Japanese Authorities Okays The Sexual Abuse Of 18-20 Year Olds

Ryann Connell
Not long after she had finished elementary school, the father of a now 18-year-old woman identifies only as Miss A began "visiting" her bedroom and sexually abusing her.

His unwanted ministrations continued for years. She graduated high school in the spring of last year but failed to gain entrance into a university, so stayed at home to study.

"He stopped coming in for a while, but then started all over again," Miss A tells Yomiuri Weekly journalist and confidante Miho Nagata.

When the teen's mother was due to go away for a weekend, she was terrified that her father would be able to do as he liked with her, so Nagata stepped in to try and help. But after the journalist dragged the girl away from her incestuous father's clutches, she was horrified to discover Japan's support system places the young woman in limbo -- simply because she's aged 18.

Japanese are legally minors until turning 20, until which time their parents have the legal right and obligation to supervise and educate them. However, laws aimed at protecting children from abusive parents only apply to those under 18. Despite the years of her father's abuse, the Tokyo Child Consultation Center refused to help her.

"If she's 18, her case can't be picked up by one of our centers," the Yomiuri Weekly quotes a spokesman saying.

Other public authorities were equally unhelpful.

"If she really was being abused, why did she wait until she was 18 until telling someone?" the weekly quotes the ever-helpful police from the country area where Miss A grew up as saying.

Public health authorities in the same city expressed similar doubts about her situation. Women's shelter officials in Tokyo were equally unresponsive, saying they generally dealt only with female victims of physical rather than sexual violence.

"It would be the first time we've ever had to deal with a case where a woman was being sexually abused by a member of her family," the weekly quotes a shelter employee saying.

Miss A's age even worked against her when it came to seeking mental health care for the anguish she had suffered.

"If she's under 20, we can't admit her to the hospital without her parents' permission," a spokesman for a mental health hospital says.

Parental permission was highly unlikely to be forthcoming considering the circumstances surrounding Miss A's case, and the fact that her mother and father were constantly ringing or mailing her and demanding she return home. The police also came after her when her parents filed a missing person's report and demanded she be returned to their side.

Eventually, Miss A sought refuge in a place the Japanese call a Woman's Dormitory. These places were initially set up in the 1950s to house and rehabilitate prostitutes after Japan outlawed prostitution. Many of the current residents are also the original inhabitants, and teenage Miss A struggled to live in the communal dorms with the old women.

After most authorities told her they were unable to deal with her case, one welfare worker helpfully suggested to Miss A that she could always go and live in an Internet caf?, the current favorite refuge of many financially strapped Japanese. Police, however, advised the teen to return to the home of the parents who had prompted her to seek sanctuary in the first place.

In the end, Miss A -- shocking those who had tried to help her -- did, in fact, go back to her home. Experts on abuse say it's a common pattern among victims. They also say it's common for many sexually abused children to stay silent about their ordeal until turning 18 and sliding into limbo in Japan.

"We often hear of cases where the victim has actually waited until turning 18 before they tell anyone what has been happening to them," Yuko Taniga, head of Kirara -- an NPO that helps sex abuse victims -- tells Yomiuri Weekly. "Unlike neglect or physical violence, it's very hard for incest victims to tell others about the abuse they've been subjected to. For many victims, incest starts before they know what sex is about, and they can think the same thing happens in every family. There are some incest victims who so enjoy the pleasure of sex that they can't turn it down, even if a relative is forcing it on them. The shame of gaining sexual pleasure makes it all the harder to talk about. There are more than a few minors over 18 who suffer in this way because the Child Welfare Law can't protect them."

Changes to the law in 2004 do allow abused children over 18 but under 20 to apply to a family court to have their parents' guardianship over them declared void. However, it's a step few youngsters are willing to take.

"Even if they are abusive, for children parents are still parents," Kirara's Taniga says. "There are hardly any children who would sue to have their parent's guardianship over them removed."

That leaves few options for youngsters like Miss A who are being abused but are too old to seek refuge through child protection services and too young to be legally treated as adults."Abuse victims with nowhere to go are often forced into sex businesses if they're female, or homelessness if they're male, Tetsuro Tsuzaki, a professor at Hanazono University in Kyoto tells Yomiuri Weekly. "Laws should at least be changed so that children's homes can help people until they turn 20."

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Armenia - A 21st Century Symbol Of Religious Intolerance

The Constitution as amended in December 2005 provides for freedom of religion; however, the law places some restrictions on the religious freedom of adherents of minority religious groups, and there were some restrictions in practice. The Armenian (Apostolic) Church, which has formal legal status as the national church, enjoys some privileges not available to other religious groups.

There was no change in the status of respect for religious freedom by the Government during the reporting period. Some denominations reported occasional discrimination by mid- or low-level government officials but found high-level officials to be tolerant. Jehovah's Witnesses reported that judges sentenced them to longer prison terms for evasion of alternative military service than in the past, although the sentences were still within the range allowed by law.

Societal attitudes toward some minority religious groups were ambivalent, and there were reports of societal discrimination directed against members of these groups.

The U.S. Government discusses religious freedom issues with the Government as part of its overall policy to promote human rights.

Section I. Religious Demography

The country has an area of 11,500 square miles and a population of 3 million.

Approximately 98 percent of the population is ethnic Armenian. As a result of Soviet-era policies, the number of active religious practitioners is relatively low, but the link between Armenian ethnicity and the Armenian Church is strong. An estimated 90 percent of citizens nominally belong to the Armenian Church, an independent Eastern Christian denomination with its spiritual center at the Etchmiadzin cathedral and monastery. The head of the church is Catholicos Garegin (Karekin) II.

There are small communities of other religious groups. There was no reliable census data on religious minorities, and estimates from congregants varied significantly. The Catholic Church, both Roman and Mekhitarist (Armenian Uniate), estimated 120,000 followers. The Jehovah's Witnesses estimated their membership at 9,000. Groups that constitute less than 5 percent of the population include Yezidis, an ethnic Kurd cultural group whose religion includes elements derived from Zoroastrianism, Islam, and animism; unspecified "charismatic" Christians; the Armenian Evangelical Church; Molokans, an ethnic Russian pacifist Christian group that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th-century; Baptists; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons); Orthodox Christians; Seventh-day Adventists; Pentecostals; Jews; and Baha'is. Levels of membership in minority religious groups remained relatively unchanged. There was no estimate of the number of atheists.

Yezidis are concentrated primarily in agricultural areas around Mount Aragats, northwest of the capital Yerevan. Armenian Catholics live mainly in the northern region, while most Jews, Mormons, Baha'is, and Orthodox Christians reside in Yerevan. In Yerevan there is also a small community of Muslims, including Kurds, Iranians, and temporary residents from the Middle East.

Foreign missionary groups are active in the country.

Section II. Status of Religious Freedom

Legal/Policy Framework

The Constitution as amended in 2005 provides for freedom of religion and the right to practice, choose, or change religious belief. It recognizes "the exclusive mission of the Armenian Church as a national church in the spiritual life, development of the national culture, and preservation of the national identity of the people of Armenia." The law places some restrictions on the religious freedom of religious groups other than the Armenian Church. The Law on Freedom of Conscience establishes the separation of church and state but grants the Armenian Church official status as the national church.

Extended negotiations between the Government and the Armenian Church resulted in a 2000 framework for the two sides to negotiate a concordat. The negotiations resulted in the signing of a law March 14, 2007, that codified the church's role.

The law establishes confessor-penitent confidentiality, makes the church's marriage rite legally binding, and assigns the church and the state joint responsibility to preserve national historic churches. The law does not grant the church tax-exempt status or establish any state funding for the church. The law formally recognizes the role that the Armenian Church already plays in society, since most citizens see the church as an integral part of national identity, history, and cultural heritage. January 6, the day on which the Armenian Church celebrates Christmas, is a national holiday.

The law does not mandate registration of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including religious groups; however, only registered organizations have legal status. Only registered groups may publish newspapers or magazines, rent meeting places, broadcast programs on television or radio, or officially sponsor the visas of visitors, although there is no prohibition on individual members doing so. There were no reports of the Government refusing registration to religious groups that qualified for registration under the law. To qualify for registration, religious organizations must "be free from materialism and of a purely spiritual nature," and must subscribe to a doctrine based on "historically recognized holy scriptures." The Office of the State Registrar registers religious entities. The Department of Religious Affairs and National Minorities oversees religious affairs and performs a consultative role in the registration process. A religious organization must have at least 200 adult members to register. By the end of the reporting period, the Government had registered 63 religious organizations, including individual congregations within the same denomination.

According to the Department of Religious Affairs and National Minorities, some minority religious groups, including the Molokans and some Yezidi groups, have not sought registration. Although it was not registered as a religious facility, Yerevan's sole mosque was open for regular Friday prayers, and the Government did not restrict Muslims from praying there.

The Law on Education mandates that public schools offer a secular education but does not prohibit religious education in state schools. Only personnel authorized and trained by the Government may teach in public schools. Classes in religious history are part of the public school curriculum and are taught by teachers. The history of the Armenian Church is the basis of this curriculum; many schools teach about world religions in elementary school and the history of the Armenian Church in middle school. Religious groups may not provide religious instruction in schools, although registered groups may do so in private homes to children of their members. The use of public school buildings for religious "indoctrination" is illegal.

