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Russia Joins Global Pro-Life Initiative
By Lisa Correnti |
October 28, 2021
WASHINGTON DC, October 29 (C-Fam) It was announced on Capitol Hill today that the Russian government has joined the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Women’s Health and Protection of the Family. To mark the historic pro-life agreement’s one-year anniversary Congressional pro-life leaders introduced a resolution to affirm the declaration principles.
“When other nations or international agencies interject unhealthy and harmful policies upon you that compromise life, family, and your own sovereignty —they must be challenged,” said Valerie Huber, president of the Institute for Women’s Health which hosted an event to mark the first anniversary of the declaration in the Kennedy Room of the Russell Senate building.
The pro-life agreement was the first time that a broad coalition of countries jointly rejected attempts by the United Nations to promote abortion as an international right.
Huber, the architect of the Geneva Consensus Declaration under the Trump administration, stressed that these policy debates “should be handled at the country level, not the international level.”
While announcing two new signatories to the declaration, the Russian Federation and Guatemala, Huber said that the declaration “is alive and it is growing.” The Russian Federation’s commitment to the declaration was made public for the first time. Guatemala’s President announced his country’s in mid-October.
“What happened last year was historic,” Huber said.
The Geneva Consensus Declaration launched in October 2021, was originally co-sponsored by the United States, Hungary, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia and Uganda and joined by 32 countries.
The coalition has since grown to 36 countries, even though President Biden withdrew the United States from the agreement and asked other countries to stop supporting it early in his administration.
The declaration promotes women’s health based on authentic human rights and respect for the sovereignty of states to legislate on abortion without external interference from the United Nations or powerful countries.
The agreement affirms that “there is no international right to abortion, nor any international obligation on the part of states to finance or facilitate abortion.” It also recognizes the centrality of the family as the “natural and fundamental group unit of society” and commits countries to protection of the family in line with international law.
The commemorative event was honorably co-chaired by Senators Steve Daines (R-MT) and Jim Lankford (R-OK), and Congressmen Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Jim Banks (R-IN). Members of Congress, and Parliamentarians and Diplomats from signatory countries attended.
“The coalition is the most powerful and most effective way to give a voice to the silent global majority of billions of people who support life and family,” said Senator Daines, the founder and chairman of the Senate pro-life caucus.
Senators Daines and Lankford introduced a concurrent resolution to celebrate the first anniversary of the agreement and affirm its core commitments to protect life and strengthen the family.
The resolution “applauds the signatory countries for their dedication to advancing women’s health, protecting life at every stage while affirming that there is no international right to abortion, and upholding the importance of the family as foundational to society.”
The resolution notes “longstanding Federal laws that prohibit the United States from conducting or funding abortions, abortion lobbying, or coercive family planning in foreign countries remain in effect” and commits Members of Congress to “conduct oversight” of the Executive Branch.
It concludes urging “signatory countries to defend the universal principles affirming life and the family.” The resolution has 14 Senate co-sponsors and its companion measure lead by Congressman Banks has 29 House colleagues supporting it.
Online platforms have a responsibility to protect children from harm
7:47 AM PDT•October 31, 2021
Kathryn Kosmides is a survivor of gender-based violence and the founder of nonprofit background check Garbo.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s message about Instagram’s impact on teenage girls was unequivocal: Facebook’s studies found that 13% of British teens said Instagram prompted thoughts of suicide, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.
These statistics, however, are only one part of the bigger picture when it comes to the general safety of teenagers online.
The British have come to the conclusion that social media has a lot to do with the sudden, spectacular rise in the number of girls transitioning to boys. The result is that more than half such girls will attempt suicide while still in their teens or twenties.
It’s estimated that there are over 500,000 sexual predators active on the internet each day. More than 750,000 at any given moment, according to Terre des Hommes! In 2020, there were over 21.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation made to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. Online enticement reports — which detail when someone is communicating with a child via the internet with the intent to exploit them — increased by more than 97% from the year before.
Reports of online predators are on the rise, but predatory behavior online is as old as Netscape.
My family got our first PC in 1999. I started on gaming platforms like Neopets and Gaia Online. Soon, I was posting thoughts and communicating with other users on Myspace and Tumblr. As my online world expanded, I encountered old men pretending to be preteens. At one point, I began a “relationship” with a 17-year-old boy when I was just 12 years old. Of course, I didn’t talk about any of this, mostly out of shame. I didn’t know I was being groomed — I had never heard the word used until I started doing gender-based violence work myself.
