RELATIONSHIPS TOXICITY AND ABUSE

Child Abuse: Signs, Types, Impact

By Elizabeth Plumptre Updated on May 09, 2023

Medically reviewed by Ann-Louise T. Lockhart, PsyD, ABPP

LumiNola / Getty Images

Table of Contents

Indicators of Child Abuse

Types of Child Abuse

Impact of Child Abuse

How to Manage the E ects of Child Abuse

Child abuse is the wrongful treatment of a child. It may be in the form of

physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. This form of abuse may also be
recognized as the exploitation of a child, as well as the failure to properly
care for a child, otherwise known as neglect.
Children that are subjected to abuse usually experience harm to their
health, welfare, and self-respect. [1]

This article covers the many forms of child abuse, how each form impacts
a child's mental and physical well-being, and discusses how childhood
trauma can be treated.

If you are a victim of child abuse or know someone who might be, call
or text the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453
to speak with a professional crisis counselor.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline

Database.

Indicators of Child Abuse

When a child is experiencing ill-treatment from a caregiver or other
person, there are signs that may indicate abuse. These include: [2]

Signs of Physical Abuse

Unexplained facial injuries
Injuries on forearms
Burn marks on the skin
Bruises on the ears
Oral and dental injuries
Dislocations around the body
Internal damage
Vomiting or breathing di culties due to head trauma

Signs of Sexual Abuse

Bruising around the genitals
Painful urination or defecation
Discharge around the genital or rectal areas
Di culty walking or sitting

Signs of Neglect
Poor hygiene
Improper clothing during the seasons
Lack of access to medical care
Worsening medical conditions
Poorly-tended wounds
Hair loss
Malnutrition
Low weight

Behavioral Cues of Child Abuse

Excessive crying in infants
Nightmares
Bedwetting
Poor concentration
Development of phobias
Eating issues
Displays fear around parents/caregivers
Speech di culties
Poor performance at school
Substance abuse
Discomfort while undressing
Docile during physical exams
Withdrawing when touched

Related: Mental Health E ects of Di erent Types of Abuse

Types of Child Abuse

Child abuse is committed in epidemic proportions in the United States.
Every year, approximately one million children [3]are deprived of a normal,
harm-free childhood. Instead, they are subjected to the horrors of
maltreatment in their formative stages.

The abuse of children may take di erent forms, listed below.

Physical Abuse
This form of abuse refers to the deliberate physical harm of a child by
parents or caregivers. Physical abuse a ects around 18% of maltreated
children, [4] and is a leading cause of child deaths—homicide falling in
second for the loss of infant lives younger than one. [4]

Physical abuse may involve hitting a child with hands or an object.

Burning, biting, or physically restraining a child with the intent to do
harm is also considered physical abuse.
 Children of all races, ethnicities and economic groups may be subject
to physical abuse. It is, however, more commonly observed in boys
and infant children. [1]

A child is also at a higher risk of physical abuse where they live with a
disability or are under the care of an unmarried mother. [1]

There is also an increased chance of violence where a child is raised in

poverty, or in a home where domestic violence is rampant. The same goes
in situations where a child grows up with an unrelated adult, or with more
than two siblings at home. [1]

Emotional Abuse
This form of abuse may not always have the immediately apparent signs
of physical harm but is no less painful.

Emotional abuse occurs where a child is degraded, terrorized,

isolated, or exploited by a parent/caregiver. This is seen where a child
is constantly criticized, threatened, rejected, or given no support or
love while growing up.

In 2010, The Federal Report of Child Maltreatment Statistics stated that

8% of all reported cases of child maltreatment involve emotional abuse.
There is a chance that cases of emotional abuse may be even higher than
those reported. [5]

Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse refers to the forceful participation of children in sexual acts.
It may also involve forcing a child to engage in sexual acts that they do
not fully understand. This abuse may also force children to engage in
sexual acts that they do not fully understand.

Sexual abuse includes sexual assault, rape, incest, fondling, oral

sexual contact, the commercial sexual exploitation of children, or
genital/anal penetration. [6] Sexual abuse is a worryingly common
form of child abuse. By adulthood, it is estimated that 26% of girls
and 5% of boys will experience this maltreatment. [7]
While sexual contact typically makes up sexual abuse, non-contact
improper treatment may also come under the abuse classi cation. This
includes the exposure of a child to sexual activity or taking inappropriate
photographs of children.

Neglect
This is the failure of a caregiver/parent to meet the most basic needs of a
child. It is the most common form of child abuse where approximately
two-thirds of reports to child protective services are made over concerns
of child neglect. [8]

Neglect takes many forms and can be observed where a child is not taken
for regular doctor appointments, or is denied access to healthcare by a
caregiver.

This form of abuse is also apparent where a child is not given the right
nutritional care, or when children are exposed to harmful substances like
drugs. [8]

Impact of Child Abuse

Abuse has far-reaching e ects on every aspect of a child’s well-being.

Impact of Physical Abuse

Physically, children may su er the pains of fractures, burns, facial or
bodily dis gurement, and even seizures brought on by bodily
maltreatment. The mental e ects of this treatment may leave children
with PTSD or even cognitive retardation. [1]

Impact of Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse may cause a disconnect in a child’s sense of self. This
abuse could be responsible for negative disruptions in the brain, anxiety,
depression, low self-esteem, hostile behaviors, and noticeable delinquent
habits such as alcohol use in early adulthood. [5]

Impact of Sexual Abuse

The sexual abuse of children has both immediate and long-term e ects on
their well-being. Survivors of child sexual abuse may feel anger, guilt, and
shame over the treatment they have endured.
Children who have experienced sexual abuse are also at a higher risk of
developing anxiety, depression, and inappropriate sexual behaviors in life.
In later years, these survivors may experience problems like alcoholism,
drug dependency, marriage/family di culties, and a worrying
preoccupation with suicide. [6]

Impact of Neglect
A child left without the useful tools and care for proper development may
perform poorly in school. This child is also likely to display emotional and
behavioral problems as a result of their abandonment.

Later di culties in life like liver and heart disease may also be traceable
to poor treatment received in childhood. [8]

How to Manage the Effects of Child Abuse

In suspected cases of child abuse at the hands of a parent or caregiver, this
treatment should be reported to child protection services or other relevant
law enforcement agencies.

Children that have been physically abused should then be stabilized, with
examinations carried out to determine the extent of the ill-treatment
endured.

Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse victims, as well as children that

have lived through neglect, need appropriate care. These children
may be protected using treatments like psychotherapy, medication, or
a combination of both.

Therapy is useful for addressing the issues linked with abuse and neglect.
It is also necessary to teach a child appropriate behaviors for adult-child
relationships. Therapy can also provide a support system for poorly
treated children. [9]

Medication may be recommended for the PTSD, anxiety, depression, and

other pains associated with abusive treatment. [10]

Maltreatment is a painful thing to experience during development. The

di erent forms of child abuse have far-reaching e ects on welfare, but
may be managed using the right methods.
 Related: Healing From Childhood Abuse With Former NFL Player Reggie
Walker

A Word From Verywell

Child abuse is an alarmingly common form of abuse. With many di erent
forms, children are exposed to multiple ripple e ects from the
maltreatment they've been subjected to. While recovery from a life
punctuated by physical assault, sexual violence, or neglect can be di cult,
healing is possible. Putting a child a ected by abuse in therapy, or placing
them on medication to manage adverse outcomes are e ective ways to
manage child abuse. To protect a child against abuse, it's important to
report suspected cases of ill-treatment to the correct authorities.

Read Next: Help for Parents Wrongly Accused of Child Abuse

10 Sources

By Elizabeth Plumptre
Elizabeth is a freelance health and wellness writer. She helps brands
craft factual, yet relatable content that resonates with diverse
audiences.

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Crime against Children: A Critical Analysis

By Jahnvi_sen29 | Views 38894 (author-44879-jahnvi-sen29.html)

10 11 2 Blogger 4 pocket 7 Digg 3

Children's are the future of a nation as they are the ones who will take the country in the track of progress and
prosperity but in present scenario the crime rate against the builders of the nation i.e. "children" are increasing
day by day. They are being forcefully indulged in various activities such as tra cking, begging, they are being
sold just for the sake of money, and are being killed also.

Sexual o ence against the children is a very serious crime which not only a ects them physically but also, they
are mentally a ected. This article deals with the various o ences against the children including the sexual
o ences. It also focuses on various case laws for better understanding. Though various laws are being made in
order to protect the future of our country but still they are not safe, as in the year 2016-2017 there was an
increase in the crime rate up to 20%. It is the need of the hour to rethink on the present law in order to
prevent the crime against the children.

Introduction
Since ages, children have been the victims of the one abuse or the other. Though it is highly unbelievable that,
where we consider children's to be the future of our nation but it would not be wrong to say that they have
been neglected a lot. The crimes which are committed against children are not restricted to any speci c gender
or age group, rather it happens because of their incapability to appreciate the nature of the o ences which are
being committed against them and their consequences thereof, which ultimately makes them a soft target of
the o ender. It is due to their inherent innocence and maturity which are usually related to a children's age
make them an o ender's favorite victim.

Various o ences are being conducted against children, they are either being sold, enslaved, exploited,
physically abused and are killed too. And this victimization starts before the birth of a child itself.

For example, foeticide, gender determination of foetus and causing the miscarriage and if it is found to be a
girl child then she is being killed in the mother's womb itself. This practice is going since ages and with the
technological development, the act has been done, though various laws have been made but still in some parts
of the country they are still in existence.
Not only this, there are several other o ences that a child is victim of. These o ences are, child tra cking, sex
tourism, incest, child rape, child pornography, devadasi system, and prostitution.

Though, India with the second largest child population in the world and there are certain provisions that are
being made for the protection of children, but still the crime rate against the builder or future of our nation is
increasing day by day. There is a need to prevent these acts with the help of stricter laws.

Crime Against Children

Children are the most vulnerable and innocent victims of crime. They can be easily targeted and many a times
they being targeted by the known. They can be parents, relatives, caretakers, guardian or any other who are
being appointed to look after them.

Following are the crimes that are being committed against children and they are as follows:
Child Abandonment: - it occurs when a parent, guardian or a person in charge of a child either deserts a child
without any regard for the child's safety or welfare of the child and without considering child's physical health.
It includes:
Unwillingness in providing the care, support or supervision for the child
Abandoning an infant in a trash cans or at the road side or leaving at some other doorsteps.
Being absent from the home for a particular time period, which creates a substantial risk of serious
nature to a child left in the home.
Making only less e orts to support and communicate with the abandoned child

Statutory Rape or Sexual Assault: - It refers to sexual relations with someone below the "age of consent" i.e.
not in a state of understanding the concept of consent. In such cases individuals are too young to give the
consent and it ultimately results into child molestation.[1]

Sexual abuse and exploitation: - According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), every 15 minutes a
child is sexually abused in India. And the crime rate is increasing day by day. [2]
 Replay

Child sexual abuse also known as child molestation is a form of child abuse, where an adult uses the child for
sexual stimulation. It includes engaging a child in sexual activities, indecent exposure, child grooming, child
sexual exploitation or including a child to produce child pornography.[3] Molestations and rapes are not solely
restricted to any gender at present. A child irrespective of its gender can be exposed to sexual o ences such as
molestation or rape. Such o ences might be committed by some outsiders but it is also committed by a family
member, school teacher, friend, house help etc.

Generally, a child fails to comprehend the severity of the nature of the act due to lack of knowledge. Or
sometimes, even the child is going through this pain but the child stays silent due to the threats given from the
perpetrators, or sometimes the family advises them to be silent for the purpose of maintaining the so-called
family honour. There has been an increase in the sexual o ences against a child and the majority of the cases
do not get reported as the family members are concerned with their family honour or the reputation.

Cruelty:
Basically, cruelty is any act or omission which in icts mental or physical harm upon an individual, irrespective
of the age, gender, mental capacity etc.

Yelling at a child just to scare him or her can amount to cruelty. Our society feels that 'spare the rod shall spoil
a child'. Society is of view that unless parents or guardian behaves like a martinet with a child, such child shall
never be capable of being disciplined in life. Even educational institutions have the impression that physical
punishment for mistakes is the sole way of inducing discipline within a child. But in present scenario, cruelty
towards child in educational institutions has seen a decline due to strict legislative enactments. But the
domestic abuse of children goes on unaddressed as they are unaware of their rights. Therefore, cruelty has
become an accepted notion.

Employment of child for begging:

Children are being forcefully employed for the purpose of begging. Employment of children as beggars exists
on a global scale, irrespective of country's economic scenario. The most shocking factor is that, the child is
sometimes being used by his or her parents to beg for alms. The money that they have received for begging
ends up with those who nd a child as a convenient source of earning.

Intoxicating a Child: - Children who fall prey to such kinds of racket, are sometimes forced to consume
intoxicants such as alcohol, drugs, cigarettes etc. so that it becomes easier for the people i.e. the racket leader
to control them and they can in order to ful l their greed, they can force the children to do any kind of
unlawful activities.

Child pornography: - It refers to the inducing or coercing a child or indulging a child in sexually explicit acts and
recording them. Such inducing acts can be done by tempting a minor through monetary or some other means.
Child pornography is banned in all nations and pornographic websites are strictly directed for removal of any
kind of such content which involves a child in it.
Among crime against children, kidnapping and abduction continued to be the most prevalent in nature.
Around 42 % of the total 1,29,032 cases of crime were being reported. Apart from that, the other major crime
against children include violation of the protection of children from sexual o ences (POCSO) Act, rape, sexual
assault and procuring of minor girls.[4]

The e ects of child sexual abuse include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as some
physical injuries. Though physical injuries can be healed with the passage of time but it takes time to heal with
the mental injuries.

Generally, in most of the cases the o ender is acquainted with victim. And around 30% of the abuse on
children is being done by the family members itself (relatives).

Though, various laws have been made at international level as well.

United States, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), is an international treaty that legally obliges
the states to protect the children's rights. CRC's Article 34 and 35 states about the protection of children
from sexual abuse and sexual exploitation. As of November 2008, there are 193 countries that are being
bounded by the CRC.
Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual
abuse, Council of Europe has adopted this convention in order to prohibit child sexual abuse that occurs
within the family or at the home.[5]

In the eyes of law, any sexual activity is done with the child then it constitutes a criminal o ence i.e. if any of
such activity is done on a child below the age of 18 years then it is considered as a crime against children. As
they are too young and immature to make such kind of decisions.

Possibly, there are many reasons for crimes against children. Few of them are mentioned below:
Poverty:
Poverty is the main reason which forces many people to choose the path of crime and somehow,
children are the preys to these crimes. Sometimes, due to the problem of poverty parents often sell their
own children just for the sake of money, in the hands of criminal minded people and then they have to
face the various crimes.

Lack of awareness and carelessness by parents:

In rural parts of the country there are many poverty-stricken families with number of children's, which
ultimately results into inadequate care to each and every child and eventually they become the victims of
various crimes.

Society:
Well, society is equally responsible for the increase in crime rate against children. People who indulge
children in such heinous o ences, and people who overlook the crimes taking place etc. are all equally
responsible for the current scenario. And another area of concern is the dramatic increase in the rape
incidents, which is also a serious issue.

Internet:
Internet has played a major role in increasing the crime rate against children, as a lot of inappropriate
stu is being provided over there which somehow a ects the mentality of an individual. So, more care
and stricter measures must be taken so that these types stu s do not reach the non-desirable
audiences.

Television:
Television has somehow changed the mind set of people. As the crime shows which are being aired on
television. They have their pros and cons. Where somehow, it focuses on how to be safe and what all is
going in the society, whereas on the other hand, it provides people with criminal mind the new ideas as
how to prey kids.
Apart from this there are various other o ences that are mentioned under IPC and Special and Local laws (SLL)
and they are as follows:
Abetment of suicide of child (sec 305)
Infanticide (sec 315)
Exposure and abandonment of child under12 years, by parent or person having care of it (sec 317 IPC),
Procuration of minor girls (sec 366A)
Importation of girls from foreign country, below the age of 18 years (sec 366-B)
Selling of minors for prostitution (sec 372)
Buying of minors for prostitution (sec 373) [6]

Laws under Special Local Laws (SLL) are as follows:

Transplantation of Human Organs Act1994(for persons below 18 years of age)
Child labour (Prohibition & Regulation) Act,1986
Immoral Tra c (Prevention) Act, 1956
Juvenile Justice (Care & Protection of Children) Act, 2000
Protection of Children from Sexual O ences Act, 2012 (POCSO)
Prohibition of child marriage Act, 2006[7]

There are certain constitutional provisions which deal with the rights of children, they are as follows:

Article 21- it provides for right to life and personal liberty

Article 24- it states that child below the age of 14 years shall not be employed to work in factory or a mine nor
shall be engaged in any kind of hazardous work'

Article 39(f)- it makes obligatory for the state to direct its policy towards securing that children are given
opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy environment and in conditions of freedom and dignity and
that childhood and youth are protected against exploitation and against moral and material abandonment

Article 45- states that, free and compulsory education to all children upto the age of 14 years.[8]

Though various laws are being made by the legislation and various rights are being provided to the children
but still the crime against them is increasing. It has been seen that the main reason of these o ences against
children could be poverty and illiteracy. As they have played an important role for the exploitation of children,
in order to earn their meal for the day. It ultimately results into their sexual exploitation. Though certain laws
have been implemented for the protection of the children but still improvement is still required, as in the year
2016-2017 there was an increase in the crime rate of upto 20%.

Due to such o ences not only a child's physical health gets a ected but they are being mentally a ected too.
And due to this, there is an impact of o ences against children on society.
Children are so innocent in nature, that their innocence can be easily misused by others, which leaves an
unforgettable impression on their lives as well as on their family members. When such kind of o ences is
being committed against children, there is a threat in the minds of people living in the society and it also leaves
an impact on the parent's psychology. Because, in a country like India where a normative structure like
socialization plays quite signi cant role in one's life.

Here, people have to su er a lot because of the crime which not only destroy their social conditions merely by
labeling perspective. Though, govt. has implemented various laws and policies in order to protect children by
assuring them some rights and that are being mentioned above.

Protection of children from sexual o ences Act, 2012

Replay

Earlier there was no separate legislation for the protection of rights of children but with the increasing rate of
grave sexual o ences against them and low rate of conviction, there was a need for the separate legislation.

So, the Protection of Children from Sexual O ence Act,2012 (POCSO) was enacted to protect the children from
various types of sexual o ences and to establish Special Court for providing speedy disposal of cases.

O ences against children (Prevention) Bill, 2005 was an attempt to address the issue of child abuse. It mainly
focuses on the rights and remedies available to them. It also includes instances of sexual abuse which includes
touching a child directly or indirectly with sexual intent. It also includes the provisions of enhanced punishment
for abuse of trust and for those individuals who were previously convicted for child sexual abuse.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015

This act was enacted to consolidate and amend the law regarding juvenile in con ict with law and children in
need of care and protection by providing proper care, protection and treatment and by providing them child
friendly environment in the adjudication and disposition of matters which is in the best interest and which
ultimately helps them in their rehabilitation which are being established by law.

Conclusion
Rapid increase in the crime rate indicates that children are no longer safe neither at home nor outside. We
consider them to be the future of our country but still they belong to the most vulnerable section of the
society. There are laws that are being made for their protection and even the constitution also guarantees
certain rights to the children but still there is a need to think about the consequences of o ences against
children.

Children are victimizing due to many factors which not only a ects the child's mental state but also a ects
them physically. They may cure physically but the psychological trauma may remain which ultimately impact
on child's future. The roots of all o ences thus can be traced to their immaturity and weakness, physical as
well as mental.

They bear all this from their procreation till their adulthood. The rigid law and criminal justice, as well as law
agencies are taking over all the challenges to prevent the o ences against children. Society and community
play a major role in the prevention of o ences against children so, it is also the duty and the responsibility of
the society members to ght against this social evil while taking into consideration the morality and the human
values.

The law, as of now, already enshrines stringent punishments which are to be imposed against those who
commit any kind of o ence or crime against children, such punishments with time requires a higher degree of
severity so as to prevent and deter the perpetrators from committing such o ence.

Suggestions:
As mentioned above, poverty can be the main reason to choose the path of crime and also due to
poverty and lack of education parents are ignorant towards their children rights. So, they must be made
aware of child rights, must demand for it and also ght to obtain for the same.

There is a need to develop a national, child-centered, integrated, multidisciplinary and time bound
strategy to address violence against children and these multidisciplinary child professionals should work
together and monitor the government e orts in protecting the child rights.

If parents are unable to provide proper care and protection, then it shall be the responsibility and
accountability of the government, elected representatives, policy makers, NGO'S to look after the same.

Government must invest in law enforcement and should enact an explicit legal ban on violence against
children backed by e ective enforcement.

Strict implementation and enforcement of laws are required in order to protect them.

There is a need to generate social awareness among people and also to enhance legislation and
nurturing action towards ending violence, sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Books Referred:
Indian Penal Code, 1860 (Prof. T Bhattacharya)
Constitution of India,1950 (bare act)
POCSO Act, 2012
O ences against children (prevention) bill,2005
Juvenile justice (care and protection),2015

End-Notes:
1. https://criminal. ndlaw.com/criminal-charges/crimes-against-children.html(last seen 13th nov 2020
08:00AM)
2. https://www.ourbetterworld.org/story/breaking-silence-child-sexual-abuse?gclid=CjwKCAjw8-
78BRA0EiwAFUw8LEf_fzQYRBfBJc7zhECVD26mfWXgqIzU6C29A1ZoMQze7l2-IN25LRoCTXsQAvD_BwE (last
seen 30th oct 2020 11:25 AM)
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse (last seen 13th nov 2020 08:00 AM)
4. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/crimes-against-children-rise-by-20-per-cent-cry-
report/article30084689.ece(last seen 11th nov 2020 11:02 PM)
5. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40484.pdf (last seen 11th nov 2020 11:30 PM)
6. https://www.latestlaws.com/bare-acts/central-acts-rules/children-laws/legal-provision-related-children/
(last seen 13th nov 2020 08:53 AM)

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Pornucopia
Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls
sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships
– are they right?

by Maria Konnikova

Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
(2013) and the The Confidence Game (2016). She is a columnist for The New Yorker
online and lives in New York.

Edited by Ross Andersen

I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with pornography,
but I must have been around 10 – the experience is entwined with the sound of
the AOL dial-up tone. It was something relatively benign – a close-up photo of
some genitalia – and I wasn’t much shocked. I grew up in a family not given to
sugarcoating the realities of the human condition and I’d known what to expect.

But what if I’d grown up a decade or so later, when the internet had graduated
beyond the old-school chatrooms and into the ubiquitous juggernaut of today?
My memory might have been decidedly different.

‘ e widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest-moving global

experiments ever unconsciously conducted,’ the US science writer Gary Wilson
told a TEDx audience in 2012. For the first time ever, Wilson explained, we can
track how ever-growing exposure to pornography affects sexual practices,
appetites and trends. Wilson – who is neither a scientist nor a professor – is the
founder of Your Brain On Porn, a site that popularises anti-pornography research.
In his talk, he reiterated the site’s main conclusions: when we have pornography
freely available at our fingertips, the brain’s reward circuits go into overdrive as
they’re exposed to what he terms ‘extreme versions of natural events’. Instead of
one or two possible sexual partners, now there are dozens, hundreds, all readily
accessible in a single click. Like any addiction, Wilson says, the result is a numbed
response to pleasure, from lack of interest in real women to erectile dysfunction.
Ubiquitous pornography undermines natural sexuality.

