Psyche, Science, and Society

LA Times: Psychologists shouldn’t help church screen out gay priests

The Los Angeles Times editorialized on the ethics of psychologists helping the Catholic Church screen out gay priests. As they state:

Pope’s new edict on the priesthood
How can psychologists ethically help the Catholic Church screen out gay priests?

Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2008

The Roman Catholic Church requires its priests to refrain from any sexual relationship, whether heterosexual or homosexual. So one might think that the sexual orientation of an aspirant for the priesthood would be a nonissue — especially in light of the distinction the church has drawn between homosexual conduct, which is considered sinful, and homosexual orientation, which is not.

One would be wrong.

The Vatican recently issued a statement re-emphasizing that even chaste gay men are to be barred from the priesthood. Never mind that large numbers of gay priests — estimates range from 25% to 50% — already serve the faithful, with most adhering to their vow of celibacy.

“Guidelines for the Use of Psychology in the Admission and Formation of Candidates for the Priesthood,” released Oct. 30 by the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, not only reiterates the teaching that men with “deep-seated” homosexual tendencies are unworthy of ordination, it also urges seminaries to enlist the aid of psychologists in screening candidates for homosexuality and other “psychic disturbances.”

Yet even if the U.S. church is following a more compassionate policy than Vatican pronouncements would seem to authorize, the role of psychologists in screening applicants raises troubling ethical questions, as even psychologists who approve of such cooperation admit. Aiding the church in weeding out homosexuals is hard to reconcile with these guidelines of the American Psychological Assn.:

“Psychologists are aware of and respect cultural, individual and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language and socioeconomic status, and consider these factors when working with members of such groups. Psychologists try to eliminate the effect on their work of biases based on those factors, and they do not knowingly participate in or condone activities of others based upon such prejudices.”

If the church — or a diocese within the church — takes the Vatican decree literally, it’s hard to see how a psychologist could lend his or her expertise to the thwarting of a young man’s aspiration to serve God simply because he happens to be gay. In our view, that’s not just cruel; it’s unprofessional.

An additional issue regarding such “screening” is that it is questionable that psychologists have a valid way of determining who is “gay” that would not generate many false positives.

Here is the whole editorial:

The Vatican’s hard line against chaste gay priests seems to be inspired by the condemnation the church justly received for its passive response to the sexual abuse of minors — most of them male — by some priests. But, as Pope Benedict XVI conceded during his visit to the United States this year, homosexuality isn’t the same as pedophilia. That statement was a rebuke to conservative Catholics, and others, who have attempted to equate the two. (Despite the pope’s enlightened comments, he approved last month’s statement.)

Obviously, the church must be free to define the qualifications for its clergy based on theological arguments that many outside (and within) the fold find unpersuasive. In this country, the 1st Amendment allows the church to bar homosexuals from the priesthood, just as it does women. But even many Catholics will be horrified by the idea of the church employing psychologists to “out” prospective priests. Nor is it much comfort that the psychological scrutiny will be voluntary. What young man who feels called to the priesthood will feel free to object?

To be fair, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States — including the Archdiocese of Los Angeles — operates under its own guidelines for the screening of prospective priests, which can include consultations with psychologists. Although the U.S. policy professes to adhere to Vatican pronouncements (and was approved by the pope), it seems to adopt a narrower definition of “deep-seated” homosexual inclination, one that allows gays to be ordained as long as their sexual orientation doesn’t interfere with their ministry.

Yet even if the U.S. church is following a more compassionate policy than Vatican pronouncements would seem to authorize, the role of psychologists in screening applicants raises troubling ethical questions, as even psychologists who approve of such cooperation admit. Aiding the church in weeding out homosexuals is hard to reconcile with these guidelines of the American Psychological Assn.:

“Psychologists are aware of and respect cultural, individual and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language and socioeconomic status, and consider these factors when working with members of such groups. Psychologists try to eliminate the effect on their work of biases based on those factors, and they do not knowingly participate in or condone activities of others based upon such prejudices.”

If the church — or a diocese within the church — takes the Vatican decree literally, it’s hard to see how a psychologist could lend his or her expertise to the thwarting of a young man’s aspiration to serve God simply because he happens to be gay. In our view, that’s not just cruel; it’s unprofessional.