Grooming is subtle, and for a teen unfamiliar with it, undetectable. An individual grooms to build trust and emotional connection with a child or teen so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. This can look like an older teen asking to webcam and slowly prodding a child or teen to do inappropriate things such as spin around for them or change clothes to something “cuter,” or a digital “friend” pressuring someone to engage in cybersex. Predators sometimes pretend to be a young person to obtain personal details such as photos or sexual history; they then weaponize this information for their own pleasure.
I only recently realized that there is CSAM — or child sexual abuse material — of me out there on the internet. Footage of me may still reside on someone’s old cell phone or on a hard drive collecting dust. It could one day be shared onto private Discords or Telegram channels.
My individual experience as a teen girl on the internet is part of what led me to build a nonprofit online background check that allows anyone to see if someone they are speaking with has a history of violence — ideally before the first in-person meeting. We recently made the decision to allow users as young as 13 to access our public records database in the future. While we may never be able to entirely stop children and teens from being exploited online, we can at least arm them with tools and technology to understand whether someone they meet online has a record of bad behavior.
Of course, a background check is only one tool in the safety arsenal — people frequently lie about their names and identities. If a child is being groomed, or an adult is exploiting them, they are often doing so in ways that are anonymous, isolated and secret.
This is why educating young people about avoiding the dangers that lurk online is key. This can involve teaching them to identify early red flags like love bombing, extreme jealousy, pushing boundaries, etc. We can also communicate to young people what a healthy, safe, consensual relationship looks like — with “green flags” as opposed to red ones.
There are various practical skills that we can incorporate into kids’ education as well. Teach them to be selective about what photos they share and whose follow requests they accept and to bring an adult if they meet people they know online in real life.
When the adults in their lives discuss the dangers of online dating and internet communication openly and consistently, children and teens learn how to recognize the risks. This can go a long way toward preventing serious trauma. Conversations about safety online, like sex education, are often left to parents, while parents assume kids are having them at school. It can be difficult to navigate these discussions, especially for parents who don’t always understand online culture, but it is essential that parents seek out resources to educate themselves.
As Haugen pointed out, online platforms also have a responsibility. Trust and safety departments at online platforms are relatively new, and there’s still a lot to learn and improve on.
On most digital platforms, content moderators are understaffed, underpaid and undertrained. Online platforms need to put protection over profit and invest in additional training and support for the mental health of those responsible for keeping their platforms safe. By giving safety teams the tools and time they need to think critically about questionable content, they can execute on their mandate effectively and with care.
Though the internet can create environments that lead to abuse, it can also be a powerful tool in educating young people about early warning signs and the realities of the world, including arming them with access to information about who they’re talking to online.
Reactive measures to combat abuse — from the criminal justice system to platform moderators — are a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound. Preventing sexual abuse before it happens is the best protection we can give our kids. By taking responsibility — whether as platforms, politicians or parents — for the potential harm caused online, we can begin to create a safer world for all of us.
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Social media trolls could face two years in prison over posts
intended to cause ‘psychological harm’ – reports
1 Nov, 2021 17:48
British social media users could reportedly face a two-year prison term if they send messages or post content deemed to have caused “psychological harm” under the UK government’s draft law to tackle hate speech and abuse online.
As part of the review process on the government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport has apparently accepted recommendations to shift the law’s focus from the actual content of a message to its potentially “harmful effect”.
According to The Times, the plans have been sent to the cabinet for approval and UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is expected to add them to the bill when it is introduced to Parliament next month.
In July, the Law Commission warned of a gap in existing law governing online behaviour, noting that it “over-criminalises” in some situations and “under-criminalises” in others. Claiming that the reliance on “vague terms” like “grossly offensive” and “indecent” had set the threshold for criminality “too low”, the oversight body proposed a new classification of offences based on “likely psychological harm”. Trolls may face two years in prison for sending such messages.
Under this categorisation, prosecution would focus on the intent of a perpetrator to cause harm through an abusive post or message – and without “reasonable excuse” (understood as relating to the public interest).
A proposed new “threatening communications” offence will cover posts and messages containing threats of serious harm, The Times reported. This would make such material punishable if it can be proven that the sender intends their victim to fear that the threat will be carried out.
Meanwhile, an anti-misinformation offence – described by the newspaper as a “knowingly false communication” offence – will be formulated to criminalise messages or posts senders know to be untrue with the intent to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. In this regard, The Times reported that unnamed government sources had referenced the example of “anti-vaxxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.”