Wilson’s talk has had approximately 4.6 million views – and its popularity heralds
a new movement in pornography consumption: NoFap. ‘Fap’ comes from
Japanese manga porn, where it is a sound effect for masturbation. NoFap is a
move away from masturbation, and the pornography that so often forms its
backdrop. e rationale derives from a version of Wilson’s argument: when you
are constantly bombarded with heightened sexual stimuli, your virility is
undermined. Your ability to communicate with real sexual beings collapses. You
become isolated – porn, after all, is a solitary pursuit – and your emotional
wellbeing plummets. Refrain from those stimuli, and from acting on them, and
you will find yourself rejuvenated and your sexual powers reawakened, your
emotional equilibrium restored and your happiness rising. When Wilson’s talk
was first released, the self-styled ‘Fapstronauts’ numbered approximately 7,000.
Today, there are more than 150,000.

T he NoFap, brain-on-porn arguments are the latest in a common, critical refrain:

that, for one reason or another, pornography is bad for you. e more traditional
critiques say that pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever
happens to be the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic expectations
of sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the self-image of those
involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and actions. Porn-users
compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either come out unimpressed
and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst, demanding the types of behaviours
they see on screen, regardless of their desirability to their partner. One poll from
the US Pew Research Center in 2007 quantified the feeling, finding that 70 per
cent of Americans said pornography is harmful.

Do any of these criticisms hold water? It would be nice to know. Reliable statistics
about pornography are notoriously difficult to obtain – many people underreport
their own habits, and many porn companies are loath to share any sort of
viewership statistics. But according to ongoing research by Chyng Sun, a
professor of media studies at New York University (NYU), the numbers are high
and rising quickly. She estimates that 36 per cent of internet content is
pornography. One in four internet searches are about porn. ere are 40 million
(and growing) regular consumers of porn in the US; and around the world, at any
given time, 1.7 million users are streaming porn. Of the almost 500 men Sun
surveyed in one of her studies, only 1 per cent had never seen porn, and half had
seen their first porn film before they’d turned 13. Cindy Gallop, the founder of the
website Make Love Not Porn, told me recently that, in the past six months, the
average age when children are first exposed to pornography dropped from eight
to six. It wasn’t a deliberate seeking. Online pornography is now so widespread
that it’s easier than ever to ‘stumble’ on it.

e actual effects of pornography on attitudes, behaviour, life and relationship

satisfaction are difficult to study, and for many years most data have remained
purely correlational or anecdotal. But early on, there emerged suggestive inklings
that those who vocally opposed pornography’s spread might be motivated more
by emotion than any tangible proof.

In 1969, Denmark became the first country to legalise pornography. In the years
that followed, onlookers watched with interest and trepidation: what would
happen to Danish society? As it turns out, nothing – or rather, nothing negative.
When in 1991 Berl Kutchinsky, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen
who spent his career studying the public effects of pornography, analysed the
data for more than 20 years following legalisation, he found that rates of sexual
aggression had actually fallen. Pornography was proliferating, but the sexual
climate seemed to be improving. e same thing happened, he found, in Sweden
and West Germany, which followed Denmark’s legalisation campaign.

Kutchinsky concluded that the available country-level data ‘would seem to

exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availability [of pornography] has
had any detrimental effects in the form of increased sexual violence… the
remarkable fact is that they decreased’ – a conclusion that has since been echoed
by multiple studies of country-level data, from nations spanning North and South
America, Europe and Asia. If anything, Kutchnisky wrote, pornography was being
used precisely as it was originally intended: as an expression of a certain fantasy.

When it comes to porn, going beyond correlational evidence can be difficult.

‘Science is so scared of pornography and sexuality, and it’s so discriminated
against, that there’s a ton of work that hasn’t been done,’ Nicole Prause, head of
the Sexual Psychophysiology and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recently told me. ‘Most of the information we
currently have is not experimental or longitudinal. Lots of data talk about
correlates and associations, but the literature is especially bad – it can’t be trusted
– because no one is doing experiments, no one is showing cause and effect. at
needs to change.’
Prause fell into sex research by mistake: she followed a boyfriend to Indiana and
found herself next to the Kinsey Institute, which happened to have an opening for
a researcher. Soon, she was hooked. Today, Prause has become one of the few
researchers in the US to study pornography in the laboratory. A trained
neuroscientist, she focuses much of her efforts on the brain. Using fMRI, PET and
EEG, Prause looks at how we respond to pornography – and how those responses
translate to attitudes and behaviour. She has found that, in many ways,
pornography is no different to a scary movie or a bungee jump. We just view it
differently because it happens to involve sex. ‘ ere is a general idea that porn is
special or unique in the brain. But frankly, it doesn’t look that different from other
rewards,’ she says. ‘Lots of other things are as powerful. For someone with lower
sex drive, for instance, watching porn evokes the same magnitude response as
eating chocolate, in similar brain areas.’

What’s more, it doesn’t seem to be the case that people become desensitised to
pornography, in the sense that the more you watch it, the more extreme your
viewing content needs to become. When Prause and the psychologist James Pfaus
of Concordia University in Quebec recently measured sexual arousal in 280 men,
they found that watching more pornography actually increased arousal to less
explicit material – and increased the desire for sex with a partner. In other words,
it made them more, not less responsive to ‘normal’ cues, and more, not less,
desirous of real physical relationships. In a 2014 review, Prause likened
pornography addiction – the notion that, like a drug, the more you watch, the
more, and higher doses, you crave – to the emperor who has no clothes: everyone
says it’s there, but there is no actual evidence to support it.

Prause has also studied the question of relationship satisfaction more directly: did
watching pornography negatively impact the quality of sexual intimacy? Working
with the psychologist Cameron Staley of Idaho State University in 2013, she
asked 44 monogamous couples to watch pornography alone and together, to see
how it would affect feelings about their relationship. After each viewing session,
the couples reported on their arousal, sexual satisfaction, perception of
themselves, and their partner’s attractiveness and sexual behaviour. Prause and
Staley found that viewing pornography increased couples’ desire to be with their
significant other, whether they’d seen the film alone or together. Pornography also
increased their evaluation of their own sexual behaviour.

I n the past decade, experimental approaches such as Prause’s have finally started
to grow in number – and for the most part, their conclusions cast doubt on the
perceived social wisdom of pornography’s detrimental impact. As part of the
2002 Swiss Multicenter Adolescent Survey on Health, more than 7,500 16- to 20-
year-olds were asked about their exposure to online pornography (over three-
quarters of the males and 36 per cent of the females had viewed internet porn in
the past month) and then measured on a variety of behaviours and attitudes. e
researchers found no association between viewing explicit material and then
going on to behave in more sexually risky ways. A 2012 review of studies that,
since 2005, have looked at the effects of internet porn on adolescents’ social
development and attitudes found that the prevailing wisdom that pornography
leads to unrealistic sexual beliefs, more permissive attitudes and more
experimentation is not founded on replicable research. ‘ e aggregate literature
has failed to indicate conclusive results,’ the authors conclude in the journal
Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity.

Likewise with sexually violent behaviours or negative attitudes toward women. In

one series of experiments conducted by the sexologist Milton Diamond of the
University of Hawaii, viewing pornography neither made men more violent nor
more prone to having worse attitudes toward women. In a 2013 study of 4,600
15- to 25-year-olds in the Netherlands, the psychologist Gert Martin Hald looked
to see whether pornography-viewing had an effect on a wide variety of sexual
behaviours, such as likelihood of adventurous sex (threesomes, same-sex partners
for self-stated heterosexuals, sex with someone you met online, etc), partner
experience (one-night stands, age of first encounter, number of partners, etc), and
transactional sex (being paid money or something else for sex, paying someone
else for sex). He found that frequency of pornography-consumption did indeed
have an effect – but, once you controlled for other things, such as socio-
demographic factors, risk-seeking, and social relationships, it explained only an
additional 0.3 to 4 per cent of the impact. We shouldn’t dismiss the effect, Hald
says, but rather understand it in context: it is one of many factors, each of which
contributes to behaviour, and its influence is not any greater (and often, less) than
that of other predisposing elements.

Indeed, in another study earlier this year, Hald and the psychologist Neil
Malamuth of UCLA looked at the relationship between negative attitudes toward
women and pornography use. ey found that there was, in fact, a link – but only
if a person was already low on a scale of so-called agreeableness. ose results
came as no surprise: in 2012, they, along with the clinical psychologist Mary Koss
of the University of Arizona, found that the only time pornography viewing was
associated with attitudes that condoned any form of violence against women was
in men already at high risk of sexual aggression. When they summarised the data
that preceded their work, they wrote that negative effects ‘are evidence only for a
subgroup of males users, namely those already predisposed to sexual aggression’.
e negative behaviours we blame on pornography, in other words, might have
emerged no matter what; porn is perhaps more symptom than cause.

It’s a message that new research is increasingly supporting. Earlier this year, a
group from VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands attempted to
disambiguate cause and effect in relationship satisfaction: did frequent
pornography viewing cause people to drift apart – or was it the result of their
having drifted apart already? For three years, the psychologist Linda Muusses and
her colleagues tracked just under 200 newlywed couples, as part of a broader
study on marriage and wellbeing. At regular intervals, both members of every
couple were asked about their use of ‘explicit internet material’, as well as their
happiness with the relationship and their sexual satisfaction. e happier men
were in relationships, they found, the less pornography they watched. Conversely,
more viewing predicted lower happiness a year later. It was a self-reinforcing
cycle: get caught in a good one, with a satisfied relationship, and porn was a non-
issue. But lose satisfaction, watch more porn, and realise your relationship is
further disintegrating.

Muusses and her colleagues also noticed that higher levels of pornography use at
the start of a relationship did not predict a less sexually satisfying experience later
on, for men or women. ‘Our findings suggest that it is implausible that SEIM
[sexually explicit internet material] causes husbands to contrast their sexual
experiences and partner’s attractiveness with their SEIM experiences with long-
lasting effects,’ the authors wrote.

W hy, then, does the disconnect persist between theory, opinion and social
sentiment, on the one hand, and empirical research, on the other? Part of the
problem stems from the difficulty of saying exactly what pornography actually is.
e deeper I ventured into the world of pornography, online or not, speaking with
producers, viewers, distributors, the stars themselves, the more I realised how
misplaced the very premise of that framing was: there isn’t a monolithic
‘pornography’, just like there isn’t a monolithic ‘Hollywood film’. When we go to
the cinema, there are dramas and comedies, horror and sci-fi, thrillers and
romantic romps – movies to suit any mood, any taste, any occasion. e
experience and effects of each differ. We don’t emerge from Selma in the same
frame of mind as we do from When Harry Met Sally. But while we understand that
implicitly when it comes to mainstream cinema, we don’t see pornography with
the same level of nuance. ‘We cherry-pick the worst, most aggressive examples,’
said the media researcher Chyng Sun.

I heard the same refrain over and over, from every researcher and every member
of the pornography industry I spoke with: pornography is to sex as Hollywood
films are to real life. Pornography is fantasy, pure and simple. And just as any
fantasy can be channelled in any direction, so too can pornography. ere are bad
fantasies – Sun’s ‘worst, most aggressive examples’, just as there are good
fantasies, instances of pornography that should pass any feminist’s muster, both
in terms of quality and the ethical standards of filming. As Coyote Amrich of
Good Vibrations, an adult retailer in San Francisco (one of the oldest such
retailers in the country) puts it: ‘Just like not everyone is a Bernie Madoff in
finance, not every person involved in porn is this terrible person. Some are really
great and have allowed incredible content and have been supportive of male and
female performers, and help people make great careers.’

at short description goes to the heart of what makes pornography the kind of
fantasy we can feel good about versus the kind we should actively question. It’s
not a question of content but rather one of ethics, where the number-one criterion
is the treatment of the actors. ‘Are the women enjoying themselves and having
authentic pleasure as far as we can tell? Are the other people in the scene with
them not saying debasing things to them or, if they are, is it clear that it’s wanted
– yes, I want you to call me a slut, so call me a slut?’ Amrich explained. It matters
little what acts are being performed or how; we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss
something as bad just because we, personally, don’t think anyone could possibly
enjoy it. What matters is that the people performing these acts enjoy their
performance. As Jamie Martin, who previously worked with Amrich at Good
Vibes, put it: ‘If it’s not hurting anyone, and someone is going to get off on it, why
not?’

Amrich refuses to stock any films where the ethical treatment of actors isn’t
completely clear, a stance I saw from multiple buyers, distributors and retailers.
Increasingly, people insist that the product they host on their site or bring to their
customers comes from a place of clear desire. Not all porn is created equal. ‘We
need to move past the notion that a female performer is a victim. It’s antiquated,’
Amrich says. ‘It doesn’t acknowledge female power, pleasure, women taking
control of sexuality. It only serves the idea that a woman who is sexual is being
taken advantage of.’
Jiz Lee, recognised as one of the leading modern genderqueer adult performers,
has been in the industry for more than 10 years, and says ethical pornography is a
priority. e single biggest marker of such porn is that it costs the consumer
something. ‘By paying for it, it’s a guarantee,’ Lee told me, taking a break from
shooting with the director Shine Louise Houston. ‘Otherwise, it can be hard to tell
if it was ethically shot. Paying helps insure it, and helps the company be in good
standing.’ ese days, they point out, the internet doesn’t just function as a way to
distribute pornography; it’s a way of gauging quality and blacklisting those sites
that don’t meet certain standards. ‘I won’t work for a company that has a poor
record or is exploitative,’ Lee says. ‘And I will tell everybody else.’

Ethical pornography is becoming increasingly less exceptional. e porn industry

of today is a far cry from the ‘San Pornando Valley’ adult entertainment industry
of the 1990s. ere are more women in charge, more readily enforced standards,
and more accountability.

But regardless of what pornography insiders say, for consumers, especially

younger ones who are growing up with a ubiquitous internet, the view is quite
different. Unlike Hollywood, where it’s clear to anyone that they are watching an
idealised version of reality, with pornography, that realisation is often absent. For
one simple reason: we don’t talk about sexual pleasure as children, adolescents or
adults. It’s a taboo, guilt-ridden area. In the absence of other options,
pornography becomes a de facto way of educating yourself about sexuality. As one
2014 study of low-income black and Hispanic youth put it, led by Emily Rothman
of the Boston University School of Public Health, quoting an interview with a
porn-watching adolescent: ‘Without porn, I wouldn’t know half the things I know
now.’

T he sex researcher Alice Dreger of Northwestern University in Chicago recently

live-tweeted from a high-school sex-education class – her son’s. His teacher’s
approach, it soon became clear, was absolute avoidance of any topics other than
abstinence. Any attempt to broaden the conversation was stonewalled. And
therein lies the problem. We see pornography as a socially destructive force, but
there’s nothing inherently destructive about it. It becomes so only when it is the
one thing adolescents see as they discover sex: they use it as a learning script. It’s
not a problem of pornography as such, but rather, a problem of the absence of a
competing script, something that contextualises porn as a fantastical, not real-life,
experience.
 e way to change that – and to change the negative effects such a misperception
can have – isn’t to restrict or ban pornography. It’s to bring the discussion of
sexual pleasure to the foreground, especially in sex-ed. ‘We need to supplement
pornography with non-porn sexual education, so that porn becomes fantasy sex
rather than a real-world template,’ Zhana Vrangalova, a psychologist at NYU who
specialises in sexuality, told me. ‘We need to give people permission to enjoy sex.
Until we do that, they will go to porn. Because you can’t kill curiosity.’

Already, certain movements are trying to do just that. Jessica Cooper helps run
ScrewSmart, a sex-education collaborative in Philadelphia that aims to foster
open dialogue about sexual pleasure. e group meets with students, hosts
workshops, discusses porn and its role openly and honestly. ‘One of the biggest
issues for sexuality in general is permission,’ Cooper told me. ‘People want
permission to like things they like, want what they want. We are giving them
permission to say yes. Your desires are valid, sexuality is important, what you
want to do is not wrong. Porn does that, especially to women. ey need to be
told, I’m not an evil, weird creature for enjoying this.’

Other programmes are starting with even younger children – an important step
given the ever-earlier pornography exposure that might otherwise seep through
unexplained. In Norway, Line Jansrud, the presenter of Newton, an educational
show on state TV, gives herself a hickey with a vacuum cleaner, kisses a tomato
and uses a lubricated dildo on an anatomically correct doll model. She wants to
explain how real sex works, so that children and adolescents can distinguish
Hollywood from real life. Her target audience: third-graders.

e effects of this social change reach far beyond sexual education as such. ‘We’re
missing important therapeutic effects of using erotica because of taboos,’ Prause
says. ‘Aroused states and orgasms do really nice things for the brain and body.’
Erotica can, for some women, be the mythical Viagra that has thus far gone
missing, a way of empowering them and ‘putting their brain in that mode, helping
it do what it’s been programmed to do’. ere is certainly a desire for it, albeit
largely unspoken in normal circumstances: when Prause’s group placed an ad for
one of their recent studies, the response broke their phone lines. ey had to take
it offline. ere is also evidence that the social effects of watching porn can spread
beyond the individual: pornography has been shown to improve acceptance of
homosexuality, birth control and extra-marital sex.
 And porn has the potential to go even further. Sun doesn’t like pornography –
but it’s not actual porn she doesn’t like. It’s the social norms and standards that
led to the creation of certain stereotypes in the first place: not a result of
pornography, but rather a reflection of the direction broader society has taken.
‘We live in a patriarchy, where women are fundamentally objectified. We shouldn’t
be surprised to see it play out in pornography.’

We shouldn’t be worrying about whether pornography has negative

repercussions on society. We should be worrying about the kind of society that
would lead to the types of pornography we find distasteful in the first place – and
work on fixing that society rather than blaming its inevitable result.

aeon.co 22 June 2015

Caste lives on, and on
Indian society deludes itself that caste
discrimination is a thing of the past, yet it suffuses
the nation, top to bottom

by Prayaag Akbar

Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. He is the former deputy editor of Scroll.in,
and his first novel Leila (2017) is out in India. He lives in Mumbai.

Edited by Marina Benjamin

I n October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of
northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin.
He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent
collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered
untouchable in the caste system. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher
– Brahmins are the caste elite – who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all
the flour produced there that day, merely by his entry: notions of purity and
pollution are integral to caste. After the Dalit man objected to the insult, the
schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat, killing him instantly.

e incident caused uproar in the national press. Dalit groups in Uttarakhand

staged a series of protests. e Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested, along with
his brother and father, who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they
went to the police; booked for murder and criminal intimidation, the men were
also charged under the ‘Prevention of Atrocities’ act – a vital part of the Indian
Penal Code that prohibits a range of violent and non-violent action against
members of the lowest castes and tribes.

After the initial flurry of limited upper-class angst – followed by self-

congratulation (at the foresight of the lawmakers for how the state machinery
kicked into gear to protect the lower-castes) – the violence was then safely
imagined as belonging to a distant, retrograde realm, where things would soon
change. Silence followed, then forgetting. ere was no discussion of the deep-
seated convictions and codes that enabled this gruesome act, or how each Indian
life was linked to it: the key to living in a caste society is to distance yourself from
its most horrifying manifestations.

e American documentary Meet the Patels (2014) illustrates yet another

dimension of caste that Indian society has trained itself to ignore. Made by an
Indian-American brother and sister team, Geeta and Ravi Patel, it relates how
‘Ravi’, on approaching 30, decides to leave his Caucasian girlfriend and marry a
girl of the Patel caste to fulfil a lifelong demand made by his parents. Endearing
and witty, the film shows in granular detail Ravi’s painful quest to find a suitable
wife, and thereby silence his parents (who are no ogres, I might add, but a
hardworking couple of distinctively Indian humour and charm).

Most striking is that at no point do the Patels realise that they are making a film
about the endogamous (same-social or same-ethnic) strictures vital to caste. Ravi
is a seemingly assimilated Indian American. In speech, bearing, even ambition (he
is a comedian and actor), he transcends the bounds of traditional Indian society;
still, a lifetime of conditioning ensures that he feels the pressure of endogamy so
deeply that he will overturn his life to search for a Patel mate. He travels to huge
conventions where young men and women can meet Patel members of the
opposite sex. He allows his parents to set up a string of dates. He visits
astrologers: and he does all this out of filial duty, never interrogating why his
parents demand this of him. Endogamy is shown as a trait of Indian society, not
caste society. Yet the documentary stands as a revelatory exposition of how caste
exercises control between generations; how, without a whisper of violence or even
punishment – simply, the fear of disappointing your parents – caste ensures its
own survival, even in lands and cultures distant from its place of genesis.

It is unsurprising that the Patel siblings are unaware that they are, in effect,
making a film about caste. Many Indians watching this movie would experience
the same blindness. As caste has been globally castigated as a social evil, upper-
caste Indian society has found numerous ways to refer to caste without explicitly
mentioning it. In everyday language, media and advertising, proxies include
‘community’ and ‘family background’. Endogamous pressure is condoned as vital
to Indian society because it preserves the community (few modern Indians would
admit to wanting to preserve the caste group). Another linguistic proxy for lower-
caste groups is ‘different’. ese proxies carry the full range of meanings that
caste categorisations do, and are used in a variety of situations, from school and
job interviews to a landlord meeting prospective tenants.
 is sleight of hand lets Indian society permit itself the feel-good release of loudly
castigating brute incidents of caste violence, even as it perpetuates a self-serving
mythology about the nature and limits of caste. As we will see, caste is both varna
(hierarchy) and jati (endogamous groups). e failure to break caste stems in part
from India’s unwillingness to examine how just how jati feeds into varna.

P opular understanding of caste in India is deeply influenced by the way that

caste has been written about in the West. Perhaps because Brahmins tightly
controlled the production of knowledge through most of India’s history, there is
little sociological examination of caste from pre-colonial times. e term ‘caste’, or
casta, was attached to the social stratifications of India by 16th-century
Portuguese merchants: casta is Portuguese for race, or breed (from the Latin
castus: chaste or pure).

e new European arrivals saw in Indian society’s obsession with lineal purity and
demarcated living an echo of their own understanding of racial purity. British,
French and Dutch traders, doubling as amateur anthropologists, subsequently
sent back detailed descriptions of the social system, coloured by Orientalist ideas
about static Hindu culture and the inscrutable East. ese were used by scholars
as varied as Karl Marx, Max Weber and Oliver Cox to construct theories of
society in India and beyond. Perhaps the most influential, Homo Hierarchicus
(1966), was written by the French sociologist Louis Dumont.

Dumont described an unchanging, neatly segmented hierarchy, where everyone

accepted their position, premised not on political power but on considerations of
purity. Drawing on classical Hindu texts such as the Manusmriti (dating from as
early as 2nd century BCE), Dumont, in effect, described the varna system: the
pyramid conception of caste that ranks Brahmins, or scholar-priests, over, in
descending order, Kshatriyas (warrior class), Vaishyas (merchants and skilled
workers), and finally Shudras (unskilled workers). Untouchables, forced in the
old system to clean and deal with refuse, toilets, and animal and human carcasses,
are considered so impure as to sit outside the caste system; along with others
such as the forest tribal communities, they are literal outcastes.

e varna system, ordained in ancient India, has diminished relevance today.

More pertinent economically, and socially, is the division between high-castes (the
top three groups) and low-castes (Shudras and, after a further cleavage,
untouchable communities). Still, whether via Vedic scripture or Dumont, the
varna pyramid is what most people think of when considering caste. Importantly,
in independent India, in what seems like an act of collective self-deception, this
pyramid hierarchy is also popularly seen as containing the limits of caste. Flatten
the pyramid, and caste will end. Education, republicanism, industrialisation,
modernisation – each has been portrayed as the agent that will bring about this
flattening, finally ridding the Indian subcontinent of caste divisions.

