It’s Your Fault if You Assume You Are Safe: Indian Officials
Horrifying. Disgusting. At the very least, if you are an official and tourists are gang raped in your area, keep your mouth shut. If you must say something, tell the visitors how sorry you are this happened to them. Never, never, never suggest that they should have ASKED if they were safe, NEVER blame the victim for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You just look really, really ignorant.
These crimes will keep happening as long as there is such a preference for male children that there are not enough mates for the males once they mature. They will keep happening as long as men are not taught, as children, that women are to be equally respected.
Swiss Gang Rape Victim, Husband Partially To Blame For Attack, Indian Officials Suggest
The Huffington Post | By Cavan Sieczkowski
Posted: 03/18/2013 12:13 pm EDT
Officials in India suggested that a Swiss tourist and her husband are partially to blame for an alleged attack and gang rape in a remote wooded area in Madhya Pradesh last week. They said the couple did not inquire about the safety of the region.
On Friday, a Swiss woman and her husband pitched a tent in a forest in Madhya Pradesh while on a three-month cycling excursion, according to the Associated Press. Around 9:30 p.m. a group of men attacked the couple, beat up the husband, tied him to a tree, gang raped the wife and robbed the pair, police said.
During a press conference on Sunday, police spokesperson Avnesh Kumar Budholiya suggested the tourists are partially to blame for the assault because they chose to travel that area without speaking to local police, the Independent reports.
“No one stops there,” Budholiya said. “Why did they choose that place? They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would have passed a police station on the way to the area they camped. They should have stopped and asked about places to sleep.”
Another official also appeared to place blame on the victim and her husband.
“The rape of the Swiss national is unfortunate but foreign travelers should inform the police about their movement so they can be provided with adequate protection,” said Umashankar Gupta, the Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh, according to The Times. “They often don’t follow the state’s rules.”
Madhya Pradesh reportedly has one of the highest rates of crimes against women in the country, a fact the Swiss tourists were unaware of, according to the Times of India.
“They apparently lost track and took a wrong turn and decided to halt for the night by the side of a village brook little realizing that the district with 85:100 men to women ratio is not the safest place for women,” a senior official from the region told the newspaper.
Six men have been arrested in connection with the most recent reported gang rape, CNN reports. The victim, who was hospitalized after the attack, claims four of the men raped her. The other two reportedly robbed her and her husband. All six appeared in court Monday.
The most recent attack comes just three months after a 23-year-old woman was gang raped and beaten on a public bus by five men in New Delhi. The defense lawyer for three of the accused placed some of the blame on the now-deceased victim, saying a “respected lady” does not get raped.
Blaming a female victim of a sex crime is common in India because of a woman’s role in society, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
“This is the mentality which most Indian men are suffering from unfortunately,” Ranjana Kumari, director for the New Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, told the newspaper. “That is the mindset that has been perpetrating this crime because they justify it indirectly, you asked for it so it is your responsibility.”
Women’s Rights a Threat to Society?
Society changes. Cable television has had a huge influence, travel to other countries changes perceptions, education gives a wider perspective, The genie is out of the bottle; women are equal people. No woman should need someone else’s permission to travel, work, or to use contraception.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood: Women’s Rights Could Destroy Society, Countries Should ‘Reject And Condemn’ UN Declaration
Reuters | Posted: 03/14/2013 5:40 pm EDT
By Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS, March 14 (Reuters) – Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood warns that a U.N. declaration on women’s rights could destroy society by allowing a woman to travel, work and use contraception without her husband’s approval and letting her control family spending.
The Islamist party of President Mohamed Mursi outlined 10 reasons why Muslim countries should “reject and condemn” the declaration, which the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is racing to negotiate a consensus deal on by Friday.
The Brotherhood, which was elected to power in June, posted the statement on its website, http://www.ikhwanweb.com, on Thursday.
