Web gives volume to whispers of assault

When I was in college, in the bygone days of typewriters and corded phones, there was a rumor of a gang rape on campus. A "town" girl had gone back to a fraternity house with a boy, and several others ended up having sex with her against her will.

Or so the story went. Many on campus fumed, avoided the suspected rapists and waited for the college administration or the police to act. Months went by. Nothing happened.

We graduated and went our separate ways. I suspect that the officials involved -- not to mention the young men -- were relieved. But regardless of what really happened that night at the frat house, the way it went unaddressed instilled distrust in me, and perhaps in thousands of others who were on campus at the time: Would people in charge stand up for women's safety and dignity?

Having to ask ourselves that question meant we lost some innocence about the world we were about to fully enter. And it raised the possibility that, maybe, ignoring ugly realities is right. The smart thing to do.

But now, that sort of official privilege has gone the way of the typewriter and corded phone -- as two recent stories of rape illustrate. Hundreds of protesters gathered in eastern Ohio last Saturday to "Occupy Steubenville." They called for justice in the case of a 16-year-old girl, who was allegedly drunk to the point of unconsciousness last August, carried around to parties and sexually assaulted while others watched. The girl was from across the Ohio River in Weirton, W.Va., and the accused are Steubenville High School football players.

The alleged assault became public in the days afterward, when partygoers posted photos and reports to Instagram and Twitter. Two 16-year-old boys were arrested and charged, and they face trial on Feb. 13. They maintain they are innocent.

However, some in the community were not finished with this case. They became convinced that the investigating sheriff wasn't taking it seriously enough. Online, a branch of the hacker collective known as Anonymous accused the sheriff of deleting video evidence, noted his friendship with the high school football coach, and began leaking information on people who are believed to be covering up the full extent of the assault.

Last weekend, protesters arrived from around the country -- like Occupy Wall Streeters, many wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Some speakers told their stories of being raped.

Steubenville city and police officials have been forced to respond by establishing their own website about the case, which they say is intended to sort fact from fiction.

Teenagers are obsessed with documenting their lives online, and oversharing and even sexual cyberbullying are real problems. But without social media, this case never would have gotten such broad attention. And it's all but certain that Steubenville officialdom would not be trying to explain itself online to a bewildered international audience.

The Ohio story has parallels to the horrific alleged gang rape and fatal beating last month of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on a bus in Delhi, India. Outraged, thousands of people took to the city's streets, only to be met by police with tear gas and long sticks. The government closed roads to discourage protests, but instead, as word spread through social media, protests sprung up around the country. Six men have been arrested.

No doubt, there is danger in rushing to judgment and in anonymous online reports. People's reputations and lives are at stake. But social media are proving to be useful to call for justice in cases of rape, where justice is still too often uncertain, inconvenient and easily avoided.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

We need better involuntary commitment rules for mentally ill

Tomorrow will mark three weeks since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. The wretchedness of that day has touched off a national debate about preventing mass murders -- as it should. But lately the conversation has narrowed to gun control.

In a year-end interview, responding to a question about the political fights ahead, President Barack Obama voiced his support for banning assault rifles and high-capacity clips, and for better background checks for gun buyers. What I didn't hear from the president was a vow to strengthen our mental health system to treat people like Adam Lanza before they descend into madness. Whatever Lanza's technical diagnosis -- schizophrenia? -- executing two classrooms of first-graders is by definition mad.

Gun control is easier to discuss, because there is an identifiable, organized opposition in the National Rifle Association. But mental illness is harder to recognize, reach and heal.

Consider the divergent responses I received to a column that ran right after the Sandy Hook killings. I wrote that in New York, as in most states, the law allows for involuntary commitments of those who are mentally ill. What's more, New York permits someone to alert the authorities to dangerous behavior while remaining anonymous.

Some readers wondered about the potential for abuse of involuntary commitment -- also called civil commitment. "How do [the authorities] know that you are just not furthering a neighborly feud or personal vendetta?" one man emailed.

Others said that even though such laws exist, they are almost unenforceable in practice. A mental-health group home administrator said he has often been frustrated when calling for help: "There is no mechanism for involuntary admission unless the person is either violent or expresses violent ideas in front of a psychiatrist or police."

And so there is the conundrum. The problem isn't the law, exactly, but the judgment, resources and political will to enforce it.

We have yet to find the place where the pendulum should rest since deinstitutionalization began in the 1960s. The idea was to wipe out the abuse of mentally ill people, to respect their civil rights by closing psychiatric hospitals and moving toward community-based care, such as group homes and outpatient treatment. But the system that was supposed to take the place of psychiatric hospitals has never been adequately funded or built out.

The results are cruelly inadequate. Twenty percent of prison inmates, and at least one-third of the homeless, are seriously mentally ill, according to the national Treatment Advocacy Center. Mostly, they are not receiving the care they need to heal, stabilize and lead full lives.

And, as appears to be the case with Lanza, responsibility for care falls to individual families -- sometimes with disastrous results. In two other recent mass murders -- the killing of 12 people and injuring 58 at a Colorado movie theater in July, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killing of six others in Tucson two years ago -- family, acquaintances and school officials had been alarmed about the behavior of the two men who became suspects. Yet no one stopped them.

Most mentally ill people are not violent, but statistics favor stronger civil commitment laws. According to a 2011 study by the University of California, Berkeley, states with stronger laws have homicide rates about one-third lower.

Vice President Joe Biden is preparing a report on preventing mass shootings. If he wants a place to start, he might consider our patchwork of state civil commitment laws -- both how they are written and how they work in practice.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Reasons to shoo away the humbuggers

It's been a Scrooge of a year, wouldn't you say? Ebenezer Scrooge - whom I caught on television the other night looking a lot like the actor George C. Scott - was a man who refused to share any of his wealth with the world around him. The year 2012 bears a resemblance.

This year, we endured a divisive battle for the presidency, which was fought at times as though the only thing that mattered was how much money either side could raise. That's a sad statement for a country that stands for democracy.

Thousands were wiped out financially and emotionally by superstorm Sandy. Many innocents were lost to deranged gunmen in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn.