The law on alternative military service allows conscientious objectors, subject to government panel approval, to perform either noncombatant military or civilian service duties rather than serve as combat-trained military personnel. The law took effect in 2004 and applied to subsequent draftees and those serving prison terms for draft evasion. An amendment to the law on military service that took effect in January 2006 criminalizes evasion of alternative labor service. Conscientious objectors maintained, however, that military control of the alternative labor service amounted to unacceptable military service.

The military employs Armenian Church chaplains for each division, but no other religious groups are represented in the military chaplaincy. The Armenian Church runs a prison ministry program but does not have permanent representatives in prisons. The Armenian Evangelical Church has chaplains in seven prisons.

The Government's human rights ombudsman and the head of the Department of Religious Affairs and National Minorities met with minority religious organizations during the reporting period.

Restrictions on Religious Freedom

The law places some restrictions on the religious freedom of adherents of minority religious groups, and there were some restrictions in practice.

The Law on Freedom of Conscience prohibits "proselytizing" but does not define it. The prohibition applies to all groups, including the Armenian Church. Most registered religious groups reported no serious legal impediments to their activities during the reporting period.

Although the law prohibits foreign funding of foreign-based denominations, the Government did not enforce the ban and considered it unenforceable.

During the reporting period, the Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists reported that low-level government officials denied them the use of public space for religious gatherings. However, the Jehovah's Witnesses noted that, in general, they were free to assemble without harassment by police or other government entities.

A customs issue pertaining to the Jehovah's Witnesses ability to obtain shipments of religious literature was not resolved at the end of the reporting period. On March 29, 2007, customs officials in Yerevan reevaluated a shipment of religious periodicals received by the Jehovah's Witnesses at a significantly higher rate than the group expected, making it financially difficult for them to arrange clearance of the shipment. Customs officials maintained that the reevaluation complied with the customs code.

At the end of the reporting period, the Jehovah's Witnesses reported that following complaints to high-ranking officials, the military commissariat had issued certificates of registration (necessary for obtaining passports) to the majority of a group of Witnesses who had completed prison sentences for conscientious objection to military service.

Abuses of Religious Freedom

According to leaders of Jehovah's Witnesses in Yerevan, as of the end of the reporting period, 69 Witnesses remained in prison for refusal, on conscientious and religious grounds, to perform military service or alternative labor service. Two additional members were awaiting trial. Representatives of the Jehovah's Witnesses stated that all of the prisoners were given the opportunity to serve an alternative to military service rather than prison time, but that all refused because the military retained administrative control of alternative service.

Jehovah's Witnesses complained that the courts handed down tougher sentences for evasion of alternative labor service during the reporting period. In the period covered by this report, of the 48 Jehovah's Witnesses sentenced, 24 received 30-month sentences and 5 received 36-month sentences, the maximum allowed by law. Of the remaining 19 Jehovah's Witnesses sentenced during the reporting period, 15 received sentences ranging between 22 and 27 months, and 4 received 18-month sentences. Of 36 Jehovah's Witnesses convicted during the previous reporting period, only 1 received a 30-month sentence, and none received 36-month sentences; the majority were sentenced to either 18 or 24 months of imprisonment.

Unlike during the previous reporting period, there were no reports that military hazing of new conscripts was more severe for minority group members. Yezidi representatives reported no harassment or discrimination.

During the reporting period there was no reported officially sponsored violence against minority religious groups. Other than Jehovah's Witnesses who were conscientious objectors, there were no reports of religious prisoners or detainees in the country.

Forced Religious Conversion

There were no reports of forced religious conversion, including of minor U.S. citizens who had been abducted or illegally removed from the United States, or of the refusal to allow such citizens to be returned to the United States.

Improvements and Positive Developments in Respect for Religious Freedom

Nineteen Jehovah's Witnesses who had begun and then abandoned alternative military service were acquitted, and criminal proceedings against them were terminated by a decision of the Prosecutor General on September 12, 2006. The individuals were charged with desertion or absence without leave. Seven of the 19 had been in pretrial detention or agreed not to leave the country before their trials at the time of their acquittal. The others had received sentences ranging from 2 to 3 years in prison and served between 5 and 9 months of their sentences.

On October 27, 2006, Yerevan's Holocaust memorial, which had been inexplicably vandalized earlier in the year, was replaced and rededicated to the memory of both Jews and Armenians who had been the victims of "heinous crimes." A gesture of respect and national empathy, the memorial was erected with the cooperation of international donors, the Jewish community, Armenian Diaspora organizations, and the Government.

Section III. Societal Abuses and Discrimination

Societal attitudes toward most minority religious groups were ambivalent. Many citizens are not religiously observant, but the link between Armenian ethnicity and the Armenian Church is strong.

According to some observers, the general population expressed negative attitudes about Jehovah's Witnesses because the latter refused to serve in the military, engaged in little-understood proselytizing practices, and because of a widespread but unsubstantiated belief that they pay the desperately poor to convert. Jehovah's Witnesses continued to be targets of hostile sermons by some Armenian Church clerics and experienced occasional societal discrimination. Unlike in the previous reporting period, the press did not report complaints of allegedly illegal proselytizing lodged by citizens against members of Jehovah's Witnesses.

On June 1, 2007, in the village of Lusarat, a passing Armenian Apostolic priest verbally harassed and assaulted two Jehovah's Witnesses having a Bible discussion with a woman in the central square. While the Witnesses agreed to drop assault charges pending the priest's apology, none was forthcoming. Police closed the case for lack of evidence after the priest denied the incident.

Two Jehovah's Witnesses filed a complaint with local police after they were allegedly threatened by a man with a pistol while they engaged in public ministry on April 15, 2007. Police did not investigate the incident, citing lack of evidence.

At the end of the reporting period, a Witness dropped his case against a co-worker who had attacked him. Police had taken no action on the matter. On March 29, 2007, the co-worker had attempted to choke the Witness at their place of work after discovering that the latter was a member of the religious group.

The group also reported that an Armenian Church priest assaulted two female Jehovah's Witnesses on August 21, 2006. According to the group, one of the victims suffered a broken arm. Police refused to initiate an investigation, in part because the priest expressed remorse, and the women were unable to appeal the decision.

In isolated incidents, some members of the press stoked suspicion of "nontraditional" religious organizations. On February 14, 2007, online news source Panorama published an article based on an e-mail from a reader that accused several famous Armenian singers and a television commentator of being "followers of religious sects." On February 13, 2007, online news source A1+ published an article warning readers about "false Bibles" distributed by "sectarian organizations."

The Jewish community reported no incidents of verbal harassment during the reporting period. In the summer and fall of 2006, a number of spray-painted swastikas of unknown origin, accompanied by the words "No Arabs," "Sieg Heil," and "Russians out of our country," were observed on kiosks and construction site walls in downtown Yerevan; the symbols appeared to express general xenophobia.

Section IV. U.S. Government Policy

The U.S. Government discusses religious freedom issues with the Government as part of its overall policy to promote human rights. During these discussions, the U.S. Government emphasized to authorities that continued eligibility for the $235 million (approximately 79 billion AMD) Millennium Challenge Compact remained contingent upon the Government's performance in meeting good governance indicators, which include standards of respect for religious freedom. Embassy officials maintained close contact with the Catholicos at Etchmiadzin and with leaders of other religious and ecumenical groups in the country. The Embassy maintained regular contact with resident and visiting regional representatives of foreign-based religious groups such as Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Baha'is, and raised their concerns with the Government when necessary. Embassy officials closely monitored trials related to issues of religious freedom and took an active role in policy forums and NGO roundtables regarding religious freedom.

Leaders of local minority religious groups were regularly welcomed at embassy events.

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Mormon Church Experimentation In Nigeria

Outside Zion Osandu Ndukwe's one-room apartment, a naked toddler ran up and down a filthy hallway lit by a single candle. The power in the overcrowded slum was off yet again. The stench of urine from the communal bathroom overpowered the fragrance of spices in the bubbling soup a neighbor was stirring.

But this night, the misery all around Ndukwe — the crime, the uncollected trash, the bathtub-size potholes, the cars belching black smoke — stopped at his door. It was a Monday evening, and because Ndukwe, 39, had been baptized into the Mormon church six months earlier, that meant it was time to be with his family and sing God's praises.

"I am a child of God!" he sang, as he, his wife and their 4-year-old daughter celebrated in loud, joyous voices a faith once known for its all-white, all-American membership.

"I'm a changed man," Ndukwe said, sitting on a bed that took up most of his apartment. "I used to drink. I had girlfriends outside my marriage. I don't do that anymore, and I feel better. The Mormon church contributed 100 percent to the change."

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is formally known, now has more members outside the United States than inside it.

The church's rise from its roots in Utah to a steadily growing global faith in 176 countries and territories has been aided by the Internet, including the popular Web site www.mormon.org, which seeks to dispel the mystery that still surrounds the religion; by a satellite system linking 6,000 of its churches worldwide with the Salt Lake City headquarters; and by tens of thousands of missionaries knocking on doors from Lagos to Lapland.

As the world's largest faiths — Islam, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Hinduism — expand across the developing world, smaller faiths such as Mormonism are also gaining strength. The Mormon church, which did not permit blacks to become priests until 1978, says it now has more than 250,000 members in Africa, including almost 80,000 in Nigeria.

