This week, I got an email from the embattled New York Governor, David Paterson. It read in part,
I would like to inform you of an important new initiative I signed and enacted into law that will enable you to automatically receive an alert when a moderate or high-risk sex offender moves into an area of interest to you or your family, NY-ALERT. Through this new service, you can be notified by e-mail, text message, fax or telephone when a sex offender moves into or out of your community, or even when an offender relocates within a certain radius (from a quarter mile to 25 miles) of your home.
Really? That’s going to keep my kids safe? I kind of doubt it. But I’m not surprised that my state has decided to go this route.
Despite Department of Justice reports which have found that sexual violence in the United States is decreasing, an increasing number of states have adopted zero tolerance laws for sex-based offenses. Many of these include making sex offender names and addresses publicly available. As a result of these laws, sex offenders across the country not only face increasing jail time, but they have also been facing more and more restrictions on their day-to-day life. For example, many have been reduced to living in motels alongside highways as tougher and tougher restrictions bar them from residing anywhere near children.
Though many sex offenders are indeed sexual predators, others are adults consensually buying or selling sex. Some are also teens who were convicted on statutory rape charges, or even for “sexting”.
Yet even in cases where truly hardened criminals have committed unspeakable crimes, such restrictions don’t seem to have the intended effect. A 2009 study conducted by the National Institute of Justice and Rutgers University, found that the ever increasing legislation requiring sex offender registration, residency restrictions, and mandatory minimums had not made a difference in deterring future sex crimes against children.
Apparently, Paterson, like many in his profession, didn’t get this memo. So for New Yorkers, it is now easier than ever to find out our neighbor’s really dirty laundry. Wouldn’t it be nice if actually preventing sex crimes in the first place was also that easy?
The birth control pill has been around for fifty years, and in that time, a lot of women have taken a lot of hormones. Indeed, the United Nations Population Division estimates that more than 100 million women around the world are currently taking hormonal contraception. That’s a huge number to be sure, but it’s also one that makes sense when we consider that in America alone studies have found that 98% of women between the ages of 15 and 44 who have ever had sex, have used some form of birth control.
And while there are proven risks to hormonal contraception–such as blood clots and strokes for some women–a study out of the U.K. has determined something a lot of birth control users will be pleased to learn: women on the pill tend to live longer than their non-pill popping sisters.
“These latest results, led by Professor Philip Hannaford from the University of Aberdeen, relate to the 46,000 recruited women, followed for up to nearly 40 years, creating more than a million woman-years of observation. The results show that in the longer term, women who used oral contraception had a significantly lower rate of death from any cause, including heart disease and all cancers (notably bowel, uterine body and ovarian cancers) compared with never users.”
It doesn’t quite make up for the fact that women still bear the lion’s share of responsibility for birth control, but at least it’s something.
Last week, headlines were made after a school in Mississippi cancelled its senior prom rather than let a lesbian couple attend. The school, Itawamba Agricultural High School, released a statement that explained prom was off, “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events.”
And while the events leading up to this particular incident were indeed recent, barring gay and lesbian teens from taking same sex dates to prom, isn’t.
This issue first entered the courts back in 1980, when a school in Rhode Island told a gay teen named Aaron Fricke that he could not bring a male date to prom and outlined the reasons in a letter sent to Aaron by the principal.
Dear Aaron:
This is to confirm our conversation of Friday, April 11, 1980, during which I denied your request to attend the Senior Reception on May 30, 1980 at the Pleasant Valley Country Club in Sutton, Massachusetts, accompanied by a male escort. I am denying your request for the following reasons:
1. The real and present threat of physical harm to you, your male escort and to others;
2. The adverse effect among your classmates, other students, the School and the Town of Cumberland, which is certain to follow approval of such a request for overt homosexual interaction (male or female) at a class function;
3. Since the dance is being held out of state and this is a function of the students of Cumberland High School, the School Department is powerless to insure protection in Sutton, Massachusetts. That protection would be required of property as well as persons and
would expose all concerned to liability for harm which might occur;
Sincerely,
Richard B. Lynch
Principal
Aaron ultimately sued and won the right to attend his prom with a male date. As the judge deciding the case wrote, “I find that principal Lynch’s reason for prohibiting Aaron’s attendance at the reception the potential for disruption is not sufficiently compelling to justify a classification that would abridge first amendment rights.”
