Teenage Sexuality / Latino Issues
Speaker: Blanca Ovalle (click here for biography)
Soap Summit 1

Transcript of Proceedings
October 22, 1994

SONNY FOX: Eloise pointed out to you a number of ethnic differences, and there are others too, including in the Latino community. Our next guest, our next expert, Blanca Ovalle, is Project Supervisor Coordinator of Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Project associated with USC Medical Center. She coordinates the Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Project Research Center to meet the goals and objectives of its grants. She's responsible for analyzing, making recommendations for the solutions of a variety of problems related to clinic functions. She operates with about 1,200 clients, mostly between 10 and 17 years of age, and most of them are Latinos. So Blanca, can you come up and give us a sort of insight into that area of these problems that is unique to her work.
Blanca Ovalle.

BLANCA OVALLE: God, that's so special. And I was a teen mom myself. I feel real big and grown up now. Let me see. The cases...the teens continue to be primarily Hispanic, low income, high obstetric-risk population, with limited prenatal care. That's real important. I'm going to touch on certain bases, and then I'll get into the little scenarios that I think some people need to hear. The real-life action, and who they are. This has been a long-awaited opportunity. It's good to hear your limits. And I never knew you had any, because it was like all the monied world should have no limits. (laughter)

You hear a lot of teens, and maybe the statistics are on 18, 19. I'm going to talk about just 17 and under that have delivered there at the big, general women's hospital. The goal of our project again is to work on prevention, and delay of the subsequent unintended pregnancy among these 17-year-olds. In working with these young mothers, several obstacles to prevention, or the repeat of the pregnan-cies seem to occur. Number one, we keep hearing it, and we're hearing it more now, is the poverty issue. Lack of resources and options. Lower education level, and sometimes language problems. Here in California we have that migrating population. Lack of sophistication with the system, and reluctance of undocumented teens to enter the system. I think we've become the new Ellis Island down here, where we see all this migration of people coming in and liking our weather, and staying here.

Again, the big problem is the lack of programs and services for high-risk teen mothers and their children. Family and social problems. I'll get really into this when it is the gypsy phenomenon as we call it. And we even had an article written in Perspectives about it. How does population move around? Dysfunctional families. The absence of father. I think this is very true. Absence of father, or the absence of her partner. The poor social support system. Physical or sexual abuse is not an uncommon occurrence in the population. Cultured barriers to the use of contraceptives which affect both low and high-risk teens are traditions, values, family role person, somebody, the mother, the respected, the honor member, their role is very important. Be it the Godmother, the Comadre, how she influences, and how she's the mediator to family decision making. It could just be the little old grandmother, the little Abuelita, that really controls how the family runs and behaves here in this country. Religion, we've heard of religion again, and it's really that old politics. You don't talk about politics, and you don't mix religion. Well, that really exists in the Latino community. This needs to hit on something that really hasn't been explored through the media or through telenovellas -- it's how poor people really live, and how they work out their problems. How we can see the situation worked out. That's a big one. So we need to change the language of what we're hearing. Again affection vs. the lust and the love.

The philosophy of life. A lot of Latinos think this is the land of milk and honey. Again, "Loque Dios Monde", what God will send us will be. Where they came from to this country. When did they come. The years, the ages that they came, them from their family. Making it's either rural, urban. The socio-economic class. We're hearing that mentioned with other labels of the social and the demographics on these people. Socio-economic class. Acculturation factors. Reasons they came. Would it be for economic improvement or political reasons. Self esteem is a strong issue. We're one of the really unique programs that is school-based to promote continuing to stay in school programs. We have some successes. Our work with the teen mothers is documented, and need also to have non-school-based primary prevention since over two thirds of the teen mothers in our program were not in school at the time when they became pregnant. They felt that they were too behind, they couldn't catch up. They're home, caring for their siblings while their parents are working.

Many had not been in school for years more. This population of teens... this particular population are either home watching the soaps. They are the most difficult ones to reach. They're not associated with other girls and in school because they're kind of maybe the bad girl, or they're not progressing in their lives, and so they're kind of outcast by the good families. Or some are just... this is real important, some of them were already living with their partners and functioning as housewives too. Some were just simply hanging out, involved in street life, drugs, gangs, activities of themselves, or maybe of their partners. Those teens are not likely to associate with the other girls that are in school.

