Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged crime

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-against-women-hate-crime.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?
  • Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with — the catcalling and lewd gestures — connects directly with more serious abuses.
  • “Men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women.”
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.
  • Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.
  • London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
  • In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated
  • In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom
  • the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.
  • “Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,”
  • “Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”
  • In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a “sexual addiction,” according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.
  • “What can’t be forgotten is the hate crime statute says ‘because of gender’ as well,”
  • “The angle of misogyny has to be looked at.”
  • Do ‘sweat the small stuff’
  • As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent.
  • Women spoke of all of the things that they — like Ms. Everard — did “right,” including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so — and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations.
  • Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.
  • Their stories confirm that violence against women isn’t an aberration, but a “global public health” crisis of “epidemic proportions,”
  • In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK.
  • These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.
  • Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence,
  • UN Women’s initiative to end gender-based violence.
  • “We’re not joining the dots, nobody is making connections,
  • “There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses.”
  • a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were “being oversensitive.
  • In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent.
  • a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.
  • There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats
  • a spike in gender-based violence — particularly domestic violence — correlates with “rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly.”
  • A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views
  • “If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis.”
  • As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered
  • “The term ‘violence against women’ is a passive construction — there’s no active agent, it’s a bad thing that happens to women,” he explained, but it’s as if “nobody’s doing it to them.”
  • “shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women.”
  • The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. “There’s this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators — that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp,
  • “But if you accept the concept that it’s systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable.
  • “And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it.”
  • “Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime — it’s unfortunate, it’s ugly and we wish people wouldn’t do it, but you can’t punish somebody for saying something,” he said.
  • In other words, they’d have to show that the man assaulted her because she’s a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.
  • In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states.
  • Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints.
  • But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women’s rights groups argue wouldn’t do much to prompt deeper cultural change.
  • . Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.
  • “So what’s the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’”
kushnerha

The Rise of Hate Search - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-rise-of-hate-search.html

new york times islamophobia terrorism language

shared by kushnerha on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.
  • the rest of America searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe,” “migraine symptoms” and “Cowboys roster.”
  • People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • In 2014, according to the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes represented 16.3 percent of the total of 1,092 reported offenses. Anti-Semitism still led the way as a motive for hate crimes, at 58.2 percent.
  • Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.
  • If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
  • How can these Google searches track Islamophobia so well? Who searches for “I hate Muslims” anyway?We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night’s game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.
  • It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It’s that it’s exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States.
  • “If someone is willing to say ‘I hate them’ or ‘they disgust me,’ we know that those emotions are as good a predictor of behavior as actual intent,” said Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton
  • Google searches seem to suffer from selection bias: Instead of asking a random sample of Americans how they feel, you just get information from those who are motivated to search. But this restriction may actually help search data predict hate crimes.
  • “Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes.”
  • While the vast majority of Muslim Americans won’t be victims of hate crimes, few escape the “constant sense of fear and paranoia” that they or their loved ones might be next, said Rana Ibrahem
  • What about the other side of the coin — compassion and understanding? Do they stand a chance against hate?Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. “Who is Muhammad?” “what do Muslims believe?” and “what does the Quran say?” for instance, were no match for intolerance.
  • Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.
  • The search data also tells us that changes in Americans’ policy concerns have been dramatic. They happened, quite literally, within minutes of the terror attacks.Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans’ searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could “help,” “volunteer” or “aid.” The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.
  • One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the “contact hypothesis”: If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate. We did not find support for this in the data — in fact, we found evidence for the opposite.
  • That’s evidence for the dominance of the “racial threat” hypothesis, which predicts that proximity breeds tension, not trust.
  • Another solution might be for leaders to talk about the importance of tolerance and the irrationality of hatred, as President Obama did in his Oval Office speech last Sunday night. He asked Americans to reject discrimination and religious tests for immigration. The reactions to his speech offer an excellent opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work.
  • There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
  • On the whole, though, the response to the president’s speech shows that appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire.
Javier E

