Letter to myself

Once upon a time, at a social work camp not too long ago, we went through a group exercise where we wrote short letters to ourselves, to be posted by the camp organizers back to us 6 months hence.

This is the letter I wrote.

Dear CD,

Hope you are well.

You are changing your job soon, and tendering your resignation. You will have finished your internship attachment at an as yet unknown place. The attachment will have changed you, as you have hoped for change, and I hope it has changed you positively, though it might not seem so now to you.

I have just spent 1.5 days in the social work camp in (month), and we are now supposed to write motivational things to enable you to live better in this time.

I can only say that I trust your judgment and that I believe in you, always. You will be a very good social worker, even though you are just starting out. It is more than the doubt that matters, although that is important as part of self-reflection. It is the heart.


Yours,
CD

MCYS video on filial piety

There has been much furore in the Straits Times Forum, both online and print edition, about Ms Hannah Chee's letter in response to the latest MCYS social-message video on filial piety (both the video and the full text of Ms Chee's letter are archived here.) In both her letter and the flurry of Forum letters that ensued, we see different takes (pun unintended) on the descriptive events in the video.

I'm still a social work student, even after this long (yes), and I saw the flurry of negative commentary before seeing the actual video, and so was led to watch it for myself. I've never been enthused about government propaganda visual events (NDP!) and was prepared to be skeptical. This is what I have to say after watching the video from a social work perspective:

There is definitely insufficient information in the video to conclude what are the intentions and motivations of each member of the family, including whether or not the father is showing filial piety.

You can take this word in gold. I'll address some of the major comments that have arisen in this furore:


1. The father is showing filial piety by bringing the grandmother home to live with his family, after the death of the grandfather.

Consider separating the event and the interpretation of the event, for the moment. Event: The grandmother goes to live with the father's family after the death of her husband.

What does this show?

It definitely does not show the presence or absence of decision-making process between the father and the mother. Perhaps the mother has agreed to take in her mother-in-law, but has reservations about the matter that she has kept secret from the father. Perhaps the mother has agreed unconditionally to take in the elderly lady. Perhaps the mother disagreed vehemently but was overruled by her husband. You can't tell from the video.

It definitely does not show the reasons why the grandmother chose to live with the father's family. Is she ill - does she require special care and supervision? Is she feeling lost and confused by her husband's death, and blurrily accepts her son and daughter-in-law's offer of live-in company? Is she feeling on principle that her son by right of filial piety must take her in once her husband is dead? Is she providing a contribution to her son's family in some way by moving in, say, by taking care of the grandchild due to special increased job duties of the parents? You can't tell, either.

What is suggested (but not known for certain, either) in the scene itself is that the elderly lady still grieves her husband's death, as she holds on tightly to her husband's death photo while moving in. However, there is this cultural or religious belief that one must bring the dead relative's personal effects when one moves house, so that the dead relative will know where to go when he returns to the living loved one when the other world's gates are opened during seasons of visitation. It is entirely possible that the elderly lady is not in a state of grief, but merely transporting her late husband's personal effects, in that manner.

True, she looks a little doubtful while getting out of the taxi her son is driving, but possibly if she had been living with her late husband self-sufficiently in her own household, and now is literally faced with moving into her daughter-in-law's household with its associated unknowns and new possibilities, it might give a few moments of unease, yes. I know I would be, in that position.


2. The father disregards his wife's feelings by being kind to his mother, in the dinner table segment.

This interpretation of the dinner table segment, where the grandmother complains that the meat is too tough, and silently refuses the offer of vegetables, is the most overhyped of all the commentary associated with this video.

Consider that the grandmother is, obviously, old, therefore she might not have wished to eat at that moment because she felt significantly unwell. All of us who have lived with physically frail ageing parents would know that sometimes they would rather suffer for long periods than tell us they are feeling unwell, either for the sake of pride or for not wanting to bother the "young ones" i.e. us. She might simply have weak teeth or poor digestion!

As also said earlier in the previous section, we have no idea of the duties and compromises between grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law, such that the cooking may be a point of compromise that has been well-discussed, poorly-discussed, or not discussed at all between the three. (family triad, for the more technically-inclined). We do not know if the grandmother has ever expressed her opinion on the cooking - this could be the first time, which is why the daughter-in-law looked so shocked and reacted so poorly by dumping the 'tough' meat into the bin.

Alternatively, if the grandmother is still suffering intense grief, this may lessen both the appetite (in other words, the tolerance for food) and the empathy towards others' feelings, since some people cope with intense grief by trying not to feel anything at all. They want to feel numb, and for some time, they actually do succeed in doing so.

I note that there is an utter lack of coverage of the discussions between grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law, throughout this video.


3. The grandmother runs out of the house saying loudly that she wants to move to her sister's house in Redhill, and is restrained from leaving by her son and her daughter-in-law. Presumably this is another instance of filial piety in action.

The grandmother's reasons for wanting to move out may have nothing to do with the household per se. She may be bored with her daily life at home, in a new area without her familiar friends, and want to move to a place which has more elderly-friendly access and facilities as well as peer companionship. There is nothing terribly wrong with that. Redhill is well-known to be an elderly estate and community services and gathering places for the elderly are plentiful there. Again this possibility is not shown or discussed. The ways in which the grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law explore the grandmother's possible loneliness to attempt to resolve it, are not shown.


When I watched this video, what immediately came to mind was that this is a very good social work training case study, for students as well as non-social-workers, to explain what social work can do to understand and help this situation. All the alternative interpretations and possibilities I have introduced above are not pulled out by "common sense", or by "good intentions", but by actual shared social work experience of studying intensely and working with families and the elderly, every day. Do you think that elderly pride would come to mind if you had no social work training? Or that all these flurried hurried commentators have judged the events in the video too quickly and too narrowly? I don't think so. QED.

(a commencement speech)

I am easily overwhelmed by the magic of commencement speeches but this one by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 has a bit of a social work slant to it, don't you think? He talks about perceptions, self-awareness towards a need for the spiritual, and generosity. Take a look if you have the time.

Little-known Facts 1 (that should be more widely known)

Some foreign workers live in bin centres when they don't want to. You know, bin centres, those little buildings in HDB carparks where all the rubbish collected from surrounding apartment blocks is brought to. They are, without fail, very stinky, and have lots of cockroaches. You can barely put a human being inside there for five minutes. Our foreign workers do this because their employers can't afford a place to put them, and there aren't enough dormitories around to house them decently. And the reason there aren't enough places fit for human living to house them, is because we, elitist status-conscious Singaporeans that we are, don't want them seen to be living near us. Think of your friendly neighbourhood cleaner living in a Bin Centre(!), the next time you petition against having decent housing for them near you.

Prisoners are only allowed to reply to two letters a month. [Update: Not a rigid rule, the Prisons Service says.]

The Medisave withdrawal limits are $450 per day for inpatient hospital stay, $300 per day for most day surgeries, $20 per day for senior citizens' daycare at daycare centres (up to $1500 per year), and $300 per year per account for chronic diseases. The chronic diseases in the list are diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, various lipid disorders, asthma, COPD. If a person with one or more of these chronic diseases qualifies for Medifund assistance, the $300 per year per account of Medisave of the person and all his immediate family (parents, spouse, children) must still be exhausted first for partial payment, while Medifund covers the remaining cash component.

I know the Medifund income criteria, but I cannot reveal it, not even under pain of death I suppose. Suffice to say that it is not the $1500 household income that is openly used by some other financial assistance schemes. This is because Medifund has a different mission from those other financial assistance schemes. When the government calls it the Medical safety net of last resort, they really mean it. You won't be left alone to be ill if you can't manage.

Role of a Social Worker, Part sqrt(2) of infinite

I'll say this upfront to get it out of the way first. The social work profession in Singapore is less mature than in other countries, for now. At present we have both a low average standard of social work education and few niches of advanced specialization. The Singapore Association of Social Workers is making some plans to change this in the near future. But at the present time this is how it is.

Given all this apparent lack of formal structure, have you ever wondered one rather obvious thing: why do social workers seldom work in pairs when seeing an individual client?

Is it because the work is so simple that it can be handled by one person? Or that the work is of such a nature that it is best handled by one person?

Consider this question for contrast: have you ever seen counsellors work in pairs when seeing (counselling) an individual client. Why, or why not? Is the work so simple that it can be handled by one person? Or is the work of such a nature that it is best handled by one person?

