Tag Archives: Great Britain

Dishonest Comparison of Great Britain and U.S. Teen Pregnancy Rates

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In January, Olga Craig wrote an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph favorably comparing the declining rate of teen pregnancies in the United States with the rate in Great Britain, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any country in Europe. But in doing so, Craig left readers with a distorted view of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the two countries at preventing teen births.

Craig argues that the U.S. rate is declining due to the recent emphasis by the Bush administration on abstinence, whereas the British rate is as high as it is, she maintains, because Great Britain has gone the opposite route of “dishing out condoms and morning-after pills, making sex education compulsory in secondary schools, and inundating our teenagers with explicit information on sex.”

According to Craig,

In the past decade the number of teenage pregnancies in America has decreased by 30 percent, with the past year’s statistics indicating a historic low of just 43 births per 1,000 teenage girls.

. . .

For the past 12 years Britain has been the pregnancy capital of Europe. According to Unicef’s figures, in 2002 some 41,966 British girls under 18 became pregnant. Of those, 5954 were 15; 2,011 were 14, and 450 were under 14.

Anytime someone talks about per-capita rates for one country and just gives absolute numbers for the second country, the odds are very high that the intent is to deceive and such is true in this case.

What Craig conveniently leaves out is that Great Britain’s teen pregnancy rate is significantly lower than that of the United States. Most estimates put the UK teen pregnancy rate in the low 30s per 1,000 teenage girls.

In addition, while Craig is correct that Great Britain’s teen pregnancy rate has risen over the last 12 years, she fails to note that most studies of teen pregnancy in the UK show the rate has declined over the past several years.

Why do Great Britain and the United States have such high rates of teen pregnancies for developed countries? Both countries face similar issues with ethnic makeup, immigration and poverty that are fundamentally different from what other developed nations face.

Source:

No sex please . . . Olga Craig, The Telegraph (London), January 11, 2004.

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Great Britain Opens First Shelter for Male Victims of Domestic Violence

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The Observer reported in December that the first shelter for male victims of domestic violence in Great Britain would open in early 2004, with another shelter planned for later in the year.

The Observer noted that the most recent British Crime Survey found that about 4 percent of both men and women said they had been victims of violence by intimates, and that in those incidents 50 percent of women and 31 percent of men said they sustained an injury.

Those sort of findings lead men’s groups to question the lack of resources for male victim’s of domestic violence. The Observer quoted David Hughes, editor of Male View magazine, as saying,

At the last count there were 426 shelters for women in Britain. That means there should be at least 70 refuges for men [assuming 1 in 6 acts of domestic violence are committed by women against men based on another survey]. Yet up until now there was none.

Ian Hancock, a National Health System director of psychological services, told The Observer that along with the lack of facilities, men also face social pressure not to report acts of domestic violence. According to Hancock,

It’s difficult for anybody if they’re being battered but with men their problem is compounded by the fact that they feel they shouldn’t allow themselves to be battered by a woman. The idea that it makes you some kind of weakling means it’s a double whammy for men. It affects their self esteem. . . . People have this image of muscular women and weedy men but size has got nothing to do with it. A man can be twice the size of his female partner and still be battered by her.

Source:

Battered men get their own refuge. Jamie Doward, The Observer, December 21, 2003.

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Men Sentenced to Jail for Honor Killing in Great Britain

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In October, the BBC reported that two men who murdered their cousin in an apparent honor killing in Great Britain were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Tafarak Hussain and Rafaqat Hussain were convicted of stabbing their 21-year-old cousin Sahjda Bibi 22 times on January 11, 2003. The cousins killed her with a kitchen knife in her bedroom.

Tafarak and Rafaqat actually claimed they had accidentally stabbed Bibi 22 times, but prosecutors argued that they murdered her because she was going to marry a divorcee. The BBC quotes a West Midlands Police spokesman as saying,

The death has been called an honor killing — when a person is murdered because they have ‘brought dishonor’ upon their family. In Sahjda’s case it seems she had simply fallen in love with the wrong man. Rafaqat appears to have been unable to accept this union and took it upon himself to prevent it taking place — at any cost.