Is crime a virus or a beast? How metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions [Repost] : ... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...e-our-thoughts-and-decisions-2

metaphor science problem thinking decision-making bias

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • how influential metaphors can be. They can change the way we try to solve big problems like crime. They can shift the sources that we turn to for information. They can polarise our opinions to a far greater extent than, say, our political leanings. And most of all, they do it under our noses
  • In the first report, crime was described as a “wild beast preying on the city” and “lurking in neighbourhoods”. After reading these words, 75% of the students put forward solutions that involved enforcement or punishment,
  • The second report was exactly the same, except it described crime as a “virus infecting the city” and “plaguing” neighbourhoods. After reading this version, only 56% opted for more enforcement, while 44% suggested social reforms.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The metaphors affected how the students saw the problem, and how they proposed to fix it.
  • So metaphors can influence opinions and choices, but how strong are their effects really? At the end of their experiments, Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked the students to state their gender and political affiliation. As you might expect, men and Republicans were more likely to emphasise enforcement, while women and Democrats leant towards social reforms. But these factors only created differences of around 8 to 9 percentage points. The metaphors, on the other hand, created shifts of between 18 to 22 percentage points!
  • it’s virtually impossible to talk about complex issues like crime, the economy, health and so on, without resorting to metaphors.
  • bad metaphors can do a great disservice to the public understanding of science. The idea of the “evolutionary ladder” perpetuates the myth that evolution is about a steady linear march towards complexity.
Maria Delzi

How Dangerous Neighborhoods Make You Feel Paranoid | TIME.com - 0 views

healthland.time.com/...orhoods-make-you-feel-paranoid

shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Simply walking through a sketchy-looking neighborhood can make you feel more paranoid and lower your trust in others
  • In a study published in the journal PeerJ, student volunteers who spent less than an hour in a more dangerous neighborhood showed significant changes in some of their social perceptions.
  • The researchers’ goal was to investigate the relationship between lower income neighborhoods and reduced trust and poor mental health.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • from Newcastle University in the UK, wanted to determine whether the connection was due to people reacting to the environment around them, or because those who are generally less trusting were more likely to live in troubled areas. Prior research showed that kids who grew up in such neighborhoods were less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to develop stress that can lead to depression.
  • The study took 50 students, sent half of them to a low income, high crime neighborhood and the other half to an affluent neighborhood with little crime.
  • Before the students ventured into their respective areas, the researchers interviewed the neighborhood residents and found that residents of the high-crime neighborhood harbored more feelings of paranoia and lower levels of social trust compared to the residents of the other neighborhood.
  • The students in the study were not from either neighborhood, and did not know what the study was about. They were were dropped off by a taxi and told to deliver envelopes containing a packet of questions to a list of residential addresses. They spent 45 minutes walking around their assigned neighborhood distributing the envelopes. When the students returned, the researchers surveyed them about their experience, their feelings of trust, and their feelings of paranoia.
  • Despite the short amount of time they spent in the neighborhoods, the students picked up the prevailing social attitudes of the residents living in those environments; those who went to the more dangerous neighborhood scored higher on measures of paranoia and lower on measures of trust compared to the other group, just as the residents had.
  • Not only that, but their levels of reported paranoia and trust were indistinguishable from the residents who spent years living there.
  • That came as an intriguing surprise to other experts. Ingrid Gould Ellen, the director of the Urban Planning Program at New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, studies how the make-up of neighborhoods can impact the attitudes and interactions of people who live in them
  • found that kids who live on blocks where violent crimes occurred the week before they took a standardized test performed worse on those tests than students from similar backgrounds who were not exposed to a violent crime in their neighborhood before their exam.
  • paranoia and lack of trust set in after just a short time in the more troubled neighborhood suggested how powerful the influence of these environments can be.
  • For urban planners, the findings confirm what most probably understood instinctively — that people do tend to make snap judgments about both their environments and the people in them based on visual cues such as broken windows and abandoned houses. But the results also show how these cues can influence deeper perceptions and mental states as well.
Javier E