Yet every Indian knows that there is another aspect to caste: jaat, or jati. Jati is the
caste identity that every Indian is born with, the multifarious groupings of clans,
tribes, communities and religions that comprise Indian society. Each jati is
typically associated with a traditional job function, and some jatis are defined by
religious variation or linguistic groupings. Jati is not limited to Hindus: Indian
Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all hold to age-old sectarian identities, with
prescribed rules and customs analogous to jati, within their larger belief system.
Indian society is divided into thousands of these endogamous kinship groups, no
one is sure how many. e bigger jatis are further subdivided, in accordance with
observable differences in custom and rule. A Hindu’s jati prescribes the rules and
rituals of life: the foods they can eat, whom they can marry and socially interact
with, where and how they pray. When the Portuguese wayfarers ventured inland
from the Western coast, it is the numerous social divisions that jati mandates that
would have reminded them of casta. Endogamy, chief among them.

Caste is no static pyramid. It’s a dynamic social organisation, both hierarchy and
segmentation. e revered Dalit scholar and leader B R Ambedkar likened the jati
system to ‘a string of tennis balls hanging one above the other’, the string twining
about, separating each caste from the other. is image helps us understand how,
within a hierarchy, castes can shift in status; how different jatis can each believe
themselves superior to the other; and how neatly separated, as planets in a
system, each group is from even those occupying a similar status.

It is this intellectual duplicitousness – the simultaneous knowing and unknowing

– that allows many Indians to claim that the Brahmin attacking the Dalit man in a
flour mill was casteist, but that the young Patel man searching for a Patel wife is
nothing more than an act of community.

In 1916, in a paper presented at Columbia University, Ambedkar identified

endogamy as the ‘key to the mystery of the caste system’. He wrote that caste in
India meant ‘an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite
units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of
endogamy’. e history of 20th-century India certainly seems to bear him out.
Anthropologists have identified any number of ways that caste has mutated and
adapted in those years, yet the pressure of endogamy and the social sanctions
against it remain as real in India as they were in 1916. ough the pressures have
diminished in permissive social circles, for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and
Christians, in every corner and class of India, endogamy remains a cherished
observance.

‘Love marriages’ (a euphemism for inter-caste and inter-religious unions) have

spurred horrifying incidents of jati violence over the past decades – of brothers,
fathers and mothers attacking or condoning attacks on their kin. Indian
newspapers decry caste violence on their front and editorial pages, yet rely for
survival on the revenue from the jati-based matrimonial advertisements that
fatten their middle pages. ese ads are now shifting online. One of the great
successes of the Indian dotcom industry is Shaadi.com, a matrimonial website
whose founders understood early on that Indians looking to marry were most
interested in jati as their metric. Now numerous sites have sprung up dedicated to
one jati group or the other. Even in cyberspace, separation and distance seem
essential.

When an urban Indian today says that caste is a matter of the past, or a concern of
the village, he means that the hierarchical formation (varna) is no longer as
relevant as it once was. He knows that kinship communities (jati) remain relevant
and visible, but sees that influence as benign; a natural, eternal division of peoples
that does not rupture society but is instead a marker of civilisational strength,
modern India’s link with its ancient custom and social practice.

I n the summer of 2010, I travelled to Mirchpur, a small village in rural Haryana,

rent by a horrific burst of casteist violence. e dominant caste in the state, the
Jats (not to be confused with jaat or jati), had set fire to a long cluster of Dalit
homes and shops. Jats were once the rural peasantry in this region, but now many
are important landowners. Tensions between Jats and Dalits have grown with the
recent Jat demand for reservations in government jobs and education, which they
believe Dalits have cornered. You can see here the interplay between jati and
varna: the felt identity of both Jats and Dalits derives from jati, but the anger is
fuelled by Dalit upward mobility, which is seen as a threat to the ancient varna
hierarchy.
In a final act of fury, the Jat mob torched a home in which Suman, a polio-stricken
teenage girl, was sleeping. When her elderly father went to save her, the mob
latched the door from the outside and waited as both burned to death. e
tricycle Suman had been given by the state because of her condition stood
blackened in a corner, melted plastic like burnt flesh against the spokes.

e conflagration had been sparked by a scuffle, after two young Dalit men
responded to the provocations of two Jat men of similar age. e Dalit response
was seen as an insult to the Jat community so egregious that Jats were called in
overnight from neighbouring villages to attend a caste council meeting and
determine the retaliatory action required. I was most surprised by the way that
the Jat violence seemed to inspire solidarity not shame. En route to the village, Jat
men had refused to give us directions. At one point, we stopped at a haveli
(mansion) in another village two hours’ drive away, where the patriarch, a former
politician, aware where my sympathies lay, had gathered some Jat elders so that I
could hear ‘their side’. None of them had been to Mirchpur. ey knew details of
the incident only from community networks. ey didn’t condone the violence.
But they were prepared to give me many reasons why the Jats’ anger had been
triggered.

Just this February, the village again made headlines after a group of Dalit men
were beaten with rods and sticks by upper-caste villagers. e provocation: one of
the Dalit men was winning the village races traditionally won by upper-castes.

For decades after independence in 1947, caste remained a conversational and

analytic taboo in India. It was claimed and popularly believed that the Indian
republic had eradicated the caste problem in the first years of nation-building,
with the abolition of untouchability and landlordism, and the apportioning of
reclaimed land to sharecroppers. e erroneous formulation here was that the
varna system had crumbled or was on its way out, while the jati system was simply
a sectioning, and therefore not truly an expression of caste. is claim was
burnished by public institutions, and by the English and Hindi media still firmly
in the grip of caste elites. It was taught in classrooms across the country. e
Indian Census, a vast, vital undertaking that gives statistical grounding to
policymakers, did not count caste numbers and the concentrations of wealth
therein until 2011. Outside academia, it was considered regressive or unpatriotic
to use caste as a lens with which to examine India.
As Satish Deshpande wrote in Contemporary India: A Sociological View (2003),
only now ‘are [we] beginning to understand why caste was almost invisible in
urban middle-class contexts. e most important reason, of course, is that these
contexts were overwhelmingly dominated by the upper castes. is homogeneity
made caste drop below the threshold of social visibility.’ Meanwhile, lower-caste
groups faced intense discrimination but were simultaneously told such
discrimination no longer existed.

is elite silence has had varied societal impacts, not least the failure to examine
how privilege and disprivilege have been carried over within caste groups from
the colonial state to the modern republic. e association with Indian tradition
was key. Another scholar, Surinder Jodhka, writes: ‘One of the obvious
implications of this identification of caste with culture and tradition was that
considerations of caste could not become part of the hard questions of economic
redistribution, privilege and poverty, or the mainstream development discourse.’

e silence began to erode in 1990, with a series of violent high-caste protests,

known as the Mandal Commission riots, over the government’s decision to
expand the reserved quotas in government jobs and education to a large section
of the population. Caste-based quotas in government jobs date back to colonial
times: they were first introduced in Tamil Nadu in 1831, with the spread of
modern education, as the British sought to create a bureaucratic class outside the
Brahmins. e Indian state expanded this policy post-independence,
guaranteeing members of the ‘Scheduled Castes and Tribes’ (previously, the
untouchables) a proportion of low-level government positions. In 1990, when the
Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented, a huge grouping of
low- and middle-caste jatis availed themselves of similar reservations in jobs and
education. is sparked riots across north India. Buses were burnt, students
immolated themselves, the capital and other cities were brought to a halt – and
caste was kicked firmly back into public consciousness.

ese ‘reservations’ have since become a fault-line. e limited upward mobility

they engender through affirmative action is perhaps Indian democracy’s most
significant challenge to the age-old social order. Yet reservation schemes are
attacked by privileged groups everywhere: as the denial of the ‘merit’ of deserving
(for which read: upper-caste) candidates. In India’s finest scientific institutions,
notably the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi and the Indian
Institutes of Technology, where the entrance exams are among the most
competitive in the world, reports surface every year about ‘reserved’ category
students being discriminated against by upper-caste students and faculty who feel
that the reservations have denied spots to more deserving students.

e discrimination is so entrenched that it has led to a disturbing spate of suicides

by lower-caste students. Yet Jodhka explains how this caste discrimination is
replicated in the job market. Some universities hand recruiters separate lists, of
‘general’ category students versus ‘reserved’ category students, the implication
being that only students on list one are meritorious. Recruiters in India also prize
metrics that serve as a proxy for considerations of caste (again, the simultaneous
knowing and unknowing). ‘Family background’ is a routine area of enquiry,
enabling the determining of ‘social origins’. e soft skills and cultural capital
afforded by being a member of a high-caste are also overvalued. ( is leads to
interesting responses, such as the Dalit movement that paints the English
language as a ‘mother goddess’ – or the only true enabler of social mobility in
India.)

India’s democratic progression has produced fascinating reactions from caste

groups. Politically dominant castes seek to rewrite official histories to excise
embarrassing aspects of their past from the school curricula, and claim new feats
and victories for long-gone kings and chiefs. Meanwhile, a new challenge to the
system of reservations comes from dominant castes who seek to downgrade their
own status to ‘OBC’, or ‘Other Backward Classes’, so that they, too, can claim a
share of protected government jobs and college seats. Caste has always
responded to political authority in this way, with groups willing themselves lower
– though more typically higher – if benefits can be accrued.

In the past two years, massive violent protests have been orchestrated in the
states of Maharashtra, Haryana and Gujarat against state organs. So far, the
Supreme Court has resisted the protestors’ demands for protections, citing the
economic and opportunity advantages their communities already enjoy. e
matter is complicated because the important political parties in each state
aggregate their support from these dominant groups.

Another important incursion of caste into the mainstream discourse has been in
electoral politics. For many decades after independence, the Congress Party
dominated democratic politics, forming a succession of governments. e
political scientist Rajni Kothari described this as the ‘Congress system’, where the
Congress was an umbrella organisation that could accommodate various kinds of
pressures, simultaneously Left- and Right-wing, elite and populist. Yet the
Congress has always been predominantly upper-caste. As universal adult
franchise took root post-independence, its upper rungs drew heavily from
Brahmins, and also the zamindar castes (feudal landlords) prevalent in rural areas,
where the vast majority of the Indian population resided, leading to the
incendiary Dalit critique that the Indian freedom movement had simply replaced
the colonial elite with the pre-existing caste elite.

e noted American scholar Paul Brass identified a phenomenon he called caste

succession, where it took lower-caste communities a number of successive
elections to feel free and assertive enough within the democratic system to vote
for their own, though finally producing ‘their own leaders who have given them a
voice in the political process and access to political and economic patronage’.
Now caste parties dominate politics in some important regions of India, as
multiple jatis have banded together in jati-clusters so that they can maximise their
numerical strength in the hope of gaining advantages in the public sphere.

In e Saffron Wave (1999), the anthropologist omas B Hansen argues that the
consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India is, in part, a reaction to this caste-
based churn, as upper-castes have coalesced around a fervid ideology that
champions tradition and custom, and consequently, if quietly, the ancient
hierarchy. e ruling party of India, the Right-wing BJP, is not typically seen as a
caste outfit, yet its parent organisation and own ranks are dominated by
Brahmins; Hindu nationalism is a deeply Brahminical ideology; and since
inception has enjoyed the unswerving financial patronage of the upper-caste
Baniya jati-cluster.

e BJP’s recent electoral success is described by the party and pliant sections of
the media as a transcendence of caste, with votes accruing around the promise of
economic development rather than caste loyalties. Yet the BJP picks candidates
and elevates them to high positions based on their caste. e prime minister
Narendra Modi has played up the fact that his own jati belongs to the numerically
dominant OBC categorisation – a demographic category that has become a
political force via the reservation system. e surprising support that the party
has lately received from OBC jatis nationally derives, in part, from Modi’s careful
caste-based appeal.

Arguably, caste has been the most influential social reality in India over all the
years that its disappearance was cheered, decades when horrific acts of group
violence against lower-castes was routine, when the perpetrators were either
never arrested or later freed by local courts (all these practices continue in India
today). Tellingly, the silence around caste was broken only when lower-caste
mobilisation really took hold, influencing electoral politics and social status.

ough the two national parties, Congress and BJP, have always relied on
aggregating support from various jatis to win elections at the local level, it is the
political mobility of non-elite castes that is seen to have fundamentally changed
the game. Lower-caste assertion is portrayed as having beset the previously clean
political system with caste. In this, a parallel can be drawn with the Black Lives
Matter movement in the US, which broke the silence around race-based
discrimination among police. For years, it was privately acknowledged that US
policing had a problem with black minorities. It was aired in conversation, joked
about in popular culture, referenced in important avenues of black culture such
as hip-hop music and film. Yet only after video evidence began building on social
media, and grassroots political mobilisation rallied, did white-controlled media
acknowledge the scale of the problem. e responses it spawned – All Lives
Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and increased support for Donald Trump – are an
instructive demonstration of how elite groups deal with the demand for fair and
equal treatment.

C aste has tremendous, overarching effects on society, but it is most intimately

concerned with the person, the body; what humans take in and what we push out.
Saliva, semen, sweat, excreta and blood are all agents of ritual pollution, the
effluents of lower-caste bodies more so than those of high-castes. Food, what can
be eaten and what is prohibited, creates fault lines that divide Indian society into
minute configurations.

e taboo around the sharing of potables continues to this day. In ‘Waiting for a
Visa’ (written in the 1940s), Ambedkar wrote movingly of an incident in his
childhood – little more than 100 years ago – when he and his brothers and sisters
took a bullock cart from a train station to visit their father, who was working in
another town. ey ended up having to spend the night en route. Riding through
the dark of rural Maharashtra, the children were denied water in house after
house. e bullock cart driver also refused to share. Ambedkar cites this as his
moment of political awakening: coming from a relatively privileged family within
his Mahar clan (a Dalit subcaste), he had not yet understood what it would be like
outside the geographical bounds of his jati.
From the 1970s on, anthropologists have reported from villages that the caste
structure as Dumont understood it is disappearing. Certainly, middle-caste
assertion and mobility have been noticeable aspects of the democratic experience
in India. It is also often argued that urban living has destroyed caste; for example,
since people of different castes are forced to live with each other in high-rise
buildings, apartheid is no longer possible. ere is some truth to this. In economic
terms, caste inequalities are smallest in metropolitan cities. But it needs to be
qualified: only in India’s largest cities has caste-influence been moderated:
elsewhere economic benefits accrue to privileged groups.

And the intimate considerations of purity that are essential to caste – have those
disappeared? In any Indian city today, especially in the torrid, torpid summer, it is
hard to imagine household after household denying a Dalit child water. e act of
sharing water has itself become political: a way of asserting that caste does not
matter. But it is also true that upper-caste households will have a separate set of
utensils and crockery for their domestic servants. Outsiders who come in on
menial work drink from glasses the family does not use. e safe presumption is
that both servant and outsider are lower-caste, and therefore liable of polluting
the everyday cutlery used in the home.

With the increase in gated communities, the divide between rich and poor and
upper- and lower-castes has become so sharp that it is equally hard to imagine
Dalit children having access to the doorsteps of upper-caste homes. A paper
published in 2012 studied urban residential segregation in India’s seven largest
metro cities. e authors found that residential segregation by caste was sizably
larger than the level of segregation by socio-economic status. is is a remarkable
finding, telling us that rich and poor caste cohorts are more likely to live together
than rich people of different castes and poor people of different castes.

In India’s biggest cities, caste-communities create strong social sanctions around

eating and living habits so that people of different castes are eventually forced
out. Informal strictures – in defiance of Indian law – about whom to rent or sell to
also help to solidify the geographical concentrations of castes.

Caste has proved itself a resolute, nimble institution, surviving the dramatic
political and economic transformations of three millennia. ere is no question of
it having disappeared from either the rural or urban context. Instead, it has
shifted, morphed in ways that we must continually examine. It has claimed an
 important role in modern Indian urbanism. e first step is to relieve ourselves of
the old, colonial idea of caste. Instead, we must understand how both hierarchy
and segmentation seep continually into every Indian life.

aeon.co 20 April 2017

 MINISTRY OF
HOME AFFAIRS

Home Women Safety Division Crime against Children

CRIME AGAINST CHILDREN

The Government of India is deeply concerned about crime against children and would, therefore, advise the
State Governments and UT Administrations to taken steps for e ective prevention, detection, registration,
investigation and prosecution of all crimes against children within their jurisdiction.

Even Hon’ble Supreme Court while hearing a Writ Petition (Civil) no. 75 of 2012, on 10.05.2013, Bachpan
Bachao Andolan vs Union of India has directed advisory on missing children.

The POCSO Act has also been amended to make it more e ective in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse in
the country and aims at arresting the rising trend of gruesome and heart wrenching o ences being committed
against children. The Amendment Act also provides for more stringent punishments such as increase in the
imprisonment period and depending on the gravity of the o ence, the Courts may impose penalties on the
perpetrator which includes death penalty in extreme cases of aggravated penetrative sexual assault. The Act
has also made adequate provisions for timely disposal of cases pertaining to POCSO.

Crime against Children

Crime against Children

SR-No Title Download/Link Date

1 Suo Moto Writ Petition regarding Alarming rise in the Download Tue,
number of reported child rape incidents (469.62 KB) 12/03/2019 -
17:30

2 The Protection of Children from Sexual Download Wed,

O ences(Amendment) Act 2019 (873.18 KB) 11/20/2019 -
17:30

3 Advisory on mandatory registration of FIR in case of Download Tue,

Missing Children (60.39 KB) 06/25/2013 -
17:30

4 Advisory on Crime Against children Download Wed,

(16.48 KB) 07/14/2010 -
17:30
SR-No Title Download/Link Date

5 Protection of Children from Sexual O ences Act 2013 Download Tue,

(67.63 KB) 05/28/2013 -
17:30

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O ences against Children under IPC

By Astitva.vatsa | Views 66565 (author-10405-astitva-vatsa.html)

8 2 6 Blogger 5 pocket 6 Digg 3

This project gives a description on the o ences done with children under IPC. This project gives the details about the crimes like sexual acts, kidnapping,
homicides, foeticides. It tells about the di erent sections that are made for the criminals who perform the crime against children. These criminals simply use
the children for their own use and make their own pro t out of their innocence. Some cases have also been described in this project where the criminals
have been punished for their acts.

Introduction
The most unguarded and decent victim of crimes are children and crimes are committed against them in the society. The most important legislations
approved for protection of children's rights and secure their safety are the POSCO Act and Juvenile Justice Act. The Indian Penal Code, 1860 gives a
description about the various misdeeds which are performed against children and punish their task under the various sections of the IPC. Homicide,
foeticides, kidnapping, sexual acts are some of the o ences that come under the IPC, 1860.

Section 302- Murder

Murder has been de ned in Section 302, it's a sort of wrongdoing of the culpable homicide. Basically, the functions that are exception under Section 302,
come under culpable homicide not amounting to murder. O ence of murder, if is committed by anyone, then that person is blameworthy under Section
302, which includes death, or imprisonment for all times. The execution is announced in very rare cases where the collective ethics or values of the whole
group anticipates that the holders of judicial powers is centred to impose such penalization regardless of the opinions of the accused, even if the victim is an
innocent child.

Section 305- Abetment of Suicide

In uence of suicide done by the people to the children for the commitment of suicide: Section 305 of IPC states that if any individual who encourages
children to perform suicide, and if the suicide is committed by the individual who is under eighteen-year age will get punishment of death or life
imprisonment, or imprisonment up to 10 years. This facility is predicted on the principle of public policy to stop other peoples' participation, prompting and
assisting within end of a youngster's life.

Kidnapping and Abduction

Kidnapping of any type reduces freedom of any private, by that disturb the protection of life and proper liberty which is justi ed under Article 21 of the
Indian Constitution. Section 359 of IPC acknowledges two types of Kidnapping
1. Kidnapping from India; and
2. Kidnapping from lawful guardianship.[1]

A person who commits kidnapping shall get punishment under Section 363 of IPC with detention of 7 years.

Section 360- Kidnapping for exporting

Section 360 states that whenever a person is sent beyond or outside of India without his/ her permission by an another person, he/she commits the crime
of abducting the person from India. This clearly shows that the wrongdoing is nished at that time when the individual was sent outside localized area of
India, but this needs e ort to perform under the principle of locus poenitentiae.

Section 361- Kidnapping from lawful guardianship

Section 361 involves alluring or letting go of children under the age of 18 years from the guardianship which are legal without their permission. The work of
this section provides protection and safety to the minors so that they don't get depraved, injured or used by others.

Section 364A- Kidnapping for Ransom

Section 364A states that if anyone gets kidnapped or captured and is being retarded by someone and is being logically nervous for death or hurt for some
forced ransom, will be punished with death or life imprisonment. Section 364A was added in the IPC with the help of legal code Act, 1993 for providing
punishments to such an o ense.

Section 363A- Kidnapping for begging

Section 363A was brought in the year 1959 for the expansion of systemised begging, where unethical people abducted children and taught them lesson on
the aim that how to beg. The rule was also introduced if any child under lawful guardianship uses the child for begging, then unless it is proven, the children
will be assumed to be kidnapped. This section includes serious punishments for 10 years and if the child is injured during these o ences, the culprit will be
punished of imprisonment for the injury at all times.

Section 366- Kidnapping to compel from marriage

Section 366 states that if any woman gets kidnapped for forcing her to marry someone with whom she doesn't want to marry or she would be forced to
come into sexual intercourse will be put in the jail for up to 10 years.

If such crime is committed by hiring the means of abuse of authority, an equivalent penalizing shall apply. The Supreme Court of Bombay, in the case of
Emperor v. Ayubkhan Mir Sultan, has given the rule that a minor's assent will not be entertained in this section to marry the accused, it is an o ence in every
circumstances.
 Replay

Later, Apex Court declared in the judgement of Thakorlal D Vadgama v. State of Gujarat, if the accused laid a base by attraction and if this attraction
promotes a minor to get away from the guardian, then it will become tough for the accused to request innocence on the bottom and the minor himself
came to him with his own assent.

Section 367- Kidnapping for slavery etc.

Section 367 penalizes the people who capture children to make him/her perform slavery/ unnatural lust with anyone or imprisonment till 10 years.

Section 369- Kidnapping for stealing from its person

Under 10 years aged only: Section 369 states that the punishment will be given to those who capture children till the age of 10 years so as to stealing from
the property of such person of the child ad it makes wrongdoer responsible of up to 7 years.

Section 366A- Procuration of minor girls

An individual under Section 366-A is for incentive to force or seduce, it is important to determine the minor girl who is below the age of 18 years has been
persuaded to travel from one place to another without the intention of the child. The accused is punishable with imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Section 372- Selling of minors for prostitution

Section 372 states that there is a punishment to trade an individual who is below the age of 18 years of either sex for making them a sex worker. This
wrongdoing gets complete once a minor is rented without their knowledge and this o ence if performed by someone will be punished with the
imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Section 373- Buying of minors for prostitution

Section 373 is for those people or crimes who hire people under the age of 18 years for further use as a sex worker or for other unlawful uses. More to this,
this o ence committed against the female known to be a speci ed maliciousness unless proven.

Rape
Section 375(6) of the IPC states that the work related to sexual activities in any of the formation which is given in the clause (a), (b), (c), and (d), with a girl
who is below the age of 18 years results in rape, regardless of the girl's consent for this type of acts. It is declared that the minor girl's consent is irrelevant
and unimportant on this ground that she is incapable of thinking and to give her consent. The Legislature assumes that these girls are tempted into these
type of activities without knowing the outcomes. In this section under the Exception 2, protects women under age of 15 years from any sexual acts.

