Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- Our Destiny Lies Not in Our Stars, But in Our Bacteria
- The Reasons Behind the Slow Pace of Executions
- ‘Unprecedented Levels’ of Mental Illness Among Gang Members
- Here’s the Full Text of the Taliban Letter to Malala Yousafzai
- Postal Service by Projectile: Delivering Mail With Rockets
- 12 Steps to Danger: How Alcoholics Anonymous Can Be a Playground for Violence-Prone Members
- Pink Boys: What’s the Best Way to Raise Children Who Might Have Gender Identity Issues?
- Chocolate: The Scent That Could Save Struggling Bookstores
| Our Destiny Lies Not in Our Stars, But in Our Bacteria Posted: 18 Jul 2013 06:06 PM PDT  In 2010 we offered a fascinating (and if you're a germ-ophobe, alarming) look at how much of what makes up a human is made up of microbes. As author Valerie Brown outlined:
There's been a lively academic debate—the "hologenomic theory of evolution"—drawn along these lines, wondering that if microbes are so much of us, surely they must affect our evolution. Hologenomic refers to a critter's genetic package and that of its itty-bitty entourage, or as biologist Seth Bordenstein ("a scientist, educator, optimist, consultant, and non-linear thinker") puts it, "the aggregate genome and microbiome of animals." He and his colleagues at his Vanderbilt lab believe these combined sets of genetic stuff form a "persistent, evolutionary unit." Given the weight of biomatter in an animal, and the yeoman's work these bugs do, it's an intuitively sensible proposition. Still, until late it's been somewhat of a microbiology wallflower, or perhaps Wallin-flower, since Ivan Wallin suggested something along the lines of such "symbiosis and speciation" in 1927. To fast forward more than eight decades, here's a recent tweet from Bordenstein: "Biologists no longer study if there r genomes in life’s structures but whether all those genomes r interconnected beyond self #hologenome" Bordenstein and his post-doc Robert Brucker concocted an elegant proof of this—their study appears online in the journal Science—using gut bacteria not from people but from three different species of a parasitic wasp. Two of the species are believed to have diverged 400,000 years ago, the third about a million years ago. As a result, this gave the researchers two species with somewhat similar genomes and somewhat similar but not identical "microbiomes,” while the third species' genome and microbiome were further removed. When the various species mate with each other, those differences are apparent—offspring from the two more closely related species tend to survive, while those from one of the close and the far species tend to die out over time. (Bordenstein has described these wide-gulf hybrids as having "chaotic and totally different" gut flora, hardly a recipe for thriving.) Feeding the wasps sterile food so that the gut flora wouldn't develop, Bordenstein and Brucker interbred the insects in the lab. The presence of the gut bacteria actually tamps down successful hybridization. Among what we might call the bug-less insects, the survival rate for hybrids was pretty much the same regardless of what pair of parents they had. If that's interesting enough, as a sort of second stage check, when the gut bugs were introduced to the hybrids, the ones with the wider genetic (and microbiomic) gulf tended to not survive another generation. "Our results move the controversy of hologenomic evolution from an idea to an observed phenomenon," Bordenstein was quoted in a release from Vanderbilt. "The question is no longer whether the hologenome exists, but how common it is?" And while the research has been met with interest, not everyone accepts the whole of the hologenomic concept yet. As evolutionary geneticist John Werren—who considers this wasp work important—asked Science's Kai Kupferschmidt, “They are not co-evolving as a single unit, so why would we call them a single genome?” But for those of us not on the frontlines of microbiology, whether hologenomic or not, the title of Valerie Brown's piece seems more accurate than ever: “Bacteria R Us.” |
| The Reasons Behind the Slow Pace of Executions Posted: 18 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  States that impose the death penalty have been facing a crisis in recent years: They are short on the drugs used in executions. In California, which has the country’s largest death row population, the chief justice of the state supreme court has said there are unlikely to be any executions for three years, in part due to the shortage of appropriate lethal drugs. As a result, state prosecutors are calling for a return of the gas chamber. Ohio, which is second only to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 2010, said it will run out of the drug it uses in executions, pentobarbital, on September 30. The state has two men scheduled for execution in November, and eight more set to be killed after that. Every state’s supply of pentotbarbital, which has been the principal execution drug, expires at the end of November. The shortage has forced death penalty states to scramble on two fronts: They are hunting for new suppliers or different drugs to use, and enacting changes to public records laws to keep the names of suppliers and manufacturers of those alternative drugs secret. The lack of lethal drugs, and the fight over keeping new ones secret, are partly the result of a remarkably effective campaign by opponents of the death penalty, who have, in effect, taken their efforts from the court room to the boardroom. Each time a state has found a new source for a drug to use in executions, Reprieve, an anti-death penalty organization based in London, in collaboration with death penalty lawyers in the United States, has used freedom of information laws, the local news media, and the powers of persuasion to compel the drug’s manufacturer to cut off the supply. “Who’s easier to persuade? The Supreme Court or a corporation that has financial interests?” said Clive Stafford Smith, a British-American, who was a death penalty lawyer in the South for many years before founding Reprieve. “You can make it not worth their while to allow their drugs in executions.” The effectiveness of Reprieve’s campaign might well be behind the action taken last year by the state of Texas, which leads the nation in executions. When a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, Mike Ward, using the state’s Public Information Act, sought information about the drugs used in executions, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice fiercely resisted. Some death penalty states, looking to solve their drug supply problems in a more reliable way, switched drugs—opting for pentobarbital, an anesthetic commonly used in putting animals to sleep.In one legal filing, Patricia Fleming, the agency’s assistant general counsel, said revealing the information about the drugs and who made them would invite “financial intimidation and negative publicity,” as well as “intensive lobbying” and “unrestrained harassment.” Referring to death penalty opponents, Fleming asserted that “essential to their strategy is knowledge of the private companies” that supply the drugs used in lethal injections. The state attorney general ruled against her, and the department disclosed that it had enough pentobarbital at the time for 23 executions, Ward reported. Death penalty states are now taking measures to keep anti-death penalty activists, and journalists, from learning the identity of suppliers. A Georgia law enacted in March provides that any information about a “person or entity that manufactures, supplies, compounds, or prescribes the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment” used in an execution shall be considered a “confidential state secret.” Already this year, at least three other states—Arkansas, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have amended their public records laws to exempt the names of suppliers from disclosure. Lethal injection was first proposed as a method of execution in the 19th century by a New York doctor who argued it would be cheaper than hanging. It took 100 years or so for it to be used, but every state that set out to execute people eventually adopted it as the chosen method. Generally, states have used a three-drug protocol. The first was an anesthetic, sodium thiopental, intended to render the prisoner unconscious so that he or she does not experience the pain and suffering from the drugs to come. The second drug, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs, making it impossible for the condemned to breathe. Finally, potassium chloride is injected, causing death by cardiac arrest. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in Baze v. Rees, held that lethal injection did not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment proscription on “cruel and unusual punishment.” But the Court recognized care had to be taken in the killing, so that it wasn’t unconstitutionally “cruel.” The most critical drug, it emphasized, is the anesthetic. “It is uncontested that, failing a proper dose of sodium thiopental that would render the prisoner unconscious, there is substantial, unconstitutionally unacceptable risk of suffocation from the administration of pancuronium bromide and pain from the injection of potassium chloride,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. The problems for death penalty states, and the opening for opponents of the death penalty arose when the only company that had governmental approval to make the anesthetic, Hospira, announced in 2011 that it was suspending production because of manufacturing problems at its plant in North Carolina. Arizona, with two executions pending in late 2011, managed to find another source of sodium thiopental; but it didn’t want the public to know what it was or where it came from. When lawyers for Jeffrey Landrigan, one of the men facing death, sought the name of the supplier, Arizona’s state attorney general refused to say. Ultimately, on the eve of Landrigan’s execution, the attorney general disclosed that the drug had come from Britain. He did so, he said, to allay fears that the drugs had been made in a Third World country and might be contaminated and unsafe. Tennessee also acknowledged that one of its execution drugs had been made in Britain but refused to divulge the company’s name. At Reprieve, Maya Foa, head of the lethal investigation project, searched through medical and pharmaceutical directories to identify British companies that made sodium thiopental. The British company selling sodium thiopental to Arizona, Tennessee, and other states turned out to be a tiny wholesaler that operated out of the back of a driving school in a working class neighborhood in West London. It was called Dream Pharma, and it was basically a one-man operation. It also suddenly became more profitable, as states in America moved to improvise. Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, wrote a letter to Dream Pharma. “You have played a significant role and hold responsibility for the potential deaths of many people in the United States,” he wrote. Reprieve sent the letter, along with Dream Pharma’s address and phone number, to journalists, and articles appeared in British newspapers and on the BBC. Dream Pharma shut down. The company has declined to comment on its battles with Reprieve or the sale of drugs to the U.S. for executions. Reprieve then successfully lobbied the British government to ban exports of any drugs to the U.S. for executions. Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in the early 1960s even though polls showed the public supported it. With Hospira out of the business, states had become fairly desperate. That urgency was captured in government emails and documents obtained by death penalty defense lawyers. “I have been given a task to obtain some Sodium Pentothal by any means available,” the director of the pharmacy in the Nebraska department of corrections wrote to her counterparts in several states. “Does anyone know where I might start looking?” She eventually found a small wholesaler in Mumbai, India, which operated out of two rooms on the ground floor of an apartment building; it had no air conditioning, raising doubts about the safety and efficacy of any drugs stored there. Reprieve again went to work, alerting local reporters and holding a news conference in Mumbai. Officials from India’s food and drug administration raided the offices. The company was quickly out of business. In California, prison officials turned to hospitals throughout the state in search of sodium thiopental, without success. The warden at San Quentin explored buying some in Pakistan. In the end, Arizona officials solved California’s problems, supplying 12 grams of sodium thiopental from its limited supply, a happy exchange according to government emails unearthed by death penalty opponents. “You guys in AZ are life savers,” a California corrections officer wrote to his Arizona counterpart. “Buy you a beer next time I get that way.” Some death penalty states, looking to solve their drug supply problems in a more reliable way, switched drugs—opting for pentobarbital, an anesthetic commonly used in putting animals to sleep. The first state to use it for an execution was Oklahoma, in December 2010, and it quickly became one of the execution drugs of choice. This time, however, Reprieve was not up against a small entity. Only one company had government approval to sell pentobarbital in the U.S., and it was a major international pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck Inc. Headquartered in Denmark, it had some 6,000 employees worldwide; its American plant was in Kansas. When Reprieve approached Lundbeck, in early 2011, the company said it was “adamantly opposed” to its drugs being used in executions—its primary use is in the treatment of epilepsy—but it said it had no control over what happened after its products were sold to wholesalers or distributors. Reprieve ratcheted up the pressure. Every time Lundbeck’s pentobarbital was used in an execution, it issued a press release. Anti-death penalty activists campaigned against Lundbeck on Twitter and Facebook, shareholders raised questions at the company’s annual meeting, a pension fund sold its shares, and the company’s place on an annual ranking of Denmark’s best companies fell from 17 to 40. Lundbeck then did what it had said it couldn’t do: It devised a distribution system that would keep its pentobarbital from the states that conducted executions. In April, Hospira announced that it was putting controls in place so that three of its drugs—pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride, and propofol—would not be used in executions. Once again, that has left states trying to figure out what to do. In Colorado, a man who killed three teenagers and their boss in a pizza restaurant in 1993 is set to be executed in August. But the state does not have the proper drugs, causing the director of prisons to send an urgent plea to the state’s compounding pharmacies. At “compounding pharmacies,” pharmacists mix, or compound, the ingredients for drugs on site. Last October, South Dakota became the first state to use a compound drug in an execution, and it did so twice. Lawyers for one of the men to be executed, Robert Moeller, who had kidnapped, raped, and murdered a nine-year-old girl, filed a lawsuit to obtain information about the supplying pharmacy. The state resisted, and a federal judge sided with the state. South Dakota was among the states to recently pass a law exempting the names of suppliers of lethal injection drugs from its public records law. The change was necessary, said South Dakota State Senator Jean Hunhoff, “because there’s been harassment that has occurred against non-protected manufacturers and pharmacists, thereby causing difficulty for the state in obtaining the necessary chemicals for the lethal injection.” South Dakota’s law passed in the state senate without opposition, and the house by a lopsided 60-8. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| ‘Unprecedented Levels’ of Mental Illness Among Gang Members Posted: 18 Jul 2013 10:40 AM PDT  The New York Times Magazine this past weekend had a great piece about the persistent problem of gang violence in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Police Department's changing tactics against it. The headline says it all: "What Does It Take to Stop Crips and Bloods From Killing Each Other?" Reporter John Burtin describes experiments that the L.A.P.D. is undertaking to collaborate closely with community members to try to create a safer environment with less collateral damage. This in stark contrast to the department's 1980s-era tactic of responding to the gang problem with "overwhelming force." Burtin also notes that this is an interesting experiment because many of those community members have close ties to the gangs, or are former gang members themselves. It's a complex problem that requires nuanced law enforcement methods. "When we talk about crime, we tend to talk about victims and offenders, innocence and guilt, prey and predator," Burtin writes. "Gang violence clouds and warps this logic: victims and victimizers are often the same people, and neither side has any reason to talk to the police." Do gangs appeal to kids who are at risk of mental and emotional instability? Or is the psychological damage done during the time spent running with their gangs?The Times article doesn't say so, but one of the greatest challenges facing any kind of police-gang cooperative efforts may be the unpredictability and instability of the gang members themselves—and not just when drugs are involved. In fact, a new study in the July issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry has found "unprecedented levels of psychiatric illnesss," like various anxiety disorders and psychosis, among gang members. Common problems among young men in gangs (the study only looked at males) included "violent ruminative thinking, violent victimization and fear of further victimization." It makes sense, in an intuitive way: If you live a life where you're both perpetrating violence and constantly on guard against retaliation, it's got to be hard to keep calm and keep perspective. It also makes sense that this is a lifestyle that would attract people with volatile tendencies. The study, led by Jeremy Coid, director of forensic psychiatry research at Queen Mary, University of London, didn't just focus on kids. In fact, the men in the survey were aged 18 to 34, older than the age at which most would have probably joined the gang. So these particular men all show a long-term gang affiliation—and a long-term dedication to the lifestyle attached to it. Previous research Coid had studied in the U.K. had not effectively separated the substance-abuse factor from the troubled lives of these young men. The substance-abuse factor is a big one: Coid found that two-thirds of the gang members he surveyed were dependent on alcohol, and more than half were addicted to drugs. But the problem is larger than that: a fourth of the group had some kind of a diagnosis of psychosis, and about a third of the group had attempted suicide. (Interestingly, while anger and anxiety were extremely prevalent, depression was actually less common among gang members than it was in non-gang-member men in the study.) So the question remains: Do gangs appeal to certain types of kids who are already at risk of mental and emotional instability, either because they promise a family-like inclusivity or because they offer an outlet for violent, risk-taking itches? Or, rather, is the psychological damage done during the time the young men spend running with their gangs? Earlier this month I wrote about research based on political unrest in Kenya that concluded that even short-term exposure to violence can have a long-lasting impact on the children who witness it. More than a year after the short-lived violent upheaval, Kenyan children who were exposed to violence were exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, like aggressive behavior, bullying, and problems focusing on schoolwork. Could PTSD be to blame for this pattern of psychiatric problems, too? Coid said that the violence/PTSD connection is a too-simplistic one: "this could only partly explain the high prevalence of psychosis, which warrants further investigation." One theory about the suicide-attempt factor that Coid and his colleagues do suggest, however, is that gang life can encourage giving in to sudden, impulsive violence. This violence is most often directed outward, but perhaps these young men may be giving in to sudden impulses to do themselves harm, as well. |