That decision guaranteed the right of any American student to bring a same sex date to a school sponsored dance.
I’d like to think that educators in Mississippi, the state with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, would have more important things to wory about than who was taking who to prom. Then again, I’d also like to think that schools would feel compelled to obey the law rather than impose a homophobic vision of teen life.
According to the CDC almost 50% of American teens have had sex. Of those, 61% used a condom the last time they did.
That’s pretty significant number of kids to be practicing safe sex. But what if despite their best efforts, the condoms these kids were using just weren’t working out for them?
Switzerland, at least, has decided to tackle this issue and Pam’s House Blend is reporting that,
“A special condom for teens has hit the market in Switzerland…The new condom is 5 millimeters smaller in diameter than the standard model (1.7 inches rather than 2.0 inches).
According to the Swiss research, a regular condom is too big for one in four youths of that age and can slip off. At that age, the penis is not always fully grown.”
A smaller teen condom seems like a good idea, but I wonder if such a thing would be a success in the States. First off, the idea of marketing a condom to a young teen is about as far from the American view of teen sexuality as you can get.
Additionally, even at that young age, it is likely that a lot of teens would be put off by the knowledge that their condom was smaller than average.
It’s not that smaller sized condoms aren’t available in the U.S. A few brands make “snug fit” versions of their condoms. But one rarely sees them marketed. And unlike men who need to use larger sized condoms, those who opt for the smaller versions, don’t often do so with macho bravado.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Do you think that sexually active teens with smaller penises would be open to using smaller condoms? Or do you think our cultural penis size baggage would get in the way?
Mississippi is the state with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. It has rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis among youth practically twice that of the national average.
Additionally, the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. reports that:
“Nearly 60 percent of Mississippi high school students report ever having had sexual intercourse compared to 47.8 percent of high school students nationwide. Moreover, teens in the state are nearly twice as likely to have engaged in sexual intercourse before the age of 13, and 50 percent more likely to have had four or more sexual partners than their peers nationwide.”
So what’s a good legislator to do in this case? Why propose a law requiring abstinence education, of course!
According to the Clarion Ledger,
“House Bill 837 would mandate school boards adopt a sex education policy by June 30, 2011, of their choosing: abstinence-only or abstinence-plus. Current law does not require schools to have a policy. The bill passed the House 83-32 and awaits Senate action. Last year, a bill that would have required schools to teach more than abstinence failed.”
Nice of them to allow schools to pick between abstinence and….well, abstinence.
It’s also worth noting that Mississippi is no stranger to these programs, having accepted millions and millions in federal finding for abstinence programs over the past ten years. In fact, the state accepted close to six million in abstinence funds in 2008 alone.
I understand the reluctance to try something new, but more of a failed program for a state in crisis, well, its nothing short of lunacy.
Here’s a situation: You are a 13-year-old girl forced into prostitution by an adult pimp. Despite the fact thirteen is under the age of consent, and you can’t even legally have sex with a peer, let alone with an adult, you are still charged with the crime of selling sex. Oh, and the 32-year-old man who got you started? Well, he walks free.
If that sounds outrageous, it should. But that exact situation is currently going on in Texas. As a blogger for the San Antonio Current explains,
“The case involves a girl identified as B.W., taken from her mother at age 11 and placed with Child Protective Services. After running away from CPS, she was picked up by Houston Police Department officers two years later after they observed her trying to sell herself on the street. She was booked on charges of prostitution. Later, after her age of 13 became known, she was placed in the juvenile system and charged with delinquency for committing prostitution instead of returning her to CPS.”
