Five years after one of the worst mass kidnappings in recent history, over one hundred Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Islamic militants remain missing.
On April 14th, 2014, about 230 girls from Chibok Girls’ Secondary School in NE Nigeria were rounded up at night by men in army dress and driven off on trucks into the darkness. In the immediate aftermath, 47 of them escaped; some jumped off the trucks, others managed to get away within a few days.
Thirty months on, the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram freed 21 of the Chibok girls (Oct 2016), then 82 more in May 2017. Half of them -112 – have yet to be freed, says the Chairman of the Chibok Parents’ Association. Meantime at least a dozen of the Chibok parents have died, either themselves killed by Boko Haram, or by stress-related illness.
European countries are not obliged to register a “commissioning mother” in a surrogacy arrangement as birth mother in their civil registry. That’s according to the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights when it delivered its first advisory opinion on surrogacy last week. The court however also advised that it is in the best interests of the child to establish some legal relationship between the child and the “commissioning mother”, though it would leave it up to states how best to recognize that legal relationship.
The case stemmed from a French couple who “commissioned” a child through surrogacy in the USA and then attempted to bring the child back to France and register it as their own. The child was genetically related to the man, but not to the woman.
One hundred children from the Republic of Ireland have been sent to England over the past three years to be assessed at a controversial clinic accused of fast-tracking gender changes. Five staff members, including consultant Psychotherapist Marcus Evans, one of the former governors of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, resigned over concerns that the Tavistock youth gender clinic was too quick to give children and young people gender reassignment treatment.
The most recent figures released from the clinic in London show that 38 Irish children attended their service from June 2017 to June 2018, while 35 children were referred the previous year, and 27 the year before that.
Since 2010, 117 boys and girls from Ireland have been referred to the clinic; but there has been a sharp rise in referrals in the past three years.
The children, aged eight to 17, are initially psychologically assessed in the UK Clinic while treatment, which can involve puberty blockers in some cases, is now mainly carried out in the Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Dublin.
In a statement released over the weekend, the HSE said: “We now have a planned and funded commitment to have the services delivered by a full staff team based in Ireland and we are currently recruiting in that regard.” The statement added that Tavistock are supporting them to make the change.
A fledgling pro-life student society in the University of Aberdeen has taken a court case after having been denied official recognition by the University’s Student Union.
The Aberdeen Life Ethics Society (Ales) is claiming that a “no-platforming” policy, through which affiliation was denied, amounted to discrimination under the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act. Without affiliation, a society is not eligible for grants or allowed to use campus facilities or have a presence at freshers’ week.
The pro-life group argued that the union should represent “the interests and diverse beliefs of nearly 14,500 students [but instead] has adopted a policy which in essence has recast the students’ union as a pro-abortion campaigning organisation”. There was “an alarming trend of limiting freedom of expression on university campuses”, their lawyers added.
The University of Aberdeen is the latest of a series of universities where pro-life student groups have had to resort to legal action in order to gain university recognition.
Legislation allowing a referendum to take place on eliminating the waiting period for divorce from the constitution has been passed by the Seanad.
As the Thirty-eighth Amendment of the Constitution (Dissolution of Marriage) Bill was passed by the Dáil last week, it now goes to the President to be signed into law.
The debate in the Seanad centred on a proposal by Senator Lynn Ruane, that the referendum should also delete two other restrictions on divorce, namely, that there be no prospect of reconciliation between the spouses; and that proper financial provision be made for spouses, children and dependants. Senator Ivana Bacik further expressed a preference that the waiting period in subsequent legislation might be reduced to one year “in keeping with EU norms” rather than two.
Minister Flanagan responded by saying he didn’t want to complicate matters for the electorate and so wanted to focus solely on the time requirement and the recognition of foreign divorces. Regarding the ‘no prospect of reconciliation’ clause, he assured the senators that it is viewed merely as a “formal proof” to be satisfied and is therefore “unlikely to impede any significant number of persons in bringing applications for divorce.”