| Here’s the Full Text of the Taliban Letter to Malala Yousafzai Posted: 18 Jul 2013 10:08 AM PDT  Late last year we published an interview with Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani freelance reporter. Ashraf played a central role in the rise to prominence of Malala Yousafzai, the young advocate for girls education, gravely injured in an attempted assassination when a Taliban-linked gunman boarded her school bus and opened fire, hitting Yousafzai and three classmates. Since surviving the shooting, Yousafzai has risen to international fame, speaking this week at the United Nations, receiving thousands of votes to be Time magazine’s famous “Person of the Year,” and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Reporter Ashraf, who is now studying for a Ph.D. in Illinois, had published a column in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper questioning whether he and foreign media had gone too far in thrusting Yousafzai into the spotlight alone—a fame that may have led to her targeting. This week, following Yousafzai’s U.N. speech, which received a standing ovation, a Taliban senior officer, Adnan Rasheed, sent a letter to Yousafzai, the full text of which is reproduced below. In it, he addressed several of the same points Ashraf had in our interview—if in drastically different ways. The letter deepens the story in several ways. The attack on Yousafzai, Rasheed argues, was not designed to deter girls from going to school, but was motivated by Yousafzai’s own attacks on the Taliban. The motivation was to shut her up, or punish her for criticizing Taliban tactics, not her actions to promote her right to an education, Rasheed claims. It’s a thin hair to split: Yousafzai’s criticisms of Rasheed’s Taliban faction were, precisely, about Taliban attacks on her school. But the argument recalls statements by Ashraf in our interview last year, in which he parsed the complex motivations behind the Taliban anti-education campaign. Though the Taliban had made clear their opposition to girls studying, Ashraf claimed the initial attacks on schools were intended as strikes against the Pakistani state, which was at war with Taliban forces. The goal was to hit state property, and complicate life for the government. Education for girls was one of several targets at the time, but the larger issue was political control of the region. Why does that distinction matter? In a practical sense, it probably doesn’t—the end of girls’ education was a particularly toxic item on the Taliban platform, and violence resulted. Yousafzai and three other girls were near-fatally attacked, the schools closed, and the world recoiled. But Rasheed’s letter provides more of the deeply weird context around the events that would culminate in Yousafzai’s shooting, and the broader Taliban war on girls. His letter quotes the educational goals of then-colonial power Britain, and references drone strikes, modern war crimes, and the Freemasons. It all adds up to a portrait of a belief system that makes it impossible for girls to study because, he seems to believe, studying suggests secularism and imperialism. The problem with Yousafzai learning geography or math, at least as far as Rasheed’s letter goes, isn’t that biblical law to forbid it. It’s that he doesn’t like the curriculum.
Surprisingly few outlets have published the original text of the letter, below. It contains several spelling and grammatical mistakes, but is not difficult to read, and one of the few times an English-speaking audience has had access to a direct statement by a Taliban leader on the controversial case. Here it is.
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| Postal Service by Projectile: Delivering Mail With Rockets Posted: 18 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  The financially beleaguered U.S. Postal Service came close to stopping Saturday mail delivery earlier this year—but even if it had, most businesses would probably have hardly noticed. In these digital days, there are far more efficient ways to transmit a document than by entrusting it to a creaky physical system of planes, trucks, and demoralized letter carriers. And, it turns out, long before email trumped snail mail, corporate execs were looking for faster ways to get documents signed, sealed, and delivered. The head of aerospace giant Lockheed Aircraft's missile division predicted that rockets would be carrying letters by 1965.Back in 1957, at the dawn of the Space Age, the editors of Mechanix Illustrated envisioned how ever-advancing technology would speed up correspondence: via a national network of mail-carrying rocket ships. The article that accompanied the artwork quotes the then head of aerospace giant Lockheed Aircraft's missile division predicting that rockets would be carrying letters by 1965. At noon a company in New York would copy a crucial document with a "micro-photo machine," the magazine enthused, then seal the copy in a plastic case and pop that into a pneumatic tube feeding directly to the nearest post office. From there, a helicopterlike "convertaplane" would ferry the case to the local rocket base, where it would be loaded onto the next ship bound for, say, San Francisco. Blasting through the atmosphere at 10,000mph, the document would arrive at its destination by 10 a.m. Pacific time on the same day. After another few trips by helicopter, tube, and rocket ship, the paper, duly signed in San Francisco, would arrive back in New York before close of business. How much simpler could it get? Fortunately for everyone, except perhaps rocket manufacturers, digital technology came along instead. Today, of course, anyone can send all the documents they want to, pretty much wherever they want, whenever they want—even on Saturdays. |
| 12 Steps to Danger: How Alcoholics Anonymous Can Be a Playground for Violence-Prone Members Posted: 18 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  In the spring of 2011, Karla Brada Mendez finally seemed happy. She was 31 and in love, eager to move ahead on the path to maturity—marriage, a family, stability. She had a good job in the customer-service department of a large medical supply firm, and was settling into a condo she had recently bought near her childhood home in California’s San Fernando Valley. Her 20s had been rough, a struggle with depression, anxiety, alcohol, and drugs. But early that spring two years ago, she told her parents and younger sister that she had met a charming, kind, and handsome man who understood what she had been through. Their relationship blossomed as the couple attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings several times a week. But there was much Karla didn’t know about the tall blond man who said he was an AA old-timer. Court records show that Eric Allen Earle repeatedly relapsed and turned violent when drunk, lashing out at family members, his ex-wife, and people close to him. By the time he and Karla crossed paths, judges had granted six restraining orders against him. The 40-year-old sometime electrician had been convicted on dozens of criminal charges, mostly involving assault and driving under the influence. He had served more than two years in prison. Unlike Karla, Earle was not attending AA meetings voluntarily. A succession of judges and parole officers had ordered him to go as an alternative to jail. In that regard, Earle was part of a national trend. Each year, the legal system coerces more than 150,000 people to join AA, according to AA’s own membership surveys. Many are drunken drivers ordered to attend a few months of meetings. Others are felons whose records include sexual offenses and domestic violence and who choose AA over longer prison sentences. They mingle with AA’s traditional clientele, ordinary citizens who are voluntarily seeking help with their drinking problems from a group whose main tenet is anonymity. (When telling often-harrowing stories of their alcoholism, the recovering drinkers introduce themselves only by their first names.) Forced attendance seems at odds with the original traditions of the organization, which state that the “only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” So far, AA has declined to caution members about potentially dangerous peers or to create separate meetings for convicted criminals. “We do not discriminate against any prospective AA member, even if he or she comes to us under pressure from a court, an employer, or any other agency,” the public information officer at New York’s central office wrote in a June email. “We cannot predict who will recover, nor have we the authority to decide how recovery should be sought by any other alcoholic.” Internal AA documents show that when questioned about the sexual abuse of young women by other members, the organization’s leadership decided in 2009 that it could not do anything to screen potential members.Friends and family members say that Earle gained little lasting