Egypt has joined Iran, Russia and the Vatican – dubbed an “unholy alliance” by some diplomats – in threatening to derail the women’s rights declaration by objecting to language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights.
The Muslim Brotherhood said the declaration would give “wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands accusing them of rape or sexual harassment, obliging competent authorities to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger.”
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice last week touted at the commission – a global policy-making body created in 1946 for the advancement of women – progress made by the United States in reducing the rate of violence against women by their partners.
“All 50 states in our union now have laws that treat date rape or spousal rape as just as much of a crime as rape by a stranger,” Rice said. “We cannot live in truly free societies, if women and girls are not free to reach their full potential.”
The contrasting views show the gap that needs to be breached in negotiations on the declaration, which this year is focused on urging an end to violence against women and girls. The commission failed to agree a declaration last year on a theme of empowering rural women due to similar disagreements.
WORLD IS WATCHING
Egypt has proposed an amendment, diplomats say, that would allow countries to avoid implementing the declaration if it clashed with national laws, religious or cultural values. But some diplomats say this would undermine the entire declaration.
The Muslim Brotherhood warned the declaration would give girls sexual freedom, legalize abortion, provide teenagers with contraceptives, give equality to women in marriage and require men and women to share duties such as child care and chores.
It said the declaration would allow “equal rights to homosexuals, and provide protection and respect for prostitutes” and “equal rights to adulterous wives and illegitimate sons resulting from adulterous relationships.”
A coalition of Arab human rights groups – from Egypt, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Tunisia – called on countries at the Commission on the Status of Women on Thursday to stop using religion, culture, and tradition to justify abuse of women.
“The current positions taken by some Arab governments at this meeting is clearly not representative of civil society views, aspirations or best practices regarding the elimination and prevention of violence against women and girls within our countries,” said the statement issued by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies.
Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and head of U.N. Women, which supports the commission, said the commission was unable to reach a deal a decade ago when it last focused on the theme of women’s rights and ending violence against women.
“Ten years later, we simply cannot allow disagreement or indecision to block progress for the world’s women,” Bachelet told the opening session of the commission last week. “The world is watching … the violence needs to stop.” (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
Long Term Care Insurance: Buy it Young
I have a whopping bill to pay, and while I hate to do it, it is necessary. Women in my family live a long time. People in America are living longer. While retirement funds can look generous at the time you retire, health care costs and late-life care can eat those funds down to nothing . . . and then what?
It’s not like the old days. There was a time when we didn’t live so long, and women didn’t work. Who, these days, has time to stay home and care for the ailing elderly? Because we live longer, by the time we become ailing-elderly, our children are borderline elderly themselves, unable to do the heavy lifting that comes with helping the elderly do even the smallest of everyday tasks, bathing, grooming, eating, dressing – it takes strength.
I found this article on AOL’s Daily Finance page.
Long-Term Care Insurance Should Be Part of Your Financial Plan
by Michele Lerner, Mar 12th 2013 5:00AM
In the world of insurance products, long-term care insurance is a relative newcomer. It was introduced in the late 1970s, but in recent years, it has become a much more important element of retirement planning thanks to twin rises in health care costs and longevity. (Life expectancy in 1930 was just 59.7; in 2010 life expectancy for Americans was 78.7.)
Many people associate long-term care insurance with nursing homes, but it also pays for in-home care and assisted living facilities. According to the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance, 50 percent of long-term care insurance benefits in 2011 went to pay for in-home care, 31 percent for nursing home care, and 19 percent for an assisted living facility.
How Long-Term Care Insurance Works
Each long-term care insurance policy is slightly different, but most benefits kick in based on a similar definition of “disability”: either you have severe cognitive impairment or you need help with at least two daily living activities. These activities include bathing, dressing, eating or using the bathroom.
In other words, you don’t just automatically receive the benefits when you think you could use some help or when you move into a retirement community. Policies are typically purchased with fixed daily benefits for a fixed period of time such as three years or five years.