The Government of the State of Quebec have proposed an “Act Respecting the Laicity of the State”, known as Bill 21, that would prohibit public servants “in positions of authority” — teachers, police officers, Crown prosecutors, and prison guards, for example — from wearing religious symbols. In Ireland, Gardai will be permitted to wear head-scarves and turbans, it was recently announced.
The Government argue that the law would be an affirmation of the separation of religion and state. Critics say it contravenes not only religious freedom, but also equality, as it doesn’t ban a Muslim man from wearing a religiously inspired beard, but does ban a Muslim woman from her chosen way of presenting herself. Nonetheless, polls show it has up to 75% popular support.
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, opposes the bill saying: “It is unthinkable to me that in a free society, we would legitimise discrimination against citizens based on their religion.”
Irish people are waiting longer to get married and fewer people are engaging in it, new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show.
The average of an Irish groom now is just over 36 years of age, while brides are about two years younger.
In the past 50 years the average age of grooms decreased from 28.4 in 1968 to 26.2 10 years later, before rising to a high of 36.4 last year. A similar trend is evident for brides, with the average age falling from 25.5 in 1968 to a record low of 24 in 1978, and increasing to a high of 34.4 last year.
The number of all marriages (opposite-sex and same-sex) registered in 2018 was 21,053 which equates to a crude (unadjusted) marriage rate of 4.3 per 1,000 population, 0.3 less than the 2017 rate. This is 968 fewer marriages than in 2017 when 22,021 marriages took place.
In the first major overhaul of U.K. divorce law for 50 years, new legislation will enable couples to split up simply by filing a statement to say the marriage had broken down irretrievably. Couples will be able to divorce in as little as six months.
An application can be made by just one of the spouses, and the other spouse will not have a right to legally contest the divorce, even if they disagree with it.
The plans include a “cooling off” period of six months to allow spouses to reconsider any decision to break up.
Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, speaking on behalf of the English and Welsh bishops, said the proposals were flawed.
“If notice can be given by just one party that they wish to leave the marriage without any recourse for the party that has been left, the equality and validity of that contract and the trust and commitment vital for its success will be undermined at the outset,” said Doyle, chairman of the bishops’ Marriage and Family Life Committee.
The “cooling off” period was an “insufficient time for the couple to consider any prospect of reconciliation,” he said.
“It may, in fact, push couples headlong into making new arrangements for themselves and their children without first giving them the time necessary to work through the decision to end the marriage,” the bishop added.
He said the government should invest in “good marriage preparation and initiatives which help make marriages work.”
A clinical psychologist has warned parents that they need to talk to their children about pornography and teach them not to watch it. Writing in the Irish Independent, David Coleman, an adjunct associate professor at the School of Psychology, UCD, said that pornography can act powerfully on a teenager’s brain so they can get rapidly addicted to it. Furthermore, he said regularly watching pornography “leads inevitably to teens moving on to more extreme forms of pornography to get aroused”. This, in turn changes their sexual “tastes” and they can “become desensitised to things that they previously may have considered disgusting, degrading or dangerous”.
Professor Coleman warns that parents need to educate themselves and recommended a website called “Fight the new drug”. Then, he advised a no-nonsense approach with children: “Much like we need to promote an abstinence message in relation to alcohol to preteens and younger teens, we must do the same with pornography.”
The only NHS transgender clinic in the UK for children is risking a “live experiment” by sending hundreds of kids for life-changing medical interventions without sufficient evidence of its long-term effects, experts have warned.
The Times in London has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting as transgender.
They believe that some gay children are being wrongly diagnosed as “transgender” by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic.
All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development from as early as eleven years of age. The vast majority of those who begin blockers go on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach 16.
The NHS specialists warned that vulnerable children and teenagers had been sent down the path towards transition before experts had time to assess the causes of their gender confusion.
An Oxford professor has also raised concerns about the safety of drug therapies used by the clinic, saying the treatments were “supported by low-quality evidence, or in many cases no evidence at all”.
The number of young people referred to the clinic in north London has soared. In 2010 there were 94 referrals. By last year there were 2,519. The youngest was aged three. The five clinicians are among at least 18 clinical staff who have resigned over the past three years.