medical or spiritual benefit from AA. “On the way home from meetings, he’d stop at the liquor store and buy a pint of vodka,” said his father, Ronald Earle. “He’d finish that thing in an hour.” His estranged wife, Jennifer Mertell, said Earle frequently told her that he never had any intention of stopping drinking. “He had no desire to ever get sober,” Mertell said. But Earle figured out something at AA. Friends and his former wife say he learned to troll the meetings for emotionally fragile women whom he impressed with his smooth mastery of the movement’s jargon and principles. Mertell says he met four of his most recent girlfriends by doing just that. “He has no place to live. He has no job. He goes to AA and finds these women who will take him in. He can be very sweet-talking and convincing,” she said. “He weasels himself into these girls’ lives, and just does what he has to do to have a living situation.” In recent years, some critics have pressed AA to do more about the combustible mix of violent ex-felons and newcomers who assume that others “in the rooms” are there voluntarily. “It’s like letting a wolf into the sheep’s den,” said Dee-Dee Stout, an Emeryville, California, alcohol and drug counselor who offers alternatives to traditional 12-step treatment. Twelve-step adherents accept the notion of alcohol dependency as a disease that can be remedied by abstinence and attending meetings with others who are trying to stop drinking. Stout has been an outspoken critic of what she views as the medical and judicial overreliance on AA and its offshoots. Internal AA documents show that when questioned about the sexual abuse of young women by other members, the organization’s leadership decided in 2009 that it could not do anything to screen potential members. AA, which is a non-profit, considers each of the nearly 60,000 U.S. AA groups autonomous and responsible for supervising themselves. Board members argued that a group organized around anonymity could do nothing to monitor members without undercutting its basic principles. And that’s where things stood in 2010 when Karla decided her substance abuse was out of control. She checked into a rehab facility in her hometown of Santa Clarita, where she quickly made friends, despite her emotional turmoil. “She was the life of the party, a social butterfly,” said her sister Sasha Brada Mendez. “Everybody loved Karla.” KARLA BRADA MENDEZ WAS born on September 3, 1979, the second of three daughters. She was a talented athlete and a gifted linguist, fluent in her mother’s native Czech and her Mexican-born father’s Spanish. After high school, Karla took classes at a community college and worked full time in a series of jobs she hoped might ignite a deeper interest. She played softball and the saxophone and took kickboxing classes with her sister Sasha. She had excelled as a cosmetology student, but she didn’t feel the life of a hair stylist would provide the same security as her job at the medical firm, so she cut friends’ hair on the side. At one point, dismayed by her lack of progress in the world, she saw a psychiatrist, who diagnosed depression. She kept this a secret, riddled with guilt that her immigrant parents had sacrificed so much for her middle-class comfort: her airy, childhood ranch home had a pool, cedars that pierced the California sky and hummingbirds that buzzed in the garden. She also kept another secret from her family: Sometimes she abused prescription pills and drank too much. In mid-2009, she had crashed her car after a night out with friends. No other cars were involved, and Karla was unhurt. But her father, Hector Mendez, later learned that she had paid a lawyer $1,500 to get a driving under the influence violation removed from her record. And at the advice of her then-boyfriend, a Los Angeles policeman, Karla checked into rehab. She stayed a month in the facility, where she attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, a separate group with a similar approach to treatment. Rehab facilities like the one Karla’s insurance was paying for often send patients to AA and NA meetings. After her release, Karla continued to attend meetings. But she never spoke about it openly, and her family, unfamiliar with the program, did not inquire. No one felt the need after her release. “She looked and seemed so much better after,” says her sister Sasha, now 28. With her big green eyes, thick curly hair and engaging smile, Karla was never at a loss for male company, but she despaired over finding a man with whom she could build a future—especially as she attended peers’ weddings, and rejoiced over the news that girlfriends were pregnant. To kick-start the next chapter of her own life, she bought a condo near her family home and began living on her own. By late 2010, she felt lonely and isolated. She was bored in her job, felt despondent about being single at 30, and once again began drinking and taking drugs. One weekday afternoon near Christmas, her mother, Jaroslava, found Karla asleep in her darkened bedroom. They agreed that perhaps another stay in rehab would help to establish a more lasting recovery. “We thought it could help her again,” said Jaroslava. In her second stint in rehab, Karla roomed with a woman named Suzanne, and they became instant friends. Suzanne, like several others in this story, asked that her last name be withheld in order to protect her privacy. During their month-long stay at rehab, Karla took a daily van to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings at nearby facilities, Suzanne said. When people abuse both alcohol and narcotics, addiction counselors often suggest that they try both groups. In late January 2011, when they were both released, Suzanne and Karla agreed that Suzanne would move into Karla’s condo. During those shaky days, the two women strove to help each other adjust to life without illicit substances. When they first emerged from rehab, Suzanne had difficulty waking up. Karla, she said, would come into her room every morning with a steaming cup of coffee, gently urging her friend to get out of bed. “She just knew how to care for people,” Suzanne said. At some point in early 2011, Karla went to a 12-step meeting at the sober-living home where Earle was living at the time. Such facilities serve as interim housing for people recently released from rehab or as an alternative to incarceration. Earle’s former roommate, John, said Earle quickly noticed Karla. “That girl is fine,” John recalled Earle saying. Earle quickly found a way to introduce himself to her. Earle was a nimble conversationalist, especially with women, and spoke engagingly about his children, music, and motorcycles. “He was charming,” said Sasha. “He found a way to use whatever information people gave him to connect to them.” There were no clues, initially, that his intentions were not in Karla’s interest. “Anybody who helps him, that’s who he picks on,” said his father, Ronald Earle. “It’s a weakness he sees and tries to exploit.” Karla fell in love. Soon, Earle persuaded her to stop attending Narcotics Anonymous sessions, which spoke to her principal addictions, and exclusively attend AA meetings, which addressed his drug of choice, Suzanne said. While AA has few set rules—and says it has no way of enforcing them anyway—its literature advises members against dating anyone until they have marked one year of sobriety. The theory is that a person struggling to quit drinking and put his or her life back together is unable to make sound emotional decisions. Romantic entanglements during that fragile period are unnecessarily confusing. As a relative newcomer to AA, Suzanne said, Karla had not yet chosen a sponsor, a customary part of the program. Typically, sponsors are peers who have longer-lasting sobriety, and who help guide others through the 12 faith-based steps. Sponsors need not be trained in counseling or have unblemished legal records; the only requirement is that they be knowledgeable about the program. Likewise, group leaders need only meet the same qualifications. “When they show an AA group on TV, they show a leader, like someone knows what’s going on,” said Stanton Peele, a psychologist, attorney, and author of numerous books that challenge the 12-step approach to drug and alcohol treatment. “But that’s not how it is in reality. You’re on your own. It’s the Wild West out there. Who knows who you’re sitting next to?” But if Karla hadn’t memorized the 12-step guidelines, Earle was certainly familiar with them: He had been a regular at AA since 1992. After convictions for battery and property damage in May of that year, court records show, he was ordered by a judge to attend 104 AA meetings over the next 52 weeks. According to Earle’s extensive criminal record, it was the first of at least four times that officials would demand that Earle address the alcohol problem that correlated with recklessness and violence. Many of those who are coerced into going to meetings must have attendance sheets signed by meeting secretaries. “He was ordered into AA at least four different times,” recalled Jennifer Mertell, 41, who married Earle in 1994 and left him eight years later because of his escalating violence. Mertell, the mother of two of Earle’s three children, estimates that he owes her nearly $100,000 in child support. ERIC ALLEN EARLE SEEMED to know his way around rules from the start. The third of three children, Earle was born in 1971 to Ronald Earle, an Army veteran and electrical contractor, and his wife Carlotta. School didn’t come easily and he had trouble fitting in socially. ”He was always beating up on the little kids in the neighborhood,” his father recalled. “He’d run his mouth and get the big kids after him and then he’d have to run like hell.” He had difficulty even at rest: He’d jump from his bed with night terrors, screaming in his sleep. Even back then, tenderness had little