Can You Cover These Costs Without It?
On an hourly, daily and monthly basis, the cost of the kinds of services covered by long-term care insurance really add up.
A 2012 MetLife Survey of Long-term Care Costs found:
The national average monthly base rate in an assisted living community cost $3,550 in 2012.
The national average daily rate for a private room in a nursing home cost $248; a semi-private room ran $222 per day.
The national average daily rate for adult day services was $70.
The national average for hourly rates for home health aides was $21.
While many people recognize the value of having insurance coverage to help pay for their care when they age, not everyone purchases it.
A 2012 Generational Research project by Financial Finesse showed that just 10 percent of people age 45 to 54 have purchased long-term care insurance, and only 16 percent of people age 55 to 64 have it.
Why are people forgoing coverage? It comes down to cost, according to the AARP.
How Much Does Coverage Cost?
Long-term care insurance can vary widely depending on your age at the time of purchase, the length and amount of coverage, and policy characteristics including whether your benefits are adjusted for inflation and the length of any waiting period before benefits are paid, among other things.
According to the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance, the average annual premium for long-term care insurance in 2012 for a policy for a 50-year old with a daily benefit of $200 for three years of coverage and a 3 percent automatic compound inflation coverage was $2,235. Your policy can’t be cancelled (except for non-payment) and premiums for long-term care insurance cannot be increased on an individual basis for your age or health reasons. Still, insurance companies can raise the premiums for an entire class of policyholders (such as everyone age 75 and older).
Obviously, the older you are when you purchase long-term care insurance, the more expensive the policy and the higher the likelihood that you will be turned down for the coverage. Underwriters look at your health records as well as mortality risk to determine your eligibility for coverage.
Some companies give you a discount if you’re married because they assume spouses are likely to take care of each other longer before resorting to a nursing home.
Four Reasons You Need Long-Term Care Insurance
So how do you know if you need this kind of insurance? If you have more limited retirement savings, long-term care insurance should probably be part of your financial plan. And even if you have $2 million or $3 million in the bank for your retirement and future health care needs, don’t dismiss these policies before you examine the benefits more closely. Consider, for example:
How much longer we’re living these days. The longer you live, the higher your chances of needing some type of long-term care, either in your home, in a nursing home or in an assisted living facility.
Rising health care costs. AARP says that health care costs have historically outpaced the overall rate of inflation. If you need to live in a nursing home for more than a year or two, you could need $250,000 or more to pay for it.
How far your retirement investments will really take you. Your 401(k) may look good when you retire at 65, but if you need to pay for assisted living or even a home health aide the income generated by your retirement investments could get eaten away very quickly. If one spouse needs to live in a nursing home but the other can stay at home, you’ll need enough savings to cover two separate living expenses.
Your family’s emotional and financial health. Even wealthy families often choose to purchase long-term care insurance because the policy can make decisions about how to care for loved ones easier by giving them more options. Instead of draining their inheritance, your family members can use insurance benefits to pay for home health care or to cover some of the expense of a more costly nursing home.
Financial experts suggest purchasing long-term care insurance between age 55 and 64, but remember that the younger you are when you buy it, the lower your premiums will be. If you or your parents are 50 or 55, it’s time to discuss your options with an insurance agent.
Child Marriage Increases Due to Financial Crisis
I have mixed feelings about child marriage. On one hand, girls are so immature in their teen years, and their bodies are not fully formed for child bearing. On the other hand, they are physically mature, and the hormones are raging.
A good friend married off her daughter at fifteen. She was actually “married” by contract at fourteen, but the families waited for the official marriage until she was fifteen. I was heartsick, but the girl herself was delighted. She liked the man she was marrying. She had no fears, no concerns. She started having babies – and she continued going to school, through university. I know it can work; I have seen it.
On the other hand, selling off a thirteen year old to a man she has never met, especially an OLD man, fills me with disgust. It’s a whole different situation.
