Sociology

Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War'

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:59:39 +0000

Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War' Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/20/2024 - 11:59

Tracy Fehr

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims

Nepal’s attempt to deliver justice and accountability following the country’s decade-long civil war froze more than two years ago with little progress—but a recent development has raised hopes that it could soon be revived and revamped.

In August 2024, the country’s parliament passed a long-awaited bill that sets the stage for appointing a third —and hopefully final—round of truth commissions to carry out investigations into the more than 66,000 conflict victim cases that have been collecting dust since the last commissions ended in July 2022.

The two main bodies involved—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons—were created by Nepal’s government in 2015 to deal with crimes that were committed during Nepal’s conflict, commonly known as “The People’s War.”

Tracy Fehr (right, with a woman living in Gorkha, Nepal) is a PhD student in the CU Boulder Department of Sociology who researches Nepal's transitional justice process. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

In 1996, Maoist rebels began an insurgency against the Nepali government in western Nepal that escalated into a 10-year civil war across the country. According to United Nations estimates, the conflict resulted in the deaths of 13,000, with 1,300 people still missing and an unknown number of torture and conflict-related sexual violence victims.

The People’s War ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord that, among other obligations, required the Nepal government to create a high-level truth commission.

To date, the commissions have completed two rounds. The first, which collected the majority of the victim cases, began with a two-year mandate in 2015 that the government extended by an additional year three times. The second round, mandated from 2020 to 2022, was shut down for months due to COVID-19.

The commissions were tasked with three main objectives: to reveal the truth about gross human rights violations; to create an environment of peace, trust and reconciliation; and to make legal recommendations for victim reparations and perpetrators from the conflict.

However, despite seven years of work, little progress toward any of these objectives has been made. No case investigations have been completed, no perpetrators have been held accountable, and no victim reparations have been distributed. Reconciliation in a country that still bears the scars of conflict remains a distant thought.

From 2022 to 2023, I conducted research in Nepal about the country’s transitional justice process. During my research, I heard people refer to Nepal’s prolonged process as “a judicial merry-go-round,” “Groundhog Day” and “transitional injustice.”

Many Nepali people I spoke to believe that the government has strategically prolonged the transitional justice process to avoid accountability, hoping that people will eventually tire of the process and forget. Indeed, a heavy cloud of hopelessness and frustration had settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases plagued the first two rounds, severely slowing progress and impairing the commissions’ functionality and local trust.

Justice ‘adjourned’

In 2022, I interviewed a conflict victim in the rolling hills of Rolpa, in the country’s west, where the conflict began. She had submitted her case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seven years before but had heard nothing since. “In a way, our complaints are in adjournment,” she said. “They have not ended, yet they are not being forwarded either.”

She was one of approximately 300 women who officially submitted a case of conflict-related sexual violence to the TRC.

A woman looks over the village of Thabang, Rolpa, Nepal. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

However, a former truth commissioner told me that this number may be as high as 1,000 because some victims of sexual violence submitted their case as “torture” to distance themselves from the stigma and shame often associated with sexual violence in Nepal.

I also met leaders at several women’s organizations who have documented thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Nepal, but they have not yet submitted these cases to the TRC due to ongoing concerns of confidentiality and trust.

The lack of progress by Nepal’s truth commissions suggests that they are being used to carry out what I refer to as “transitional justice ritualism”—the act of a state creating hollow institutions designed without the support to produce actual consequences.

As part of this transitional justice ritualism, I believe that Nepal’s post-conflict coalition government has, up to this point, been using the truth commissions as a political tool to show the international community that it is upholding its obligations under the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord and to avoid universal jurisdiction—that is, the international legal principal that allows other nations to prosecute individuals for serious human rights violations regardless of where the crimes took place.

The threat of universal jurisdiction has been a particular concern for alleged perpetrators in Nepal since 2013 when Colonel Kumar Lama, a former Royal Nepal Army commander during Nepal’s conflict, was apprehended in the United Kingdom on charges of torture and war crimes. While Lama was acquitted there due to a lack of evidence, the threat of universal jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrators in Nepal still looms for those in positions of power during the civil war.

A contested step forward

But a recent change in the political leadership of Nepal and the passing of the new law, which amended the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, mark an opportunity for the government to move beyond transitional justice lip service.