In the L.A. economy we could fill every AFLP program, and those are adolescent family life programs, with the high-risk teens that we see there. Because they kind of cater to the high-risk teens. Many of the outlying programs work on primary prevention, which are the ones that are pushing out the condoms, and giving the colored ones out. Or girls that are pregnant. So they forget about the little teens who are the parenting mom. They are kind of the forgotten kid. Even when motivated kids want to go back to school, the bureaucracy's indifference they meet, often makes it impossible for them to reenter because they live on a certain street; they belong to a school that is eleven miles back that way. And they live across the street from the school that they want to go to.

The gypsies. Where did it come from? Maybe it came because of a dysfunctional family. The step-father's trying to hit on her now. Mom's always gone, working hard, looking tired, and here's the one that's the little homemaker, staying home, and she might look good. Now if she's lacking affection, and then she gets it at home by her stepfather, or the stepfather that's younger than her mother, maybe friends that come over and visit. She is being attracted to maybe the stepfather or the friend, the Compadre, or the men that come over. And that's where you see a lot of that age difference with these older...girls that are 14, 15, 16 and their stepfathers are maybe 27 to 32 years old. Their friends are about that same age group. She gets pregnant, wants out of that family. Maybe doesn't get pregnant by that person, or gets outcast because she became pregnant. Now she's going to live with a family relative that's taking her under her wing or taking her in.

And somehow the baby's born now and it's a little too expensive, and they can't keep up with her. So now she's a burden after three days. There is a saying in Spanish, "Despuese tres dias huele hasta muerto." So after three days she's kind of overstayed her welcome, and maybe this has gone onto maybe three weeks or a month. She now has to find somewhere else to live. Maybe back home because the mother has seen the situation and maybe threw out the stepfather. Maybe not, because he's also the breadwinner, and the only, sole support system that she has. So she might not take the daughter, and make arrangements for her to stay somewhere else. Sometimes it is a good little couple. It's a young teenage couple and they've found love, and they're happy ever after, and they can't stand each other now because he won't help with the baby, and he doesn't realize the responsibility because he still wants to hang out. So then she goes to live with a family member. So then they take her back in. His family takes her back in because that can't happen. The pride and the tradition of family, en familia, for Latinos is very important. So they're all going to stick together and keep her.

She then doesn't want to be the housekeeper to the mother-in-law's home and her chores, so then she moves out. So these kids, within a three to six-month period, have moved maybe five to six times. Juggling that baby around. They break up. She goes back. It's hard to provide follow-up contact with these kids. Everything they do it's forever and it's never going to happen again. Or I'm the vulnerable target, and I'm never going to get pregnant again, never going to have sex again. That's the best one. Where the mother comes in and feels that now that she's had her baby, and everybody's going to come in and take care of her, and be there for her delivery. And even though it was the biggest shame for the family because this little girl didn't reach the quinzenera point, which is a big celebration in the Latino community, she's kept her virginity, they now have taken her under their wing again, and forgiven her, and the big part of the pride and joy thing is this new baby.

So they go, everybody wants to be part of it. At the same time, they know that it's very important for her to come back for her postpartum care. Because we're instituting that. We're teaching them that. She comes back and then we're talking about contraceptive methods, or abstinence, whichever it may be. And then this teen knows she's going to be sexually active. Even though she's forbidden to see her partner, she's going to see him again. Whichever way she did it to get pregnant the first time, she's going to sneak around to do it the second time. But she wants maybe some kind of birth control method. She's given then, what is 70% accepted for them is the birth control pills. She'll take the pills and her mother finds them and throws them out. "She's never going to do that, she doesn't need them. The side effects of birth control methods will cause her health long time complications." And that's a myth. Those are a lot of the myths, or the misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the Latino community not really practicing birth control because, again, religion and Catholicism really taking part of that in their life.