Mormonism, which teaches that an American named Joseph Smith was a prophet who received visions from God about how to restore the true and original Christian church, had 1.7 million members in 1960. Today, according to church statistics, it has about 13 million, more than 7 million of them outside the U.S.

The church's landmark six-spire temple in Kensington, Md., was its first east of the Rocky Mountains when it opened in 1974. Now there are Mormon temples in more than 40 countries, from China to Finland to Ghana, and more than 8,400 Mormon churches or meetinghouses abroad, with a new one built nearly every day.

As the church grows in numbers and diversity, it is gaining global recognition.

"A lot of people think nothing but polygamy" when they hear of the Mormons, said Rodney Stark, a religious-studies specialist at Baylor University in Texas, even though that practice has been outlawed by the church for more than a century. But as more people acquire Mormon friends and neighbors, Stark said, Mormons "are no longer seen as a peculiar little sect. They are too big."

Jan Shipps, a Methodist scholar who has written extensively about the Mormons, said, "When a cult grows up, it becomes a culture."

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Finding "peace of mind"

Early Sunday morning in the dusty Oshodi neighborhood of Lagos, before the tropical sun pressed down like a heavy steam iron, the noisy streets were teeming. Women carried bundles on their heads — cans of paint or a sewing machine. Creaking yellow buses were overcrowded. Wealthier people drove past in ancient Mercedes sedans discarded by faraway owners.

Amid the seemingly endless shacks and open sewers on haphazard Llesanmi Street, one lovely place stood out: a gated, cream-colored compound with a steepled church. Inside the spotless chapel, about 170 people sat in neat rows under whirring ceiling fans as an organist played quiet hymns. Almost every worshipper was black, and every male worshipper wore a white shirt and tie.

One after another, adults and children walked to the microphone and professed their devotion to the Mormon faith. Their reasons for joining it were diverse, but nearly all had once belonged to a larger Christian church they found lacking. Perhaps most of all, they said, they were initially attracted to the Mormon belief that devout families stay together eternally, not just until death.

Joshua Matthews Ebiloma, 40, a sales manager for a power-generator company, said the Mormons offered him "peace of mind" he had not found anywhere else.

Nigeria is half Muslim and almost half Christian, and proselytizing foreigners, from the United States to Saudi Arabia, are pouring millions of dollars into the African nation of 135 million to expand their faiths.

Ebiloma has sampled a range of them. He was born into a pagan family and still bears the scars of tribal markings carved into his cheeks when he was young. After attending Muslim schools as a child, he tried various Christian churches before finding what he described as "happiness and peace" in Mormonism.

Now, Ebiloma nodded and smiled as fellow Mormons told their stories. One woman described the joy of having her family "sealed," a ritual that Mormons believe ensures that families stay together beyond death.

Another said she believed that tithing — the Mormon practice of members giving one-tenth of their income to the church — "would bring great blessings."

A third woman praised Gordon Hinckley, the 97-year-old church president in Salt Lake City, who followers believe receives divine revelations. "I know President Hinckley is the living prophet," she said, just as amplified clapping and stamping in a nearby Pentecostal church began drowning out more testimonies.

"It is quiet and more organized in here," Ebiloma said later. "In other churches, people are shouting at the top of their lungs, sweating so much they need a hankie. One thing I know for sure: God is not deaf."

Ebiloma said those quiet services, along with the fact that all the men wear white shirts, have led many to think that his church is strange: "My friends ask, 'What are you doing in there? Did they make you wear a uniform?' "

Many scholars say the Mormons' decision not to adopt more local customs — such as incorporating African drumming or dancing into Sunday services — is one reason the church has not experienced the same remarkable growth as other denominations. Pentecostals, a lively evangelical Christian movement, can draw half a million worshippers to their all-night services here.

The Mormon church has often had strained relations with other Christian churches, not least because it was founded in the 19th century on the tenet that mainstream Christianity had strayed from the original message of Jesus.

Nigerian Catholic and Pentecostal leaders interviewed about the Mormons said the group was growing, becoming more visible especially because of its fine buildings, but was still small. Others have taken issue with the Mormons' membership statistics, saying that by counting as members those who have been baptized, they include those who have fallen away from the church.

Among the places the church says it is particularly vibrant are Brazil and Mexico, which have about 1 million Mormons each, and the Philippines, with nearly 600,000. In Africa, there are Mormon congregations in 27 countries.

Ebiloma said he especially liked that Mormons don't preach that people of other faiths were going to hell and that Mormon church leaders are largely unpaid and support themselves with other jobs.

Abstinence from alcohol, another church practice, was a tougher sell. But gradually, with the help of his favorite part of the church — regular home visits from missionaries and other members — he abandoned his Guinness beer.

Now, the affable father of two said, he even tries to obey the church's no-caffeine rule. "I am so happy," he said. "I am at peace."

"If you are bereaved or you have a new baby or you don't have money to pay your hospital bills, church members rally around you," he said, smiling. "You tell me: Is this a church I should leave?"

A racist past

Ebiloma is a now a Mormon priest, a lay position in the church which, three decades ago, he could not have held because of the color of his skin. Influenced by the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, many Mormons in the United States grew increasingly uncomfortable with that policy — including George Romney, the former Michigan governor whose son, Mitt Romney, is now a Republican presidential candidate.

According to Newell Bringhurst, an American scholar who has written two books about the place of black people in the Mormon church, the issue surfaced again in 1976, hurting Morris Udall, a Mormon, in his run against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination.

It wasn't until 1978 that the Mormon president at the time said he had received a divine revelation and lifted the ban against ordaining black men to the priesthood, which has since been open to all "worthy" male candidates over the age of 12.

Like many members interviewed in Nigeria, Ebiloma said he knew nothing of that history. "But I know this church is not racist," he said. "Here it's strange if there is a white person in church."

Bringhurst said the church has been "more successful among blacks outside the United States than inside," partly because abroad there is less "awareness of this past historic discrimination."

The main pressure for the 1978 policy change, he said, "came from the Mormon church wanting to expand outside the United States. There was a certain element of pragmatism. Potential growth was being impeded in places like Brazil and Africa."

A few miles away, in another Mormon church, Muyiwa Omowaiye closed his eyes and fell back in the arms of a Mormon elder until he was completely under water. "I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit," the elder said, as the seated congregation watched the 6-foot-1 computer salesman in a white gown being submerged, their eyes on a ceiling mirror hung above the pool-size baptismal font.

The role of the Internet

Omowaiye is one of more than 220,000 people a year baptized abroad into the Mormon church — four times the 54,000 annual baptisms in the United States. And like many people around the world, he first started learning about the church on the Internet.

The Mormons have embraced the Internet, and a new TV ad campaign in the United States directs people to find out more about the faith online. Millions of people first learn of the religion through its vast online depository of genealogical records.

The Salt Lake City headquarters has considerable oversight over the global church and transmits general conferences and leadership training sessions via satellite to churches around the world. About one-third of the church's 53,000 missionaries are not from the United States.

After reading about the church online, Omowaiye clicked his way to a dating Web site for Mormons (though not officially affiliated with the church). There he began chatting electronically with Deborah Hess, a relocation manager from Colorado. After corresponding for a year by e-mail, webcam and phone, Hess recently came to Lagos and married Omowaiye, a quiet, soft-spoken man.

"No matter where you go in the world, the service is the same," Hess said, noting that the buildings, baptismal fonts, services and hymns in Lagos were nearly identical to those back home in the United States.

Ngozi Ndukwe, a teacher and the wife of the recent convert who says the church helped him stop drinking and womanizing, likes this uniformity. She has watched meetings in Salt Lake City on satellite TV here and saw that the teachings in Nigeria are the same as in the United States — including the emphasis on ancestors.

A central Mormon belief is that even the dead deserve the chance of salvation through baptism. In temples — only Mormons "in good standing" can enter — baptisms by proxy are done with a living person standing in for one who has died, with names and dates of birth and death discovered in genealogical research.

"My daddy didn't attend any church before he died," said Zion Ndukwe, who said he and his wife are planning an 11-hour bus ride to Aba, in southeastern Nigeria, where there is a stunning new Mormon temple. There, he said, he will wade into a pool, surrounded by his Mormon family, and be baptized on behalf of his father. He believes the church teaching that his whole family can be together in heaven one day. "It gives me hope," he said.

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Expulsion From The Church An Expression Of Love?

ALEXANDRA ALTER
On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. "And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P."

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff's officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.

The charge was trespassing, but Mrs. Caskey's real offense, in her pastor's view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had questioned his authority, he'd charged her with spreading "a spirit of cancer and discord" and expelled her from the congregation. "I've been shunned," she says.

A devout Christian and grandmother of three, Mrs. Caskey moves with a halting gait, due to two artificial knees and a double hip replacement. Friends and family describe her as a generous woman who helped pay the electricity bill for Allen Baptist, in Allen, Mich., when funds were low, gave the church $1,200 after she sold her van, and even cut the church's lawn on occasion. She has requested an engraved image of the church on her tombstone.

Her expulsion came as a shock to some church members when, in August 2006, the pastor sent a letter to the congregation stating Mrs. Caskey and an older married couple, Patsy and Emmit Church, had been removed for taking "action against the church and your preacher." The pastor, Mr. Burrick, told congregants the three were guilty of gossip, slander and idolatry and should be shunned, according to several former church members.