Most Americans believe politicians' heated rhetoric can lead to violence, report finds ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ssive-rhetoric-violence-report

dangerous speech language racism populism provocateur

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • A report published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday found that 78% of Americans believed such rhetoric from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely. A similar majority, 73% of those surveyed, believed elected officials should avoid heated language because it encourages violence.
  • Among those surveyed, 55% said Trump had changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse. Given a list of positive and negative sentiments, ranging from “hopeful” to “concerned”, a large majority said the president’s statements often or sometimes made them “concerned”, “confused” and “embarrassed”.
  • The most popular positive reaction, from 54% of those polled, was “entertained”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Recent studies have nonetheless pointed to an increase in crimes against some groups following Trump’s White House run and election victory. After years of falling, hate crimes have risen in the last three years. One analysis from the Washington Post found that counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes. Student surveys from Virginia found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump.
  • Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech” – meaning rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another – after years of studying speech used to instigate atrocities like the Holocaust.
  • “He absolutely uses the language of threat,” Benesch said. “He describes non-citizens as ‘invaders’ and as an ‘invasion’ – that is highly characteristic language of dangerous speech.
  • “It will be only when people have enough courage and love of country to call out dangerous rhetoric on their own side that we will see norms shifting in the right direction,” Benesch said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.”
aprossi

474 charged with crimes related to theft of Covid relief funds - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crimes theft funds Covid-19 knowledge social media research

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • 474 charged with crimes related to theft of Covid relief funds
  • Federal investigators identified more than half a billion dollars in fraud and charged 474 people with crimes related to theft of money from US Covid relief programs, the Justice Department announced Friday.
  • The announcement came one year after the passage of the $2 trillion economic aid legislation known as the CARES Act, which aimed to help people and businesses suffering financial losses in the coronavirus pandemic.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the Justice Department says it has charged 120 people with crimes related PPP fraud.
  • In one Texas case, a man pleaded guilty to seeking $24.8 million in PPP loans using the names of 11 different companies to make loan applications to 11 lenders. He managed to obtain $17.3 million in forgivable loans and used the money to buy homes, jewelry and luxury cars.
annabaldwin_

A Marine Attacked an Iraqi Restaurant. But Was It a Hate Crime or PTSD? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rodriguez-marine-portland.html

Marine PTSD violence hate-crime Iraqi

shared by annabaldwin_ on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • After a Marine attacked an Iraqi restaurant inPortland, Ore., his family said he was provoked bytrauma, not hate, and that he needed help, not jail time.
  • PORTLAND, Ore
  • The Iraqi family who ran it felt welcome in this eclectic city.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • After about a half-hour, he got up, walked over to the cash register, began cursing about Iraq, and threw a chair at a waiter’s head, sending him dazed to the floor.
  • Portland has been on edge over a sharp increase in hate crimes this year.
  • As the case unfolded over the summer, it raised questions about what constitutes a hate crime and how effectively the legal system treats combat veterans who suffer from PTSD.
  • There is no evidence that combat veterans are more prone to committing hate crimes, but studies suggest combat veterans with PTSD commit violent acts at a much higher rate than civilians.
Emily Horwitz

Long Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-contributing-to-poverty.html

human sciences economics prison poverty

shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    A very eye-opening (albeit very long) article about the devastating effects that a stint in prison can have on a family. The article noted that many men who are sent to jail are often given sentences that are too long, so that, by the time they are released, they are way past the average age for committing crimes, and have missed out on valuable life experiences that could have aided them in getting a job. As a result, many of these men find it difficult to get a job, falling into a cycle of poverty, and perhaps, again, to crime. Additionally, for those who have spouses and/or children, time in prison can drastically harm the economic status of a man's family; without the extra income, these families may become homeless, as did the woman, Ms. Hamilton, in the article. Especially intriguing to me was the racial implications of the article; the author pointed out that African-American men are more likely to be incarcerated than they are to have a job, if they did not receive a high school diploma. In terms of TOK, this article showed that all the facets of the human sciences are related - from social problems to economic problems, times in prison can have a devastating effect on not only the jailed man, but his family as well.
nataliedepaulo1

