According to the Washington Free Beacon, the National Institutes for Health has spent $8 million in taxpayer dollars to study sexual behavior in gay and transgender boys as young as 13, without any parental permission.
In 2013, Columbia University received a $300,000 grant to develop a mobile app which tracks sexual behavior. They have received $7.9 million since 2016. Under the guise of educating teens through (interactive games) how to have "safe sex," the MyPEEPS app tracks their sexual activity, including how often and whether they have "condomless anal sex." Alarmingly, there is no oversight mechanism to determine if these minors are the victims of exploitative sex with older males, or even being prostituted and/or trafficked.
Minors are considered a vulnerable population incapable of giving informed consent in research studies, however, the project leader, Dr. Rebecca Schnall, said her team was able to obtain a parental permission waiver from the institutional review board because the study "poses minimal risk to its subjects."
This line in the article should alarm parents everywhere: Teens 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.
Imagine learning that your 13 year old son traveled (without your knowledge) to a meeting with adults who taught him "how to have gay sex safely" and then invited him to report his sexual behaviors using an app on his phone.
Under what rubric is this OK?