Even though it's been under seige for years, the United Nations is alive and well, and costing governments lots and lots of money. But just WHAT do they do? Well, they do help out with condoms, but those doyans of condom deliveries, the UN's aid workers, are part of the problem, not the solution.
In 2006, abuses by UN aid workers was exposed; it seems that in return for basic food supplies to refugees from places like Sierra Leone but living in Guinea, the workers have been demanding sex with girls as young as 10. Starving girls who are at constant risk of sexual assault if they try to forage for food, don't have much choice. As for condoms, the workers don't bother and when the baby arrives, they are off again. The "lucky" girl is taken up by another worker, and so it goes.
The UN's response? After two years, during which charities working in Africa have begged the UN to clean up their acts, the only thing they have done is to " investigate individual allegations," and draft a new code of conduct, which will explicitly prohibit the abuse of power and sexual exploitation. Wow, are you as overwhelmed as I?
One charity's response to this? "By the end of the story, however, it's clear that it will take a lot more than words to stop young girls from having to sell their bodies to survive. "
When I first read about this campaign - see News - I thought it was a great idea. But recently, there has been a great deal of debate - in the UK and the US - about just where charity begins and where it should end, when so much of what is collected comes from the sort of people who are likely to be negatively impacted by the dreaded credit crunch. Afterall, if you are hurting at home, should you be spending your shrinking dollar or pound on "other"? But what strikes me in this sort of-argument is the muddling up of just what constitutes charity. As presenters and pundits argue over whether monies given should be directed toward home needs or continue to go overseas, I can't help but think of all those freebie condoms that are produced both overseas and in the US and UK, that end up "everywhere," most at either the public's expense - read the tax payer - or at private charity's expense (which could be argued to be mostly the same pot of money!). All that busy thinking led me to the BBC safe sex campaign in India.
I can't help but wonder "why?"
Condom queen or no, I just don't get it. India has the second fastest growing economy, accompanied by the fastest growing and largest middle class in the world, yet the UK continues to poor money into "development" into that country, kind of like the good old days of empire are still with us. NOT.
Then there is the BBC.
One of my favourite enterprises, and remarkable in so much of what it does, I still cannot justify the idea of a tiny little country, suffering under incredible debt AND realizing an increase in HIV/AIDS, and all those other STDs - meaning we are not getting it right in our own back yard - going to this bohemoth and spending billions of public money to teach Indians how not to, or if they are going to, to do it safely!
Clearly trying to cover its tracks - perhaps someone there figured out that a an old meanie like me would question this kind of charity - BBC World has this to say about its funding:
Independently funded
We are funded by external grants and voluntary contributions, mainly from the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union, UN agencies and charitable foundations. We receive a small amount of core support from the BBC (both in kind and cash).
Hum, four of those five funding sites are publically funded...how is that independent? And if this is to be done through a public agency - remember those bills that arrive every year, telling us that if we don't pay our TV tax, we go to gaol? - shouldn't we tax payers say yes or no to the enterprise?
What a fuzzy fuzzy world is that of "charity."
Whilst in Ireland last week, I was thinking about how late that country was in making birth control legal. Thanks to a great degree to Bono and U2, condoms were finally allowed in the late 70s, but still not easily available until much later.
But what a weird part they played in the ending of one Ireland's oldest theatres, the Pike Theatre Club in Dublin. It was when the Dublin Theatre Festival - the oldest English-speaking festival in the world - was being held 50 years ago, and the theatre company was performing Tennessee Williams' play "The Rose Tatoo."
In the play, during an embarrassing moment, a character pulls out his wallet from which the audience is supposed to believe a condom falls out and he hurriedly toes it under the bed.
A zealot or two in the audience were outraged and told the authorities who promptly arrested the assistant director and threw him in gaol.
The legal costs to the theatre were so high, it had to close, never to re-open and even threatened the future of the festival.
The worst part? The actor playing the part did not actually have a condom in his wallet, it was a little piece of paper, a prop.
Ah, the joys of morality!
From the Daily Telegraph, August...
Lip-kissing is the new mwah, mwah;
The passion for puckering up forces Celia Walden to turn the other cheek
Picture the scene: Harriet Harman has just finished her speech to the Labour Party conference. As the applause echoes around the hall, she strides over to her Cabinet colleagues and plants a great big kiss on their lips.
It seems unlikely, I grant you, but if my experience last week is anything to go by, then it's only a matter of time. On the party scene, air-kissing - that horrible "mwah, mwah'' used by the kind of people who know your job title and dress size but forget your name - is out. Instead, there's a far worse social plague doing the rounds: being kissed on the mouth, or what I refer to as "anti-social kissing''. And this is not delivered by your significant other, but by people you barely know: your dentist's wife, a colleague, a friend of a friend, some floating soul you once got drunk with.
The one good thing about air-kissing was that it tended to be used by those who didn't want their lips anywhere near your flesh. Anti-social kissing, however, has no such upside. By the end of the recent London Fashion Week, my lips felt as though they had been assaulted, my dignity ravaged by a procession of violently friendly unknowns.
The first assault demanded the most recovery time. It was at a party earlier this month, when I locked eyes with a PR I had met a handful of times. My heart sank at her primeval cry of recognition, expecting one of those squeaky, excitable conversations that leave you dizzied by their fraudulence. But then, to my utter horror, the nameless blonde scuttled across, pneumatic, glossy and glittering, and crushed her lips against mine with moist aggression.
The rest of the conversation I have forgotten, but the shock, and the sparkling residue of her lip-gloss, lingered for days. Since then I have witnessed, and suffered, anti-social kissing more times than I care to mention. At the GQ Men of the Year awards, every winner was greeted by - or lunged towards - the puckered lips of co-hosts Sir Elton John and Lily Allen. At Naomi Campbell's Fashion For Relief show last Wednesday, a model actually cradled my head while she administered the full-on smackeroo. The worst offenders are celebrities: Peaches Geldof, Daisy Lowe and Elle Macpherson have all been seen locking lips, and even those who have never met will be smooching like pubescents within seconds.
"It's everywhere,'' says Peter York, author of The Return of the Sloane Ranger, "not just with the very posh, but it's definitely female-led. You go politely up to this person and suddenly find yourself being digested. It's singular and bold women who do it, and when they do my every brain cell fuses.''
"After my show last week, all these people I didn't know well were going for my lips instead of my cheek,'' says top British designer Afshin Feiz. "It was as if they wanted to demonstrate what close friends we were, and yet even in the fashion world, where shmoozing is rife, this is taking things to a new level.''
Behavioural expert Judi James, author of The Body Language Bible, explains that it's not just popular among fashionistas - even City types are locking lips. "A lot of very straight business people started to move into air-kissing to escape their rather dull image,'' she says, "but there was always the dilemma of how many times to do it. With lip-to-lip, at least you're only locking on to the one landing area.''
Some might think of it as risqué, but James insists that it's "not a sexual thing: there is increasing evidence of it between parents and sons and daughters, as well as heterosexual men. You see a lot of it on football and rugby pitches, which gives it the seal of approval for men.''
Apparently, the idea comes from our primate ancestry. "The air kiss doesn't have any roots in the animal world,'' says James, "but lip-to-lip kissing is actually done in order to exchange food and let the other person share the smells and tastes you have just consumed.''
But if you don't want to let everyone know about that crayfish salad from Pret a Manger, there are deflection techniques. Women can use the time-honoured head turn; men, suggests James, should learn to convert the encounter into an air kiss "by lightly touching the person on both shoulders as they go for the lips - a steerage signal - and turning your cheek''. With luck, we'll stop this horrific new trend before Harriet gets to her feet next year.
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