The wrongdoing of rape which is committed against the girls is punished under the IPC as follows:

Section 376(3) Rape of woman under 16 years of age Rigorous imprisonment of not less than 20 years/life & ne
Section 376-AB Rape of woman under 12 years of age Rigorous imprisonment of not less than 20 years/life & ne, or death
Section 376-DA Gang rape of woman under 16 years of age Imprisonment for life & ne
Section 376-DB Gang rape of woman under 12 years of age Imprisonment for life & ne, or death

O ences against new born and unborn children

The wrongdoings which are done against the new born and unborn child given under the IPC, 1860 includes from Sections 312-318, i.e., causing of injuries,
miscarriages to the unborn babies, concealment of births, desertion of infants and secretly disposing of the dead bodies.

Causing Miscarriage
Sections 312, 313 & 314 a ect the wrongdoing of causing thwarting and its annoying forms, di erentiating the accountability into 2 categories with regard to
women's assent and reference of her being with child or quick with child.

Essential Ingredients
Voluntarily Causing Miscarriage
The rules given under the given Sections can be implied to such cases where miscarriage is caused by their own choice. Section 39 of the IPC de nes
voluntarily as to cause intentionally. Mens rea is an important element of this o ence.

Woman with child and Woman quick with child

The factum of pregnancy may be a prerequisite to the o ence. The sections provide distinct liabilities for o ences against a lady who is understood to be
with child or quick with child. within the case of Queen-Empress v. Ademma, it had been held that the moment a lady conceives and therefore the gestation
period/ pregnancy begins, the lady is claimed to be with child; while in another case of Re: Malayara Seethu, a woman quick with child was mentioned as a
more advanced stage of pregnancy wherein quickening is seemed to be the mother's stimulus to the movement of her foetus. However, an o ence against
a lady quick with child is an aggravated sort of that against a lady with child, and hence, the punishment prescribed for the latter is imprisonment for up to 3
years/ ne/ both, and for the previous is up to 7 years with ne.

Miscarriage
The term miscarriage has not been de ned under the IPC and its usage is synonymous to abortion. within the legal context, miscarriage is that the
premature expulsion of the merchandise of conception at any time before the complete term is reached; while medically, three distinct terms of abortion,
miscarriage, and premature labor are wont to indicate the expulsion of the foetus at di erent stages of gestation. Miscarriage is especially used if such
expulsion occurs from the fourth to the seventh month, before it's viable.[2]

Consent of Woman
Sections 312 & 313 a ect the aspect of the woman's consent against whom such o ence is committed. Section 312 envisages things where the lady
consents to the causing of a miscarriage of her foetus and is held equally susceptible to the committing of such o ence with imprisonment of up to 7 years
and ne. Section 313, on the opposite hand, manifests a way graver sort of such o ence, i.e. committed without that woman's consent and hence is
susceptible to imprisonment for all times, or up to 10 years & ne.

Miscarriage resulting in the death of woman

According to Section 314 of the IPC, an act through with the intention of causing miscarriage, when leads to the death of such woman, it's an o ence liable
with imprisonment of up to 10 years and ne. Provided, if the lady was one to be quick with child, or if such o ence was committed without the woman's
consent, then it's considered a more serious o ence and hence could also be punishable with imprisonment for all times. it's to be stated here that
intention to cause/ knowledge of the act likely to cause death isn't an important element for it to constitute an o ence under this Section, but an immediate
nexus between the act done and therefore the death of the lady has got to be established before the Court.

Exceptions
Exceptions to the o ence of causing miscarriage/ abortion are twofold:
Good faith:
Section 312 of the IPC exempts such persons who cause miscarriage in straightness (as de ned under Section 52) to save lots of the woman's life.
In the case of Dr. Jacob George V. State of Kerala, a surgery for abortion was performed by a quack on a lady together with her consent, which
resulted in her death thanks to the perforation of her uterus. The Supreme Court a rmed his conviction while laying down the principle that an
individual might be held liable under this section if the abortion isn't administered in straightness for the aim of saving the woman's life.

In another case of State of Maharashtra v. Flora Santuno Kutino, one among the respondents, who had illicit relations with a lady & pregnated her,
was instrumental in causing miscarriage, and hence, was convicted by the supreme court since such miscarriage was caused, not in straightness, but
to wipe o his illicit relationship.

Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971:

It had been enacted to legalise the termination of certain pregnancies by registered medical practitioners so as to supply for safe abortions. The Act,
prevailing over the aforementioned provisions of IPC, allows a lady to legally abort her pregnancy if its continuance would be injurious to her life
(physically/mentally); if the foetus is detected with abnormalities; or if such pregnancy may be a results of rape or failure of contraceptives.

Injury to an unborn child

Sections 315 & 316 envisage the provisions concerning injury caused to an unborn child. They cover the situations where an act is completed with the
intention of preventing such child to change state alive; or causing the death of a toddler who's quick unborn by an act amounting to culpable homicide.

Essential Ingredients of Section 316

Act to be born before the birth of the child
An essential element under these two provisions is that the culpable act/actus reus should be done before the kid is born resulting into the prevention of
such child being born alive or cause it to die after its birth. It merely covers injury caused to an unborn child, since whence such act is committed after the
birth of the kid, itd be addressed other provisions of the IPC.

Intention
Section 315 declares that the intention to stop a toddler from being born alive/to cause it to die after its birth is important to the o ence committed
thereunder, except when wiped out straightness for the aim of saving the mother's life. An o ender under this Section shall be liable with imprisonment
which can reach 10 years/ ne/both.

Causing death of quick unborn child by acting amounting to culpable homicide

Replay

Section 316 may be a graver variant of Section 315, wherein the act is completed with the intention/ malice aforethought to commit an o ence amounting
to culpable homicide (presumably of the mother), which act though doesn't cause the death of the mother, but causes the death of a fast unborn child, and
is punishable with imprisonment of up to 10 years and ne. Further, if the wrongdoing leads to the death of the mother, then it shall amount to culpable
homicide.

Abandonment and exposure of an infant

Section 317 of the IPC deals with the o ence of exposing a toddler under twelve years aged with an intention of wholly abandoning it, done by a parent or a
person having care of it. An o ender under this Section shall be liable with imprisonment of up to 7 years/ ne/both.

Conclusion
It has been understood now that the o ences mentioned above concerning about the infants or the new born and the unborn, are highlighted by the
pressure which the society gives us and the judgments which have values on the unwedded mothers. The male members of the society are equally
responsible, the social shame and the avoidance is placed on the lady only, which successively leads to the child's abortion.
Moreover, things like desertion of child is usually seen in the cases of female child only. This behaviour and mind set which is spread in the society has to
change and there are many reforms that are being performed. The IPC in accordance to the legal code has recognised annoying types of o ences which are
performed against the children. Minors are still prone and are exploited in the working of crimes. Therefore, strict enforced mechanisms are to be used to
counter the issue so as to make sure that the protection of infants and new born and to ensure the safety of them.

Award Winning Article Is Written By: Mr.Astitva Vatsa

Authentication No: MA34085868489-19-0521

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Sex on the curriculum
Sex education is a battlefield over morals and
young bodies, and has exposed fractures in
American life for over a century

by Kristy Slominski

Kristy Slominski is the assistant professor of religion, science and health in the
Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. She is the
author of Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United
States (2021).

Edited by Sam Dresser

T he state of sex education in the United States is dismal. Shaped by divergent

state policies and local school board decisions, programmes are uneven in their
content and coverage. ere is confusion about what is being taught where. Most
programmes are limited in scope, some are even harmful. Proponents of
comprehensive sexuality education urge the teaching of reproductive
development, contraception and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) but, far
from these goals, they have fought and failed to ensure the bare minimum
standard in more than half of the states: that lessons in sex education be
medically accurate. Meanwhile, comprehensive programmes are attacked as too
revealing and immoral by supporters of abstinence-only sex education, recently
re-branded as ‘sexual risk avoidance education’, which tends to dissuade students
from engaging in any sexual activity at all. Both factions argue that the country
will continue to fail its youth unless schools embrace their version of sex
education.

At the national level, the debate over sex education has generally followed culture
war divides, with liberals supporting comprehensive sexuality education, and
conservatives leading calls for sexual risk avoidance education. Long aligned with
the latter has been white conservative Protestantism, the religious group most
vocal in public debates about sex education since the late 1960s. But it would be
wrong to think of the sex education debate as simply ‘religious versus secular’. In
fact, religions are not one-sided on this issue, and cannot be separated from these
discussions. A look at the history of sex education in the US shows that religions
– especially Protestant denominations – have deeply influenced many aspects of
sex education, both progressive and conservative. is is not surprising given the
symbolic value of sexuality, as well as the transmission of moral values through sex
education, both of which make it a key battleground in the culture wars. Sex
education is attached to the control of young bodies through lessons about sexual
diseases, reproduction and romantic pairings, as well as the control of young
minds through the classroom. In formative ways, Christian involvement in the
history of sex education laid the groundwork for both sides of the debate today.

Sex education began with 19th-century Protestant anti-prostitution reformers.

ese reformers led the ‘social purity movement’ (‘social’ was then a euphemism
for ‘sexual’). ey paired their primary work of stamping out red-light districts
with educational lectures about the physical and moral dangers of sex outside
marriage. Social purity overlapped with other female-dominated reforms such as
the temperance movement; alcohol and prostitutes were twin evils that lured men
away from their Christian households. Social purity advocates such as Frances
Willard, the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, preached
against the sexual standard that condoned men visiting prostitutes, while those
such as John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, emphasised premarital
abstinence and marital monogamy as essential to a healthy Christian lifestyle.
Ironically, social purity reformers supported obscenity laws to protect youth
against lewd sexual publications, even as they challenged the prevailing
‘conspiracy of silence’ around public discussions of sexuality.

Whereas sex education was secondary to anti-prostitution reforms, it became a

primary focus of doctors who began advocating for ‘social hygiene’ (ie, sexual
hygiene) in the early 20th century. e father of social hygiene – and the founder
of US sex education – was a man named Prince Albert Morrow, a Kentucky-born
dermatologist inspired by the advanced studies of venereal diseases in France. In
the US, he promoted social hygiene education in order to protect ‘innocent’ wives
and offspring from the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhoea introduced into the
family by husbands and fathers. He showed a flair for publicity by disseminating
stomach-turning images of syphilitic children suffering from blindness and skin
deformities. Morrow soon began to organise his campaign among fellow doctors,
but progress was slow. Despite some being passionate about fighting venereal
disease, many were nervous about treating syphilis and gonorrhoea since these
diseases were popularly seen as fit punishments for sexual sins. Easing symptoms
supposedly encouraged patients to continue their sinful behaviour – not a
position doctors were keen on defending.
So Morrow moved outside his professional scientific circle and engaged with
Protestant social purity reformers as well. ey had already developed publicly
acceptable Christian rhetoric for talking about sexuality in a time when obscenity
laws stifled other public discussions. ose who accepted Morrow’s invitation to
join scientific professionals in creating the sex education movement made up the
more progressive branch of purity reform. Influenced by liberal Protestantism’s
embrace of scientific authority to reveal God’s truths about creation, they sought
to cooperate across religious and secular divisions as part of their Christian
mission to mitigate social problems. Now Morrow’s movement took off in earnest.

M orrow had learned a lesson that recurs throughout the history of sex education:
adding religious frameworks and spokespeople into medical campaigns is
necessary for success. Facts and data are often not enough to convince the US
public to take scientific lessons about sex seriously; religious persuasion is
needed too. So, since the early 20th century, the sex education movement has
treated Christianity as a fount of ample resources: live audiences (church
attendees and auxiliary networks), free advertising (religious pulpits and
publications), reputable leadership to guide and promote sensitive campaigns
(ministers and other respected church people), an ethical system to motivate
people to ‘behave’, and ideologies that safeguarded the topic from censorship by
connecting it to well-accepted ideas of love, family and Christian respectability.
Morrow’s work helped to create a coalition between social hygiene and social
purity or, as he would later put it, between ‘the medical man and the moralist’.
is eventually led to the creation in 1914 of the American Social Hygiene
Association (now the American Sexual Health Association), an organisation that
would guide the national sex education movement for decades to come.

e coalition that Morrow helped to create was particularly significant at a time of

scientific professionalisation. Confidence was high in science, especially medicine,
to solve society’s problems. As scientific authority had become largely
independent of religious authority by the early 20th century, some physicians
accused conservative Christian reformers of spreading inaccurate medical
information in their religious enthusiasm to curb vices. Doctors feared that
religious approaches would always advocate for conversion and prayer over
scientific education and medical intervention, even though liberal Protestant
purity reformers who joined them also eschewed these more conservative
evangelical reform methods.
For their part, purity reformers had reasons to distrust doctors, as some had
stymied anti-prostitution reforms with their advocacy for medical regulation of
prostitution, which would have amounted to legalising it – anathema to those
who wanted its abolition. But where there was overlap, there was success.
Christian doctors and leaders such as Morrow advocated for a balance of religion
and medicine within both groups, and helped to bridge tensions. Both agreed on
the connection between prostitution, STIs and weak morals. ey decided on sex
education for children as the best way to address these problems so that boys
would learn the dangers of visiting prostitutes, and girls would choose husbands
who upheld a higher sexual standard. Early sex-education leaders made careful
negotiations to keep a balance of approaches.

Elevating religious concerns also provided a reason to keep the sex education
movement separate from the birth control movement. Endorsing birth control
would have ostracised prominent Catholic sex educators such as John
Montgomery Cooper. An anthropologist and priest, Cooper was well aware of the
Roman Catholic position against artificial birth control methods but saw great
value in sex education to discourage sin, strengthen character, and support
reproduction within nuclear families. e decision by the American Social
Hygiene Association to remain neutral on birth control – viewed as a more
radical, feminist cause – further protected the movement from censorship and
public outcry in its early years. At a time before most public schools were ready to
incorporate lessons about sexuality, religious groups provided direct access to
parents who would help to decide whether to let sex education into schools; they
also offered experimental locations for developing and trying out these
programmes.

e movement’s goals aligned with progressive education trends that sought to

use public education to strengthen moral character and, ultimately, the nation.
Sex educators of both religious and medical varieties shared concern for growing
‘problems of the cities’, which was often code for white people’s fears about an
influx of immigrants and Black people to urban areas, a trend they believed
fuelled vice and spread diseases. Like many progressive white elites of the time,
most early sex educators supported beliefs related to social Darwinism, using
middle-class Anglo-Saxons as a common benchmark for depicting ideals within
sexual hygiene campaigns. Many sex educators came to support popular aspects
of so-called ‘positive eugenics’, including the idea that keeping sexuality
contained within a ‘well-matched’ marriage (ie, same race, class, religion, etc)
would advance each race, although some sex educators notably denounced the
 eugenics movement for promoting sterilisation and other ‘negative eugenic’
measures.

A fter early experiments with public school sex education in Chicago, sex
educators temporarily shifted to the immediate challenge of educating young
soldiers about sexual temptations during the First World War. e military had a
bad reputation for letting soldiers sow their wild oats; in response to parental
uproar, the US government enlisted sex educators of the American Social
Hygiene Association and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to build
a military sex-education programme. e sex educators focused on the moral side
of sex, while military doctors lectured on STI symptoms and how to use a
prophylactic kit when moral restraint failed. YMCA sex educators connected
these lectures to their physical programmes to keep men morally, mentally and
physically fit, with the goal of preventing men from visiting prostitutes or
engaging in the largely unspoken option of same-sex intercourse.

A US Navy poster from 1942 warning of the perils of venereal disease. Courtesy NIH
Digital Collections

YMCA lecturers such as James Naismith, the inventor of basketball and sex
educator to the American Expeditionary Forces, used Christianity as a powerful
motivator to encourage soldiers to stay morally and physically ‘clean’ while
overseas. Along with lectures and counselling sessions, Naismith considered
sports a wholesome way to expel sexual energy and distract soldiers from sexual
temptations. Chaplains, mostly Protestant, supported YMCA sex educators in
urging soldiers to strengthen their Christian character and stay away from
prostitutes. Moral education about sex was one piece of a larger ‘American plan’
to stop the spread of STIs, which included policing red-light districts.
Incarceration and forced medical examinations followed racist, classist and sexist
assumptions, as they targeted women deemed ‘problematic’ by those in power.

After the war, attention shifted back home. Religious leaders within the American
Social Hygiene Association steered away from STI education and toward family
life education. e liberal Protestant sex educator Anna Garlin Spencer led this
shift, arguing that sexuality education was intimately connected to raising morally
responsible children. As a pathbreaking female minister – the first woman to be
ordained in Rhode Island and a leader in social purity, suffrage and pacifism – as
well as a sociology professor, Spencer believed that religious groups had an
obligation to support sex education, which would strengthen the family unit as
the building block of each religion and of the nation. Her argument corresponded
with broader concerns about the perils facing the modern family, primarily
divorce, and overlapped with social scientific trends for domestic sciences, home
economics, social work and marital counselling. Family life education echoed
racial and cultural ideals of the eugenics movement about the importance of
finding an ‘ideal’ partner with whom to marry and reproduce. It further reflected
liberal Protestant efforts to be on the cutting edge of academic trends and a desire
to find common ground across religious groups, since they believed all could
agree on the religious and national importance of strengthening the social
institution of the family (read: the heterosexual, nuclear family).

Spencer created a partnership between the American Social Hygiene Association

and the Federal Council of Churches (now the National Council of Churches),
which represented many mainline Protestant denominations and provided a voice
for the moderate centre of liberal Protestantism. e Federal Council of Churches
committed itself to preserving ‘Judeo-Christian family life’ as the cornerstone of
the nation, adding Reform Jewish and progressive Catholic sex educators to their
liberal Protestant agenda. With the new focus on family life, the sex education
movement used the Federal Council of Churches to reach churches and
synagogues, convincing them to include family life education in their youth
programmes. Religious institutions provided important testing grounds at a time
when sex education was slow to catch on in school curricula, and they served as
trustworthy avenues for convincing parents that sex education was not smut and
could serve godly goals, paving the way for school programmes.

ese religiously affiliated efforts pushed sex education forward through the mid-
20th century, providing further infrastructure for the movement and making the
platform more publicly acceptable. ey chipped away at the conspiracy of
silence and found ways of educating parents, young soldiers and some children,
overcoming concerns that any discussion would incite sexual curiosity and
depravity. Despite progress, the specific frameworks and decisions had
consequences, shackling sex education to a certain ideal of family (as
heterosexual, white, middle-class, and nuclear) and to morals (of a specifically
white liberal Protestant variety). e overarching belief that the proper domain
for sexuality was within monogamous, heterosexual marriages forged the sex
education consensus in the first half of the 20th century. It didn’t last much
longer.

T hese progressive coalitions and agendas brought about their own downfall,
laying the groundwork for the tumultuous sex education battles of the 1960s.
Progressive religion wanted to invite everyone to the table, though still on
progressive and usually Protestant terms. One perennial challenge of this liberal
impulse is the question of how to be inclusive of those who don’t accept the same
terms of inclusiveness. Not everyone wants a spot at the table, and some exclusive
worldviews feel compromised when certain groups are allowed to join the
conversation on equal footing.

e Protestant brand of liberal theology that came to influence sex educators

centred around the ‘new morality’, also known as situation ethics. Popularised by
Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopalian professor of social ethics, it advanced the idea
that to value inclusiveness and individualism meant acknowledging that morality
is not the same for everyone in every situation. In place of absolute morality, the
new morality advocated a Christian view of love as a common denominator to
guide individuals in their unique contexts. Despite critiques that this was a
slippery slope into moral bankruptcy, proponents argued that teaching individual
decision-making guided by love would lead to higher standards. Fletcher
advocated situation ethics for people to ‘choose like people, not submit like
sheep’, suggesting that legalistic tactics produced ‘reluctant virgins and technical
chastity’, with people acting as they were told to, rather than according to their
own determinations.

As the new morality became the central religious framework of comprehensive

sexuality education, it opened the door to discussions of previously taboo topics.
Even though many comprehensive sexuality educators – including Mary
Calderone, the founder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the
United States – believed that sex belonged within monogamous, heterosexual
marriages, the new morality opened up the possibility that any sexual act could be
moral, given the right contexts and motivations. Calderone also had a personal
interest in education about the naturalness of masturbation, recalling her own
trauma at being forced to wear aluminium mitts as a child to prevent her from
touching herself. Informed by her progressive Quaker faith, Calderone advocated
for the new morality to empower individuals to follow their own conscience and to
denounce judging others’ sexual behaviour, since she believed that God could
speak privately to individuals and that only God could judge how people
responded to those intimate messages. She viewed education about sexual topics
of all varieties to be part of the search for God-given truths, as well as vital to
improving public health.

Acknowledgement of sexual diversity was significant for those rendered invisible

or deviant by traditional frameworks. It was the liberal straw that broke the
camel’s back, as conservative Christians relied upon absolute morality to support
their ethical foundation: some things are always wrong, regardless of reason or
context, a view tied to the belief that the Bible conveys unchanging, universal
truths from God. e sex education battles of the late 1960s erupted when
conservative Christian groups such as Christian Crusade launched public
campaigns against comprehensive sexuality education, accusing it of promoting
an anything-goes, anti-God morality that would lead to sexual chaos and the
downfall of Christian America. Christian Crusade’s pamphlet Is the School House
the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? (1968) inflamed opposition to sex education as
it reached households across the country.

By making sure that moral behaviour was a central concern of sex education,
liberal Protestants had convinced Americans that sex education was important
for raising children and building strong families. But after the 1960s, they lost
control over whose morals guided the lessons. When the mainstream Judeo-
Protestant consensus that had been used to justify family life education gave way
to a rejection of universal morality, conservative Christians stepped in to put their
morals at the centre of sex education. After spending years on defence against
comprehensive sexuality education, evangelicals such as Tim LaHaye went on the
offensive in the 1980s with abstinence-only education. LaHaye and his wife had
reached bestseller status with their sex manual, e Act of Marriage (1976).
Building on that success, he sought to prove that sex education could also be
sanctified for conservative Christian purposes. Others followed, making
abstinence-only education an integral part of the Christian Right’s pro-family
movement and evangelical purity culture, known for its silver rings and virginity
pledges.
In 1996, abstinence-only received an enormous boost of federal funding
($50 million a year), supporting the message that ‘a mutually faithful
monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of
human sexual activity.’ Christian abstinence-only campaigners worked to remove
the most explicit religious language to fit their curricula within public schools.
Abstinence-only federal funding has remained fairly consistent, with only a brief
lull for less than a year under the Barack Obama administration, during which
time a separate funding stream was made available to comprehensive sexuality
education.

Even the liberal Protestant trend of embracing science as a method for revealing
God’s truth came back around, as conservative Christians borrowed scientific
language to argue that their version of sex education was representative of God’s
will. Medically accurate sexual terminology that evangelicals had initially labelled
pornographic now became part of their arsenal, within a framework of ‘Just say
no.’ Abstinence-only advocates took the same statistics that comprehensive
sexuality educators used to demonstrate the need for more expansive
programmes, and argued the opposite: that high rates of STIs and unintended
pregnancies indicated the failure of comprehensive sexuality education, therefore
demonstrating the need for restrictive programmes that exclude lessons on the
effectiveness of contraceptives and the diversity of sexual and gender identities.

Peer-reviewed scientific studies have largely rejected the abstinence-only

rationale, demonstrating that comprehensive approaches are more effective
across multiple types of measurements. While some abstinence-only programmes
have proven effective on specific behavioural outcomes, scholars and some
policymakers have further critiqued such programmes for medical inaccuracies
and harmful messages against LGBTQI youth and students who have been
sexually active, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Adding to confused public
discourse over the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of programmes is a tangled
mess of policies that vary dramatically across states. e politicised nature of sex
education also leads to teachers and textbook creators self-censoring for fear of
parental complaints or school board retaliation, much as narrow anti-evolution
laws in the early 20th century had the broader effect of inclining teachers to
downplay the topic.

