UK launches £500,000 fund to help male victims of rape and sexual abuse

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counselling, male rape, men, rape, Sexual Violence, taboo

UK launches £500,000 fund to help male victims of rape and sexual abuse

A £500,000 fund to provide help, including counselling and advice, to male victims of rape and sexual violence is to be launched on Thursday.

The creation of the fund comes as the latest set of crime figures showed there were 2,164 rapes and sexual assaults against men and boys aged 13 or over recorded by the police in the 12 months to last November.

The crime survey for England and Wales estimates that there are as many as 72,000 male victims of sexual offences every year, whether they are reported to the police or not.

The victims minister, Damian Green, said the new fund would also help “historic victims” who were under 13 at the time. He said: “We believe around 12% of rapes are against men. Yet many choose not to come forward, either to report the crime or seek the support they need. I am determined to help break the silence on a subject still seen as a taboo.”

Green said the average sentences for male rape had increased but there was still more to do: “That is why we are toughening up sentencing and have introduced a mandatory life sentence for anyone convicted of a second very serious sexual or violent crime.”

Duncan Craig of Survivors Manchester, which specialises in helping male survivors of rape and sexual abuse, welcomed the new funding. He said: “In the past, there has not been enough support in the UK for male victims of sexual violence. But in the future I would like to see both the government and society begin talking more openly about boys and men as victims and see us trying to make a positive change to pulling down those barriers that stop boys and men speaking up. This funding will help to raise awareness of the issue and ensure that male victims are no longer ignored.”

The launch of the fund comes as the justice ministry starts a social media #breakthesilence campaign to encourage male victims to speak about their experiences. The Channel 4 teenage soap Hollyoaks recently featured a male rape storyline.

A Firm Grasp on Comfort

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attachment, psychoanalytic theory, separation, transitional objects, Winnicott

A Firm Grasp on Comfort

“Where’s your baby?” said the mother to her sobbing 3-year-old daughter. “You need your baby!”

Her older daughter began digging through the two large diaper bags, and triumphantly extracted a fuzzy pink blanket. The 3-year-old grabbed the blanket and tucked it up under her chin, gripping it tightly. “There’s your baby!” the mother and the older sister said in unison. The crying subsided, and we went on with the medical exam.

So-called transitional objects — beloved blankets, tattered stuffed animals, irreplaceable garments — are frequent in the pediatric exam room. Some children clutch them to ease the stress of being examined or immunized, while others simply never leave the house without their favorites. Ask any small group of parents about transitional objects — or blankies, or lovies — and you’ll get a good story, usually of a precious item misplaced or lost at some critical juncture.

Ask adults, and the most unlikely people tell you the names of their treasured childhood blankets or get misty-eyed about a stuffed bear.

The British experts who first wrote about the term mentioned Winnie the Pooh and Aloysius, the teddy bear in “Brideshead Revisited”; a recent literary incarnation is Knuffle Bunny, in the series of three picture books by Mo Willems. But the formative American take on transitional objects is probably Linus, with his blanket, in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, which date to the 1950s and the moment of the original psychoanalytic discussion of the phenomenon.

In 1953, Dr. Donald Woods Winnicott, a prominent pediatrician and psychoanalyst, presented a paper to the British Psycho-Analytical Society: “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena — A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” The paper, published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, combines psychoanalytic theory with a clear pediatric familiarity with children and their blankies.

“The parents get to know its value and carry it round when travelling,” Dr. Winnicott wrote. “The mother lets it get dirty and even smelly, knowing that by washing it she introduces a break in continuity in the infant’s experience.” In Dr. Winnicott’s view, the object, together with what he called a “good enough mother,” helps the young child navigate the essential problem of separation.

“The baby knows the teddy bear is not Mom, but the baby can get a certain satisfaction. It is neither Mom nor totally just a stuffed animal,” said Steve Tuber, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at City College, and the author of a book on Winnicott.

The specificity of the child’s preference — and affection — parallels the developing ability to feel a strong specific attachment to particular people. The transitional object is “a bridge between the mother and the external world,” said Alicia Lieberman, an expert in infant mental health and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Arietta Slade, a professor of clinical and developmental psychology at the City University of New York, said: “It’s a very adaptive mechanism, if you think about it, that there are things other than mother that kids can hang on to that help them retain that comforted and comforting feeling.”