Under the amended law, a third round of appointed commissioners will operate for a period of four years – hopefully enough time to complete their unaccomplished mandates. A government committee is working to appoint new truth commissioners before the country’s major holiday Dashain in October 2024. The amended act also provides for creating specialized subunits within the TRC—concerning truth-seeking and investigations, reparations, sexual violence and rape, and victims coordination—that could potentially improve the streamlining of resources and move some of these stalled parts of the commissions forward.

Maoist victims protest in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2023. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

Nonetheless, hope has been tempered by apprehension and uncertainty. Some victim groups support the legislation, while others protest provisions they argue could undermine justice, especially by protecting perpetrators with decreased sentencing.

International human rights groups have recognized positive and long-awaited amendments to the existing law, but also warn of serious accountability gaps that could undermine the transitional justice process.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the revised law was “an important step forward” but added: “It is imperative that the legislation is interpreted and implemented in a manner that upholds victims’ rights, including to truth, justice and reparations, and that guarantees accountability in full compliance with international human rights standards.”

Potential for international support

Although it seems the transitional justice process will still be Nepali-led, doors may be opening for international support in the form of financial or technical assistance—marking a significant shift in the process.

The amended act provides for a “fund” to finance the investigations process and victim reparations that will be supported by the Nepali government and is open to contributions from other national and international organizations.

Sushil Pyakurel, a former member of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, is among a group of human rights defenders, lawyers and victims establishing a civil monitoring committee to serve as a watchdog for the revived process. Pyakurel stressed the need for Nepali civil society, alongside the international community, to pressure the government to fulfill its promises of a victim-centric implementation.

“You can make whatever law you want, but it is how you implement it that really matters,” Pyakurel told me. “Although the law is different, if the mentality remains the same, then nothing will change.”

The revival of Nepal’s truth commissions provides the government a chance to demonstrate a commitment to a transparent and legitimate process. But I believe it must move beyond the transitional justice ritualism of the previous two commissions to actually provide justice and acknowledgment for the country’s civil war victims.

Top image: A Nepali man looks at photographs of people 'disappeared' during Nepal's civil war in Kathmandu Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Tracy Fehr is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims.

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Violence underpins American life, sociologist contends

Anonymous — Wed, 22 May 2024 23:08:07 +0000

Violence underpins American life, sociologist contends Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/22/2024 - 17:08

Clint Talbott

In new book, CU Boulder researcher Liam Downey argues that different forms of violence produce both consent to the social order and divisions among subordinate social groups, which helps to maintain the power and wealth of economic and political elites

Violence in America causes incalculable suffering, but it also supports the nation’s social order and helps the country’s elites maintain their control, argues Liam Downey, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of sociology.

Downey makes this case in a new book, The Violent Underpinnings of American Life: How Violence Maintains Social Order in the U.S., published in October by NYU Press.

In the work, Downey examines several kinds of violence: sexual and sexualized violence against women and police and political violence against Black people. He contends that these and other types of violence bolster the social order and preserve the power of elites.

CU Boulder sociologist Liam Downey argues that violence in America causes incalculable suffering, but it also supports the nation’s social order and helps the country’s elites maintain their control.

Downey notes that the United States sees itself differently—as inherently peace-loving, harming others and resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary, “often in the name of freedom, human rights and democracy, and only when provoked or threatened by external enemies or deviant populations within its borders.”

On the contrary, he contends, U.S. social order is buttressed and maintained by violence. Further, he writes, “unless we believe that humans’ primary trait is a propensity for violence and that violence does not harm the psyches of those who engage in it and are victims of it, then relying on extremely high and sustained levels of violence to maintain our lifestyles and social order is alien to our innate humanity.”

The role of violence

His analysis expands upon existing research and builds from his definitions of “violence” and “social order.” Downey defines “violence” as “any action, inaction or property of the social structure that severely harms an individual, community or society, either physically, emotionally or psychologically.”

Downey underscores his interest in the role violence plays in producing a social order that benefits elites—those who have the greatest influence in economic power networks, political power networks, military power networks and ideological power networks.

He defines “social order” as existing when social relations are “stable enough within that society that elites can regularly (though not necessarily always) achieve their goals and maintain or increase their advantaged position within society.”

“You can think of a social order as a set of economic, political, social and cultural rules and relationships. And these rules and relationships and the institutions that create them can produce more or less equal and violent outcomes,” Downey says.