Psychologists Find An Alarming Long-Term Effect Of Teen Sleep Deprivation | The Huffing... - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ts_us_58b70880e4b019d36d0fec64

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • People comparing current crime rates with those of past decades tend to agree that today’s numbers should be lower. And new research points to a relatively easy way to do that: Help teens get more sleep.
  • Lack of sleep is only one risk factor that may affect an individual’s odds of becoming a criminal, Raine said, noting genetic and social factors. “But sleep is something we can do something about,” he said.
Javier E

Regulating Sex - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-shulevitz-regulating-sex.html

sexual ethics law consent psychology rape

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • THIS is a strange moment for sex in America. We’ve detached it from pregnancy, matrimony and, in some circles, romance. At least, we no longer assume that intercourse signals the start of a relationship.
  • But the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t. And we wonder how to define rape. Is it a violent assault or a violation of personal autonomy? Is a person guilty of sexual misconduct if he fails to get a clear “yes” through every step of seduction and consummation?
  • According to the doctrine of affirmative consent — the “yes means yes” rule — the answer is, well, yes, he is.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,”
  • About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement,
  • And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.
  • But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores.
  • Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?)
  • It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.
  • Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies.
  • “If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”
  • The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.
  • Some new crimes outlined in the proposed code, for example, assume consent to be meaningless under conditions of unequal power. Consensual sex between professionals (therapists, lawyers and the like) and their patients and clients, for instance, would be a fourth-degree felony, punishable by significant time in prison.
  • most of these occupations already have codes of professional conduct, and victims also have recourse in the civil courts. Miscreants, she says, “should be drummed out of the profession or sued for malpractice.”
  • It’s important to remember that people convicted of sex crimes may not only go to jail, they can wind up on a sex-offender registry, with dire and lasting consequences.
  • We shouldn’t forget the harm done to American communities by the national passion for incarceration, either. In a letter to the American Law Institute, Ms. Smith listed several disturbing statistics: roughly one person in 100 behind bars, one in 31 under correctional supervision
  • the case for affirmative consent is “compelling,” he says. Mr. Schulhofer has argued that being raped is much worse than having to endure that awkward moment when one stops to confirm that one’s partner is happy to continue. Silence or inertia, often interpreted as agreement, may actually reflect confusion, drunkenness or “frozen fright,” a documented physiological response in which a person under sexual threat is paralyzed by terror
  • To critics who object that millions of people are having sex without getting unqualified assent and aren’t likely to change their ways, he’d reply that millions of people drive 65 miles per hour despite a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the law still saves lives. As long as “people know what the rules of the road are,” he says, “the overwhelming majority will comply with them.”
  • He understands that the law will have to bring a light touch to the refashioning of sexual norms, which is why the current draft of the model code suggests classifying penetration without consent as a misdemeanor, a much lesser crime than a felony.
  • This may all sound reasonable, but even a misdemeanor conviction goes on the record as a sexual offense and can lead to registration
  • An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead
  • if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.
  • “It’s an unworkable standard,” says the Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk. “It’s only workable if we assume it’s not going to be enforced, by and large.” But that’s worrisome too. Selectively enforced laws have a nasty history of being used to harass people deemed to be undesirable, because of their politics, race or other reasons.
  • it’s probably just a matter of time before “yes means yes” becomes the law in most states. Ms. Suk told me that she and her colleagues have noticed a generational divide between them and their students. As undergraduates, they’re learning affirmative consent in their mandatory sexual-respect training sessions, and they come to “believe that this really is the best way to define consent, as positive agreement,” she says. When they graduate and enter the legal profession, they’ll probably reshape the law to reflect that belief.
  • Sex may become safer for some, but it will be a whole lot more anxiety-producing for others.
Javier E

