La invasión de los preescolares pervertidos

La invasión de los preescolares pervertidos

Mark Steyn

¿Es la enseñanza pública norteamericana una forma de pederastia? Hace una semana, Brigid Schulte, del Washington Post, contaba que el pasado mes de noviembre un estudiante llamado Randy Castro, que asiste a una escuela de Woodbridge, en Virginia, le dio una palmada en el trasero a una compañera de clase durante el recreo. La profesora lo llevó al director. Los funcionarios del centro redactaron un parte y después llamaron a la policía.

Randy Castro está en primero. Pero, a la avanzada edad de 6 años, ha sido declarado agresor sexual por la Escuela Elemental de Potomac View. Es culpable de acoso sexual y el informe sobre el incidente permanecerá en su expediente por el resto de sus días lectivos (y quizá más allá). Tal vez sea una de esas cosas que aparecen una y otra vez en las comprobaciones de antecedentes: quizá a los 34 años Randy Castro solicite un empleo y en el ordenador de su futuro jefe aparezca de nuevo su ficha de acosador sexual. O tal vez pueda mantenerlo en secreto hasta que tenga 57 y se presente a gobernador de Virginia y su carrera política explote inesperadamente cuando los sórdidos detalles de su patología sexual se den a conocer. Pero eso es lo que es ahora: Randy Castro, agresor sexual. El título del informe expone su crimen: “Toque sexual contra estudiante, ofensivo”. La coma, extrañamente colocada, también podría considerarse ofensiva si no fuera porque los empleados del centro tienen que emplear tantas energías en combatir la epidemia de acoso sexual entre los escolares que ya no pueden permitirse perder el tiempo adquiriendo habilidades secundarias como la puntuación.

Puritanismo

Todos los periódicos han recogido la noticia: el presidente de una federación participó en una orgía con cinco prostitutas. Como parte de la fiesta, hubo juego de roles BDSM, algunos de ellos de temática nazi. Piden su dimisión por considerar este comportamiento indigno e incompatible con su cargo. Además, mencionan el parentesco nazi de su padre como agravante.

Sobre esto último debo de andar muy despistado porque no creía que a los hijos se les pudiera responsabilizar en modo alguno por la ideología paterna.

Pero vamos al meollo: en sus ratos libres, en el disfrute de su erótica, un señor se monta una orgía, paga a unas prostitutas y juegan a buenos y malos. ¡¡¿Y?!!

¿A quién le importa esto?

¿Hay eróticas dignas e indignas? ¿Ahora hay que ponerse lúbrico sólo con lo políticamente correcto? ¿Acaso los deseos siguen normas sociales? ¿La intromisión en la vida privada no es un rasgo de los fascismos? ¿Solo son fiables las personas que se acuestan con su esposa en la postura del misionero? ¿Desde cuándo juzgamos la adecuación al trabajo por los deseos eróticos?

No es un caso único. El linchamiento mediático que acompaña cualquier revelación sobre la vida erótica de los personajes públicos (especialmente si se trata de sadomasoquismo) revela el puritanismo que todavía tiñe las actitudes de muchos.

Evaluación del abuso de menores

El reto de evaluar el abuso sexual

El proceso pericial puede agravar las secuelas psicológicas que sufren los niños

JOAN CARLES AMBROJO  -  Barcelona
EL PAÍS - 29-01-2008

Cuando el abuso sexual a un menor no deja huella física, el niño que supuestamente ha vivido el trance es el único testimonio que puede ayudar a esclarecer los hechos. Pero ¿son fiables las narraciones infantiles?, ¿corresponden a situaciones vividas realmente?, ¿son susceptibles de ser manipulados los niños? La dificultad que entrañan estas cuestiones hace que muchos de los niños víctimas de abusos hayan de entrar en una espiral de pruebas e interrogatorios que en ocasiones agravan las secuelas de los propios abusos. Por eso, los especialistas plantean la necesidad de mejorar las entrevistas psicológicas periciales. La prevalencia del abuso sexual infantil en España es parecida a la de otros países occidentales y se sitúa en torno al 18,9% (15,2% en niños y 22,5% en niñas), según la psicóloga de la Universidad de Barcelona Noemí Pereda. Tan sólo la Unidad Funcional de Abusos Sexuales y Maltratos al Menor (UFAM) del hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Barcelona atiende cada año unas 160 consultas en las que se sospecha que un menor ha sido víctima de abusos. “El 50% de las consultas proceden directamente de las familias, lo cual indica que hay un elevado nivel de alerta, pero también hay sospechas de abusos que luego no se confirman”, afirma Dolors Petitbó, coordinadora de la unidad especializada del hospital Sant Joan de Déu.
La tercera parte de los casos tratados en este hospital tenían una alta probabilidad de haber padecido abuso sexual. Aunque las estadísticas indican que ahora hay más denuncias de abusos sexuales intrafamiliares, Arturo Canalda, Defensor del Menor de la Comunidad de Madrid, no cree que hayan aumentado los casos. Muchas denuncias se producen en el contexto de una separación matrimonial conflictiva. El problema es cómo distinguir en qué casos, de entre los denunciados, se han producido realmente abusos sexuales, y para ello es decisivo el tipo de pruebas e interrogatorios que se practican.