What other jobs does social work bear close similarities to?

Some thoughts to throw to you, dear reader.

Theories of Stages of Grief

I have found a way to come to terms with the issue of clients lying to me, as per the previous post. I discussed it briefly with colleagues and all this can be reconceptualized as the client's "readiness to change", instead of truth detection per se. I now can do my work with an easier heart.

*

Today we talk about grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's model of grief is probably the most well-known, comprising the five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However that Wikipedia article provides a link to a JAMA 2007 empirical study on another model of grief, Jacobs' model, which according to a reference of that paper has the four stages of numbness-disbelief, separation distress (yearning-anger-anxiety), depression-mourning, and recovery.

That JAMA 2007 paper by Maciejewski et al., contrary to its claims, is not a convincing empirical study of Jacobs' grief stage model on two major counts. First major count: The authors used single items obtained from a scale called the Inventory of Complicated Grief-Revised, formerly known as the Traumatic Grief Response to Loss. The reference given for this Inventory is in a book which I do not have ready access to; however it needs to be proven instead of merely asserted, that a shortened form of a scale has similar explanatory properties as the full scale. Cronbach's alpha test is commonly used as such proof. The authors have not proven this.

In addition, I am most disturbed that even the online version of the paper does not provide the actual single items used in querying the respondents. Surely JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, supports the inclusion of supplementary material. (Later note: Yes it does.) The lack of the actual questionnaire used in the paper can only be a horrific oversight by the authors.

The authors further shoot themselves in the foot by saying in an aggregate letter of response to all preceding letters of response to their paper, that "these [single] items have been evaluated and found to be among the most informative and unbiased in the evaluation of prolonged grief disorder", and that they had "removed [excluded] cases of prolonged grief disorder" from the study sample so to provide a representative sample of grief.

Second major count: As noted by Bonanno and Boerner in a letter of response, even in the earliest months of bereavement, the mean frequency of acceptance experienced by participants was between daily and several times a day, significantly more than any other grief item. Acceptance is the last stage of grief in both Kubler-Ross's and Jacobs' models - grieving is considered to be over when this stage is attained. If acceptance is consistently highest of all grief feelings assessed throughout the study, this only begs the question of what exactly the questionnaire used for assessment was.

The paper does not live up to its claim of being an empirical study of the stage theory of grief.

Homicidal thoughts

me: i have finally acknowledged having homicidal thoughts about my clients, to myself

friend: so late?

me: yeah

because the social worker professional ethics code forbids thinking that the client is bad.

i don't think the ethics code is a good guide anymore

seriously, there are people who will lie to a social worker just to get the financial support they want

(they slip up when i ask them random qns)

me: i think i would rather pursue truth than ethics. in general.

because the truth of "how much are you taking home per month" is probably the most simple truth alive. and they don't even get it right.

me: today i made a phone call to a client's son asking how much he and his siblings earn

he said straight to me, "if i tell you that we all don't earn much, you will give me more money, right?" and he laughed.

no doubt he thought it was funny.

it probably was. but not in a way i can appreciate, or that i choose to appreciate, or that i will ever accept.

me: and he wasn't even someone who was consistently on welfare assistance before

so it was just a simple logical deduction on his part.

how many liars are we subsidizing.

-----

More to the point, why do I try to learn so much about helping people merely to consistently come across people like this? I swear that giving out financial assistance is bad for the sincere social worker soul.

At some point a person really has to put his (or her) foot down hard and say, enough is enough. You are gaming the system. You are freeriding on the goodwill of others' hard work, others who have produced the resources that generate the money that you so gleefully, spinelessly, inhumanly take. Go forth and die. I will not care.

But of course, we are never supposed to say this to the client.

Cognitive Dissonance as the name of this blog, is more apt than I'd ever thought it would be.

Being Helpful

I have previously written about how different people present themselves differently when coming to look for social workers, and how regardless of circumstances we try to assist the client. But this recent article in TOC bothers me enough that I need to write about it.

Several allegations have been made in the main article as well as in the comments. I have no wish to polarize the comments as many of them do show sympathy for the client mentioned in the main article, by offering concrete suggestions and wondering aloud what wider social changes are necessary for similar situations to be prevented in the future. Generally I find the comments to be fair.

To what extent do we subsidize people's choices?

And how do you explain to your hopeful client, sitting in front of you, you wishing to help him, that his previous actions have compounded his problems to such an extent that merely signing over some money to him will not assure his long-term stability? How do you survey with him his barriers to a successful life? A single consultation will not be enough. People take a long long time to readjust their expectations =)

And, of course, we cannot rely on hearsay to judge this man even before we have met him and he has spoken with us. In person. For an extended period of time. About 45 minutes is the normal length of an in-person conversation. 30 minutes is the bare minimum.

I have had fairly long conversations with clients during which it transpired that their children are earning quite a bit and yet the client does not wish to ask for financial support from them. We are social workers, not ATMs in disguise. If there is some longstanding issue with the client's family relationships, we would like to know so that we can offer help. The client's quality of life remains always important to us. It's not always financial assistance that will alleviate the issues <- this is faintly heretical to some of our clients - again the bit about managing expectations. What we would like to do most often, when time permits, is to provide education in the ways of the world so that our clients can fledge.

The Third Door

There are no poor in this country.


-------------

"Pity those who are somehow unable to open a third door in their hearts or their minds. No one believes them when they talk about ghosts.


The fuss about the two NS deaths this week is already on its way to the third door, which will disappear the moment it has served its purpose.


Goodbye.


There's nothing wrong with Singapore.


Despite being a small island with no natural resources, we have managed to overcome difficulties and become a developed country.


There are no ghosts in this country.

- Mollymeek, 13th June 2008

-------------

A Pencil and Unconditional Positive Regard

We always go out to the reception area to call the client in. I make use of all the customer service skills I've ever learnt in my short life, to welcome him (or her) once he has acknowledged his identity, and then walk a little in front to lead the client to my desk. He follows hesitantly, clutching his documents and hope. The corridor is narrow, so that I cannot walk beside him. This is the best compromise I can find, the first of the many in our interaction.

I use these few moments to take a breath and to strongly resist the urge to weep. Not a trace of anything except unconditional positive regard shows in my face and demeanor, as I invite him to sit, before I take my own seat behind the desk. No social worker weeps where you can see it - it is not polite to the client.

(I mentally clutch at my social work theories the way the client holds his documents. The desk between us provides a focus for my terribly confused feelings at this point - I may not be able to give the client full financial assistance and this desk will enable separation at the end of the appointment without hard feelings. I know that our money does not fall from the sky and to give one family what they ask for may result in deprivation for another family even more needy yet whose only reason for deprivation was that I saw them just a little bit later. So there are rules, government rules, agency rules. I have to suspend my disbelief in the wisdom of the State in deciding precisely those rules.

Those of you who have read my previous posts would know that I dislike systems without transparency but in this instance I do not know where to go to find the demographics breakdown of how much was given to each family under which circumstances. I do not know if such demographics data even exists, whether busy fatigued social workers have taken the time to code their information in formal research studies. I do not know anything at all except some rules.

If things continue in this way I will become a mindless tool of the State. One of my tutors said it well, a long time ago, "You either become an agent of change or you become a changed agent." I must discover or I shall go mad.)

We begin the conversation with our client, eliciting information we need to assess their requirements. From what we can observe during the interview, we know if clients are evading our questions, and we will ask further. Nonetheless, we do not finalize our assessment of the client's honesty except in the final instance where we use a pencil to sign the form to decide how much additional financial assistance to give, on top of what is given according to the rules. There are clients who lie about their finances and their family relationships, and you will know it. They tell you these while sitting across the desk from you, expecting you to bestow the funds that they deserve as a right. But you can only trust them to give you the truth, in those gray areas (which I cannot reveal here lest it inspire others to practise them :) ).

There are all these borderline instances where the clients know the system so well and it simply breaks my heart to give them the benefit of the doubt, although I do and I know that I should. Because you know that if their families had put just a little bit more effort into salvaging their family relationships, there would be a bit more State funds for the person who sat across from you with sad, sad eyes, giving you his documents, answering your questions and talking with you, trying to gracefully ask for some help while being the sole caregiver and financial provider for his grandchildren. And this grandfather would always be the one to say, "Money doesn't fall from the sky, I know. I can manage with the [present assistance I have from elsewhere], and my grandchildren [incidentally still preschoolers] are obedient and smart. We simply have [astronomical sum!] in [organizations'] arrears, is all. We will be fine. It is only the arrears that worry me, we cannot have our [et cetera basic necessities] cut off, the children need to eat."

