Ethics news:
2 March 2005
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Breaking the wave
Today, being Sunday and a day off like Boxing Day, the children of class 7A of Talalla high school will be playing in the dusty streets. Melanie Kraft will still be trawling the morgues and guesthouses of Khao Lak, unsure if her father is alive or dead. Andrew and Kate Kemp will be at their hotel - or what's left of it. Donny Patterson will be happier than he has been for years, running a refugee camp and wondering if he should go back to training a junior rugby league team in his hometown of Newcastle, Australia. Wanigaratna Karnnathilake, the guard on the train on which 1,500 died, will wake up in his bungalow in a back street of Matara, safe from all but his nightmares ...
The Guardian - 27 February 2005
'Aid tourists' pass the test of time
In the weeks that followed the tsunami, tourists started returning to Sri Lanka - but many were not there for a holiday, they went to help in the relief effort. It did not take long before critical voices were raised. Who were these "aid tourists" and would they help or hinder the reconstruction process? Was it just a fad or would they stay the distance? Nearly two months on and the foreigners are still there - and still helping in organisations like Impakt aid, Galle 2005, Friends of the South and the Aid Sri Lanka Foundation. The groups have been led by expatriates who already have a lot of experience working in Sri Lanka ...
BBC News - 18 February 2005
Kneejerk reactions won't help in fight against child abuse
It is time to cast aside the myths about pedophile crimes. For more than 20 years writers have expressed concern that childhood has changed irrevocably. Books such as Children Without Childhood and The Hurried Child suggest that childhood is under threat. Now it appears that even parents celebrating some of the joys of childhood - swimming and athletics carnivals - could be prevented from taking photographs in case someone might abuse the privilege. The truth is that we have always had trouble with child abuse, in all its forms. Throughout history children have been terribly treated. It is only in the past 40 years that we have shown real interest, and that interest has not always led to appropriate responses ...
They Sydney Morning Herald - 1 March 2005
Paedophiles 'are not monsters'
Actor Kevin Bacon has said that it is misleading for films to "100 percent demonise" paedophiles, following his performance in controversial film The Woodsman. In the film, which won top honours at the London Film Festival last year, Bacon plays a convicted paedophile trying to rebuild his life after 12 years in jail. The actor told the BBC that it was important to recognise that the sexual abuse of children is a very complex theme, and that paedophiles are not simple "monsters". "These guys don't have horns, they're not monsters," he told the BBC. "If they were monsters we could send a superhero out to kill them, or a guy with a big sword - and that would make life a lot easier ...
BBC News - 18 February 2005
Things Summers didn't say
The real scandal at Harvard is not that university president Lawrence Summers suggested, at a private symposium, that the small numbers of women in math and science departments at top research institutions may be due less to sex discrimination than to personal choices and inherent sex differences. The scandal is that his fairly innocuous, carefully hedged remarks sparked an irrational, intolerant outcry - and that Summers was forced to offer groveling apologies in order to save his job. Now that the transcript of Summers's remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce on Jan. 14 has been released, let's clarify what Summers did not say. ...
International Herald Tribune - 2 March 2005
'Please don't be like me'
Top career women are dropping out, while others are racked with guilt. It's time to rethink how we all work. We had a good chunk of the global economy represented around the table. Major American and UK multinationals had sent some of their most senior women to London to thrash out why there aren't more women getting to the top. I'm not sure I've seen quite so much gold jewellery or so many Blackberrys in one room before, yet neither inhibited an unexpectedly moving conversation about these women's achievements as a "battle-scarred generation" and whether their hard-bitten, profit-driven companies might evolve a model of success that didn't exact such a high personal price ...
The Guardian - 28 February 2005
Opening adotptions's Pandora's box
Tracing natural parents does not guarantee a happy ending. I am writing this under the name that I was given at birth (not the one by which I have been known for the past 49 years) because, as in the case of Daniel O'Connor, the frightened teenage girl who named me was forced by circumstance and convention to give me up for adoption. Little surprise then that I have taken a more than passing interest in the revelations about Daniel, Kathy Donnelly and Tony Abbott. Over the past few days, their amazing story has, more than once, brought a lump to my throat ...