"People couldn't believe it," says Janet Biggs, 53, a former church member who quit the congregation in protest.

The conflict had been brewing for months. Shortly after the church hired Mr. Burrick in 2005 to help revive the congregation, which had dwindled to 12 members, Mrs. Caskey asked him to appoint a board of deacons to help govern the church, a tradition outlined in the church's charter. Mr. Burrick said the congregation was too small to warrant deacons. Mrs. Caskey pressed the issue at the church's quarterly business meetings and began complaining that Mr. Burrick was not following the church's bylaws. "She's one of the nicest, kindest people I know," says friend and neighbor Robert Johnston, 69, a retired cabinet maker. "But she won't be pushed around."

In April 2006, Mrs. Caskey received a stern letter from Mr. Burrick. "This church will not tolerate this spirit of cancer and discord that you would like to spread," it said. Mrs. Caskey, along with Mr. and Mrs. Church, continued to insist that the pastor follow the church's constitution. In August, she received a letter from Mr. Burrick that said her failure to repent had led to her removal. It also said he would not write her a transfer letter enabling her to join another church, a requirement in many Baptist congregations, until she had "made things right here at Allen Baptist."

She went to Florida for the winter, and when she returned to Michigan last June, she drove the two miles to Allen Baptist as usual. A church member asked her to leave, saying she was not welcome, but Mrs. Caskey told him she had come to worship and asked if they could speak after the service. Twenty minutes into the service, a sheriff's officer was at her side, and an hour later, she was in jail.

"It was very humiliating," says Mrs. Caskey, who worked for the state of Michigan for 25 years before retiring from the Department of Corrections in 1992. "The other prisoners were surprised to see a little old lady in her church clothes. One of them said, 'You robbed a church?' and I said, 'No, I just attended church.' "

Word quickly spread throughout Allen, a close-knit town of about 200 residents. Once a thriving community of farmers and factory workers, Allen consists of little more than a strip of dusty antiques stores. Mr. and Mrs. Church, both in their 70s, eventually joined another Baptist congregation nearby.

About 25 people stopped attending Allen Baptist Church after Mrs. Caskey was shunned, according to several former church members.

Current members say they support the pastor's actions, and they note that the congregation has grown under his leadership. The simple, white-washed building now draws around 70 people on Sunday mornings, many of them young families. "He's a very good leader; he has total respect for the people," says Stephen Johnson, 66, an auto parts inspector, who added that Mr. Burrick was right to remove Mrs. Caskey because "the Bible says causing discord in the church is an abomination."

Mrs. Caskey went back to the church about a month after her arrest, shortly after the county prosecutor threw out the trespassing charge. More than a dozen supporters gathered outside, some with signs that read "What Would Jesus Do?" She sat in the front row as Mr. Burrick preached about "infidels in the pews," according to reports from those present.

Once again, Mrs. Caskey was escorted out by a state trooper and taken to jail, where she posted the $62 bail and was released. After that, the county prosecutor dismissed the charge and told county law enforcement not to arrest her again unless she was creating a disturbance.

In the following weeks, Mrs. Caskey continued to worship at Allen Baptist. Some congregants no longer spoke to her or passed the offering plate, and some changed seats if she sat next to them, she says.

Mr. Burrick repeatedly declined to comment on Mrs. Caskey's case, calling it a "private ecclesiastical matter." He did say that while the church does not "blacklist" anyone, a strict reading of the Bible requires pastors to punish disobedient members. "A lot of times, flocks aren't willing to submit or be obedient to God," he said in an interview before a Sunday evening service. "If somebody is not willing to be helped, they forfeit their membership."

In Christianity's early centuries, church discipline led sinners to cover themselves with ashes or spend time in the stocks. In later centuries, expulsion was more common. Until the late 19th century, shunning was widely practiced by American evangelicals, including Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists. Today, excommunication rarely occurs in the U.S. Catholic Church, and shunning is largely unheard of among mainline Protestants.

Little Consensus

Among churches that practice discipline, there is little consensus on how sinners should be dealt with, says Gregory Wills, a theologian at Southern Baptist Theological seminary. Some pastors remove members on their own, while other churches require agreement among deacons or a majority vote from the congregation.

Since Mrs. Caskey's second arrest last July, the turmoil at Allen Baptist has fizzled into an awkward stalemate. Allen Baptist is an independent congregation, unaffiliated with a church hierarchy that might review the ouster. Supporters have urged Mrs. Caskey to sue to have her membership restored, but she says the matter should be settled in the church. Mr. Burrick no longer calls the police when Mrs. Caskey shows up for Sunday services.

Since November, Mrs. Caskey has been attending a Baptist church near her winter home in Tavares, Fla. She plans to go back to Allen Baptist when she returns to Michigan this spring.

"I don't intend to abandon that church," Mrs. Caskey says. "I feel like I have every right to be there."

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Vulnerable James Packer Was A Perfect Scientology Recruit

Sad, overweight and jilted by his then wife Jodi Meares, James Packer was the "perfect recruit" when actor Tom Cruise set off on a carefully targeted crusade in mid-2002, aimed at converting wealthy and influential celebrities to scientology.

The claim is made in a blockbuster new biography of Cruise by British author Andrew Morton, who describes the then 35-year-old Mr Packer as the "raw meat" Scientology needed to gain recognition and credibility.

"Not only was he (Mr Packer) wildly wealthy and emotionally confused, he was a well-known figure in a country that has been hostile to the faith, a 1965 (Australian) Government report accusing scientology of being 'evil'," Morton writes in Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography.

"Dominated by his larger-than-life father (the late Kerry Packer), James Packer cut a sorry figure, overweight and out of shape.

"Not only had his One.Tel communications business collapsed, but his wife of just two years had walked out on him.

"His 'ruin' was obvious to anyone - and it did not take long before he was reading Scientology literature."

Morton says Mr Packer was specifically targeted by Cruise, who by mid-2002 had resolved to dedicate his life to Scientology.

He suggests Cruise offered Mr Packer a role as a samurai extra in the film The Last Samurai solely to convert him.

Mr Packer was quickly seduced, saying later he admired Cruise for his humility, values and decency.

Morton claims actor Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett, were similarly targeted by Cruise because of their stature in African-American society.

Cruz relationship 'calculated'

Even Cruise's love interest with actor Penelope Cruz was calculated to boost scientology in Spanish-speaking countries, he says.

"He (Cruise) was not only an advocate but a teacher, donor, a preacher and a recruiting sergeant, using his celebrity and his image as a clean-cut action hero to gain access to the levers of power while making Scientology seem like a middle-of-the-road institution for regular folk," Morton writes.

Australian customers who wish to read all of this for themselves, may have trouble buying a copy, after US publisher St Martin's Press reportedly instructed its distributors not to sell it outside North America.

It was still available last night on the internet.

Amazon.com had a notice saying the publisher had authorised distribution of the book only to US and Canadian customers.

However, The Australian had no trouble ordering a copy using an Australian credit card and an Australian mailing address.

Book sellers scrambling for copies

Angus & Robertson book manager Jodi Smith said the company received an email yesterday from its US wholesaler, Baker & Taylor - one of the main suppliers of books to the Australian market - stating it could no longer provide the book to Australian customers because of restrictions placed on it by St Martin's.

"We had every intention of ordering the book," Ms Smith said. "But everyone we know has been unable to supply it to us.

"We physically can't get the book from anyone."

Another big US distributor, Ingram International, also emailed its Australian customers overnight, informing them it was no longer able to sell the book outside the US and Canada.

It said customers who had already placed orders would have them fulfilled, but no more orders would be taken.

Kinokuniya's Sydney store manager Steve Jones yesterday said the bookseller had found another distributor who was willing to sell to Australia.

"We have actually sourced another supplier of the book - although it may take a little longer," he said.

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What Your Kiss Can Do To A Woman

Your first kiss will determine if you get an invitation or a handshake. When it comes to kissing, you have to approach it with the right attitude. It is an experience to be enjoyed in and of itself, not just a stepping-stone to sex. Yes, of course we want it to lead to the bedroom and if done correctly, it probably will, but you need to experience and really enjoy the act of kissing. A woman will feel your kiss with great sensitivity and she will know if it is sincere or not. And if you really kiss with purpose, you'll enjoy it and thereby also be good at it.

Kissing not only involves the lips, but the whole body and mind, and, if you do it right, the soul. First know how to enjoy kissing before you can expect a woman to enjoy kissing you. Kissing is a process, not an act.

The way to enjoy kissing is to be sensitive to the closeness and touching of lips and tongues. Focus on your lips and hers. Enjoy the sensation. Let your mind wander with what you are feeling. Women are touchy-feely and it's all about emotions and heady stuff like that and most of us guys don't really understand and really don't want to, but we have to deal with it. And, again, if you go with the flow and catch the feeling, so to speak, you might find yourself on a new plane of pleasure. Kissing is a wonderful experience if you let it be. I'm reminded of a time when a kiss created the setting for a night of bliss that illustrates one of those wonderful kissing experiences.

I was visiting my parents at my boyhood home in Italy on the Mediterranean coast some years ago, the time not being of importance. After hooking up with old time friends and hitting the social scene, it was not long before my eyes met those of a fair young lady. We hit it right off after a brief introductory chat and from there the night flowed like wine at an Italian wedding.