Neither is it such a good thing, in our own culture, to have fourteen year old girls raising their babies with no husband around to be a father to the child. We all have some problems to face working out mating.
This is an excerpt from an article I found on Huffpost for International Women’s Day. You can read the whole article here.
Child Marriage On Rise As Global Crises Increase, New Study Says
Jessica Prois
Jessica.Prois@huffingtonpost.com
Half of all girls living in the world’s 51 least-developed countries have been married before the age of 18, according to the U.N. The World Vision study, released to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8, found that such marriages are on the rise due to an increase in global poverty and crises. Researchers highlighted that parents living in areas prone to political instability or natural disasters are more likely to marry off their daughters at a young age, largely due to fear from these crises. Children living in these areas, such as South Sudan or Somalia, are also more likely to be forced into child marriage, the study said.
Erica Hall, Child Rights Policy director at World Vision, explained that the root causes of child marriage — poverty and gender inequality — are being exacerbated.
“Worldwide, there are increases in security issues and increases in natural disasters linked to global warming,” Hall said. She cited the recent humanitarian crisis in the Sahel region of North Africa and Somalia due to drought and political unrest as an example in which many girls often quit school and are sent to work as domestic workers or are married, to reduce the burden on their families.
For Bangladeshi families such as Humaiya’s, drought and lack of food are the primary reasons to discharge a young girl from her home. One of the most unjust impacts of this is education inequality. World Vision’s research in Bangaldesh revealed that girls who were unable to attend school due to disruptions from natural disasters were more likely to marry early.
Humaiya speaks out about child rights issues such as early marriage and became an advocate through World Vision, which introduced Humaiya to HuffPost. She said she knows that her ongoing education in Bangladesh is rare. Some 66 percent of girls in Bangladesh are married before age 18, according to World Vision. Humaiya works to educate her peers in her village and speaks to government leaders, asking them to do more to stem child marriage and provide greater education opportunities.
But Humaiya told The Huffington Post that she has seen many of her friends married off, and described how disconnected she feels from the girls she has been friends with for five or more years.
“Now they are good cooks,” she said. “They are like my mother, even though we are the same age. I don’t know how to manage a family, but they know.”
She explained that her mother was 16 when she was forced to get married, and lost a son by the time she was 18 years old.
In Bangladesh, the law is that girls can’t marry until they’re 18 and boys can’t marry until they’re 21. But the rules are not implemented, Hall said.
“The law is not the problem,” she pointed out. “You have to have political will to do that and capacity and understanding among law enforcement. The goal is to get governments to enforce these things, and — this is such an NGO word — but it has to be a holistic approach.”
Hall pointed out that requiring marriage registration and working on a grassroots community level is key to creating systemic change. She cited examples such as the Grandmother’s Project in southern Senegal, a nonprofit partner of World Vision that focuses on reducing early marriage, female genital mutilation and early pregnancy by creating an intergenerational dialogue about how to shift the gender-role paradigm.
“That’s been successful — you know how grandmothers are — in getting an idea like that across that it doesn’t have to be part of the tradition,” Hall said.
World Vision also works with religious leaders to address the practice of child marriage.
“There is a strong foundation in religion that children should be protected and they don’t want girls dying in childbirth and these leaders say, ‘This is a tenet of our faith and this is why we are going to start speaking out against it,'” Hall explained.
The issue of child marriage has gained momentum outside of the NGO world as well. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last October a public-private initiative that focuses on ending child marriage by increasing education opportunities, providing training among officials and tracking every country’s legal minimum age of marriage — in particular in Humaiya’s home country of Bangladesh.
START with Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
I recently wrote a book review on River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh, which held me spellbound, so riveting that I had to order Sea of Poppies, which is actually the first volume of the trilogy. I had heard a review of River of Smoke on NPR and although it was written as the second volume in a trilogy, it can be read as a stand-alond.
