Teacher aide suspended for cutting boy's hair

Another article from my morning Toronto Star:

A Lakehead Public School (Thunder Bay, Ontario) Board employee has been suspended and a mother is seeking legal counsel after her seven-year-old son's hair was cut while he was at school.

The mother reported the incident to police shortly after it happened, Thunder Bay police spokesman Chris Adams said Thursday.

The boy complained to his mother that a teaching assistant had cut his hair on April 16.

Police interviewed the boy, his mother, the school principal and the teaching assistant, and then consulted with the Crown's office about the possibility of laying an assault charge, Adams said.

The mother of the boy, who is aboriginal, called the teaching assistant's actions "culturally disrespectful," according to information that outlines the incident.

David MacKenzie, an assistant Crown attorney, said the decision to not lay an assault charge was made with strict accordance to Crown policy.

That policy outlines the need for both a reasonable prospect of conviction and a public interest before a charge is laid.

The boy was in a computer lab reading when a teaching assistant observed the student having difficulty seeing due to the length of his bangs.

The teaching assistant took the boy into the hall and trimmed a small amount off his bangs with scissors.

When the boy went home after school, his mother noticed he was upset and then realized his hair had been cut.

The school employee admitted she had cut the student's bangs, and she was suspended from her job.

There was no evidence the teaching assistant cut the boy's hair for any reason other than helping him to see better.

"We view this as a very unfortunate incident," said Bruce Nugent, a school board spokesman.

The mother has hired Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer, who specializes in human rights and has handled northwestern Ontario cases before.

Falconer was unavailable for comment Thursday.

Thoughts?

Employers fire mothers-to-be

I was reading The Toronto Star this morning while having coffee, and I came across this article, I thought i'd share it with you

Recession used as excuse for surge in pink slips

Human rights advocates are seeing an alarming surge in cases of pregnant women being fired by "Neanderthal" employers across Ontario, who claim hard times are the cause.

What's especially stunning, they say, is how brazen some bosses are, almost 50 years after Ontario enacted the Human Rights Code to prevent such discrimination.

"We actually have an email from one employer saying, `Sorry, but with your little bundle, I don't think we'll be able to (re)hire you. We want a permanent solution,'" says Consuelo Rubio, manager of client services for Ontario's Human Rights Legal Support Centre, an independent agency funded by the province to provide free legal services to people experiencing discrimination.

The firings are in all sectors: "It's happening to women in senior positions and women in minimum-wage jobs," says Katherine Laird, executive director of the centre, who says she hasn't seen this level of discrimination through two previous recessions and 30 years in the human rights field.

"It's outrageous and illegal," Laird says.

The spike in calls from pregnant women who are frightened for their jobs, can't nail down return-to-work dates or have been told there will be no job waiting for them at the end of their maternity leave, started last fall. But they hit "nightmare" levels in January, says Rubio, and are now averaging 10 to 15 calls a week – accounting for about 10 per cent of all calls from workers inquiring about their rights.

"I thought I was the only person this was happening to," says Brandi Mather, 21, a housekeeper at an Orillia hotel who was laid off Jan. 19, ostensibly because of a lack of work. She later learned her boss had overhead co-workers talking about her pregnancy. Mather had hoped to return to work this month, but found out a replacement worker had been hired in the meantime.

Her boss was quite upfront, saying it was because of the pregnancy. But the boss backtracked when she realized Mather had checked out her legal rights and then said it was because her work was shoddy.

Most firings seem to occur soon after women announce they are pregnant, says Rubio. That puts women's maternity leave benefits at risk, since to qualify for full benefits they must work 600 hours within the 52 weeks before filing.

"I need 435 more hours," says Mather, who also has a 2-year-old daughter and had been working part-time while studying to be a pharmacy assistant. Her pregnancy is starting to show, which has made it impossible to get another job.

"I don't want to go on welfare, but if that's what I have to do, that's what I have to do. I've tried really hard not to do that because I know there are other people who need it."

Until Dec. 4, dental assistant Ann Dunn split her work week between two dentists, one in Courtice and one in Bowmanville. At 10 a.m. she told the Bowmanville dentist she was pregnant. A few hours later she was given a $300 gift certificate to The Bay and told her one-day-a-week job was over.

To her gratitude, the other dentist was so shocked by the move he took her on staff early enough before her son, Michael, was born April 1 to allow her to qualify for maternity benefits. She's filed a claim with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and is seeking $10,000 in damages.

"If he had said to me, `Things are getting slow in the office and we don't have a lot of hours. Just finish off your three months,' I would have said, `That's fine.' But I didn't have that option. The only option I had was the gift card."

The dentist hired a replacement.

The centre is also hearing from pregnant women who work on commission but simply aren't being given any work or sales calls to make.

"Employers are crying about the recession and saying, `This is so terrible for us,'" says Rubio. "Well, what about all these workers who are going through the financial crisis too? The recession is not only affecting employers, it's affecting mothers with children, it's affecting disabled people – even more so because a lot of these people can be even more vulnerable financially."

The centre is also fielding more calls from injured workers and disabled people – who have always accounted for the vast majority of inquiries – and are seeing troubling signs on that front as well, especially among people who work for hard-hit auto-parts manufacturers, some of them unionized shops.

Human-rights advocates are investigating a Peterborough firm that produces car bumpers and other plastic parts. It laid off 18 workers back in January – every one of whom had at some point claimed disability benefits or were on modified work assignments to allow them to do less strenuous work to cope with their injury.