S ex education battles form the roots of the Christian Right, and they became
entangled with later developments of evangelical resistance to racial integration
in their schools and an alignment with the Republican Party in the 1970s.
Protests against comprehensive sexuality education provided an opportunity to
use sexuality to represent other political issues, showing the symbolic potency of
sexuality as a carrier for moral values. e subsequent growth of abstinence-only
programmes further strengthened their pro-family platform. ese developments
helped the Christian Right forge its Christian nationalist ideology.

Looking back on this history prompts the question of why scientific professionals
needed religion in the sex-ed movement in the first place. Besides the resources
and experience that Protestant reformers brought to the table, in the words of the
scientists themselves, science was not enough. Early sex educators knew that data
and facts were insufficient for changing sexual behaviours. One pointed out that
doctors still contracted STIs, even though they knew the most about them, so
something more than information must be needed to convince and motivate
people to follow sexual health guidelines.

e realisation that scientific information alone was ineffective for the goals of sex
education should resonate, as there are still many cases in which the US public
remains resistant to scientific findings on controversial topics. Many Americans’
resistance to the overwhelming consensus on the basics of human evolution is
one case in point, and one in which Protestantism has similarly played complex
roles, with liberal Protestantism championing mainstream scientific authority,
conservative Protestantism developing alternative rationales for creationism, and
many individual beliefs falling somewhere along the spectrum between these
national talking points. Religious responses to COVID-19 have revealed some
similar divisions. A 2020 study found that those who held a Christian nationalist
ideology – supported mostly by politically conservative Christians who believe
the Bible should be interpreted literally – were most likely to reject scientific
findings about the efficacy of masking, social distancing, and vaccination while
other highly religious Americans were supportive of these same measures.

Religious affiliations, of course, are not the only factors influencing the public
reception of scientific data and discourses. Common distrust of ‘science’ (as if it
were just one thing) can stem from the overuse of scientific jargon, the nonlinear
process of scientific discovery, and real scientific mistakes, including corruption of
individual researchers and classist, sexist and racist projects in the past and
present. However, as the history of sex education demonstrates, religions have
complex influences on secular issues and on public receptions, and scientists and
science educators would benefit from pedagogical approaches that take seriously
religious resistance to scientific authority. More broadly, scientists and educators
 of all varieties need new ways to teach scientific knowledge effectively to the
public.

Another lesson that can be gleaned from this history is the need to re-examine the
behaviour-oriented goals of sex education. If we evaluated the success of school
mathematics classes by how many people could complete their own tax forms, we
would also have much cause for alarm. Obviously, there are important differences
between the topics of mathematics and sex, but instrumentalist assessments can
put an unfair burden on education programmes: there are many other reasons
that people engage in sexual activity (or fail to ace their taxes), completely
unrelated to the type or quality of education programmes they previously
encountered or the extent of their learning within those programmes. is calls
for critical conversations about why we desire to control what happens beyond
the classroom, whether such control is possible, and in what ways it impedes
other educational objectives that we have stronger chances of achieving through
sex education: concluding programmes with students who are well-informed and
have the critical skills to ask good questions and find reliable answers after class is
out.

e legacies of religious involvement on the history of sex education in the US will

continue to be felt, and examining them will help us better understand our
country’s messy and ambivalent approaches to sex today. ose influenced by
comprehensive sexuality education might be able to recognise traces of past
progressive Protestant influences, including the embrace of science as a way to
learn about creation, the interfaith desire to find common ground, and the
situation ethics of the new morality. Liberal Protestants also continue to generate
some of the most comprehensive sexuality education programmes for religious
education and private schools. ose familiar with abstinence-only/sexual-risk
reduction programmes might recognise aspects of earlier Protestant purity
reforms and midcentury family life education, along with the more direct
influence of evangelical pro-family politics. Previous religious sex educators
sought to move the conversation forward while also holding on to the reins as
best they could. ey set the boundaries of what should be considered acceptable
in public sex education that would later break into our current divisions.

aeon.co 16 September 2021

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The Child Abuse Epidemic

Carson Kessler · Follow
2 min read · May 5, 2017

Listen Share More

Childhood means more than the years between birth and adulthood. It means
attending school alongside classmates, splashing in pools during the summers, and
playing soccer knowing that your family sits in the stands. Childhood is a time for
children to blossom at the hands of unconditional love and endless encouragement.

02:18

Statistics from https://www.childhelp.org/child-abuse-statistics/

Unfortunately, not all children live free from fear and safe from violence. In 2015,
nearly 700,000 children experienced some form of maltreatment in the United
States. For these children, abuse and neglect replace love and encouragement.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan declared April as Child Abuse Prevention Month, a month
designed to increase attention to the protection of children and to intensify efforts
to prevent maltreatment. Although April serves to raise awareness of child abuse
and some of its preventative measures, abuse doesn’t stop at the end of April,
continuing to occur every month, every day, every hour.

04:08

03:53

While some resilient survivors share their personal stories of abuse in hopes of
raising awareness, national abuse child estimates are known for being under-
reported.
You may think child abuse doesn’t happen where you live. How could something this
horrific take place within your state, your city, your own neighborhood? However,
child abuse victims live in every state.

Map Overview Back To Beginning 

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 VICTIMS
IN YOUR
STATE IN
2015?
Statistics from American SPCC

S E l i
■

By learning to recognize the signs of child abuse, raising awareness, and increasing
advocacy, we can put an end to child abuse. Many organizations, such as The Blue
Ribbon Project, Invisible Children, and Childhelp, provide programs to end the
cycle of child abuse among families and communities.

Let’s raise awareness and help stop child abuse.

No child deserves this; it’s up to us.

 Child Abuse Abuse Health Children Help

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Written by Carson Kessler

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Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to
set us free. But it is both illogical and politically
troubling

by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is a political philosopher at the University of Warwick in the

UK. She is interested in political liberalism, democratic theory, moral psychology, and
the philosophy of emotion, and is currently working on a book about sex, gender and
identity.

Edited by Nigel Warburton

W hat is gender? is is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory
and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about
class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a
synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due to a
vague squeamishness about uttering a word that also describes sexual
intercourse, the word ‘gender’ is now euphemistically used to refer to the
biological fact of whether a person is female or male, saving us all the mild
embarrassment of having to invoke, however indirectly, the bodily organs and
processes that this bifurcation entails.

e word ‘gender’ originally had a purely grammatical meaning in languages that

classify their nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. But since at least the 1960s,
the word has taken on another meaning, allowing us to make a distinction
between sex and gender. For feminists, this distinction has been important,
because it enables us to acknowledge that some of the differences between
women and men are traceable to biology, while others have their roots in
environment, culture, upbringing and education – what feminists call ‘gendered
socialisation’.

At least, that is the role that the word gender traditionally performed in feminist
theory. It used to be a basic, fundamental feminist idea that while sex referred to
what is biological, and so perhaps in some sense ‘natural’, gender referred to what
is socially constructed. On this view, which for simplicity we can call the radical
feminist view, gender refers to the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe
and proscribe desirable behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally
arbitrary characteristics.

Not only are these norms external to the individual and coercively imposed, but
they also represent a binary caste system or hierarchy, a value system with two
positions: maleness above femaleness, manhood above womanhood, masculinity
above femininity. Individuals are born with the potential to perform one of two
reproductive roles, determined at birth, or even before, by the external genitals
that the infant possesses. From then on, they will be inculcated into one of two
classes in the hierarchy: the superior class if their genitals are convex, the inferior
one if their genitals are concave.

From birth, and the identification of sex-class membership that happens at that
moment, most female people are raised to be passive, submissive, weak and
nurturing, while most male people are raised to be active, dominant, strong and
aggressive. is value system, and the process of socialising and inculcating
individuals into it, is what a radical feminist means by the word ‘gender’.
Understood like this, it’s not difficult to see what is objectionable and oppressive
about gender, since it constrains the potential of both male and female people
alike, and asserts the superiority of males over females. So, for the radical
feminist, the aim is to abolish gender altogether: to stop putting people into pink
and blue boxes, and to allow the development of individuals’ personalities and
preferences without the coercive influence of this socially enacted value system.

is view of the nature of gender sits uneasily with those who experience gender
as in some sense internal and innate, rather than as entirely socially constructed
and externally imposed. Such people not only dispute that gender is entirely
constructed, but also reject the radical feminist analysis that it is inherently
hierarchical with two positions. On this view, which for ease I will call the queer
feminist view of gender, what makes the operation of gender oppressive is not
that it is socially constructed and coercively imposed: rather, the problem is the
prevalence of the belief that there are only two genders.

Humans of both sexes would be liberated if we recognised that while gender is

indeed an internal, innate, essential facet of our identities, there are more genders
than just ‘woman’ or ‘man’ to choose from. And the next step on the path to
liberation is the recognition of a new range of gender identities: so we now have
people referring to themselves as ‘genderqueer’ or ‘non-binary’ or ‘pangender’ or
‘polygender’ or ‘agender’ or ‘demiboy’ or ‘demigirl’ or ‘neutrois’ or ‘aporagender’
or ‘lunagender’ or ‘quantumgender’… I could go on. An oft-repeated mantra
among proponents of this view is that ‘gender is not a binary; it’s a spectrum’.
What follows from this view is not that we need to tear down the pink and the
blue boxes; rather, we simply need to recognise that there are many more boxes
than just these two.

At first blush this seems an appealing idea, but there are numerous problems with
it, problems that render it internally incoherent and politically unattractive.

M any proponents of the queer view of gender describe their own gender identity
as ‘non-binary’, and present this in opposition to the vast majority of people
whose gender identity is presumed to be binary. On the face of it, there seems to
be an immediate tension between the claim that gender is not a binary but a
spectrum, and the claim that only a small proportion of individuals can be
described as having a non-binary gender identity. If gender really is a spectrum,
doesn’t this mean that every individual alive is non-binary, by definition? If so,
then the label ‘non-binary’ to describe a specific gender identity would become
redundant, because it would fail to pick out a special category of people.

To avoid this, the proponent of the spectrum model must in fact be assuming that
gender is both a binary and a spectrum. It is entirely possible for a property to be
described in both continuous and binary ways. One example is height: clearly
height is a continuum, and individuals can fall anywhere along that continuum;
but we also have the binary labels Tall and Short. Might gender operate in a
similar way?

e thing to notice about the Tall/Short binary is that when these concepts are
invoked to refer to people, they are relative or comparative descriptions. Since
height is a spectrum or a continuum, no individual is absolutely tall or absolutely
short; we are all of us taller than some people and shorter than some others.
When we refer to people as tall, what we mean is that they are taller than the
average person in some group whose height we are interested in examining. A
boy could simultaneously be tall for a six-year-old, and yet short by comparison
with all male people. So ascriptions of the binary labels Tall and Short must be
comparative, and make reference to the average. Perhaps individuals who cluster
around that average might have some claim to refer to themselves as of ‘non-
binary height’.

However, it seems unlikely that this interpretation of the spectrum model will
satisfy those who describe themselves as non-binary gendered. If gender, like
height, is to be understood as comparative or relative, this would fly in the face of
the insistence that individuals are the sole arbiters of their gender. Your gender
would be defined by reference to the distribution of gender identities present in
the group in which you find yourself, and not by your own individual self-
determination. It would thus not be up to me to decide that I am non-binary. is
could be determined only by comparing my gender identity to the spread of other
people’s, and seeing where I fall. And although I might think of myself as a
woman, someone else might be further down the spectrum towards womanhood
than I am, and thus ‘more of a woman’ than me.

Further, when we observe the analogy with height we can see that, when
observing the entire population, only a small minority of people would be
accurately described as Tall or Short. Given that height really is a spectrum, and
the binary labels are ascribed comparatively, only the handful of people at either
end of the spectrum can be meaningfully labelled Tall or Short. e rest of us,
falling along all the points in between, are the non-binary height people, and we
are typical. In fact, it is the binary Tall and Short people who are rare and unusual.
And if we extend the analogy to gender, we see that being non-binary gendered is
actually the norm, not the exception.

If gender is a spectrum, that means it’s a continuum between two extremes, and
everyone is located somewhere along that continuum. I assume the two ends of
the spectrum are masculinity and femininity. Is there anything else that they
could possibly be? Once we realise this, it becomes clear that everybody is non-
binary, because absolutely nobody is pure masculinity or pure femininity. Of
course, some people will be closer to one end of the spectrum, while others will be
more ambiguous and float around the centre. But even the most conventionally
feminine person will demonstrate some characteristics that we associate with
masculinity, and vice versa.

I would be happy with this implication, because despite possessing female biology
and calling myself a woman, I do not consider myself a two-dimensional gender
stereotype. I am not an ideal manifestation of the essence of womanhood, and so I
am non-binary. Just like everybody else. However, those who describe themselves
as non-binary are unlikely to be satisfied with this conclusion, as their identity as
‘non-binary person’ depends upon the existence of a much larger group of so-
called binary ‘cisgender’ people, people who are incapable of being outside the
arbitrary masculine/feminine genders dictated by society.

And here we have an irony about some people insisting that they and a handful of
their fellow gender revolutionaries are non-binary: in doing so, they create a false
binary between those who conform to the gender norms associated with their sex,
and those who do not. In reality, everybody is non-binary. We all actively
participate in some gender norms, passively acquiesce with others, and positively
rail against others still. So to call oneself non-binary is in fact to create a new false
binary. It also often seems to involve, at least implicitly, placing oneself on the
more complex and interesting side of that binary, enabling the non-binary person
to claim to be both misunderstood and politically oppressed by the binary
cisgender people.

I f you identify as pangender, is the claim that you represent every possible point
on the spectrum? All at the same time? How might that be possible, given that the
extremes necessarily represent incompatible opposites of one another? Pure
femininity is passivity, weakness and submission, while pure masculinity is
aggression, strength and dominance. It is simply impossible to be all of these
things at the same time. If you disagree with these definitions of masculinity and
femininity, and do not accept that masculinity should be defined in terms of
dominance while femininity should be described in terms of submission, you are
welcome to propose other definitions. But whatever you come up with, they are
going to represent opposites of one another.

A handful of individuals are apparently permitted to opt out of the spectrum

altogether by declaring themselves ‘agender’, saying that they feel neither
masculine nor feminine, and don’t have any internal experience of gender. We are
not given any explanation as to why some people are able to refuse to define their
personality in gendered terms while others are not, but one thing that is clear
about the self-designation as ‘agender’: we cannot all do it, for the same reasons
we cannot all call ourselves non-binary. If we were all to deny that we have an
innate, essential gender identity, then the label ‘agender’ would become
redundant, as lacking in gender would be a universal trait. Agender can be
defined only against gender. ose who define themselves and their identity by
their lack of gender must therefore be committed to the view that most people do
have an innate, essential gender but that, for some reason, they do not.
Once we assert that the problem with gender is that we currently recognise only
two of them, the obvious question to ask is: how many genders would we have to
recognise in order not to be oppressive? Just how many possible gender identities
are there?

e only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take. ere are as many
possible gender identities as there are humans on the planet. According to
Nonbinary.org, one of the main internet reference sites for information about
non-binary genders, your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or
Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.

But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense or adds anything to our
understanding to call any of this stuff ‘gender’, as opposed to just ‘human
personality’ or ‘stuff I like’. e word gender is not just a fancy word for your
personality or your tastes or preferences. It is not just a label to adopt so that you
now have a unique way to describe just how large and multitudinous and
interesting you are. Gender is the value system that ties desirable (and sometimes
undesirable?) behaviours and characteristics to reproductive function. Once
we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function
– which we should – and once we’ve rejected the idea that there are just two
types of personality and that one is superior to the other – which we should –
what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff ‘gender’? What meaning
does the word ‘gender’ have here, that the word ‘personality’ cannot capture?

On Nonbinary.org, your gender can apparently be:

(Name)gender: ‘A gender that is best described by one’s name, good for

those who aren’t sure what they identify as yet but definitely know that they
aren’t cis … it can be used as a catch-all term or a specific identifier, eg,
johngender, janegender, (your name here)gender, etc.’

e example of ‘(name)gender’ perfectly demonstrates how non-binary gender

identities operate, and the function they perform. ey are for people who aren’t
sure what they identify as, but know that they aren’t cisgender. Presumably
because they are far too interesting and revolutionary and transgressive for
something as ordinary and conventional as cis.
 is desire not to be cis is rational and makes perfect sense, especially if you are
female. I too believe my thoughts, feelings, aptitudes and dispositions are far too
interesting, well-rounded and complex to simply be a ‘cis woman’. I, too, would
like to transcend socially constructed stereotypes about my female body and the
assumptions others make about me as a result of it. I, too, would like to be seen as
more than just a mother/domestic servant/object of sexual gratification. I, too,
would like to be viewed as a human being, a person with a rich and deep inner life
of my own, with the potential to be more than what our society currently views as
possible for women.

e solution to that, however, is not to call myself agender, to try to slip through
the bars of the cage while leaving the rest of the cage intact, and the rest of
womankind trapped within it. is is especially so given that you can’t slip
through the bars. No amount of calling myself ‘agender’ will stop the world seeing
me as a woman, and treating me accordingly. I can introduce myself as agender
and insist upon my own set of neo-pronouns when I apply for a job, but it won’t
stop the interviewer seeing a potential baby-maker, and giving the position to the
less qualified but less encumbered by reproduction male candidate.

H ere we arrive at the crucial tension at the heart of gender identity politics, and
one that most of its proponents either haven’t noticed, or choose to ignore
because it can only be resolved by rejecting some of the key tenets of the
doctrine.

Many people justifiably assume that the word ‘transgender’ is synonymous with
‘transsexual’, and means something like: having dysphoria and distress about
your sexed body, and having a desire to alter that body to make it more closely
resemble the body of the opposite sex. But according to the current terminology
of gender identity politics, being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to
change your sexed body. What it means to be transgender is that your innate
gender identity does not match the gender you were assigned at birth. is might
be the case even if you are perfectly happy and content in the body you possess.
You are transgender simply if you identify as one gender, but socially have been
perceived as another.

It is a key tenet of the doctrine that the vast majority of people can be described
as ‘cisgender’, which means that our innate gender identity matches the one we
were assigned at birth. But as we have seen, if gender identity is a spectrum, then
we are all non-binary, because none of us inhabits the points represented by the
ends of that spectrum. Every single one of us will exist at some unique point
along that spectrum, determined by the individual and idiosyncratic nature of our
own particular identity, and our own subjective experience of gender. Given that,
it’s not clear how anybody ever could be cisgender. None of us was assigned our
correct gender identity at birth, for how could we possibly have been? At the
moment of my birth, how could anyone have known that I would later go on to
discover that my gender identity is ‘frostgender’, a gender which is apparently
‘very cold and snowy’?

Once we recognise that the number of gender identities is potentially infinite, we

are forced to concede that nobody is deep down cisgender, because nobody is
assigned the correct gender identity at birth. In fact, none of us was assigned a
gender identity at birth at all. We were placed into one of two sex classes on the
basis of our potential reproductive function, determined by our external genitals.
We were then raised in accordance with the socially prescribed gender norms for
people of that sex. We are all educated and inculcated into one of two roles, long
before we are able to express our beliefs about our innate gender identity, or to
determine for ourselves the precise point at which we fall on the gender
continuum. So defining transgender people as those who at birth were not
assigned the correct place on the gender spectrum has the implication that every
single one of us is transgender; there are no cisgender people.

e logical conclusion of all this is: if gender is a spectrum, not a binary, then
everyone is trans. Or alternatively, there are no trans people. Either way, this a
profoundly unsatisfactory conclusion, and one that serves both to obscure the
reality of female oppression, as well as to erase and invalidate the experiences of
transsexual people.

e way to avoid this conclusion is to realise that gender is not a spectrum. It’s
not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is
not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then build
our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed all the way
through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes, occupying two value
positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity over femininity.

e truth of the spectrum analogy lies in the fact that conformity to one’s place in
the hierarchy, and to the roles it assigns to people, will vary from person to
person. Some people will find it relatively easier and more painless to conform to
the gender norms associated with their sex, while others find the gender roles
associated with their sex so oppressive and limiting that they cannot tolerably live
under them, and choose to transition to live in accordance with the opposite
gender role.

Fortunately, what is a spectrum is human personality, in all its variety and

complexity. (Actually that’s not a single spectrum either, because it is not simply
one continuum between two extremes. It’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly,
humany-wumany stuff.) Gender is the value system that says there are two types
of personality, determined by the reproductive organs you were born with. One of
the first steps to liberating people from the cage that is gender is to challenge
established gender norms, and to play with and explore your gender expression
and presentation. Nobody, and certainly no radical feminist, wants to stop anyone
from defining themselves in ways that make sense to them, or from expressing
their personality in ways they find enjoyable and liberating.

So if you want to call yourself a genderqueer femme presenting demigirl, you go

for it. Express that identity however you like. Have fun with it. A problem emerges
only when you start making political claims on the basis of that label – when you
start demanding that others call themselves cisgender, because you require there
to be a bunch of conventional binary cis people for you to define yourself against;
and when you insist that these cis people have structural advantage and political
privilege over you, because they are socially read as the conformist binary people,
while nobody really understands just how complex and luminous and
multifaceted and unique your gender identity is. To call yourself non-binary or
genderfluid while demanding that others call themselves cisgender is to insist that
the vast majority of humans must stay in their boxes, because you identify as
boxless.

e solution is not to reify gender by insisting on ever more gender categories

that define the complexity of human personality in rigid and essentialist ways.
e solution is to abolish gender altogether. We do not need gender. We would be
better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to
naturalise and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people, and
constrains the development of individuals of both sexes. Reconceiving of gender
as an identity spectrum represents no improvement.

You do not need to have a deep, internal, essential experience of gender to be free
to dress how you like, behave how you like, work how you like, love who you like.
 You do not need to show that your personality is feminine for it to be acceptable
for you to enjoy cosmetics, cookery and crafting. You do not need to be
genderqueer to queer gender. e solution to an oppressive system that puts
people into pink and blue boxes is not to create more and more boxes that are
any colour but blue or pink. e solution is to tear down the boxes altogether.

aeon.co 28 June 2016

 https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warming-faq.html

The Science of Climate Change

Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof
Definitive answers to the big questions.

By Julia Rosen
Ms. Rosen is a journalist with a Ph.D. in geology. Her research involved studying ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica
to understand past climate changes.

Published April 19, 2021 Updated Nov. 6, 2021

The science of climate change is more solid and widely agreed upon than you might think.
But the scope of the topic, as well as rampant disinformation, can make it hard to separate
fact from fiction. Here, we’ve done our best to present you with not only the most accurate
scientific information, but also an explanation of how we know it.

How do we know climate change is really happening?

How much agreement is there among scientists about climate change?

Do we really only have 150 years of climate data? How is that enough to tell us
about centuries of change?

How do we know climate change is caused by humans?

Since greenhouse gases occur naturally, how do we know theyʼre causing Earthʼs
temperature to rise?

Why should we be worried that the planet has warmed 2°F since the 1800s?

Is climate change a part of the planetʼs natural warming and cooling cycles?

How do we know global warming is not because of the sun or volcanoes?

How can winters and certain places be getting colder if the planet is warming?

Wildfires and bad weather have always happened. How do we know thereʼs a
connection to climate change?

How bad are the effects of climate change going to be?