The economy refused to rebound, and Washington wouldn't come to agreement over anything.

And so the year 2012 was stingy like Scrooge. But in "A Christmas Carol," Charles Dickens thankfully gives us examples of two people who don't lose faith in the old miser: his long-suffering clerk Bob Cratchit and his nephew, Fred.

Cratchit raises a glass to Scrooge over the family's meager Christmas dinner - and over Mrs. Cratchit's objections. And Fred continues to invite his uncle to dine, year after year, even though the old man riddles him with insults.

We all know the end of the story. After his ghostly visitations, Scrooge accepts dinner with Fred and becomes a generous benefactor to the Cratchits. And so, neither should we close our hearts to hope for the 21st century.

Taking a wide look around, here are a few silver linings that emerged in 2012.

*Apple announced that it is bringing back some of its manufacturing to the United States. In interviews, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, said the company would spend about $100 million on U.S. manufacturing operations in 2013.

*Several cities, including New York, are reporting declines in childhood obesity - perhaps showing that public health campaigns can be effective. Obesity is a significant factor in health care costs.

*The years-long deployment of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in an unexpected gain for quality child care in this country. When parents began shipping out, the Department of Defense realized that there weren't enough approved, private child care slots. So the military worked with a national organization, Child Care Aware, to train and certify child care providers, greatly expanding the supply of quality programs.

*Here's another unexpected gain. During the economic downturn that began in 2008, even as people are hurting financially, they are demonstrating more compassion. The Corporation for National and Community Service reports a rise in volunteerism - exactly the opposite of what happened during hard economic times in the past.

There are many more bright spots; we see them in our personal lives every day. Let's hold a hope in our hearts for rebirth in our public life as well.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

We can no longer ignore need for gun control, care for mentally ill

Make it stop.

That's how I react to yet another horrible mass killing. Like the third-grade class at Sandy Hook Elementary School that huddled into a corner - "squished," as one student described it - and the gym students hidden in a closet, I just want to shrink into a defensive posture. Don't tell me any more.

Don't offer any explanations or reasons. We've heard too many. There is no good reason why, when I talk to my children about mass murder, they've heard it all before in their 14- and 15-year lifetimes. As a country, we should not be resigning ourselves to this reality.

We need to face up to two facts we've been avoiding: that we have permitted an outrageous access to guns and level of gun violence. And we are pitifully inadequate at dealing with people in mental and emotional crisis.

It pains me to say this, but we have gone too far in protecting individual rights, and we must pull back and make this society safer. Get the guns out of madmen's hands, even if it means some hunters and self-defense advocates have to put up with more bureaucracy. The cost is worth it.

Strong and savvy voices - those of Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola) and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg among them - are raised now on gun control. Let's hope they are not muffled by politics yet again.

And what about the mentally ill? We always seem to find out after the fact that someone suspected this person was about to snap. A college mental-health counselor, or a parent, or a friend.

Does it seem at all likely that no one around Adam Lanza - whom officials have named as the shooter - recognized his potential to break? If someone in your home were about to murder 27 people, wouldn't you have some hint? Wouldn't something feel wrong?

It's not that we need stronger laws on involuntary commitment. For the most part, we already have them. We just don't use them.

Such laws vary by state. In New York, a person can alert the authorities that someone is dangerously askew, and that person will be taken in for observation and evaluation by a psychiatrist within 48 to 72 hours. The person making the report can remain anonymous.

One ready place to research the commitment laws is on each state's department of mental health website. The New York State Office of Mental Health has hotline emergency numbers on its home page. Police and other first-responders also know where to direct people.

I don't know how often involuntary commitment is used. But it needs to be more widely known-about. The symptoms of someone in mental crisis are most times not subtle: mood swings, abusive behavior, isolation, inability to cope with daily tasks like bathing, loss of touch with reality.

Perhaps it's often just too hard to admit that someone you love is so far gone. I wonder what Nancy Lanza - Adam's mother, who was also killed - was going through.

Too often, we look for a history of mental illness and treatment before we act. We want a diagnosis, some proof - someone who has "gone off his meds" or tried suicide.

But a person who is about to snap for the first time slips out of this net. These are the ones who design and execute elaborate schemes to go out in a blaze. It must satisfy something that's gone wrong inside them, but we should not have to be a party to this any longer.

It sickens me to think that I will have to read about the "reasons" for this horror, as though the torments of the shooter could account for the terrible cost for all of these innocent children, their families, their communities - and our country.

I don't want to see the photos of those Connecticut parents burying their kids. And it makes me die inside to think we could have prevented this tragedy but we didn't get serious enough. About guns, about insanity. We need to make it stop.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Individualism vs. collectivism is a false choice

Hurricane Sandy

Some people say the 2012 presidential race was a contest between worldviews. On one side is the collective view (represented by President Barack Obama), and on the other, the idea that the individual succeeds on his or her own (promoted by Mitt Romney).

Think of the sound bites we had on these themes - from Rep. Paul Ryan's admiration for ultra-individualist Ayn Rand to Obama's reminder that business people didn't "build that" by themselves. They had a country behind them.

Superstorm Sandy, as if on cue, blew in to provide us with daily reminders of how we need each other. Driving past a recently bisected tree that had been blocking my daily commute, I know: I didn't cut that.

Neighbors have been checking on one another's well-being. Even in the heat of the close presidential contest, leaders of opposite parties returned to civility. Perhaps New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who considered challenging Obama, understood that he might need the White House - whether it's inhabited by an R or a D.

In "The Social Conquest of Earth," published earlier this year, naturalist Edward O. Wilson argues that humans evolved as we did precisely because we have strains of both individualism and collectivism. Wilson, who has spent years studying ant colonies, updates the idea that the fittest individuals survive. In fact, groups in which individuals sacrifice for the good of the collective have, over millions of years, won out. "Selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals," Wilson writes, "while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals."

Groups that are willing to share, to withhold individual rewards in order to further the growth of the collective, emerged from the evolutionary contest to become modern humans.