Meanwhile, 18 "healthy" workers were called back from layoffs.

"The Human Rights Code is supposed to be about recognizing the worth and dignity of every person – and sometimes the real test of an employer's commitment comes when economic times are tough," says Kate Sellar, a lawyer with the centre.

"Bad economic times aren't a licence for employers to discriminate against pregnant women and workers with disabilities."

A Czech Solution for Sex Offenders

A doctor makes an incision in a man's scrotal sack and, deftly wielding his scalpel, quickly removes both testicles.

In the Czech Republic that simple operation is the punishment for male sex offenders. But to the Council of Europe, the region's leading human rights body, the procedure is "invasive, irreversible and mutilating." In a report issued last week the Council called the punishment "degrading" and demanded it be scrapped immediately.

Over the past decade, at least 94 prisoners have undergone the treatment in the Czech Republic, the only country in Europe to continue to surgically castrate sex offenders. The Czech government insists the procedure is a medical issue, permanently reducing testosterone levels to lower an offender's sexual urges. Officials say it is only performed at the request of the prisoners themselves.

But the Council of Europe — whose Committee for the Prevention of Torture investigated the law — says it can only be described as medical intervention if the genitalia are diseased or damaged. "Surgical castration is no longer a generally accepted medical intervention in the treatment of sex-offenders," the Council's report said.

The Czech law has a long pedigree.
Castration as a punishment dates back thousands of years, and across all world cultures. The methods have evolved from brutal knife swipes that removed entire genitalia to chemical treatments. Drugs that lower the testosterone, dampen the sex drive and inhibit erections are now available in Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and many U.S. states, but prisoners must volunteer for the treatment before the drugs are administered.

Despite many studies into the effectiveness of castration — both surgical and chemical — the results are inconclusive. Some surveys suggest castration can dramatically reduce recidivism.

One 1989 survey in Germany of 104 voluntary castrates showed a 75% drop in sexual interest, libido, erection, and ejaculation. But measuring such changes is notoriously difficult and often depends on the subjective self-reports of sex offenders. A 1989 Psychological Bulletin study concluded that, "the recidivism rate for treated offenders is not lower than that for untreated offenders; if anything, it tends to be higher." Many other studies emphasize the mental nature of deviant sexual interests, which cannot be cured through surgery. Fred S. Berlin, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, argues that even if most sexual offenders cannot be cured, many can be successfully treated through counseling. "It depends on the availability of adequate community-based resources, in some instances following a period of residential care," he says.

In its report the Council of Europe also criticized the fact that the Czech's often use the punishment on first-time, non-violent offenders, such as exhibitionists.
Another issue: the Czech penal system effectively forces many prisoners into accepting the procedure out of fear they will be jailed for life if they do not, according to the Council.

"Given the context in which the intervention is offered, it is questionable whether consent to the option of surgical castration will always be truly free and informed," it added. Investigators found five cases of it being performed on legally incapacitated offenders who were not capable of making an informed decision. They found only two convicts who had spontaneously volunteered for castration.

Civil rights groups say any kind of castration, even if reversible, could take society down the road to eugenics. A 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said that involuntary surgical castration constituted cruel and unusual punishment. David Fathi, the head of Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program in Washington says the Czech methods not only defy medical convention, but are an affront to civil liberties. "Any irreversible punishment is a fundamental violation of human rights. And any kind of mutilation is barbaric," he says.

Fathi says that rehabilitation of sex offenders is far more effective than castration. "There are no easy answers," he says. "But castration does not work any more than cutting off hands treats kleptomania."

Lack of action on Omar Khadr riles Muslim community

More than 180 Canadian organizations and public figures have signed a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling on him to repatriate Omar Khadr — one of the largest efforts yet in a growing campaign to bring the detained Canadian home.

“We believe that your inaction with regards to this important case, compared to your active involvement in other cases (such as the repatriation of Brenda Martin from Mexico), has been, rightly or wrongly, interpreted by the Muslim community as indicative that your government considers Canadian Muslims to be second-class citizens,” the letter, released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, reads.

“While we most certainly hope and expect that this does not in any way reflect reality, it is nonetheless crucial that you understand that this is a growing perception within the Muslim community.”

The letter, released publicly Tuesday morning, was addressed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and copied to the leaders of the three federal opposition parties, all of whom have already demanded Mr. Khadr's return.

The letter's signatories include virtually every major Muslim group in Canada, as well as several Jewish and human-rights organizations. Among the individuals who attached their names to the plea are former NDP leader Alexa McDonough, Naomi Klein and Maher Arar. Former Progressive Conservative MP Flora MacDonald, who served as secretary of state for external affairs under Joe Clark, also signed the letter.

Mr. Khadr, now 22, is currently in in a state of legal limbo. Captured after an Afghanistan firefight in 2002, he has been held in a Guantanamo Bay prison camp for more than six years. He faced numerous charges under the controversial military commissions system, the most serious relating to his alleged murder of a U.S. soldier during the firefight. However, all charges before the military commissions system have been suspended at the request of the Obama administration, and it is widely believed that the new U.S. President will shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison camps and that no case will resume in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom.

Despite this, the Conservative government refuses to budge from its long-held position that it will not act to bring Mr. Khadr home until legal proceedings in the United States are exhausted.

In their letter to the Prime Minister, the organizations pushing for Mr. Khadr's repatriation say this is no longer a tenable position.

“With the welcome news that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is slated to be shut down by President Obama, the inescapable reality now is that your government must find a viable and fair solution for Omar Khadr's case,” the letter reads.