Taxpayer-Funded Study Pays Minors To Report Gay Sexual Activity Without Parental Permission
The government is now your child’s guardian.
The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $8 million on a research study that pays gay and transgender boys as young as 13 hundreds of dollars to report their sexual behavior on a mobile app, all without parental permission.
NIH-funded researchers at Columbia University offer up to $275 to gay and transgender boys, between the ages of 13 and 18, to document their sexual activity on MyPEEPS Mobile, including whether they have “condomless anal sex.” The NIH spent more than $300,000 to develop the app in 2012 and 2013, and $7.9 million since 2016 for Columbia researchers to study the data it collects, according to a government spending database. The app for “young men who have sex with men” provides “interactive games and activities” designed to teach participating teenagers how to minimize risk in their sex lives, according to the research grant and resulting study.
While researchers say MyPEEPS Mobile provides educational information for gay adolescents on how to have safe sex, some medical experts say there are ethical concerns. According to one of the program’s studies, teenaged participants in the pilot trial were “recruited” to use the app in six different cities and traveled to attend “interventions” to discuss the sex education program, all without parental permission.
“There is an ethical balance between investigators’ desire to enroll children in a study and the need to support parents in caring for their children,” Dr. Monique Wubbenhorst, former deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the Washington Free Beacon. “There are additional concerns that minor children in this study may be engaged in sexually exploitative relationships with older males, sex trafficking/child prostitution, violence, and sexual abuse, from which they should be protected.”
Wubbenhorst, a former member of the Duke University Health System Institutional Review Board, said minors are considered a vulnerable population and are unable to give informed consent in research studies.