But we've retained characteristics of both, Wilson says. We are forever stuck in between selfishness and generosity. If we were all-out collectivists, we would cooperate robotically, like ants. As extreme individualists, humans wouldn't have formed societies where we specialize in healing, finding food and building shelters.

It's that tension of being stuck in between that played out in the presidential election - and will continue to bedevil us. What's the right place on the spectrum? Does it change after a hurricane?

Individualists say that when people are free to act in their own self-interest, society benefits. This philosophy promotes hard work and worries about creeping totalitarianism.

Collectivists point out the many things we accomplish together that we wouldn't do singly - efforts that spread the cost over many people and even many generations: medicine, the university system, roads and airports, our judicial system, arming a military, fighting fires.

People who hold the collectivist view fear that job creators want an excuse for greed and special tax treatment.

The great thing is that we don't have to choose between these views - no matter what you heard on the presidential campaign trail. Science argues for some of each.

So, what's it to be to lift us out of the Great Recession? Other catastrophes, like the Great Depression, have catalyzed collective solutions. We emerged with the Social Security Act and the GI Bill and a sense that we're in this together.

It's been difficult over the past several months to feel a sense of fellowship, however. I purposely didn't vote for either candidate in my Assembly district yesterday because I thought they made false, destructive claims about each other.

So, I'm glad it's the day after Election Day. Let's set aside fake choices and use all of our abilities to move on.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

The 'lost generation' of teenage workers

iStock

I well remember how my first job made me feel: capable, creative, in charge. I was a summer counselor at a YMCA day camp, and still practically a kid myself, just out of 10th grade. I made a lot of mistakes.

As the arts and crafts counselor, I blew most of my $200 budget on Popsicle sticks and gimp. We ran out of arts and crafts supplies halfway through the summer, and so taking long "nature walks" became our fallback. I wonder what the campers' parents thought.

Making mistakes like that is partly what early jobs are all about. We learn, and then make better decisions when the "real" job comes along.

So it's troubling that teens today are facing their third straight summer of bleak employment prospects -- in fact, the worst since World War II, when the government began keeping track. In April, the jobless rate for 16- to 19-year-olds approached 25 percent. And the unemployment rate only counts those actively looking. Many are too discouraged by the dismal economy to try.

Parents may debate the merits of teens taking jobs bagging groceries versus studying or pursuing music, sports or college-level courses. But the poorest Americans don't have that choice, and to double down on their woes, they are hit hardest by teen unemployment. Last summer, just one in five teenagers with annual family income below $20,000 had a job, according to a report by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies.

Not only aren't these teens earning needed cash -- or learning the life lessons I got at the YMCA -- but the joblessness they experience now may drag them down for years. One study in the United States and Britain said that 37-year-old men who had sustained a year of unemployment before age 23 made 23 percent less than their peers. The equivalent gap was 16 percent for women.

College graduates who took jobs beneath their education or outside of their fields often never got back to where they might have been, according to what the Japanese learned from their "lost decade" of economic doldrums in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the Japanese economy recovered, employers preferred graduates fresh out of school, creating a generation that suffers higher rates of depression, heart attack and suicide, and lower life expectancy.

These structural problems with capitalism -- the ups and downs of the business cycle -- should not be borne by individuals, but collectively. That's why we have unemployment insurance, for example.

Other countries seem to have a better understanding of this. Germany's renowned apprenticeship program, a training period of two to four years, attracts roughly two-thirds of vocational school students there. They're often hired afterward, one reason Germany has a far lower youth unemployment rate than us, at 9.5 percent. Firms and government share the apprenticeship expenses.

The Netherlands, also keen on averting a lost generation of workers, is dividing full-time private sector jobs into two or three part-time ones, with government providing supplemental income for part-time workers. When the economy improves, Dutch 20-somethings will be ready with skills and experience.

The New York Youth Works program has the right idea. On Long Island, at least 64 employers have signed up. The program offers them tax credits for hiring low-income youth. Given that unemployment among teens is more than twice the 7.4 percent rate for adults on Long Island, we should expand this program.

When teens work, it teaches them independence, responsibility, a good work ethic and how to get along with others. Our collective future depends on investing in their success.

This essay was first published in Newsday.

Mike Wallace left his mark on awareness of depression

iStock

Mike Wallace, the groundbreaking TV newsman who died Saturday at 93, worked hard at earning his tough-guy image. During some of the most volatile events of our times, he asked pointed questions of powerful people: members of the Nixon administration, cigarette manufacturers, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan, champions of the Vietnam War. He tossed aside his nervy image, though, to highlight a problem that many men have difficulty admitting: depression. This revelation by a highly visible tough guy has encouraged untold numbers to seek help.

Wallace spoke publicly about his depression for the first time during a "60 Minutes" retrospective of his career in 2006. He told the camera that he had tried to commit suicide.

Before Wallace went public, his doctor advised him against owning up to the illness. "'That's bad for your image,'" Wallace quoted his doctor as saying, in an interview with the Saturday Evening Post. "But finally, I had to face up to it."

Although it's more common for women to suffer from depression, men with this affliction more often end their lives, according to research published in the journal "Suicide" in 2008. Because families and the press are reluctant to make suicides public, it's not widely known that suicides are far more common in the United States than homicides - an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 each year.

The majority of men who kill themselves have not asked for help before their deaths, according to Ciaran Mulholland, a psychiatrist and international expert from Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose findings hold for men all over the world. The reasons are poorly understood. Perhaps men are less likely to recognize that they are under stress or unhappy, Mulholland says, and more reluctant to consult their doctor about their distress.

Exacerbating the problem, health professionals are often less likely to consider a diagnosis of mental illness in men, Mulholland adds. This is true also for seniors, and especially African-American seniors, according to Charles Reynolds, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Depression is hard to admit to. Even with everything we've learned about mental illness, it's often viewed as a moral or personal failing rather than as a medical problem. There's no blood test to show that someone is depressed, just a list of grim symptoms. Similarly, there's no clear understanding of what causes depression, just its risk factors: unemployment, social isolation, chronic illness.