The Age - 26 February 2005
Don't airbrush stories of adoption
The stories told by mothers who gave their children up for adoption are unbearably painful. For decades no one wanted to listen to these "relinquishing" mothers who fell pregnant in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. They were often sent away from home, gave birth in cruel circumstances and then were expected to act as if nothing had happened. I have been re-reading some of their stories, given in testimony to inquiries such as the 1992 NSW Law Reform Commission review of the Adoption Act, and the 2000 inquiry by the social issues committee of the NSW Legislative Council into adoption practice between 1950 and 1998. It is impossible not to feel the women's suffering ...
Sydney Morning Herald - 26 February 2005
We have created a culture that failts to teach our children about coping
When Jane Austen was 16 she wrote a short story entitled Catharine, or the Bower. The tale follows the adventures of a young penniless orphan, Miss Wynne, forced to marry a man twice her age 'whose disposition was not amiable and whose Manners were unpleasing'. Austen's own teenage years were not much better: they were spent looking after nephews and nieces, caring for a hypochondriac mother, assisting various female relatives during their confinement and then childbirth. Her fate, like Miss Wynne's, was not uncommon in the nineteenth century ...
The Observer - 27 February 2005
Pass the batons, not the buck
Watching the news coverage of the riots in Sydney's southwestern suburb of Macquarie Fields in recent days left me wondering whether we've been down this path before. Who, after all, could forget the Redfern riots last year? Those race riots in inner-city Sydney followed the controversial death of local youth TJ Hickey. The NSW Coroner would later clear police of any blame in connection with his death. The Macquarie Fields riots in recent days appear to centre on the deaths of two local youths during a short police pursuit. That these youths were in a stolen vehicle and may have been involved in a home invasion in Sydney's south hours earlier did not appear to upset many of the local residents ...
The Australian - 2 March 2005
Government action needed in crime-prone areas
There's a lack of consensus on the best way to deal with troubled communities. As events over the past week have shown, Macquarie Fields and the surrounding suburbs remain crime hot spots. These suburbs, included in postcode 2564, have a robbery rate twice the state average, a burglary rate nearly twice the state average and a motor vehicle theft rate that is nearly 1.5 times higher. With the high crime rate in areas such as Macquarie Fields, public opinion is divided on how to respond . Some argue the only way to deal with these neighbourhoods is to crack down on offenders; others say the right response is to reduce economic and social disadvantage ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 2 March 2005
Choice, liberty and the evil weed
Smoking is not a cause - but anti-smoking has become a crusade. It's the kind of headline that you assume that you must have misread: 'Smoking ban "may harm patients"'. Accustomed as we are to reading headline after headline reporting calls for bans on smoking in pubs and restaurants, a headline that reports some objections to smoking bans in hospitals seems nothing but perverse. But you haven't misread the headline, and the story is not a put-up job by cranks, pro-smokers and Big Tobacco. It is a humane response by UK health professionals, including the Royal College of Nursing ...
Spiked-Online - 23 February 2005
Women challenge 'honor' killings
A widespread campaign aims to help Jordan's forgotten victims. Six months ago, Mona fled her home. Her husband had married a second wife, as Islamic law allows, and Mona - defying his demands to return to her mother's house, where he could call upon her at any time - sought refuge in a cheap and run-down hotel. Alone and frightened, she waited, fearing her husband would find and kill her. By fleeing, Mona had tarnished the family's honor, which tribal custom dictated could be cleansed only by her death. So-called "honor" killings - the murder of a woman who is accused of tainting family honor - account for one-third of all violent deaths in Jordan, a country which otherwise has low crime rates ...
Christian Science Monitor - 2 March 2005
It's called torture
As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything OK. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are OK, why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross? When I interviewed Maher Arar in Ottawa last week, it seemed clear that however thoughtful his comments, I was talking with the frightened, shaky successor of a once robust and fully functioning human being. Torture does that to a person. It's an unspeakable crime, an affront to one's humanity that can rob you of a portion of your being as surely as acid can destroy your flesh ...
