Rape – whose fault is it?

A stunning new Amnesty Insternational survey of young Swedes show that young people feel it’s apparently very much the woman’s responsibility to make sure she doesn’t get raped. I was shocked to find out that every 5th young Swede between 15 and 25 think it’s the girl’s own fault if she’s raped.

An even higher percentage, one in 4, think that it’s the girl’s own fault if she’s raped and doesn’t “shout loud enough or fight back”.

Almost 20% thought that “if she’s under the influence of alcohol or drugs” then it’s her fault.

What has happened for young people, even GIRLS, to think this way? Why is a man’s behavior, be it under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or whilst sober, admissible, but a woman in the same situation is to blame? Is it because boys do not have limits imposed on them in this respect at an early age? Is it because women are seen as sex objects, more so now than even just 10 years ago? Why is rape still largely a “girl’s problem”? We need to shift the focus on this. To not impose strict limits on boys’ behavior is to do them a great disservice.

And girls need to understand that is should ALWAYS be their right to say no. There is NO excuse for rape.

House of Horrors – update

Here is the latest on the house of horrors, the 24 year jail situation with rape and abuse, in Amstetten, Austria:

• The children who were imprisoned with their mom walk bent over, are missing teeth, and are anemic
• The oldest daughter is still in a coma
• The two imprisoned boys, 18 and 5 years old, have their own language consisting largely of grunts and gurgles. They had never seen the light of day until now.
• Social Services made 21 visits to the house over the years, without finding Elisabeth
• The Fire Marshall made a visit to the basement to check on the furnace, without finding Elisabeth
• Josef Fritzl is being linked to a murder that took place 22 years ago, by Mondsee Lake where he ran an inn at the time
• Josef has explained that the reason he “adopted” three of the children was because they “screamed too loudly”..
• There is speculation that Josef was imprisoned in the 60’s for pedofilic behavior
• Rosemarie, Josef’s wife, sought help from psychics to find out what had happened to her daughter, Elisabeth. The psychics told her that “Elisabeth was not doing well, where she was”…
• Rosemarie’s best friend is adamant that Rosemarie knew nothing of what Josef was doing

I am still gobsmacked over all this.

15 years in jail for 24 years of rape and abuse???

Incest, rape, abduction and imprisonment. For 24 years. His own daughter and her children, who also happen to be his children. Because his perverted ways fathered children with his own daughter. He’s caught, and he faces 15 years in jail. MSNBC.com

15 years for that???? What is wrong with this picture? This sick excuse of a human being is going to get much less (10 years less!) of a sentence than his poor daughter and her children have had to endure? In my opinion this man should be locked up for the rest of his life, in a dark room with no more than a bunk and a smelly toilet, and he should be left there to rot.

Elisabeth lived in her windowless prison for 8,642 days and nights. How often did she wonder ”why me? What have I done to deserve this?”? How will she, and her children, ever manage to fully leave the nightmare?

Her perpetrator might be sentenced to 15 years for what he’s done. As an 18-year old girl with hopes and dreams, Elisabeth was sentenced to her own jail sentence. 23 years, seven months and 29 days. While in her jail, she suffered constant rape and abuse, and was forced to live with and bring up her children in a black hole behind an electronic door of steel. Her own dad, Josef, was prosecutor, jury, judge, prison guard and rapist, all in one powerful, controlling man

According to what Elisabeth has told the police, her dad started sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old. Was it his insatiable need to control everyone in his environment that made him imprison her 7 years later? Did she perhaps threaten to tell on him?

In 2005 three girls under seven years of age were found imprisoned in darkness by their mother, in Linz, Austria. In 2005 Natascha Kampusch made headlines after she’d manage to escape her kidnapper after 8 years in a basement in Strasshof, Austria, where she was repeatedly raped

When the world read about these girls, what did Josef think, knowing that he was doing the same? Knowing that he had kept his own daughter imprisoned for 3 times as long a time, did he feel proud of himself, or did he know that what he was doing was utterly wrong?