As the night turned into the wee hours of the morning, we strolled as lovers would in an old time movie through the city square. As she twirled in front of me, arms outstretched and hair flowing so beautifully, I gently stepped closer. Seeing the impassioned look on my face, she slowly glided around and leaned into my arms. I pulled her close to me, looked into her eyes, and whispered a sweet compliment. She smiled and I kissed her. The kind of kiss that brought out all her passions and erased her inhibitions. It was a night that she will always remember as I do. I remember all my moments with women, even though there have been hundreds of them.

The beginning to a great night with a beautiful woman can end with a handshake if she does not like the way you kiss. If you want her to spread her legs, you first have to know how to spread her lips.

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Will Smith, I Am The Legend

Today's lesson: how to film a movie about the end of the world in the busiest city in the world. First, stop the traffic.

One Saturday morning last year, director Francis Lawrence stood in the middle of Sixth Avenue in New York. A voice crackled over his walkie-talkie: "Locking up 42nd Street down to 34th."

At each intersection of one-way Sixth Avenue, police stopped the cross traffic, as well as the vehicles heading north at 34th Street. Production assistants ushered bystanders back into doorways and off the corners, so that within the viewing range of the camera, the stretch was empty. The first day of shooting the film of I Am Legend had begun.

"Just standing there and looking on a Saturday morning down Sixth Avenue and it's completely empty and it's because they're letting us film our movie, and it's cool," Lawrence says. "It's not a power thing, it's just, 'Man, I'm lucky being able to experience these sorts of things.'"

I Am Legend is about the end of the world as we know it, a place swept clean of humanity by a lethal virus that began life as a cure for cancer, shepherded into existence by, among others, military scientist Robert Neville, played by Will Smith. The film is loosely based on the 1954 novel of the same name, written by Richard Matheson.

The virus spares Neville, whose wife and daughter die in the frenzied evacuation of Manhattan, but transforms countless others - human and animal - into zombies with aggressively anti-social dispositions, the usual netherworld aversion to daylight and extraordinary strength and agility.

Smith, Lawrence and Oscar-winning scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman went to considerable lengths to explore the mindset of a man totally alone: I Am Legend begins with Neville three years into his solitary existence.

The questions the film provokes, not least of them being the recent American fascination with apocalyptic scenarios - two such books, The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, became best-sellers - have forced Smith to ponder the difference between the man he is and the guys he plays on screen.

"Ali didn't step forward [after being conscripted into the US Army] because they wouldn't call him Muhammad Ali, and he knew he was going to jail, knew what the situation would be, but he could not," Smith says. "He wouldn't step forward. I just remember thinking, 'What would I do?' I don't know if I would be enough of a man to give up everything I have right now, the way Ali did for that principle.

"When I look at Robert Neville: what was there to live for, what was there to hope for? To wake up every day and to try to restore something that is good and gone. I like to believe I would put my chest up and stand forward and march on [loud, inspiring voice] and continue to fight for the future of humanity. But I would probably find a bridge - 'I'm comin' to join ya, Elizabeth [Neville's wife].'

"It's a tough question. I don't know. I don't think so. There's a part of me ... you want to be tested to know what you would do but you really don't want to be tested. That's the space I've lived in with quite a few of the roles I've played."

Part of the film is carried by Smith's elan and buff presence. He dropped eight kilograms for the role, illuminated in a single shirtless scene where he does a series of chin-ups, to many sighs from both genders in preview screenings.

In many ways, his part is a reprise of the everyman roles of other movies he has starred in, from Enemy of the State to Men In Black, Hitch and The Pursuit of Happyness. In this case, it's an everyday guy, trying to get by after life as we know it has ceased.

"He's attracted to those roles," Lawrence says. "If you can set aside the fact that he's a superstar, he's kind of an everyguy, oddly enough.

His sensibilities are that way.

"He's better than anyone I know at being just like a member of the general audience, which is partially why he's so successful, because he can sit back and imagine being a 16-year-old kid in the theatre and knows what he wants to see, what he wants to feel.''

In person Smith is tall and fit-looking, with the build of the runner who averages 50km a week, as he does. If anything, that physique yields to his personality, with a loud guffaw of a laugh and a charming and intimate manner - a big salesman for larger-than-life movies about the unexpected travails of an everyday guy. The press were in the palms of his inordinately large hands.

As executive producer and star, Smith had significant say in most aspects of the production of I Am Legend, not least of them casting, with his seven-year-old daughter, Willow, playing his screen daughter, Marley. Willow's older brother, Jaden, nine, appeared as his father's screen son in last year's hit The Pursuit of Happyness.

"Jaden is Johnny Depp," his father says. "He just wants to do good work. He doesn't care what money he gets, he doesn't care [how] many people see it or don't see it. He loves acting. He just wants to make good movies. And Willow is Paris Hilton [laughing]. Willow wants to be on TV [louder laughing]. We're managing both of those in our household."

Other than the challenge of emptying New York, Lawrence had to deal with the challenge of a one-man show, where that one man has no one to talk to but his dog.

Inspiration arrived by accident.

As Lawrence's wife fed their newborn son one evening, he watched a DVD with the sound muted. The movie was The Piano and Lawrence found that even without dialogue he could pick up every nuance of Jane Campion's unlikely, beautiful love story.

"My wife and I were struck at how we could follow it and not just follow, but feel it," Lawrence says.

"I got very excited and I said to the guys [Smith and Goldsman], 'This is what we have to do. We have to apply that thinking to this movie because there's really no dialogue, so whatever we do we have to treat it like a silent film, so not only can you follow it, but you have to be able to feel it without sound.'"

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Amy Winehouse Arrested For Interfering With Course Of Justice

Troubled British soul singer Amy Winehouse was arrested today as part of an investigation into perverting the course of justice, London police and her publicist said.

The 24-year-old, whose husband Blake Fielder-Civil is being held on remand accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, went to a London police station to be arrested in agreement with police.

"It was voluntary and pre-arranged," a representative at her publicity agency said, asking not to be quoted by name.

London's Metropolitan police said: "A 24-year-old woman has been arrested by appointment at an East London police station in connection with an investigation into perverting the course of justice. She remains in custody."

Winehouse, nominated for six Grammy awards, has struggled with drugs and alcohol since shooting to fame. She was pictured this month wandering the streets of London at dawn in only a bra and jeans.

The tattooed singer has cancelled all her remaining planned concerts this year saying she cannot perform while her husband is in jail.

Fielder-Civil, 25, was charged in November in an investigation into perverting the course of justice, days before he was due to go on trial for beating up a bartender.

The trial was delayed after police launched an investigation into allegations made by British newspaper The Daily Mirror that the bartender was offered money not to testify.

Winehouse's parents have made repeated calls for their daughter to seek help, fearing that she could be sucked into a cycle of drugs and trauma.

"We want to help you, but we know that unless you want to be helped, unless you come to us, anything we tried would be in vain," her mother, Janis Winehouse, wrote in a letter published by the News of the World newspaper last week.

"Early fame has overwhelmed you, it's dizzied you and muddled your mind."

Winehouse scored a hit last year with the song Rehab about refusing treatment for drugs and alcohol.

She and Fielder-Civil, who married earlier this year, were arrested in Norway in October for possessing cannabis and paid a fine.

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Singer Bob Dylan Claimed Five Spirit Award Nominations

I'm Not There, an artful look at the life of singer Bob Dylan, claimed a leading five Spirit Award nominations for independent movies, including best film as Hollywood launched its annual award season.

The movie, in which several actors represent different stages of the musician's life and work, also earned nominations for director Todd Haynes, supporting actress Cate Blanchett, who plays one version of Dylan, and supporting actor Marcus Carl Franklin, 14, who plays another.

I'm Not There also claimed the first Robert Altman Award, named after the iconoclastic director of MASH who long-championed independent movies before his death in 2006.

Director Julian Schnabel's drama, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about a paralyzed French journalist who dictates a book by blinking, and Jason Reitman's comedy Juno, which tells of a young woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, earned four nominations each, including best movie and best director.

Also taking best film and director nods was Gus Van Sant's teenage skateboard drama, Paranoid Park. The final nomination among best films went to A Mighty Heart, about the search for slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The final director nominee was Tamara Jenkins for drama The Savages, the story of two adult siblings who move their father to a nursing home. It earned four nominations overall.

'Talented filmmakers'

"We have a huge array of talented filmmakers with movies in many different genres. It has been an exciting year for independent film and this shows a deep pool of talent," said Dawn Hudson, executive director of Los Angeles-based group Film Independent, which gives out the Spirit Awards.

Film Independent supports moviemakers working outside Hollywood's major studios or within the studios' specialty film divisions. The awards have become an important barometer for which low-budget and art films might compete for Oscars, Golden Globes or other honors in Hollywood's annual awards season.

Angelina Jolie was nominated for best leading actress playing Pearl's wife in Mighty Heart and relative newcomer Ellen Page earned a nod for Juno. Joining them were Sienna Miller for Interview, Parker Posey in Broken English and another newcomer, China's Tang Wei, in drama Lust, Caution.

In the category for best leading actor, Don Cheadle was nominated for his role as a radio disc jockey in Talk To Me and Philip Seymour Hoffman earned a nomination playing one of the siblings in The Savages.

