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Friday, December 9, 2016

UK football sex abuse: 83 suspects and 98 clubs involved in inquiry

5:30 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Story highlights

83 suspects in UK sex abuse case
98 soccer clubs involved in investigation

The investigation involves all levels of football, from top-level clubs to amateur teams.

Police forces across the UK continue to receive calls from victims and people offering information. In total, 639 referrals have been received from both the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) helpline and police forces.

Read: Chelsea FC accused of paying child sex abuse victim to keep quiet

Of the victims identified so far, 98% are male and their ages range from seven to 20.

Read: Hundreds come forward to police in sex abuse inquiry

"Allegations received by police forces across the country are being swiftly acted upon," said Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the NPCC's lead for Child Protection.

The investigation began when former professional footballer Andy Woodward became the first to publicly tell his story in November.

Visit cnn.com/football for more news and videos

Fellow lower-league player Steve Walters and ex-England internationals Paul Stewart and David White also came forward soon after, before a hotline was set up for people who were sexually abused while playing football in Britain.

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UK football sex abuse: 83 suspects and 98 clubs involved in inquiry

6:30 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Story highlights

83 suspects in UK sex abuse case
98 soccer clubs involved in investigation

The investigation involves all levels of football, from top-level clubs to amateur teams.

Follow @cnnsport

Read: Chelsea FC accused of paying child sex abuse victim to keep quiet

Of the victims identified so far, 98% are male and their ages range from seven to 20.

Read: Hundreds come forward to police in sex abuse inquiry

"Allegations received by police forces across the country are being swiftly acted upon," said Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the NPCC's lead for Child Protection.

The investigation began when former professional footballer Andy Woodward became the first to publicly tell his story in November.

Visit cnn.com/football for more news and videos

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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Why Arkansas same-sex parents won't be listed on a child's birth certificate

5:00 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

Arkansas same-sex parents will not be listed on their childrenâ€™s birth certificates, the stateâ€™s highest court ruled on Thursday. The decision has raised questions about equal protection, and the state may still change its approach.

The ruling by a four-member majority of the Arkansas Supreme Court determined that only biological parents can be listed on a childâ€™s birth certificate. It overturns last yearâ€™s decision by a lower court that married same-sex couples could automatically have both spouses listed as parents.Â

For the state Supreme Court, itâ€™s simply a question of biology. At the same time, marriage allows different-sex couples to be listed as parents, and the US Supreme Courtâ€™s ruling on gay marriage may mean that now applies to same-sex couples too. And the debate is complicated by state laws that require parentage to be tracked.

â€œIt is clear that including both married spousesâ€™ names â€" regardless of whether they are same-sex or opposite sex â€" on a childâ€™s birth certificate is exactly the kind of benefit of marriage that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled should be extended to same-sex couples,â€ Kate Oakley, senior legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a press release.

That was the approach taken by Little Rock Circuit Judge Tim Fox in December 2015. Three same-sex couples brought a case arguing that the legalization of same-sex marriage gave same-sex parents the same rights to be identified as parents on their childrenâ€™s birth certificates that different-sex parents already enjoyed.Â

For parents, being named on a childâ€™s birth certificate is important for all kinds of reasons, as LGBT news source The Advocate described. Without this legitimization, parents may struggle to put children on their health insurance or even pick them up from school.

When they won their suit, the three couples were granted the right to list the names of both partners on the birth certificates. But the state appealed the decision on the grounds that it was causing legal and logistical problems. Several days after the initial ruling, the Arkansas Supreme Court stayed the decision, preventing it from being extended to other couples.

One possible reason for the issues: birth certificates are woven into legislation and Health Board protocol in the state of Arkansas. Identifying biological parents is an â€œimportant governmental objective,â€ wrote Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Josephine Linker Hart in the majority opinion, explaining that knowing who parents are allows the state to track public health trends and give children genetic information that they might need for medical reasons later on.

But different-sex Arkansas parents arenâ€™t required to prove that they are the biological parents of the child, perhaps limiting the value of state tracking â€" and raising questions about unequal treatment of same-sex parents.

"There's no requirement that DNA be given or that there be a biological relationship to a child to get on a birth certificate for a father, for the non-birth parent," said Cheryl Maples, who sued on behalf of the three couples, the Associated Press reported.

â€œThe inclusion of a parent's name on a child's birth certificate is a benefit associated with and flowing from marriage," wrote Arkansas Associate Justice Paul Danielson in the dissenting opinion.

The decision may have provided an impetus for the state to make some changes to the law.

â€œIt is time to heed the callâ€ to make changes heralded by decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right to same-sex marriage, said Arkansas Chief Justice Howard Brill, according to NBC.