Our clients' dignity steadies us, but it worries me too. The social workers would know, because we spend the time to talk with them, but taken at face value their claims to be able to get by with only a little bit of assistance are not really viable.

So the pencil strikes as we sign the form, where we give as much as we can give. We have some discretion in our additional recommendations. :) and we hand back the client's documents to him after photocopying them, and we send him out. Where unconditional positive regard meets pencil, the pencil has the final say, sorry. No matter how much we want to treat you well by liking you personally, that liking does not automatically translate into assistance because assistance is a public good, shared in common. (Maybe some would find this unconditional positive regard a bit vacuous, then. You are entitled to your opinion on that. We try to make the client feel comfortable during the conversation.) The ending of this interaction is somewhat businesslike - client gets his assistance, and we do not get weird power kicks from the client thanking us profusely for the State's temporary relief of his woes. It is unnecessary to prolong the leavetaking, although some thanks are customarily exchanged.

And we go out to call the next person in.

Ways to spend the Budget Surplus....

It could have been worse.

More S'poreans eligible for public assistance with relaxed criteria.

Poverty is Poison

... from the New York Times today.

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

()

busy with work, not been reading blogs for the past month. Probably will continue that trend till mid-January. Not that it matters =) just thought to let you know.

Philosophical Developments in Social Work (quoted)

Entire section quoted from Early TJ and GlenMaye LF (2000), Social Work 45(2):118-127, 'Valuing Families: Social Work Practice with Families from a Strengths Perspective'. Supporting references have been deleted to improve readability.

Philosophical Developments in Social Work

Although the focus of social work throughout its history was primarily client problems and deficits, prominent examples of other foci also existed. For example, the functional approach, developed by Virginia Robinson, Jesse Taft, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in the 1930s, was centered on a psychology of growth and was distinctly different from the other major approach of that period, the diagnostic school, which was based on Mary Richmond's traditional formulations emphasizing metaphors of illness and locating the center of change in the social worker. The functional approach saw change as centered in the client rather than the social worker, and a client-social worker relationship process in which the client's own power for growth and choice was released. In contrast to the expert role adopted by the diagnostic school of practice, within the functional approach, the social worker entered into the helping relationship "with avowed lack of knowledge of how it would all turn out.... only client and worker together would discover what the client could do with the help offered" (p. 80). The functional approach was based in large part on philosophical perspectives emphasizing human purposive action, self-actualization, human potential, and other existentialist understandings of human development which tended to view human beings in terms of complexity and potential. The diagnostic approach, in contrast, was based on deterministic formulations of behavior in which causal events needed to be discovered and understood before adjustment could occur. The social worker's expert knowledge was used to diagnose and describe behaviors and causes. Functionalism contributed a major and lasting reconceptualization of the helping process by underscoring the fundamental importance of the relationship between client and worker. The diagnostic approach and the functionalist approach are representative of a basic split in philosophical perspective that has informed social work practice since the beginning of the profession.

Functionalism, with an emphasis on phenomena as processes, the concept of wholeness, relationship, and human potential, is part of a philosophical thread that winds its way through one major aspect of the social work profession-- the abiding presence of schools of thought advocating for social change, social justice, and the search for meaning and purpose in human endeavors. The other major aspect of social work has focused on treatment and cure, and problem identification and problem solving. This dichotomy of practice perspectives is based on a similar bifurcation of philosophical perspective that has been conceptualized in many ways, including a dichotomy of subjectivist versus objectivist. The objectivist position, with its focus on pathogens, determinism, universalizing theories of human behavior, and diagnosis, informs the problem-based approaches of traditional casework. The subjectivist standpoint emphasizes the complexity and uniqueness of human beings, the creation of self and choices, and understanding through the search for meaning. Subjectivist perspectives supported the functional approach and today provide the philosophical underpinnings for the social justice-- oriented approaches, such as socialist, feminist, constructivist, empowerment, and strengths approaches to practice. Space does not permit a full explication of the similarities and differences among subjectivist orientations, as, for instance, the difference between empowerment approaches and strengths approaches, or the differences between a constructivist versus a feminist approach. These approaches share similar values orientations regarding the sharing of power between client and worker, emphasis on process and praxis, and a belief in the potential competence and inherent worth of all human beings. The strengths approach, with its emphasis on growth and change, collaborative relationship, and the center of change located in the client, has as its foundation a subjectivist understanding of human behavior and purpose.

Two other current movements that share common assumptions and goals with the strengths perspective are the early intervention "family support" movement based on empowerment principles and "resilience-based practice".

Alternative Perspectives

I write in response to the post by Loveless Summer, entitled "Singaporeans are scared sh*tless by gay people".

I agree with his general theme. This post of mine is not to critique his argument point by point, because I am swamped with 335912838 things to do right now, but to add some comments in line with his general theme of the fear experienced by The Majority.

Perhaps one of the reasons the repeal did not go through, is that The Majority fears their own behaviour around our gay people. And that may be because many people do not know any gay people, or if they do, their gay friends and acquaintances and (maybe) relatives have not yet dared to tell them they are gay. I would, for example, seriously reconsider telling Thio Li-Ann I was gay (hypothetically), if she were an acquaintance.

I am reminded of Baey Yam Keng's Parliamentary speech on the subject, where he questioned the knowledge and understanding The Majority had of our gays. Here I highlight some quotes from his speech. The emphases in bold are mine.

I assume most Singaporeans do not have many gay acquaintances. We are likely to gather our knowledge and form our opinions of the homosexual world from media reports. I believe certain stereotypes of homosexuals in people’s minds will include effeminate men (eg Boy George), men who prey on young boys (eg Christopher Neil), flamboyant men who seem to lead decadent lifestyles (eg Elton John) and AIDS patients (eg Paddy Chew). I do know quite a number of homosexual men and women. The majority, if not all of them, do not fall into any of those above-mentioned stereotype categories. Well, they include some very talented and creative people, a common descriptor of gays which many have said is unfounded, eg directors, actors, hairstylists and designers. But I also know gay men who many will say are just your average man on the street, making a living as lawyers, lecturers, engineers, accountants, bankers, teachers and civil servants.

[...]

Because of the extensive and some may say, polarized debate, we may not be ready to repeal the act [section 377A] now. However, whether the perceived majority holding the status quo view has enough knowledge and understanding of the subject matter to make an informed opinion, is another question. I suspect a significant segment of our society does not really care and some are just uncomfortable with this topic and choose the convenient way to stick with status quo without knowing what the act [section 377A] exactly is and does.

For now, obviously the government is not going to welcome another call to repeal the gay sex law. It would be tremendously silly for gay rights activists to push hard to do so at this very moment. Therefore in response as a gay rights activist (not a gay activist, thank you), over the next few posts I will instead offer some anecdotal personal perspectives for the Majority to consider. It will be worth hearing the stories of the gay people in a less emo form than has been presented over these past few weeks. (I also recommend reading Ng Yi-Sheng's SQ21, a compilation of personal stories from the LGBT community.)

But we begin with something non-homosexual today, since you're not too used to it. Something light to start off with.

Suppose you are straight, which many of you are. It's not something you think about a great deal. You simply chase girls, or allow yourself to be chased by guys. You have firm ideas about gender roles and feel that those ideas are shared by everybody. Being accepted and validated by your community is very important to you. And you feel that all of Singapore is your community (which I agree is good, btw).

So first I ask: what would you think of girls who express their interest in the men they are interested in? They are straight, just like you. Are they still 'girls'?

Would you continue to see them the same way if you knew they had taken the initiative to show their interest in their guys?

This seems a trivial question, but it is especially relevant to the notion of equal consideration of diversity.

For the guys especially, how would you behave if a girl said that she liked you, in the best-case scenario of foreknowledge where she has given you plentiful hints over some period of time? Would you physically shove her aside? Would you be rude to her? Would you, perhaps, consider her any less of a person for having had the unbelievably "socially unheard of" good grace (or bad taste) to make the first move? Would you, oh horrors, beat her? I hope not.

