Tag: World Health Organization

Virginity Testing is Just Stupid

On By southwerkIn business ethics

Virginity Testing is Just Stupid

And I can add, evil as well. My half of the human race, the male half, can sometimes be alarmingly stupid, ignorant and malicious. Pushing around young girls looking for some bizarre concept of purity is the ultimate bullying and we should know better. We might do better trying to live our lives as gentlemen and worrying less about women’s sexuality.

There is no way that taking money for testing a woman’s virginity to determine her purity is ethical in business or otherwise. It never will be. Doesn’t basic business ethics imply that you are doing something useful, something beneficial in a sense? What’s useful about testing for virginity?

The Virginity Hit
The Virginity Hit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Where would you get that out of this?

James Pilant

The invasive, sexist practice of “testing” girls’ virginity – Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/14/the_invasive_sexist_practice_of_testing_girls_virginity/

Aside from the primary fact that a virginity test is evil and invasive, it’s not even accurate – as any teenager who’s ever gone horseback riding or read the instructions in a box of tampons could tell you. As ethicist and researcher Marie-Ève Bouthillier told the Gazette, to assume so “reduces virginity to a piece of skin.” Claire Faucher, an assistant clinical professor at the Université de Montréal, says that the World Health Organization considers virginity testing sexual violence against women. And Amnesty International calls it “sexual violence… akin to rape.”In far too many places in this world, a girl’s virginity is so highly prized her community is willing to sexually abuse her to try to confirm it. And though an official statement on the ethics of the practice may help curb it in some areas, it’s clear from its persistence in places where it’s not supposed to exist that it takes a lot more than saying it’s wrong to stop it. As Bouthillier notes, testing is easy to perpetuate “because it’s a taboo practice and it’s hidden.” That’s why more education and enlightenment and protections for girls need to be a serious priority in the healthcare profession, all over the world. Healthcare providers need …

via The invasive, sexist practice of “testing” girls’ virginity – Salon.com.

From around the web.

From the web site,

http://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/before-melanie-phillips-was-mad-her-role-in-uncovering-the-virginity-testing-controversy/

But I thought I’d mention that before Melanie Phillips became ‘Mad Mel’, she was a social affairs journalist for The Guardian and broke the ‘virginity testing’ story for the newspaper in 1979, as seen in this archival piece from The Guardian‘s
website. The ‘virginity testing’ controversy centred around the
gynaecological examination of a South Asian women at Heathrow when she
tried to enter the country on a fiancee visa, and soon led to a
widespread investigation into racially discriminatory practices within
the UK immigration control system (you can find out more about our
research into this here).

It is bizarre how the investigative journalist who broke this story
in 1979 has become the right-wing columnist that we know (and don’t
love) today. I wonder what she would write if the ‘virginity testing’
story broke now…

Ethics Blogs, Monday, June 14, 2010

On By southwerkIn business ethics2 Comments

Lauren Bloom blogs that employers should allow workers the freedom to deal with family problems such as illness. Currently with the great difficulty in finding jobs, there is certainly a temptation to put the hammer down. Bloom believes this is counterproductive.

 

 

 

 

Gael O’Brien discusses the World Health Organization’s problems. The WHO has been criticized for over estimating the danger of a flu pandemic and advising governments to stockpile enormous quantities of drugs as preparation. The three scientists who recommended these steps all have ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the drugs recommended. The article is long enough for a good analysis and achieves that goal. The article has links to two reports, one from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the other from BMJ (it used to be the British Medical Journal). Neither report is complimentary.

You Can Make Money With The Flu! (and not just a little)

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Government Failure

“Scientists who drew up the key World Health Organisation guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs in the event of a flu pandemic had previously been paid by drug companies which stood to profit, according to a report out today.”

This is the first sentence in the Guardian’s article on the trio of experts who wrote the WHO report. The news article authored by Randeep Ramesh, the Social Affairs editor at the Guardian finds all three scientists has ties to drug companies that would profit by the stockpiling recommended by their report.

Britain alone spent more than a billion pounds stockpiling medicines like tamiflu. All together the stockpiling of drugs by the various countries involved wound up costing more than seven billion dollars.