Wallace was in his mid-60s when he plunged into a depression that put him in the hospital. He had been fighting a courtroom battle for his journalistic credibility, after being sued by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded the U.S. military in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Westmoreland alleged that he had been libeled by the Wallace documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," which claimed that U.S. leaders had deliberately underestimated enemy troop strength to prop up domestic support for the war. Westmoreland eventually dropped the suit.

In the midst of the trial, Wallace remembered, "I couldn't sleep, couldn't think straight, was losing weight, and my self-esteem was disappearing."

When Wallace spoke publicly about his depression, his message was that it is treatable - so much so that, at 88, he said the decades since he had begun taking antidepressants had been the best of his life. He lobbied for better health insurance coverage for mental illness.

When he embraced his depression, Wallace was motivated by a cause larger than himself. Just as he was in his journalism. This was one tough guy who could inspire us at our weakest.

Essay first published in Newsday.

Uneasy about Chris Brown and the Grammys

Chris Brown

Within minutes of singer Chris Brown's appearance on the 2012 Grammy Awards - as he moved liquidly to his new single, "Turn Up the Music" - the phrases #womanbeater and #chrisbrownbeatswomen began trending worldwide on Twitter.

What that means is that people with Twitter accounts sent those phrases to their followers, in enough numbers that they showed up on every Twitter user's home page.

To achieve "trending" was a victory for those who wanted to protest Brown's appearance on stage. They said his brutality three years earlier should have disqualified him from a Grammy platform; he performed twice during the show - clearly a favorite of the show's producers.

On the eve of the 2009 Grammys, news broke about Brown beating his then-girlfriend and fellow pop star, Rihanna. The images of her beautiful, badly bruised face were heart-rending. The incident would later lead to felony assault charges for Brown, to which he pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of community service, probation and counseling - a light-seeming sentence.

At the 2012 awards show, Brown won his first Grammy, for best R&B album. Afterward, the 22-year-old took to Twitter to tell off his critics: "Hate all u want becuz I got a Grammy now! That's the ultimate --- off!"

But Brown's was not the most disturbing reaction of the night. That came from at least 25 women on Twitter: "chris brown can punch me whenever he wants." And, "chris brown can beat me all he wants ... I'd do anything to have him, oh my."

This is really disturbing. Could these women really understand what they are saying? Could they have been in abusive relationships before and are volunteering for more? That seems unlikely. More probably, they are making the age-old mistake of confusing emotional intensity with love, and passion.

But the problem with that, of course, is that it seldom ends with one blow. U.S. government statistics from 1976-2005 state that 30 percent of all the murders of women are the result of "intimate partner violence." And what doesn't kill women - or men - in abusive relationships, can cripple them for life. Think of Whitney Houston, recently dead of an assumed drug overdose, who became hooked on drugs during an allegedly abusive 15-year marriage. Abuse, drugs, self-loathing - they can be a toxic mix.

Before the tweets from these young women, we could fool ourselves into believing that they had more self-respect. At one time, women were believed to stay in abusive relationships for financial reasons, or out of fear. The women's movement - with its push for access to paychecks - and the greater availability of women's shelters, were supposed to have won our freedom.

Now, the Grammys, and the Chris Brown twitterati, are glorifying a man who put his then-girlfriend in the hospital.

More disturbing still are the rumors that Rihanna herself is seeing him again. Gossip columns report that they spent Valentine's night together. This is a woman who found the strength to leave him once.

Surely, Brown could be a changed man. He was only 19 in 2009, and the court ordered him into counseling. But if his anger and narcissism have eased, there is no public sign of it. He seems unrepentant.

The only public message is that the Grammys organization rewards batterers - and so do their fans, and perhaps, their ex-girlfriends. These are horrific lessons for our daughters and sons.

Essay first published in Newsday.

Another mother leaves a great job

People leaving jobs for reasons they don't want to discuss often say something hackneyed about spending more time with family. But it appears that Michèle Flournoy literally means it.

Flournoy, 50, is a top Pentagon policy adviser and potential first female defense secretary. She announced this week that she will quit after the New Year to have more time with her three children, ages 14, 12 and 9. Her work for the Defense Department often runs from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and over many weekends.

Flournoy's work sounds fascinating. She testifies before Congress, and is strategizing troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's a lot to give up for three kids.

Which is why I love that she stated her reason so baldly: The work of being a mother is important, too.

It's possible there's more to her story -- who knows? But her public affirmation of motherhood is brave. It risks the anger of those who argue women can "have it all." Flournoy invites the envy of parents who have to work for financial reasons; she's married to a top deputy at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She risks instilling doubt in the junior women -- perhaps also mothers -- whom she sought to mentor and inspire. And she courts ridicule by the ignorant. Remember when talk show host Mike Gallagher called Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly's three-month maternity leave "a racket"?

Highly visible women should keep talking about the importance of parenting, because they can have repercussions for working moms and dads who aren't among the power elite. There are many parents who don't have the protections of money or status to assert something so basic as the need for time away from a job to raise children.

And working people have ever less leverage now, as the depressed economy has "excessed" so many into the unemployment line. In the spring of 2009, a House subcommittee on Workforce Protections, chaired by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), heard testimony from advocates that the dismal economy was pushing parents out of the workforce because their opportunities for flexible work schedules were drying up. Parents who had worked a four-day week, for example, found their employers suddenly requiring five days.

Sometimes, employers were trying to stretch to make do with the current workforce, because they didn't want to hire anyone new. But the result was often to upset a delicate balance and force the parents out.

Flexible schedules are rarely set down in writing and can disappear when an accommodating manager is replaced by someone less family-friendly. Another possibility -- and the one that most concerned Congress -- was that employers could be using the bad economy to discriminate against pregnant workers and parents.

Recognizing how precarious the work-family balance continues to be, some companies have begun making flexible work arrangements more formal. For example, KPMG, the audit firm based in Idaho, with offices in Melville, has a flexibility website where employees can explore compressed work weeks, telecommuting, job sharing and more.

Of course, accounting firms like KPMG battle notoriously high turnover, so they look for ways to retain employees. At other kinds of jobs, many workers don't even have paid sick days -- in fact, 47 percent of private-sector workers, according to the Department of Labor. We have a long way to go as a country that supports parents.

