"The Lost Children of Rockdale County"
Teen sex tales turn national focus to Rockdale

By M.A.J. McKenna
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

Seventeen cases of syphilis. More than 50 teenagers experimenting with group
sex. At least 200 middle and high schoolers exposed to sexually transmitted
diseases.

And the behavior that created the problem may still be going on.

That's what TV viewers will see and hear tonight in "The Lost Children of
Rockdale County," a PBS "Frontline" documentary that explores an outbreak of
syphilis among area teenagers in 1996.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the cases at the time, but the
discovery came when Atlanta was gearing up for the Olympics. So, to many area
residents, the report of the syphilis outbreak will still come as a shock.

So will many of the moments captured by filmmakers Rachel Dretzin Goodman and
Barak Goodman, who lived in Conyers for five months. Several teens, all
identified by first name only, describe in graphic detail a largely hidden
world of reckless teen behavior.

One girl, 15 at the time of the outbreak, compares the spread of syphilis to
"the cooties game little kids play." Another, 15 now, stacks up cuddly
stuffed animals to demonstrate a sexual position. And one 14-year-old boy,
whom the film places at the center of the group of teens, says: "I didn't
really want to be notorious. I wanted to be popular."

Rockdale residents already know the shock a wider audience will likely feel.
Those who lived through the syphilis outbreak and its soul-searching,
finger-pointing aftermath are wincing in apprehension at the harsh national
attention the program could bring. Some hope, once the impact fades, the
exposure of their community's secrets will underline a lesson the ordeal
taught them.

"Kids need parenting," said Cynthia Noel, a county public health nurse who
treated most of those infected. "They want a family, they want rules, they
want someone to be in charge. If they can't get that attention from their
parents, they will seek it somewhere else."

The Rockdale outbreak surfaced in two places almost simultaneously in the
late spring of 1996. At the county health department, Noel was encountering
students from the three local high schools. All had similar symptoms of
sexually transmitted diseases, and most had similar stories of how they might
have contracted them.

At Memorial Middle School, counselor Peggy Cooper was hearing identical
stories: teens having sex with multiple partners at home after school and
before parents came home, and sleepovers where imitating sexually explicit
movie scenes on cable was the chief entertainment.

"I told the health department I thought we had a problem," said Cooper, a
grandmother who had also worked at Rockdale County High School. "Some of my
girls were coming to me with deep uncomfortableness. They were scared, and
they wanted an adult to know."

The state and county investigation that Noel and Cooper triggered turned up
jaw-dropping findings. Rockdale's teens were infecting each other with
chlamydia, herpes and human papilloma virus, the cause of genital warts and
occasionally of cervical cancer. And 17 had syphilis.

That was unheard of. Syphilis was once as feared as smallpox; left untreated,
it can cause miscarriage, sterility and madness. But public health campaigns
have pursued it so aggressively that there were fewer than 7,000 cases in the
United States last year. It is overwhelmingly a disease of poverty and poor
health care -- not of affluent suburban teens with SUVs and cell phones.

(Among students the same ages as those in the Rockdale outbreak, sexual
activity itself among younger teens -- let alone sexually transmitted
diseases -- is not common. A 1994 study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute
found that 71 percent of students nationwide had sex before they graduated
from high school --- but less than 10 percent of 12-year-olds and less than
30 percent of 15-year-olds had.)

"What lit this up for us (was) syphilis had occurred in a community where you
never see syphilis," said Dr. Kathleen Toomey, Georgia's director of public
health. "It allowed us to be aware of the high-risk behaviors among these
teens in Rockdale."

By the time the investigation concluded, seasoned public health investigators
trained not to be judgmental would be startled by what they found. There were
14-year-olds who had had up to 50 sex partners, sixth-graders competing for
the sexual attention of high school students, girls in sexual scenes with
three boys at once. In one case, according to the film, a girl at a party
with 30 to 40 teens volunteered to have sex with all the boys there -- and
did. "My heart dropped," Cooper said. "I felt nauseated. I wanted to cry."

There was some drug use, and significant amounts of alcohol. Surprisingly,
there were only a few pregnancies, possibly because multiple infections
impaired the girls' fertility. "I have worked in the STD field for many, many
years," said Toomey, who was state epidemiologist in 1996 and oversaw the
investigation. "I had never encountered anything of these dimensions of
sexual activity, of this high risk, among teens this young and in this kind
of a population."

One other factor linked many of the Rockdale students, the investigators
said: Parents were unaware of what was going on. By law, minors who seek help
in a public health clinic are treated as adults and accorded doctor-patient
confidentiality. Thus the investigators were unable to contact parents
directly, though they urged the kids to involve their parents, and many did.

"We found a lot of lack of communication between children and parents," Noel
said. "Some didn't know their kids were sexually active. Some, even when
presented with evidence, refused to believe it. One woman cussed me out and
said she knew her child was a virgin, until I had to say no, her child was
pregnant."

The disconnect between Rockdale's parents and teens is a central theme in
tonight's film. The Goodmans, longtime "Frontline" producers, found only four
parents who would appear on camera. Identified only by first name, they talk
with anxious smiles that seem pleas for understanding about their inability
to understand or control their kids.