impact. “We’d have to wash his face with cold water to bring him out of it,” Ronald said. At some point, he was diagnosed with a learning disability, and enrolled in a special private school from which he never officially graduated. “I always said he was my late bloomer,” Ronald said. “Only he never bloomed.” There were girlfriends, Ronald said. He had a child with one, but she couldn’t handle Earle’s black moods, especially when he drank. “When he gets on booze some part of his brain just takes over,” Ronald said, “and turns him into a monster.” There is ample evidence of that. On one occasion in 2001, Eric was separated from Mertell and was living at home with his father and mother, who has since died. In a drunken rage, he drove his fist through a wall and some cabinetry, Ronald Earle recalled. His mother tried to stop him, and Eric put his hands around her neck, as if to strangle her. She reached for the cordless phone, which Eric snatched away. “You want the f__ing phone? I’ll give you the f__ing phone,” Ronald Earle recalled his son saying. “And then he jabbed the antenna right in her eye.” Later that year, he was convicted on seven charges, including battery and elder abuse. Mertell, meanwhile, filed for divorce. She said Earle was incarcerated at the time and never signed the papers. In 2003, Eric’s sister Rondalee Johnson, a respiratory therapist, took out a restraining order against him. “That’s because he threatened to strangle her and her daughter,” Ronald Earle said. Johnson did not respond to requests for comment. The following years showed little promise. Earle cycled out of jail, mandated attendance at domestic violence counseling, and educational programs for those convicted of driving under the influence. “Proof of Zero Progress in Counseling,” court records from 2007 say. In May 2008, Earle was arrested on 18 charges, including driving under the influence, reckless driving, and evading police officers. Court records say he was clocked driving at a speed exceeding 95 miles per hour. He was sentenced to nine months in state prison, and was released on 11 months of parole. In 2010, Earle’s problems with the law continued: Despite repeated delinquency with child support, he fought Mertell for custody of their two children. Late in the year—homeless and with the goodwill of his friends and family members exhausted—he checked into Eden Ministries, a sober-living facility for men in Canyon Country, about eight miles from Santa Clarita. There, he shared a mobile home with John and his future sponsor, Patrick Fry. Eden Ministries director the Reverend James Cliffe recalled that for a couple of months, Earle adhered to the facility’s rules, abstaining from alcohol and drugs, and attending frequent 12-step meetings. At some point during this period—no one seems to remember the exact date—he met Karla. John said Earle was paying $450 per month for a bed in a trailer and easy access to the 12-step meetings that were held on the grounds. It was unclear why Eric came—or who paid his bills. A few months later, John recalled, Karla arrived at Eden Ministries from her own rehab, a nearby facility that cost $42,000 for a month’s stay, according to records. “She showed up in what we call a 'druggy buggy,’” he said. Earle would sit next to Karla in a large room with chairs arranged in a large square, John recalled. “He was always around her, sitting next to her,” he said. The two began dating and, at Earle’s insistence, began attending AA meetings together. Eden Ministries founder Cliffe said he discouraged their relationship, citing AA’s guidelines about romantic involvements in early sobriety. “As soon as he latched onto her, he started to fall away from the principles of the program that we teach,” Cliffe said. Karla’s bubbly personality and pretty smile were impossible to ignore, but Earle also mentioned another attribute to John: her financial security, John said. Karla had a job in a large company with a 401(k) plan and equity in her condo, and she was receiving temporary disability payments during her rehab. As a convicted felon, Earle’s job possibilities were limited. “It wasn’t like, 'She’s loaded,’” John said. “But it was, 'This girl has some dough.’” Indeed, at around the same time early that spring, Cliffe recalled, Earle quit going to church and stopped attending meetings at Eden Ministries. “We expelled him from the program,” he said, “and he took off with her.” BY APRIL, 2011, KARLA Brada Mendez and Eric Allen Earle were a couple. Karla busied herself with cooking her favorite dishes: caldo de pollo and a spicy salsa she had learned from her Mexican grandmother. To Suzanne, the condo began to feel crowded. The man who had seemed so charming at meetings—"like a Boy Scout," Suzanne recalled—suddenly became domineering and suspicious. If Suzanne invited friends to the house, Earle demanded to know who they were, and what they were doing there. Uncomfortable, she moved out, and Earle moved in. Before she met him, Karla's monthly credit card balance hovered near $1,200, according to financial documents. In the few months that they lived together, Karla took on $21,000 in credit card debt. Earle, meanwhile, collected food stamps and unemployment benefits. When he did manage to find jobs, he signed his checks over to Karla, documents show. Despite Karla's exuberance about her new relationship, something started to seem off as the summer of 2011 progressed. Earle, who was handy around the house, discouraged her family from visiting, always explaining that the condo needed more home improvements before it would be comfortable for guests. When the couple went to Jaroslava's and Hector's house, they would stay only for a few minutes before excusing themselves to go to a meeting. Her parents and sister assumed it was part of Karla's redoubled efforts at sobriety, and they didn't pry. "He knew how to set boundaries and wouldn't let anyone get too close," Sasha said. She recalls feeling unsettled by Earle's dominance of Karla's time, but she kept it to herself. "Everyone else was so relieved that she seemed happier and healthier." Not everyone. Her friend Suzanne, who had moved to a condominium down the street from Karla's, started noticing strange things. A mother of three, she had regained custody of her children and would visit Karla, kids in tow. Karla had a key to the community pool, which Suzanne frequently borrowed. One day, Suzanne said, she came by and found the front gate locked. She called up to an open window, knowing Karla was not at work. No one responded. It was clear to Suzanne that Karla's sobriety had faltered. Earle would take the car, buy alcohol, and together the couple would hole up in the condo and drink. Though Karla preferred the high of pills, she drank with Earle, giving herself over to his drug of choice, Suzanne said. IN THE EVENING OF August 5, 2011, Karla ran down the street toward Suzanne's condo. She was disoriented, bloodied, bruised—and soaking wet. She said Earle had struck her in a drunken rage, blackening her eye and bruising her left upper arm. He had put her head under water while screaming obscenities, she said. Karla, too, had been drinking. Unlike many people, Suzanne said, when Karla drank, she almost never seemed inebriated. And when she drank, Suzanne said, she often had no recollection of what had occurred the night before. Suzanne asked her roommate to walk back with them to Karla's condo, where they could see a shattered window. Together the three of them confronted Earle, who, Suzanne said, was relaxing on the bed with his hands behind his head and his feet crossed. "'What are you doing here?'" Suzanne recalled Earle asking. "I told him I'd never seen anyone so beat up and still walking around," Suzanne said. "'This is Karla's house,'" she told Earle, "'and you're not welcome here.'" Some time later, Karla called 911, and the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrived. They photographed her bruises and her black eye, and carted Earle off to jail. In the squad car, he became so enraged that he broke a rear window with his head. From jail, however, Earle, who stood 6 foot 2 and weighed 210 pounds, managed to convince the 5-foot-4, 139-pound Karla that she had "attacked" him while she was blackout drunk, breaking his nose and bruising him severely. He claimed he was the victim. "She didn't remember," Suzanne said. "She just believed his version of events." Patrick Fry, Earle's sponsor, recalls noticing Karla's bruises. "Did he do that to you, girl?" he asked her. She demurred, Fry said. "I don't know if she was trying to cover his ass or what. She was really in love with the dude." Earle was convicted of property damage to the police car, but charges of beating Karla were dropped. The sheriff's office did not respond to a request for comment. The next day, despite Suzanne's protestations, Karla bailed Earle out of jail, charging $8,000 to her credit card for his bail and lawyer's fees. Karla told Joanne Fry, Patrick's wife and the woman she had asked to be her AA sponsor, that she had broken the window in her condo during her drinking binge. "She said she plopped down in a chair so hard she hit her head and broke the glass," Joanne Fry said. "I told her, 'That must have been some plopping.'" Together Karla and Joanne went to a nearby Lowe's store to find a replacement window. Days later, Karla announced to friends that she and Earle had become engaged. AT THE END OF August, Sasha called Karla to plan a celebration for Karla's 32nd birthday on September 3. "Bring Eric," Sasha suggested. Karla vetoed the idea, saying that they would keep the event just for family. "I just thought that was weird," Sasha said. "There were so many red flags." Each year, the legal system coerces more than 150,000 people to join AA. Many are drunken drivers ordered to attend a few months of meetings. Others are felons whose records include