Source:

Cousins jailed for bride’s murder. The BBC, October 20, 2003.

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Woman in UK Appeals Murder Conviction Citing Recovered Memories

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Jane Andrews, a former dresser to the Duchess of York, recently filed an appeal of her murder conviction claiming that she has recovered memories of early childhood sexual abuse that diminished her responsibility for killing her boyfriend.

Andrews, 35, was convicted in 2001 of murdering her lover, Tom Cressman. She hit Cressman with a bat and then stabbed him to death.

At trial Andrews offered a number of claims, including that Cressman was abusive and that she had suffered sexual abuse as a child, but a jury convicted her and she was sentenced to life.

While in prison, Andrews underwent psychiatric therapy and now claims that she has recovered repressed memories of sexual assault by her brother when she was aged 8 to 12. The brother denies the accusations.

Andrews now claims that Cressman had sexual assaulted her, that she feared he would do it again, and that her repressed fears of childhood sexual abuse boiled up and led her to kill him.

Government attorney Bruce Houlder, however, said that Andrews “has consistently lied, has changed her accounts and now seeks to get a new trial on the basis of something she could perfectly reasonably have run at the time of the trial.”

Source:

Ex-royal dresser tells appeal of ‘unlocked’ abuse. John Steele, Daily Telegraph, September 24, 2003.

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Controversy Over Sexuality Materials for Schools in Great Britain and Scotland

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Controversy erupted in Great Britain and Scotland in September over materials related to same-sex relationships targeted at primary school children.

In Scotland, Catholic groups and others were angered by a project that uses dolls to teach tolerance for, among other groups, homosexual couples.

The so-called Persona Dolls were funded by Lesbian Mothers Scotland. According to a report in the Edinburgh News, educators bring the dolls to school and use them to tell stories to help children “unlearn discriminatory attitudes and behaviors.

Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph reported on a controversy in Great Britain over a pamphlet published by the government-funded Family Planning Association.

The pamphlet, “4 You,” is targeted at 9-11 years old, but includes material that some believe is inappropriate for that age group. Among other things, the pamphlet includes a cartoon depicting a young girl masturbating in the bath, a diagram showing the location of the clitoris, and the admonition that it’s “totally normal” to be attracted to members of the same sex.

Sources:

Primary pupils to get lesbian doll lessons. Jason Cumming, Edinburgh News, September 26, 2003.

Attack on children’s cartoon sex guide. Sarah Womak, Daily Telegraph, September 27, 2003.

The explicit sex guide aimed at nine-year-olds. Laura Clark, Daily Mail, September 27, 2003.

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Debate Over Kenyan Rape Allegations

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There has been much controversy in recent weeks over a planned lawsuit on behalf of 650 Kenyan women who claim to have been raped by British soldiers. The crux of the debate is whether or not the rape charges are genuine or are being invented out of thin air in order to pursue the potentially lucrative lawsuit.

Much of the controversy centers around the Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict (IMPACT) — a Kenyan group that has been working with British lawyers in preparing the lawsuit.

One of the major pieces of evidence buttressing the rape charges were mixed-race children born to Kenyan women who claimed they had been born as the result of rape by British soldiers. First, however, it turned out most of these children were born to prostitutes. Then, Kenyan prostitutes began stepping forward claiming they were told by IMPACT that they could receive thousands of dollars if they accused British soldiers of raping them.

The Daily Telegraph reported on one of these prostitutes,

Angela Muguri, 24, claims three IMPACT activists sought her out and promised to make her a millionaire. All she had to do was pretend that British soldiers raped her — and then give them a cut of any forthcoming compensation.

