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In my most recent post, I wrote about the brutalization of a 15 year old girl at Richmond High, and how angry and frustrated I felt. Despite my own desire for vigilante justice against the rapists, I want to focus on the message the family of survivor gave during a community meeting. The message called for restoring justice by community action to make sure this type of violence does not happen, rather than take bloody revenge against her attackers. Inspired by such admirable actions, I want to participate, but my question is how do you do that?

When I think about the incident at Richmond High, when a 15 girl was gang raped for hours while bystanders watched, I become upset for many reasons. I wonder why the boys felt like this would be an amusing thing to do to another human being. I wonder why the onlookers didn’t leave or call the police. I wonder why police were not patrolling all parts of the school for the two and a half hours after the dance. I wonder why the school chose to send home the security guards early (actually I know the reason, the school could not afford to pay them overtime.

Did you know that the United States is one of only a dozen countries that still bar the entry of people with HIV?

Last Friday, President Obama announced that he will lift the 22-year-old ban on entry into the United States for people infected with HIV/AIDS .

"We talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat," he said at the White House. "If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it."—President Obama

A recent study about women, alcohol and sex has been making a lot of noise on the blog and news circuit. The statistics are shocking, with such sound bites as: “75 per cent of women liked to drink before getting into bed with their husband or boyfriend, and 6 per cent had never had sex sober” among others. The lead researcher on this, Kathryn Lakeland, said the results demonstrated that women lacked confidence when it comes to getting down.

October is Sex Ed Month of Action and the research is in: it is absolutely conclusive that abstinence only education programs not only do not work, but instead put youth at higher risk for STD transmission and unwanted pregnancies. Despite the 1.5 billion dollars paid out to school based programs that promoted total abstinence as the only appropriate action for teenagers, research has shown that such programs do not really delay sexual activity for most teens, nor do they lead to lower teenage pregnancy or STD rates.