Working in healthcare I'm familiar with maintaining confidentiality and I imagine your dealing with the same issues I've had to when using real documentation to teach students. As long as you remove an information that would identify the asker (name, city, etc.) you aren't violating confidentiality. You can probably take out everything except gender (and even that depending on the question). If you want to keep ages and are still concerned, you can have it as an age range instead a specific age. 10-13, 14-16, 17-19 for example.

If your question came up and you recognized it would you feel betrayed?

These days I'm a lot more laid back about such things, but in my teens, much as I hate to say it, the answer to this question would probably be "yes". I'm assuming that when people submitted their questions, they expected them to be revealed and answered in a small group setting.

Other than that, I'd say that yes, disabling comments would be a good idea. I know people who would read it and who would find it helpful. So the idea is good, it's a matter of how to implement it.

A couple of ideas:

1) Could you make it an opt-in thing going forward (e.g. a little checkbox on the card saying "ok to post this question and the answer to such-and-such blog")?

2) Could you paraphrase or re-word the questions, so that information still gets out there but doesn't result in somebody reading it and going "Hey, that's *my* exact question!"

You definitely should start a blog! And I think if you have a little preamble in your sidebar or header that there are no stupid questions and it's important to have accurate info out there, people wouldn't make fun. I like Fishbike's idea of paraphrasing/re-wording.

I think Fishbike makes great points.

Do you have any type of ethics committee? I dunno what your kids comprehension of things like informed consent is. Sharing anonymous information with colleagues is one thing, but publicly publishing is something else.

Make it opt in going forward, all the ones you've already collected already should be considered out of bounds.

I would reword the questions. You can still address all the topics and concerns, and avoid the embarrassment.

I agree with DarkForest. I think if you said it would be confidential it's a bit dubious to put it online in its original form, even without identifying information.

Even if you switch off comments, it could easily happen that somewhere else on the web people start quoting it with "haha look at that dumbass" comments, which could make the person who asked the question feel bad.

Former teenager here, so I speak with a bit of experience :)

None of the questions that Stewie mentioned in her post on the gray strike me as anything odd or new. I think I heard those questions or a variation thereof from the time my best friend's older brother started suggesting stupid shit to us when we were about ten. I understand the need to maintain some confidentiality and privacy for the kids, but the questions are all generic enough (Really, I liked the "big penis/small penis - who knocks her up first?" question. I've heard that one before. Former ignorant Catholic schoolchild here!)
I can't imagine right now what form a blog would take, but I would definitely heavily mod or disable contents, so as to avoid any young readers from feeling marginalized or diminished intellectually.
I suppose another question is, would you start this blog to answer these questions, a la Savage Love (without the shitty snark), or would the blog be more directed at adults, to educate them on how undereducated today's youth are about sexual reproduction?
Either way, you got a winner.

If your question came up and you recognized it would you feel betrayed?

Yes. More than that, it would have confirmed a fear never far from my mind in my darkest teenage years: adults are untrustworthy, even the ones who seem most empathetic and honest. This is a terrible sentiment, and one that no teenager should have to believe. Do not make them think it's true.

I think it's a great idea to have opt-in consent on any questions you collect in the future, to discuss this with the ethics board (if any), and --- if you do decide to use existing questions --- to rephrase them so they aren't identifiable to the original asker. (Though I have to admit: using questions that you promised to keep confidential feels uneasy to me, too, even if they're obscured a bit.)

Maybe also change the wording when promising confidentiality in the future? If you'd originally said "Your question will remain anonymous" rather than "confidential," it might be a different matter.

As a teenager, I would've loved something like this, but I agree that some of the issues with using real questions are murky.

(My parents kept me out of any sex-ed/health class until late in HS so I had no idea what things were until my friends took me to the school librarian (a friend's mom) and found a ton of books for me to peruse during the lunch hour.)

I think it would be a violation of privacy to use the questions submitted by your students. But you could easily harvest similar questions from yahoo questions. And, yes, great idea.

I ran this by what could be called our "ethics committee" (our medical director and the person who is in charge of development/marketing), and they didn't seem at all concerned about using the real questions. I still feel somewhat squicky* about using some of the questions I have so far, but some of them are so generic that I'd not worry.

And to clarify the confidentiality thing a little bit, the way I communicated that was that if someone said something about themselves or someone else while we were in the workshops that it would be off bounds to talk about it afterwards. A "no gossip" type of confidentiality. The questions themselves were anonymous questions.

I'm leaning towards using the questions I have as a guide for an FAQ or something like that instead. I'll continue to chew on it before doing anything. Thanks guys!


*for all the reasons mentioned above, actually! Are you all in my brain or what?

I like the opt-in idea and the idea of soliciting anonymous questions on the blog itself or answering ones you see on other sites.
I think it is a good idea to have the blog for your students as well because some people are too shy (speaking from experience) to even write an anonymous question in class because OMG she will totally recognize my handwriting and everyone will know it was me.
An online anonymous question submitter is cool because then no one knows who or when the question was submitted.
I guess it could lead to some bs and trolling, but maybe it won't if you keep them private and off the site until you decide to answer them.

Terrific idea if you can get the ethical issues resolved.

I might even take it one step further and offer the blog proactively to kids as a resource along the lines of an adolescent, sex-ed version of PostSecret, or indeed a variant of Savage Love without all the snarky nastiness. As long as the boundaries of anonymity are clearly defined upfront (a la PostSecret) then I think it shouldn't be A Thing.

I certainly think there's need for reliable adolescent sexual health information on the web that is non judgemental, approachable, and unhindered by historical baggage. Planned Parenthood covers a lot of these bases already, and they're really great, but there's tended to be this portrayal of them in the media as Those Evil Abortion Merchants, and thus my perception is that teens view any interaction with PP as generally squicky and shameful. Which is incredibly sad, but, you know, politics :P Plus the PP website tends to be sort of this faceless sterile corporate entity.

I would disable or heavily moderate comments tho. And if you take it public, maybe be prepared / come armed for some heavy disapproval from certain sectors.