sexual offenses and domestic violence and who choose AA over longer prison sentences.Few, though, had foreseen the events of August 31. Late that evening, Earle called John, his former roommate from Eden Ministries, who was working the graveyard shift as an aerospace machinist. "He was drunk, running his mouth," John recalled. Karla, he said, was screaming in the background. "Johnny, he's drunk, don't listen to him," she cried. "Listen, Eric," John recalled saying, "you need to leave the house now. Things are going to go all bad." Earle responded with a string of obscenities, John said. Then John heard the dull smack of a fist hitting flesh. "I've been in jail," he said. "I know what punches sound like." A few minutes later, Eric's phone went dead. On breaks, John tried to reach both Earle and Karla, to no avail. Finally, at 11 that night, he got through to Karla. She assured him that she was upstairs in the bedroom, that Earle was downstairs, and that it was going to stay that way. But a few hours later, Karla's next-door neighbors reported hearing a loud television blaring from a common wall. They even called the sheriff to report the excessive noise, court documents show. Sheriff's deputies drove by the house and called the neighbors to say they heard nothing. The neighbors also reported that they heard Earle shouting an obscenity at odd intervals, until nearly 3 a.m. Around 7:30 that morning, court records show, they heard Earle shout Karla's name over and over. Around 8, he walked to a 7-Eleven and used Karla's credit card to buy iced green tea costing $12. At 8:45 a.m., he called Jaroslava and Hector. "She's gone," he told them. "You've got to come over. She's gone." Confused, Jaroslava thought Karla might have fled the condo. When she arrived, she saw the ambulance, the police and tape blocking off the entrance to her daughter's condo. "I'm sorry about your daughter's passing," a detective told her. Earle told the police that Karla had overdosed on drugs and alcohol, had fallen down the stairs, managed to get back up, and died in bed after he fell asleep. His story didn't align with the evidence: The door and doorjamb of the upstairs bedroom were split in two, likely from the push of a forced entry. Karla's neck was bruised and swollen, and the inside of her lips had profound contusions, apparently, the autopsy report said, from blunt force pressing against her teeth. Broken blood vessels had left the whites of her left eye bright red, the result of what the coroner said was a punch. The coroner concluded that the injuries, which included more than 30 bruises, were consistent with compression and strangulation. The toxicology report showed no alcohol, but there were four drugs in Karla's blood—an antidepressant she had been prescribed, marijuana, methamphetamines, and methadone. None, the coroner reported, were in amounts sufficient to cause death. After the police left the house that morning, Hector and Jaroslava found a letter from a bank, which had been opened and tossed aside. It showed that Karla had been rejected for a $30,000 loan. They also found eight large vodka bottles, all empty. Four months later, Eric Allen Earle was charged with the murder of Karla Brada Mendez. In his pretrial hearings, a new woman was at his side. Friends say they met at an AA meeting. IN SEPTEMBER 2012, AS they waited for the murder trial—no date has yet been set—the Mendez family in September 2012 filed a civil suit against Alcoholics Anonymous of Santa Clarita and Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, and several other defendants, contending that AA had a "reckless disregard for, and deliberate indifference … to the safety and security of victims attending AA meetings who are repeatedly preyed upon at those meetings by financial, violent, and sexual predators like Earle." As of this writing, AA of Santa Clarita didn't reply to multiple requests for comment. The complaint says "AA has been on notice for years that AA meetings are repeatedly used by financial, sexual, and violent predators as a means to locate victims." There is considerable evidence to support that assertion. Sexually exploitative actions toward newcomers in AA have long been detailed in AA's history; biographies of founder Bill Wilson detail his sexual encounters with attractive female members. One associate of Wilson's told a biographer that at one point, he and others feared Wilson's womanizing would derail the group altogether. The actions, which range from inappropriate advances to rape, are known in AA circles as the "13th Step." In 2007, stories in the Washington Post and Newsweek described the sexual and emotional abuse of young women at a cult-like AA group in Washington, D.C., called Midtown. The stories included the accounts of young women who said they were pressured to have sex with many AA members, but especially with the group leader, Michael Quinones, who has since died. Police concluded that no crime had been committed, since the women involved were over the age of 16 and therefore consenting adults. AA groups abroad have also confronted the issue of sexual predation among its members. In 2001, Australian AA officials published guidelines for how to bar financial, spiritual, and sexual predators from the group, noting that older members had a "moral obligation" to help protect vulnerable new members—and possibly a legal one. In 2002, 3,400 British AA groups voted to adopt a new code of conduct regarding predatory behavior, concluding, "Failure to challenge and stop inappropriate behaviour gives the offender permission to repeat the offensive behaviour and encourages others to follow suit." Buoyed by these actions, and prompted by the news accounts, in 2007 a member of the board of Alcoholics Anonymous in the U.S. and Canada drafted a seven-page memo to his colleagues on the board that listed accounts of sexually predatory behavior for which he had direct evidence. More than two years later, AA's newly created Subcommittee on Vulnerable Members responded with a one-page letter. Its sentences were lawyerly but the intent was clear. It said: "The subcommittee members agreed that the General Service Board in its position at the bottom of the A.A. service structure would not have a role in setting any behavioral policy or guideline for the A.A. groups or members in regards to protecting any vulnerable member. … The General Service Board has no authority, legal or otherwise, to control or direct the behavior of A.A. members and groups." In AA, reports from the country's 59,321 groups flow from groups to districts, from districts to regions, and from regions to the General Service Office in Manhattan. With the exception of the paid staff in New York, positions are unpaid. And the Brada Mendez case is not the only one of its kind. In 2010, a Hawaii judge mandated that Clayborne Conley, a troubled Iraq veteran, must attend AA after nine months in a state psychiatric hospital. Conley had post-traumatic stress disorder and a record of violence against women, facts little known to Kristine Cass, a Honolulu marketing consultant he met at AA. According to published reports, in midsummer 2010, Cass spurned Conley's romantic overtures. Enraged, he began to show up at her workplace. Early on the morning of August 20, Conley pried open the security bars of Cass' condo and shot Cass, her 13-year-old daughter, and a neighbor's dog before killing himself. And in 2012, Sean Calahan was on probation in Montana after jail time for molesting a 12-year-old girl. Among Lake County Court's demands for the first-time offender were that he attend AA meetings regularly, remain abstinent from alcohol, and not enter into any relationships with women. He was able to abide only by the first condition, according to court documents published in the Leader Advertiser, a Montana newspaper. His probation officers discovered alcohol in his possession, along with a diary in which he admitted to preying on women at AA meetings, precisely because they were fragile. "Will take sex where I can get it," Calahan wrote. "Who ever I can trick or use. Usually women early in sobriety cause they are the most vunerable. They have the most insecuritys so just a few words and a little care and they fall rite in to my trap. Its not there falt but I make them think it is there falt and tell them I love them and everything will be okay." To Victor Vieth, a former Minnesota prosecutor who now heads the National Child Protection Training Center in Minneapolis, none of these developments is surprising. Vieth has been involved in sexual abuse cases and prevention for 25 years and has become a nationally recognized expert in developing protective mechanisms for volunteers in service organizations. "It's predictable that if you put violent offenders in the company of those who are vulnerable, this is going to happen. This is exactly where they want to be, and who they want to target," Vieth said. Sentencing a man who has repeatedly been physically violent to women to attend AA meetings, he said, is akin to sentencing a pedophile to be a middle-school hall monitor. "Predators find the company of who they want and violate them," he said. "If you are a woman in AA and you have social factors intervening in your life and you need someone to understand you, offenders know that. They can demonstrate compassion and kindness. This is exactly where they want to be. It's 100 percent predictable that violence or sex offenses will occur because this is their target." Judges, he said, should consider the possibility of predatory behavior. Rogelio Flores, a Superior Court judge in Santa Barbara County, California, finished a six-year term on AA's board of trustees as one of its non-alcoholic members in April 2013. He acknowledged that mandating attendance at AA meetings was not always the best solution, but he said that it often seemed better than sending