El futuro del matrimonio

The Future of Marriage

By Stephanie Coontz
January 14th, 2008

Any serious discussion of the future of marriage requires a clear understanding of how marriage evolved over the ages, along with the causes of its most recent transformations. Many people who hope to “re-institutionalize” marriage misunderstand the reasons that marriage was once more stable and played a stronger role in regulating social life.

For most of history, marriage was more about getting the right in-laws than picking the right partner to love and live with. In the small-scale, band-level societies of our distant ancestors, marriage alliances turned strangers into relatives, creating interdependencies among groups that might otherwise meet as enemies. But as large wealth and status differentials developed in the ancient world, marriage became more exclusionary and coercive. People maneuvered to orchestrate advantageous marriage connections with some families and avoid incurring obligations to others. Marriage became the main way that the upper classes consolidated wealth, forged military coalitions, finalized peace treaties, and bolstered claims to social status or political authority. Getting “well-connected” in-laws was a preoccupation of the middle classes as well, while the dowry a man received at marriage was often the biggest economic stake he would acquire before his parents died. Peasants, farmers, and craftsmen acquired new workers for the family enterprise and forged cooperative bonds with neighbors through their marriages.

Because of marriage’s vital economic and political functions, few societies in history believed that individuals should freely choose their own marriage partners, especially on such fragile grounds as love. Indeed, for millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission. In Anglo-American law, a child born outside an approved marriage was a “fillius nullius” - a child of no one, entitled to nothing. In fact, through most of history, the precondition for maintaining a strong institution of marriage was the existence of an equally strong institution of illegitimacy, which denied such children any claim on their families.

Pornografía infantil en internet

  May, 2003

Child pornography online: myth, fact, and social control 

Book Review
Robert Bauserman

Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography Online. By Philip Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 2001, 253 pages. Hardcover, $22.95.

Few areas of sexual behavior arouse as much condemnation or as little critical thought as child sexual abuse, and child pornography (despite lack of a consensus definition) is often presented as the epitome of sexual abuse. Consequently, Jenkins’ book is valuable to those interested in issues of child and adolescent sexuality, sexual abuse, pornography, and sexuality on the Internet. Despite its flaws, no other comparable work exists that explores the online subculture of child pornography based on the thoughts and beliefs of the participants themselves, primarily as posted on message boards catering to individuals seeking to collect child pornography (CP) images.

Jenkins clearly states that CP images are exploitative and abusive, but manages to be (usually) calm and reasoned in discussing the nature and extent of the problem and possible responses. Jenkins is well qualified to take a levelheaded look at this online subculture. In his earlier book, Moral Panics, he documented how periods of extreme concern over sexual threats to children have occurred several times in 20th-century America, leading to exaggerated claims about prevalence and effects in order to advance social and moral agendas. Jenkins also writes that he recognizes the contradiction between his earlier exposure of such concerns as overblown, and his effort in this book to raise social concern about an authentic problem he believes is neglected.

Por la vuelta al matrimonio privado

November 26, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Taking Marriage Private
By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Olympia, Wash.

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

The American colonies officially required marriages to be registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control over who was allowed to marry.

