"A Day in the Life of ... a Rape Crisis Advocate" Blog Contest
Thank you to the advocates who submitted a blog post. We chose 6 finalists, and will feature a new story each week.
We hope you enjoy reading about the fascinating experiences
of these rape crisis advocates!
Week 1: Laura, from the Mt Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program
Week 2: Vicki, from The Awareness Center
Week 3: Ihotu, from the Crime Victims Treatment Center
Week 4: Meredith, from Beth Israel Medical Center Rape Crisis and Domestic Violence Intervention Program
Week 5: Kristin, from Mt Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention (SAVI) Program
Worth a read.
As Secretary Clinton said recently, the vast majority of Afghans want to see their daughters educated, and women given access to economic livelihoods and to healthcare. Women’s empowerment is inextricably linked to security, economic opportunity, effective governance, and social development. It is a simple fact that no country can prosper if half its citizens are left behind. All reliable development indices show that investments in women are the single most effective poverty alleviation mechanism contributing to a society’s prosperity; similarly, lack of investment in women characterizes failed states.
I’m becoming a bigger fan of Clinton every day.
It’s always worth keeping an eye on what the Alan Guttmacher Institute is up to.
These new data from the Guttmacher Institute are especially noteworthy because they provide the first documentation of what experts have suspected for several years, based on trends in teens’ contraceptive use – that the overall teen pregnancy rate would increase in the mid-2000s following steep declines in the 1990s and a subsequent plateau in the early 2000s. The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence – and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception – became increasingly widespread and teens’ use of contraceptives declined.
“After more than a decade of progress, this reversal is deeply troubling,” says Heather Boonstra, Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate. “It coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration. A strong body of research shows that these programs do not work. Fortunately, the heyday of this failed experiment has come to an end with the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness.”
…
“It is too soon to tell whether the increase in the teen pregnancy rate between 2005 and 2006 is a short term fluctuation, a more lasting stabilization or the beginning of a significant new trend, any of which would be of great concern,” says Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research. “Either way, it is clearly time to redouble our efforts to make sure our young people have the information, interpersonal skills and health services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to become sexually healthy adults.”
It makes me so happy when an occasional scattering of rigorous, methodical research is sprinkled, like nutmeg, atop the wild frappuccino of absurd · idealogical · diatribe.
The full study is here (pdf).
Wonderful column today from Bob Herbert, remembering Howard Zinn.
Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”
Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it. (There’s a restaurant chain called “Hooters,” for crying out loud.)