And though some state officials pronounced the state â€œgratifiedâ€ that the court had chosen to uphold state law, they suggested that lawmakers might be willing to consider changes. Arkansas has so far been reluctant to amend its laws.

â€œIf any changes are appropriate, it is the job of legislators to do so, not the circuit court,â€ said Judd Deere, a spokesman for Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, AP reported.

As it stands, the ruling would require same-sex parents to obtain a court order if they want both spouses to be listed on a childâ€™s birth certificate. Ms. Maples told AP that she has not yet decided whether to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

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Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony celebrates 24th year

5:00 PM Bilal Muazin No comments

â€œItâ€™s terribly British, isnâ€™t it,â€ said the man next to me at last nightâ€™s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony at the (appropriately named) In and Out Club in St Jamesâ€™s. He was referring, of course, to the yearly bash â€" now in its 24th year â€" in which the Literary Review magazine nominates half a dozen passages from contemporary fiction seen to represent sex at its most cringeworthy, reads them out to champagne-infused guffaws, and then awards a prize to the author of the worst.

It is a terribly British event, but it also provides a snarky satisfaction that transcends nationality. Because for anyone with the sneaking suspicion that the sexual act is better done or seen than artistically described â€" that its complex idiosyncrasy is one of the few things that lie outside the remit of the otherwise resourceful English language â€" the Bad Sex Awards hits its mark.

Yet as the entrants this year make clear, writing about sex with flagrant abominableness is still cheerily far from going out of fashion. Hearty examples were a passage from Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellisâ€™s The Butcherâ€™s Hook:

When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below.

â€œAudacious swellâ€? Quite.

Then there was the American Gayle Formanâ€™s entry, from Leave Me:

They were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous. And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how sheâ€™d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time.

Erri de Luca.
Claudio Onorati/EPA

But the gong went to the Italian poet and translator Erri De Luca for The Day Before Happiness (de Luca understandably wasnâ€™t present). â€œMy prick was a plank stuck to her stomach,â€ the Neapolitan was justly rebuked for writing:

With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her â€¦ I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.

Not everyone felt this deserved the award â€" as an American woman nearby remarked to me, this could clearly be read as satire, plain and simple. Perhaps, but satire doesnâ€™t necessarily get you home dry, especially when itâ€™s ambiguous. After all, the book, a coming of age story, is not particularly comic in the way that, for instance, the early sex-mad tomes of Philip Roth and Martin Amis were.

In fact, the awards were conceived not to discourage writing about sex, but to discourage writing about sex badly. The wording of the original mission statement in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, is revealing: the bash was to â€œdraw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fictionâ€.

It would be helpful to have some guidance on what non-redundant, good sex writing looks like, since itâ€™s not entirely clear whether it can exist in a literary form at all. After all, the most sexually charged novels of the last 100 or so years use the rule of thumb that the act is unmentionable, boring, or best only suggested.

The novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope are full of sexual yearning, and their emotional and erotic pull are none the worse for the veiled references to kissing and love. Even in 20th century novels with subject matter devoted to romantic entanglements, the sexual act is not necessarily spelled out or even mentioned â€" Iris Murdoch doesnâ€™t go further than â€œmaking loveâ€ as an account of the nocturnal activities of her highly sexually charged couple Dora and Paul in The Bell (1958).

And while Margaret Drabbleâ€™s super-sexy characters Clara and Gabriel get pretty steamy in Jerusalem the Golden, nothing beyond the fact is spelled out. Itâ€™s a blessed relief which does nothing to diminish the profoundly saucy atmosphere of the book.

The awards are also a humorous reminder not just of the imaginative power but also of the literary value of discipline and restraint in matters of bonking. A recent book about prime minster Herbert Asquithâ€™s passionate attachment to Venetia Stanley tells of his thousands of letters to her, all passionately headed with variants of â€œmy own darlingâ€ and â€œdarlingestâ€.

Asquithâ€™s desperate fixation with Stanley pours out from every page, but had he indulged in anything more sexually explicit than the desire to â€œgo for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talkâ€, it would hardly have helped, and probably only hindered, the accumulated intensity of his fixation. Voluble lusters: take note.

Zoe Strimpel, PhD Candidate, University of Sussex

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Thursday, December 8, 2016

The child sex trade is booming in this Kenyan port city

10:30 AM Bilal Muazin No comments

Inside a tiny houseÂ outside the city of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya, 11-year-old Sabina sits on a bed, one of her breasts exposed, a 2-year-old on her back.

With an effortless click, the girl shoots a jet of saliva through the gap between her two front teeth. It lands on the floor. Then she begins to talk as she shifts the toddler from her back to her bosom.