Violación: Historia de 1860 a la actualidad

Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
By Joanna Bourke: an examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts

Reviewed by Isabella Thomas

Rape, says Joanna Bourke, used to be understood as the act of sex with a woman who does not “belong” to the perpetrator. In the 19th century it was widely thought that an unwilling woman could not be raped because “merely by vibrating”, a vagina “could ward off attack”. A victim of rape was, therefore, a contradiction in terms. Some thought that if the woman had experienced orgasm in the act, or had finally succumbed, then she could not claim to have been raped. The belief that women were prone to lie about rape to gain attention was, of course, widespread, and rape trials were notorious for their prurient investigations into a woman’s past. In the past 50 years or so, western feminists have argued – with some success – that rape is more about power than sex. In British courts these days, rape does not have to involve violence to justify the name. Lack of consent (which is itself potentially ambiguous) suffices.

As Bourke shows in her scholarly historical survey of rape and rapists, part of the problem with this subject is that “imprecision permeates much of the clinical and psychiatric literature”. Her examination of the many preposterous ways that rape has been explained over time by all manner of experts – doctors, academics, lawyers, psychologists et al – is an attempt to lift the obfuscation.

Mitos y hechos sobre los agresores sexuales

Sexual Offender Treatment, Volume 2 (2007), Issue 1

Myths and Facts about Sexual Offenders: Implications for Treatment and Public Policy

Timothy Fortney¹, Jill Levenson², Yolanda Brannon³ & Juanita N. Baker^4
1Florida Institute of Technology, ²Lynn University, ³Florida Institute of Technology, ⁴Florida Institute of Technology

 

Abstract

Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent perceptions about sexual offenders are based on empirical evidence or misconceptions.
Background: Sexual offenders have often been under the spotlight of media attention and public censure. Legislatures in the United States and abroad have passed increasingly restrictive and intrusive laws in order to protect the public from convicted sexual offenders. Sex offender policies are often passed hastily and are not based on scientific evidence but on emotional reactions to high profile, violent, disturbing cases.
Method: Data were collected in Brevard County, Florida from 192 community members and 125 sexual offenders in outpatient treatment, all of whom were surveyed regarding their knowledge about five common themes. Comparisons between groups were analyzed, as were comparisons between participants’ responses and published data.
Results: Results revealed that both sex offenders and the public overestimated the rate by which strangers victimize children, and overestimated the number of sex offenders who were victims of sexual abuse in childhood. Both offenders and the public overestimated the number of sex crimes that come to the attention of authorities. The public more extensively than offenders overestimated the frequency of sexual recidivism rates and underestimated the efficacy of sexual offender treatment in comparison to the literature.
Conclusions: Common misconceptions may interfere with offenders’ treatment and reintegration into society as well as influence legislatures to pass laws that are misguided and inefficient. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Key words: sex offender, public perception, sexual abuse, myths, misconceptions, public policy

Hijos de homosexuales

A Helena, futura madre lesbiana

Estuve ayer dudando si colgar el artículo sobre los hijos de lesbianas. ¿No ha quedado ya claro que su adaptación es más que adecuada?¿Que no padecen “confusiones” de ningún tipo? ¿Que lo único que necesitan son figuras de apego estables y que les den cariño? ¿Que esto sucede tanto en parejas homosexuales como heterosexuales? ¿Realmente hace falta insistir en lo obvio? Sí, hace falta…
Después leer un extracto sobre las creencias (no llegan a pensamientos) del antiguo presidente del Gobierno, es evidente que queda una labor dura por delante. Veamos lo que dice Aznar en sus Cartas a un joven español (2007):

- Familia: hombre y mujer. Por mi parte yo creo, Santiago, en una familia compuesta de un hombre y una mujer, con hijos, y extendida a todos los miembros que por costumbre, por consanguinidad o integración, pertenecen a ella. Existen otras formas de convivencia, homosexuales o heterosexuales. Hay que respetarlo. Pero no estoy de acuerdo en que se considere cualquier situación equivalente a la familia de la que te hablo. Ni equivalente, ni alternativo.
- Hijos de homosexuales. No sé, y creo que nadie lo sabe, qué pasará cuando un niño o una niña no puedan llamar padre ni madre a quienes se dicen sus progenitores pero que en muchos casos no lo van a ser. ¿Qué idea del mundo y de la realidad van a tener unos niños así criados? ¿La de que todo es posible? ¿La de que las leyes pueden dar satisfacción a todos los deseos?

Los hijos de lesbianas están bien adaptados

Children Of Lesbian Couples Are Doing Well, Study Finds

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2007) — A study of families in the Netherlands indicates that children raised by lesbian couples “do not differ in well being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families.”