Yes. Yes, it can be read as a stand-alone, but it is so much easier, I can state with authority, if you read them in order. Once I started Sea of Poppies, I also discovered an extensive glossary in the back, several pages, a list of the words, annotated with suggested origins, and it adds so much color to an already brilliantly colored novel. Much of both novels uses words from many cultures, and words that have been formed by another culture’s understanding of the words (some hilarious). If you like Captain Jack Sparrow, you’re going to love the polyglot language spoken by ship’s crews from many nations trying to communicate with one another. It can be intimidating, but if you sort of say the words out loud the way they are written at the beginning, you begin to find the rhythm and the gist of the communication, just as if you were a new recruit to the sea-going vessels of the early 1800’s. I loved it because it captured the difficulties encountered trying to say the simplest things, and the clever ways people in all cultures manage to get around it, and make themselves understood.
Sea of Poppies starts in a small Indian village, with one of the very small poppy gardens, planted on an advance from an opium factory representative, thrust upon the small farmer, with the result that most small Indian farmers converted their entire allotment from subsistence foods to poppies. Ghosh walks us through an opium processing factory, which is a little like walking through the circles of hell. We meet many of the characters we will follow in River of Smoke, and learn how this diverse group bonded into one sort of super-family through their adventures – and misadventures – together.
It is an entirely engrossing work. Sea of Poppies was short listed for the Man Booker award, and was listed as a “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and The Economist. The theme is the opium trade, leading to the Opium Wars, with China, and is a chilling indictment of how business interests manipulate a population’s perceptions of national interests to justify . . . well, just about anything, in the name of profit.
The theme is woven through human stories so interesting, so textured, so compelling, that you hardly realize you are reading history and learning about the trade, cultures, travel, clothing, traditions, religions, food, and motivations as you avidly turn the pages.
I can hardly wait for the third volume. Get started now, so you’ll be ready for it when it comes out!
Stay With A Violent Man, You End up Dead
No, no, this was not Rihanna and Chris Brown, it just sort of SEEMED familiar, like their story. Bottom line, Law and Order SVU is saying, if a guy hits you, abuses you, it is not likely to get better. You stay, you risk, at the very least, continued and increasing damage at best, increasing violence toward those you hold dear, even brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and CHILDREN to the self-centeredness of the violent abuser, and ultimately, many abuse victims end up dead. It’s not a story about Rihanna and Chris; it’s a story about every woman who stacks up economic realities against a violent outcome and chooses to stay.
‘Law & Order: SVU’ Tackles The Chris Brown-Rihanna Story Of Abuse, Reconciliation
It’s a staple of the “Law & Order” franchise to rip stories straight from the headlines. For the latest episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” the case was one that is very familiar to music fans, and remains as controversial today as it was when the story first broke in 2009. Using obvious counterparts, “SVU” tackled the Chris Brown and Rihanna story.
Brown assaulted Rihanna in 2009 before the Grammy Awards. The two have since reconciled and have remained linked romantically off and on since then. In the “SVU” episode they were Micha and Caleb. Just like Rihanna, Micha was assaulted by Caleb. The case went to trial, but the two reconciled. But “SVU” took their story further down a dark path.
In this fiction, Caleb finally went too far and killed Micha. “Shocked fans gathered in Manhattan tonight to mourn the death of rising talent, Micha Green, whose body was discovered a few hours ago in Bermuda,” a reporter said in the aftermath of hear death.
Did they take it too far? E! wondered that very thing, while Hollywood Life worried that the ending could hit too close to home for the real couple, writing, “Overall, the show took some liberties … but pretty much wrapped things up exactly as they are: Chris is a violent man and Rihanna accepts a bad man in her life. How sad!”
Maldives Rape Victim Sentenced to 100 Lashes for PreMarital Sex
Where are the Maldives Islands?