For the girls, it is much socially ingrained in us that we should not be rude to people, and many of us have developed fairly effective methods for rejecting guys without resorting to physical or emotional violence. But I have also heard horror stories of girls thinking that by right of their birth as girls, that they can trample all over the feelings of the men.

In Singapore there is no culture of courteously and graciously rejecting someone, that I know of. We should begin to develop one, the way we would want to develop a rational basis for thought and opinion in Singapore. You would be quite perturbed if someone rejected you by calling you the worst specimen of your gender ever to live on Earth.

In so many ways, all our people deserve the same courtesy that we wish was shown to us those times long ago in our youth when uncaring girls or guys rejected us badly due to their own fears. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you... People do take hints and good rejections when delivered well.

Some Quotes from others on the Fallacy of the Majority, for my own reference

1. The Daily Backtrack: Applause and Thumping of Chairs

"No, no, that's not the worst line, this is: "(A) heterosexual, stable family... it's what we teach in schools, what parents want to see, want their children to see... to set their expectations and encourage them to develop in this direction". From our own Prime Minister's mouth- and here's a coinage, we live in a country with a "Straight Atmosphere". Breathe in our wonderful heterosexual air, it makes everyone grow up into Biblically acceptable copulators, go forth and multiply, nevermind the gay people.

[...]

In the past, the government used the word "backlash" instead of "pushback". In the former, the government insisted that the more gay people pushed for their rights, the more clamping-down would come. This was a warning- shut up or we will turn violent. In the latter, however, the government realises that it is not just gay people who find the law unconstitutional, and they would never touch their precious heterosexuals, so it becomes a "pushback"- shut up or you'll get more resistance. I for one do not believe the resistance could get any stronger."

2. Loveless Summer: Singaporeans are scared sh*tless by gay people


3. And an exchange between lbandit and Darth Grievous on 377A itself, links can be found from lbandit's most cogent post on it, here.

My Key Takeaways from the Repeal 377A Petition

Over the course of these two weeks, I have publicized the existence of the Repeal 377A petition to many people. Over email, over MSN, and in real life. At all times, I have tempered my words and actions during these interactions because I value and respect their decision to sign or not sign. Whichever it may be.

This may seem unusual - to fight for a cause is to be fully committed to it, which in part includes 'evangelizing' the message. But here, I believe that to coerce or persuade people into signing goes against the spirit of the petition, which is to repeal an unjust discriminatory law so as to honour the dignity and freedom of choice of all peoples. So I did not even try to persuade anyone to sign. (It took some doing to hold back, but I did manage.)

The organisers of this petition probably share this view on freedom and dignity, since they have put in place a "Report to Webmaster" option for every signature on this petition. If someone's name has been signed by someone else, the abuse can be reported to the Webmaster and the signature will be removed. I did this for the signature "Ho Peng Kee, Member of Parliament", as it was obvious it could not have been him, for 2 reasons: 1. he is a PAP MP and thus subject to the party Whip, and 2. his position against homosexuality being "promoted" has been highlighted in Yawning Bread's articles before. And it was removed in short order.

In light of this atmosphere of respectful freedom and easy accessibility to not sign, I must say that 6500+ signatures on the petition is a truly amazing and heartwarming number.

When speaking to my friends and acquaintances about this petition, in addition to respecting their decision to sign or not sign, I have also taken some time to speak with them to understand why. This post lists out the reasons.

Signing the repeal petition:

• For justice and equality and human rights, honouring their freedom of choice and their dignity. Liberal egalitarian values, in other words.
• To remove at least this justification for discrimination against gays, the legal justification. For those who still disapprove of homosexuality, this will promote honesty and clearer thinking for the grounds of their disapproval, so that rational discussion is more likely to happen.
• Consensual sex between gay adults harms no one and therefore is not a crime.
• The probability of future parliament personnel reversing the present PM's decision to not prosecute is nonzero. So PM's assurance is no full-scale assurance.
• The fear and sorrow felt by their gay friends/relatives/acquaintances, that they will still be harassed by the police under this law, although the Attorney General's Chambers will not actively prosecute.
• State powers: To not give the police the discretion or license to harass gays (see above point).
• State powers: To not bow to the views of the "morally conservative majority"
• - survey done by NTU is misleadingly framed and does not address de/criminalization merely social acceptance, and no other supporting study provided.
Therefore statistical proof of the existence of this group is dubious.
• - even if such a majority exists, there cannot be a tyranny of the majority in a functioning democracy. Minority groups' rights do have to be protected, subject to some caveats.
• State powers: A clear separation between religion and State, so that the religiously-motivated views of certain religious people are not favoured over those of other religions and therefore do not set a precedent for violating the Constitutional freedom of all religions in our State. Our Constitution says that we are a secular State, not a theocracy.
• To assert the presence of a "non-conservative" voice given that the Straits Times does not give much representation to this sector and gives much media coverage to the "morally conservative majority" instead.

Not signing the repeal petition:

• Fear of ISD or other expectations of doom and retribution from the State apparatus.
• Neutrality on this issue, coupled with a "prefer to pick the winning side, whichever side wins" attitude.
• Apathy on everything faintly political. Prefer to derive meaning in life from economic sustenance, and to heck with all the rest.
• "I am religious, and homosexual behaviour is against my religion."
• It is not normal. (in the sense that it is not the behaviour of the majority)
• (interestingly...) From the gays, fear of greater discrimination from the "morally conservative majority" as a backlash of this petition.
• Slippery slope - gay rights, gay marriage, generally a "what next?! nuclear war?" fear uncertainty and doubt.
• The family unit should be a unit of procreation, and procreation can occur between a man and a woman only.

I think it is quite clear that the non-signers' reasons are unsound compared to the signers' reasons. But they are still valid.*

As a result, we do have to build up social understanding, instead of pandering to the unsound reasons for keeping 377A. If the law is repealed, good. If the law is not repealed, it will be a great pity, but it will not be the end of the world nor of liberal democracy in Singapore nor of the gays' hopes for fair treatment. As always, there are two ways for things to change: Repeal the law, and social acceptance will follow. Or increase social acceptance, through all our individual daily thoughts and actions, and the law will die a quiet death eventually.

Take heart, live life well, and we shall wait and see.


*I wish to say that the issue of gay marriages is vastly separate from that of gay decriminalization, if only because Singapore is so far away from social acceptance of gay marriage that it would be ludicrous and counterproductive to force it through legislation, even if it could be forced, which it can't. For that, society is truly, absolutely not ready - see the present DEBATE over basic decriminalization of gays and you'll know what I mean.

More on the 377A petition

I have grown a large nice mushroom. Now we shall see.

Open Letter to Repeal Section 377A

http://www.repeal377a.com/letter/

Deadline is October 19th, after which it will be forwarded to the PM. Yes this is for real. Please sign if you support it.

Mushrooms in a Fairy Ring

A quick one:

I was reading The World is Flat again while in Borders for the 20% discount sale they held this week; Thomas Friedman has come up with yet another revised edition (the Red Edition) with two additional chapters, the ones I was reading. They didn't add much to the overall story, merely expanded some anecdotes in the Green Edition of last year, except one thing: he said, and i paraphrase, if what you want is not being done, that just means you're not doing it. In reference to Internet information uploading technologies and the Net itself as a medium of dissemination and civic action.

Civic action. I'd met Alex Au in person the other day and he said that political participation only counts when it is offline, in real life, otherwise it'd just be all sound and fury and merely an outlet for venting et cetera.

And then I read Sze Meng's latest post in Singapore Angle about what attributes the next PM should have, where he said in reply comments that "maybe the system is not cranking along fine because there are not enough robust actual dissent (aka make it harder to run) taken into serious consideration in major policies."

And it all sets me thinking. Thinking about political participation online and offline, about political participation as a citizen and as a member of Parliament. Do you see the false dichotomies and parallels that Alex Au and Friedman have drawn? - Like mushrooms sprung up in a fairy ring after some rain, there have to be roots that were always there growing deep and quietly, but steadily. Political participation of the true type, that is offline and in the real world by citizens, or that is offline in the real world in a political party by very active citizens, does not jump straight from total apathy. Civic action and becoming a member of Parliament both do not occur overnight; there has to be some effort and thought given by concerned individuals or groups, to matters at hand. To me there is no significant distinction between growing roots and growing mushrooms, because when the rain comes, as it will one day to all of us somehow or other, you will get good mushrooms from good roots anyway. So we can keep busy growing the roots, it is quite a full-time endeavour, as well as not being afraid to grow large nice mushrooms when we ownself feel necessary.