November 17th, 2008

American Psychoanalytic Association dnounces passage of anti-gay Proposition 8

The American Psychoanalytic Association has issued a press release denouncing California’s passage of Proposition 8, making gay marriages unconstitutional:

Psychoanalysts Censure California’s Vote to Ban Same-Sex Marriage

NEW YORK, Nov 06, 2008 / The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) denounces the election results in California that supported Proposition 8, a ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage in the state. In keeping with its overall support of social justice, APsaA issued a position statement earlier this year supporting the legal recognition of same-sex civil marriage while opposing discrimination against same-sex couples. For the full text of the APsaA Marriage Resolution, please visit: http://www.apsa.org/ABOUTAPSAA/POSITIONSTATEMENTS/MARRIAGERESOLUTION/tabid/470/Default.aspx.

APsaA President-elect and Pasadena, CA resident Warren Procci, M.D. remarks: “These ballot propositions such as California’s Proposition 8, deny to gay individuals the rights to freedom of choice of partner in marriage as well as access to equal protection which is granted to all of us by our constitution. These denials are based solely on an individual’s sexual orientation.”

“We want people to think about the broad impact the denial of same-sex marriage has on Americans today,” says psychoanalyst Ethan Grumbach, Ph.D., a Los Angeles resident and chair of APsaA’s Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues. “Families exist in many different ways and it is important for same-sex couples to have legal and societal recognition of their unions for themselves, their children, and their extended families. Research continues to demonstrate the stigmatization and discrimination to which same sex couples and families are subjected is traumatizing and damaging to their health.”

APsaA’s Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues has reviewed extensive research on homosexual relationships and gay and lesbian parents and their children prior to issuing its Same-Sex Marriage Resolution. Some relevant statistics and research results are:

    --  The Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of 2001 found that 68 percent of lesbians and gays considered lesbian and gay marriage to be very important and 25 percent considered it to be somewhat important.
    --  According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 34 percent of cohabitating female couples and 22 percent of male couples were raising children under the age of 18.
    --  In a 2006 paper, Charlotte Patterson, Ph.D., renowned researcher and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, concluded, "Results of the research (of various population samples of lesbian and gay families) suggest that qualities of family relationships are more tightly linked with child (development) outcomes than is parental sexual orientation."

In addition, APsaA’s Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues is currently developing a proposed position statement on the United States’ military policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The American Psychoanalytic Association is a professional organization of psychoanalysts throughout the United States and is comprised of approximately 3,300 members.

Visit www.apsa.org for more information.

Available Topic Expert(s): For information on the listed expert(s), click appropriate link.

Mark D. Smaller, Ph.D.

http://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=58376

Prudence Gourguechon MD

http://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=59358

SOURCE American Psychoanalytic Association

November 7th, 2008

Californians, Vote No on Proposition 8!

And San Diego Republican Mayor has a Profile In Courage moment, explaining why he changed his mind and now supports gay marriage:

November 2nd, 2008

ABC News on the Wasilla library censorship scandal

The Wasilla librarian, a hero, and a victim, of politicians of intolerance. An ABC News report:

September 11th, 2008

Census Bureau to dissapear gay marriages

Most researchers recognize that research is inherently affected by social beliefs, norms, and practices. But the Census Bureau is about to give us an enormous demonstration. They have decided to remove all gay marriages from their marriage data for the 2010 census, despite laws in Massachusetts and California legalizing those marriges. Perhaps next they’ll remove “Islam” from the list of reportable religions.

U.S. Census Bureau won’t count same-sex marriages

By Mike Swift
Mercury News

Tens of thousands of same-sex couples are expected to marry legally in California by 2010, if a constitutional ban on gay marriage doesn’t pass at the polls in November.

But no matter what the voters decide, the official government count of the number of married same-sex couples in California is not in doubt. It will be zero.

The U.S. Census Bureau, reacting to the federal Defense of Marriage Act and other mandates, plans to edit the 2010 census responses of same-sex couples who marry legally in California, Massachusetts or any other state. They will be reported as “unmarried partners,” rather than married spouses, in census tabulations – a policy that will likely draw the ire of gay rights groups.

The Census Bureau followed the same procedure for the 2000 census, and it does not plan to change in 2010 even though courts in Massachusetts and now California have ruled gay men and lesbians can marry lawfully.

“This has been a question we’ve been looking at for quite a long time,” said Martin O’Connell, chief of the Census Bureau’s Fertility and Family Statistics Branch. “It’s not something the bureau could arbitrarily or casually decide to change on a whim, because our data is used by virtually every federal agency.”

