The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sponsored a “Choose Purity” event on Saturday to teach young girls about drug addiction, sex trafficking and prostitution in an effort to scare them out of having premarital sex.
Officer Regina Coward, president of the Nevada Black Police Association, said she was asked by her church, Victory Outreach Church, to put on the purity event at the William Pearson Center in North Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Sun reported.
“The room of about 125 parents and children watched recorded interviews with a pimp and prostitutes, learned modern-day slavery exists in the form of the sex trade, and saw grisly images of people who’d suffered at the hands of hard drugs — such as a woman who’d lost limbs in a methamphetamine lab explosion and a man who’d had his face partially gnawed off by a meth user,” the paper reported.
All of the macabre examples were meant to drive home the point that sex before marriage equals death.
“Drugs are real. Sex trafficking is real. I don’t know what is real about linking purity with those things,” Laura Deitsch, a health educator for a local reproductive health organization, told the paper. “It was a hodgepodge of unrelated fearmongering.”
Miss Deitsch said she didn’t see any facts presented at the event that a young girl could apply in real life. She also wondered if seeing officers with guns, talking about sex, could confuse kids.
“I wonder if anybody came away with the idea that premarital sex is criminal,” she said.
Miss Coward said the event was necessary because the police department doesn’t have a program that promotes abstinence.
“Sending a message of abstinence is crime prevention,” she told the paper.
Metro’s message is straight abstinence, she said, adding that the police department didn’t spend any money on the event despite co-sponsoring it.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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