A new app called YES to SEX has been developed to encourage high school and college students to understand the concepts behind safe sex prior to engaging in sexual activities.

Developed by Wendy Mandell-Geller, the app is designed to provide young individuals with facts about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), pregnancy, and the rules of consent before proceeding with sexual activities by requiring both parties to be recorded both consenting and agreeing to birth control methods.

Mandell-Geller created the app after learning that over 1.7 million of STIs in the U.S. are transferred between 15-25-year-olds, and that 51 percent of young pregnancies are unintended.

“I want to empower teens and young adults to initiate conversations with their partner(s) about consent and the use of protection in a modern, approachable manner that fits into their lifestyles,” Mandell-Geller said in a statement.

The app comes during a time when sexual education in the U.S. is repeatedly criticized for not being comprehensive enough.

As the education website The 74 reported earlier in the month, only 13 states have regulations on the accuracy of HIV and sexual education.

The lack of accurate sex ed, the report said, could be one of the reasons why the U.S. is plagued with both high teen pregnancy rates and a rise in STD cases in young Americans. In the Netherlands, the report pointed out, students begin learning the core concepts of sex ed by age 11. Also in the Netherlands, not surprisingly, significantly lower teen pregnancy rates have been recorded.

YES to SEX aims to address this issue by helping quickly educate students that have not learned proper safe sex procedures in their classroom.

"The app is free to use and requires no sign-up, names, faces, videos, fingerprints, emails, phone numbers, social media information or signatures. Once a user closes out of the app, no information remains saved on any phone, however the date, time, place, and voice recordings are stored on YES to SEX's secure servers, using the same data encryption as the government’s Department of Defense. These records can only be retrieved with court-endorsed orders, ensuring anonymity for both consenting partners,” the statement said.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

4/8/2016