People like Flournoy should keep up the drumbeat about the importance of child-raising, reminding employers that parents have important work off the job, too.

First published in Newsday.

Readers respond: Students need layoff facts

Regarding the column by Anne Michaud, "Keep school budget talk out of the classroom" [Opinion, Dec. 8], I agree that children need to feel secure in school. Their focus needs to be on learning. A major part of that learning should, in my opinion, be relating knowledge to reality. What good are the three Rs if we don't see the issues that are facing us daily?

We live in a society that has a small percentage of people voting in general and school elections. This lack of response leads to lack of control over the direction our country takes and sometimes even to corruption in government.

It is imperative that our children learn to be good citizens and participate in our democracy. If this means bringing up budget concerns to students old enough to understand, then they should be mentioned. An open discussion talking about the whole process and not focusing just on layoffs, would be in order. This hopefully would bring students to begin thinking about mundane issues that our society faces on a daily basis. Opening their young minds would undoubtedly lead to a more involved electorate later on.

Steve Tuck, Huntington

If a teacher is asked a question by a student, shouldn't it be answered? I find it amusing that a person who contributes to Newsday's Opinion pages wants to now control the things we say in class. Newspaper columnists get their forum without any input from readers.

I find all the harsh rhetoric printed in the last several years about teachers "divisive, angry and unhealthy" as well. When class sizes are larger and programs are cut, remember the true culprits: the financial institutions and oil companies whose employees and owners still get record bonuses each year -- on average, more than teachers make in a year.

Rich Weeks, Middle Island

I believe that Anne Michaud completely missed the point. School budget talks allow Social Studies teachers to discuss relevant and current issues facing our communities. This issue lends itself to great discussions of limited resources, the role of the citizen in a democracy, economic choices and a whole host of other topics. This is what we call a teachable moment.

We do our students a great disservice when we try to shelter them from what is happening in the news.

Kathleen Stanley, Massapequa Park Editor's note: The writer is a high school Social Studies teacher.

As a teacher in a public high school, I feel that I need to explain why teachers sometimes discuss rules governing teacher layoffs (last in, first out) with their students. A lot of students don't understand the difference between being laid off and being fired. They just assume that when someone is excessed because of budgetary reasons, that person has been fired for cause.

I feel it is important to explain to students how tenure and seniority work. It's bad enough when colleagues are let go. I'm certainly not going to let their reputations be tarnished with misinformation.

The column is right in this sense, that younger children should not be frightened by teachers into thinking Mom and Dad hold the key to a teacher's survival, and children should therefore convince their parents to vote for the budget. It's a cheap ploy.

However, I also think that when students come to school and tell me their parents say I make too much money and have it really easy, that I should be allowed to defend my profession. I don't think it's inappropriate to discuss the realities with older students, some of whom will be able to participate in the upcoming budget votes.

Jeffrey A. Stotsky, Forest Hills

Time for a 'living wage' for the middle class?

With millions out of work, complaints about the decline in middle-class wages may seem misplaced. But without some shoring up, the middle class will remain dispirited -- and our economy, which is 70 percent dependent on consumer spending, will remain in the dumper.

It may be that there's a role for government to play in buttressing these eroding wages, which result not only in a declining standard of living, but also in a family life so pressure-filled that it leads to its own problems: angry homes, fast-food diets, dependence on alcohol and drugs.

Calling for any sort of government role during these tea party times can raise charges of socialism. But the idea of a wage that supports some minimum standard of living -- shelter, clothing, food -- has been broached on and off for more than a century.

In the late 1800s, social activists began protesting wages earned by a working-class man that were not sufficient to sustain his family, without the additional wages of working children and mothers. The Catholic Church published a fundamental social teaching, "Rerum Novarum" (on capital and labor), that read, "Wealthy owners of the means of production and employers must never forget that both divine and human law forbid them to squeeze the poor and wretched for the sake of gain or to profit from the helplessness of others."

Shortly afterward, Australia's courts ruled that an employer must pay a wage that guaranteed a standard of living that was reasonable for "a human being in a civilized community" for a family of four to live in "frugal comfort."

In the United States, these ideas led to laws forbidding child labor, making education compulsory and protecting women from exploitive labor conditions. The campaign to establish a "family wage" was defeated, but in 1938, a lower standard, the federal minimum wage, was passed.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Patrick Moynihan and in 1968, a group of 1,200 economists including Paul Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith, have all supported some kind of minium income guarantee.

Echoes of this debate are being heard now, in the Vatican's critique last week of the global financial system, and in places where labor unions still have some sway: In the New York City Council, which at the urging of retail workers may require employers in commercial developments built with public subsidies to pay at least $10 an hour, a "living wage" higher than the minimum wage of $7.25; and in Albany, where the State Legislature in April passed an increase to $9 an hour for home health aides, who are represented by the influential 1199 SEIU United Health Care Workers East. That increase takes effect on Long Island in 2013.

It's easy to see why the lowest-paid workers would need a boost from someone powerful enough to argue on their behalf. But to make the argument for the middle class, one has to believe that this great swath of America, nearly half the country, has special value. And it does: The stability and upward mobility of the middle class not only underpin the U.S. economy but give America its famously optimistic and innovative spirit.

That spirit is on display as the middle class makes the best of things today: The average American has added around a month's worth of work, 164 hours per year, in the last two decades. One-third of American families have reduced their savings for college, according to a 2010 Sallie Mae/Gallup poll, and another 15 percent are not saving at all. Retirement savings are in similar decline.

How much more can the middle class cinch in its belt, before we lose what's precious about this way of life?

First published in Newsday.

Bullets are wrong way out of a marriage

As the facts stand, it seems wrong to allow Barbara Sheehan to get away with killing her husband. Sheehan, 50, is the Howard Beach, Queens, woman who was just acquitted of murder by reason of self-defense, based on her claims of physical and psychological abuse by Sgt. Raymond Sheehan, a retired cop and her husband of 24 years.