Some parents are able to “suggest” a convenient object (and buy multiples to keep in reserve), but children are guided mostly by their own mysterious and passionate preferences, and they do not necessarily accept substitutes — witness all those stories about turning the car around to go back for the one true blankie.

The transitional object “has to be created by the baby,” Dr. Tuber said. “A child has to pick the one that really becomes theirs.”

Inevitably, there are parents who worry that the object has become too important, and that caring for it and curating it has become a major burden — or that it’s being held on to past some age of expected maturity and independence.

“Parents get upset because they think they’re going to lose the transitional object, they think it collects germs, they think it looks babyish, which is a problem in American culture,” said Dr. Barbara Howard, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Johns Hopkins.

“The biggest problem is stigmatization. There is no ultimate age where it’s bad, but you can get teased for it,” she added.

As children get older, some transitional objects — especially stuffed animals — take on distinct personalities, moving toward a combined role as comforter and imaginary friend. Think of how Winnie the Pooh serves as Christopher Robin’s playmate, companion and sometimes problem child. Aloysius, the teddy bear in “Brideshead Revisited,” is taken along to Oxford.

Indeed, Dr. Howard suggested that as many as 25 percent of young women going to college take along something identifiable as a childhood transitional object. The young adult going off to college, with or without stuffed animals or scraps of a favorite old blanket, should be a reminder that the challenges of separation — and the consolations and complexities of attachment — are not developmentally confined to the first years of life.

The familiar image of the small child and the transitional object, generally sweet and mildly humorous, occasionally frantic and even desperate, reminds us that learning to negotiate, and even enjoy, partings and reunions is part of the whole assignment, for parents and for children.

France faces up to scandal of Réunion’s stolen children

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France, Reunion, stolen children

France faces up to scandal of Réunion’s stolen children

Jean-Jacques Martial was six years old when he arrived at Orly airport in Paris one November morning wearing flip-flops and shorts. He had been removed from his grandmother’s care in the French island territory of Réunion as part of an official scheme to help boost the falling population in the rural heart of the mother country. He had only one idea in his head: “I was going to cultivate myself and I would denounce what had happened to me,” he said.

Martial went on to do just that, and on Tuesday the French national assembly will address this shameful chapter of its history for the first time when members vote on a motion to formally recognise the state’s role in the scandal of Réunion’s “stolen children”. From 1963 to 1982 a total of 1,615 children were forcibly dispatched from the Indian Ocean territory, whose population was exploding, in order to repopulate rural areas.

“They took babies who were only six months old,” said Ericka Bareigts, one of the territory’s deputies who is behind the initiative. Poor and illiterate families were informed that their children would be sent to France, “and of course they imagined Paris and the Eiffel tower,” she said. “They were promised a home, schooling, and told they would succeed. The families were told the children would return for the holidays. But it was all a lie.”

Martial, who is now 55, was initially placed in a home before being transferred to Guéret, in the Creuse district of central France, where he was brought up by an elderly farmer and his wife. Martial has recounted his experiences in a memoir, Une Enfance Volée (Stolen Childhood), which describes how, after four years in the Creuse, he was fostered by a young couple in the Normandy harbour town of Saint Vaast la Hougue.

The scandal was only brought to the attention of the wider French public when Martial tried to sue the state for €1bn in 2002 for “kidnapping and sequestration of minors, roundup and deportation”.

“It’s a lot of money, but how much is a stolen childhood worth?” he asked. His case failed because the events took place outside the statute of limitations.

He returned to Réunion in 2006, but will be back in France for the debate, the final leg of a long journey for justice. “After the national assembly, I’m going to turn the page,” he said. “I’m tired.”

Another victim, Simon A-Poi, was 12 years old when he was driven to Guéret on 6 September 1966 with one of two coachloads of children from Réunion. “There were children of all ages – 12, 15, 17, even three,” he recalled on Sunday. He was an orphan who was removed from his grandmother’s care with four brothers and sisters, and 12 cousins. “We were the largest family to arrive in the Creuse.

