was running rings around me."

D'Shaun has now been diagnosed as suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. He has speech delay and may also be autistic. Shenaiye is on an access course, hoping to train as a social worker.

Neither Carnegie nor Brown would be without their children. They are clearly good mothers and succeeding in life outside motherhood. Isn't there a danger that young teenagers hearing their stories might think it looks fine to have a baby early, particularly if it gets them away from school - where they might not be very successful - or from home, which may be restricting?

Both deny that it will. "They will be hearing how hard it was to get where we are now," says Carnegie.

If their stories needed any backing, the Teens and Toddlers programme would do it. Aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at young people thought to be at risk of teen pregnancy, it builds self-esteem and develops alternative goals to parenthood, such as satisfying work and relationships. The programme also includes modules on child development and parenting skills to break the cycle of poor parenting.

Diana Whitmore, director of Children Our Ultimate Investment UK, which offers the programme says: "What we invest today must do more than prevent unwanted pregnancies; it must start to tackle the issues that put teenagers on the path to pregnancy."

Teens and Toddlers has also been trialled in Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Islington, and a study looking at its effects found that the vast majority of the young people who responded to a questionnaire had decided to wait for longer to have children - half of them a lot longer. More than half talked about the high levels of responsibility and hard work associated with having children.

The organisation, which was set up in the US by Laura Huxley, wife of the novelist Aldous Huxley, is in dialogue with the Department for Education and Skills with a view to getting part funding for a national pilot. Margaret Hodge, the children's minister, is visiting one of the projects in January.

Dorothy Okotie, teenage pregnancy coordinator for Southwark, says the work is bearing fruit. There has been a 6.8% reduction in teen pregnancies in the borough between 1998 and 2002. Of the Teens and Toddlers programme she says: "It is fantastic. It does change the young people. It grounds them in reality and makes them look beyond the here and now."

Given it only costs £600 to put a youngster through Teens and Toddlers and about £37,000 in pregnancy and social support costs for the average 15-year-old who has a baby, it is easy to argue this is money spent wisely.

Meanwhile, three Southwark schools have signed up to have a teenage mum visit. So what will Bianca be telling them?

"Don't think your boyfriend is going to be giving you money. Most of the fathers aren't there. You don't look the same as you did before and you don't act the same. Once you become a mother you are on a different wavelength to the others who go partying. You have to take responsibility. It's not your mum's responsibility, or the aunt who was always there for you. It's yours.

"I'm not going to make everyone who listens to me in a school think I'm right but if I help one person then that will have been good."