The Census Bureau is not falsifying people’s responses, O’Connell said, because the bureau will retain people’s original census responses.

“We’re not destroying data; we are keeping that data,” O’Connell said. “We are just showing the data published in a way that is consistent with the way every other agency publishes their data.”The Census Bureau does not ask about sexual orientation, but it does ask people to describe their relationships to others in their household. If a respondent refers to a person of the same gender as their “husband/wife” on the 2010 census form, the Census Bureau will automatically assign them to the “unmarried partner” category. Legally married same-sex couples will be indistinguishable in census data from those who chose “unmarried partner” to describe their relationship.

Researcher’s view

Critics say the census plan will mask the records of legal, same-sex, married couples and therefore degrade the quality of the government’s demographic data.

“I just think it’s bad form for the census to change a legal response to an incorrect response,” said Gary Gates of the Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California-Los Angeles law school that studies gay-related public policy issues. “That goes against everything the census stands for.”

Gates, a prominent demographer who was consulted by Census Bureau officials about counting legally married same-sex couples, said one result is that the census will undercount marriages in states with gay marriage. And because the bureau defines a “family” as two or more people related by birth, adoption or marriage, it also will remove many same-sex married couples from being counted as families.

“It’s a systematic hiding not only of married gay couples, but gay couples as families, which I would argue is a fundamentally political decision,” Gates said.

One recently married couple called the policy “frustrating.”

“It’s just another layer of the hurdles we have to jump, as far as our relationship being recognized,” said Jim Winstead of Hollister, who recently married his partner, Rodney Naccarato-Winstead. The couple have an 18-month-old son.

Gay rights groups, learning of the policy this week, were also critical.

“To have the federal government disappear your marriage I’m sure will be painful and upsetting,” said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It really is something out of Orwell. It’s shameful.”

A spokeswoman for ProtectMarriage.com, campaigning in favor of the constitutional ban, declined to discuss the census issue in detail, but said it illuminates how the legalization of gay marriage potentially could dictate policy changes on government.

“One of our campaign cornerstones will be the fact that if the initiative doesn’t pass that public schools will be forced to teach the difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage,” said Jennifer Kerns.

Bureau’s reasoning

A census technical note that explains the bureau’s rationale on counting same-sex partners for the 2000 census notes that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act “instructs all federal agencies only to recognize opposite-sex marriages for the purposes of enacting any agency programs.”

O’Connell said the Census Bureau has been unable to find any federal agency that collects data on same-sex married couples. Changing the policy before the 2010 census also would be a huge and difficult logistical issue.

“The last thing anyone wants is to use the 2010 census as a trial run,” O’Connell said.

Gates said, however, that the limitations on access to people’s original responses will make it very difficult for private researchers to analyze raw data and back out the number of same-sex spouses in California or other states.

“It’s an official closet,” Gates said, “that the government has built.”

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1 comment July 12th, 2008

Are teen sex and delinquenct linked?

The Washington Post has an article partially on a study claiming to debunk the finding that early teen consensual sex leads to later delinquency. By comparing pairs of twins, they suggest that the effect might even be in the opposite direction. While hardly definitive, it looks like a nice attempt to use sophisticated data analysis along with careful conceptual analysis to clarify important social issues.

The article also discusses other issues,including a claim that the relationship between IQ and breastfeeding, about which I blogged last week, may be artifactual:

A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother’s IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children’s IQ.

I suspect neither of these studies is the last word on the breastfeeding-IQ link.

Another issue involves the benefits and risks of early parenting by poor black girls. For decades, Arline Geronimus has made the case that poor young girls are often better off having children young, in direct contradiction of our society’s obsession with preventing teen pregnancy. I was in a seminar with Arlene during our postdocs in 1986-87 and remember her making a quite plausible case. She apparently has continued to amass evidence over the 20 years since.

While none of these studies are definitive, they all emphasize the importance of careful research work before developing social interventions to address what, in some instances, are nonexistent problems.

Here’s the entire article:

Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency
New Analyses Challenging Many Old Assumptions

By Rick Weiss

Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal “abstinence only” programs.

There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

That new analysis, a reworking of the same data the Ohio team used, is one of several recent instances in which a more precise parsing of data has begun to turn long-standing societal presumptions on their head. By bringing evidence to bear on complex social issues, these studies are forcing individuals and policymakers to rethink such hot-button topics as the benefits of breast-feeding, the risks of teen child-bearing and, in the latest example, the harms long presumed to result from teen sex.