The Last Cosby Defenders Throw In The Towel - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ew-cosby-revelations-quaaludes

rape sexism sexual abuse culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • people treat sexual abuse differently than other crimes. Because the crime reveals icky things about our society and our continuing problem of gendered violence, a lot of people simply refuse to see it for what it is, either going into deep denial or holding accusations of rape to a much higher standard of evidence than they would any other crime.
  • The Cosby situation is a classic example of this. Public Policy Polling found, back in January, that despite the testimony of dozens of women, 41 percent of Americans remained unsure about Cosby’s guilt. Another 20 percent outright preferred to believe all those women were lying rather than admit that he probably did it. A minority of Americans—39 percent—were able to look at all these testimonials and accept the likely truth that he did it.
  • there’s a felony conviction in only 5 percent of rape cases. That is well beyond “innocent until proven guilty” and shows that eyewitness testimony is simply disregarded in rape cases to an extent that isn’t true in all other crimes. Fixing this situation requires everyone—not just cops and judges, but ordinary Americans who might sit a jury one day—to rethink our attitudes towards rape accusations.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • we should also learn to check that tendency to just immediately assume rape accusers are lying, a tendency that’s so out of control that many people believe or at least entertain the possibility that 30 women could somehow be conspiring to lie together for reasons unknown.
Javier E

What 'White Privilege' Really Means - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...t-white-privilege-really-means

white privilege racism stereotypes race broken windows culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”
  • My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.
  • Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.
  • In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first.
  • How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys? N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate.
  • Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.
  • Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted? N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries.
  • Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting.
  • So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.
  • Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed.
  • The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. 
  • that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do.
  • Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery.
  • Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege.
  • Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be.
  • race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.
sissij

Is Crime Forensics Flawed? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...is-crime-forensics-flawed

science research bias

shared by sissij on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • This is concerning because in recent years, time honored methods such as fingerprinting, hair and fiber analysis, firearm analysis, and others, have come under intense scrutiny.
  • Sessions plans to replace the commission with an internal body called the department crime task force, headed by a senior forensic adviser who will report to him directly. No one has been named for the position as of yet.
  • Since 1989, DNA evidence has exonerated 329 individuals. Bite mark and hair analysis—part of what is known as pattern forensics, helped convict 25% of them.
  • sissij on 21 Apr 17
     
    I have long been interested in forensics. There was a late night show called forensic files that I really like to watch. As I learned in biology that human fingerprint is very unique, I have never imagined that there are actually serious flaws in forensics. As long as there is human involvement in this activity, it couldn't be one hundred percent reliable. --Sissi (4/21/2017)
ilanaprincilus06

Are shows like Dexter to blame for inspiring violent crimes? | Steve Lillebuen | Opinio... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...inal-season-tv-violence-murder

TV Dexter crime pop culture

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • serious crime has always been tied to pop culture.
  • The attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan was even linked to watching Taxi Driver.
  • But the scientific evidence backing up such a link has never been very clear, leading many to quite rightly discount the level of influence.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • how Twitchell's crimes challenge this new way of thinking that totally exonerates pop culture from contributing to real-life violence.
  • In 2008, he had been completing a Dexter-inspired film production when police charged him with a missing man's murder and an attack on another. An unimaginable court case then revealed all: the filmmaker had re-enacted his horror script in real-life.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      How do you regulate something like this? Many people like myself, watch these shows for the plot lines or topics addressed. People would eventually maneuver around watching shows like these even if they were banned/cancelled.
  • This didn't seem like a case of insanity, mental illness or a drug-induced psychosis. Twitchell was a married father with no history of violence or criminal convictions before he transformed seemingly overnight into a would-be serial killer.
  • We just need to distinguish what it really means to be inspired rather than who is responsible.
  • Like other tragedies before it, this finger-pointing stems from an intense need to find tangible explanations for horrific violence when the answers can be far more layered, far more complex.
  • Millions around the world are now watching. The uncomfortable truth remains that so is Mark Twitchell and many others who are like him.
katherineharron

