Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Leon Dash said permissiveness and lack of education are responsible for high teen pregnancy rates in inner-city American in a speech yesterday afternoon.
Dash addressed possible reasons for the high numbers of children who become parents to an audience of about 60 people in 105 Dartmouth Hall.
He spent 17 months living in the Washington Highlands section of the District of Columbia, one of the city's poorest sections, conducting interviews with area residents for several weeks to learn inner-city teenagers' motives for having children so early.
"Girls out here know all about birth control," one teenage girl told Dash in an interview. "Girls out here get pregnant because they want to have babies."
A common sentiment among inner-city youth is the idea "one becomes a man or one becomes a woman by having a child," he said.
Dash said a16-year-old boy said he "couldn't feel like a man" until he became a father.
"Youth and adults did not become teenage parents because of aimlessness or ignorance, but that did not make them any less vulnerable to the problems of early childbearing" and single parenting, Dash said.
Another problem Dash discovered during his time in the community was "class antagonism", a situation in which middle-class teachers in inner-city schools looked down upon their students.
He said education was so bad that often high school graduates were "unemployable", which contributes to the social problems of the inner city.
Dash said he knew of no instant solutions to the problem.
"I don't have a simple or easy remedy," he said. "I don't know that one exists."
But he did note most of his interviewees began grade school with enthusiasm but soon fell behind due to deficiencies in the system. More emphasis on remedial English, math and reading would be an important step to solving the problem of teenage pregnancy, he said.
Dash's interviews included four parts -- questions about family, school, church and social life.
Dash won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for a series he wrote about an inner-city family.