Let us talk more about roots and mushrooms. If the mushrooms, the desired outcome, is to have public policies that show equal concern and respect (concern for the individual's well-being, respect for the individual's right to self-determination and privacy), you must have the roots, people who are interested in discussing policies on those merits of balancing concern and respect, which is something different from the power struggle for policymaking in a government setting. Some people also call this rather altruistic type of action "civic action". If "civic action" sounds too fiery to be palatable, I would personally consider this roots to be a large but essential part of the political structure known as "deliberative democracy". To get a government of this type, you must have citizens who deliberate and discuss in meaningful ways (that means with good intentions for being constructive contributors), and who have been tested through the fire of public debate exposed to all persons in society (yes I mean all) on public policies.

To get good government, you must have citizens who can be government. This means your citizens should be interested in government and in policies. Yet in this country the average citizen's opinion is constantly devalued as too unsophisticated for thorough and fair hearing ("heartlanders" vs "cosmopolitans", "the conservative majority"), as if they can't speak for themselves liddat. And browbeaten endlessly with this personal attacks, we end up being the sheep we were told we were. Much kudos to Shianux for his stunning exposition on this, a while ago.

I wonder. I wonder why it seems to be the unspoken status quo in this country that deliberative democracy is perceived as a social ill, as "dissent", the Freudian slip of Sze Meng's mind*, when in fact it is the sole right and responsibility that every citizen has towards the care of his country. How could anyone rely on others to do his thinking for him, to align his values for him, to declare without transparency or accountability that 'this' is dissent and 'that' is not? Indeed, why is robust actual "dissent", the voice of your people, hardly officially acknowledged to exist?*

Civil and rational discourse. Deliberative democracy. Civic action.

Perhaps a short course of self-study on political philosophy is in order. Blogging has to wait till later, then.

*I acknowledge Sze Meng was discussing the question of why the citizens' roots and mushrooms don't seem to affect any government policy. But the authoritarian nature of this country's present political structure is not something I am well-read enough to critically discuss. I can only bitch about it very quietly in my offline world to raise some minimal awareness. Definitely need to grow more roots in this area of thought.

Disclosure

I think enough people know my real identity that I could not care less about being anonymous now. Anonymity hasn't furthered my cause in any way that I know of, in any case. Who likes talking to anonymous people who drone on and on about issues when they don't reveal enough about themselves to let others know why they talk about such issues? Nobody cares who I am and given how I write, I won't get sued anytime in the foreseeable future.

So. It has been said in my profile for some time now that I am a social work student. That is true. I am, however, a part-time social work student. In my normal daily hours I work. I work as a very little cog in a very large machine. I enjoy my paid work very much. Occasionally I get upset with the futility of being a very little cog in the very large machine, but on those days I remember I like my salary, if little else. Such upset phases often pass as unremarkably as they came, after some diddling and talks with the boss and colleagues, and I enjoy my work again. It is work of the type I can think about 24/7 and make some progress on, anytime 24/7.

As a very little cog in a very large machine I am, as I have said, part of a very large machine. I write this now because I have been doing a great deal of 'very large machine' work that I hope will further my little cog career, into a medium-sized cog perhaps. All is going well, but I am restless. I am restless that I am only doing things that will further my little cog career. This slavery to the 'cog'-ness of it all, the insistence that if I think this and do this I will get that (and I will be safe, because people say so), quite simply drives me up the wall if I do it for a long time without break, and I get itchy and rebellious. I want to be all aspects of me. The longer the denial, the more independent critical thinking I crave to do. So I talk.

I examine the things that matter to me on a larger scale. I cogitate on the Cognitive Dissonance blog (argh, stopstop). Love matters to me, as do hope and faith and the ability to define one's own path. Empathy and altruism matter to me. And you, who are reading this, matter to me. Because if you did not matter to me, I would not be writing this on a public medium. If you did not matter to me at all, if I did not care about you at all, I would be a happy little silent cog, content to be one, living in a bubble world pursuing my cog path. Content to be one day a medium-sized cog, and then a larger cog. But that is not my nature, I could never be happy that way. And so, perhaps, if you are like me, I want you to know that you are not alone, first. And that you will not die if you speak your mind.

Education and the Theory of Comparative Advantage

Sooner or later, every blogger worth his salt writes about the education system in Singapore. It makes sense; the topic is familiar to all in this country, giving an instant bloodthirsty audience, and (less cynically) it is worth reviewing how opinions are formed in youth, in the hope of affecting those opinions in the mature reader towards the goal of enhancing critical thinking in social and political matters. Notably it also provides a vehicle for people of limited life experience to rant and rave about their limitations.

Enough with the cynicism. I was reading KTM's reply comments to Piper in his article on social mobility recently, where he mentioned that there existed a deep-seated belief that hard work can confer greater material success i.e. lead to upward social mobility, and expressed his own sentiments that "hard work is a pre-requisite for success, but hard work doesn't guarantee success".

I agree with KTM in this. Here are my two cents' worth.

There is hard work, and then there is hard work. Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage simply states: Work hard at what you naturally do better at than most other people. Right now I could probably do multivariate calculus and advanced physics, if I spent 10 years learning and practising it without any other activity. This would be hard work. Hard work brings success, no? No. This would also be profoundly stupid compared to those more naturally talented in physics who do their undergraduate courses in the normal 3-4 years and then come out to become investment bankers. Sure, if I master the stuff and thereafter become an investment banker (I hear the banks love these maths skills), I will have material success and social mobility. But it is simply very unlikely that any bank would hire an aged decrepit slow learner unless truly outstanding reasons were provided to offset the lack of "normal" ability.

I may, instead, spend some time in my youth exploring my interests to see if I have enough aptitude for a few of them to make those my career choice.
[Update: takchek: "I learnt more about China and Taiwan when I was trying to date girls from those countries, than from my 10 years in SAP schools"]

And, as always, your career choices do not dictate your present and future interests :) .

Okay that's the end of my obligatory post on education. No anecdotes, no apologies, simply a word.

Selfishness and Altruism

From The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand:

"Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason."

This is the reason why this blog does not exhort the reader to make some sacrifice, despite it being a social work blog and for all my own very selfish :) purposes altruistic in intention. Instead I insist upon the right to choose your own happiness, as opposed to having others choose it for you.

(for my own reference)

Recognise gay rights, Ian McKellen urges Singapore
http://tomorrow.sg/archives/2007/07/18/recognise_gay_rights_ian_mckelle.html


Hundreds attend forum on decriminalisation of homosexual acts
By Pearl Forss, Channel NewsAsia Posted: 15 July 2007 2147 hrs
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/288311/1/.html

A short note: Be Happy Doing Nothing

Last week I wrote about a young one asking me for advice on how to develop his interests. Today he wrote again to me, "I have no interests. What do I do now?"

....

I told him to be happy doing nothing.

Social work* is, after all, respecting the choices of the client. Apart from special situations of imminent harm or criminality, which are governed by our Codes of Ethics. I think this is something you the reader should know if one day you should ever decide to seek help.


*More accurately this refers to direct social work practice, not the entirety of social work.

How Do You Capture An Idea Or An Action Into Achievement

I.

From time to time, I start writing a post, and don't know what to say. So I was sitting here blankly after a two-month hiatus from blogging, and wondering that same thing. Everyone has ideas all the time, after all; walking is an idea, computer programming is an idea, and vegging out at home watching DVDs with your wife over the weekend is also an idea. My mother has a thousand and one ideas about my elder sister's upcoming wedding. How do you then capture an idea into writing?

II.

I had a conversation with a young one a short while back, and when I asked him to read more of what he loved, and do more of what he loved, and hang out with communities who do the same (he enjoys oceanography, not drugs, so this sort of advice is okay), he asked me, How?

He asked, how? That terrible lost look. How can I do it?

III.

I have read the recent series of discussions on how to discover one's purpose in life that Mr Wang hosted. His present post is on how to refocus one's sense of duty and obligation onto one's self. He has ambiguous feelings about that approach to life; on the one hand, he considers it necessary, but on the other, he wonders if it is selfish and bad.

I would prefer to think of Mr Wang's approach as self-centred. To do I. or II. or any other action, you must move yourself to do it. To move yourself, you must feel obliged to yourself to move, and your duty to yourself to learn. You must know the concept of the self-disciplined self as primary. How, again how?