Physical or sexual abuse is also becoming a real strong issue with us because it's really surfacing. We case manage these girls for up to two years from age of entry up to the age of eighteen, some-times up to the age of nineteen. They really bond with us, they trust us, and they are now sharing a history of physical or sexual abuse. Physical battery of the teen by her partner has been the most common story. Although we have seen very little of child abuse, several have left abusive situations with our assistance, but it is difficult to find shelters or rooms that will take them with an infant. Many in the Latino community say their partners will not use a condom and again will not let them use anything themselves. There is still the misunderstanding of birth control methods. There is still the fear of what the side effects are, the weight gain...it will cause infertility. And again, when they accept the method, it's very difficult to continue with the method because of the pressure they get and the influence of the family and friends. "No, this isn't good for her. This happens and this is why she has breast cancer now." Again, the myths of conception and birth control methods. It's really hard for them to maintain a consistency of compliancy for their method.

Another thing that is really strong for a lot of teens is that the partner feels that "if you really love me, you will do anything". It's almost like a controlling mechanism, because if she is using the contraceptive, then maybe she may go out with someone else. One of the girls that I'd like to mention was a battered teen. She had nowhere to go, no relatives. No shelters would take her with her infant. Because of the real harsh situation she was in, the in-laws really didn't intervene because the son was the bread winner. She really had a difficult time. We were trying to get her in a shelter. She was in a hospital. And it had been over two weeks where she had been coming every day, every day. At that time we didn't have bus tokens to give them. And so I don't how she got it, but all the counselors put up together to get her home and feed her and do things like that. She finally came in one day and one of us drove her to a site, a hamburger stand or something.

They picked her up, knowing that the partner had been spying on her every action, every day and followed one of the counselors back. So that's why I say don't get involved because the safety of your life is at risk. And we thought we had this system under control because a lot of us know the neighborhood and know the people there, but this guy was too slick, he was obsessed. Turns out he did make it to the shelter and did cause a little scene there and he was arrested. And so it was a happy outcome for her because she was finally able to say after that "This is what has been going on all along. I'm a prisoner. He won't let me see the baby, he won't let me the touch the baby when he's around." So that finally helped her, someone from the outside did finally see what she was really going through. So she's never gone back and that's been over three years now and she's kept contact with us. She's been three years now out of that relationship.

The other one, from a dysfunctional family, I'll call her Ceci. Her mother's an alcoholic, she has an abusive stepfather. She has two babies and they're both by different fathers. Her most recent partner is already married with other children. She lives in a severe poverty situation and she's pregnant again. That last partner is always promising that things are going to get better. And she's living on the hope and the dream that someday it will get better. Termination, adoption is just a "no". I worked at Women's Hospital and there were two girls, one in '89 and one in '91, who were consider-ing adoption. The families became aware of it and intervened right away. I mean they hid these pregnancies all the way up to day of delivery. They didn't come home one or two days and then just said "Can a friend come and pick me up." I don't know how Mom found out. There she was to pick up her and her baby. You see these incidents where they're bringing their daughters either in for a bleeding condition or a pain in the stomach and here they are "The reason your daughter is going through this and her pain is so severe is that your daughter is going through contractions."

And it's like "What? "Your daughters going to deliver a baby any minute now so go have a seat in the waiting room." "What, how could she? Where was she? She slept with me, we live in a one-room bedroom house and she slept with me, how is it that it happened? I've never left her side and it happens?"

Again, the situation of one teen, premature delivery. She herself didn't realize how her body worked, didn't know how her body worked. She was pregnant, didn't know she was pregnant, and went to the hospital. She was at a magnet school down the street from us, and felt that something was wrong because she had this pain. This pain continued, she had been having periods, she goes to the hospital and they find she is prematurely delivering a baby at six months. That baby has been in the ICU over six months now at extreme cost to her and to her baby. When the system found out her parents had some kind of insurance, and they have that little upper level of income, she doesn't qualify for certain Medical benefits so it's a burden...it's a bill. We're helping with her bills now, trying to help her with the system so she will not have to pay for all of that.

There's many, many stories. Although with family and social problems, we do have some success rates because of some small and large grants. We have some who have gone on to school, some have gone to college, have successful jobs. Some want to grow up and be just like me and work with teenagers. They all want to come back and give volunteer work for the community. Several of them have very successful... because we keep in contact, they come back to the clinic and do volunteer work for us. Thank you.

SONNY FOX: I often think we miss the real heros in our society, the stories about the real heroes like Blanca.