Looking at a map of Austria, you can see that the three towns Linz, Amstetten and Strasshof are situated in a straight line. Drive a few miles from Linz and you are in Amstetten, a few miles from there and you are in Strasshof. Austria itself is a surrounded country, full of people imprisoned by their geographical location between 7 other countries, with no coastline, and no openings towards the sea. Could this have had anything to do with the mentality of these criminals? The questions mount.. did Josef rape any other of his imprisoned children? Can the victims ever recover? Are there more imprisoned children in dark holes in Austria, waiting for someone to rescue them one of these years?

You couldn’t make something like this up, it’s so sick and depraved that it must surely take an evil, twisted mind to think it up in the first place. I think Josef Fritzl fits that bill.

Wanted! Eat chocolate every day for the greater good!

Eating chocolate every day for a year, with a good excuse? Who could ask for more?

British scientist are looking for 150 postmenopausal women under the age of 70, to be chocolate-eating lab rats for a year to test whether a natural compound found in cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, could cut the risk of heart disease among women with diabetes.

A Belgian confectionist has created the special chocolate bar containing high levels of flavonoids — a plant compound that has been shown to reduce heart risk factors — to be used in the experiment. Soy, another natural source of flavonoids, has also been added to the bar.

The women will have their risk of heart disease tested on five occasions during the year to see whether change occurs. Deaths due to heart disease among women increase rapidly after menopause. For women who suffer from type 2 diabetes, the risk of heart disease is up to three and a half times higher. Despite this, heart disease in women is still not properly researched, and many women, and doctors, are woefully ignorant of the risks of heart disease that we women face. Perhaps these a-chocolate-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away trials will make a difference!

Can’t believe I’m saying this.. but I almost wish I was postmenopausal!

Vaccinate against smoking

Swedish reserachers have joined an international body of researchers in the fight against smoking and have now developed a vaccine that should stop the cravings. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm have, with the help of the company Independent Pharmaceutica, developed a vaccine that will be tested at five different clinics in three Scandinavian countries.

400 people will get help and support to stop smoking and will receive anti-smoking medication, as well as 4 injections every other month. Half the group will get the vaccine, whereas the other half will get a placebo.

The vaccine, namde Niccine, helps the body develop antibodies to nicotine, and will prevent nicotine from reaching the part of the brain that registers pleasure from the drug. In so doing, the “high” reached from smoking which keeps the addiction going, will be bypassed. The hope is that once weaned off cigarettes, the ex-smoker will no longer wish to return to the habit.

Here in the US, Pfizer offers a vaccine called Chantix, which largely does the same thing. Perhaps there’s finally hope for those who wish to stop smoking but find it hard to kick the habit.

A blood test to detect breast cancer?

Doesn’t that sound a lot easier and less painful than the mammogram mangle? Not that it will remove the necessity to have mammograms, but according to researchers, this blood test could detect sign of breast cancer up to 4 years before a mammogram would!

Breast cancer kills 500,000 women worldwide every year, but this early blood test could save thousands of lives just by detecting tiny changes in the chemical setup in the bloodstream which the body produces as it reacts to the presence of cancer cells.

So, where can you get this blood test? Well, it’s been 10 years in the making, but the company that developed the technology, Oncimmune.  the University of Nottingham’s commercial technology company in England,  are starting trials to confirm whether the test is accurate and robust enough to work across all age groups and ethnic groups.

“We are cautious . . . but if it works – which we will know for certain later this year – then it’s potentially exciting,” said Professor John Robertson, professor of surgery at the University of Nottingham, who started the research 10 years ago.

If it is succesful, the test could then possibly be adapted for other cancers. Keeping fingers crossed!

Forced to live near Chernobyl

Kasja Markouskaja, 23, is one of thousands of students in Russia who have been told that once they finish university they will move to the Chernobyl area. Not, “would you consider moving to Chernobyl” or “we’d like you to move to Chernobyl” but “you WILL move to Chernobyl”.