What will it cost to do something about climate change, versus doing nothing?
How do we know climate change is really happening?
Climate change is often cast as a prediction made by complicated computer models. But
the scientific basis for climate change is much broader, and models are actually only one
part of it (and, for what it’s worth, they’re surprisingly accurate).

For more than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics behind why
greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up just a small
fraction of the atmosphere but exert outsized control on Earth’s climate by trapping some
of the planet’s heat before it escapes into space. This greenhouse effect is important: It’s
why a planet so far from the sun has liquid water and life!

However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fossil
fuels to power factories, smelters and steam engines, which added more greenhouse gases
to the atmosphere. Ever since, human activities have been heating the planet.

We know this is true thanks to an overwhelming body of evidence that begins with
temperature measurements taken at weather stations and on ships starting in the mid-
1800s. Later, scientists began tracking surface temperatures with satellites and looking for
clues about climate change in geologic records. Together, these data all tell the same story:
Earth is getting hotter.

Average global temperatures have increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees
Celsius, since 1880, with the greatest changes happening in the late 20th century. Land
areas have warmed more than the sea surface and the Arctic has warmed the most — by
more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit just since the 1960s. Temperature extremes have also
shifted. In the United States, daily record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one.

Where it was cooler or warmer in 2020

compared with the middle of the 20th century

–1˚C 0˚ +1˚ +2˚ +3˚ No data

 Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies • By Veronica Penney
This warming is unprecedented in recent geologic history. A famous illustration, first
published in 1998 and often called the hockey-stick graph, shows how temperatures
remained fairly flat for centuries (the shaft of the stick) before turning sharply upward
(the blade). It’s based on data from tree rings, ice cores and other natural indicators. And
the basic picture, which has withstood decades of scrutiny from climate scientists and
contrarians alike, shows that Earth is hotter today than it’s been in at least 1,000 years, and
probably much longer.

In fact, surface temperatures actually mask the true scale of climate change, because the
ocean has absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Measurements
collected over the last six decades by oceanographic expeditions and networks of floating
instruments show that every layer of the ocean is warming up. According to one study, the
ocean has absorbed as much heat between 1997 and 2015 as it did in the previous 130 years.

We also know that climate change is happening because we see the effects everywhere. Ice
sheets and glaciers are shrinking while sea levels are rising. Arctic sea ice is disappearing.
In the spring, snow melts sooner and plants flower earlier. Animals are moving to higher
elevations and latitudes to find cooler conditions. And droughts, floods and wildfires have
all gotten more extreme. Models predicted many of these changes, but observations show
they are now coming to pass.
Back to top.

How much agreement is there among scientists about climate

change?
There’s no denying that scientists love a good, old-fashioned argument. But when it comes
to climate change, there is virtually no debate: Numerous studies have found that more
than 90 percent of scientists who study Earth’s climate agree that the planet is warming
and that humans are the primary cause. Most major scientific bodies, from NASA to the
World Meteorological Organization, endorse this view. That’s an astounding level of
consensus given the contrarian, competitive nature of the scientific enterprise, where
questions like what killed the dinosaurs remain bitterly contested.

Scientific agreement about climate change started to emerge in the late 1980s, when the
influence of human-caused warming began to rise above natural climate variability. By
1991, two-thirds of earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed for an early consensus study
said that they accepted the idea of anthropogenic global warming. And by 1995, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a famously conservative body that
periodically takes stock of the state of scientific knowledge, concluded that “the balance of
evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” Currently,
more than 97 percent of publishing climate scientists agree on the existence and cause of
climate change (as does nearly 60 percent of the general population of the United States).

Climate Fwd A new administration, an ongoing climate emergency —

and a ton of news. Our newsletter will help you stay on top of it. Get it
with a Times subscription.

So where did we get the idea that there’s still debate about climate change? A lot of it came
from coordinated messaging campaigns by companies and politicians that opposed climate
action. Many pushed the narrative that scientists still hadn’t made up their minds about
climate change, even though that was misleading. Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant,
explained the rationale in an infamous 2002 memo to conservative lawmakers: “Should the
public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global
warming will change accordingly,” he wrote. Questioning consensus remains a common
talking point today, and the 97 percent figure has become something of a lightning rod.

To bolster the falsehood of lingering scientific doubt, some people have pointed to things
like the Global Warming Petition Project, which urged the United States government to
reject the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, an early international climate agreement. The petition
proclaimed that climate change wasn’t happening, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be bad
for humanity. Since 1998, more than 30,000 people with science degrees have signed it.
However, nearly 90 percent of them studied something other than Earth, atmospheric or
environmental science, and the signatories included just 39 climatologists. Most were
engineers, doctors, and others whose training had little to do with the physics of the
climate system.

A few well-known researchers remain opposed to the scientific consensus. Some, like Willie
Soon, a researcher affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have
ties to the fossil fuel industry. Others do not, but their assertions have not held up under
the weight of evidence. At least one prominent skeptic, the physicist Richard Muller,
changed his mind after reassessing historical temperature data as part of the Berkeley
Earth project. His team’s findings essentially confirmed the results he had set out to
investigate, and he came away firmly convinced that human activities were warming the
planet. “Call me a converted skeptic,” he wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times in 2012.

Mr. Luntz, the Republican pollster, has also reversed his position on climate change and
now advises politicians on how to motivate climate action.

A final note on uncertainty: Denialists often use it as evidence that climate science isn’t
settled. However, in science, uncertainty doesn’t imply a lack of knowledge. Rather, it’s a
measure of how well something is known. In the case of climate change, scientists have
found a range of possible future changes in temperature, precipitation and other important
variables — which will depend largely on how quickly we reduce emissions. But
uncertainty does not undermine their confidence that climate change is real and that
people are causing it.

Back to top.

Climate Fwd A new administration, an ongoing climate emergency —

and a ton of news. Our newsletter will help you stay on top of it. Get it
with a Times subscription.

Do we really only have 150 years of climate data? How is that enough
to tell us about centuries of change?
Earth’s climate is inherently variable. Some years are hot and others are cold, some
decades bring more hurricanes than others, some ancient droughts spanned the better
part of centuries. Glacial cycles operate over many millenniums. So how can scientists look
at data collected over a relatively short period of time and conclude that humans are
warming the planet? The answer is that the instrumental temperature data that we have
tells us a lot, but it’s not all we have to go on.

Historical records stretch back to the 1880s (and often before), when people began to
regularly measure temperatures at weather stations and on ships as they traversed the
world’s oceans. These data show a clear warming trend during the 20th century.

+1.2°C

Global average temperature compared

with the middle of the 20th century
 +0.75°C

+0.50°

+0.25°

–0.25°

1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies • By Veronica Penney

Some have questioned whether these records could be skewed, for instance, by the fact
that a disproportionate number of weather stations are near cities, which tend to be hotter
than surrounding areas as a result of the so-called urban heat island effect. However,
researchers regularly correct for these potential biases when reconstructing global
temperatures. In addition, warming is corroborated by independent data like satellite
observations, which cover the whole planet, and other ways of measuring temperature
changes.

Much has also been made of the small dips and pauses that punctuate the rising
temperature trend of the last 150 years. But these are just the result of natural climate
variability or other human activities that temporarily counteract greenhouse warming. For
instance, in the mid-1900s, internal climate dynamics and light-blocking pollution from
coal-fired power plants halted global warming for a few decades. (Eventually, rising
greenhouse gases and pollution-control laws caused the planet to start heating up again.)
Likewise, the so-called warming hiatus of the 2000s was partly a result of natural climate
variability that allowed more heat to enter the ocean rather than warm the atmosphere.
The years since have been the hottest on record.

Still, could the entire 20th century just be one big natural climate wiggle? To address that
question, we can look at other kinds of data that give a longer perspective. Researchers
have used geologic records like tree rings, ice cores, corals and sediments that preserve
information about prehistoric climates to extend the climate record. The resulting picture
of global temperature change is basically flat for centuries, then turns sharply upward over
the last 150 years. It has been a target of climate denialists for decades. However, study
after study has confirmed the results, which show that the planet hasn’t been this hot in at
least 1,000 years, and probably longer.
Back to top.
How do we know climate change is caused by humans?
Scientists have studied past climate changes to understand the factors that can cause the
planet to warm or cool. The big ones are changes in solar energy, ocean circulation,
volcanic activity and the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And they have
each played a role at times.

For example, 300 years ago, a combination of reduced solar output and increased volcanic
activity cooled parts of the planet enough that Londoners regularly ice skated on the
Thames. About 12,000 years ago, major changes in Atlantic circulation plunged the
Northern Hemisphere into a frigid state. And 56 million years ago, a giant burst of
greenhouse gases, from volcanic activity or vast deposits of methane (or both), abruptly
warmed the planet by at least 9 degrees Fahrenheit, scrambling the climate, choking the
oceans and triggering mass extinctions.

In trying to determine the cause of current climate changes, scientists have looked at all of
these factors. The first three have varied a bit over the last few centuries and they have
quite likely had modest effects on climate, particularly before 1950. But they cannot
account for the planet’s rapidly rising temperature, especially in the second half of the 20th
century, when solar output actually declined and volcanic eruptions exerted a cooling
effect.

That warming is best explained by rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Greenhouse

gases have a powerful effect on climate (see the next question for why). And since the
Industrial Revolution, humans have been adding more of them to the atmosphere,
primarily by extracting and burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, which releases
carbon dioxide.

Bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice show that, before about 1750, the concentration of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million. It began to rise slowly
and crossed the 300 p.p.m. threshold around 1900. CO2 levels then accelerated as cars and
electricity became big parts of modern life, recently topping 420 p.p.m. The concentration
of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. We’re now
emitting carbon much faster than it was released 56 million years ago.

30 billion
metric tons
 Carbon dioxide emitted worldwide 25
1850-2017 India
Rest of
world 20

China
15

Russia Other
developed 10

European Union
Developed economies 5
Other countries
United States

1850 1900 1950 2000

Note: Total carbon dioxide emissions are from fossil fuels and cement production and do not include land use and forestry-related
emissions. Russia data includes the Soviet Union through 1991, but only the Russian Federation afterward. • Source: Research
Institute for Environment, Energy and Economics at Appalachian State University • By Veronica Penney
These rapid increases in greenhouse gases have caused the climate to warm abruptly. In
fact, climate models suggest that greenhouse warming can explain virtually all of the
temperature change since 1950. According to the most recent report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assesses published scientific
literature, natural drivers and internal climate variability can only explain a small fraction
of late-20th century warming.

Another study put it this way: The odds of current warming occurring without
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are less than 1 in 100,000.

But greenhouse gases aren’t the only climate-altering compounds people put into the air.
Burning fossil fuels also produces particulate pollution that reflects sunlight and cools the
planet. Scientists estimate that this pollution has masked up to half of the greenhouse
warming we would have otherwise experienced.

Back to top.
Since greenhouse gases occur naturally, how do we know theyʼre
causing Earthʼs temperature to rise?
Greenhouse gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide serve an important role in the
climate. Without them, Earth would be far too cold to maintain liquid water and humans
would not exist!

Here’s how it works: the planet’s temperature is basically a function of the energy the
Earth absorbs from the sun (which heats it up) and the energy Earth emits to space as
infrared radiation (which cools it down). Because of their molecular structure, greenhouse
gases temporarily absorb some of that outgoing infrared radiation and then re-emit it in all
directions, sending some of that energy back toward the surface and heating the planet.
Scientists have understood this process since the 1850s.

Greenhouse gas concentrations have varied naturally in the past. Over millions of years,
atmospheric CO2 levels have changed depending on how much of the gas volcanoes
belched into the air and how much got removed through geologic processes. On time scales
of hundreds to thousands of years, concentrations have changed as carbon has cycled
between the ocean, soil and air.

Today, however, we are the ones causing CO2 levels to increase at an unprecedented pace
by taking ancient carbon from geologic deposits of fossil fuels and putting it into the
atmosphere when we burn them. Since 1750, carbon dioxide concentrations have increased
by almost 50 percent. Methane and nitrous oxide, other important anthropogenic
greenhouse gases that are released mainly by agricultural activities, have also spiked over
the last 250 years.

We know based on the physics described above that this should cause the climate to warm.
We also see certain telltale “fingerprints” of greenhouse warming. For example, nights are
warming even faster than days because greenhouse gases don’t go away when the sun
sets. And upper layers of the atmosphere have actually cooled, because more energy is
being trapped by greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere.

We also know that we are the cause of rising greenhouse gas concentrations — and not just
because we can measure the CO2 coming out of tailpipes and smokestacks. We can see it in
the chemical signature of the carbon in CO2.

Carbon comes in three different masses: 12, 13 and 14. Things made of organic matter
(including fossil fuels) tend to have relatively less carbon-13. Volcanoes tend to produce
CO2 with relatively more carbon-13. And over the last century, the carbon in atmospheric
CO2 has gotten lighter, pointing to an organic source.

We can tell it’s old organic matter by looking for carbon-14, which is radioactive and decays
over time. Fossil fuels are too ancient to have any carbon-14 left in them, so if they were
behind rising CO2 levels, you would expect the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere to
drop, which is exactly what the data show.

It’s important to note that water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the
atmosphere. However, it does not cause warming; instead it responds to it. That’s because
warmer air holds more moisture, which creates a snowball effect in which human-caused
warming allows the atmosphere to hold more water vapor and further amplifies climate
change. This so-called feedback cycle has doubled the warming caused by anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions.
Back to top.

Why should we be worried that the planet has warmed 2°F since the
1800s?
A common source of confusion when it comes to climate change is the difference between
weather and climate. Weather is the constantly changing set of meteorological conditions
that we experience when we step outside, whereas climate is the long-term average of
those conditions, usually calculated over a 30-year period. Or, as some say: Weather is
your mood and climate is your personality.

So while 2 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t represent a big change in the weather, it’s a huge
change in climate. As we’ve already seen, it’s enough to melt ice and raise sea levels, to
shift rainfall patterns around the world and to reorganize ecosystems, sending animals
scurrying toward cooler habitats and killing trees by the millions.

It’s also important to remember that two degrees represents the global average, and many
parts of the world have already warmed by more than that. For example, land areas have
warmed about twice as much as the sea surface. And the Arctic has warmed by about 5
degrees. That’s because the loss of snow and ice at high latitudes allows the ground to
absorb more energy, causing additional heating on top of greenhouse warming.

Relatively small long-term changes in climate averages also shift extremes in significant
ways. For instance, heat waves have always happened, but they have shattered records in
recent years. In June of 2020, a town in Siberia registered temperatures of 100 degrees.
And in Australia, meteorologists have added a new color to their weather maps to show
areas where temperatures exceed 125 degrees. Rising sea levels have also increased the
risk of flooding because of storm surges and high tides. These are the foreshocks of climate
change.

And we are in for more changes in the future — up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit of average
global warming by the end of the century, in the worst-case scenario. For reference, the
difference in global average temperatures between now and the peak of the last ice age,
when ice sheets covered large parts of North America and Europe, is about 11 degrees
Fahrenheit.

Under the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden recently rejoined, countries
have agreed to try to limit total warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 and
3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, since preindustrial times. And even this narrow range has huge
implications. According to scientific studies, the difference between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit will very likely mean the difference between coral reefs hanging on or going
extinct, and between summer sea ice persisting in the Arctic or disappearing completely. It
will also determine how many millions of people suffer from water scarcity and crop
failures, and how many are driven from their homes by rising seas. In other words, one
degree Fahrenheit makes a world of difference.

Back to top.

Is climate change a part of the planetʼs natural warming and cooling

cycles?
Earth’s climate has always changed. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the entire planet
froze. Fifty million years ago, alligators lived in what we now call the Arctic. And for the
last 2.6 million years, the planet has cycled between ice ages when the planet was up to 11
degrees cooler and ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe, and milder
interglacial periods like the one we’re in now.

Climate denialists often point to these natural climate changes as a way to cast doubt on
the idea that humans are causing climate to change today. However, that argument rests
on a logical fallacy. It’s like “seeing a murdered body and concluding that people have died
of natural causes in the past, so the murder victim must also have died of natural causes,” a
team of social scientists wrote in The Debunking Handbook, which explains the
misinformation strategies behind many climate myths.

Indeed, we know that different mechanisms caused the climate to change in the past.
Glacial cycles, for example, were triggered by periodic variations in Earth’s orbit, which
take place over tens of thousands of years and change how solar energy gets distributed
around the globe and across the seasons.

These orbital variations don’t affect the planet’s temperature much on their own. But they
set off a cascade of other changes in the climate system; for instance, growing or melting
vast Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and altering ocean circulation. These changes, in
turn, affect climate by altering the amount of snow and ice, which reflect sunlight, and by
changing greenhouse gas concentrations. This is actually part of how we know that
greenhouse gases have the ability to significantly affect Earth’s temperature.

For at least the last 800,000 years, atmospheric CO2 concentrations oscillated between
about 180 parts per million during ice ages and about 280 p.p.m. during warmer periods, as
carbon moved between oceans, forests, soils and the atmosphere. These changes occurred
in lock step with global temperatures, and are a major reason the entire planet warmed
and cooled during glacial cycles, not just the frozen poles.

Today, however, CO2 levels have soared to 420 p.p.m. — the highest they’ve been in at least
three million years. The concentration of CO2 is also increasing about 100 times faster than
it did at the end of the last ice age. This suggests something else is going on, and we know
what it is: Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been burning fossil fuels and
releasing greenhouse gases that are heating the planet now (see Question 5 for more
details on how we know this, and Questions 4 and 8 for how we know that other natural
forces aren’t to blame).

Over the next century or two, societies and ecosystems will experience the consequences
of this climate change. But our emissions will have even more lasting geologic impacts:
According to some studies, greenhouse gas levels may have already warmed the planet
enough to delay the onset of the next glacial cycle for at least an additional 50,000 years.

How do we know global warming is not because of the sun or

volcanoes?
The sun is the ultimate source of energy in Earth’s climate system, so it’s a natural
candidate for causing climate change. And solar activity has certainly changed over time.
We know from satellite measurements and other astronomical observations that the sun’s
output changes on 11-year cycles. Geologic records and sunspot numbers, which
astronomers have tracked for centuries, also show long-term variations in the sun’s
activity, including some exceptionally quiet periods in the late 1600s and early 1800s.

We know that, from 1900 until the 1950s, solar irradiance increased. And studies suggest
that this had a modest effect on early 20th century climate, explaining up to 10 percent of
the warming that’s occurred since the late 1800s. However, in the second half of the
century, when the most warming occurred, solar activity actually declined. This disparity
is one of the main reasons we know that the sun is not the driving force behind climate
change.
Another reason we know that solar activity hasn’t caused recent warming is that, if it had,
all the layers of the atmosphere should be heating up. Instead, data show that the upper
atmosphere has actually cooled in recent decades — a hallmark of greenhouse warming.

So how about volcanoes? Eruptions cool the planet by injecting ash and aerosol particles
into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. We’ve observed this effect in the years following
large eruptions. There are also some notable historical examples, like when Iceland’s Laki
volcano erupted in 1783, causing widespread crop failures in Europe and beyond, and the
“year without a summer,” which followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

Since volcanoes mainly act as climate coolers, they can’t really explain recent warming.
However, scientists say that they may also have contributed slightly to rising temperatures
in the early 20th century. That’s because there were several large eruptions in the late
1800s that cooled the planet, followed by a few decades with no major volcanic events
when warming caught up. During the second half of the 20th century, though, several big
eruptions occurred as the planet was heating up fast. If anything, they temporarily masked
some amount of human-caused warming.

The second way volcanoes can impact climate is by emitting carbon dioxide. This is
important on time scales of millions of years — it’s what keeps the planet habitable (see
Question 5 for more on the greenhouse effect). But by comparison to modern
anthropogenic emissions, even big eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens are just a
drop in the bucket. After all, they last only a few hours or days, while we burn fossil fuels
24-7. Studies suggest that, today, volcanoes account for 1 to 2 percent of total CO2
emissions.
Back to top.

How can winters and certain places be getting colder if the planet is
warming?
When a big snowstorm hits the United States, climate denialists can try to cite it as proof
that climate change isn’t happening. In 2015, Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma
Republican, famously lobbed a snowball in the Senate as he denounced climate science.
But these events don’t actually disprove climate change.

While there have been some memorable storms in recent years, winters are actually
warming across the world. In the United States, average temperatures in December,
January and February have increased by about 2.5 degrees this century.
On the flip side, record cold days are becoming less common than record warm days. In the
United States, record highs now outnumber record lows two-to-one. And ever-smaller
areas of the country experience extremely cold winter temperatures. (The same trends are
happening globally.)

So what’s with the blizzards? Weather always varies, so it’s no surprise that we still have
severe winter storms even as average temperatures rise. However, some studies suggest
that climate change may be to blame. One possibility is that rapid Arctic warming has
affected atmospheric circulation, including the fast-flowing, high-altitude air that usually
swirls over the North Pole (a.k.a. the Polar Vortex). Some studies suggest that these
changes are bringing more frigid temperatures to lower latitudes and causing weather
systems to stall, allowing storms to produce more snowfall. This may explain what we’ve
experienced in the U.S. over the past few decades, as well as a wintertime cooling trend in
Siberia, although exactly how the Arctic affects global weather remains a topic of ongoing
scientific debate.

Climate change may also explain the apparent paradox behind some of the other places on
Earth that haven’t warmed much. For instance, a splotch of water in the North Atlantic has
cooled in recent years, and scientists say they suspect that may be because ocean
circulation is slowing as a result of freshwater streaming off a melting Greenland. If this
circulation grinds almost to a halt, as it’s done in the geologic past, it would alter weather
patterns around the world.

Not all cold weather stems from some counterintuitive consequence of climate change. But
it’s a good reminder that Earth’s climate system is complex and chaotic, so the effects of
human-caused changes will play out differently in different places. That’s why “global
warming” is a bit of an oversimplification. Instead, some scientists have suggested that the
phenomenon of human-caused climate change would more aptly be called “global
weirding.”
Back to top.

Wildfires and bad weather have always happened. How do we know

thereʼs a connection to climate change?
Extreme weather and natural disasters are part of life on Earth — just ask the dinosaurs.
But there is good evidence that climate change has increased the frequency and severity of
certain phenomena like heat waves, droughts and floods. Recent research has also allowed
scientists to identify the influence of climate change on specific events.
Let’s start with heat waves. Studies show that stretches of abnormally high temperatures
now happen about five times more often than they would without climate change, and they
last longer, too. Climate models project that, by the 2040s, heat waves will be about 12
times more frequent. And that’s concerning since extreme heat often causes increased
hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among older people and those with underlying
health conditions. In the summer of 2003, for example, a heat wave caused an estimated
70,000 excess deaths across Europe. (Human-caused warming amplified the death toll.)

Climate change has also exacerbated droughts, primarily by increasing evaporation.

Droughts occur naturally because of random climate variability and factors like whether El
Niño or La Niña conditions prevail in the tropical Pacific. But some researchers have found
evidence that greenhouse warming has been affecting droughts since even before the Dust
Bowl. And it continues to do so today. According to one analysis, the drought that afflicted
the American Southwest from 2000 to 2018 was almost 50 percent more severe because of
climate change. It was the worst drought the region had experienced in more than 1,000
years.

Rising temperatures have also increased the intensity of heavy precipitation events and
the flooding that often follows. For example, studies have found that, because warmer air
holds more moisture, Hurricane Harvey, which struck Houston in 2017, dropped between 15
and 40 percent more rainfall than it would have without climate change.

It’s still unclear whether climate change is changing the overall frequency of hurricanes,
but it is making them stronger. And warming appears to favor certain kinds of weather
patterns, like the “Midwest Water Hose” events that caused devastating flooding across
the Midwest in 2019.

