Post-Election Variety
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 10:30AM 
With special guests:
- Diane Winterling, Bronwyn Hudson and Ann Cheek from Belair Primary School in Adelaide, talking about how they’ve made their school more “boy friendly”. Interviewed at the Working With Boys, Building Fine Men conference in Newcastle in July
- Tom Golden, author of Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing, talking about how and why males and females differ in processing emotion and stress. Interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis Conference in Washington DC in July
- J. Steven Svoboda from Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, talking about protecting boys from infant circumcision. Also interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis Conference.
First up this week, Diane Winterling, Bronwyn Hudson and Ann Cheek from Belair Primary School in Adelaide, talk about how they’ve made their school more “boy friendly”. They were interviewed at the Working With Boys, Building Fine Men conference in Newcastle in July.
Belair Primary is a metropolitan government school 15 kilometres from CBD Adelaide. Over the past 4 years there has been an increasing need to focus on boys’ needs. With a predominant and increasing enrolment of boys it was noticed that there was an increase in Guidance referrals, more boys in timeout at lunchtime and an increase in behavioural support referrals. More boys reported feeling angry and anxious. With the implementation of modules from Curriculum Corporation resources in the local cluster of schools, dramatic changes took place. A decrease of the number of boys in time-out was noted, especially across Years 3 - 5. There has been a link to Information & Communications Technology and boys, boys and literacy through sports stars across the cluster.
Tom Golden is the author of Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing. This week he talks about how and why males and females differ in processing emotion and stress. He was interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis conference in Washington DC in July. There are major differences in males and females in the ways they handle stress and emotions. Very little is known about the masculine side since most people including mental health professionals assume that the default mode of talking and open emoting is the sole path in dealing with stress and emotions.
Also this week J. Steven Svoboda, from Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, talks about protecting boys from infant circumcision. He was also interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis conference. The fact that infant circumcision still happens today is astounding. It is a violent procedure that has been searching for a rationale since Victorian times, when medicalized circumcision began. Circumcised boys feel pain more than intact children. The procedure also causes a broad range of documented problems. Societies tend to be blind to the horrors they create themselves. And so are we regarding male circumcision.
American beliefs that circumcision destroys little tissue, and that the tissue lost is of no particular value, are contradicted by medical research, which recently proved the serious impacts on male sexuality. Circumcision as a medical (as opposed to religious) procedure was born in this country in the nineteenth century as a technique aimed at stopping young boys from masturbating by reducing their ability to feel genital pleasure. The pain of the procedure was explicitly cited by doctors as a “positive” byproduct of the operation. Many doctors also recommended circumcision of girls for similar reasons.
As time went on, whenever any new disease would become a subject of social concern, circumcision would be proposed as a panacea. Circumcision was claimed to cure sexually transmitted diseases, penile cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer in women, and urinary tract infections. Currently, the procedure is being promoted as a near-magical preventive measure to stop AIDS. We seem to have learned little from history. Under standard medical practice, amputation is the treatment of last resort.
Cross-cultural studies demonstrate that the earlier and more violently the circumcision ritual occurs, the more violent is the society. Human rights treaties forbid female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision alike. Yet somehow we have entered the 21st century but not yet learned from the errors of 19th Century Victorians. Let’s bring ourselves up to date and give our boys the same joyful birthright that we ardently safeguard in girls: safe, intact bodies.
Plus the DOTA team will do a wrap-up and post-mortem of the Australian Federal Election.