The reason the Russian government is doing this is because they want the area repopulated, they want industry back in the area and they want farming to start back up again. Despite the fact that a recent German study, spearheaded by German Alfred Körblein, has shown that the infant mortality rate has increased in both Finland and Sweden, two of the many countries that were downwind of the poisonous emissions from Chernobyl, since the incident.

“I feel like a slave” Kasja says, tears running down her cheeks. To complicate matters, Kasja has an enlarged thyroid gland, something that has been linked to the Chernobyl incident, and which won’t improve being exposed to whatever radiation lingers at the site.

Kasja and her fellow students have been told that if they refuse to move to the Chernobyl area, their University diplomas will be revoked. Or they’ll have to pay for the entire cost of their education.  Forced removal of students is something that was introduced during the time that Kasjas has been at University.

Kasja is a journalism student, and after graduation she will be removed to work at the state owned newspaper Avangard in the town of Buda-Koshelevo, about 16 miles north of Chernobyl. Alexander Yadrentsev, editor of the newspaper, said Kasja will be replacing a journalist who was also forced to move to the area, who has now decided to return to Minsk.

Around 800 students have refused the forced move so far and 99 of them have been taken to court.

It’s like something out of the dark ages, isn’t it? Who’d have thought something like this could would still be allowed in this day and age, in a supposedly industrialized country, let alone the fact that it’s actually happening.

Kasja, the world is listening and we’re as disgusted as you are. Perhaps the embarassment your government must surely be suffering now that the world knows what they’re doing will finally be enough to force them to stop this atrocity.

Just found out you are being paid less than your male co-workers doing the same job?

Well, too bad. Yup, you heard me. You now have no recourse. Because  the Supreme Court, on May 29, 2007, issued a narrow 5-4 conservative majority shielding employers from liability unless an employee learns of the pay discrimination (oh so unlikely) and does something about it within 180 days. 

The ruling says that the clock for the statute of limitations on wage discrimination begins running when the employer first makes the decision to discriminate, and does not run for all the subsequent months or years that the disparate paychecks are mailed. So, in other words, if you didn’t know when you were hired, and for the next 180 days, that you are being discriminated against, you are screwed. And let’s face it, how many of us are going to have the balls to start asking our co-workers who do the same job, when we are new on the job, if they earn more than us?

That’s how the justice system works under a republican government. Why do I say that? Well, I say that because senate republicans just blocked a bill that would have overturned the Supreme Court’s ruling (the supreme court which of course is staffed by Bush puppets at the moment). The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, already passed by the House, would have reinstated the law as it was interpreted by most appellate courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in other words that every single discriminatory paycheck represents a new act of discrimination and that the 180-day period begins anew with every one.

As it stands now, unless you know when you are first hired that you are earning less than your  male counterparts, well, that’s just your tough luck. And this, apparently, was done to “protect” us women - read “stupid women”(how  fricking condescending can the republicans be???)—from the greedy clutches of unprincipled plaintiffs’ attorneys and from women’s own stupid inclination to sit around for years—decades even—while being screwed over financially before they bring suit. That means they were, in effect, just protecting us from the dangerous laws that protect us. Well, ain’t that just nice and purdy. Thank you Mr. Republican Senator for saving little ol’ me from myself and from my obtaining justice, little ol’ me being nuttin’ but a woman wouldn’t know nothing about such complicated matters. @@

The time to be heard is now. Write to members of this Committee and your Senator to ask her (or him) to correct the inequity of the Ledbetter decision. And sign the petition at www.momsrising.org in support of this law.

President George W. Bush plans to veto the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay. Let your Senator know that we won’t rest our case until such time as our anti-discrimination laws live up to the original intent of expanding opportunity.

People, we simply HAVE to vote in a democratic, humanitarian, non-dictatorial, intelligence-based government this next time around.