“We thought we were going to Paris, to see the Eiffel tower, and the Arc de Triomphe. And we ended up in a home in Guéret. In October it was the first time we had seen snow, we thought it was cotton wool falling,” he told a local TV station in Réunion.

The children’s forced removal was the brainchild of Michel Debré, a former Gaullist minister who was then a deputy for Réunion. In 1963 he discovered an island suffering from a 60% redundancy rate and a booming population. “He must have thought that it was a logical solution to a problem of depopulation somewhere else in France. Never mind that it was a two-day journey from Réunion, where the temperature was 40 degrees. He completely denied the human aspect, and the diversity,” said Bareigts.

The resettlements were organised by the state-run Office for the Development of Migration in Overseas Territories, with most of the victims being sent to the Creuse. The children worked on the farms or became the servants of bourgeois families. Some took their own lives, while others were interned in psychiatric hospitals. The Office was disbanded in 1983, two years after the Socialist president François Mitterrand came to power.

The motion to be debated on Tuesday does not provide for compensation, but will carry a strong moral weight. The draft denounces the “forced migration” of the children from Réunion Island and describes their fate as “irreparable”.

France is not the only state to have sinned against its own children. The Australian government apologised in 2008 for the removal of an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal children who were forcibly assimilated from the 1890s to the 1970s. The United States and Canada had similar policies for their indigenous peoples.

Colonial Britain exported 100,000 children to populate Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada under the “home children” programme. And the story of Philomena, now an Oscar-nominated film, highlights Ireland’s treatment of thousands of single mothers whose children were forcibly removed by the Catholic church.

Yvan Combeau, a historian from Réunion, noted that the French motion did not ask for an apology, but he said every word had been carefully weighed so that historical archives could be opened up. “The text seeks reparation through a recognition of the history of these exiles. Reparation must come through knowledge and recognition,” he said in an email.

“We need to analyse this from a political point of view,” said Bareigts. “Réunion used to be a colony. We have known slavery. We can’t sweep these things under the carpet. We need to recognise what happened so that we and the victims can move on.”

Mind over cancer: can meditation aid recovery?

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anxiety, Cancer, Depression, meditation, mindfulness, present, recovery, well-being

Mind over cancer: can meditation aid recovery?

Cancer leaves many scars. For survivors, the wounds that run deepest are often those left on the mind. Fear, anxiety and depression are common during recovery. But instead of popping a pill, could practising a few minutes of mindfulness a day be as effective as any drug?

While Buddhists have been practising the meditation technique for more than 2,000 years, medical science is finally beginning to catch up, discovering the extent to which focusing the mind on the present moment can help treat a range of mental conditions associated with cancer recovery.

In the largest trial to date, published last year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, breast cancer survivors who practised mindfulness were found to have increased calm and wellbeing, better sleep and less physical pain. Clinical trials by Oxford University have shown that mindfulness is as effective as antidepressants, and in patients with multiple episodes of depression can reduce the recurrence rate by 40-50% compared with usual care.

Andy Puddicombe’s 20 years of practice were put to the test when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer last April. While the mindfulness expert and former Tibetan Buddhist monk expected the physical pain after surgery to remove his right testicle, he was surprised by the emotional and mental impact of recovery.

“The biggest shock about recovery is that there is no end point,” he says. “People often talk about having beaten cancer, but I find that hard to relate to. I would say that nature has simply taken its course and I am very fortunate that it didn’t spread.”

Puddicombe, who aims to demystify meditation with his Headspace app, explains that mindfulness allows us to step back from our thoughts and feelings and view them with a different perspective. It would be very easy, he adds, to get caught up in negative thinking or feelings of anxiety and depression. But mindfulness gave him enough space to be able to embrace these emotions without getting lost in them.

“Rather than it being a terrible experience, it became a transformative one,” he reveals. “It may sound a bit fluffy, but the reality is anything but. In fact, it was life-changing.”

Psychotherapist Elana Rosenbaum has been practising and teaching mindfulness stress reduction techniques since the early 1980s. She believes her ability to focus the mind on the present moment and break patterns of negative thought helped her survive an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma which required bone marrow transplant surgery to remove.

She explains that recovering from cancer was a frightening experience. Once she had finished her treatment, she felt lost without the help and support of medical staff. Mindfulness helped her to face those fears.