another person suffering from any combination of mental illness, alcohol, and substance abuse into California's overcrowded prisons. "In the balance of justice," he said, "there are a lot of competing interests." "I understand that AA isn't for everyone," Flores said. "I'm the first person to tell anyone." If it were up to him, Judge Flores said, he would devise a plan to put every convicted criminal through a psychological assessment to help determine the best treatment option. In recent years, researchers have developed newer, scientifically proven treatments for alcohol-use disorder, including a handful of medications. Many of those drugs are prohibitively expensive. "AA is one piece of a much bigger puzzle. How do we deal with sociopaths? What do we do with them? No one wants anyone to be hurt by predatory conduct," he said. "I wish I had a better answer for alcoholics," Judge Flores said. "I really do." The judge who required Earle to attend sessions most recently did not return calls for comment. In response to a query about the murder case, the public information officer of AA's General Service staff wrote in an email: "The matters you describe are distressing and disturbing." But she reiterated that each AA group is responsible for supervising itself. She quoted from the 2009 report from the Subcommittee on Vulnerable Members, which acknowledged that groups and individual members "may encounter a few members who do not have their best interests in mind about getting sober through the AA program of recovery. "It is hoped," the report went on, "that the areas, districts and groups will discuss this important topic and seek ways through sponsorship, workshops and assemblies and committee meetings to raise awareness in the Fellowship and encourage the creation of as safe an environment as possible for the newcomer, minors and other members or potential members who may be vulnerable." The information officer, who declined to be quoted by name, said it might be possible for the organization to develop "some form of document related to vulnerable members … if the members of the Fellowship of A.A in the U.S. and Canada, beginning at the grassroots level of the groups and working its way through the service structure, indicated that they wanted such a piece created." So far, there has been no such document. Santa Clarita Alcoholics Anonymous, which oversees the AA meetings in the area where Karla met Earle, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the case. All this leaves Vieth analogizing AA to Penn State University, the Catholic Church, or the Boy Scouts of America, each of which at first denied and then was forced to confront the abuse that had taken place in its midst. Vieth predicts that the Brada Mendez case will create an uncomfortable institutional reaction. "Typically, we only react when there’s a big story or a death, something that makes us so uncomfortable, we are motivated to change it. Very few institutions change in response to data," he said. "It's stories we connect to," he said, "that cause people to move." One day late this spring, Karla's parents and sister traveled to the Los Angeles County courthouse in San Fernando to attend a preliminary hearing for the murder trial. Jaroslava recalls wincing as they heard the testimony of the neighbors and dropping her head as the coroner described Karla's injuries. Earle stared straight ahead. "Karla thought she had met people who understood her struggle," Jaroslava said. "All she ever wanted was to be loved." This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Pink Boys: What’s the Best Way to Raise Children Who Might Have Gender Identity Issues? Posted: 18 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  In my email in-box a few weeks ago, I received a polite message from a woman named Sarah Hoffman who was writing to ask why I was being such a gender conservative. Sarah didn’t quite put it that way, but that was the gist of her message, and given that I’m usually accused of being a gender radical, I sat up and listened. And as I read the whole of Sarah’s message, I realized she was absolutely right. Sarah identifies herself as a mother of a “pink boy”—a boy whose manner of play and dress has often tended toward what’s common in girls. Sarah was writing to me specifically in response to a piece I’d written for the Hastings Center Report called “Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood: Inconclusive Advice to Parents.” There I had outlined the two basic clinical approaches taken to children labeled as having “gender identity disorder,” and had mentioned my sympathies for and reservations about each. The approach I called “therapeutic” seeks to see a child’s gender dysphoria evaporate, if at all possible. This typically involves strictly limiting the child’s access to gender-atypical activities and trying to help the child adjust to fit a social environment that (supposedly) requires gender divisions. It also often involves family therapy. Though it would seem to promise to make a child more comfortable with his body, there’s very little data that the therapeutic approach “works.” Moreover, the proponents of it have tended to be obsessed with measuring outcomes in terms of ultimate gender identity and sexual orientation rather than ultimate well-being, which surely is what should really matter. By contrast, the approach I called “accommodating” seeks to prepare the gender dysphoric child for a transgendered life—a life that will ultimately involve hormonal and surgical sex change. Though it seems superficially more gender progressive, the problem I have with this approach is that it may end up sending more children down a high-medical-intervention path than is really necessary to maximize well-being in the population of children who go through gender dysphoria. “You’ve done a good job of outlining the warring factions,” Sarah told me. But, she added, “I think that there is a third, quieter point of view—the perspective that, sure, transgender kids exist, but really, most of these gender-nonconforming kids are just kids who don’t fall to the most-masculine or most-feminine ends of the spectrum, and that’s okay. They don’t need treatment, they don’t need sexual reassignment, they just need a supportive home life, schools with anti-bullying protocols, and therapy for any harassment they face for being different.” Some pink boys may benefit simply from meeting a swishy gay man—or better yet, two or three such men who can show them you can grow from being a pink boy to a pink man and have (dare I say it?) a fabulous life.I felt kind of stupid reading Sarah’s message, because I realized that I had, in fact, left out this approach. I had targeted my article to parents who report that their male children are insisting they are girls or that their female children are insisting they are boys. But the truth is, as Sarah was suggesting, that a lot of “gender nonconforming” kids don’t have a simple story of being “trapped in the wrong body.” They are expressing more subtle, more complex, and more varied messages of self. What they need isn’t therapy; what they need is to know that it’s OK to be gender non-conforming. It’s perfectly OK be a male who has feminine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires, or a female who has masculine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires. Take Sarah’s son Sam as an example. Starting in toddlerhood and continuing through early elementary school, Sam expressed an interest in wearing a dress. Sarah, being progressive, didn’t see Sam’s wish as his unruly desire to collapse the social order. She didn’t see it as a sign of a profound mental illness. She saw a boy who wanted to wear a dress. And, as she pointed out to me, we don’t think so much (anymore) of girls who want to wear cargo pants. So why get so upset about Sam’s wish? Why not just recognize that he’s gender non-conforming and understand that if he gets bullied for that, the problem is the bullying and the suffering he is made to experience by the bully? I asked Sarah if we could converse by phone more about this, and we ended up talking for about an hour, and then more in follow-up emails. It was quickly obvious to me that Sarah was right: In my essay, I had set my expectations for parents’ and schools’ abilities to adjust way too low. This was rather disappointing, I have to say, in that I’m constantly criticizing health care professionals for setting their expectations of parents of “different” children too low. “You basically said in the essay that, in our culture, we don’t have a space for boys who are gender non-conforming, that they’ve got to conform or cross over into girlhood,” Sarah told me. “But our culture has, over the years, made space for women: to dress how they want, to vote how they want, to act however they want in the home and as parents, and we continue to make progress for girls and women.” So why not allow our culture the same potential for growth where males are concerned? “We don’t have to accept that our culture is unwilling to make a space. I’m not a Pollyanna,” Sarah clarified. “I don’t think there will be grand acceptance soon. But I think we can begin to make more space for boys to fully express who they are.” I asked Sarah if she thought there was ever a good reason for parents of a child with gender non-conformity to seek out clinical help. She answered sensibly again: “I think that, given the social context, a lot of families could benefit from mental health assistance. Children who are gender non-conforming are often persecuted and their families don’t know how to approach that, especially in communities that disallow non-conformity. Some therapists help parents to do the hard work of accepting a child who is different than they expected. Fathers—and, interestingly, the more masculine partner in a lesbian couple—tend to have stronger