Like many of the newer studies, the latest one — led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville — used the powerful techniques of behavioral genetics. The field specializes in studies on twins, research that can help tell whether behavioral traits are the result of genes or the social environment, and that has periodically stirred controversy when it has focused on the genetic underpinnings of criminality and intelligence.

But the specialty’s analytic methods can also help tell whether one behavior, such as early sex, is merely correlated with or actually causes a second behavior that is often found with it, such as delinquency. If two behaviors often exist in the same people but are found not to be connected by cause and effect, then a third factor is likely to be causing both.

That kind of finding can help identify better targets for prevention efforts, experts say.

“Behavioral geneticists have long sought to establish causal links between genes and complex behaviors. So it’s fascinating to see them use the tools of their trade to dispute widely held beliefs” about the social roots of some of those behaviors, said Erik Parens, a senior research scholar who has tracked the field intensively at the Hastings Center, a Garrison, N.Y., science and ethics think tank.

The latest example started when Dana Haynie, a sociologist at Ohio State, and her then-graduate student, Stacy Armour, published a study in February in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. They analyzed data collected from more than 7,000 children as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a federally funded survey that in 1994 began gathering information about the health-related behavior of U.S. schoolchildren who were then in grades seven through 12.

Haynie and Armour divided the children into three groups based on when they first had sex: when they were younger, about the same age or older than the age at which most of their local peers lost their virginity. (It varies by region, but on average, U.S. children lose their virginity at age 16.) They also compiled information on graffiti-painting, shoplifting, drug-selling and other “problem behaviors” by those young people in later years.

Their conclusion: One year after losing their virginity, children in the early category were 20 percent more likely than those who started having sex at the average age to engage in delinquent behavior, even when several other relevant factors such as wealth, race, parental involvement and physical development were taken into account.

Those findings supported the widely held notion that loss of virginity at a relatively young age appears to, as Haynie and Armour wrote, “open the doorway to problem behaviors.”

Harden, at the University of Virginia, didn’t believe it.

Looked at from a similarly high altitude, she said, people might conclude that red meat is a health food, since people live longer in countries where more is eaten. Only when the issue is studied within one country does red meat’s link to chronic diseases appear.

Suspecting such an error in the Haynie study, Harden and three colleagues, including her adviser, Eric Turkheimer, an expert in behavioral genetics, studied more than 500 pairs of twins in the same national survey analyzed by the Ohio team. Because twin pairs share similar or identical genetic inheritances (depending on whether they are fraternal or identical) and the same home environment, twin studies are useful for seeing through false cause-and-effect relationships.

The team looked at identical twin pairs in which one twin initiated sex younger than the other, then team members tallied subsequent problem behaviors. If sex really adds to the chances of delinquency, then early-sex teens should end up delinquent more often than their later-sex twins.

“It turns out that there was no positive relationship between age of first sex and delinquency,” Harden said.

The way to reconcile that with the previous evidence of a link is to conclude that some other factors are promoting both early sex and delinquency, she said. In an e-mail, Haynie agreed. And the Virginia study, to appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, offers some clues.

It found that identical twins, who have the same DNA, were more similar to one another in the ages at which they lost their virginity than were fraternal twins, whose DNA patterns are 50 percent the same — an indication that genes influence the age at which a person will first have sex. Other twin studies have found the same pattern for delinquency.

Together, those findings suggest that some genes — perhaps, for example, those that increase impulsivity and risk-taking — may underlie both behaviors.

“You need to have some appetite for risk-taking to be a delinquent. And the same if you’re 13 and going to have sex for the first time,” Harden said.

Efforts to prevent delinquency can hardly take aim at people’s genes. But the Virginia study also indicates that social factors, as yet unidentified but perhaps involving relationships with family and friends, have an even bigger impact than genes on whether a child will become delinquent. Those are the things that should be identified and targeted by delinquency-prevention programs, said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, co-director of Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families.

“I wouldn’t be focusing on early sexuality . . . to alter rates of delinquency,” she said.

Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person’s readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.

Even then, there are emotional and physical risks. Young adolescents, in particular, are less likely to use condoms and so are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

But those are risks that other nations have mitigated with education, Harden and Turkheimer said, while U.S. educators wanting a piece of the nation’s $200 million “abstinence only” budget must adhere to a curriculum that links sex to delinquency and explicitly precludes discussion of contraception.