Miss Muguri held her two-year-old daughter, Britanny, who, like scores of children in Nanyuki, is mixed race. “They told me that if I said I was raped by British soldiers and showed them my baby then I would get three million shillings [30,000 pounds],” Miss Muguri said. “I would take two million and they would take one.”

According to Miss Muguri, Britanny’s father is a British soldier, but she insisted that the child was the product of a six-week consensual relationships, not of rape.

“I know it was a lie but they told me if I told the truth I would get nothing,” she said. “This British soldier no longer sends me ay money, or communicates with me. I am very poor. How could I say no?”

Those sort of revelations followed on the heels of Royal Military Police investigators concluding that police records documenting the alleged rapes were in fact fakes created specifically for the purposes of pursuing the IMPACT lawsuit.

According to the Daily Telegraph,

A spokesman at the British High Commission in Nairobi confirmed that the 37 reports expected to form the backbone of the case, the only ones filed at the time of the alleged attacks, had proved to be fakes. The reports had encouraged hundreds more women to come forward.

“I am therefore unaware of any genuine entries concerning rapes by British servicemen in police records,” the spokesman said.

Unfortunately the Royal Military Police have not yet explained how they were so certain the reports were not genuine. British newspaper The Guardian, however, examined hospital records related to the rapes and said that the records appeared to have been doctored after-the-fact to include rape-related materials. For example, there tended to be large numbers of patients allegedly raped by British soldiers added to the end of daily hospital logs, suggesting they were added at a later date.

Writing about the controversy, Wendy McElroy noted that it’s often difficult to sort out whether such allegations are accurate or not because of what McElroy terms the “compensation culture” that is currently prevalent in developing countries that plays on Western feelings of guilt over colonial-era injustices,

A “compensation culture” seems to be spreading through poor nations. This “soak the rich” attitude toward the West draws upon Western guilt over its own prosperity and over historical wrongs, like slavery. This collective guilt is especially undeserved when placed on the blameless shoulders of children born today. It is also likely to harm the credibility of true victims who seek compensation.

It also has the effect of infantilizing the governments of developing nations who often seem to spend more time blaming Western nations than actually trying to solve problems their countries face.

Sources:

Rape claims are forged, says Army. Adrian Blomfield, Daily Telegraph, September 27, 2003.

New doubt thrown on Kenyan mass-rape claim against UK. James Astill, The Guardian, October 2, 2003.

Prostitutes ‘told to fake rape claims’. Daily Telegraph, October 11, 2003.

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Jon Holbrook on Domestic Violence in Great Britain

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Jon Holbrook recently wrote an interesting analysis (The law and the ‘one in four’) about British government claims that 1 in 4 women in Great Britain have been the victims of domestic violence. According to Holbrook, the government figures intentionally exaggerate domestic violence incidence in order to recast how domestic violence is perceived in that country.

Holbrook writes,

It is interesting that [Home Secretary, David] Blunkett has not relied on the Home Office’s own research of 1999, which dealt in detail with victims’ perceptions of domestic violence. What this showed was not that people thought domestic violence was acceptable, but that only 17 percent of most recent domestic violence incidents were considered by their victims to have been crimes.

Probably part of the reason for victims being reluctant to criminalize their partner’s violent behavior is the fact that, as the researchers say, many of the incidents were perceived ‘as too trivial in intent or action to warrant the attention of the criminal justice system.’

Holbrook notes, for example, that the overwhelming majority of incidents used to support the 1 in 4 claim did not result in any sort of injury, but was instead characterized as either a push, shove or grab.

Such actions are not appropriate, but do they rise to the level of criminal behavior? Clearly most of the “victims” of such acts did not think so. As Holbrook puts it,

But another related factor is that victims of domestic violence, and no doubt other members of the public as well, are able to distinguish between something that is wrong and something that is criminal. Or to put it another way, they are able to distinguish between something that is a private matter to be sorted out by those affected and something that warrants criminal justice intervention.