Bullies are often kids with ADHD, new study finds

A new study shows that children with ADHD are almost four times as likely as others to be bullies. But in a weird twist, the children with ADHD symptoms were also almost 10 times as likely as others to have been regular TARGETS of bullies prior to the onset of those symptoms, according to a report in the February issue of the journal of Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology.

Now, before you start worrying about your child being a bully because he’s dealing with ADHD, the study did offer some interesting insights.

The study followed 577 children — the entire population of fourth graders from a municipality near Stockholm, Sweden — for a year. During this time the researchers met with parents, teachers and children to determine which kids were likely to have ADHD. Children showing signs of the disorder were then seen by a child neurologist for diagnosis. The researchers also asked the kids about bullying.

“The results underscore the importance of observing how kids with ADHD symptoms interact with their peers,” says study co-author Dr. Anders Hjern, a professor in pediatric epidemiology at the University of Uppsala in Stockholm. “These kids might be making life miserable for their fellow students. Or it might turn out that the attention problems they’re exhibiting could be related to the stress of being bullied.”

Agreeing with Dr Hjern, William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said:  ”You can’t learn if you’re being bullied, if every day you’re frightened of how you’re going to be treated. As for the bullies, they often need help with other issues. It’s not uncommon, for instance, to find that the aggressor is acting out because he’s depressed. And often, the kids who are doing the bullying have been bullied themselves”, he adds.

Unfortunately, whilst treating the inability to focus in school, the drugs won’t necessary curb the bullying behavior as the ADHD drugs do not necessarily treat aggressive behaviors.  But the upside is that this new study could help parents and teachers identify children at risk for becoming bullies, or being bullied themselves. And the best solution for bullying,experts say, is for schools to develop programs that help both the bullies and the bullied.

On another note, about ADHD, another study has found that ADHD kids’ brains mature more slowly than kids without. You can read about that here.

ADHD drugs can lead to cardiac arrest

If you have a child on ADHD drugs, or one who is about to be put on ADHD drugs, you should read this.

A review by The Food and Drug Administration of its databases found reports of 19 sudden deaths in children treated with ADHD drugs and 26 reports of other problems including strokes and fast heart rates between 1999 and 2003.

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommended this week that all children with ADHD, for whom drugs are necessary, should have their hearts checked before taking the drugs. Stimulant drugs can increase blood pressure and heart rate. For most children, that isn’t a problem. But in those with heart conditions, it could make them more vulnerable to sudden cardiac arrest or other heart problems. So, the AHA is now recommending a thorough exam, including a family history and an EKG, before children are put on the drugs to make sure that they don’t have any undiagnosed heart issues.

This doesn’t just apply to children who are about to start taking ADHD drugs, but also those who are already taking them. With careful monitoring, even children with heart conditions can take the drugs.

A screening of 1,000 children at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia showed that 2% of the children had some kind of heart problem. Whilst that may seem like a small percentage, it isn’t small to the families concerned.

An ADHD advocacy group called CHADD said parents should monitor their child’s reaction to all medications. EKG screening “will bring an even further measure of safety to what is already a safe clinical treatment approach,” the group said. But the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recently updated its treatment guidelines for ADHD, and did not recommend routine EKGs. They worry that the added step in the process to get drugs for their children might deter people from seeking treatment because it’s an added expense and hassle.

The AACAP noted that the heart association doesn’t recommended EKG screening for young athletes to prevent sudden death. The group has said it wasn’t feasible or cost-effective to screen all student athletes. Well, duh. There are a hell of a lot more student athletes than there are children with ADHD. What a stupid reason to argue about the necessity to keep children safe from potential harm from a PHARMACEUTICAL!!!

Personally, I would have thought that parents would want to do what’s best for their child, not worry about the extra strain it might put on them?

A spokeswoman for Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., which makes Ritalin, said the company had not seen the latest heart association statement and could not comment, but she pointed out that the label does suggest patients be evaluated for heart problems.

Well, at least there’s that.