It’s important to remember that in most natural disasters, there are multiple factors at
play. For instance, the 2019 Midwest floods occurred after a recent cold snap had frozen the
ground solid, preventing the soil from absorbing rainwater and increasing runoff into the
Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. These waterways have also been reshaped by levees and
other forms of river engineering, some of which failed in the floods.

Wildfires are another phenomenon with multiple causes. In many places, fire risk has
increased because humans have aggressively fought natural fires and prevented
Indigenous peoples from carrying out traditional burning practices. This has allowed fuel
to accumulate that makes current fires worse.

However, climate change still plays a major role by heating and drying forests, turning
them into tinderboxes. Studies show that warming is the driving factor behind the recent
increases in wildfires; one analysis found that climate change is responsible for doubling
the area burned across the American West between 1984 and 2015. And researchers say
that warming will only make fires bigger and more dangerous in the future.
Back to top.
How bad are the effects of climate change going to be?
It depends on how aggressively we act to address climate change. If we continue with
business as usual, by the end of the century, it will be too hot to go outside during heat
waves in the Middle East and South Asia. Droughts will grip Central America, the
Mediterranean and southern Africa. And many island nations and low-lying areas, from
Texas to Bangladesh, will be overtaken by rising seas. Conversely, climate change could
bring welcome warming and extended growing seasons to the upper Midwest, Canada, the
Nordic countries and Russia. Farther north, however, the loss of snow, ice and permafrost
will upend the traditions of Indigenous peoples and threaten infrastructure.

It’s complicated, but the underlying message is simple: unchecked climate change will
likely exacerbate existing inequalities. At a national level, poorer countries will be hit
hardest, even though they have historically emitted only a fraction of the greenhouse gases
that cause warming. That’s because many less developed countries tend to be in tropical
regions where additional warming will make the climate increasingly intolerable for
humans and crops. These nations also often have greater vulnerabilities, like large coastal
populations and people living in improvised housing that is easily damaged in storms. And
they have fewer resources to adapt, which will require expensive measures like
redesigning cities, engineering coastlines and changing how people grow food.

Already, between 1961 and 2000, climate change appears to have harmed the economies of
the poorest countries while boosting the fortunes of the wealthiest nations that have done
the most to cause the problem, making the global wealth gap 25 percent bigger than it
would otherwise have been. Similarly, the Global Climate Risk Index found that lower
income countries — like Myanmar, Haiti and Nepal — rank high on the list of nations most
affected by extreme weather between 1999 and 2018. Climate change has also contributed
to increased human migration, which is expected to increase significantly.

Even within wealthy countries, the poor and marginalized will suffer the most. People with
more resources have greater buffers, like air-conditioners to keep their houses cool during
dangerous heat waves, and the means to pay the resulting energy bills. They also have an
easier time evacuating their homes before disasters, and recovering afterward. Lower
income people have fewer of these advantages, and they are also more likely to live in
hotter neighborhoods and work outdoors, where they face the brunt of climate change.

These inequalities will play out on an individual, community, and regional level. A 2017
analysis of the U.S. found that, under business as usual, the poorest one-third of counties,
which are concentrated in the South, will experience damages totaling as much as 20
percent of gross domestic product, while others, mostly in the northern part of the country,
will see modest economic gains. Solomon Hsiang, an economist at University of California,
Berkeley, and the lead author of the study, has said that climate change “may result in the
largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”

Even the climate “winners” will not be immune from all climate impacts, though. Desirable
locations will face an influx of migrants. And as the coronavirus pandemic has
demonstrated, disasters in one place quickly ripple across our globalized economy. For
instance, scientists expect climate change to increase the odds of multiple crop failures
occurring at the same time in different places, throwing the world into a food crisis.

On top of that, warmer weather is aiding the spread of infectious diseases and the vectors
that transmit them, like ticks and mosquitoes. Research has also identified troubling
correlations between rising temperatures and increased interpersonal violence, and
climate change is widely recognized as a “threat multiplier” that increases the odds of
larger conflicts within and between countries. In other words, climate change will bring
many changes that no amount of money can stop. What could help is taking action to limit
warming.
Back to top.

What will it cost to do something about climate change, versus doing

nothing?
One of the most common arguments against taking aggressive action to combat climate
change is that doing so will kill jobs and cripple the economy. But this implies that there’s
an alternative in which we pay nothing for climate change. And unfortunately, there isn’t.
In reality, not tackling climate change will cost a lot, and cause enormous human suffering
and ecological damage, while transitioning to a greener economy would benefit many
people and ecosystems around the world.

Let’s start with how much it will cost to address climate change. To keep warming well
below 2 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, society will have to
reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century. That will require
significant investments in things like renewable energy, electric cars and charging
infrastructure, not to mention efforts to adapt to hotter temperatures, rising sea-levels and
other unavoidable effects of current climate changes. And we’ll have to make changes fast.

Estimates of the cost vary widely. One recent study found that keeping warming to 2
degrees Celsius would require a total investment of between $4 trillion and $60 trillion,
with a median estimate of $16 trillion, while keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could
cost between $10 trillion and $100 trillion, with a median estimate of $30 trillion. (For
reference, the entire world economy was about $88 trillion in 2019.) Other studies have
found that reaching net zero will require annual investments ranging from less than 1.5
percent of global gross domestic product to as much as 4 percent. That’s a lot, but within
the range of historical energy investments in countries like the U.S.

Now, let’s consider the costs of unchecked climate change, which will fall hardest on the
most vulnerable. These include damage to property and infrastructure from sea-level rise
and extreme weather, death and sickness linked to natural disasters, pollution and
infectious disease, reduced agricultural yields and lost labor productivity because of rising
temperatures, decreased water availability and increased energy costs, and species
extinction and habitat destruction. Dr. Hsiang, the U.C. Berkeley economist, describes it as
“death by a thousand cuts.”

As a result, climate damages are hard to quantify. Moody’s Analytics estimates that even 2
degrees Celsius of warming will cost the world $69 trillion by 2100, and economists expect
the toll to keep rising with the temperature. In a recent survey, economists estimated the
cost would equal 5 percent of global G.D.P. at 3 degrees Celsius of warming (our trajectory
under current policies) and 10 percent for 5 degrees Celsius. Other research indicates that,
if current warming trends continue, global G.D.P. per capita will decrease between 7
percent and 23 percent by the end of the century — an economic blow equivalent to
multiple coronavirus pandemics every year. And some fear these are vast underestimates.

Already, studies suggest that climate change has slashed incomes in the poorest countries
by as much as 30 percent and reduced global agricultural productivity by 21 percent since
1961. Extreme weather events have also racked up a large bill. In 2020, in the United States
alone, climate-related disasters like hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires caused nearly $100
billion in damages to businesses, property and infrastructure, compared to an average of
$18 billion per year in the 1980s.

Given the steep price of inaction, many economists say that addressing climate change is a
better deal. It’s like that old saying: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In this
case, limiting warming will greatly reduce future damage and inequality caused by climate
change. It will also produce so-called co-benefits, like saving one million lives every year
by reducing air pollution, and millions more from eating healthier, climate-friendly diets.
Some studies even find that meeting the Paris Agreement goals could create jobs and
increase global G.D.P. And, of course, reining in climate change will spare many species
and ecosystems upon which humans depend — and which many people believe to have
their own innate value.

The challenge is that we need to reduce emissions now to avoid damages later, which
requires big investments over the next few decades. And the longer we delay, the more we
will pay to meet the Paris goals. One recent analysis found that reaching net-zero by 2050
would cost the U.S. almost twice as much if we waited until 2030 instead of acting now. But
even if we miss the Paris target, the economics still make a strong case for climate action,
because every additional degree of warming will cost us more — in dollars, and in lives.
Back to top.

Veronica Penney contributed reporting.

Illustration photographs by Esther Horvath, Max Whittaker, David Maurice Smith and Talia Herman for The New York
Times; Esther Horvath/Alfred-Wegener-Institut

A correction was made on April 20, 2021: An earlier version of this article misidentified the
authors of The Debunking Handbook. It was written by social scientists who study climate
communication, not a team of climate scientists.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at
nytnews@nytimes.com. Learn more

A version of this article appears in print on , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Explaining The Science
Deep warming
Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older,
slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter
Earth’s future

by Mark Buchanan

Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer. Formerly an editor at Nature and
New Scientist, his work has been published in Science, The New York Times and
Wired, among others. He was formerly a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and
currently writes a monthly column for Nature Physics. His latest book is Forecast:
What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics
(2013). He lives in in Dorset, England.

Edited by Cameron Allan McKean

T he world will be transformed. By 2050, we will be driving electric cars and flying
in aircraft running on synthetic fuels produced through solar and wind energy.
New energy-efficient technologies, most likely harnessing artificial intelligence,
will dominate nearly all human activities from farming to heavy industry. e
fossil fuel industry will be in the final stages of a terminal decline. Nuclear fusion
and other new energy sources may have become widespread. Perhaps our planet
will even be orbited by massive solar arrays capturing cosmic energy from
sunlight and generating seemingly endless energy for all our needs.

at is one possible future for humanity. It’s an optimistic view of how radical
changes to energy production might help us slow or avoid the worst outcomes of
global warming. In a report from 1965, scientists from the US government
warned that our ongoing use of fossil fuels would cause global warming with
potentially disastrous consequences for Earth’s climate. e report, one of the
first government-produced documents to predict a major crisis caused by
humanity’s large-scale activities, noted that the likely consequences would
include higher global temperatures, the melting of the ice caps and rising sea
levels. ‘ rough his worldwide industrial civilisation,’ the report concluded, ‘Man
is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment’ – an experiment with a
highly uncertain outcome, but clear and important risks for life on Earth.
Since then, we’ve dithered and doubted and argued about what to do, but still
have not managed to take serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
which continue to rise. Governments around the planet have promised to phase
out emissions in the coming decades and transition to ‘green energy’. But global
temperatures may be rising faster than we expected: some climate scientists
worry that rapid rises could create new problems and positive feedback loops that
may accelerate climate destabilisation and make parts of the world uninhabitable
long before a hoped-for transition is possible.

Despite this bleak vision of the future, there are reasons for optimists to hope due
to progress on cleaner sources of renewable energy, especially solar power.
Around 2010, solar energy generation accounted for less than 1 per cent of the
electricity generated by humanity. But experts believe that, by 2027, due to falling
costs, better technology and exponential growth in new installations, solar power
will become the largest global energy source for producing electricity. If progress
on renewables continues, we might find a way to resolve the warming problem
linked to greenhouse gas emissions. By 2050, large-scale societal and ecological
changes might have helped us avoid the worst consequences of our extensive use
of fossil fuels.

It’s a momentous challenge. And it won’t be easy. But this story of transformation
only hints at the true depth of the future problems humanity will confront in
managing our energy use and its influence over our climate.

As scientists are gradually learning, even if we solve the immediate warming

problem linked to the greenhouse effect, there’s another warming problem
steadily growing beneath it. Let’s call it the ‘deep warming’ problem. is deeper
problem also raises Earth’s surface temperature but, unlike global warming, it has
nothing to do with greenhouse gases and our use of fossil fuels. It stems directly
from our use of energy in all forms and our tendency to use more energy over
time – a problem created by the inevitable waste heat that is generated whenever
we use energy to do something. Yes, the world may well be transformed by 2050.
Carbon dioxide levels may stabilise or fall thanks to advanced AI-assisted
technologies that run on energy harvested from the sun and wind. And the fossil
fuel industry may be taking its last breaths. But we will still face a deeper problem.
at’s because ‘deep warming’ is not created by the release of greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere. It’s a problem built into our relationship with energy itself.
F inding new ways to harness more energy has been a constant theme of human
development. e evolution of humanity – from early modes of hunter-gathering
to farming and industry – has involved large systematic increases in our per-
capita energy use. e British historian and archaeologist Ian Morris estimates, in
his book Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015), that
early human hunter-gatherers, living more than 10,000 years ago, ‘captured’
around 5,000 kcal per person per day by consuming food, burning fuel, making
clothing, building shelter, or through other activities. Later, after we turned to
farming and enlisted the energies of domesticated animals, we were able to
harness as much as 30,000 kcal per day. In the late 17th century, the exploitation
of coal and steam power marked another leap: by 1970, the use of fossil fuels
allowed humans to consume some 230,000 kcal per person per day. (When we
think about humanity writ large as ‘humans’, it’s important to acknowledge that
the average person in the wealthiest nations consumes up to 100 times more
energy than the average person in the poorest nations.) As the global population
has risen and people have invented new energy-dependent technologies, our
global energy use has continued to climb.

In many respects, this is great. We can now do more with less effort and achieve
things that were unimaginable to the 17th-century inventors of steam engines, let
alone to our hominin ancestors. We’ve made powerful mining machines,
superfast trains, lasers for use in telecommunications and brain-imaging
equipment. But these creations, while helping us, are also subtly heating the
planet.

All the energy we humans use – to heat our homes, run our factories, propel our
automobiles and aircraft, or to run our electronics – eventually ends up as heat in
the environment. In the shorter term, most of the energy we use flows directly
into the environment. It gets there through hot exhaust gases, friction between
tires and roads, the noises generated by powerful engines, which spread out,
dissipate, and eventually end up as heat. However, a small portion of the energy
we use gets stored in physical changes, such as in new steel, plastic or concrete.
It’s stored in our cities and technologies. In the longer term, as these materials
break down, the energy stored inside also finds its way into the environment as
heat. is is a direct consequence of the well-tested principles of
thermodynamics.

In the early decades of the 21st century, this heat created by simply using energy,
known as ‘waste heat’, is not so serious. It’s equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of the
planetary heating imbalance caused by greenhouse gases – for now. But, with the
passing of time, the problem is likely to get much more serious. at’s because
humans have a historical tendency to consistently discover and produce things,
creating entirely new technologies and industries in the process: domesticated
animals for farming; railways and automobiles; global air travel and shipping;
personal computers, the internet and mobile phones. e result of such activities
is that we end up using more and more energy, despite improved energy
efficiency in nearly every area of technology.

During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly
energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years. Our energy use seems to be
growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep
finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and
more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining
or the accelerating energy requirements of AI.

If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose a
problem in roughly 150-200 years that is every bit as serious as the current
problem of global warming from greenhouse gases. However, deep heating will be
more pernicious as we won’t be able to avoid it by merely shifting from one kind
energy to another. A profound problem will loom before us: can we set strict limits
on all the energy we use? Can we reign in the seemingly inexorable expansion of
our activities to avoid destroying our own environment?

Deep warming is a problem hiding beneath global warming, but one that will
become prominent if and when we manage to solve the more pressing issue of
greenhouse gases. It remains just out of sight, which might explain why scientists
only became concerned about the ‘waste heat’ problem around 15 years ago.

O ne of the first people to describe the problem is the Harvard astrophysicist Eric
Chaisson, who discussed the issue of waste heat in a paper titled ‘Long-Term
Global Heating from Energy Usage’ (2008). He concluded that our technological
society may be facing a fundamental limit to growth due to ‘unavoidable global
heating … dictated solely by the second law of thermodynamics, a biogeophysical
effect often ignored when estimating future planetary warming scenarios’. When I
emailed Chaisson to learn more, he told me the history of his thinking on the
problem:
 It was on a night flight, Paris-Boston [circa] 2006, after a UNESCO meeting
on the environment when it dawned on me that the IPCC were overlooking
something. While others on the plane slept, I crunched some numbers
literally on the back of an envelope … and then hoped I was wrong, that is,
hoped that I was incorrect in thinking that the very act of using energy heats
the air, however slightly now.

Chaisson drafted the idea up as a paper and sent it to an academic journal. Two
anonymous reviewers were eager for it to be published. ‘A third tried his
damnedest to kill it,’ Chaisson said, the reviewer claiming the findings were
‘irrelevant and distracting’. After it was finally published, the paper got some
traction when it was covered by a journalist and ran as a feature story on the front
page of e Boston Globe. e numbers Chaisson crunched, predictions of our
mounting waste heat, were even run on a supercomputer at the US National
Center for Atmospheric Research, by Mark Flanner, a professor of earth system
science. Flanner, Chaisson suspected at the time, was likely ‘out to prove it
wrong’. But, ‘after his machine crunched for many hours’, he saw the same results
that Chaisson had written on the back of an envelope that night in the plane.

Around the same time, also in 2008, two engineers, Nick Cowern and Chihak
Ahn, wrote a research paper entirely independent of Chaisson’s work, but with
similar conclusions. is was how I first came across the problem. Cowern and
Ahn’s study estimated the total amount of waste heat we’re currently releasing to
the environment, and found that it is, right now, quite small. But, like Chaisson,
they acknowledged that the problem would eventually become serious unless
steps were taken to avoid it.

at’s some of the early history of thinking in this area. But these two papers, and
a few other analyses since, point to the same unsettling conclusion: what I am
calling ‘deep warming’ will be a big problem for humanity at some point in the
not-too-distant future. e precise date is far from certain. It might be 150 years,
or 400, or 800, but it’s in the relatively near future, not the distant future of, say,
thousands or millions of years. is is our future.

T he transformation of energy into heat is among the most ubiquitous processes

of physics. As cars drive down roads, trains roar along railways, planes cross the
skies and industrial plants turn raw materials into refined products, energy gets
turned into heat, which is the scientific word for energy stored in the disorganised
motions of molecules at the microscopic level. As a plane flies from Paris to
Boston, it burns fuel and thrusts hot gases into the air, generates lots of sound and
stirs up contrails. ese swirls of air give rise to swirls on smaller scales which in
turn make smaller ones until the energy ultimately ends up lost in heat – the air is
a little warmer than before, the molecules making it up moving about a little more
vigorously. A similar process takes place when energy is used by the tiny electrical
currents inside the microchips of computers, silently carrying out computations.
Energy used always ends up as heat. Decades ago, research by the IBM physicist
Rolf Landauer showed that a computation involving even a single computing bit
will release a certain minimum amount of heat to the environment.

How this happens is described by the laws of thermodynamics, which were

described in the mid-19th century by scientists including Sadi Carnot in France
and Rudolf Clausius in Germany. Two key ‘laws’ summarise its main principles.

e first law of thermodynamics simply states that the total quantity of energy
never changes but is conserved. Energy, in other words, never disappears, but
only changes form. e energy initially stored in an aircraft’s fuel, for example,
can be changed into the energetic motion of the plane. Turn on an electric heater,
and energy initially held in electric currents gets turned into heat, which spreads
into the air, walls and fabric of your house. e total energy remains the same, but
it markedly changes form.

e second law of thermodynamics, equally important, is more subtle and states

that, in natural processes, the transformation of energy always moves from more
organised and useful forms to less organised and less useful forms. For an aircraft,
the energy initially concentrated in jet fuel ends up dissipated in stirred-up winds,
sounds and heat spread over vast areas of the atmosphere in a largely invisible
way. It’s the same with the electric heater: the organised useful energy in the
electric currents gets dissipated and spread into the low-grade warmth of the
walls, then leaks into the outside air. Although the amount of energy remains the
same, it gradually turns into less organised, less usable forms. e end point of
the energy process produces waste heat. And we’re generating it all the time with
everything we do.

Data on world energy consumption shows that, collectively, all humans on Earth
are currently using about 170,000 terawatt-hours (TWh), which is a lot of energy
in absolute terms – a terawatt-hour is the total energy consumed in one hour by
any process using energy at a rate of 1 trillion watts. is huge number isn’t
surprising, as it represents all the energy being used every day by the billions of
cars and homes around the world, as well as by industry, farming, construction,
air traffic and so on. But, in the early 21st century, the warming from this energy is
still much less than the planetary heating due to greenhouse gases.

Concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane are quite small,
and only make a fractional difference to how much of the Sun’s energy gets
trapped in the atmosphere, rather than making it back out to space. Even so, this
fractional difference has a huge effect because the stream of energy arriving from
the Sun to Earth is so large. Current estimates of this greenhouse energy
imbalance come to around 0.87 W per square meter, which translates into a total
energy figure about 50 times larger than our waste heat. at’s reassuring. But as
Cowern and Ahn wrote in their 2008 paper, things aren’t likely to stay this way
over time because our energy usage keeps rising. Unless, that is, we can find some
radical way to break the trend of using ever more energy.

O ne common objection to the idea of the deep warming is to claim that the
problem won’t really arise. ‘Don’t worry,’ someone might say, ‘with efficient
technology, we’re going to find ways to stop using more energy; though we’ll end
up doing more things in the future, we’ll use less energy.’ is may sound
plausible at first, because we are indeed getting more efficient at using energy in
most areas of technology. Our cars, appliances and laptops are all doing more
with less energy. If efficiency keeps improving, perhaps we can learn to run these
things with almost no energy at all? Not likely, because there are limits to energy
efficiency.

Over the past few decades, the efficiency of heating in homes – including oil and
gas furnaces, and boilers used to heat water – has increased from less than 50 per
cent to well above 90 per cent of what is theoretically possible. at’s good news,
but there’s not much more efficiency to be realised in basic heating. e efficiency
of lighting has also vastly improved, with modern LED lighting turning something
like 70 per cent of the applied electrical energy into light. We will gain some
efficiencies as older lighting gets completely replaced by LEDs, but there’s not a
lot of room left for future efficiency improvements. Similar efficiency limits arise in
the growing or cooking of food; in the manufacturing of cars, bikes and electronic
devices; in transportation, as we’re taken from place to place; in the running of
search engines, translation software, GPT-4 or other large-language models.

Even if we made significant improvements in the efficiencies of these

technologies, we will only have bought a little time. ese changes won’t delay by
much the date when deep warming becomes a problem we must reckon with.

As a thought experiment, suppose we could immediately improve the energy

efficiency of everything we do by a factor of 10 – a fantastically optimistic
proposal. at is, imagine the energy output of humans on Earth has been
reduced 10 times, from 170,000 TWh to 17,000 TWh. If our energy use keeps
expanding, doubling every 30-50 years or so (as it has for centuries), then a
10-fold increase in waste heat will happen in just over three doubling times, which
is about 130 years: 17,000 TWh doubles to 34,000 TWh, which doubles to
68,000 TWh, which doubles to 136,000 TWh, and so on. All those improvements
in energy efficiency would quickly evaporate. e date when deep warming hits
would recede by 130 years or so, but not much more. Optimising efficiencies is
just a temporary reprieve, not a radical change in our human future.

Improvements in energy efficiency can also have an inverse effect on our overall
energy use. It’s easy to think that if we make a technology more efficient, we’ll
then use less energy through the technology. But economists are deeply aware of
a paradoxical effect known as ‘rebound’, whereby improved energy efficiency, by
making the use of a technology cheaper, actually leads to more widespread use of
that technology – and more energy use too. e classic example, as noted by the
British economist William Stanley Jevons in his book e Coal Question (1865), is
the invention of the steam engine. is new technology could extract energy from
burning coal more efficiently, but it also made possible so many new applications
that the use of coal increased. A recent study by economists suggests that, across
the economy, such rebound effects might easily swallow at least 50 per cent of any
efficiency gains in energy use. Something similar has already happened with LED
lights, for which people have found thousands of new uses.