*

We all ask "how?" so often, it has become a stopping point for critical thought. After taking the trouble to find something we might like, we stop, tear our hair out, and turn round and round in circles. We fear it can never be done. We hope it can be done. And fear and hope are a potent combination by themselves, in causing us to lose whatever sense of direction and purpose we once had. In causing us to build on worry, to panic, and to fear more, and in the end, to never find our way. Does this sound familiar?

*

You'd realise, in the entire previous paragraph, there was not a single word about rational thought, about planning, and about persistence. Yet these are as vital human qualities as are worry and hope and fear. And all involve only the self in some manner.

And strangely, my only answer on how to capture an idea or an initial action into achievement, is to keep going, and to always know that you are searching for your ultimate purpose, and to remember these two things when nothing seems right. That is all. Once you get moving in that way, you will know where you are going next. Rational thought is involved when you reflect on the actions you had chosen. Planning is involved when using those reflections to help decide what to do next. And persistence carries everything through dark times. So it doesn't matter what direction you take at first, as long as you are developing one or a few (best if all) of your present interests.

At the end of my young life, I found that it wasn't my lack of inspired direction that was stopping me. It was the fixed thought I had that I definitely had to pick the shortest and most "beautiful" path. No one path is beautiful, every life has its shortcomings. It is the greatest tragedy of our education system that we have been indoctrinated into thinking there is only one perfect way. Instead, I believe the way that belongs to you will unfold itself gradually in a process of constant feedback and refinement.

Incidentally, this post also encapsulates my views on university admissions.

On the Notion of Free Will

Work is falling on me like a ton of bricks. In lieu of a proper post, I offer you this, and note it for my own reference as well. =)

Edward O. Wilson writes this in his book On Human Nature, p. 72:

Consider the flip of a coin and the extent of the coin's freedom. On first thought nothing could seem less subject to determinism; coin flipping is the classic textbook example of a random process. But suppose that for some reason we decided to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on a single toss. The coin's physical properties are measured to the nearest picogram and micron, the muscle physiology and exact contours of the flipper's thumb are analyzed, the air currents of the room charted, the microtopography and resiliency of the floor surface mapped. At the moment of release, all of this information, plus the instantaneously recorded force and angle of the flip, are fed into a computer. Before the coin has spun through more than a few revolutions, the computer reports the expected full trajectory of the coin and its final resting position at heads or tails. The method is not perfect, and tiny errors in the initial conditions of the flip can be blown up during computation into an error concerning the outcome. Nevertheless a series of computer-aided predictions will probably be more accurate than a series of guesses. To a limited extent, we can know the destiny of the coin.

An interesting exercise, one can reply, but not entirely relevant, because the coin has no mind. This deficiency can be remedied stepwise [...] Let the object propelled into the air be [...] a honeybee. [...] The bee appears to be a free agent to the uninformed human observer, but again if we were to concentrate all we know [...] and if the most advanced computational techniques were again brought to bear, we might predict the flight path of the bee with an accuracy that exceeds pure chance. To the circle of human observers watching the computer read-out, the future of the bee is determined to some extent. But in her own "mind" the bee, who is isolated permanently from such human knowledge, will always have free will.

Pearls Before Breakfast, from the Washington Post

What if beauty is right before your eyes, and you walk past it unseeing?

What would you be, then?

Love

Love. Sometimes known as Charity in other versions of the Christian Bible.

I intend to talk about ministerial pay and social work pay, about just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those, and the nature of public service for both ministers and social workers.

Of course whether this intention has been realized in this article is not for me to judge, at the end. :)

We begin. And begin again and again, on the topic of ministerial pay. Presently the ministers are paid 1.2m a year. According to a pay peg to the salaries of the most highly-paid 8 professionals in 6 fields of the private sector (Yawning Bread), they should be paid 2.2m. Our Prime Minister wishes to "close this gap" (direct quote). Needless to say, the question of perverse incentive to not spend effort on closing the other gap has been raised elsewhere.

It's going to rise no matter what we say. You know it, and I know it. A question to consider is: why is it that we know what we know? My suggested answer is, because there is no clear accountability for performance of the ministers. If they advocate that they deserve to have their pay pegged to the private sector, where are their KPIs, and thus the sword of Damocles that falls when they perform badly?

I hear only a ringing silence on this.

A hypothetical scenario for comparison: If I walked into my boss' office today and asked for a pay raise without justifying the contributions over and above my job's required specifications that I had made, he would not only laugh in my face but possibly fire me for arrogance (except that it would be called lack of team-playing skills or something). But this situation would never arise amongst the citizens and the PAP, because they were voted in without any clear mention of their jobs' required specifications a.k.a. KPIs. Thus the screaming of the cows (Ringisei).

But all this isn't quite about what KPIs they have. The present state of affairs has not even reached that stage of transparency yet. It's about on what basis (KPIs, pure randomness, the 66.6% vote?) they are paying themselves more. Let those criteria be held up for open scrutiny by the citizens, our country's stakeholders - only then will the increase in pay begin to be rationally justified.

Alternatively, the pay peg to the private sector would be acceptable if, like the masses they govern, each and every one of them could do this: Go to a private sector company with absolutely no ties to their original company Singapore (no suggestion of possible corruption or vested interest for our PAP, no), apply for a job, get selected for the interview, pass the interview, get offered a certain salary, and then bring that salary amount back to their original company Singapore as a competing quote. How the ministers are going to put this into effect, well we will just have to rely on their work ethics to find such jobs.

Other comparisons have been offered, from the method of selection of PAP ministers (LuckyTan), to the lack of further increase in Public Assistance (PA) funding, to the recent GST hike to "help the poor" ...

On to social work pay now. Yapdates mentions (found via The Void Deck: Minsta Pay Increase Special!) that people do not want to become social workers because of the low pay.

"I think back on those social organizations where social-workers receive one of the lowest pay in the whole economy, yet people continue to say that the work they do are 'priceless.' Isn't it common to hear positive comments about social workers helping an unemployed widow of many children find a job? Yet how many people will raise their hands to become social workers? Not many, as one of the reasons is that it does not pay adequately). "

Please, this is a pretty inaccurate analogy. From anecdotal evidence, I have heard that the threshold for "being paid adequately" in the social service sector is a question of whether one can support a 1-child family on social worker income. This criterion is one of basic subsistence; it is a far cry from the proposed increase in ministerial pay. So please do not insult the social work profession in this manner, by saying that its inadequate pay is comparable to the ministers' inadequate pay and that its selflessness is comparable to the ministers' selflessness. Notably, on Jan 21 2007, a day after the ST ran their Saturday profile on Social Workers' Day, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan announced in the ST that 11m would be set aside for the social service sector, some of which would go towards an increase in social workers' pay. 11m happens to be more or less the same sum as that required for the salaries of 10 Cabinet ministers to reach their proposed benchmark.

Which leads on to whether ministers are more talented than social workers? Undoubtedly they are. (okay, indubitably, you pedants. :) ) But...

...On just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those. LuckyTan has another interesting piece on this. Less rantily, there will always be a pay differential amongst various occupations, though all are required to keep the society running. This pay differential would ideally be based only on the fruits of one's talent (therefore, the existence of KPIs) as a contribution to society, but this view ignores pre-existing variation in people's talents or backgrounds in contributing to those fruits. Say, if one had enough space at home to store all the books one wanted to read, one would tend to buy those books instead of renting or borrowing them, thus enabling 365/24/7 access to the ideas in those books. This is quite different from borrowing those same books and taking the extra time to summarize them quickly for future reference before returning them, to achieve the same outcome of round-the-clock access. In the former, the cost is in money; the latter's cost is in time. If society places a premium on group availability of the individual's time instead of group availability of the individual's money, then the financially poorer one would be disadvantaged no matter what claims of equal starting points the meritocracy rhetoric has. The word for unequal starting points, in the social work conceptual framework, is 'privilege'.

So there are pre-existing variations in people's talents or backgrounds already. But does it therefore follow that those variations must be reinforced, or worse, solely attributed to one's individual intrinsic 'talent'? Is it really true that the poor deserve to live poorly while the rich deserve to live richly? Well this is up for debate and is a huge topic in itself, but I have taken the step to be a social work student so I clearly do not think so. Neither do the many people who have made their stand clear that the nature of public service is one of selfless generosity.