But, of course, such ideas presumes the sort of autonomy on the part of women which domestic violence rhetoric tends to diminish and deny. Can a woman really decide on her own whether or not to prosecute when her husband or boyfriend grabs her during a heated argument? The answer, of course, is no if you buy into current domestic violence ideology (ironically, when men are the victims of such behavior, the feminist line is that this isn’t really domestic violence at all).

Sources:

The law and the ‘one in four’. Jon Holbrook, Spiked-Online, July 23, 2003.
Thursday, September 4, 2003.

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British Gov’t Workers Required to Report Inter-Office Sexual Liasions

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UK newspaper The Observer reports that fears of sexual harassment lawsuits have prompted many government agencies in Great Britain to require employees to report any sexual relationships they are having with their colleagues to their respective human resources department.

And such fears appear to be well-founded. According to The Observer,

Research by academics at the University of Sydney suggests that almost a quarter of failed office relationships end in sexual harassment cases, and a survey in America by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 52 per cent of companies believe they suffer in some way because of romance in the workplace. Nearly a third of employees quizzed said they feared office affairs would end in claims of sexual harassment. Small wonder then that 95 per cent of personnel managers said they believed office romances should not be allowed or, at least, should be discouraged.

Which, of course, takes further along the road to where Daphne Patai predicted the sexual harassment industry was eventually headed — to stigmatizing heterosexual relationships as inherently suspect.

Are two of your coworkers sleeping together? Well, clearly, somebody should be watching that situation to make certain it doesn’t get out of hand. As Patai put it, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women and men.”

Clearly the former are in charge in the UK.

Source:

Personnel affair. The Observer, July 20, 2003.

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Great Britain Proposes Outlawing Secret DNA Paternity Tests

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In response to a handful of bizarre cases, the United Kingdom is proposing outlawing DNA tests without the consent of all parties involved, which could make it very difficult for men who are suspicious about the paternity of their children.

This seems like an extreme position to take and the Human Genetics Commission chair Baroness Kennedy QC completely dismissed the position of men who are concerned about establishing whether or not they are really the father of their children saying,

A person may say, ‘what is wrong with a man knowing whether he really is the father of a child?’, but there are real repercussions for a family when that is done.

That is an outrageously patronizing attitude that would never be uttered in this day and age about women’s rights to know (or if it were, this woman would have faced immense pressure to step down immediately).

The cases of people trying to take DNA of celebrities or public figures can be handled without a blanket ban on all such private tests. Besides which the cost of genetic testing is falling so rapidly that it is doubtful such a ban will really prevent someone determined to do DNA testing from going forward.

Source:

Secret testing on ‘stolen’ DNA to be outlawed. Colin Brown, The Daily Telegraph (London), June 16, 2003.

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Requiring Men to Wear Ties Is Sex Discrimination?

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The Daily Telegraph reported in March that a 32-year-old civil servant had won his sexual discrimination complaint against his employer after a new dress code required men at the company to wear ties.

The actual dress code required employees at a JobCenter office to dress in a “professional and businesslike manner” and went on to say,

For men the basic standard is to wear a collar and tie; for women to dress appropriately and to a similar standard . . . Within these rules staff are free to decide what clothes to wear.

Matthew Thompson filed a complaint with an industrial tribunal that this was sex discrimination. Thompson argued that since the dress code mentioned a specific set of clothes for men — collared shirt and tie — but did not mention any specific clothes that women had to wear, that it was discriminatory.

And the industrial tribunal agreed saying, in part,

If we were to turn the argument round and the only mandatory item of clothing had been for a woman to wear, say, a skirt, and she was disciplined for wearing some other item, would that be deemed discriminatory against her on the grounds of sex? We believe it would be.

Can’t you wait until tribunals like this are scouring through our lives looking to abolish every hint of an imbalance between the sexes?

Source:

Telling men to wear ties is sex discrimination. Sandra Laville, The Daily Telegraph (London), March 12, 2003.

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