The new study “really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems,” Harden said, “and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad.”

Similar re-analyses have begun to undermine other conventional notions about health.

A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother’s IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children’s IQ.

In another example, Arline Geronimus, a University of Michigan professor of health behavior who is now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study, knew that babies born to teenagers are more likely to die in their first year of life than those born to older women.

“But that is an apples-to-oranges comparison,” she said. In New York City, for example, far more teen mothers live in Harlem than on the Upper East Side, she said, and “there are a lot of differences between those groups.”

So Geronimus looked more closely and got a different answer.

“If you compare Harlem teen moms to Harlem older moms, you find that the kids of the teen moms are actually less likely to die,” she said. The reasons include the fact that, unlike older women, poor teenagers are generally not juggling jobs and have older relatives to help.

It can make sense for poor women to have children when they are quite young, Geronimus concludes, and any effort to change that ought to treat it as an economic problem, not a health education problem.

In a different re-analysis, Geronimus made another counterintuitive finding. While it is true that, in general, teen mothers are less likely to breast-feed their babies than older moms, it is not true among poor women. Poor teenagers are actually more likely to breast-feed than poor older moms, in large part because the older women have jobs that don’t grant them the time to breast-feed or pump milk.

Because of that misconception, programs promoting breast-feeding have targeted teens instead of older women, Geronimus said. And they have taken aim, in part, at a concern that teenagers were believed to have: the cosmetic effects of breast-feeding on their breasts.

“So you’ve targeted the wrong population,” Geronimus said, “and come up with the wrong kind of intervention.”

1 comment November 11th, 2007

Panties for Burmese freedom

Jim Hightower informs us of an innovative protest whereby women around the world are sending panties to Burmese embassies. It seems that the junta leaders have this superstition that even touching a woman’s panty will sap their energy. I’ll let Jim explain the rest:

[h/t Alternet.]

November 7th, 2007

Senator Craig scandal in the light of social research

The New York Times opinion Section has an article by Laura MacDonald that shed new light on the Sen. Larry Craig bathroom sex case. She draws upon the 1970 research of Laud Humphreys on sexual behavior in men’s bathrooms. Humphreys showed that men’s sexual advances in bathrooms are elaborately ritualized, so that, the author argues, the policeman had to have responded to Craig and he must have been entrapped.

The Humphreys study is described in the social research methods text I use for my undergraduate class, put only in terms of the ethical issues raised. Its nice to see it entering popular consciousness for its findings. The article also illustrates that research ca provide illumination for important social questions.

The article:

America’s Toe-Tapping Menace

by Laura MacDonald

WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.

That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”

Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”

As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.

In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”

Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”

This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.

Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?

And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.

Laura M. Mac Donald is the author of “The Curse of the Narrows: The Story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion.”

September 2nd, 2007

In Iraq, poor women forced into prostitution

A long time ago, I first wrote of the specter of prostitution in Iraq. Evidence is now emerging that, like many countries in conflict, many poor women are being forced into prostitution, either by economic means or by force. Aljazeera sadly reports on the rise of prostitution:

In Iraq, sex is traded for survival
By Afif Sarhan in Baghdad

When Rana Jalil, 38, lost her husband in an explosion in Baghdad last year, she could never have imagined becoming a prostitute in order to feed her children.

A mother of four, Jalil sought out employment, but job opportunities for women had decreased since the US invasion.

She begged shop owners, office workers and companies to hire her but was treated with what she calls chauvinistic discrimination.

Within weeks of her husband’s death, a doctor diagnosed her children with malnutrition.

Fighting tears, she recalled the desperation which led her to the oldest profession: “In the beginning these were the worst days in my life. My husband was the first man I met and slept with, but I didn’t have another option … my children were starving.”

She left the house in a daze, she recalled, and walked to the nearest market to find someone who would pay her for sex.

She said: “I’m a nice-looking woman and it wasn’t difficult to find a client. When we got to the bed I tried to run away … I just couldn’t do it, but he hit and raped me. When he paid me afterwards, it was finished for me.

“When I came home with some food I had bought from that money and saw my children screaming of happiness, I discovered that honour is insignificant compared to the hunger of my children.”

Iraqi widows desperate

Prior to the US invasion, Iraqi widows, particularly those who lost husbands during the Iran-Iraq war, were provided with compensation and free education for their children. In some cases, they were provided with free homes.

