Social Issues

Another reason Switzerland has to be one of the most dangerous places for children. Not only do they have huge pedophile rings there, but they’re now selling extra small condoms for young boys. Outrageous!

A leading condom manufacturer in Switzerland has created extra-small condoms for boys as young as 12 years old, the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph reported.

The condom, called the Hotshot, was produced after family planning groups and the Swiss AIDS Federation campaigned to have the condoms made following several studies that showed adolescent boys were not using proper protection when engaging in intercourse.

A private swimming pool booted a camp class consisting of many minority students when they allegedly heard complaints from club members about sharing the pool with black and Hispanic children. In an ironic twist, the manager of the pool was allegedly a Barack Obama campaign manager in the state of Pennsylvania.

I’m shocked that this kind of thing still goes on. I really hoped and thought we were past this kind of gross discrimination. It’s so wrong on so many levels. Those poor kids.

The Creative Steps camp in northeast Philadelphia had paid $1,950 for 65 children to go each Monday afternoon this summer to The Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley. But after the first outing on June 29, the money was refunded with no explanation.

Camp director Alethea Wright said Thursday that while at the club, some black and Hispanic children reported hearing racial comments.

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a woman that refuses to seek traditional treatment for her son who has cancer.

A young boy with “gender identity disorder” has decided to live life as a girl named Katie.

Looks like yet another cheerleader coach has gotten in trouble for some racy photos. Carlie Becker, a.k.a. Carlie Christine, has been fired from her job as cheerleader coaching job after some cheerleaders she cut from the squad revealed that Ms. Becker posed nude as a “Cybergirl” for Playboy’s website. She was immediately fired.

Actually, it’s not so easy to understand. Becker did this on her own time — it’s not as if she posed in the school locker room. And Playboy.com has to be one of the most tame adult sites on the internet — there was plenty “left to the imagination” compared to many other websites out there. So we fail to understand why an adult posing for tastefully nude photos somehow is demonized and can’t be a suitable “role model”.

Janet Fraser, a vocal advocate for homebirths who calls c-sections “birth rapes”, suffered a tragedy when her baby died during delivery. A blogger from NJ.com is none too sympathetic:

A new study by researchers is stating that while toddlers watching a bunch of TV doesn’t exactly help, it might not be that harmful, either.

A study out of Australia purports that children that have older fathers seem to get lower scores on intelligence tests administered during infancy and childhood. (We’re a bit fuzzy on how you give a baby an IQ test, but whatever.) On the flip side, children with older mothers have higher test scores — so all you cougars out there, try to squeeze out one last kid, they might be a genius.

No, really? Because we thought all the stress of dealing with a newborn was just the thing to mend a relationship. And nothing says healthy childhood like growing up in a house with parents on the verge of divorce, no?

The single mom who gave birth to octuplets is apparently accepting donations from the web — and they’re pouring in. *That* should settle down the crowd that thinks she had the babies for the money, fame and attention.

A 10-year-old law intended to block children’s access to pornography online never got traction and has finally died a slow, painful death.

A judge’s panel ruling earlier this week allowing teachers in Washington to have sex with of-age students has many in a tizzy.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that more teens are becoming vegans or vegetarians.

A couple described by the AP as “ultra-religious” (is that term in the AP stylebook?) are fighting to keep their brain-dead son on life support.

Motl Brody of Brooklyn was pronounced dead this week after a half-year fight against a brain tumor.

Doctors at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington say the seventh-grader’s brain has ceased functioning entirely. But Motl’s parents, who are Orthodox Jews, are refusing the hospital’s request to remove all artificial life support.

They say their son is alive because his heart and lungs are still working. A machine inflates and deflates his lungs and drugs help his heart beat.

A new study is purporting that the more kids watch sexual antics on television, the larger the risk of teen pregnancy. Hmm, we’re a bit skeptical that there’s a little causation/correlation stretching going on here.

Boys and girls ages 12 to 17 years old who watched the most sexual content on TV were twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who watched the least sexually suggestive shows, according to research in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The study is the first to find a link between exposure to sexual content on television and teen pregnancies, according to the researchers. Almost 1 million 15- to 19-year-old females become pregnant each year in the U.S. Based on these findings, the television industry needs to balance sexual content in programs with messages about the risks and responsibilities of sex, said study author Anita Chandra.

In these TV programs, “no one is talking about the negative consequences of sex or contraceptive use,” said Chandra, a behavioral scientist at Rand Corp., a nonprofit research company based in Santa Monica, California, in an Oct. 31 telephone interview. “There are many factors that contribute to our high teen pregnancy rate. We’re not saying it’s the only predictor. It’s one factor that should be examined and should be part of the discussion with teens.”