“The findings in the Dutch study are identical to those in a very large number of U.S. studies,” said Robert-Jay Green PhD, director of Rockway Institute, a national center for research and public policy on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. “Children do well in loving families, regardless of whether there are two moms or a mom and a dad involved.”

The study was conducted by Henny Bos, Frank van Balen, and Dymphna van den Boom of the University of Amsterdam.

Gays en Irán

Ser homosexual en el país de Ahmadineyad

Gays iraníes relatan la dureza de vivir en un régimen que niega su existencia y que mantiene la pena de muerte para los ‘desviados’

ÁNGELES ESPINOSA  -  Teherán
EL PAÍS  -  Internacional - 30-09-2007

“Entonces, ¿yo no existo?”, exclama incrédulo M., un gay acomodado de Teherán ante la afirmación de que “en Irán no tenemos homosexuales” pronunciada por el presidente, Mahmud Ahmadineyad, en la Universidad de Columbia el pasado lunes. “Lo que debiera hacer es informarse antes de hablar para no meter la pata como con el Holocausto”, añade Taha, de los pocos gays iraníes que ha aceptado hablar con este diario. La discreción es la norma de supervivencia en un Estado cuyo código penal establece la pena de muerte para quien mantiene relaciones homosexuales. Algo que también ocurre en países aliados de EE UU como Pakistán, Arabia Saudí o Yemen.
“Ahmadineyad sólo tiene que darse una vuelta cualquier tarde-noche por el parque Daneshju para descubrir que en su país sí que hay homosexuales”, sugiere un estudiante universitario. El Daneshju es uno de los típicos lugares de encuentro gay de Teherán. Quizá el más democrático. A diferencia del centro comercial Jam-e Jam, donde el ambiente pijo hace que sus camisetas ceñidas y sus cejas arregladas pasen desapercibidas, en el parque confluyen chicos tanto del norte rico como del sur más modesto. A menos que alguno se muestre extremadamente cariñoso, la policía no suele intervenir.

Como en el caso de los heterosexuales, la República islámica considera inmoral cualquier muestra pública de afecto. De acuerdo con la moral que institucionalizó la revolución islámica de 1979, toda relación fuera del matrimonio heterosexual es ilícita y punible.

Canibalismo

Archives of Sexual Behavior, August 2007  10.1007/s10508-007-9227-7

Clinical Case Report Series
Good Enough To Eat

Friedemann Pfäfflin
Forensic Psychotherapy, Ulm University, Am Hochsträss 8, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Contact Information     Friedemann Pfäfflin
Email: friedemann.pfaefflin@uni-ulm.de

Abstract

In mythology, religion, and literature, there are many examples of cannibalism that have been passed down over the centuries and which do not strike us as shocking as long as they remain fixed in a symbolic context. Things only become problematic when cannibalistic impulses are taken literally and put into practice. Apart from situations of extreme emergency in which this rare phenomenon might enjoy a certain sympathy, it also occurs within the context of serious sexual offences. Recently, in Germany, there was the case of a man who used the internet to find a person who wanted to have himself eaten. The victim’s consent unsettled not only the public at large, but also the judiciary, which at first did not know how the case was legally to be appropriately assessed. In a first trial in January 2004, the man was sentenced to a comparatively short prison term of only a few years, a sentence that was lifted by the Federal Supreme Court. In a fresh trial in May 2006, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In this essay, I discuss to what extent mythological, religious, and artistic models of cannibalism express something fundamentally anthropological and how concrete examples should be assessed against this background.

Keywords  Cannibalism - Forensic sexology - Forensic psychiatry - Responsibility

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

Verdades silenciadas del aborto

EVA RODRÍGUEZ ARMARIO
EL PAÍS - 18-09-2007

Durante mucho tiempo se ha hablado del recurso al aborto como una prestación casi exclusiva de la sanidad privada debido a que las clínicas acreditadas para el aborto en España vinieron a cubrir una necesidad social que ningún otro colectivo se atrevió a solucionar. De hecho, fue un grupo de profesionales el que decidió atender esta necesidad y soportar individualmente los posibles problemas legales, civiles y penales, creando una serie de centros médicos que dieran una solución digna a la demanda de unas mujeres que hasta ese momento tenían que hacer turismo abortivo o arriesgar su vida para abortar. Esta realidad innegable nos lleva a preguntarnos acerca de las causas que han propiciado que el 97% de los abortos se realice en clínicas privadas.
Para la Asociación de Clínicas Acreditadas para la Interrupción del Embarazo (ACAI), la ambigüedad de las dos principales leyes que regularon la interrupción del embarazo (la Ley del Aborto 9/1985, de 5 de julio, y el Real Decreto 2409/1986, de 21 de noviembre) ha sido un elemento clave para que fueran las clínicas privadas, y no los hospitales públicos, las que llevaran a cabo esta prestación. La ambigüedad procede de que la ley sólo autoriza la interrupción del embarazo en los casos de violación, malformación del feto y grave peligro físico o psíquico de la embarazada, y exige para ello unos requisitos basados en dictámenes preceptivos.

