Philippine News Digest 33
July 25 - 5 August, 2002
Contents:
Study find boys hide sexual abuse
Vietnam tighten curbs on adoptions
Human progress improving- UN
Study find boys hide
sexual abuse
A new study from the University of South Australia has found that boys
generally keep silent about sexual abuse and use a variety of techniques to
mask the effects of the abuse. It also revealed that one in six boys would be
abused sexually before their 16th birthday but it was believed that
less than 10% of abused boys would rep[ort the abuse. Male sexual abuse
victims rarely told anyone at the time of the abuse and when they did, it was
usually many years later and expressed to a female. Source:
Childwise Newsletter June-July 2002.
Vietnam tighten curbs
on adoptions
Vietnam has introduced a new decree that tightens controls over foreign
adoptions of Vietnamese children in an attempt to halt fraud and child
trafficking. Under the new decree, all adoptions must be approved by a special
foreign adoption agency and children may only be adopted by foreigners from
countries which have bilateral adoption agreements with Vietnam. More than
10,000 Vietnamese children have been adopted by foreigners since Communist
Vietnam opened to the outside world in the mid 1980s. About two dozen people,
including some government officials, have been in the past two years from
soliciting children from unwed mothers and poor families and falsifying
documents for hundreds of children sold to brokers for foreign adoption.
Source: Associated Press report in Today, 3 August 2002.
Human progress
improving- UN
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