However, no such safety nets currently exist and widows have few resources at their disposal.

According to the non-governmental organisation Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), 15 per cent of Iraqi women widowed by the war have been desperately searching for temporary marriages or prostitution, either for financial support or protection in the midst of sectarian war.

Nuha Salim, the spokesperson for OWFI, told Al Jazeera: “Widows are one of our priorities but their situation is worsening and we are feeling ineffective to cope with this significant problem. Hundreds of women are searching for an easy way to support their loved ones as employers refuse to hire them for fear of extremists’ reprisals.”

She said the NGO has documented the disappearance of some 4000 women, 20 per cent of whom are under 18, since the March 2003 invasion.

OWFI believes most of the missing women were kidnapped and sold into prostitution outside Iraq.

Although few reliable statistics are available on the total number of widows in Iraq, the ministry of women’s affairs says that there are at least 350,000 in Baghdad alone, with more than eight million throughout the country.

Bitter trade

As Iraqi families continue to fall on hard times, some have been forced to make the most painful of decisions – selling their daughters.

Abu Ahmed, a handicapped father of five who is himself a widower, sold his daughter Lina to an Iraqi man who came to Iraq to “shop” for sex workers. Abu Ahmed said he could not afford to buy food for his other children.

He told Al Jazeera: “I’m sure that whatever she is, at least she is having food to eat. I have three other girls and a son and what they paid me for Lina is enough to raise the remaining ones.”

Abu Ahmed had been initially approached by Shada, the alias of a woman living in Baghdad, who sought young women for Iraqi gangs running prostitution rackets in neighbouring Arab countries.

She told Al Jazeera that her role was to convince young women from impoverished families that a better life awaited them beyond the country’s borders.

She said: “Families don’t want them and we are helping the girls to survive. We offer them food and housing and about $10 a day if they have had at least two clients.”

“Our priority is virgin girls; they can be sold at very expensive prices to Arab millionaires.”

Shada said she sleeps in a different house every few nights as armed groups have marked her for trial and assassination.

Escape from Jordan

OWFI’s Salim says cases like Lina’s have become very common as poverty is increasing in Iraq and desperate families sometimes sell their daughters for less than $500 to traffickers.

But increasingly, young Iraqi women arrive in neighbouring capitals to find that prostitution carries a heavy and dangerous price.

Suha Muhammad, 17, was sold to an Iraqi gang by her mother, herself a prostitute, after her father was killed.

When she arrived in Jordan, she was gang-raped by four men who told her they were teaching her the tricks of the trade.

She told Al Jazeera she had been sold to a gang that caters to VIPs in Syria and was often shuttled to Amman, the Jordanian capital, for high-profile clients.

After six months, she escaped: “I ran away and an Iraqi family helped me by driving me to the immigration department where they helped me get a passport to return to Iraq.

“My aunt is now taking care of me in Baghdad. She never imagined that my mother could sell me, but unfortunately women in Iraq are not important and respected.”

Traffic

Mayada Zuhair, a spokesperson for the Baghdad-based Women’s Rights Association (WRA), said Iraqi and Arab NGOs are trying to monitor the trafficking of young women from the war-ravaged country to neighbouring destinations.

She told Al Jazeera: “We are trying to find out the fate of many widows and teenager girls who were trafficked. Unfortunately it is not an easy process and without international support, funding, and resources, we fear more young Iraqi women will be taken abroad to work in the sex trade.”

In the meantime, however, prostitution remains the only option for Nirmeen Lattif, a 27-year-old widow who lost her husband in an attack on Shia pilgrims south of Baghdad.

When she turned to her husband’s relatives for financial support, they could not afford to help her.

She says she tries not to think of the gravity of what she does or the dishonour it carries in conservative Muslim society.

“I think of my children, only my children; without money we starve in the streets.”

3 comments August 15th, 2007

Nazi use of prostitution in concentration camps

In response to last night’s posting of an article by Debra McNutt [Is the Iraq Occupation Enabling Prostitution?] a colleague sent this disturbing Reuters article on the Nazi’s use of forced prostitution in the concentration camps in order to control and divide the inmate population. It’s a reminder that the ways of human cruelty are manifold, and that manipulation of sexuality often plays a role in this cruelty. It also reminds us of the shame that victims often feel regarding their self-perceived perceived participation in their abuse, and of the personal and social pressures to maintain silence. We Americans should remember that one of the reasons believed to have been behind the Abu Ghraib photographs was as material to blackmail those prisoners forced into the humiliating “sexual” scenes:

Secrets of Nazi camp brothels emerge decades on

By Alexandra Hudson

For decades no one wanted to remember the concentration camp “special blocks” where the Nazis forced female inmates to entertain their male peers.

Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler had ordered the creation of camp brothels in 1941. His logic was chilling — male prisoners would work harder if offered the incentive of sex, and if only a few had this privilege it would crush solidarity.

As the horrors of Hitler’s death camps emerged, the brothels swiftly became taboo. The mainly German women who had staffed them were too scarred by the experience to speak of it, whereas the male inmates who used them remained silent in shame.

Now an exhibition in Ravensbrueck women’s concentration camp north of Berlin aims to shed light on the brothels and expose the Nazis’ sinister attempt to manipulate prisoners’ sexuality.

One man who tried to break this enduring silence is former Buchenwald prisoner Albert van Dijk, a Dutchman from the town of Kampen, close to the German border.

“Often I raised the subject of the ‘special block’ at meetings of former inmates of Buchenwald, but nobody ever wanted to discuss it or they said I was mistaken,” said Van Dijk.

The 83-year-old still vividly recalls how at the age of 18, among the despair and degradation of the camp, he fell for a blonde prostitute called Frieda and lost his virginity to her in the “special block.”

Although prostitution was officially forbidden by the Nazis, the elite SS guards had set up a network of brothels catering to German soldiers, forced laborers and prisoners, which they intended in part to stamp out homosexuality.

From 1942 onwards, 200-300 gentile prisoners from the camp were forced to work in 10 camp brothels across Germany, Austria and Poland. Almost all had been imprisoned as “anti-social.”

At first some women volunteered for service as prostitutes, falsely informed they would be released after 6 months. Later they were forcibly recruited during roll call or even from the camp sick bay.

Although the women got slightly better rations and could wear civilian clothes, the work reduced most to physical wrecks. Many caught sexually transmitted diseases, were subject to medical experiments or were forced to have abortions.

Each woman used a small room where male prisoners, after a brief examination, were allowed 15 minutes. Guards looked through peep holes to check sex only took place lying down, as stated in the rules.

After a full day of work in the camp, women spent two hours each night entertaining male prisoners, who paid two Reichsmark. Those who came to them held the most privileged positions among the hierarchy of prisoners, and had the best rations. The vast majority of the male prisoners were much too weak for sex.

FRIEDA

Frieda was the first woman Van Dijk had seen in 6 months. He was a teenager, sent to Buchenwald for fleeing a forced labor troop and smuggling rations to Kampen’s Jews and was in awe of her. She appreciated his youthful coyness.

“One day I was sent to clean in the block and I found myself alone with her… She gave me some Schnaps, blew cigarette smoke in my mouth and we landed in bed. It was my first time and you never forget.”

Later he had to pay like the others to see Frieda, a privilege allowed him as he was imprisoned neither on racial nor political grounds.

“You could let your relatives send you money which was written on an account to spend in the camp,” recalls Van Dijk.

With grotesque efficiency, the SS camp administrators sometimes billed prisoners’ families for services rendered in the brothel.

Other prisoners told him he should be ashamed for spending his mother’s money in the brothel, but in an environment where sexual exploitation was rife and young men sometimes bartered with sexual favors, Van Dijk saw nothing wrong.

“Some young guys slept with older prisoners for an extra morsel of bread … I was young and naive and thought Frieda was interested in me,” he recalled.

After liberation, forced laborers began their fight for compensation. But women who had worked in the brothels found they were unable to claim damages, because of the supposed “voluntary” nature of their work.

Others, fearing stigmatization and the scorn they had already attracted from other prisoners, simply fell silent.

The exhibition in Ravensbrueck, where tens of thousands of women were murdered or died of hunger or disease, has video extracts of former prisoners remembering the brothels and their victims, as well as vouchers which were handed in for sex.

“The theme invites voyeurism,” said Insa Eschebach, head of the Ravensbrueck memorial site, which is why the exhibition relies mainly on the written word.

Concentration camps have featured as a backdrop in some erotic films and a realm of sexual fantasy, exploiting the extreme power gulf between SS guards and prisoners, she said.

Also on display are the few remaining photographs of the special blocks, where the rustic German furniture, vases of flowers and tablecloths belie the horror of what took place.

10 comments July 12th, 2007