feelings about this. Parents need time to deal with their own issues, and help learning how to support their kids. And if the kids are being bullied, they need tools for dealing with it.” But, she went on, “there’s nothing inherently wrong with these boys,” boys who might want to wear dresses or take on a traditionally feminine role. I’ve actually written about this, about how in some places, like Samoa, there are systems that welcome such children. So why was I expecting so little progress in North America? It’s worth keeping in mind that in North America, some of the advocates of the “therapeutic” approach to childhood gender dysphoria have had a very negative view of sexual minorities, and so they’ve sought to “cure” children who might otherwise turn out gay, lesbian, bi, or transgender. That’s changed to some extent, and thank goodness. But now I really think we are seeing a problem coming in on the other end, namely that strong advocates of the accommodation approach are, I worry, too quick to conclude that a gender non-conforming child is destined to be transgender. The move toward transitioning children early may look progressive, but if you step back, you have to wonder why the Samoan approach isn’t the most progressive. I actually had a (truly) progressive pediatric endocrinologist at one of my talks express just this concern to me a few months ago—the concern that kids are being sent the route of sex-change too quickly. What we know about gender dysphoria in childhood suggests that we don’t actually know that much. Outcomes vary wildly, and it isn’t clear what effects clinical interventions have, if any. In case it isn’t obvious, sending a child the transgender route is not trivial. Lupron is typically used to delay puberty (to avoid unwanted pubertal changes), but this use of Lupron is off-label and poorly studied. Endocrinologists all over the country have worried to me about the long-term effects of this use. Surgical sex change will render a person infertile, in need of lifelong hormone replacement therapy, and carries significant risk to sexual function and physical health. Some transgender advocates don’t like to hear this. Because sex change saved their lives—and it really does save lives for people who are transgender—they understandably want children like them to have the best possible experience of transition. The problem is, it just isn’t clear which children are children like them, the children in whom significant gender dysphoria will persist. What we know is that, in a large percentage of children, gender dysphoria appears to go away (or maybe to become accepted as part of their personalities, so that the pressure to change stops?). We also know that a significant number of gay men report having had interests in wearing typically-feminine clothes and doing traditionally-feminine activities as children. So how on Earth can we know when a boy who wants to wear a dress will need an endocrinologist? Or even a psychologist? It’s not that simple. I’m going to say something incredibly politically incorrect: Some pink boys may benefit simply from meeting a swishy gay man—or better yet, two or three such men who can show them you can grow from being a pink boy to a pink man and have (dare I say it?) a fabulous life. I’ve actually met one therapist who whispered to me at a meeting that when he met a “gender dysphoric” pink boy who seemed to need this kind of “intervention,” it’s just what he provided (with a consultation by a colleague). The point was to let the boy know that there were even grown-ups like him, men who love “girly” things like beautiful clothes and Martha Stewart (and, um, men), and who are perfectly at home in their bodies and their selves. Why can’t you have (and keep) a penis and love sparkles? Lots of men have. I asked Sarah—who has engaged with many parents in situations similar to hers—about whether she thought some parents seek out the transgender route for their children because it will mean they might end up going from having a gay son to having a straight daughter. Was homophobia motivating these parents? Sarah observed that what seemed to be motivating many of these parents is what motivates all us parents—the desire for certainty, and maybe some sense that things will feel “normal” somewhere down the line if all goes as planned. Duh again—this is what I wrote about in an essay called “What to Expect When You Have the Child You Weren’t Expecting” in a book, Surgically Shaping Children. There I was writing about children born with norm-challenging bodies, but a boy in a dress—same experience of having the child you weren’t expecting. Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long—especially when you don’t know where it’s all going to go—it’s hard stuff. I’m not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I? I get that parents want to feel like they’re doing what they can to help resolve whatever suffering their child may be feeling, and prevent more suffering in the future. Sometimes they’re sold on the idea that a particular clinical approach will do that. The truth—that we’re not sure what “works” clinically, that it isn’t clear this should even be considered a clinical problem in any conventional sense, but that we are sure that many people still brutalize boys who wear dresses or even just have long hair—is pretty hard to take. Sarah concluded our conversation this way: “I want to be clear that I believe that people who are truly transgender should have societal support and access to whatever therapeutic care they need. If my own son were transgender, I would love and accept him as I do my gender-normative daughter, just as I will love them whether they are straight, gay, or bisexual. My position does not come out of lack of trans acceptance, it comes from wanting to see broader social acceptance for the entire spectrum of gender expression so that kids can really figure out who they are and not be pushed into a box that doesn’t fit.” And I’d add that we should especially avoid pushing children into a box that involves surgery and lifelong hormone treatments if it turns out that’s not what they need to be well. Being well needs to be the outcome we measure. |
| Chocolate: The Scent That Could Save Struggling Bookstores Posted: 18 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  Great news for independent booksellers striving to keep their shops profitable in an Amazon-dominated marketplace. Researchers in Belgium have discovered a simple, inexpensive way to keep customers in the store longer and, quite possibly, boost sales. They report shoppers are more likely to engage in leisurely browsing—and ultimately purchase books in certain popular genres, including romance novels—if the store is infused with the scent of chocolate. Writing in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, a research team led by Lieve Doucé of Hasselt University describes a 10-day experiment conducted in a general-interest bookstore in Belgium. "Retailers can make use of pleasant ambient scents to improve the store environment, leading consumers to explore the store."For approximately half of its open-for-business hours (either morning or afternoon, depending upon the specific day), the scent of chocolate was dispersed into the store from two locations. The smell was subtle enough that it wasn't immediately noticeable, but strong enough so that it could be instantly identified once it was pointed out. Researchers tracked the actions of every fifth customer to enter the store—a total of 201 people. They report that when the scent was activated, shoppers showed a greater tendency to take their time, check out a variety of titles, and/or chat with an employee. Specifically, "customers were 2.22 times more likely to closely examine multiple books when the chocolate scent was present in the store, compared with the control condition," they write. In addition, when the aroma was present, shoppers were less likely to search out one specific book and take it directly to the cash register. Something about the store's environment made them want to hang out a bit longer than they perhaps had planned. The researchers tracked sales of books in four popular genres. A panel of students had previously ranked two of them (food and drink and romance novels) as congruent with the smell of chocolate, and another two (history books and mysteries/crime thrillers) as particularly incongruent with that aroma. Altogether, 119 of the 201 tracked shoppers bought at least one book in one of those categories. They report sales for books in the first category increased by an impressive 40 percent when the chocolate smell was in the air. Perhaps even more encouragingly, those in the second category also rose, by a more modest but still substantial 22 percent, over the hours when the store was scentless. Interestingly, the customers were more likely to check out the crime thrillers and history volumes when the aroma was absent. The scent of chocolate apparently steered people away from those genres. But after controlling for the gender of the observed shoppers, sales of those books increased anyway during the chocolate-scented hours, apparently because those who did peruse the mystery or history aisles were more likely to buy multiple volumes. These results lead the authors to offer some practical advice: "Retailers can make use of pleasant ambient scents to improve the store environment, leading consumers to explore the store." Ideally, they add, the scents should be congruent with the merchandise on sale—say, the salty smell of the sea for a surf shop. It's certainly worth a try for hard-pressed independent bookstores—or even for a certain struggling chain. Indeed, the customer-pleasing power of chocolate might even inspire thoughts of a merger. Who wouldn't want to shop at Barnes and Nestlés? |
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