Other best actor nominees included veteran Frank Langella in Starting Out in the Evening, Tony Leung, a veteran of Hong Kong movies, for Lust, Caution and Pedro Castaneda portraying a migrant worker in August Evening.

Joining Blanchett for supporting actress were Jennifer Jason Leigh for Margot at the Wedding, Anna Kendrick in Rocket Science, Tamara Podemski for Four Sheets to the Wind and Marisa Tomei with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

Supporting actor nominees with Franklin were Steve Zahn in Rescue Dawn, Chiwetel Ejiofor for Talk to Me, Kene Holliday in Great World of Sound, and Irrfan Khan in The Namesake.

Foreign film nominees included Romania's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, winner of the Cannes film festival's Palme d'Or, Israeli film The Band's Visit, Irish drama Once and two French films, Lady Chatterley and the animated Persepolis.

The Spirit Awards will be given out February 23 in a ceremony that will air on the Independent Film Channel.

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One On One With Zachary Quinto

A year ago, you were just another jobless Hollywood actor. Now you're starring on Heroes and playing Spock. Are you sure you're not dreaming all this?
It's all very dreamlike, though Trek is feeling less so as it draws nearer. We're getting ready to shoot in a month, and I just had my first fitting for my Vulcan ears. It felt incredible, and in that moment there was a huge shift for me. Suddenly it was real, and I was like, "Okay! Let's get this thing going!"

In a wild twist on Heroes, your serial-killer character, Sylar, has lost his powers. Will this help humanise the monster?
Not really. Sylar's plans for ultimate power have been derailed, but that doesn't give us a chance to know him better. If anything, he's the same guy but even more driven and obsessed and in a place of absolute hunger: "I want my power back. No time to waste!" During this struggle, he'll align himself with the twins, Maya [Dania Ramirez] and Alejandro [Shalim Ortiz], and they'll go on a journey to New York to find Mohinder [Sendhil Ramamurthy].

Do some fans root for you to slay as many heroes as possible?
Oh, yeah! There's a group that calls itself the Sarmy or Sylar's Army that's dedicated to the support of my character, and they don't like it when he's disparaged. Their slogan is "Every villain needs a legion of evil supporters." But what's funny is they do great charity work. It's never bad to have an army.

Is it true you were ready to drop out of showbiz when Heroes came along?
I was in the depths of despair to the point where I couldn't get out of bed. I was about to turn 30, which is a notoriously tumultuous time for people, and I was dealing with career obstacles that were profound - a real existential crisis. I was asking myself, "What's the point of all this? Why am I even in the game anymore?"

But you'd already had a few cool roles by that time Tori Spelling's gay friend on So NoTORIous and Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) analyst Adam Kaufman on Season 3 of 24. Weren't you encouraged by that?
So NoTORIous was great fun but had no far-reaching appeal. 24 did have that, but I was an information disseminator who was very expendable on a show that doesn't have a lot of character depth. Until Heroes happened, I'd never played an amazing character on a really great show that a lot of people watched.

Let's get back to Spock. It's almost like you manifested this role. Was this (self-help philosophy) The Secret at work?
From the day I found out they were making the Star Trek movie, I said, "I want to be Spock" and I started talking about it to everybody - to my friends, my agents, reporters who interviewed me. I put my intentions out there clearly and the universe responded. But this is age-old thinking rooted in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. I've never read The Secret.

Some Trek loyalists are already griping online that the film, about Starfleet Academy, is starting to look like Star Trek, 90210. Response?
I don't immerse myself in the internet chatter because it opens you up to a whole source of danger. I think Zoe Saldana [young Uhura] and Anton Yelchin [young Chekov] are formidable young actors, and I'm grateful to be among them. The film is being made with the long-time fans in mind, but it will also be of its own time and have a distinct voice and perspective. There's no better way to respect the Trek mythology than to try to bring it to a wider audience.

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Al Gore Says Global Television Community Saved The Planet

Former US vice-president Al Gore urged the global television community to help get the word out about the climate crisis before it is too late as he accepted a special honour at the 35th International Emmy Awards.

British TV productions dominated the awards ceremony, winning seven of the nine categories, with BBC One's The Street enjoying wins for drama series and best actor.

Actor-director Robert De Niro introduced Mr Gore at the awards gala as this year's recipient of the International Emmy Founders Award for his efforts to promote "our common humanity".

De Niro wryly noted in his introduction that Mr Gore had "devoted his life to public service" and continued to do so "after he was elected President in 2000 and voted out of office by the Supreme Court".

"He has used his prominence as a concerned world leader to wield enormous influence," De Niro said. "When you see an international figure or head of state coming out in support of the fight against global warming look closely, you may see Al Gore behind him, pushing him."

Mr Gore had a special message for the audience of television executives, producers and performers from around the world who gathered in the grand ballroom of the Hilton New York Hotel for the awards ceremony presented by the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

"The climate crisis is by far the most serious challenge human civilisation has ever faced," said Gore, who has already won an Oscar for his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and will be travelling to Oslo, Norway, next month to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. "We really do now confront a true planetary emergency.

"We still have time to fix it. But this great powerful medium of television can be part of that solution because networks and channels all around the world represented here can help to get the word out while there is time."

Mr Gore was also honoured for his role as co-chairman and co-founder of the interactive Current TV cable and satellite network, which relies heavily on viewer-created short video segments.

"I think the future of democracy in our world depends to a surprising degree on democratising television," said Mr Gore.

"Current TV was designed from the start to connect the internet and television."

Britain had led all countries with eight nominations. Brazil had seven nominations, but was shut out on awards night. The International Emmys honour excellence in TV production outside the United States.

The only non-British winners were Poland's The Magic Tree for children's programme; the Netherlands' Pierre Bokma, for his role as a religious software entrepreneur in The Chosen One, for which he tied with Jim Broadbent of The Street for best actor; and French actress Muriel Robin, who won as best actress for her role as an infamous "black widow" serial killer in the true-life drama Marie Besnard - The Poisoner.

Robin said she was "so superstitious" that she thought it would be bad luck to prepare a winner's speech, so she wrote "a loser's speech" instead.

"From the bottom of my heart to you just simple words: emotional - a lot, happy - very, proud - yes, tears - not now, later in my bed. I dreamed so much of this moment."

But otherwise the awards ceremony was an all-British affair with BBC productions leading the way with six Emmys.

Each episode of The Street focuses on the residents of a different house on the same street in a city in northern England.

Broadbent, who missed the presentations, was honoured for his role as an embittered warehouse foreman approaching retirement.

"Really this award goes to the creator of The Street, Jimmy McGovern, whose characters have to face the inconvenient truth of their lives with honesty," said the show's executive producer, Sita Williams, in accepting the best drama series Emmy.

British comedian Stephen Fry took home the Emmy for best documentary for Stephen Fry - The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive about his own and other people's experiences living with bipolar disorder.

"This documentary was very important to me ... Manic depression is a pandemic chronic condition," said Fry. "We need to understand much more about it and most of all we need to address the urgent problem of the stigma."

Other British winners included Little Britain Abroad in the comedy category; How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? a competition to cast the role of Maria in a London production of The Sound of Music, for non-scripted entertainment, and Simon Schama's Power of Art: Bernini, about the 17th-century Roman sculptor, for arts programming.

"I wanted to prove that art actually isn't some sort of cultural luxury, it's our food and drink, it's our necessity," said Schama. "Art is a war against dreck. It actually shows us what our best we can do."

Of the British wins, the only non-BBC winner was in the TV movie/mini-series category - the More4 satellite channel's controversial docudrama Death of a President, which begins with the fictional assassination of George W. Bush.

Its producer-writer Simon Finch said the film wasn't meant to be "a liberal fantasy" or "anti-Bush".

"It was meant to be a film which was trying to say that there was something about the age of fear in which we live, about the danger of rushing to judgment," said Finch.

French actress Carole Bouquet presented the International Emmy Directorate Award to Patrick Le Lay, chairman of the TF1 Group, for his role in expanding the French network into one of the largest in Europe.

Le Lay said the television industry should not be thought of as an "old business" because TV programming is much in demand by the new technology from internet access providers to mobile phone companies.

National Broadcasting of Thailand won the special International Children's Day of Broadcasting Award, which this year dealt with the theme of Aids.

The event, hosted by Roger Bart, currently starring in the Broadway musical Young Frankenstein, featured several US television celebrity presenters, including Sam Waterston (Law & Order), Lorraine Bracco (The Sopranos), Rob Morrow (Numb3rs) and George Wendt (Cheers).

The academy is the largest organisation of global broadcasters with more than 500 members from nearly 70 countries and more than 400 companies.

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Ryan Phillipe Became Suicidal After Divorce

Ryan Phillippe has revealed he contemplated suicide following his split from ex-wife Reese Witherspoon.

The actor - whose divorce from the actress was finalised last month - considered taking his own life because he couldn't stop crying and vomiting.

He said: "After the divorce, I was a physical wreck. I wanted to die. I was ready to kill myself. I was not taking care of myself at all. I would wake up and cry and vomit."

Luckily, Ryan - who shares custody of the couple's children, eight-year-old Ava and four-year-old Deacon, with Reese - pulled through and believes the experience has made him a better actor.

He added to Man About Town magazine: "Now, it's f***ing easy to cry on cue. When I was younger, I didn't have enough to cry about. But since I've had kids, I feel my work has become better, because my life is fuller and more complicated, and I've experienced so many highs and lows."