Central Park confrontation sends an ugly message (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.
  • That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice
  • She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.
  • Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.
  • "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."
  • "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"
  • Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.
  • She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.
  • Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.
  • We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.
  • To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.
  • Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."
  • Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.
  • let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.
proudsa

Gun Supporters To Obama: Restrictions Aren't Worth It If Every Death Won't Be Prevented - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ntrol_568f11cde4b0cad15e6443df

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • She questioned the ability of a piece of legislation or an executive order to deter those with malicious intent, and asked if it would be better to focus on the positive changes throughout the country, like the ongoing decline in violent crime. 
  • "What would you have done to prevent these mass shootings ... and how do we get those with mental illness and criminals [from getting weapons]?
  • Obama cut off moderator Anderson Cooper when the CNN host asked if there was any truth to the conspiracy that the president was after the country's guns.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Obama, who is kicking off his last year in office, has emphasized that this problem could last beyond his presidency, and is working to outline the next steps that need to be taken.
Javier E

The Rediscovery of Character - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-rediscovery-of-character.html

character morality social science psychology crime prevention

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • broken windows was only a small piece of what Wilson contributed, and he did not consider it the center of his work. The best way to understand the core Wilson is by borrowing the title of one of his essays: “The Rediscovery of Character.”
  • When Wilson began looking at social policy, at the University of Redlands, the University of Chicago and Harvard, most people did not pay much attention to character. The Marxists looked at material forces. Darwinians at the time treated people as isolated products of competition. Policy makers of right and left thought about how to rearrange economic incentives. “It is as if it were a mark of sophistication for us to shun the language of morality in discussing the problems of mankind,” he once recalled.
  • during the 1960s and ’70s, he noticed that the nation’s problems could not be understood by looking at incentives
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “At root,” Wilson wrote in 1985 in The Public Interest, “in almost every area of important concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers or voters and public officials.”
  • When Wilson wrote about character and virtue, he didn’t mean anything high flown or theocratic. It was just the basics, befitting a man who grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1940s: Behave in a balanced way. Think about the long-term consequences of your actions. Cooperate. Be decent.
  • Wilson argued that American communities responded to the stresses of industrialization by fortifying self-control.
  • he emphasized that character was formed in groups. As he wrote in “The Moral Sense,” his 1993 masterpiece, “Order exists because a system of beliefs and sentiments held by members of a society sets limits to what those members can do.”
  • Wilson set out to learn how groups created a good order, why that order sometimes frayed.
  • In “The Moral Sense,” he brilliantly investigated the virtuous sentiments we are born with and how they are cultivated by habit. Wilson’s broken windows theory was promoted in an essay with George Kelling called “Character and Community.” Wilson and Kelling didn’t think of crime primarily as an individual choice. They saw it as something that emerged from the social psychology of a community. When neighborhoods feel disorganized and scary, crime increases.
  • It was habituated by practicing good manners, by being dependable, punctual and responsible day by day.
  • But America responded to the stresses of the information economy by reducing the communal buttresses to self-control, with unfortunate results.
  • Wilson was not a philosopher. He was a social scientist. He just understood that people are moral judgers and moral actors, and he reintegrated the vocabulary of character into discussions of everyday life.
Javier E