Another new offence will reportedly focus on so-called “pile-on” harassment, which refers to instances where a number of individuals join together to send abusive messages and specifically target a victim on social media. The practice has previously been described by the Law Commission as “genuinely harmful and distressing”.
Making its recommendations, the commission cited a report by the Alan Turing Institute that estimated that approximately one-third of people in the UK have been exposed to online abuse. In recent weeks, the debate over online harm has grown after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told UK MPs that the tech firm was “subsidising hate”. The knife-killing of Conservative MP David Amess last month has also led to increased calls for an end to online anonymity.
In the wake of Amess’ murder, UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said there was a “case” to be made for removing the “veil of anonymity” to prevent internet users from “[abusing] their position on social media”. Although no immediate link was made between the killing and social media, a number of MPs also lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson to include the so-called ‘David’s Law’ on removing anonymity to “toughen up” the Online Safety Bill.
An unnamed government spokesman told the paper that the draft bill would “[make] our laws fit for the digital age” and “make tech companies responsible for people’s safety”. However, privacy rights groups have criticised the evaluation of criminality on the basis of ‘psychological harm’ as an effort to “censor lawful speech that the politically powerful don’t like” using the pretext of “reining in tech companies”.
I like this idea, but I think it has to be focused on those who target individuals online, not those who post an opinion that might be considered by some as untrue.
US mother accuses school board of teaching her daughter
she was ‘BORN EVIL’ because she is WHITE
1 Nov, 2021 10:54
© Reuters / Evelyn Hockstein
The Virginia school board at the center of a row over its gender-affirmation policies and alleged critical race theory (CRT) curriculum has been accused by a parent of teaching primary schoolers that white people are “born evil.”
At a Loudoun County School Board meeting last week, a mother revealed that she had pulled her children from the county’s public school system after her six-year-old daughter asked her last year if she was “born evil because she was a white person.” The child had apparently learned this in a history lesson taught at her former school.
Video of the incident was widely shared over the weekend. It showed the unidentified woman accusing the Loudoun County Public School (LCPS) board of allegedly forcing its “uncompromising political agenda” on parents. Claiming that the board was “[destroying] our schools,” she called on its members to resign over a series of recent scandals.
Over the last month, the national spotlight has been trained on Loudoun County after school administrators reportedly covered up a sexual assault by a supposedly ‘gender-fluid’ student. The unnamed “boy in a skirt” was convicted last week of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio in relation to the rape of a teenage girl at Stone Bridge High School in May. While that incident was being investigated, he was quietly transferred to Broad Run High School, where he allegedly assaulted another student on October 6.
In August, the LCPS board enforced policy proposal 8040 – a directive that requires district schools to affirm the preferred gender of students by calling them their chosen pronouns and allowing them access to gender-restricted areas, such as locker rooms and bathrooms.
Last week, students at Broad Run staged a walkout to protest the school board’s policy as “enabling” behavior. At a previous school board meeting last month, an angry parent said the policy was “rushed through to a vote without consideration for the safety of all students, simply to satisfy a liberal agenda.”
A series of contentious school meetings in recent months has laid bare the tensions surrounding the policy, which has seen at least one teacher resign after refusing to “push highly politicized agendas” on students. Another teacher who refused to abide by the policy on account of his religious beliefs was suspended by the board, but a court later ordered his reinstatement on First Amendment grounds.
Meanwhile, the National School Board Association (NSBA) appeared to smear the first victim’s family and other concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” in a controversial letter to the White House that requested FBI involvement after alleged threats to LCPS board members. After criticism from some 20 state school board associations, the NSBA partially apologized for the letter, blaming renegade leaders and expressing remorse at “some of the language” it used.
But the debate over schooling in Loudoun County is not limited to trans issues. Critics of the board are accusing it of adopting ideology-driven agendas, like shaping the curriculum in line with CRT. The LCPS board has denied embracing the highly controversial view of American history and society, which states that the country was founded on institutionalized racism that needs to be dismantled.
Although school board member Beth Barts is expected to step down on Tuesday, after announcing her resignation last month, parents and other critics have repeatedly called on LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler to resign.
In May, Ziegler emailed the school board about the sexual assault at Stone Bridge High School, but claimed at a June school board meeting that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist” and that there was not “any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” He later apologized but insisted there was no cover-up.
Loudon Co., Va
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