Ryan recently revealed how his children helped him get through the divorce.

He said: "I know it sounds pathetic - I'm a 33-year-old guy but my daughter is getting me through the toughest time in my life, and that's beautiful.

"Deacon's fun, every day he says something that makes me laugh, warms my heart. It ain't easy. It's devastating but the bottom line is I have to focus on the children, and they're doing amazingly well and that's really all that matters."

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Globalisation - Making China More Westernised

Lijia Zhang

'Scored yet?' That was the first question from several young adventurers crowded around a table at a bar in Lhasa, Tibet's colourful capital city. Between sips of yak butter tea, they trade jokes and swap tales about their latest sexual encounters. These twentysomethings on leave from city jobs could have been from anywhere in the world looking for spiritual enlightenment, romantic encounters, or both. But they were all from China, where such conversations and attitudes would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

'Why not?' said Sandy Li, a 28-year-old fashion designer from Beijing, lighting a cigarette from a candle and confessing that she took the trip to meet someone with no strings attached. 'Just for a bit of harmless fun. We don't have to behave ourselves here; we don't know anyone. Finding a proper boyfriend is a lot harder than finding a man you can go to bed with.'

Li's attitude is typical of many of the young urban middle class, whose slogan could well be carpe diem or rather carpe noctem. Apart from Lhasa, another popular pick-up place is Lijiang, in Yunnan province.

Of course, people don't have to travel to far-flung places for casual sex. Your own flat would do. Less than 20 years ago, singles had little choice but to stay with their parents. Now cohabitation, like sex before marriage, is commonplace.

Before a split six months ago, Li lived with her photographer boyfriend for three years but had never introduced him to her family. 'For my parents, bringing a boyfriend home means impending marriage. I am still young. I'd like to make a splash in my career first, and explore what life can offer.'

'The singles are not talking about marriages, and lovers aren't talking about the future,' goes one popular saying among colleague students. And a joke describes the pattern of 'one-week' relationships: 'On Monday, you send out vibes. Tuesday, you express true desire. Wednesday, you hold hands. Thursday, you sleep together. Friday, a feeling of distance sets in. Saturday, you want out. On Sunday, you start searching again.'

Youngsters' unwillingness to settle down is causing great anxiety to the older generation. In Zhongshan Park, a stone's throw from the Forbidden City in Beijing, dozens of parents, armed with photographs and information about their children, gather and search for potential partners. Some even go 'eight-minute speed dating' on behalf of children who themselves will be chatting and flirting on the internet.

'Today's young people are probably more sexually charged than their parents' generation,' said Susie Huang, author of All About Susie, a collection of essays about the love and sex lives of today's burgeoning bourgeois. It's China's literary version of Sex and the City. 'To start with, it's now safe to be naughty,' she said. 'Before you might have landed in a labour camp for conducting an extramarital affair.'

But is it safe? A more tolerant social environment has led many to experiment in uncharted waters, with mixed results. Divorce rates are climbing steadily in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where one in three marriages ends in failure. Syphilis has skyrocketed, with a 25-fold increase since the early 1990s. And extra-marital affairs are now common.

Maybe Muzi Mei, a former sex blogger, is an extreme example of today's restless and hedonistic crowds. Her site used to attract 10 million visitors a day before it was shut down by the government in 2003. Officials objected to her online diary, which explicitly detailed her exploits. She was forced to resign from her Guangzhou-based magazine as a sex columnist and now works for a website, but still continues her man-hopping ways.

'My sex life is very interesting. Some may find it educational as well as entertaining,' said the 29-year-old journalist over a bowl of steaming soup in a Beijing restaurant. 'I sleep with lots of men because I don't want to be imprisoned in one relationship,' she declared to the giggles of eavesdropping waitresses. 'I am a free spirit.'

She is also a romantic. In her magazine she offered tips on creating the right environment on a date and suggested playing your favourite music while making love. There are books available too, offering step-by-step guides to dating, from basic advice such as not spitting to sending flowers on Valentine's Day. Kissing, something the Chinese people once saw only in foreign films, is now part of the landscape.

A recent cover story in the national News Weekly concluded that 'China's love life is in a stage of revelry, featuring the emphasis on sex rather than love; on physical pleasure rather than spiritual fulfilment'.

Susie Huang thinks she knows why: 'It is a globalisation of some sort: China is becoming more westernised. And, in some ways, more human.'

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China's Sexual Revolution Awakens Its Sleeping Libido

Vanessa Richmond
The tanks are parked. Kids are kissing in Tiananmen Square. And if a new documentary is right, it's the kissing that's leading to more personal liberty than any form of rebellion since the Cultural Revolution began.

According to China's Sexual Revolution, by Miro Cernetig and Josh Freed, Chairman Mao married sexuality with capitalism (as forms of corruption and decadence). But now Chinese youth are embracing both with a passion. At warp speed, in fact. There are probably people necking in front of his statue right now, and that's just for starters.

Here's what happened. Sixty years ago, Mao turned "couples into comrades and not lovers, and cloaked men and women in the same unisexual suits," according to the film's narrator. Makeup was forbidden, and hairstyles were dictated by the government (they were not what you would call flattering). Men and women were supposed to feel only like brothers and sisters, and were supposed to regard sex merely as reproductive labour. Instead, they were supposed to get on with more important work. Um, like making cheap plastic sex toys for the rest of the world (70 per cent of which now come from China).

Why? The communist party regarded sex as an outdated feudal custom. And as Dr. Pan Sue Ming, a scholar featured in the doc says, they considered it dangerous since the Revolution needed "a man to want to fight against someone, but sex makes you love and happy." The party even chose people's spouses. And there were propaganda films portraying people who believed in "romance" as foolish, and a source of shame to their families.

Virgin lust

The film reports that secretly, Mao's own sex life was "worthy of an emperor." He, in fact, had a lust for virgins, whom he believed kept him young. "And his sexual excesses are now legend." But he didn't want his comrades comingling.

As a result there are many Chinese people with as much sexual knowledge as I have of the Mandarin language (I know two words). In fact, a recent survey found that 20 per cent of Chinese men didn't know what the clitoris is and 50 per cent of Chinese women had never had an orgasm. Sounds super.

One male student from Beijing recently called in to Whispers, a radio sex show (which is now one of the most popular shows in the nation) with a question. He wondered if he could have made a girl pregnant or got AIDS himself from their encounter. The incident in question was one where he and a girl kissed and hugged (and that's all) while wearing winter coats.

In the past, the government would have cracked down not only on the naughty public kiss but also on the radio show, but now, realizing whole generations lack adequate sexual information and it's leading to restlessness and resentment of the government, they tolerate it. The government has even come to tolerate sex conferences, complete with sex toy sales and video demonstrations, often flooded by as many as 15,000 people; whereas they used to shut them down. And Beijing alone has 5,000 sex shops, more than New York -- all of which are allowed to dispense free sex ed and sell lingerie and sex toys -- without bother.

It seems sex ed really is needed -- the film has other anecdotes about the level of sexual information out there. One couple, recently married, went to a health information centre to ask about "marital relations." The counselors soon realized they were both virgins. The couple thought sex entailed touching legs in bed. When I spoke to him, Cernetig said when he heard these two stories, he was shocked. But he's since heard countless more.

Raunch meets Revolution

Now, I've asked a few male friends about this. All said no one specifically told them the details about the birds and the bees, but they were pretty sure that a certain part of their anatomy was meant to make contact with something else -- anything else, in fact. And the idea that leg-touching could be "it" seemed, to them, hard to buy. But as a woman, who grew up before so-called third wave feminism made pole dancing and lingerie-in-high-school the norm (have you seen Gossip Girl?), I can see that with sexual repression 100 times stronger than what I experienced, that kind of deep ignorance is not only possible but likely.

Young people in the film are aware they're under a cloak of darkness and are moving into the cities in droves in order to shed it. The phrase "Sex and the City" comes up frequently, albeit in interesting translations. There's even a word for the first city haircut a country girl gets -- and it represents a kind of metamorphosis. And on the documentary, one such country-bumpkin-transformation says she's now working as a waitress, and gets shocked when she sees men and women kissing in the restaurant -- she sticks out her tongue. But she sticks around.

Another, Xiao Feng, the editor of the Chinese equivalent of FHM is in her 30s and still not interested in getting married. "Once, I would have had a husband and love him and do everything for him. But now we can do things just for ourselves." She says this would have been unheard of even a few years ago, and her parents still aren't pleased. But she'll continue the way she is. And many other women are leaving party-arranged, loveless marriages to pursue the city life too, creating an urban divorce rate comparable to ours.

Feng, and many other "city girls" are glamorous. But most women in the doc aren't. In fact, one of the most striking things about the documentary is the images of women not subject to "beauty" obsession present elsewhere, like here.

I covered the Miss China World pageant for a magazine a few years ago, and let's just say most women in the film don't look like they just stepped off that stage. It threw me for a minute, to see women not so elaborately commercially groomed, and it was also a relief. There was a kind of innocence -- meaning un-self-consciousness -- that I definitely don't experience here. And unlike when I watch "normal" TV, I wasn't constantly measuring myself against the women in the shows. Instead, I was just drawn in to what they were saying.

It's the feminist irony. On the one hand, I wanted them to find liberation and their dreams. On the other, I wanted to warn them against looking for it in a lip gloss.