She shot him 11 times on a February morning in 2008, leaving him dead in their bathroom, where he had been shaving. She got off 11 rounds -- and he? Zero. Considering the circumstances, this doesn't seem as much like a woman who fired in self-defense as someone who was shooting to kill.

And yet, a jury on Thursday found her not guilty of murder. It's troubling that, with as many social and legal supports as we've erected for abused partners in the past 40 years, Barbara Sheehan still felt she had to resort to killing to escape her marriage, no matter how nightmarish.

Up until the 1970s, domestic violence, and especially violence against women, was dismissed by the criminal justice system as "a family matter." Perpetrators were often not arrested or charged with crimes. Police gave a low priority to "domestic" calls.

But much has changed. Many states have enacted mandatory arrest laws for reports of violence. Some states have set up special courts and treatment programs for batterers. Victims can seek restraining orders and take refuge in clandestine emergency shelters. The U.S. Department of Justice created an Office on Violence Against Women in 1994, and estimates that this crime fell by more than 50 percent in the subsequent decade.

Sheehan testified that she feared her husband would kill her in one of his rages. He kept at least one gun with him at all times, had smashed her head into a cement wall, and had often held a gun to her head. She said he insinuated that his past as a police officer would make it difficult for her to report him and escape his orbit. She claimed that his threats had been growing more serious.

Sheehan told the court that on that final morning, Feb. 18, she took her husband's revolver and tried to sneak out of their home. But he allegedly confronted her with his 9-mm Glock pistol, which he had taken into the bathroom. She fired five shots from the revolver, retrieved his pistol, and then emptied that into his body too.

Acquitted of murder, Sheehan faces sentencing Nov. 10 on a conviction of gun possession, which could carry three to 15 years behind bars.

What she apparently did not do, before resorting to this lethal act, was call 9-1-1. During Sheehan's monthlong trial, she produced no record of reports to police. She didn't claim, as women often did when their customary role was housewife, that she couldn't afford to leave; she had a job, as a school secretary. Nor could she have been afraid of leaving her children behind: Their daughter and son were grown.

Granted, it may have been dangerous for Sheehan to inform to the police on one of their own. And domestic violence victims are said to enter a kind of mental paralysis and passivity after years of domination, humiliation and torture. Statistics argue that Sheehan had good reason to fear for her life; of those killed by an intimate partner each year, three-quarters are female.

The prosecution argued that she stayed in the marriage to collect her husband's life insurance money. But there should have been some half step she could have taken. Remaining passive in the face of abuse and then nailing someone with 11 bullets shouldn't have felt like her only option. Raymond Sheehan was probably a monster. But society has worked hard to ensure that battered women don't have to resort to violence, too.

First published in Newsday.

Economic trends threaten families' health

After listening to President Barack Obama's job-creation address last week, I kept coming back to the idea that he wants to give payroll tax breaks to businesses that offer people pay raises. That struck me as odd, given that unemployment stands at 9.1 percent, and you'd think that this hard-times president would be focused exclusively on getting people back to work.

But even people with jobs are facing time and money pressures in this economy, pressures that are bad for families' health.

Certainly, putting cash in people's pockets should help to rev up the listless consumer economy. But it looks like the president is also acknowledging just how much wages have eroded in the last couple of decades.

Real wages have been declining since 1983 and that means the middle class has less buying power. At the same time, the average American has added around a month's worth of work -- 164 hours per year -- in the past two decades. The number of dual-income households has risen, as well as the number of people working multiple jobs. It's not hard to imagine that people are putting in more time at work to make up for the erosion in their wages. That sounds like a very busy -- an overly busy -- middle class.

This busyness has consequences for the mental and physical health of parents and children -- and study after study substantiates this. A six-year study of 11,540 working parents in France, published in 2007, showed that people who had higher work stress or greater family demands were more likely to miss work due to poor mental health, particularly depression. Research on working parents in New York's Erie County demonstrated a relationship between family-work conflict and depression, heavy alcohol consumption, poor physical health and high blood pressure.

Time pressures also contribute to weight problems. For the first time in history, there are more overweight than underweight adults worldwide, according to new research at American University. A study published in the January-February issue of the journal Child Development found that children's body mass index rose the more years their mothers worked over their lifetimes. One explanation offered is that working parents have limited time for grocery shopping and food preparation.

Not so long ago, as a society we were asking, is it better for families if parents stay home with kids or work outside the home? Moms were usually the parents in question. Now, because of steadily declining purchasing power, for most people, it's less a matter of choice than necessity.

I have to ask myself, was this a conscious decision? Did Americans choose "working parents" as the better alternative? Was it a good direction or have we lost something in the translation? Have we perhaps given too little thought to how parents can give both their employers and their children what they need?

The financial and time pressures on families are what make us so vulnerable to implied criticisms, like those on display in Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." It registered so strongly with American parents because we're insecure about having adequate resources to meet the challenges of raising children now.

It's too early to tell if the Obama tax break, if adopted, will be effective in raising people's wages, or even whether, if we made more money, we would choose to spend more time with our children. But it's worth trying to reverse some of the trends that are putting so much pressure on families' health.

First published in Newsday

So far, Arab Spring has been chilly for women

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This year's Arab Spring uprisings against authoritarian regimes included many prominent women: There was a Tunisian blogger who was among the first to alert the world to the country's growing turmoil. And there were demonstrators, journalists, bloggers and tweeters in Egypt who forced the February ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

But since those inspiring days, the news from this region has painted a picture of a democratic revolution only partly finished. The problem with leaving a task unfinished is that there's the danger of stalling - or leaving an opening for someone worse.

In recent days, an Egyptian general admitted that his troops conducted "virginity checks" of female protesters - a barbaric and unnecessary humiliation by the military, which now seems like a poor caretaker of power as Egypt prepares its new constitution.

But the virgin tests are only the most notorious of the setbacks for the women of the Arab Spring. Backsliding in this part of the world is particularly frightening, given its history and its cast of brutes who want a return to Islamic law. It would be tragic for another country whose women helped make revolution - like Iran in 1979 or Algeria in 1962 - to reverse course to subjugate them to a fundamentalist regime.

