Ook lang na de gevechtshandelingen blijven vrouwen en jonge meisjes nog doelwit van geweld. Het klimaat van straffeloosheid, dat vaak in post-conflictgebieden heerst, zorgt ervoor dat het seksuele geweld welig tieren blijft. Dat brengt generaal Cammaert tot de volgende conclusie: "Waarschijnlijk is het in een gewapend conflict tegenwoordig nog gevaarlijker om een vrouw te zijn dan soldaat."

In het onderzoek Jeugd en Seks uit 1995 zoomt Rutgers Nisso vooral in op jongeren die zelf weleens dingen doen tussen de lakens die verder gaan dan de ander wil. Daarin geeft 37 procent van de seksueel ervaren jongens en 22 procent van de meiden aan, weleens andermans of eigen grenzen te veronachtzamen.

Criminoloog Anton van Wijk presenteerde in 2006 een onderzoek waaruit blijkt dat de zedendelinquentie onder jongeren met 300 procent toenam in vijftien jaar tijd. Naar de exacte oorzaak (betere, snellere registratie, meer aangiftebereidheid, de komst van internet?) blijft het vooralsnog gissen.

Hetgeen volgens de onderzoekers weer is te herleiden tot de uitgesproken machocultuur onder veel Marokkaanse (straat)jongeren, waarin stoer, mannelijk en dwars gedrag (‘in straattaal van de jongens: kapot moeilijk’) de hoogst haalbare status is.

Evenmin is gebleken dat de oververtegenwoordiging van Marokkanen iets te maken zou hebben met nare seksuele ervaringen in hun jeugd.

Religie, aldus de onderzoekers, speelt daarbij geen enkele rol

Verdachten van fysiek geweld, althans in de hoofdstad, zijn meestal jongens van 17 tot 25 jaar oud. Ze zijn even vaak autochtoon-Nederlands als van Marokkaanse afkomst, elk 36 procent. Maar omdat blanke Nederlanders in die leeftijdscategorie 39 procent van het totaal uitmaken en Marokkanen 16 procent is er sprake van duidelijke Marokkaanse oververtegenwoordiging.

Buijs, Hekma en Duyvendak onderzochten tevens de veel gehoorde stelling dat het imago van Amsterdam als homohoofdstad van de wereld ‘naar de knoppen zou zijn’, zoals voormalig D66-leider Boris Dittrich (thans Human Right Watch) het recent nog verwoordde. Onjuist, aldus de wetenschappers.

This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage.

More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse.

pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how “embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture.

Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives.

In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.

Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage—just careful about it.

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks—in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue.

But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms—producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what two dogs do out on the street corner—they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.”

A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway.

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a “secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

Personality tests also show differences, with gay men ranking higher than straight men in standardised tests for agreeableness, expressiveness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Lesbians tend to be more assertive and less neurotic than straight women.

Dr Zietsch and his colleagues tested their idea by doing a twin study of their own. They asked 4,904 individual twins, not all of them identical, to fill out anonymous questionnaires about their sexual orientation, their gender self-identification and the number of opposite-sex partners they had had during the course of their lives.

Their first observation was that the number of sexual partners an individual claimed did correlate with that individual’s “gender identity”. The more feminine a man, the more masculine a woman, the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex—though women of all gender identities reported fewer partners than men did.

When the relationships between twins were included in the statistical analysis (all genes in common for identical twins; a 50% overlap for the non-identical) the team was able to show that both atypical gender identity and its influence on the number of people of the opposite sex an individual claimed to have seduced were under a significant amount of genetic control. More directly, the study showed that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin tend to have more sexual partners than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin.

According to the final crunching of the numbers, genes explain 27% of an individual’s gender identity and 59% of the variation in the number of sexual partners that people have. The team also measured the genetic component of sexual orientation and came up with a figure of 47%—more or less the same, therefore, as that from previous studies. The idea that it is having fecund relatives that sustains homosexuality thus looks quite plausible.

Same-sex relations are not banned in Turkey. But like America, it bans gays and cross-dressing men from the army. Yet to win exemption from mandatory military service, they must prove their sexual orientation. A Human Rights Watch report notes that this can involve “abusive and intrusive anal examinations”, and adds that many are forced into psychiatric treatment because they are deemed to be mentally ill.