Texas is not the only state to treat sexually exploited children as criminals. New York, for example, did the same thing until the passage of the Safe Harbor for Exploited Youth Act in 2008. The act is set to go into effect this April, and
“Requires local districts to provide crisis intervention services and community based programming for exploited youth. Currently, individuals under the age of 18 who are arrested for prostitution or other illegal activities of a sexual nature enter the criminal justice system with the legal presumption that they are juvenile delinquents. This bill…decriminalize[s] child prostitution, recognizing these children as victims, not criminals, and provide[s] them with necessary social service.”
This law demonstrates an important change and it is something that a state like Texas (which has already locked up more than enough abused children), should consider adopting.
If you ask its detractors, there are a lot of reasons to oppose gay marriage. Excuses include that these unions destroy traditional family units, go against religious doctrine, and, yes, even condone anal sex.
That last issue seems to be a big one for some folks. Take, for example, New Hampshire Rep. Nancy Elliott who is one of the co-sponsors of a bill to repeal same sex marriage in that state. During a hearing on the bill last week, she tried to drum up support for her agenda by painting a graphic description of what she thinks two men do in bed.
If seeing Sarah Palin’s face on Fox news wasn’t reminder enough that a socially conservative woman has more chance of gaining political power than does a liberal one, Costa Rica’s recent election of Laura Chinchilla for president, hits that message home.
According to the New York Times, “Although she follows the center-left welfare policies of her party, she is a social conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage.”
To be sure, this is an important moment. With this election, Chinchilla becomes Costa Rica’s first female president, and joins only a handful of other female world leaders. As a result, many women are likely very inspired by the victory.
But given her views, the Chinchilla win is really more of a victory for one woman than it is for all women. While it’s nice to have your gender represented in politics, it’s not nearly as nice as having your rights guaranteed.
When abortion was decriminalized in 1973, all existing abortion laws on the books were invalidated. Pretty much five seconds later, anti-abortion crusaders set about trying to put as many back in place as they could. Then they set about adding a bunch of new restrictions for good measure. As a result of these efforts, there are currently innumerable legal restrictions limiting abortion in America.
Among these, 43 states had laws requiring parental consent and notification for minors seeking an abortion. 32 states required “counseling” or imposed waiting limits on obtaining the procedure. 20 states prohibited organizations which receive state funding from referring women for abortions. And 33 states, plus the District of Columbia, prevented women from using Medicaid and other state sponsored health insurance to cover the procedure.
Additionally, the Guttmacher Institute reports that almost 90% of American counties do not have a single abortion provider.
Yet anti-abortion legislators still scramble to impose ever more restrictive laws, putting a procedure that many women will need at some point during their lives, ever further out of reach.
Most recently, the Utah house passed a bill that would give a woman seeking an abortion the option to first view her ultrasound. The bill, using the scare tactics loved by abortion foes, refers to a woman’s ability under the bill to view the heartbeat of a fetus at three weeks.
Um, last time, I, (and medical science) checked, a three week-old fetus did not have the developed heart that would be needed in order to view a heartbeat.
This fact was actually pointed out to the bill’s sponsor, Republican, Carl Wimmer (a man who a few years back opined that he was considering introducing a bill that would make it a crime for a teacher to stray from the state sanctioned abstinence-only curricula, by discussing things like contraception, or even sex, and who recently introduced a bill that would, in effect, criminalize a miscarriage) would not be swayed. “There are arguments on both sides of the issue,” he offered.
Sure, the ones based on science and the ones based on a desperately misguided attempt at ending legal abortion at any cost.
Finally some good news for a change! According to a congressionally mandated study, child abuse has significantly declined since the early 1990s.
How much of a decline are we looking at? Physical, sexual and emotional abuse combined dropped 26 percent between 1993 and 2006, and when you look at sexual abuse alone, the drop was significant: 38%.
Of course, this study ends in 2006, before our current recession, and it’s true that America in 2010 is not the same place it was four years ago. But it is also important to remember that while there have been fears that crime would increase due to the rise in poverty, this has not actually occurred. In fact, the U.S. crime rate was actually lower in 2009, than it was the previous year. Let’s hope this trend also holds for crimes against children.