Dancing without the stars

In fact, the most charming thing about the doc is the images -- shots of ordinary people and of places like night clubs. In the last clubs I went to, in Vancouver, New York and even London, most people looked bored and jaded (maybe nightclubs have "ended" but that's another story). Not so in Beijing. The club-goers look like they've been locked away until this very minute and have just seen color, warmth, music, booze, drugs and the opposite sex for the first time. There's joy on their faces and in their uninhibited dancing. It's worth watching this film just to see the wholehearted enjoyment.

But it's not all rosy -- and unlike most docs that focus on sexy topics, this one delves into the complex sociological implications of the trends.

The one child policy was meant to curb overpopulation, and on the good side (depending on whom you ask) had the unintended consequence of liberating women to pursue other things like education and paid employment. But solving the population problem created social problems -- given the culture's strong preference for boys, there will be 30 million more men than women within the decade.

Cernetig says for him, it was the saddest part of the research. In the cities, there are whole armies of men who will never have a girlfriend or a wife. They've moved from the country to make a certain kind of life and won't ever have it. And a form of class-ism is building. Working class men in the film talk about how they know they will never get a wife because they don't own an apartment and they aren't at least 173 centimetres tall.

"There is already a rising sense of gang violence in China," he says, "and it's getting harder to control. And that's the reason. A lot of men have nothing to lose. They go to Beijing only to find they will never be a Beijinger."

And it's also given rise to a thriving, brand new sex trade, not unlike that of Thailand's bordellos -- to serve those men. Some scenes show "karaoke bars," shot with a secret camera, where a hundred women sit in a basement, waiting for a client/john to purchase their services for the evening. Cernetig says the dungeon-like grimness there is one of the things that shocked him most.

So what can we learn from watching a sped-up version of the 1960s North American revolution take place at warp speed? Cernetig says, "One is that the Chinese are more like us than you might think. And the other is that it's a very layered place and a lot of what you see about the great rise of China actually masks a lot of problems."

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Sex A Taboo To A Muslim Girl

Rosie Millard
There is no way that Selin Tamtekin could be described as even remotely low-life. Immaculate, groomed to perfection, she walks towards me on perfectly unscuffed heels, without a gleaming hair out of place or a single microfibre of dust on her pristine white shirt.

At 33 she looks after the private clients of a Mayfair contemporary art gallery, organising dinner parties for collectors and inhabiting a glittering world that thinks nothing of dropping £40,000 on a painting. Her father is Yuksel Tamtekin, one of Turkey's most revered consular-generals.

Yet she has caused outrage in Turkey after the British publication of her debut novel. The Turkish Diplomat's Daughter is a racy roman à clef, chronicling sexual affairs with a Bangladeshi landlord, a sailor and a Freddie Mercury-obsessed fantasist.

When Turkish newspapers got hold of the book, Tamtekin admitted her identity (it is written under the pseudonym Deniz Goran) and was so roundly pilloried that worried friends dubbed her "the female Salman Rushdie". Splashed on the front pages of at least four national newspapers, she was derided as a "high-class Mayfair prostitute" who was writing about her own thinly veiled sexual experiences. The media were astonished that not only a Turkish woman but one from the highest echelons of society had written so frankly about her sexuality.

A public witch-hunt went on to name and shame members of the Turkish elite whose sexual peccadil-loes were supposedly outlined by the novel. Tamtekin went into hiding for three weeks, horrified by the uproar.

Despite the title, she insists that the novel is not about her experiences.

"It's not an autobiography, although there are people and situations in it that have inspired me. In society, women are expected to play the game according to the rules. Well, I wanted to create a character who does as she pleases. It's not common for women in Turkey to be so overtly sexual," admits Tamtekin.

Although she concedes she has not received death threats, the examples of not only Rushdie, but also Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker murdered for Submission, his transgressive film about women and sex in Islamic society, are a reminder that artistic expression as social critique is not easily accepted in some Muslim countries, even the secular ones.

Tamtekin is unbowed and is furious about the hypocrisy. "It's not as if no one has sex in Turkey. Of course women have sexually active lives, but they always make sure that no one hears about them. Women aren't able to stand out as individuals and talk openly about sex or fancying men," she says.

Turkey might pride itself on its secularity, but it seems as if the notion of a sexually active woman is as utterly taboo there as it is in far more fundamentalist Muslim countries. Tamtekin, who has a BA in history of art from University College London, is the first Turkish Muslim woman to publish a sexually explicit book. The reaction to what would seem pretty mainstream in Britain and the rest of Europe, where even such salacious series as Sex and the City have become accepted, shows how wide the gulf in attitudes still is between Turkey and its neighbours.

The process of Turkish accession to the European Union may well require a wholesale modernisation of the country's attitudes to women and freedom of expression. "There are no tele-vision programmes where people just chat about sex, for example," says Tamtekin. "Where I am from in Istan-bul, it's not that restrictive. I come from a secular, liberal background. But a high number of people living in Turkey regard virginity as crucial and would not contemplate the idea that their daughter might have sex before marriage."

As her book roundly attests, this morality is often utter hypocrisy; Tamtekin vividly describes a society where young women may well be sexually active but who are encouraged to visit a back-street doctor for a bit of "corrective" surgery before marriage.

She writes of a society where in remote rural areas incest is an unspoken but present horror and where, even among the middle classes, "sex, especially female sexuality and homo-sexuality, is still regarded as taboo - it's always done in a highly intricate manner behind closed doors".

From the subsequent furore, one can only surmise that many of her observations on Turkish society are spot on; even her father, the worldly wise diplomat, has stopped speaking to her since her book came out. "When a female Turkish author writes about sex in such a big way, that's a big issue," says Tamtekin sadly.

Given all the fuss, why did she go on with the publication of her novel in Turkish, which is now imminent? "Before signing the Turkish agreement I did have my doubts," she admits. "But if you have an idea and have created something, you have to take a stand and go all the way. I'm not insisting on imposing my own ideas, but everyone has a right to an opinion. I believe I have a right to publish this book in Turkey. And I will stand by my book."

She says that when writing it she just let her imagination wander. "I mean, why do people make such a big deal of it," she says. "We all have sex, everyone does. Sex is part of life and we should come to terms with it. From an early age, my father always taught me there was no taboo in art. And so I took him at his word."

Somehow I suspect that did not go down too well with the former consular-general. "Well, I sent him a letter reminding him that he always told me I was an artist with a great imagination. Of course, my mother asked me why I didn't write a novel all about flowers and birds."

Her novel is a lively gauntlet thrown down by a single woman championing casual sex. It encourages women to indulge in sex openly and freely and even dares to cast a sceptical look at marital fidelity. And it's not just about Turkey.

As she writes: "I never seem to understand why society considers sexually liberated women as such a big threat. Even in London, as a woman you need to play down your sexuality, otherwise people see you as some sort of a nuisance. I find it insane that there is still a majority out there who actually believe men . . . have a much higher sexual drive than women."

While The Turkish Diplomat's Daughter (Burning House, £10.99) may not be perfect literary fiction, the ideas that it suggests are quietly revolutionary. "I would like to be able to change opinion a bit," says Tamtekin. "I am not saying every woman should be leaping around, but they should have more freedom to do so if they wish to. And be open about it."

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Hong Kong Sex Workers Attacking Foreign Businessmen

Forty-four mostly foreign businessmen have reported being drugged and robbed by sex workers in a Hong Kong red-light district over the last three years, police said this week.

Police are continuing to investigate the possible poisoning deaths of two Americans at the Grand Hyatt hotel, also in the red-light Wan Chai district, over a week ago. Reports said the two men, identified only as Paul, 45, and Richard, 51, had been to a night club before returning to their room with two women.

The men's slumped bodies were discovered the next day by cleaning staff.

Police have yet to say what caused the men's deaths, although they have not ruled out that they were drugged. The Standard newspaper reported that a mixture of cocaine and heroin was found in their blood, but police have refused to comment, saying toxicology tests were continuing.

A Filipino women arrested shortly after the bodies were found has been released, but will appear in court on charges of violating her visa by moonlighting as a prostitute, a police spokesman said.

Police said Sunday that at least 44 men had reported incidents of drugging and robbery over the last three years in Wan Chai, where many nightclubs are easy places to meet Filipino, Indonesian and mainland Chinese prostitutes.

Some victims couldn't remember much and only made reports days or weeks after the event when they received their bank statements and found unexplained withdrawals from cash machines, a police spokeswoman said.

Other victims discovered cash and other valuables missing when they awoke in their hotel room, she said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with policy.

Police were aware of the problem and of the possibility that some type of date-rape drug may have been used, she said.

She said police were giving crime prevention advice to bars and hotels in the area and working with the immigration department.

In one of the most high-profile cases, a senior Finnish policeman, Kari Juhani Koivuniemi, died of a heart attack in a luxury hotel after being given the drug Rohypnol in 2003. A woman thought to have been a mainland Chinese prostitute was suspected of giving him the drug, but she was never found.

Wan Chai was once one of Hong Kong's most notorious districts for sex and drugs, but has undergone a makeover in recent years. It remains a popular place for U.S. sailors, tourists and overseas businessmen.

Although prostitution is legal in Hong Kong, many of the women are either illegal immigrants from mainland China, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, or moonlighting from their day jobs.

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