If we avoid the tempting but misleading analogy to race and look at what's directly at stake, the combination of widespread opposition to same-sex marriage and equally widespread support for other gay rights is easier to understand. Gay rights in employment and civil unions don't require the elimination of longstanding and culturally potent sex roles. Same-sex marriage does.

Civil rights law reflects this ambivalence about sex difference. While constitutional law applies "strict scrutiny" to racial distinctions and federal employment law condemns race discrimination in almost all its forms, there's no such comprehensiveness with respect to sex. Sex discrimination is not subject to the same exacting scrutiny as race discrimination under constitutional law, and federal employment law allows many types of it. For instance, courts have routinely upheld workplace rules that enforce sex-specific dress and grooming norms against legal challenge. Employers lawfully can require women to wear makeup and feminine attire and prohibit men from wearing jewelry and long hair. By contrast, they can't have one set of grooming rules for white employees and another one for black employees. Civil rights laws explicitly allow employers to defend a claim of sex discrimination by arguing that male or female sex is itself a job requirement—say, for prison guards who do strip searches or for restroom attendants. By contrast, as a matter of federal law, no job can be the exclusive province of white people, or black people, or Asians or Latinos.

Many advocates believe that fundamental change can only come when more trans people are willing -- like M.J. and Jansen -- to be "out" and tell their stories in their communities. Parallel polls have shown that, in the case of gay rights, as more and more people came to know gay people as friends, co-workers, and family members, support for gay rights grew as well. There is reason to think that similar progress can be made as more trans people feel safe enough to be "visible" -- out and open in their communities.

Salt Lake City is well known for the intimidating heights of Temple Square, the heart of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But just a few blocks to the east is a lesser-known community hub: the bustling building complex of the Utah Pride Center. Offering services to the entire LGBT community of Utah, the center has made transgender rights a priority

Even in conservative Mormon enclaves like Davis and Weber counties, Nelson reports that judges now routinely allow people to change their name when they transition.

"When you're trans in Wyoming, you're wearing a bull's-eye on your back," Jasmine says. "The best protection for Wyoming is having pepper spray, a stun gun, and an expandable tactical baton." She flashes her nails dramatically and laughs. "I didn't grow these for my health."

Lindsay tells the story of how she was twice involuntarily committed to a mental hospital as a danger to herself for no other reason than that she was trans.

Employment discrimination has touched almost everyone.

Prior to the 19th century, it's fair to say that adolescence did not exist. Instead, there was virtually universal acceptance that puberty marked the transition from childhood to young adulthood.

For the poor who most need to make money, learn seriously, and accumulate resources, adolescence has helped crush their future. By trapping poor people in bad schools, with no work opportunities and no culture of responsibility, we have left them in poverty, in gangs, in drugs, and in irresponsible sexual activity. As a result, we have ruined several generations of poor people who might have made it if we had provided a different model of being young.

the girl was refused in two hospitals in her hometown of Lublin due to a conscience clause, which is the right of a doctor to refuse an abortion if it's contradictory to his/her religious beliefs.

In one hospital, as the mother was talking to the senior registrar, a priest arrived and attempted to persuade the girl not to have the abortion

According to Wanda Nowicka, the head of the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, an obvious violation of doctor-patient privilege had taken place, not to mention the girl's right to privacy

Unofficially, the doctors wouldn't perform the abortion because the hospital was raided by pro-life activists and spammed by e-mails expressing both pleads and threats. To the staff's horror it turned out that personal data of the girl had been leaked, including her mobile number, on which she received threats and pleads via SMS. When the girl left the hospital, she was followed by pro-life activists on the street and even at the police station where she and her mother sought refuge.

Finally, thanks to the Foundation for Women and Family Planning, the girl and her mother found a place where they could perform the abortion and it was carried out on the last day possible - at the very end of the 12th week of pregnancy

Top American researchers called the treatment unthinkable for the millions infected in Africa and impractical even for insured patients in top research hospitals.

That mutation, discovered in a few gay men in the 1990s and known as Delta 32, must be inherited from both parents. With it, the white blood cells produced in the marrow lack the surface receptors that allow HIV to invade the immune system.

Doctors say the case gives hope for therapies that artificially induce the Delta 32 mutation.

If it becomes law it would mean "punters" would have a legal obligation to ensure women they pay have not been trafficked.

Nine of them, including "Helen", later gave statements to police. Most of them have since been sent back to Thailand. "Helen" had been bought out of her slavery by a client, who had paid off the remaining £20,000 of her debt to her "owners".