Monday 9 March 2009

Young People - Sex and the Broken Society


"Epidemiology is like a bikini. What is revealed is interesting. What is concealed is crucial." 

Huge apologies to whoever said this, as I don't have a source. But just bear it in mind as you consider how you feel when you read hysterical headlines about teenage pregnancies 'rocketing' in Britain? If you are a young adult, doesn't this make you feel a bit picked upon? As though you're being spied upon? Maybe you feel worried and a little threatened? 

If you are a parent, don't you feel as though you are a failure? 

What the newspapers aren't saying is that almost everywhere in the world, (according to a study from The Lancet) most people first have sex between the ages of 15 and 19. And as or our teen pregnancies, many other, more sensible newspapers and sites are reporting that in fact, in the UK, there has been a 'slight rise, for the first time in five years.'

Men are more likely to start having sex before girls or young women do, and there is no discernable worldwide trend towards more sex at an earlier age. More people are having what might be called pre-marital sex, particularly in the West, where it is also more likely that people will have more partners, however monogamy is still the dominant type of relationship. And finally, in countries where women are increasingly likely to marry young, they are less likely to first have sex before marriage. 

(As an aside, in many countries, marriage actually just used to be defined as the act of two people living together, or having mated. Which confuses things slightly. Under this definition, pre-marital sex is still possible if you are both living in your own respective parents' or carers' houses, but if you're living with the person then it can't be pre-marital sex. A bit like 'insanity', marriage is really a legal state.)

We often hear about sex being treated as a commodity. Seeing first experiences being documented like this is enough to make you wonder who exactly is using sex as a commodity? Young people who are finding out about themselves, their changing bodies and attitudes? Or the newspapers, who, as newspaper sales are hit hard by the digital age, are increasingly desperate to write attention-grabbing headlines with little factual foundation? 

It is important to remember that for a young person, one of their rites of passage is to claim ownership of their bodies. A lot of parents start out (naturally) feeling that they 'own' their children. As children grow and develop, the whole basis of how they can turn out in later life is to do with how they negotiate with their parents or carers over their need for more freedom, over their own bodies and over where they go, how long for and with whom. In this context, it is hugely important that children and young people do not just see sex as a physical act - it is a complex, multilayered process, to do with identity, past history, social situation and confidence, that, not unlike electricity, has a history of having been treated as a commodity, but that in fact should perhaps be quantified (or qualified) in other ways. 

Many of the papers bang on about 'how sex should not just be an act' and then go on to treat it as just that by counting the numbers of occasions it has taken place and the number of partners that an 'average' young person in the UK might have had. 

In fact, sex is one of the most difficult things to quantify. You can talk about the male orgasm and say that if ejaculation has taken place in one (or all) of a number of areas, a sex act might have taken place. But what about the female orgasm? What about young women who can have intense feelings that are almost orgasmic without them having even been touched? What about when sex takes place in the head? What about penetration without ejaculation? What about orgasms that are so mechanical it's as though a person doesn't experience them?

In fact a lot of sex takes place in the head, and is to do with how people feel about themselves (not surprisingly). Not to do with 'part a had x effect on part b'. 

Let's stop counting partners and penetration and start thinking about how to make young people feel more confident about taking ownership of their bodies and minds. 

If you are a teacher, you will know how important it is to have 'high expectations' of the young people that you are in touch with. It is also important to use statistics wisely. Teenage pregnancies might be on the increase in Britain, but it's not necessarily for the reasons being quoted, or with the assumed associated behaviours of increasingly younger first sexual contacts. In order to help young people it's definitely important to understand what's going on, and not be led by a few columnists (and, to be fair, many concerned people as well) who wield statistics like untrained mercenaries. 

www.Mother2Goddess.eu

Saturday 7 March 2009

OFT closes down Debt Advice Sites


The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is going to ask at least thirteen businesses which run 27 websites, offering debt advice, to change their sites or shut them down. 

There is nothing wrong with offering debt advice, and obviously more people are turning to these businesses. However some of these sites attempt to masquerade as free advice sites, such as The Citizen's Advice Bureau, and do not make it clear that you will end up paying for the debt management plan that they set up for you. These debt management companies are deliberately misleading people by using website addresses similar to those of charities.

If you are need to ask for financial advice, do please ask the person who is offering to help whether they have a consumer credit licence.

The OFT will either prosecute those firms that are not licensed, or remove the licence from those that are, if they do not comply. 

"There is a danger that with increasing unemployment, more people could run into financial difficulty and we are concerned that at the point where they are most vulnerable and seeking advice, they are being deliberately misled by people who are trying to gain a commercial advantage from them," says Ray Watson, director of credit at the OFT.

"We believe they are misleading consumers by holding themselves out as free advice agencies such as Citizens Advice, the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, the Money Advice Trust and Advice UK."

The 13 companies have not been named, but many of the genuine charities have been concerned about fee-charging debt management companies who aim to give the impression they are connected with government organisations or charities.

Do research the company who you are thinking of approaching. You can look at the 'about us' tab in order ot get more information about them.


