In the UK, the Howard League for Prison Reform recently released a report entitled "Imprisoning children may lead to sexual offences in adulthood" - raising justifiable concerns about the treatment of incarcerated UK youth. An article on www.OpenDemocracy.net suggests this may be creating a future cohort of sexual offenders. The Howard League for Prison Reform will be holding a Conference on these and related Penal Reform issues in London on Tues March 17, 2015. Excerpt from first cited source link above:

'Sending children to prison may make them more likely to commit sexual offences in adulthood, Britain’s first-ever independent review of sex behind bars has found.

Video here. Caption: "CNN's Randi Kaye reports on newly released interrogation tapes of the two Wisconsin girls who are on trial for allegedly trying to kill their classmate." Obviously, the defense will argue either insanity or move to dismiss due to incompetence/mental defect. The question is: if two boys were in the same place, how would things go for them? This is one to watch.

Article here. Excerpt:

'An alarming number of young Western women are defying their families — and all logic — to join the ISIS barbarians.

As many as 550 of the estimated 3,000 Westerners who have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic terrorists are female, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank.

It’s the sick siren song of the caliphate that appears to have taken hold of three British schoolgirls, who lied to their East London families last week and casually slipped out of the country on a flight bound for Turkey, believed to be a stopover for those heading to Syria, and ISIS.
...
Some are coerced — but not all, says law professor Jayne Huckerby, head of Duke University’s International Human Rights Clinic.

“Why do they go? In many cases it’s the same reason as men,” Huckerby told The Post.

Article here. Excerpt:

'My 8-year-old son has been struggling in school. Again.

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school – Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. – have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.

My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.

The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.

Does that sound dramatic to you? Perhaps. After all, most of us go through school and somehow survive more or less intact. But if you really think about it, you might remember what you hated about school. You might remember that it took you years after school to rediscover your own soul and passions, and the courage to pursue them.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Primary school boys are struggling to keep up with the girls and we need to act, according to Belmont Primary School principal, Bruce Cunningham.

Last year, Mr Cunningham decided to start a boys-only class at his Auckland coeducational school.

"This is about boys being allowed to be boys," says Mr Cunningham.

He says there's a "gender gap", and that normal boys are failing in the education system at unprecedented levels because the education system isn't boy-friendly.

"Boys were passive learners. Girls were answering the questions and boys were probably thinking which tree will I climb.

"We've got some excellent teachers in New Zealand but a lot of the writing and reading programmes are designed around girls."

Mr Cunningham advocates class time where there's plenty of exercise, and doing schoolwork around themes that interest boys - like robots, war stories and sport.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Criminalizing johns for purchasing sex will make it more difficult for prostitutes to verify their client’s identity, which is a key safety measure in prostitution. The john bears all the legal risk in purchasing sex making it more likely that they will take steps to conceal their identity. Furthermore, it means that any street transactions for purchasing sex will likely be conducted in secluded spots where the prostitute is at greater risk.

The new prostitution laws are somewhat reminiscent of the early 1900s when women were not persons and could be convicted of vagrancy for being out in public without a legitimate reason. There was little regard for the social reasons then as to why women engaged in prostitution and no regard for women’s right to choose what to do with their own bodies.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Under the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights “has sacrificed the basic safeguards of the lawmaking process,” wrote 16 University of Pennsylvania Law School professors, according to The Washington Post.

Take, for example, the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees everyone in America the right to a “public trial,” the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” and the right “to be confronted with the witnesses.”

The letter from the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights guarantees exactly none of these things and, in fact, directs school officials to avoid providing these basic rights to students accused of sexual violence.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Is an academic discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae aimed at “challenging the ideological echo chamber” elicited this ominous “trigger/content warning” when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: “Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.”

No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning?
...

Story here. Just wondering if the White House will create a hashtag as they did for the girls, like #BringBackOurBoys. Excerpt:

'Dozens of South Sudanese boys, some as young as 13, were recently abducted by an armed group in South Sudan as they prepared for school exams, UNICEF reported Saturday..

UNICEF did not say what group had seized the boys from a displacement camp, but the abductions reportedly took place in an area controlled by government forces and allied militias. Several days ago, the rights group Human Rights Watch accused government forces of recruiting child soldiers in the same area.

War broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 after the governing Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the army split, triggering ethnic killings and fighting in many parts of the country. The two sides recently signed a peace agreement designed to establish a power-sharing government.

Press release here. Excerpt:

'SAVE, a national sexual assault organization, is highlighting the courageous action of 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors for protesting a new campus sexual assault policy. The Open Letter charges the new university policy lacks “fundamental fairness” in avoiding wrongful decisions of wrongful conduct: http://media.philly.com/documents/OpenLetter.pdf

The faculty letter denounces the university’s policy for concentrating power to investigate claims of sexual assault in the hands of an Investigating Officer, turning the campus disciplinary hearing into little more than a rubber-stamp exercise.

The letter also reveals the perverse pressures being brought to bear by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. “The threat of loss of federal funding risks coloring the proceedings,” the law professors wrote.

President Obama's fiscal year 2016 budget eliminates all funding for the Centers for Disease Control prostate cancer program. Congress has the power to protect the CDC Prostate Cancer program. We ask for your advocacy to protect this life saving program.

Letters, e-mails are effective ways to tell your representative that funding for Prostate Cancer programs matters to you.

Please go to http://malecare.org/cdc

There you will find a sample letter, which you are welcome to copy. Representatives hear from very few prostate cancer survivors and family members so your letter will be surprisingly powerful.

The national men's cancer survivor support and advocacy nonprofit organization, Malecare, protests against the proposed elimination of funding for prostate cancer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in America. Almost 30,000 American men die from prostate cancer every year.  And, twice as many African American men die from prostate cancer as do white men. Incredibly, the 2016 President's Budget request would eliminate prostate cancer funding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FY 2016 budget request eliminates the entire $13,200,000 budget for prostate cancer activities. While the evidence on prostate cancer screening remains unclear, CDC has conducted extensive research on and developed materials to help doctors and other health providers better communicate with their patients about informed decision making related to prostate cancer screening and treatment. The proposed elimination will not impact CDC's ability to collect data on national prostate cancer incidence through the National Program of Cancer Registries, nor hinder the ability to share resources and lessons learned.

Please go to Malecare CDC Advocacy now.

Email any questions to:

Darryl Mitteldorf, LCSW

Letter here. Excerpt:

'The fact the Bill proposes extending guardianship to non-marital fathers who have lived with the mother of the child for at least 12 months - including at least three months after the child's birth - is being heralded as a major improvement in the legal position of fathers.

However, looked at in the context of the Bill as a whole, fathers could be even more marginalised by this legislation. What about fathers who don't meet, or cannot prove they meet, the co-habitation requirement? Such fathers will be faced with the possibility (probability?) of a variety of individuals, some of whom have no biological link to the child, taking their place as joint guardians with the mothers.

In this regard it should be noted that a child can only have two guardians, hence such fathers will be denied guardianship forever if another person is appointed in their stead.

Story here. Excerpt:

'The University of Colorado has agreed to pay a suspended male student $15,000 and will not disclose without a waiver the details of his disciplinary record — which includes convictions under the campus judicial process in a 2013 sexual assault case.

The agreement was made with the CU junior known only as "John Doe," as he identified himself — with a judge's permission — when he sued the university last year under Title IX, the federal gender-equity law.

The university will not reveal his identity to the public and agreed to provide John Doe with a positive reference.

John Doe agreed to withdraw from the university.

Article here. Excerpt:

“Most men today don’t have a life.”

That’s the first line of Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph’s book Manhood. I thought about that line and that book again yesterday when I read about the latest statistics relating to male suicides in the UK.

Those statistics made for grim reading. In 2013, 78 per cent of the 6,233 suicides registered in the UK were men. That’s a rate of 19 deaths per 100,000 population.

Article here. Excerpt:

'During the political gridlock that led to the 2013 federal government shutdown, the leading voices for compromise were the handful of female U.S. senators — only 20 percent of the overall legislative body.

"I don’t think it’s a coincidence that women were so heavily involved in trying to end this stalemate,” U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said in The New York Times. “Although we span the ideological spectrum, we are used to working together in a collaborative way.”

Was Collins correct? Would Congress be less dysfunctional if it consisted of 80 percent women instead of men?

It's likely, according to a new study co-authored by a University of Kansas researcher.'