Rosenbaum, who helps others use mindfulness in cancer recovery at the University of Massachusetts medical school, says: “People think you are the same. They think you have gone back to what used to be normal. But you’re really different. It’s a new normal and you don’t know what that is. I have had several recurrences of the cancer and I live with uncertainty, but it’s not my focus. Mindfulness helps me to value this moment.”

Nice, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, approved a technique developed by Cambridge and Toronto Universities for the management of depression in 2004, which means the therapy is already available on the NHS.

Headspace’s chief medical officer, Dr David Cox, prescribes cancer recoverers a dose of 10 to 40 minutes mindfulness practice a day. But once you are proficient at that, you have to remember to be mindful in anything and everything you do as much as possible, whether that’s walking the dog or washing the dishes.

He believes the link between mind and body has been neglected for far too long and it is a breath of fresh air for many doctors that someone is finally asking the question. Cox says medical professionals have known about the benefits for a while and mindfulness offers a “glimmer of hope” for tackling the spiralling cost of healthcare on the NHS. Because sufferers of depression tend to be more apathetic about looking after themselves and taking medication, compliance with treatment is therefore worse.

One of the reasons that mindfulness is really catching on is that it can be delivered in a way that is entirely secular, stripped of any religious connotations, making it entirely acceptable to the wider population.

“Around 30 years ago, yoga was probably sniffed at a little bit and now it’s much more mainstream,” Cox adds. “To me, it’s the perfect storm for something that can really help a vast number of people. I hope in five years’ time it will have the same level of acceptance as brushing your teeth every day, eating your five a day and doing 30 minutes’ exercise.”

Loneliness twice as unhealthy as obesity for older people, study finds

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health problems, isolation, loneliness, older adults, support

Loneliness twice as unhealthy as obesity for older people, study finds

Loneliness can be twice as unhealthy as obesity, according to researchers who found that feelings of isolation can have a devastating impact on older people.

The scientists tracked more than 2,000 people aged 50 and over and found that the loneliest were nearly twice as likely to die during the six-year study than the least lonely.

Compared with the average person in the study, those who reported being lonely had a 14% greater risk of dying. The figure means that loneliness has around twice the impact on an early death as obesity. Poverty increased the risk of an early death by 19%.

The findings point to a coming crisis as the population ages and people increasingly live alone or far from their families. A study of loneliness in older Britons in 2012 found that more than a fifth felt lonely all the time, and a quarter became more lonely over five years. Half of those who took part in the survey said their loneliness was worse at weekends, and three-quarters suffered more at night.

Previous studies have linked loneliness to a range of health problems, from high blood pressure and a weakened immune system to a greater risk of depression, heart attack and strokes. In his recent book, Loneliness, John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, says that the pain of loneliness is akin to physical pain.

Cacioppo said the world was experiencing a “silver tsunami” as baby boomers reached retirement age. “People have to think about how to protect themselves from depression, low subjective well-being and early mortality,” he said.

In light of the damaging health effects of loneliness, Cacioppo said people approaching retirement age might want to think twice about pulling up their roots and heading to fresh pastures to live out their retirement. He described results from the study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

“We have mythic notions of retirement. We think that retirement means leaving friends and family and buying a place down in Florida where it is warm and living happily ever after. But that’s probably not the best idea,” he said.

“We find people who continue to interact with co-workers after retirement and have friends close by are less lonely. Take time to enjoy yourself and share good times with family and friends. Non-lonely people enjoy themselves with other people.”

The researchers found that some people were happy living a life of solitude. Others still felt lonely, and suffered the health impacts of loneliness, even with family and friends close by. The findings suggest that people needed to feel involved and valued by those near to them, and that company alone was not enough.

Caroline Abrahams at Age UK said the study added to a growing body of research showing that being lonely not only made life miserable for older people, but also made them more vulnerable to illness and disease.

“It’s time we took loneliness seriously as a threat to a happy and healthy later life. We need to do more to support older people to stay socially connected. This is a big part of our job at Age UK and everyone can help by being a good friend or neighbour to the older people they know,” she said.

Local branches of Age UK help older people through befriending schemes and other services that include home visits and phone calls for people who are feeling lonely or isolated, she added.