Issues that tarnish our womenfolk
THERE was that classic case carried in one of the papers recently where an officer of the law on a visit to one of our provincial capitals reportedly turned in his mobile phone to another local officer to recharge the battery.
The local officer must have decided to scroll through his friend’s picture file on the phone and found to his shock and horror pornographic images of his own wife in compromising sexual poses.
The mobile phone is now court exhibit, I presume, and the visiting officer is facing charges for production of explicit material of a pornographic nature.
Poetic justice, I’d say.
If the report is true and with the deep respect to the offended husband, here is a case which screams: Sex sells! And it would sell big time and would be front page news anywhere.
Here is strong, hard evidence involving two officers of the law.
One is allegedly entangled with the other’s wife in some compromising sexual situation.
The deed is discovered because the offending party offered his mobile phone to the husband of the woman, almost as if to say: “I dare you to find out.” The dare is met and a court case is the result. There is so much in this that warrants further digging and follow-up coverage.
But the newspaper chose to bury the snippet deep inside, perhaps because there was not enough details. And a follow-up just might not come.
Now, compare the above juicy snippet with that other story on the front page of one of the papers several days earlier with the screaming headline: “Children into sex for fees”.
The story concerned a survey by the Madang provincial AIDS committee and quoted a certain Joe Mocke.
There was no shred of evidence offered or if they were offered in the survey, certainly not reported on in the newspaper article, except that one instance of an unnamed boy in Malala High School who would not have made it to school had he not made and sold homebrew.
Whatever has the Malala boy got to do with “sex for fees”, you wondered?
No other school was mentioned so poor Malala High, which consistently produces the best students in the country each year, got its name tarnished internationally over a side issue unrelated to sex for fees.
The story wandered into “not only school aged children but mothers and guardians as well”.
Girls coming from the village were especially susceptible, the survey revealed.
I would have thought the opposite would be the case.
Village girls are shy. They are better disciplined. No headmaster or principal was quoted. No methodology or duration of the study was mentioned.
It could not be ascertained how many parents, teachers and schools girls had been interviewed.
The survey sounded, from the report, as if it had been put together on the morning before the author went on provincial radio.
Sex is a billion dollar industry worldwide.
Prostitution or sex for money is said to be the world’s oldest profession.
Prostitution, whether organised or not, is a common feature throughout PNG.
That is common knowledge. Poverty seems, for the moment, to be the prime motivating factor.
But is it poverty alone?
What are the other motivating factors?
We can only guess at the answers.
Pornography, which sells sex as graphic, visual or textual material for the gratification of the countless depraved of the world, is today a thriving industry in PNG.
Pornography in every category is available to anybody with access to the internet.
With the plethora of modern photographic gadgets available today, the potential for the creation of pornographic images in-country increases exponentially.
So the generalisations are not news.
Indeed, they tend to gloss over important issues and cover everybody.
In the end, in purveying generalisations to the masses, and that includes the world, we do our womenfolk more harm than good.
We tarnish the good names of all of them.
In the Madang instance, all school girls in Madang and their mothers and guardians stand accused and that would appear to me to be a gross injustice.
What would anyone in the world reading the “sex for fees” story on the web be thinking about our poor girl child in Madang and indeed, elsewhere in the country?
She has been discriminated against enough in the past with her being kept out of school.
After a long struggle – and she is still struggling – now she has reached the classroom door we hit her again with this unfair and perhaps unfounded accusation.
It smacks of discrimination too. We seem to be saying: She would not be here (in school) if she had not offered her little underdeveloped body for sex.
What about all the boys from poverty stricken homes?
Whatever are their fathers doing?
If indeed sex for fees is a burgeoning problem what about the related issues which never seem to get covered in surveys.
What kind of discipline operates at home and in the school?
What is the role of morality and religious principles in the raising of our children in today’s materialistic world?
Should the State take full responsibility for paying school fees?
What about the laws and penalties for the men who prey on children?
Is there counselling for those children caught up in prostitution?
Yes, prostitution and pornography are here to stay but we in the media need to seek out specific instances to underscore the existence of these huge social issues and to look at all the issues involved.
Sometimes I wonder whether we in the media are not guilty of pandering soft porn when we seek to entice readers, listeners and viewers with beat up news stories on the subject of sex.
I can almost see the flippant comment of an editor in a newsroom at the end of a tired day: “Run with it. If it is sex, it will sell.”
I have done it myself on occasion, so I speak with a guilty conscience.

Note: The author is the secretary of the Highlands Farmers and Settlers Association Inc.
 
Globalisation and the beautiful game
By DANI RODRIK
HOW does globalisation reshape wealth and opportunity around the world?
Is it mainly a force for good, enabling poor nations to lift themselves up from poverty by taking part in global markets?
Or does it create vast opportunities only for a small minority?
To answer these questions, look no farther than soccer.
Ever since European clubs loosened restrictions on the number of foreign players, the game has become truly global.
African players, in particular, have become ubiquitous, supplementing the usual retinue of Brazilians and Argentines.
Indeed, the foreign presence in soccer surpasses anything that we see in other areas of international commerce.
English Premier League club Arsenal, fields 11 starters who typically do not include a single British player.
Indeed, all the English players for the four English clubs that recently advanced to the final eight of the UEFA Champions’ League would hardly be enough to field a single team.
There is little doubt that foreign players enhance the quality of play in the European club championships.
Europe’s soccer scene would not be half as exciting without strikers such as Cote d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba (Chelsea) or Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o (Barcelona).
The benefits to African talent are easy to see, too.
African players are able to earn much more money by marketing their skills in Europe – not just the top clubs in the Premiership or the Spanish Primera Liga, but the countless nouveau-riche clubs in Russia, Ukraine, or Turkey.
To be sure, soccer players’ international mobility has increased the earnings gap between stars such as Drogba and Eto’o and their compatriots back home.
This is part and parcel of globalisation: enhanced global economic opportunities lead to wider disparities between those who have the skill or luck to take advantage of them and those who do not.
This kind of inequality is not necessarily a bad thing. It makes some people better off without making others worse off.
But soccer enthusiasts care about country as well as club, and here the consequences of the global mobility of talent are not as straightforward.
Many fear that the quality of national teams is harmed by the availability of foreign players. Why invest in developing local talent if you can hire it from abroad?
England once again provides an apt illustration.
Many blame the country’s failure to qualify for this summer’s European championship on the preponderance of foreign players in English club teams.
The real lesson is that taking full advantage of globalisation requires developing domestic capabilities along with international links.
The benefits of globalisation come to those who do their homework. – Project Syndicate

Note: Dani Rodrik, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the first recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Prize. His latest book is One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalisation, Institutions, and Economic Growth.
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