Simmons College

The ability to control one's sexuality and make informed, responsible decisions about one's sexual health is a basic human right. The Netherlands, France and Germany protect this right by providing comprehensive sex education in their schools and implementing public programs to promote sexual health. Abstinence-only education in the United States denies American youth the right to sexual autonomy and prevents them from developing healthy sexual identities. Youth in the United States are far less sexually healthy than youth in these other countries. This paper will examine sex education policies and sexual health agendas in each of these countries and look to them for inspiration in proposing a new sex education and public health agenda for the United States.

The displacement of thousands of Sudanese refugees from Darfur into the neighboring country of Chad and the ongoing violence being perpetrated against women in Chadian refugee camps deserves more attention from the international community. This paper aims to address the plight of Sudanese women and girls in refugee camps in Eastern Chad and to detail the abuses committed against them, including rape and other violence. I address the contributing factors to the prevalence of violence against refugee women, including local resentment and increased competition over resources. I also outline key ways to establish and maintain security for refugee women in Chad, including support for UN programs like UN Mission in Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) and Integrated Security Detachment (DIS), which establish security and justice, and for innovative, private humanitarian programs like Solar Cookers International (SCI), which address resource depletion.

When the personal computer was released in the early 1980s, it was met with a great deal of hesitation and fear, and representations of technology in film reflected this distrust and in fact, furthered it. So how has the computer, in just over two decades, raised to such levels of acclaim? After viewing several films and researching perceptions of technology in the 1980s, I came to the conclusion that most fearful representations of technology were created from the technologist determinist viewpoint. However, the movie Back to the Future presented an alternative humanist view and more importantly, combined this idea with humor and comedy to create a movie that made previous representations seem absurd. This paper explores this notion as well as technophobic images, and tries to show how important the film medium is and how differing representations can elicit very specific audience reactions in regards to technology and its reception.