If gains in efficiency won’t buy us lots of time, how about other factors, such as a
reduction of the global population? Scientists generally believe that the current
human population of more than 8 billion people is well beyond the limits of our
finite planet, especially if a large fraction of this population aspires to the
resource-intensive lifestyles of wealthy nations. Some estimates suggest that a
more sustainable population might be more like 2 billion, which could reduce
energy use significantly, potentially by a factor of three or four. However, this isn’t
a real solution: again, as with the example of improved energy efficiency, a one-
time reduction of our energy consumption by a factor of three will quickly be
swallowed up by an inexorable rise in energy use. If Earth’s population were
suddenly reduced to 2 billion – about a quarter of the current population – our
energy gains would initially be enormous. But those gains would be erased in two
doubling times, or roughly 60-100 years, as our energy demands would grow
fourfold.

S o, why aren’t more people talking about this? e deep warming problem is
starting to get more attention. It was recently mentioned on Twitter by the
German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, who cautioned that nuclear fusion,
despite excitement over recent advances, won’t arrive in time to save us from our
waste heat, and might make the problem worse. By providing another cheap
source of energy, fusion energy could accelerate both the growth of our energy
use and the reckoning of deep warming. A student of Rahmstorf’s, Peter
Steiglechner, wrote his master’s thesis on the problem in 2018. Recognition of
deep warming and its long-term implications for humanity is spreading. But what
can we do about the problem?

Avoiding or delaying deep warming will involve slowing the rise of our waste heat,
which means restricting the amount of energy we use and also choosing energy
sources that exacerbate the problem as little as possible. Unlike the energy from
fossil fuels or nuclear power, which add to our waste energy burden, renewable
energy sources intercept energy that is already on its way to Earth, rather than
producing additional waste heat. In this sense, the deep warming problem is
another reason to pursue renewable energy sources such as solar or wind rather
than alternatives such as nuclear fusion, fission or even geothermal power. If we
derive energy from any of these sources, we’re unleashing new flows of energy
into the Earth system without making a compensating reduction. As a result, all
such sources will add to the waste heat problem. However, if renewable sources of
energy are deployed correctly, they need not add to our deposition of waste heat
in the environment. By using this energy, we produce no more waste heat than
would have been created by sunlight in the first place.

Take the example of wind energy. Sunlight first stirs winds into motion by heating
parts of the planet unequally, causing vast cells of convection. As wind churns
through the atmosphere, blows through trees and over mountains and waves,
most of its energy gets turned into heat, ending up in the microscopic motions of
molecules. If we harvest some of this wind energy through turbines, it will also be
turned into heat in the form of stored energy. But, crucially, no more heat is
generated than if there had been no turbines to capture the wind.

e same can hold true for solar energy. In an array of solar cells, if each cell only
collects the sunlight falling on it – which would ordinarily have been absorbed by
Earth’s surface – then the cells don’t alter how much waste heat gets produced as
they generate energy. e light that would have warmed Earth’s surface instead
goes into the solar cells, gets used by people for some purpose, and then later
ends up as heat. In this way we reduce the amount of heat being absorbed by
Earth by precisely the same amount as the energy we are extracting for human
use. We are not adding to overall planetary heating. is keeps the waste energy
burden unchanged, at least in the relatively near future, even if we go on
extracting and using ever larger amounts of energy.

Chaisson summarised the problem quite clearly in 2008:

I’m now of the opinion … that any energy that’s dug up on Earth –
including all fossil fuels of course, but also nuclear and ground-sourced
geothermal – will inevitably produce waste heat as a byproduct of
humankind’s use of energy. e only exception to that is energy arriving
from beyond Earth, this is energy here and now and not dug up, namely the
many solar energies (plural) caused by the Sun’s rays landing here daily …
e need to avoid waste heat is indeed the single, strongest, scientific
argument to embrace solar energies of all types.

But not just any method of gathering solar energy will avoid the deep warming
problem. Doing so requires careful engineering. For example, covering deserts
with solar panels would add to planetary heating because deserts reflect a lot of
incident light back out to space, so it is never absorbed by Earth (and therefore
doesn’t produce waste heat). Covering deserts in dark panels would absorb a lot
more energy than the desert floor and would heat the planet further.

We’ll also face serious problems in the long run if our energy appetite keeps
increasing. Futurists dream of technologies deployed in space where huge panels
would absorb sunlight that would otherwise have passed by Earth and never
entered our atmosphere. Ultimately, they believe, this energy could be beamed
down to Earth. Like nuclear energy, such technologies would add an additional
energy source to the planet without any compensating removal of heating from
the sunlight currently striking our planet’s surface. Any effort to produce more
energy than is normally available from sunlight at Earth’s surface will only make
our heating problems worse.

D eep warming is simply a consequence of the laws of physics and our inquisitive
nature. It seems to be in our nature to constantly learn and develop new things,
changing our environment in the process. For thousands of years, we have
harvested and exploited ever greater quantities of energy in this pursuit, and we
appear poised to continue along this path with the rapidly expanding use of
renewable energy sources – and perhaps even more novel sources such as
nuclear fusion. But this path cannot proceed indefinitely without consequences.

e logic that more energy equals more warming sets up a profound dilemma for
our future. e laws of physics and the habits ingrained in us from our long
evolutionary history are steering us toward trouble. We may have a technological
fix for greenhouse gas warming – just shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy
sources – but there is no technical trick to get us out of the deep warming
problem. at won’t stop some scientists from trying.

Perhaps, believing that humanity is incapable of reducing its energy usage, we’ll
adopt a fantastic scheme to cool the planet, such as planetary-scale refrigeration
or using artificially engineered tornadoes to transport heat from Earth’s surface to
the upper atmosphere where it can be radiated away to space. As far-fetched as
such approaches sound, scientists have given some serious thought to these and
other equally bizarre ideas, which seem wholly in the realm of science fiction.
ey’re schemes that will likely make the problem worse not better.

I see several possibilities for how we might ultimately respond. As with

greenhouse gas warming, there will probably be an initial period of disbelief,
denial and inaction, as we continue with unconstrained technological advance
and growing energy use. Our planet will continue warming. Sooner or later,
however, such warming will lead to serious disruptions of the Earth environment
and its ecosystems. We won’t be able to ignore this for long, and it may provide a
natural counterbalance to our energy use, as our technical and social capacity to
generate and use ever more energy will be eroded. We may eventually come to
some uncomfortable balance in which we just scrabble out a life on a hot,
compromised planet because we lack the moral and organisational ability to
restrict our energy use enough to maintain a sound environment.

An alternative would require a radical break with our past: using less energy.
Finding a way to use less energy would represent a truly fundamental rupture
with all of human history, something entirely novel. A rupture of this magnitude
won’t come easily. However, if we could learn to view restrictions on our energy
use as a non-negotiable element of life on Earth, we may still be able to do many
of the things that make us essentially human: learning, discovering, inventing,
 creating. In this scenario, any helpful new technology that comes into use and
begins using lots of energy would require a balancing reduction in energy use
elsewhere. In such a way, we might go on with the future being perpetually new,
and possibly better.

None of this is easily achieved and will likely mirror our current struggles to come
to agreements on greenhouse gas heating. ere will be vicious squabbles,
arguments and profound polarisation, quite possibly major wars. Humanity will
never have faced a challenge of this magnitude, and we won’t face up to it quickly
or easily, I expect. But we must. Planetary heating is in our future – the very near
future and further out as well. Many people will find this conclusion surprisingly
hard to swallow, perhaps because it implies fundamental restrictions on our
future here on Earth: we can’t go on forever using more and more energy, and, at
the same time, expecting the planet’s climate to remain stable.

e world will likely be transformed by 2050. And, sometime after that, we will
need to transform the human story. e narrative arc of humanity must become a
tale of continuing innovation and learning, but also one of careful management. It
must become a story, in energy terms, of doing less, not more. ere’s no
technology for entirely escaping waste heat, only techniques.

is is important to remember as we face up to the extremely urgent challenge of

heating linked to fossil-fuel use and greenhouse gases. Global warming is just the
beginning of our problems. It’s a testing ground to see if we can manage an
intelligent and coordinated response. If we can handle this challenge, we might be
better prepared, more capable and resilient as a species to tackle an even
harder one.

aeon.co 8 June 2023

 ere’s no planet B
The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial
body that can support us is the one we evolved
with. Here’s why

by Arwen E Nicholson & Raphaëlle D Haywood

Arwen E Nicholson is a research fellow in physics and astronomy at the University of

Exeter in the UK. She has developed Gaian models of regulation to understand how
life might impact the long-term habitability prospects of its planet.

Raphaëlle D Haywood is a senior lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University

of Exeter in the UK. Her research focuses on detection of small, potentially terrestrial
planets around stars other than our Sun.

Edited by Pam Weintraub

A t the start of the 22nd century, humanity left Earth for the stars. e enormous
ecological and climatic devastation that had characterised the last 100 years had led to a
world barren and inhospitable; we had used up Earth entirely. Rapid melting of ice
caused the seas to rise, swallowing cities whole. Deforestation ravaged forests around the
globe, causing widespread destruction and loss of life. All the while, we continued to
burn the fossil fuels we knew to be poisoning us, and thus created a world no longer fit
for our survival. And so we set our sights beyond Earth’s horizons to a new world, a
place to begin again on a planet as yet untouched. But where are we going? What are
our chances of finding the elusive planet B, an Earth-like world ready and waiting to
welcome and shelter humanity from the chaos we created on the planet that brought us
into being? We built powerful astronomical telescopes to search the skies for planets
resembling our own, and very quickly found hundreds of Earth twins orbiting distant
stars. Our home was not so unique after all. e universe is full of Earths!

is futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility,

with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. For
decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of
intergalactic explorers and the untold habitable worlds they find. Many of the
highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the
science ‘realistic’. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a
post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream.

Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching
an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our
worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to
us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone
considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different
things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as
Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend
completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s
biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and
Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one
we evolved with. ere is no plan B. ere is no planet B. Our future is here, and it
doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.

D eep down, we know this from instinct: we are happiest when immersed in our
natural environment. ere are countless examples of the healing power of
spending time in nature. Numerous articles speak of the benefits of ‘forest
bathing’; spending time in the woods has been scientifically shown to reduce
stress, anxiety and depression, and to improve sleep quality, thus nurturing both
our physical and mental health. Our bodies instinctively know what we need: the
thriving and unique biosphere that we have co-evolved with, that exists only here,
on our home planet.

ere is no planet B. ese days, everyone is throwing around this catchy slogan.
Most of us have seen it inscribed on an activist’s homemade placard, or heard it
from a world leader. In 2014, the United Nations’ then secretary general Ban
Ki-moon said: ‘ ere is no plan B because we do not have [a] planet B.’ e
French president Emmanuel Macron echoed him in 2018 in his historical address
to US Congress. ere’s even a book named after it. e slogan gives strong
impetus to address our planetary crisis. However, no one actually explains why
there isn’t another planet we could live on, even though the evidence from Earth
sciences and astronomy is clear. Gathering this observation-based information is
essential to counter an increasingly popular but flawed narrative that the only way
to ensure our survival is to colonise other planets.

e most common target of such speculative dreaming is our neighbour Mars. It

is about half the size of Earth and receives about 40 per cent of the heat that we
get from the Sun. From an astronomer’s perspective, Mars is Earth’s identical
twin. And Mars has been in the news a lot lately, promoted as a possible outpost
for humanity in the near future. While human-led missions to Mars seem likely in
the coming decades, what are our prospects of long-term habitation on Mars?
Present-day Mars is a cold, dry world with a very thin atmosphere and global dust
storms that can last for weeks on end. Its average surface pressure is less than
1 per cent of Earth’s. Surviving without a pressure suit in such an environment is
impossible. e dusty air mostly consists of carbon dioxide (CO2) and the surface
temperature ranges from a balmy 30ºC (86ºF) in the summer, down to -140ºC
(-220ºF) in the winter; these extreme temperature changes are due to the thin
atmosphere on Mars.

Despite these clear challenges, proposals for terraforming Mars into a world
suitable for long-term human habitation abound. Mars is further from the Sun
than Earth, so it would require significantly more greenhouse gases to achieve a
temperature similar to Earth’s. ickening the atmosphere by releasing CO2 in
the Martian surface is the most popular ‘solution’ to the thin atmosphere on Mars.
However, every suggested method of releasing the carbon stored in Mars requires
technology and resources far beyond what we are currently capable of. What’s
more, a recent NASA study determined that there isn’t even enough CO2 on Mars
to warm it sufficiently.

Even if we could find enough CO2, we would still be left with an atmosphere we
couldn’t breathe. Earth’s atmosphere contains only 0.04 per cent CO2, and we
cannot tolerate an atmosphere high in CO2. For an atmosphere with Earth’s
atmospheric pressure, CO2 levels as high as 1 per cent can cause drowsiness in
humans, and once we reach levels of 10 per cent CO2, we will suffocate even if
there is abundant oxygen. e proposed absolute best-case scenario for
terraforming Mars leaves us with an atmosphere we are incapable of breathing;
and achieving it is well beyond our current technological and economic
capabilities.

Instead of changing the atmosphere of Mars, a more realistic scenario might be to

build habitat domes on its surface with internal conditions suitable for our
survival. However, there would be a large pressure difference between the inside
of the habitat and the outside atmosphere. Any breach in the habitat would
rapidly lead to depressurisation as the breathable air escapes into the thin
Martian atmosphere. Any humans living on Mars would have to be on constant
 high alert for any damage to their building structures, and suffocation would be a
daily threat.

F rom an astronomical perspective, Mars is Earth’s twin; and yet, it would take
vast resources, time and effort to transform it into a world that wouldn’t be
capable of providing even the bare minimum of what we have on Earth.
Suggesting that another planet could become an escape from our problems on
Earth suddenly seems absurd. But are we being pessimistic? Do we just need to
look further afield?

Next time you are out on a clear night, look up at the stars and choose one – you
are more likely than not to pick one that hosts planets. Astronomical observations
today confirm our age-old suspicion that all stars have their own planetary
systems. As astronomers, we call these exoplanets. What are exoplanets like?
Could we make any of them our home?

e majority of exoplanets discovered to date were found by NASA’s Kepler

mission, which monitored the brightness of 100,000 stars over four years, looking
for dips in a star’s light as a planet obscures it each time it completes an orbit
around it.

The solar system associated with star Kepler-90 has a similar configuration to our solar
system with small planets found orbiting close to their star, and the larger planets
found farther away. Courtesy NASA/Ames /Wendy Stenzel
Kepler observed more than 900 Earth-sized planets with a radius up to 1.25 times
that of our world. ese planets could be rocky (for the majority of them, we
haven’t yet determined their mass, so we can only make this inference based on
empirical relations between planetary mass and radius). Of these 900 or so Earth-
sized planets, 23 are in the habitable zone. e habitable zone is the range of
orbits around a star where a planet can be considered temperate: the planet’s
surface can support liquid water (provided there is sufficient atmospheric
pressure), a key ingredient of life as we know it. e concept of the habitable zone
is very useful because it depends on just two astrophysical parameters that are
relatively easy to measure: the distance of the planet to its parent star, and the
star’s temperature. It’s worth keeping in mind that the astronomical habitable
zone is a very simple concept and, in reality, there are many more factors at play
in the emergence of life; for example, this concept does not consider plate
tectonics, which are thought to be crucial to sustain life on Earth.

How many Earth-sized, temperate planets are there in our galaxy? Since we have
discovered only a handful of these planets so far, it is still quite difficult to estimate
their number. Current estimates of the frequency of Earth-sized planets rely on
extrapolating measured occurrence rates of planets that are slightly bigger and
closer to their parent star, as those are easier to detect. e studies are primarily
based on observations from the Kepler mission, which surveyed more than
100,000 stars in a systematic fashion. ese stars are all located in a tiny portion
of the entire sky; so, occurrence rate studies assume that this part of the sky is
representative of the full galaxy. ese are all reasonable assumptions for the
back-of-the-envelope estimate that we are about to make.

Several different teams carried out their own analyses and, on average, they found
that roughly one in three stars (30 per cent) hosts an Earth-sized, temperate
planet. e most pessimistic studies found a rate of 9 per cent, which is about one
in 10 stars, and the studies with the most optimistic results found that virtually all
stars host at least one Earth-sized, temperate planet, and potentially even several
of them.

At first sight, this looks like a huge range in values; but it’s worth taking a step
back and realising that we had absolutely no constraints whatsoever on this
number just 20 years ago. Whether there are other planets similar to Earth is a
question that we’ve been asking for millennia, and this is the very first time that
we are able to answer it based on actual observations. Before the Kepler mission,
we had no idea whether we would find Earth-sized, temperate planets around one
 in 10, or one in a million stars. Now we know that planets with similar observable
properties to Earth are very common: at least one in 10 stars hosts these kinds of
planets.

An artist’s concept shows exoplanet Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star.
Courttesy NASA/Ames

Let’s now use these numbers to predict the number of Earth-sized, temperate
planets in our entire galaxy. For this, let’s take the average estimate of 30 per cent,
or roughly one in three stars. Our galaxy hosts approximately 300 billion stars,
which adds up to 90 billion roughly Earth-sized, roughly temperate planets. is
is a huge number, and it can be very tempting to think that at least one of these is
bound to look exactly like Earth.

One issue to consider is that other worlds are at unimaginable distances from us.
Our neighbour Mars is on average 225 million kilometres (about 140 million
miles) away. Imagine a team of astronauts travelling in a vehicle similar to NASA’s
robotic New Horizons probe, one of humankind’s fastest spacecrafts – which flew
by Pluto in 2015. With New Horizons’ top speed of around 58,000 kph, it would
take at least 162 days to reach Mars. Beyond our solar system, the closest star to
us is Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 40 trillion kilometres. Going in the same
space vehicle, it would take our astronaut crew 79,000 years to reach planets that
might exist around our nearest stellar neighbour.

S till, let’s for a moment optimistically imagine that we find a perfect Earth twin: a
planet that really is exactly like Earth. Let’s imagine that some futuristic form of
technology exists, ready to whisk us away to this new paradise. Keen to explore
our new home, we eagerly board our rocket, but on landing we soon feel uneasy.
Where is the land? Why is the ocean green and not blue? Why is the sky orange
and thick with haze? Why are our instruments detecting no oxygen in the
atmosphere? Was this not supposed to be a perfect twin of Earth?

As it turns out, we have landed on a perfect twin of the Archean Earth, the aeon
during which life first emerged on our home world. is new planet is certainly
habitable: lifeforms are floating around the green, iron-rich oceans, breathing out
methane that is giving the sky that unsettling hazy, orange colour. is planet
sure is habitable – just not to us. It has a thriving biosphere with plenty of life, but
not life like ours. In fact, we would have been unable to survive on Earth for
around 90 per cent of its history; the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we depend on
is a recent feature of our planet.

e earliest part of our planet’s history, known as the Hadean aeon, begins with
the formation of the Earth. Named after the Greek underworld due to our planet’s
fiery beginnings, the early Hadean would have been a terrible place with molten
lava oceans and an atmosphere of vaporised rock. Next came the Archean aeon,
beginning 4 billion years ago, when the first life on Earth flourished. But, as we
just saw, the Archean would be no home for a human. e world where our
earliest ancestors thrived would kill us in an instant. After the Archean came the
Proterozoic, 2.5 billion years ago. In this aeon, there was land, and a more familiar
blue ocean and sky. What’s more, oxygen finally began to accumulate in the
atmosphere. But let’s not get too excited: the level of oxygen was less than 10 per
cent of what we have today. e air would still have been impossible for us to
breathe. is time also experienced global glaciation events known as snowball
Earths, where ice covered the globe from poles to equator for millions of years at a
time. Earth has spent more of its time fully frozen than the length of time that we
humans have existed.

Earth’s current aeon, the Phanerozoic, began only around 541 million years ago
with the Cambrian explosion – a period of time when life rapidly diversified. A
plethora of life including the first land plants, dinosaurs and the first flowering
plants all appeared during this aeon. It is only within this aeon that our
atmosphere became one that we can actually breathe. is aeon has also been
characterised by multiple mass extinction events that wiped out as much as
90 per cent of all species over short periods of time. e factors that brought on
such devastation are thought to be a combination of large asteroid impacts, and
volcanic, chemical and climate changes occurring on Earth at the time. From the
point of view of our planet, the changes leading to these mass extinctions are
relatively minor. However, for lifeforms at the time, such changes shattered their
world and very often led to their complete extinction.

Looking at Earth’s long history, we find that we would have been incapable of
living on our planet for most of its existence. Anatomically modern humans
emerged less than 400,000 years ago; we have been around for less than 0.01 per
cent of the Earth’s story. e only reason we find Earth habitable now is because
of the vast and diverse biosphere that has for hundreds of millions of years
evolved with and shaped our planet into the home we know today. Our continued
survival depends on the continuation of Earth’s present state without any nasty
bumps along the way. We are complex lifeforms with complex needs. We are
entirely dependent on other organisms for all our food and the very air we
breathe. e collapse of Earth’s ecosystems is the collapse of our life-support
systems. Replicating everything Earth offers us on another planet, on timescales
of a few human lifespans, is simply impossible.

Some argue that we need to colonise other planets to ensure the future of the
human race. In 5 billion years, our Sun, a middle-aged star, will become a red
giant, expanding in size and possibly engulfing Earth. In 1 billion years, the
gradual warming of our Sun is predicted to cause Earth’s oceans to boil away.
While this certainly sounds worrying, 1 billion years is a long, long time. A billion
years ago, Earth’s landmasses formed the supercontinent Rodinia, and life on
Earth consisted in single-celled and small multicellular organisms. No plants or
animals yet existed. e oldest Homo sapiens remains date from 315,000 years
ago, and until 12,000 years ago all humans lived as hunter-gatherers.

e industrial revolution happened less than 500 years ago. Since then, human
activity in burning fossil fuels has been rapidly changing the climate, threatening
human lives and damaging ecosystems across the globe. Without rapid action,
human-caused climate change is predicted to have devastating global
consequences within the next 50 years. is is the looming crisis that humanity
must focus on. If we can’t learn to work within the planetary system that we
evolved with, how do we ever hope to replicate these deep processes on another
planet? Considering how different human civilisations are today from even
5,000 years ago, worrying about a problem that humans may have to tackle in a
billion years is simply absurd. It would be far simpler to go back in time and ask
the ancient Egyptians to invent the internet there and then. It’s also worth
considering that many of the attitudes towards space colonisation are worryingly
 close to the same exploitative attitudes that have led us to the climate crisis we
now face.

Earth is the home we know and love not because it is Earth-sized and temperate.
No, we call this planet our home thanks to its billion-year-old relationship with
life. Just as people are shaped not only by their genetics, but by their culture and
relationships with others, planets are shaped by the living organisms that emerge
and thrive on them. Over time, Earth has been dramatically transformed by life
into a world where we, humans, can prosper. e relationship works both ways:
while life shapes its planet, the planet shapes its life. Present-day Earth is our life-
support system, and we cannot live without it.

While Earth is currently our only example of a living planet, it is now within our
technological reach to potentially find signs of life on other worlds. In the coming
decades, we will likely answer the age-old question: are we alone in the Universe?
Finding evidence for alien life promises to shake the foundations of our
understanding of our own place in the cosmos. But finding alien life does not
mean finding another planet that we can move to. Just as life on Earth has evolved
with our planet over billions of years, forming a deep, unique relationship that
makes the world we see today, any alien life on a distant planet will have a
similarly deep and unique bond with its own planet. We can’t expect to be able to
crash the party and find a warm welcome.

Living on a warming Earth presents many challenges. But these pale in

comparison with the challenges of converting Mars, or any other planet, into a
viable alternative. Scientists study Mars and other planets to better understand
how Earth and life formed and evolved, and how they shape each other. We look
to worlds beyond our horizons to better understand ourselves. In searching the
Universe, we are not looking for an escape to our problems: Earth is our unique
and only home in the cosmos. ere is no planet B.

aeon.co 16 January 2023