In Egypt especially, where the United States intervened directly by calling for Mubarak to quit, we have a moral obligation to push for results that we can support, not democracy and equality for only half the people.

Signs of anti-woman sentiment have been surfacing. One Tunisian feminist, Raja bin Salama, called for the country's new laws to be based on the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document asserts that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, that we are endowed with reason and conscience, and that we should act toward one another in a spirit of kinship.

For endorsing such outrageous ideas, the head of the Tunisian Islamist party denounced bin Salama and threatened to hang her in a public square. Rashid al-Ghannouchi was living in exile when he made his threat, but has since returned to Tunisia.

In Egypt, the eight-member committee to redraft the constitution excluded women altogether. The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights is protesting the exclusion, and 102 other Egyptian women's organizations have signed on in sympathy.

Western women have a hard time comprehending societies where women can be trained as lawyers, surgeons or computer scientists - and yet be told whom to marry, or be arrested after sitting at a coffee shop with an unrelated man. For us, economic gains have resulted in many other freedoms, although unfinished revolutions await here as well.

In Saudi Arabia - which has felt the aftershocks of its neighbors' struggles toward democracy - a 32-year-old woman was arrested last month after uploading a YouTube video of herself driving a car, since Saudi women aren't allowed to drive. Her peaceful protest is reminiscent of Rosa Parks' choice of a seat at the front of the bus.

What can we do to help? We can keep these issues in the forefront by talking, blogging, tweeting, reading. A group of Saudi women is petitioning Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to help change the driving law. International diplomatic pressure can and should play a role.

Many Americans oppose our involvement in the Arab uprisings, not knowing whether the new regimes will be an improvement. We should target our involvement to be sure they are.

First published in Newsday

Home-sharing's time returns

Pushed along by those twins of the Great Recession -- unemployment and foreclosure -- America may be moving back under the multigenerational roof.

At a recent reunion of high school friends, I talked to one who had returned to her mother's house, along with her brother and sister. The whole family was back together again, this time with grandchildren added to the mix. It was a disaster. The siblings were fighting as much as they had in high school.

Another friend's son was enlisting in the Army to avoid moving back into her home after graduation. The Census Bureau says that 54 million Americans were living in multigenerational families in 2010, up from 49 million two years earlier. That's the highest count since 1968.

Of course, it's nothing new for large extended families to live under one roof. In many parts of the world, it's the norm. In this country, Asians and Hispanics have higher rates of multigenerational living, perhaps reflecting greater cultural acceptance.

But for the most part, since the 1950s, the American middle class has assumed that one is up and out at 18. Each nuclear family, according to this standard, had its own home.

And that attitude can make moving back in together -- or "doubling up" in demographers' terms -- feel like a step backward. It can be a sign of financial desperation, a response to unemployment, lack of child care or health care, or affordable rents.

But there are many advantages that generations can offer one another: care-taking for the young or old, emotional support and the sharing of life lessons. Those benefits -- as well as the financial considerations -- are what led the Huntington-based Family Service League, a social services agency, to create its HomeShare program, which matches older adults with someone who could use their spare bedroom.

Artist Milton Colón, 47, heard about the program through Fountainhead Church in East Northport. He is sharing the Smithtown home of Meinhard and Aino Joks, who are 86 and 85. Colón does the laundry, cooking, bed-making and errands, allowing the Jokses to stay in their home even though their home health care benefits have run out.

In turn, the Jokses have given him shelter and stability. Colón's wife of 22 years died in 2008, of an accidental overdose, and he fell apart. He began living out of his car.

While she was alive, Colón had made a living painting portraits. He was as busy as he wanted to be -- before the recession drained his Brentwood business of customers.

The Jokses are from Estonia and Finland and tell him stories of their emigration after World War II. "I'm a World War II history buff," Colón says. "So, that's something we share. I love history. I could take it in all day."

In the evenings, he works at a basement desk on a comic strip that he's developing. It's about a proud Puerto Rican father named Flores who moves his family from Brooklyn to the suburbs -- "Flowers in Blue," Colón's own story. His new home with the Jokses not only tethers him back to family life, it gives him an artist's freedom from financial worries.

That's the facet of multigenerational living that is not often expressed. We all know about the tensions and bickering -- the fall from the ideal after having somehow slipped off the path to the single-family home. But there is sweetness, too.

So why not make the best of what, for some, has become the new American reality? With 8.8 percent unemployment and 2.36 million homes foreclosed by banks between 2007 and 2010, the middle class is struggling. Independent living may be an American value, but so is helping each other through hard times.

First published in Newsday

Families of the mentally ill need stronger laws

It's obvious now that Jared Lee Loughner should have been stopped. In accounts by news organizations, his madness escalated so clearly: the classroom outburst about strapping bombs to babies, the government conspiracy talk, the eerie, miscued smiling.

But for those of us with a schizophrenic in the family, the progress can look a lot like a rebellious teenager dabbling in drugs and struggling to cross into manhood - not ideal, but in a word, normal.

People ask, why didn't Loughner's parents stop him? We may never know what other steps the family took - nor do we know whether the suspect is mentally ill, though he displays all the signs. But his father was alarmed enough to chase Jared into the desert - ultimately losing him - the morning of the shootings at the Safeway meet-and-greet in Tucson. To me, as the sister of a schizophrenic man, this is the quintessential family face of mental illness: chasing, and powerless.

Families, and other authorities, have too few tools for this disease that sickens men on average at 18 and women at 25. In Arizona, like more than half the states, in the absence of specific threats, it's impossible to force someone into treatment. The law requires that individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others. That means, in most cases, a suicide attempt or a crime. As we know from Tucson, waiting for such evidence can be fatal.

Since the 1970s, Americans have moved firmly away from forced treatment, horrified by stories of brutish conditions, lobotomies and traitorous relatives signing away a poor soul's freedom. But we have journeyed so far in the opposite direction, in our concern for the civil rights of the mentally ill, that they are too often going without the medical care they need.

Like other illnesses, this disease can worsen when left untreated. The consequences can be catastrophic.

