The trafficking of women for forced marriage and prostitution is a growing problem for China, but a predictable one given its population policy and resulting demographics.
The official China Daily reports that Chinese police have “cracked 9,165 trafficking cases and rescued 17,746 women since April 2009 when the Ministry of Public Security launched a special campaign”. Many are lured to neighbouring Asian countries -- Malaysian police had detained a total of 5,453 Chinese women suspected of prostitution by the end of November -- but they can end up as far afield as Europe and Africa.
Significantly, though, forced marriages within China are behind most of the trafficking, especially in the poor areas of Southwest China’s Yunnan and Guizhou provinces. Behind this trend is the huge gender gap created by the one child policy, where poor families reliant on sons for labour aborted pre-natally…
click here to read whole article and make comments
A good, lasting marriage makes the spouses happier and healthier and increases their lifespan, compared with cohabitation. On average. That’s the net finding of a review of 148 studies in seven European countries, according to an editorial in the British Medical Journal.
So don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. A recent report from a New Zealand cohort study said that cohabiting relationships made the partners just as happy as marriage if they lasted. But they do not usually last as long as marriages, and that’s a fact.
John Gallacher, the Cardiff University academic who did the recent European review, says that as long as the relationship is loving and supportive, the partners are likely to eat healthily, have more friends and take better care of each other. It’s all down to commitment:
Does anyone remember last year’s uproar over clerical sexual abuse of minors? Or the last lot of breast-beating over teenage pregnancy? If your answers were, How could we forget? And, Er, I think so, try the next question: Have you noticed the massive cultural effort to prevent that sort of thing?
No? That’s my impression too. Last week in the US Viacom’s MTV channel launched an American remake of a British “reality” show called “Skins”. According to the New York Times this series features “simulated masturbation, implied sexual assault, and teenagers disrobing and getting into bed together.” It also has “ads that feature groups of barely clothed teenagers” and is “surely one of the most sexually charged programs that MTV has featured.” Oh, and there are also what the Parents Television Council calls “gratuitous scenes of drug and alcohol abuse”. A company called Taco Bell has pulled its ads from the show…
click here to read whole article and make comments
The story of Carlina White, the American woman who was abducted as a baby and has only just found her mother and her own identity, has made world headlines. But how many journalists are drawing the obvious moral of the story: kids need to know who they are.
Right now, babies are being concocted in laboratories around the world from the ova and/or sperm of anonymous donors and in some cases carried to birth by surrogate mothers -- all to satisfy the desires of adults to have a child. Their successes will be written up with sentimental approval.
Here is something very useful: a graphic presentation of key statistics from the US National Marriage Project’s recent report showing the inroads of divorce and non-marriage on “middle Americans”.
The UK website Promotionalcodes.org.uk, a “money-saving blog”, has produced graphics that show the changes over the last three to four decades.
The report, When Marriage Disappears, divides Americans into three classes by education: the highly-educated (with a four-year post high school degree); the least educated (no high school diploma); and the moderately educated (high school diploma and possible some post-secondary education). It finds that the 58 per cent of people in the middle class are the ones experiencing the greatest increase in marital instability.
With the feverish discussion going on over at the Wall Street Journal about the parenting style of “Chinese mother” Amy Chua (nearly 7,000 comments, last time I checked), I’m not sure why I felt the need to toss in my two cents—perhaps I felt ‘called out’ to defend my own style of parenting. (Ms Chua’s editors apparently chose the title for her article: “Why Chinese mothers are superior”, and if they did it to spark controversy and discussion, it certainly succeeded.)
Naïve, Western me, I didn’t know there was such a phenomenon as “Chinese mothers” (or a parenting syndrome related thereto), though I am well aware of the statistics when it comes to the excellence of Asian children in academics, music, and so forth.
The debate about the effects of video gaming on young minds continues, fed by new studies that find links with depression. There ensues the usual argument over causality (Did excessive gaming cause depression? Or do mentally unstable teens spend more time on gaming?) with the industry asking, “Why pick on us?”
Here are the latest results:
The results are discouraging. The latest study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 3,000 students in the third, fourth, seventh and eighth grades in Singapore. Children who were more impulsive and less comfortable with other children spent more time playing video games, the study found. Two years later, these heavy gamers, who played an average of 31 hours a week, compared with 19 hours a week for other students, were more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and social phobias. They were also more likely to see their grades in school…
click here to read whole article and make comments
Congratulations, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban! They have taken home a new baby, Faith Margaret, born on December 28 in a Nashville hospital. And none of the paparazzi knew -- because Australia’s most famous actress wasn’t ever pregnant!
In fact, the woman who gave birth to their daughter was a surrogate mother, or, in Nicole and Keith’s words, a “gestational carrier”. The child is said to be the biological daughter of the couple. Nicole already has a daughter and a son whom she adopted during her marriage with Tom Cruise and a daughter from her marriage with Urban. Why they used a surrogate was not disclosed.
Australian columnist Melinda Tankard-Reist found it hard to join in the celebration. If the anonymous surrogate was just a gestational carrier, what did that make Nicole and Keith? Proud parents, or satisfied customers?
That’s the question of new, dueling research articles out in the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, which try to explain the decline in marital happiness of some new mothers.
I don’t need a research article (never mind two) to answer that question. When I had my first baby, my “decline in marital happiness” could be summed up in one word: exhaustion. Chronic sleep deprivation can undo your sanity, never mind your relationships. But I’m being facetious. Overall, my marital happiness didn’t decline; it changed—into something richer, fuller, certainly more challenging, but ultimately soul-expanding. My marriage changed, but that’s what you can expect with any major life transformation, which parenthood undoubtedly is.
“There’s one born every minute” -- so the snide saying goes. But a British television channel has turned it to a positive use. Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute programme, according to its website, is “focused on providing helpful insights into the realities of giving birth, especially in a hospital environment. The intimate footage gives parents-to-be (or anyone thinking of having children) a unique inside view of what it is really like when life begins…”
I’m not sure that I want to investigate these “realities” too closely, but I do like the Birth Radar page, which tracks birth announcements on Twitter. The Twitter icon jumps from city to city as tweets are picked up using by selected phrases (e.g. “was born weighing”).
“It is not intended to accurately count and report on all new births across the UK or beyond. For accurate data on UK births visit UK National Statistics,” says…
click here to read whole article and make comments
A thought experiment about marriage
24 May 2012
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
SiteMap 
9:49:07 AM
The trafficking of women for forced marriage and prostitution is a growing problem for China, but a predictable one given its population policy and resulting demographics. 
A good, lasting marriage makes the spouses happier and healthier and increases their lifespan, compared with cohabitation. On average. That’s the net finding of a review of 148 studies in seven European countries, according to an 
The story of Carlina White, the American woman who was abducted as a baby and has only just found her mother and her own identity, has made world 
With the feverish discussion going on over at the Wall Street Journal about the parenting style of “Chinese mother” Amy Chua (nearly 7,000 comments, last time I checked), I’m not sure why I felt the need to toss in my two cents—perhaps I felt ‘called out’ to defend my own style of parenting. (Ms Chua’s editors apparently chose the title for her article: “Why Chinese mothers are superior”, and if they did it to spark controversy and discussion, it certainly succeeded.) 
The debate about the effects of video gaming on young minds continues, fed by 
According to this Wall Street Journal 