â€œThe father of this child is a German tourist,â€ she said. â€œHe impregnated me and left the country after his vacation. I was forced to drop out of school and take care of the child.â€

Sabina is one among many children in this coastal region who have become mothers at too young an age. She and other girls, as well as underage boys, have left school to cater to men and women who pay them for sex.

And the market is booming: Child sex tourism has remained rampant in Mombasa, a port city, despite a spate of terror attacks in the past three years that have scared away package vacationers, crippling a vital tourism sector that contributes about 10 percent to Kenyaâ€™s gross domestic product.

European travelers especially have continued to fuel the trade. Many come to the city in search of girls aged between 12 and 18. The industry has made Kenya one of the world's hubs for child sex tourism, researchers say.

â€œWe always believe that white men have money, so when they come here we hope that they will get us out of poverty,â€ said Sabina. â€œThey give us a lot of money and sleep with us. We use the money to pay rent for our parents and buy food.â€

Trace Kenya, a local nonprofitÂ group that works with the United Nations to battle child trafficking, estimates there could be as many as 100,000 child sex workers in Mombasa. The trade extends up and down the coast to the seaside resort towns of Malindi and Diani, according to the NGO.

In a 2010 report â€" the most recent available â€" UNICEF released numbers on child trafficking in Kenya that revealed that almost a third of girls age 12 and younger in the Mombasa region were involved in prostitution. European men comprise half of the clients, the report said.

Sex tourism has been blamed in Kenya for increasing rates of school dropouts, poverty and illiteracy as school-age children skip class in pursuit of easy money. At the same time, poverty is the main driver behind child sex tourism, say experts. Some parents even urge their children to become involved.

Emily, a 16-year-old orphan, said she was forced into the business due to poverty and peer pressure. Her aunt encouraged her to engage in sex with white men to help pay family expenses. Emily is now infected with HIV.

â€œI have slept with different men, especially whites from Germany, Italy and the USA,â€ she said. â€œI regret it but I had no option [at] that time. I started the business at age 10, when a friend connected me to an Italian tourist who had visited the country for three months. I had nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep.â€

Teenage boys and 20-something Kenyan men known as "beach boys" also hook up with older white women, usually Western tourists who have flown here specifically for sexual encounters.

Against a backdrop of dazzlingly white sand and the aquamarine sea at Jomo Kenyatta Public Beach, foreign women sip cocktails under bamboo shades. Young men approach them with compliments designed to break the ice.

â€œThis is our work,â€ said Alex Mwalumba, a beach boy who said heâ€™s 29 but looks much younger. â€œItâ€™s very simple to lure a white woman. First, know the language she speaks. Secondly, tell her she is the most beautiful woman you have ever seen. For the first time in years, she truly believes she is desirable.â€

Mwalumba had few regrets.

â€œThe money will begin to flow,â€ he said, referring to payments once a temporary relationship has begun. â€œSome [beach boys] have used the opportunity to build good houses and start businesses.â€

But he warned that business sometimes can be risky.

â€œSome tourists end up either being robbed or murdered by beach boys in pursuit for money,â€ he noted. â€œBeach boys are not after love. They are after money. They sometime trick tourists to go to the room and rob them.â€

Paul Adhoch, who heads child rights organization Trace Kenya, said prostitution has led to an increase in unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers in Mombasa. It has also broken up families in the city, he said.

Trace Kenya is working to rescue girls from the sex trade and to end the practice in the Mombasa region. The NGO has rescued more than 10,000 children in the last seven years, putting them in shelters and making other arrangements for them to earn a living.

â€œWe have rescued many children involved in sex tourism or those who were potentially likely to fall into it, more girls â€" for young men the number has been lower,â€ he said. â€œThe police have done little to fight the vice. They have given tourists impunity despite having evidence against them.â€

But Regional Police Chief Nelson Marwa says the government has done a lot to battle the practice, including warning tourists and parents against being involved in the business.

â€œWe have put in place laws that will deal with such acts,â€ Marwa said. â€œAlready we have arrested and charged parents, children and some tourists. We will also close all hotels that allow young girls and old tourists to check in together, and their licenses will be canceled.â€

The real problem, Adhoch believes, is culture.

â€œThere is a culture among parents and children that when you get yourself a white man, then you have gotten yourself out of poverty,â€ said Adhoch. â€œTourists always take this advantage and will come here deliberately for that.â€

But Sabina, who is still struggling to come to terms with her HIV-positive status, wants the government to do more to help girls in the local sex industry.

â€œThe government should curb the practice by arresting tourists whose aim is to engage in sex with children and dump them afterward,â€ she said. â€œThey are creating more poverty for young people here like me.â€

Editor's note: The last names of children interviewed for this story have been withheld to protect their identities. Tonny Onyulo reported from Mombasa, Kenya.

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