Raped by her stepfather, impregnated against her will, her stepfather killed the baby, and now, sentenced by Sharia law to 100 lashes for pre-marital sex. How can this be justice? (This is from BBC News)
Maldives girl to get 100 lashes for pre-marital sex
By Olivia Lang
BBC News
A 15-year-old rape victim has been sentenced to 100 lashes for engaging in premarital sex, court officials said.
The charges against the girl were brought against her last year after police investigated accusations that her stepfather had raped her and killed their baby. He is still to face trial.
Prosecutors said her conviction did not relate to the rape case.
Amnesty International condemned the punishment as “cruel, degrading and inhumane”.
The government said it did not agree with the punishment and that it would look into changing the law.
Baby death
Zaima Nasheed, a spokesperson for the juvenile court, said the girl was also ordered to remain under house arrest at a children’s home for eight months.
She defended the punishment, saying the girl had willingly committed an act outside of the law.
Officials said she would receive the punishment when she turns 18, unless she requested it earlier.
The case was sent for prosecution after police were called to investigate a dead baby buried on the island of Feydhoo in Shaviyani Atoll, in the north of the country.
Her stepfather was accused of raping her and impregnating her before killing the baby. The girl’s mother also faces charges for failing to report the abuse to the authorities.
The legal system of the Maldives, an Islamic archipelago with a population of some 400,000, has elements of Islamic law (Sharia) as well as English common law.
Ahmed Faiz, a researcher with Amnesty International, said flogging was “cruel, degrading and inhumane” and urged the authorities to abolish it.
“We are very surprised that the government is not doing anything to stop this punishment – to remove it altogether from the statute books.”
“This is not the only case. It is happening frequently – only last month there was another girl who was sexually abused and sentenced to lashes.”
He said he did not know when the punishment was last carried out as people were not willing to discuss it openly.
Putting TEETH into Anti-Rape Solutions :-)
Thank you, Hayfa, you always find the most amazing articles. What I love about this one is that if everything is where it is supposed to be, nobody gets hurt. Only invasive behavior results in . . . .lets hope excruciating pain 🙂 It also gives an attacker something else to focus on. This invention is a public service.
Rape-aXe: The Anti-Rape Condom
This is so brilliant! An anti-rape female condom invented by Sonette Ehlers.… A South African woman working as a blood technician with the South African Blood Transfusion Service, during which time she met and treated many rape victims. The device, known as The Rape-aXe, is a latex sheath embedded with shafts of sharp, inward-facing microscopic barbs that would be worn by a woman in her vagina like a tampon. If an attacker were to attempt vaginal rape, their penis would enter the latex sheath and be snagged by the barbs, causing the attacker pain during withdrawal and (ideally) giving the victim time to escape. The condom would remain attached to the attacker’s body when he withdrew and could only be removed surgically, which would alert hospital staff and police. This device could assist in the identification and prosecution of rapists.
A medieval device built on hatred of men? Or a cheap, easy-to-use invention that could free millions of South African women from fear of rape, in a country with the world’s worst sexual assault record?
Dubbed the “rape trap”, trademarked “Rapex”, the condom-like device bristling with internal hooks designed to snare rapists has re-ignited controversy over South Africa’s alarming rape rate, even before plans for its production were announced in Western Capethis week.
Some say the inventor, Sonette Ehlers, a former medical technician, deserves a medal, others that she needs help.
The device, concealed inside a woman’s body, hooks onto a rapist during penetration and must be surgically removed.
Ms Ehlers said the rape trap would be so painful for a rapist that it would disable him immediately, enabling his victim to escape; but would cause no long-term physical damage and could not injure the woman.
Some women’s activists call the device regressive, putting the onus on women to address a male problem.
Charlene Smith, an anti-rape campaigner, said it “goes back to the concept of chastity belts” and would incite injured rapists to kill their victims.
“We don’t need these nut-case devices by people hoping to make a lot of money out of other women’s fear,” Ms Smith said.