Ian, especially, talks about how public service can never be bought over by large sums of money, just recompense for the fruits of one's labour aside.

"Finally, I think the people in civil service and government should be people whose morality cannot be affected by money. We shouldn’t give more money to ensure people don’t be corrupt. We should give more money because it is fair to give them that amount of money for the work they do and their contributions to Singapore. To say X amount of money is enough to prevent corruption is to me naive because someone else could always offer X + 1. But if the argument is that there is indeed a threshold where a person would be less susceptible to be corrupt (if not totally not corrupt), then shouldn’t there also be a threshold where enough pay is enough to want to keep the person from jumping ship to the private sector.

And there is indeed such a threshold. It is the benchmark to private sector salaries. But the benchmark will change won’t it. And if such a benchmark changes which means the threshold changes, then by working backwards, doesn’t that mean the people we have are just being bought off now at current market rates so they won’t be corrupt.

And if so, doesn’t that mean they have a price. Which comes back to the first point. If there is a price, there is always an X + 1. "

It was supposed to be about Love and Charity. Are you committed to serve?

[Edit: One more thing I forgot to discuss. Social workers are bound by their national organisations' Codes of Ethics. The comparable document for government ministers would presumably be the Constitution. Your thoughts on this?]

Faith (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the previous post but it was written in January - some things had changed from Nov to Jan.

It should be noted that "The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007." Which is soon. :)

The January 2007 issue of the Singapore Law Review has a editorial and some contributed articles on the Penal Code amendments, do look through it if you can.

1. Responses to this social issue in Singapore (Key Debates)

In this part (II) of the paper I continue the discussion on whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships.

Since the submission of part (I) of this paper on 17 November 2006, I have had the privilege to participate in my personal capacity in the women’s focus group discussion on the proposed Penal Code amendments, organized by the government feedback unit REACH on 30 November 2006 [1]. It was explicitly stated by the REACH moderators in their introductory preamble that lesbian sex had always been and would continue to not be criminalised, although they acknowledged that section 377A of the Penal Code (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) was proposed to be left unchanged and that this was a point of dispute. One of the moderators was Ms Ellen Lee, cited in part (I) of this paper as speaking for the general Singaporean population in being averse to the removal of s.377A. The mood however was relaxed and friendly, with the moderators taking on the role of facilitators instead of being arbitrating judges, and a large part of the discussion was taken up on the sexual aspects of the proposed amendments. Five of the nine women who spoke made it clear before they began that they were attending the event in their private capacity, and spoke in favour of abolishing s.377A. The remaining four were from the local feminist group Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) and spoke both about abolishing s.377A for moral and economic reasons and about extending the coverage of the marital rape amendments.

Not long after on 13 December the mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times reported a summary of all the focus group discussions (Nadarajan, 2006) [2] in a manner that suggested that only AWARE had mentioned abolishing s.377A and for the completely inaccurate wrongly cited reason of lack of police enforcement at that. To clarify, the REACH moderators had clearly stated during the session’s preamble that s.377A although left unchanged was not going to be enforced as is the status quo, and yet passionate views about abolishing s.377A still continued in full flow after that. Lack of enforcement was never an issue in the ensuing discussion. In the Straits Times article, no views of any of the private individuals or AWARE members who had spoken about s.377A were quoted, nor paraphrased.

In part (I) I had expressed the hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans would eventually be supported bureaucratically. In light of the Straits Times report, Singapore is only in the extremely early stages of legal acceptance of homosexual partnerships. The finished Penal Code Amendments Bill, with adjustments for opinions from the public feedback consultation exercise, will be tabled for Second and confirmatory Third Reading in Parliament in the first quarter of 2007.

2. Strengths and Limitations of this Response with reference to Gay Marriages and Civil Unions

Although the likelihood of gay marriages and civil unions being legalized in Singapore within the next 15 years looks bleak, a framework and a plan must be set up before any goal is to be set on its path to becoming reality. Blogging has become a popular method of expression for Singaporeans, and the government is paying enough attention to thought expression in this medium [3] that it has set up its very own blog for junior members of Parliament, at http://p65.sg/ . Bloggers’ views have been cited in the mainstream media and by journalists when questioning government ministers. One of the issues that can be raised in the blogging medium is therefore the issue of gay marriages and civil unions. Mr Alex Au, of the blog Yawning Bread at http://www.yawningbread.org/, is a noted gay rights activist and well-respected for his clarity of thought on matters not limited to gay rights. Local pro-LGBT organisations such as Sayoni, People Like Us, and Oogachaga have also formed communities by blogging on their own websites on the Internet. As of the present moment the Singapore government is not censoring any of these websites nor blogs.

3. Social Workers’ Roles – A Model of Stages

‘Begin where the client is’, goes the social work intervention axiom. Bearing in mind the current rigidly conservative legal and social environments of Singapore, the ‘traditional’ institution of marriage was defined in very practical terms for this paper, as the only existing definition of marriage in Singapore to be between a man and a woman, in line with section 12 of the Women’s Charter. The combination of ‘gay marriages and civil unions’ in this paper’s title is deliberately chosen to reflect the early stage of legal acceptance of same-sex partnerships in Singapore, as the distinction between ‘marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is only viable if acceptance of rights and privileges of homosexuals is already widespread. The recent October 2006 case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) will be used as a guiding example of the various stages of specific conditions necessary for same-sex partnerships to achieve full marriage or civil union status.

In the New Jersey case, firstly it was decided that the definition of marriage and its associated rights and privileges could not be defined as between a man and a woman because the denial of equivalent rights and privileges to same-sex couples violated the New Jersey Constitution’s equal protection clause (p. 22). A look at Singapore’s corresponding equal protection clause in its Constitution, as mentioned in part (I), states that persons shall not be discriminated against based on religion, race, descent or place of birth, and that “all persons are equal before the law” [emphasis mine]. The most fundamental document of Singapore law thus suggests Singapore law itself to be the initiating point for change; it offers no expository insight into the basic moral need of the law being constantly vigilant in at least considering the judicial possibilities of reflecting contemporary social mores. Neither does it offer any broad ideals for law review committees to act upon.

It may however be fair to say that the Singapore Constitution is too venerable a document to be open to rewriting and change, by association with the touchstone Constitutions of other countries. In what other ways then might Singapore law itself monitor its own changes and adaptations? The New Jersey legislature had enacted an amendment to its Law Against Discrimination (LAD) in 1992 to include sexual orientation. The LAD stipulates that homosexuals will not be discriminated against in “pursuing employment opportunities, gaining access to public accommodations, obtaining housing and real property, seeking credit and loans from financial institutions, and engaging in business transactions.” In comparison, Singapore fares relatively badly in terms of principles in common with the New Jersey LAD; the legal and social environment is pro-business and thus in business transactions sexual orientation is irrelevant. However in the pursuit of employment opportunities, access to public housing, and financial credit, it has no anti-discriminatory laws for sexual orientation or same-sex couples. In fact, as in the above anecdote on the Penal Code amendments focus group discussion, the not improbable suggestion to strike off existing homophobic legislation that is not enforced anyway was not well-received by the government authorities. Logically, if Singapore is to move towards acceptance of same-sex partnerships, section 377A has to be struck off the Penal Code. This would clear the way for other changes in legal rights pertaining to same-sex couples.

In brief, New Jersey enacted a Domestic Partnership Act in 2004 that allowed same-sex couples to have death estate rights, guardianship rights, tax-related benefits, medical visitation and decision-making rights, and spousal health and pension benefits. In the cited October 2006 case, additional full rights of marriage afforded to same-sex couples were as follows: joint property ownership, tuition assistance for tertiary education for children and spouses of selected groups, testimonial confidentiality given to spouse of an accused in a criminal case, spousal care and childcare leave benefits, revocation of rights upon divorce, duty of care to children from the relationship, spousal maintenance allowance after divorce, and division of assets after divorce. All these rights are well-afforded to married couples in Singapore, but not to same-sex couples. We may be able to introduce these rights to same-sex couples in Singapore in similar stages.

The matter of children in a family with same-sex parents can be operationalized legally and socially as well. Allen and Demo (1995, p. 119; cited in part (I)) [4] has an overview of how family research is turning away from the original paradigm of “benchmark family versus deviant alternative family” to embrace the diversity of family types now in existence. Herek (2006) [5] describes the legal recognition of same-sex families throughout the United States in a comparatively up-to-date review.