The New York Times - 28 February 2005
From Surrey to Basra, abuse is a fact of British army life
Officers who blame 'a few bad apples' ignore a culture of brutalisation. Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket must rank as one of the grimmest portrayals of the Vietnam war. A leading character, dubbed "Joker", is asked why he volunteered; he replies: "[I] wanted to meet interesting, stimulating people from an ancient land ... and kill them." Confronted with the harrowing photographic evidence of abuse by British soldiers in Iraq, it is tempting to add the phrase "humiliate, sexually abuse, and torture" to this admission. We seem to have moved a long way from the promise of restoring democracy to the Iraqi people ...
The Guardian - 26 February 2005
Why are we welcoming this torturer?
Europe is tacitly condoning the Bush regime's appalling practices. George Bush is this week having an extravagantly orchestrated series of meetings with Europe's leaders, designed to show a united front for the creation of democracy around the world. Tony Blair talks of our "shared values". No one mentions the word that makes this show a mockery: torture. It is now undeniable that the US administration, at the highest levels, is responsible for the torture that has been routine not only, as seen round the world in iconic photographs, at Abu Ghraib, but at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram ...
The Guardian - 24 February 2005
Iraq: moment of truth is coming
Critics of involvement in Iraq will soon have to decide if they were right. Like John Howard, I've been wondering about the tipping-point. What event, what change of circumstances, what new facts, might persuade the anti-war movement in Australia to think again about the nature of the epic struggle under way across the Middle East? As far back as August 2003, I thought the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad might shake some of the misconceptions about the sort of people, the sort of ideology, driving the violent insurgency in Iraq. Sadly, I was wrong ...
The Age - 26 February 2005
Judaism and the gay dilemma
Two years ago, liberal Judaism became the first of the Jewish movements in the UK to sanction commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples in a synagogue. What was remarkable was not so much the policy itself, but the lack of reaction to it. The muted response - no condemnation, for example, from the orthodox chief rabbi - reflects a more general pact made by most of Britain's synagogue movements seven years ago to avoid, wherever possible, sparring in public. So far, British Jewry has escaped the potentially schismatic ructions over homosexuality that have afflicted the Anglican Church ...
The Guardian - 26 February 2005
Anglicans must accept moral diversity to protect universality
Early indications are that despite the Anglican penchant for irresolution having bought more time to talk around the issue of homosexuality and the church, neither conservatives nor liberals in this debate are ultimately prepared to give substantive ground. At their meeting in Northern Ireland last week, the primates of the various Anglican provinces called on the church in the United States (which has consecrated an openly gay man as a bishop) and in Canada (which has approved the blessing of same-sex unions) to withdraw voluntarily from the Anglican Consultative Council for three years and to explain their views on homosexuality at an international meeting in June ...
The Sydney Morning Herald - 1 March 2005
It's time for us to give up the nukes
The deterrent is out of date, and the money could be better spent. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament enjoys a special place in modern history. No other recent protest movement has been proved so conclusively - diametrically, demonstrably - wrong. Not so long ago, its members made regular predictions that Armageddon would soon follow the Soviet early-warning system mistaking a flock of geese for a cruise missile, or a crazy American general pressing the doomsday button just to see if it worked. Their righteousness was beyond dispute but their judgement was hopeless. e deterrent deterred. It kept Europe at peace - or at least free from a major war - for half a century ...
The Guardian - 28 February 2005
Oh, come on: we must at least give them a chance
Imagine if a busybody friend called round and told you the following gossip about a middle-aged man who lived nearby. His first wedding was more than 20 years ago, to someone much younger: it began with a big splashy ceremony but turned out a bit of a mess. It soon became clear that the pair were grievously ill-suited, although they had two children together: he had an affair with an old girlfriend, she had a fling with an army officer, and before long their shenanigans were the talk of the street. More tea? Anyway, they separated, then divorced, and then – a year later, just as the chatter was calming down – his ex-wife was killed in a car crash ...
The Telegraph - 27 February 2005