But Ms Ehlers contends that South Africa’s rape problem is so severe women cannot wait for male attitudes to improve.
“I don’t hate men. I love men. I have not got revenge in mind. All I am doing is giving women their power back,” Ms Ehlers said. “I don’t even hate rapists. But I hate the deed with a passion.”
The United Nations says South Africahas the world’s highest per capita rate of reported rapes – 119 per 100,000 people. Analysts say the total, including unreported rapes, could be nine times higher.
Ms Ehlers sees her invention as particularly attractive to poorer black women, because they often walk long distances through unsafe areas to and from work. She foresees women inserting the device as part of a daily security routine.
She said a majority of women surveyed said they were willing to use the device, which will go into production next year and sell for one rand (20 cents).
Ms Ehlers said she was inspired after meeting a traumatised rape victim who told her, “If only I had teeth down there.”
Relationship Anxiety Hard on Your Immune System
Relationship Anxiety Is Hard On The Immune System, Study Says
Katherine Bindley
katie.bindley@huffingtonpost.com
This is from AOL News/Huffpost:
Relationship anxiety is known to be tough on a person’s mental well-being, but a new study suggests that fear of rejection — and worry that someone doesn’t love you enough — can also serve as chronic stressors that tax the immune system.
In a study of 85 couples who’d been married for an average of 12 years, a team of researchers led by Lisa Jaremka with Ohio State University College of Medicine examined the level of anxiety participants had about close relationships, as well as samples of their blood and saliva.
They found that the levels of cortisol — a hormone associated with stress — were on average 11 percent higher in people with higher levels of attachment anxiety than those who were less anxious. In addition, the more anxious people had between 11 percent and 20 percent fewer T-cells, which help the body to fight off disease.
“The thing that was surprising was the magnitude of the difference, especially in the immune cells that we saw,” Jaremka told The Huffington Post. “Some of the differences in the immune cell numbers, between the higher and the less high anxious attached people, were on the magnitude of what you’d see between obese and non-obese people.”
Attachment styles are believed to be derived from the type of caregiving people experienced in childhood, but the effects extend to, and impact, relationships in adulthood.
Most people are bound to have some level of concern and stress during the ups and downs of a relationship, Jaremka explained to HuffPost. But those with higher levels of attachment anxiety are hypersensitive to signs that a person they’re close to will leave them on a regular basis. They’re also more likely to seek reassurance and interpret their partner’s behaviors in a negative way.
Because the team did not include study participants who fell on the very high end of the anxiously attached spectrum, it’s possible that the effects of relationship anxiety could be even greater than the study suggests. Incidentally, while more women in the study suffered from higher levels of attachment anxiety, the researchers saw the same elevated levels of cortisol and lower T-cells in the men who were anxious.
Previous research had already established that relationship anxiety can have negative effects on a person’s physical health, but less was known about how exactly the anxiety and the health effects related to one another.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s believed that about 20 percent of the population falls on the anxious side of the anxiously attached spectrum. Another 25 percent fall into the avoidant category, which means those people may not get close to their partner out of fear that it could lead to a loss of autonomy.
Experts told the Journal that emotional opposites are often initially attracted to one another, but they may eventually face obstacles if they exacerbate one other’s attachment tendencies. For example, an anxious person might push for more affection and attention. This behavior might make an avoidant partner pull further away, in turn, making the anxious person even more insecure.
Despite the negative effects that attachment styles can have on a person’s relationships and physical health, Jaremka explained these traits are not inalterable.
“Anybody that is experiencing something that feels like high levels of attachment anxiety would think, ‘Oh great I’m doomed, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the fact that just because you are highly anxiously attached now doesn’t mean you have to be that way forever,” Jaremka told HuffPost. “We do know based on research that people can change and people can be very anxiously attached in one relationship and not at all in a different relationship.”
So what kind of relationship can serve as an antidote to pre-existing anxiety? One with a secure partner.