Postponing help until after a crime has packed this country's jails and prisons with the mentally ill: The Treatment Advocacy Center, a national organization that wants stronger involuntary-treatment laws, estimates there are 280,000 mentally ill locked in correction facilities today, up from 170,000 a decade ago. These people are often not receiving the care they need to get well and live lives outside of a cell.

In September, Pima Community College, where Jared Loughner was enrolled, was sufficiently unnerved after several incidents that it sent two campus police to tell Loughner and his parents that he had been suspended - and those officers had backup waiting in the neighborhood, just in case. The school wanted him to be cleared by a mental health professional before he could return.

The school protected its students. But didn't college officials also have an obligation to the greater community? William Galston, who advised the Clinton administration on domestic policy, argued in The New Republic last week that college personnel, Loughner's parents and other adults should have been required to report his actions to the police and the courts.

One result, at least in New York, might have been a judge's order for a temporary commitment and medication. The threshhold here is "need for treatment," not just a person's likelihood of being dangerous. Nearly half use this standard, and 44 permit court-ordered medication. But the laws are rarely used. California, for example, recently passed Laura's Law but has not enforced it, lacking money and treatment resources, and fearful of violating patients' freedoms.

It's the nature of mental illness that nearly half of those suffering do not realize they are sick. That's why those of us around them need to give chase - and persist until we help them.

Originally published in Newsday

Economy makes more kids homeless

Every year as the cold weather arrives, the U.S. Conference of Mayors conducts a survey of who's living in homeless shelters. This year, it uncovered a troubling statistic: a 9 percent increase in the number of families who are homeless.

These numbers have been increasing - the Department of Housing and Urban Development notes a 30 percent growth since 2007 - and are expected to bump up again next year.

Many of these families, remarkably, continue to function, even as the basic need for shelter is threatened or removed entirely. Wendell Chu, the school superintendent in East Islip, says that more students are showing up for class with their homes facing foreclosure. Many more qualify for free and reduced-price lunch - another measure of families in distress.

"This creates stress for these kids," he says. "It affects how kids come to school, their readiness to learn."

As the country continues to pump billions of dollars into homeless programs, food stamps and other safety-net services, the very people these programs are meant to help - mothers and children - continue to struggle. While the welfare overhaul of the late 1990s was intended to create a path from welfare to work, its effect in the current troubled economy may well be simply dumping people without support.

The mayors were asked to identify the three main causes of homelessness among households with children. The top responses were unemployment (76 percent), lack of affordable housing (72 percent), poverty (56 percent), domestic violence (24 percent) and low-paying jobs (20 percent).

To be sure, we are living through a historic economic catastrophe, and this period will leave a mark on our national psyche. More Americans were poor in 2009 - 43.6 million total - than at any time since the U.S. Census Bureau began estimating the poverty rate 50 years ago. Jobless rates are also very high.

Our social safety net simply has too many holes. While some dismiss the homeless - depicting them as either too crazy, drugged or afraid of the authorities to seek help - surely we're not ready to concede that there's an acceptable level of homelessness for families.

The Long Island Coalition for the Homeless is preparing for its annual count of homeless people later this month. Last year, the group found 1,046 families in Suffolk County and 446 in Nassau living in emergency shelters or transitional housing.

Long Island wasn't part of the Conference of Mayors survey, but the coalition's Julee King says the trends hold true here. In the past 18 to 24 months, the coalition has fielded more calls from families, particularly those being evicted because the homes they're renting are being repossessed.

It's extraordinary that this is happening on well-to-do Long Island. Fortunately, we have a network of charities, religious and secular, that provides temporary housing. But it would be better to prevent homelessness in the first place. The dislocation is disruptive, as the school superintendent points out, and it's inhumane.

Boston is experimenting with banning evictions. Many cities, including Chicago, are expanding consumer credit counseling. Of those surveyed in the mayors' study, 92 percent said housing vouchers to reduce rents would be an effective remedy for homelessness, and 71 percent advocate higher wages for low-end jobs. Given economic realities, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Still, these are important ideas. Nobody, least of all children, should have to cope with so much insecurity when it comes to something as basic as shelter.

Originally published in Newsday

Child care choices persist into adolescence

Last month, a study about early child care came out with mixed results – one good for day care, and one bad. I decided to go back and take a look at how the news media covered the story. I have a bias: I think that we in the media reflect the American public's ongoing discomfort with the choices that dual-income families must make. Even though, at 46 percent of homes with children, dual-income households are becoming the norm. As I say, the study came up with good and bad findings. One of the biggest long-term projects of its kind, the University of California-Irvine study quizzed 15-year-olds who had been in day care as little ones. The study found that the teens who had attended "high-quality" day care did better in school than even those kids who stayed home. But the study also found that all day-care kids, regardless of the quality of care, were slightly more likely to take risks.

Is that a bad thing? Apparently, in teenagers it is. When we think of teens and risk, we think “drugs” and “sex.” Although, adult risk-takers, like inventors and money managers, are often highly compensated for such.

Anyway…. The results: My quick Nexis search turned up six neutral headlines, such as this one from States News Service, “Link between child care and academic achievement and behavior persists into adolescence.”

Five headlines gave a positive spin, like this from the Dayton Daily News: “Quality care in childhood pays off, study says.”

And seven headlines played up the negative. Here, from the Chicago Tribune, “Study: Day care kids show rash behavior as teens.”

I’m going to conclude that my bias at the outset was a little rash. This is fairly even-handed coverage – and good news for those of us who care about such things.

I also found the description of what constitutes high-quality child care to be illuminating, and cause for optimism. I remember looking for this description right after the study was published in mid-May, but I didn’t find anything this complete. I wonder if UCI updated it. No matter, here is study director Deborah Lowe Vandell’s take:

Q: How do you define a “high-quality” child care setting? ?A: It’s one where caregivers are warm, loving, sensitive, respectful and responsive to children’s needs. There should also be cognitive stimulation, with teachers talking and reading to children. If a child is wandering or getting into conflicts with other children, caregivers should find ways to intervene. If children are busy and engaged, however, caregivers should not interrupt or intrude.

What do you think? What's your observation about how child care affects kids? Does your child care measure up to this standard?