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POPSGirls entering puberty by the age of six - but are drugs the answer?
"Early puberty has even been linked to watching too much television. A few years ago, Italian scientists found that children who watched three hours a day produced less of the sleep hormone melatonin - low levels of the hormone play an important role in the timing of puberty. But perhaps more worrying is the theory that it's exposure to environmental chemicals which is causing the drop in the age of puberty. These chemicals mimic the effect of hormones, disrupting the normal timing of sexual maturing. Whatever the cause, growing numbers of children are being deprived of childhood and are turning, physically, into mini-adults at an increasingly young age. But without the emotional maturity to deal with these changes, they are vulnerable to exploitation. In Britain, it is now estimated that up to at least one in six children under ten is affected. Indeed, there is a belief that schoolgirls as young as six are entering puberty".
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POPSThe Girls 'Sexualised' At Age Of Five Researcher Dr Eileen Zurbriggen said that girls as young at four are at risk. "The consequences of the sexualisation of girls in media today are very real and are likely to be a negative influence on girls' healthy development," she said. "As a society, we need to replace all these sexualised images with ones showing girls in positive settings. "The goal should be to deliver messages to all adolescents - boy and girls - that lead to healthy sexual development." Michele Elliot, of child protection charity Kidscape, said: "Bratz dolls are little sexualised creatures which give the wrong message to kids. "Let them be kids. We have got children of 12, 13 and 14 who are ashamed that they haven't had sex yet. They think sex is the be all and end all." A spokesman for Bratz said that children see the dolls as being pretty rather than sexy.
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POPSThe Teen Brain Human and animal studies, Jensen and Urion note, have shown that the brain grows and changes continually in young people—and that it is only about 80 percent developed in adolescents. The largest part, the cortex, is divided into lobes that mature from back to front. The last section to connect is the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive processes such as reasoning, planning, and judgment. Normally this mental merger is not completed until somewhere between ages 25 and 30—much later than these two neurologists were taught in medical school. There are also gender differences in brain development. As Urion and Jensen explain, the part of our brain that processes information expands during childhood and then begins to thin, peaking in girls at roughly 12 to 14 years old and in boys about two years later. This suggests that girls and boys may be ready to absorb challenging material at different stages, and that schools may be missing opportunities to reach them.
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POPSThe Women's Crusade In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape. Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism.
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POPSDress-Like-a-Whore Day? I remember egoldstein saying something about this before. I still wouldn't trade a great Wonder Woman costume for anything. I like men who know their comic books. :)
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POPSBoys Treat Girls Like People: Thanks to Feminism Masculine stereotypes still do all kinds of harm to men and women and girls and boys alike, and there's a good argument to be made for the idea that men are much further behind women when it comes to embracing feminist ideals. But feminism has had some successes, and it's been good for all involved -- this is just one example of that. There's still a long way to go, but hopefully studies like this will serve as reminders of who actually has the interests of human beings in mind, and who is solely dedicated to a dogma that doesn't fit into most peoples' realities or ideals.
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POPSWhy you aren’t nearly as unique as you think? "Since 1994, photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have been trekking the globe together, recording Exactitudes — “exact attitudes” captu(red) in people’s peculiar dress code as an attempt to differentiate themselves from others or identify with a group."
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POPSWomen trafficking, horrible also in numbers Some more horrifying statistics: In the region of South Eastern Europe, comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, 90% of foreign women in the sex business are alleged victims of trafficking, 10% to 15% of these women and girls are under the age of 18 years. The majority of victims are recruited in Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania. The women and girls are often initially trafficked on the local market. They are being moved from one place to another and after a while sold abroad. following a movie i saw, thought to look into figures and was amazed. this is one of the lowest levels that human is reaching. and i say human because putting it away, shoving it aside, excusing oneself from that sight will not do. it is something in within human capabalities, and we should acknowledge that, also the strive to undo it.
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POPSGirls Make History At Science Contest More: Dr. Hopkins helped start a national discussion about girls and science two years ago when she walked out of a talk by Harvard University’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, after he suggested that innate differences between men and women might be one reason that fewer women than men succeed in math and science careers. Dr. Summers apologized during the ensuing furor; he announced his resignation as Harvard’s president 13 months later James Whaley, president of the Siemens Foundation, which oversees the competition for Siemens AG, a global electronics and engineering company, said the competition results send a great message to young women Alicia Darnell, 17, a senior at Pelham Memorial High School in Pelham, N.Y., won second place and a $50,000 scholarship in the individual category for research that identified genetic defects that could play a role in the development of Lou Gehrig’s disease Pretty good for 16 and 17 year olds don't ya think?
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POPS "Dudes, It's the 21st century Evolve! girl can be smart & sexy, science-y & sleek" ;-) "When physicist Lisa Randall posed for Vogue a couple of years ago, there were all sorts of outrageous criticisms of how she was playing into appearance-obsessed stereotypes and hurting the image of women in physics, blah, blah, blah. No one stopped to marvel at how incredible it was that Vogue -- which reaches millions of women around the globe each month who would never, in a million years, pick up a book or article about science -- chose to feature a woman scientist in its pages at all. If even a fraction of those millions of readers worldwide had their perceptions of female scientists changed for the better, huzzah! "
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POPSGirls and Women Women of Iraq have gradually let go of most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation. Iraq turned from a modern country of educated and working women into a divided land of Islamic and ethnic warlords who compete in canceling women from the social realm........Read more Islamic Sharia law: a constant threat against the rights and freedom of women in the Middle East
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