“If they are a very caring and loving and responsive partner, who attends to your needs when you need them, who is there for you when you’re stressed…Those relationships seem to be the types of relationships that people are able to feel secure in and are able to overcome anxieties in, if they have them,” Jaremka said.
The study, titled “Attachment Anxiety Is Linked to Alterations in Cortisol Production and Cellular Immunity,” is slated to be published in the journal Psychological Science.
New Study Shows Taking Folic Acid Cuts Autism Risk 40%
I heard this yesterday on NPR and found this article today on the Huffpost/AOL News. The critical factor is that a woman needs to be taking folic acid supplements BEFORE she gets pregnant:
With autism now affecting one in 88 children in the U.S., many parents are searching for any step they can take to help lower their child’s risk of developing the disorder. A new Norwegian study joins a small but growing body of research that suggests a simple, low-cost option already exists: Taking folic acid during the earliest stages of pregnancy could lower a child’s odds of developing autism by nearly 40 percent.
“This is a relatively inexpensive way that parents can take action to possibly prevent risk of tube birth defects and autism,” Alycia Halladay, senior director for environmental and clinical Sciences for the advocacy group Autism Speaks, told The Huffington Post. Halladay did not work on the new study, which was published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday.
Researchers analyzed a sample of more than 85,000 children born in Norway between 2002 and 2008 to study the effect of taking a folic acid supplement — typically between 200 and 400 micrograms per day — from one month before a woman got pregnant to two months after. Some .10 percent of children whose moms took folic acid supplements were diagnosed with autism, compared to .21 percent of those whose moms did not — which is equal to 39 percent lower odds.
The study does not establish a cause and effect relationship between the vitamin and subsequent autism, and its authors do not know why folic acid may have a protective effect. Study researcher Pal Suren of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health told HuffPost that folic acid is critical to the synthesis of DNA, which could play some role in the connection. Folic acid may also affect how certain genes are turned on and off in the body, he hypothesized, saying it was “not biologically implausible” that folic acid supplementation has certain epigenetic effects.
The new study also raises questions about how much folic acid may be needed to lower autism risk, as well as what form it must come in.
“We do not know how other dosages would have affected the risk of autism, or whether it matters if folic acid is taken as single tablets or as part of a prenatal multivitamin supplement,” Suren said.
The researchers took steps to ensure that the decreased risk was not just because women who took folic acid were also engaged in other healthy behaviors. To control for that, they looked at fish oil use (assuming women who took fish oil were also likely to be healthy in other ways) and found no link between lower autism risk.
Since the early 1990s, groups like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Service have recommended that all women of childbearing age take 400 micrograms of folic acid daily to help prevent neural tube defects — birth defects of the brain and spinal cord including spina bifida and anencephaly. Since folic acid was added to the grain supply in 1998, the U.S. has seen a 26 percent decrease in those neural tube disorders, according to figures compiled by the March of Dimes.
The possibility of a link between folic acid consumption and lower autism risk is far more preliminary. A 2011, California-based study in the journal Epidemiology found that mothers of children with autism were less likely to have taken a prenatal vitamin in the three months before pregnancy or in the first month after getting pregnant, suggesting that so-called “periconceptional” use of prenatal vitamins may reduce autism risk. In the U.S., prenatal vitamins typically include between 400 and 800 micrograms of folic acid.
But folic acid is by no means a magic pill, experts caution. The fact that rates of autism diagnosis have skyrocketed in the past several decades despite more and more women taking folic acid shows how complex the origins of autism are. The exact causes of the disorder, which is characterized by social and communication difficulties and repetitive behaviors, are still unknown.
“This is one way that risk may be reduced, but this isn’t the only way,” said Halladay. “It’s an inexpensive way to potentially reduce the risk of autism, but there are a number of risk factors — genetics and other environmental factors — that solidly contribute to risk.”
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