Tuesday 3 March 2009

How to make financial decisions


Should people of lower cognitive ability be trained to be more financially patient? Apparently we don’t make financial decisions in as rational a way as we might like to think. Although financial studies can be carried out in situations that perhaps don’t accurately mirror the situations in which we might find ourselves in the real world, when deciding how to spend money, there are a couple of interesting studies out that supposedly shed more light on what happens when our financial decision-making is going on.

One study shows that men with more testosterone are likely to punish others involved in transactions, even at their own financial expense, and the other shows that apparently people with superior cognitive ability take more risks, and are likely to postpone immediate pleasure for greater gains at a later date.

Using the Ultimatum game as a testing ground, it was found that men with higher testosterone levels were more likely to reject low bids, even if it meant that both parties would then lose a cut of the final pool. The game features a budget from which a proposer offers a portion to a responder. If the responder rejects the proposal then both parties lose out.

‘Twenty-six male students played the Ultimatum Game with real money after having their testosterone levels measured by saliva swab over three days. Terence Burnham at Harvard University found the students with higher testosterone levels were more likely to reject a poor offer from the proposer: 45 per cent of the men with above-average testosterone chose to reject a low $5 offer from a budget of $40 compared with 7 per cent of men with below-average testosterone.’ 

It has been proposed that a reason for rejecting low bids is to build up a reputation for being, well, basically, ‘hard’. A low offer can be seen as an insult to the responder and to repeatedly refuse these offers means that perhaps one then is less likely to receive a low offer in the future, as by rejecting offers, the responder is ‘educating’ the proposer.

In the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Terence Burnham said: ‘If our understanding of Ultimatum Game rejections and other related phenomena can be improved through studies of hormones, morphology, and neurological activity the ramifications for economics might be quite broad and positive.’ 

In other research, carried out at the University of Bonn and the Institute for the Study of Labour, in Germany, by Thomas Dohmen and colleagues, it was shown that cognitive abilities might be related to financial patience and risk aversion. There is thought to be a relationship between prosperity and high IQ, and this study attempted to tie up these factors.

Just over 1000 German adults were tested, using subscales from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. David Wechsler, in 1981, wrote: ‘Intelligence is multifaceted as well as multidetermined…What it always calls for is not a particular ability but an overall competency or global capacity” (1981, p. 8).

According to Wechsler, intelligence is influenced by personality traits and other nonintellective components, such as anxiety, persistence and goal awareness. These nonintellective factors are important, according to Wechsler, but he remarks, ”no amount of drive will develop a dullard into a mathematician” (1981, p.8).

On the basis of this rather condemnatory approach to intelligence, half the participants had to then make a series of choices between either a guaranteed lower amount ranging from 10 euros to 190 euros or a 50 per cent chance of winning 300 euros. This then looked at their financial risk aversion. Remaining participants were then tested for their financial patience, choosing between 100 euros today or a series of larger amounts in 12 months time. There was a one in seven chance that participants would receive the outcome of one of their choices.

Armin Falk, from the University of Bonn, says, of the results on financial decision-making: ‘The more intelligent the test subjects were, the more patient and tolerant of risk they were.’ The researchers said that with cognitive ability assumed to be at least partly inherited, these new findings could help explain the intergenerational transmission of poverty and socio-economic status.  Whether or not this is the case, I would next like to see research carried out that tests whether these men who rejected low bids would also reject this hypothesis. People talk about ‘being able to afford to take risks.’ I would have thought that that is precisely the point. If you are poor, then you are more dependent on knowing for certain where your next money or meal is coming from, and not gambling it away.

Other research, carried out by Jaideep Bains, PhD, a University of Calgary scientist and his team of researchers at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute has discovered that neurons in the hypothalamus, the brain's centre for stress responses, interpret 'off' chemical signals as 'on' chemical signals when stress is perceived. "It's as if the brakes in your car are now acting to speed up the vehicle, rather than slow it down." says Bains.

 Normally, neurons receive different chemical signals that tell them to either switch on or switch off. The off switch, or brake, only works if the levels of chloride ion in the cells are kept at a low level. This is accomplished by the transporter protein KCC2. Stress can lower the activity of this protein, causing the brake, a neurotransmitter called gamma-Aminobutyric acid, not to work properly.

A loss of the brain's ability to slow down could explain why too much (although how much is too much is a question in itself) stress can have such a terrible effect on people's lives.

"There is still much work needed in the basic science of this phenomenon before there are any new advances in the medical treatment of stress," says Bains, while Yves De Koninck, PhD, and president-elect of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience and professor of Psychiatry at Laval University, believes that "This opens entirely new and quite unexpected avenues for controlling stress responses.” This research may go further to helping us understand why financial decision-making may appear to be irrational – if you are under stress then decision-making gets put under enormous pressure, as is possibly shown by these latter findings. All the more reason for trying to go easy on yourself if you are in debt, or feeling depressed and unable to cope. Just say to yourself, ‘Look after your GABAs and the pounds will look after themselves.’

Hewitt SA, Wamsteeker JI, Kurz EU, Bains JS. Altered chloride homeostasis removes synaptic inhibitory constraint of the stress axis. Nat Neurosci. 2009 Mar 1; doi:10.1038/nn.2274