Presunción de culpabilidad

 Presumed guilty

Sep 13th 2007

A superb new book shows how trumped-up charges exposed faults in some of America’s grandest institutions

ON THE night of March 13th 2006, 47 lacrosse players at Duke University, North Carolina, paid a couple of strippers to entertain them. Things went badly from the start. The girls arrived late. One of them, Crystal Mangum, was so drunk that she could not utter a coherent sentence. Her “dance” lasted four minutes. But over the next few days a sordid evening mutated into a life-ruining tragedy. Ms Mangum alleged that some of the players had beaten and gang-raped her. And the full force of the American legal system and media machine was deployed against a group of young men who were presumed to embody all the evils of America’s demons of racism and sexism. The students Ms Mangum accused are white: Ms Mangum is black.

The accusation was a transparent lie from the start. Ms Mangum, who had been picked up by the police, brought up the subject of rape only when she was confronted with the possibility of a spell in a mental hospital. She recanted her accusation and then recanted her recantation. She told conflicting stories that numbered her assailants at anything from two to 20. Her co-dancer described her claims as “a crock”. The police who interviewed her on the first night regarded her charges as incredible—and, in truth, she had a long record of alcohol and drug abuse, mental instability and making up far-fetched stories.

Yet, a few weeks later, three of the students were arrested and charged with rape amid the usual media frenzy. Why did such a tissue of lies produce a high-profile prosecution? And why did the media and many of Duke’s faculty side with the stripper, not the lacrosse players? This is the subject of “Until Proven Innocent”, a superb new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson: a book that not only reads like a legal thriller (John Grisham provides one of the blurbs), but also exposes deep problems with America’s legal system and academic culture.

¿Qué hacer con los abusadores juveniles?

How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?

By MAGGIE JONES
In the early 1980s, a therapist named Robert Longo was treating adolescent boys who had committed sex offenses. Their offenses ranged from fondling girls a few years younger than they were to outright rape of young children. As part of their treatment, the boys had to keep journals — which Longo read — in which they detailed their sexual fantasies and logged how frequently they masturbated to those fantasies. They created “relapse-prevention plans,” based on the idea that sex-offending is like an addiction and that teenagers need to be watchful of any “triggers” (pornography, anger) that might initiate their “cycle” of reoffending. And at the beginning of each group session, the boys introduced themselves much as an alcoholic begins an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “I’m Brian, and I’m a sex offender. I sexually offended against a 10-year-old boy; I made him lick my penis three times.”
Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”
As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”

Europride: apoteosis y decepción

Europride: apoteosis y decepción

Por Juan Antonio Herrero Brasas, profesor de Ética Social en la Universidad del Estado de California (EL MUNDO, 30/06/07):
Esta tarde tendrá lugar en Madrid el Europride, la gran celebración europea del Orgullo Gay. Para ser exactos, la expresión preferida ahora es Orgullo LGTB, siglas éstas más inclusivas, pues aúnan las reivindicaciones de lesbianas, gays, transexuales y bisexuales. El Europride de Madrid representa la culminación simbólica de un proceso de lucha por la igualdad de todos ellos en España.

Aún dejando de lado las exageradas cifras de previsibles asistentes que anuncian los organizadores, el hecho es que el acontecimiento constituirá una auténtica apoteosis para un movimiento social que, hace justamente 20 años, apenas lograba reunir a algo más de un centenar de personas. Será, sin embargo, una apoteosis no exenta de sombras. Significados activistas que se entregaron por completo a la lucha por la igualdad de gays y lesbianas han sido marginados, e incluso objeto de conspiración, por parte de aquellos compañeros de lucha que han acumulado provecho personal y poder como resultado de la enorme proyección social y política que ha adquirido la cuestión gay en los últimos años.