Politics Makes Morons of Us All | Mother Jones - 1 views

www.motherjones.com/...politics-destroys-math-ability

motivated reasoning science numeracy bias politics reasoning

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Kahan ran the exact same test with the exact same data, except this time the question was about gun bans and crime levels. Half of the time, he presented data suggesting that a gun ban increased crime, while the other half of the time the data suggested that a gun ban decreased crime. And guess what? Among the subset of test subjects who were very good at math, they suddenly got really stupid if they didn't like the answer they got.
  • But in another sense, it really doesn't matter at all. These days, even relatively simple public policy issues can only be properly analyzed using statistical techniques that are beyond the understanding of virtually all of us. So the fact that ideology destroys our personal ability to do math hardly matters. In practice, nearly all of us have to rely on the word of experts when it comes to this kind of stuff, and there's never any shortage of experts to crunch the numbers and produce whatever results our respective tribes demand.
  • How big a deal is this? In one sense, it's even worse than it looks. Aside from being able to tell that one number is bigger than another, this is literally about the easiest possible data analysis problem you can pose. If ideologues actively turn off their minds even for something this simple, there's really no chance of changing their minds with anything even modestly more sophisticated. This is something that most of us pretty much knew already, but it's a little chilling to see it so glaringly confirmed.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We believe what we want to believe, and neither facts nor evidence ever changes that much.
carolinewren

Study finds news media may influence racial bias | WBFO - 0 views

news.wbfo.org/...edia-may-influence-racial-bias

media influence bias

shared by carolinewren on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • news media may influence racial bias.
  • there's already a focus of crime in local television news but of that crime African Americans tend to be over represented compared to their actual crime rates. So I began to think, well if this is going on, if we're seeing a lot of negative stereotypes within the news media, what are the lasting impacts of that over time?" 
  • "There's been a lot of research done that generally suggested that African Americans are over represented as criminals on the news,"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The study found viewers who watch more local TV news demonstrate more unconscious negative attitudes toward African Americans.
  • Implicit Association Test to approach the question to determine if there may be an unconscious bias at play. The Implicit Association Test is a word association test
  • "You actually have images of African Americans and Caucasians flashed on the screen with words that you have to sort. Sometimes good words will be sorted with African American, sometimes good will be sorted with Caucasian and same with bad. What you find is generally people who are bias, it takes them longer to pare what good is supposed to be with African American than good with Caucasian. So that gets a hidden connection in the mind where negativity is generally associated with African Americans and positivity generally associated with being Caucasians."
Javier E

Why Trump's 'animals' remark should make everyone angry - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-a4a4-c070ef53f315_story.html

trump dehumanization psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 24 May 18 - No Cached
  • why did so many people get so angry when President Trump said “These are animals” in response to a remark about a gang called MS-13?
  • Obviously, because he wasn’t just stating a simple fact; he was using those words to demote those people from the human race.
  • And by the transitive property, to demote immigrants from the empathy and consideration that decent people extend to other human beings.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • there is a plausible reading of Trump’s words that refers to the gang, or similar criminals, not to immigrants in general. But in light of Trump’s history, that surface reading isn’t enough.
  • the “animals” controversy illustrates a broader truth: It’s a common human failing to characterize outgroups by the worst examples we can find while dismissing our own bad apples as isolated minorities who have nothing to do with the rest of us.
  • in the succeeding days, he has seemed obsessed with repeating the word “animals” every time the social media storm threatened to die down.
  • He’s less careful when immigrants are involved. Immigrants actually have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans , yet Trump sure seems to spend an awful lot of time talking about the small fraction who are criminals.
  • It’s instructive to compare Trump’s harsh language about immigrant “animals” with his response to a direct question about a different group of people behaving badly. After white nationalists staged marches in Charlottesville, culminating in a death, Trump was at pains to distinguish the Nazis from the “people in that group that were there to innocently protest.”
  • Consider how conservatives feel, for example, when the left focuses disproportionate energy on the tiny portion of the population that belongs to the alt-right or to white-nationalist groups.
  • Or consider the lingering indignation over Barack Obama’s suggestion that in some small towns in the Midwest and Pennsylvania, where the economy has been devastated by de-industrialization, some people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
  • Obama wasn’t making an abstract observation about human psychology; he was implying that while Democrats come to their views through thoughtful reflection, the Republican rubes simply react to environmental stimulus, like amoebas.
1 - 20 of 146 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page