Social workers can advocate for these changes in policy.

4. Conclusion

Given that social change does not occur overnight, and that the lack of gay marriages and civil unions though bringing much pain to homosexual individuals and couples does not fare well in comparison with income inequality and structural unemployment issues in Singapore, it is not easy to describe how this may be desirable for Singapore in the long term. Singapore is not a country known for prizing its civil liberties above economic ones, but perhaps when that changes, the stage-by-stage framework suggested or modified by future events will come in useful in thinking about the issue of homosexual rights and making gay marriages a reality here.


References

[1] Another first-person account by Ms. pleinelune can be found here on the Sayoni site.

[2] Nadarajan, B 2006, ‘Feedback focuses on sex laws: marital rape laws inadequate, say some; continued outlawing of gay sex also questioned’, The Straits Times, 13 December 2006. I am unable to find the fulltext version of this article online and instead provide a link to Mr Wang's partial extract of it here.

[3] Also see Ms. Kitana, 'Why the internet is the most powerful voice we have', 26 October 2006. <http://kitana.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/why-the-internet-is-the-most-powerful-voice-we-have/>

[4] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[5] Herek, GM 2006, ‘Legal recognition of same-sex relationships in the United States: a social science perspective’, American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 607-621.

Faith (Part 1)

Ohaiyo :) I got no pithy quotes on Faith, unfortunately. Especially Faith in the context of this mini-anthology of Hope, Faith and Love. (1 Corinthians 13:13, Bible.)

Religious faith however can be discussed in a tangential manner - today we write about homosexuality instead. Aaron had a hot discussion over at his blog a few days back, and Ben and Kitana had weighed in earlier as well, with Ben rounding up the discussion just this weekend.

This is one of my favourite topics of all time, and I wrote a short paper on it last November when the Penal Code amendments public consultation sessions were still going strong. Acknowledgment: Much of the inspiration for the paper has to be credited to Yawning Bread [1], where I first saw the New Jersey case.


Gay Marriages and Civil Unions – the Singapore Context

1. Overview

The issue of whether gay marriage should be legislated for first garnered worldwide attention when the then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared in 2004 that gay marriage was a fundamental human right and proceeded to sign marriage licenses for gay couples without any concern or regard for the legal repercussions of those documents. Since then the state of Massachusetts in the United States has legalized gay marriage while the states of Vermont and Connecticut have legalized civil unions.

The case of Mark Lewis and Dennis Winslow et al. v. Gwendolyn L. Harris etc. et al. (Supreme Court of New Jersey, 2006) indicated two main points of contention in the legislation for or against gay marriages and, more broadly, civil unions between same-sex couples: 1. the right to marry, and 2. the rights of marriage. The right to marry was the right that Gavin Newsom was asserting by his brashly independent action. The rights of marriage are those that are already accorded to heterosexual couples when they marry, in the country they choose the marriage to take place in, as well as any other countries who have pledged to honour extraterritorial marriage contracts. The situation of a country refusing to honour an extraterritorial gay marriage has thus far not been reported.

In this paper I discuss whether civil unions or gay marriages can be legalized in Singapore, and the steps that can be taken to achieve social legitimization of such partnerships. Towards this end a literature review is timely.

2. Marriage

It is well-known that the traditional definition of marriage specifies that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, in a clear example of heterosexual privilege. The Constitution of Singapore specifies in its equal protection clause under Part IV: Fundamental Liberties that no discrimination against Singapore citizens can be effected based on religion, race, descent or place of birth; both sexual orientation and sexual identity are notably absent from this clause and from any other part of the Constitution. Section 377 of the Penal Code of Singapore criminalizes carnal intercourse ‘against the order of nature’. Marriage as specified in the Women’s Charter of Singapore is restricted to the traditional definition only.

However a recent New Jersey case brought before the state Supreme Court in February 2006 described seven same-sex couples being in a permanent committed relationship for more than ten years, some having children and grandchildren through the reproductive method of artificial insemination. The family lives of these seven couples are briefly summarized in the case (pp. 8-12) as “being remarkably similar to opposite-sex couples”. Allen and Demo also describe in a meta-review (1995) [2] similar functioning families with same-sex parents and constructively criticize the prevalence of negative case same-sex family studies over positive ones in the field of family research. There exists therefore empirical evidence that same-sex families are not a priori dysfunctional.

3. Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgenders (LGBT)

As part of a prospective longitudinal study on the upstream-downstream relationships between past temporal orientation, long-term distress and temporal disintegration in a California population after a firestorm event, Holman and Silver (1998) [3] reported significantly higher levels of immediate temporal disintegration in individuals who had had direct experience with chronic trauma prior to the fires, compared with individuals who had instead directly experienced prior acute trauma, p < 0.05, and in their Discussion they acknowledged that “the role of temporal disintegration in response to chronic forms of trauma remains unexplored” (p. 1158). Temporal disintegration is cited and defined therein (p. 1151) as “confusing day and time, narrowing attention to the present, perceiving oneself to be in slow motion, feeling as though time itself has stopped, confusing the order of events experienced, experiencing a sense of timelessness, feeling fragmentation in the continuity between past and present, and having a foreshortened or obliterated sense of the future”. How this is applicable to the LGBT sector is that one’s sexuality is not only chronic, it is constant. And it can be traumatic to ‘come out’ to declare and maintain one’s alternative sexual orientation in the face of societal disapproval, as seen in Price (2001) [4] and Vaughan (1999)’s [5] studies on homosexual women.

In Singapore, homosexuality is still very much painted as a social taboo, as evidenced by frequent association of drugs and crime with homosexuality in the daily mainstream broadsheet The Straits Times, and the government’s reluctance to remove or amend section 377A (pertaining to all sexual contact between men) of the Singapore Penal Code during the ongoing public feedback discussion of extensive proposed Penal Code amendments. Such pandering to the homophobic ‘conservative Singaporean majority’ (no demographics data available) is highlighted in the quote below from a ChannelNewsAsia article on 8 November 2006 [6] by Ms Ellen Lee, a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and Law.

“I think the general feel is that we're still not ready to introduce major changes in these areas. … It's not necessarily [sic] for major legislative change to signal changes. But the legislation will only be changed when there is sufficient justification to warrant it, because the larger section of society [sic] think that it's time for those changes to take place.”

– Ms Ellen Lee

From a humanistic perspective [7], this resistance to ending open prejudice and discrimination could hardly be affirming to the homosexual person. Given that 'risk and resilience' literature emphasizes risk factors and protective factors [8], the taboo of homosexuality in the mainstream media and high echelons of government, without balancing effects from civic pro-LGBT organisations, could make homosexuality in itself a risk factor for living in Singapore.

4. Summary

Although the ground for gay marriages and civil unions may not be fertile in Singapore at this moment in time, there exists hope that greater social acceptance of non-heterosexual Singaporeans will eventually be supported bureaucratically. This will be elaborated further in my analysis.

References

[1] Au, A 2006, ‘New Jersey court orders legislature to provide for same-sex unions’, <http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2006/yax-670.htm>

[2] Allen, KR & Demo, DH 1995, ‘The families of lesbians and gay men: a new frontier in family research’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 111-127.

[3] Holman, AE & Silver, RC 1998, ‘Getting “stuck” in the past: temporal orientation and coping with trauma’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, no. 5, pp. 1146-1163.

[4] Price, MF 2001, ‘Early trauma, societal oppression and coming out’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 59 (abstract only).

[5] Vaughan, SC 1999, ‘The hiding and revelation of sexual desire in lesbians: the lasting legacy of developmental traumas’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 81 (abstract only).

[6] Ng, J 2006, ‘Penal Code review to add protection for minors, flexibility for judges’, ChannelNewsAsia, 8 November 2006. <http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/240179/1/.html>

[7] The humanistic perspective, in brief, states that each person is unique and has value, that each person is responsible for the choices he or she makes within the limits of freedom, that people always have the capacity to change themselves, and that human behaviour is driven by a desire for growth, personal meaning, and competence, and by a need to experience a bond with others. Source is Hutchison, ED & Charlesworth, LW 2003, ‘Theoretical perspectives on human behaviour’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: person and environment, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.

[8] Hutchison, ED 2003, ‘A life course perspective’, in ED Hutchison (ed.), Dimensions of human behaviour: the changing life course, 2nd edn, Sage Publications, CA.