None of the teens or parents who appear in the film would agree to be
interviewed for this article.

On camera, one mother says of her then-18-year-old daughter, "I got to the
point where it's easier for me to let [her] go do what she wants instead of
standing there fussing and fighting with her." In another scene, a mother and
her 15-year-old daughter -- who lost her virginity at 12 when, she says in
the film, she got drunk, blacked out and woke to find she had been raped --
assemble dinner together, but eat it in separate rooms.

The girl -- who was not part of the syphilis cluster, according to the
"Frontline" staff -- had a wild early adolescence, drinking, taking drugs and
experimenting sexually.

"I took more of the blame than I gave her, definitely -- her or the guy --
because I realized I was not the parent I should be," the mother says on
camera. "She kept getting worse. And once I took control, she has done so
much better."

Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy,
viewed the documentary before its broadcast so she could serve as part of a
panel discussion following the film tonight.

" 'The Lost Children' is an appropriate title," she said, "but mine would be,
'Where Are the Adults?' "

In some cases, the investigators found, the adults were pursuing their own
agendas. Many worked long hours -- often, ironically, to fund their kids'
label-conscious clothing and consumer goods. Some had allowed their kids to
move out -- in one case, into a pool house behind the family home -- or to
live with family friends.

Cooper coached her students in how to approach their parents with news of
their sexual activity, in some cases allowing them to use her office so she
could stand by as the child's advocate.

"Some chewed the child out. Some said, 'Oh, I knew something was wrong,' "
she recalled. "But the first one who shocked me said, 'I can't have my
daughter at home all weekend. I need to date, too. I need her to spend the
night with her friends sometime' -- even though she knew her daughter was
going to a house [where teens were watching] the Playboy Channel."

Cast adrift by their parents, the Rockdale teens struggled for a niche, or
even a gathering place, in a suburb that lacked both a town square and a
mall.

"It's a community where privacy leads to isolation for some of the
adolescents," said Claire Sterk, an Emory University anthropologist who
helped the state health department investigate the teens' behavior. "So they
find each other and create their own things to do. I don't think sexuality
was even what they had in mind, originally; that in itself was a symptom of
what was lacking in their lives."

The film captures the teens of Conyers on an average evening. Chased out of
the bowling alley and the movies, they end up congregating in strip-mall
parking lots and in the playground of a McDonald's. Some are drinking on
camera, and all the girls are smoking.

"It's a portrait of a toxic community: Syphilis, smoking, alcohol and media,
and these kids are out in it by themselves for hours at a time," said Brown,
the mother of three teenage daughters. "The more poisonous the culture, the
more adolescents need their parents to be present to filter it for them."

A year after the syphilis outbreak was recognized, the state and local health
departments hosted a town meeting to air community concerns. Both attendance
and reaction left the investigators surprised and pessimistic.

"It was kind of like we gave a party, and no one came," Noel said.

Toomey presented the results of the investigation, most notably a chart that
showed how many sexual contacts the 17 confirmed syphilis cases had shared. A
gasp went up when she projected the spider-web pattern. But in the discussion
that followed, "there was a desperate searching to find an external cause for
this," she said.

"When parents were pointing fingers," Toomey said, "none of them were
pointing back at themselves."

It has been three years since the outbreak was discovered, a long time in the
lives of teenagers. It's legitimate to ask whether the syphilis and sexual
experimentation in Rockdale were a one-time aberration.

To the "Frontline" producers, the answer is clearly no. The last third of
tonight's documentary captures three girls, who have just finished their
freshman year in high school. Two say they are not virgins, and their male
acquaintances became sexually active as young as 10. And they are unfazed by
sexually explicit media: Asked to choose a favorite song, they chant a rap by
local artist Kilo Ali in which the narrator has sex with seven women in a
row.

"A lot of people do stuff like that, just experiment," one of the girls, 14,
says on camera.

Since the town meeting, Rockdale County have turned down state funds for a
health clinic catering to teens.

"I know from talking to individual parents that there are a lot of people who
have gotten some help for their families and are paying more attention to
supervising their children," said Elizabeth Ross, director of student support
services for the Rockdale County school district. "But we kept identities
confidential, so whether those are the families of the [teens in the
outbreak], I don't know. I can't tell you for certain that there is any
decrease in some of these behaviors."

At the health department, Noel, the public health nurse, is not convinced.

"After we got the girls cured of the diseases they had picked up," she said,
"there was an outbreak of pregnancy."

The news that the documentary will be broadcast tonight has caused anxiety,
both in Rockdale and among those who helped its residents understand the
epidemic.

"I worry that the community will react with anger and look for external
factors to blame," Toomey said. "And I worry that there will be knee-jerk
finger-pointing, looking at Rockdale as unique.

"This particular cluster of syphilis cases was unique -- but the syphilis
wasn't the problem, it was the symptom. The larger issue is parent-child
communication, and that problem is being mirrored in communities not only all
over Georgia, but all over the United States."