individuals for the purpose of chastity. Chastity has been used as a synonym for sexual abstinence, they are similar but with different behavior and restrictions. Legal issues In some countries any sexual activity outside marriage is illegal. Such laws are mostly tied to religion and the legal and political traditions within the particular jurisdiction. Laws differ greatly from country to country. In some Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Mauritania, Qatar, Sudan, Yemen, any form of sexual activity outside marriage is illegal. Violence In some parts of the world, people suspected of engaging in premarital or same-sex sexual activity can become victims of honor killings committed by their families. Stoning for sexual activity outside marriage is also a punishment in some places. Abstinence-only sex education in the United States Abstinence-only sex education is a form of sex education that teaches abstinence from sex, and often excludes many other types of sexual and reproductive health education, particularly regarding birth control and safe sex. Education programs which focus exclusively on abstinence have hardly been shown to delay sexual activity. Such programs promote sexual abstinence until marriage and often also condemn the use of contraceptives as an alternative. Comprehensive sex education, by contrast, covers the use of contraceptives as well as abstinence. Organizations such as SIECUS have called abstinence-only programs "fear-based," and "designed to control young people's sexual behavior by instilling fear, shame, and guilt." Author Judith Levine has argued that there might be a natural tendency of abstinence educators to escalate their messages: "Like advertising, which must continually jack up its seduction just to stay visible as other advertising proliferates, abstinence education had to make sex scarier and scarier and, at the same time, chastity sweeter." In spite of these criticisms, federal government support has made abstinence the de facto focus of sex education in the United States, so that opponents frequently adopt the line that abstinence education is acceptable only if it is combined with other methods, such as instruction in the use of condoms, and easy availability thereof. Most nations of Western Europe use more comprehensive measures, and in sharp contrast to the heated discussion in the U.S., abstinence is hardly discussed as an educational measure. A U.S. federal government-promoted abstinence-only program was aimed at teens in 1981 in order to discourage premarital sex and unwanted pregnancies. However, recent studies conducted by Mathematica Policy