“What I’m arguing and what the evidence demonstrates is that, along these different dimensions (economic, political etc.), we have very high levels of inequality in this country, and this inequality benefits certain groups,” he adds, noting, for instance, that men benefit from patriarchy and whites benefit from racism.

“But you also have a set of economic and political elites who benefit from the entire social order. … So, while men benefit from patriarchy, many men are poor. Many belong to the working class. Many are unemployed. They’re not benefitting from capitalism,” Downey says.

“Elites benefit from all these systems.”

Liam Downey's The Violent Underpinnings of American Life examines several kinds of violence and how they and other types of violence bolster the social order and preserve the power of elites.

Gaining some benefit

Downey notes that some might wonder why subordinate groups accept a social order that harms them. One argument is that many subordinate groups consent to the social order because they gain some benefit from that order that leads them to ignore or accept the harm they experience.

Men, for instance, derive an emotional and psychological benefit from the highly sexualized and violent portrayal of women in the media. “And that helps non-elite men to accept the social order.”

About sexual harassment and rape, which are extremely widespread in the United States, he adds, “These forms of violence reinforce patriarchal discourses that say, ‘Women are of the body and men are of the mind and women are there to be used and objectified by men.’ These and other forms of violence against women also reinforce patriarchal discourses that say that women are emotional, irrational and unable to control themselves.”

But, Downey points out, violence against women also reinforces “capitalist and racist discourses that make the same arguments about working people and racial and ethnic minorities. So, when you reinforce patriarchal discourses through sexual and sexualized violence, you also reinforce capitalist and racist discourses and therefore the overall social order that these discourses justify, thereby benefitting not just men and Whites but elites, too.”

Downey’s book also cites research about the extremely high prevalence of police violence against African Americans, arguing that that violence helps to reduce competition between them and White people. “It makes it more difficult for Black people who have gone through the criminal justice system to get good jobs,” he says, “and for their children to do well in school due to lack of resources and the emotional and psychological difficulties faced by young people who have a parent in prison,” adding:

“This means that many African Americans have difficulty competing with Whites for jobs and for higher-priced housing in neighborhoods with quality schools. White people benefit materially and socially from this reduced competition, leading them to support the social order more than they otherwise might.”

He further notes that police violence against African Americans is “justified by a whole set of violent and racist political discourses that denigrate Black people and elevate White people, that say that the former are inferior in some ways, and the latter are superior.”

“If White people think they’re superior, that’s a psychological benefit that increases their support of the social order. Moreover, violence against women does the same thing: it both benefits men and reinforces discourses that say that men are superior, and women are inferior.”

‘Fully and equally human’

Another way that violence supports social order is that it divides groups, Downey says. “White people and Black people are divided over the issue of police violence, for example, and in fact, many Whites are divided over this issue, too.”

It is thus in the long-term interests of the vast majority of the world’s people to eradicate violence and to treat every person and group in the world as if they are what they truly are: fully and equally human, deserving of human rights and dignity, full and healthy lives, and the chance to develop their abilities, talents and creativity to their fullest.”

So why would that matter? “When subordinate groups are divided, they have less power to challenge elites,” Downey observes. “So, creating divisions between African Americans and Whites, and between different groups of White people, makes it harder for these groups to achieve common goals and to weaken elite power, thereby promoting overall social order.”

Similarly, men and women are divided through sexual and sexualized violence, “making it harder for them to work together to challenge the elite-driven social order.”

In the end, Downey contends, “we live in a world and society that depend fundamentally on violent harm being done to others and, in many cases, to ourselves.” Further, he says, “violence is not solely a characteristic of subordinate groups and the deviant but is instead a key property of the U.S. and global social systems that helps elites oppress and exploit non-elites both in this country and around the world.”

Downey concludes: “It is thus in the long-term interests of the vast majority of the world’s people to eradicate violence and to treat every person and group in the world as if they are what they truly are: fully and equally human, deserving of human rights and dignity, full and healthy lives, and the chance to develop their abilities, talents and creativity to their fullest.

“Treating people in this way is, of course, also the morally correct thing to do. It is thus time that we start doing it.”

Top image: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

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Gang ties don’t always bind

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:35:26 +0000

Gang ties don’t always bind Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/09/2024 - 13:35

Bradley Worrell

Research from CU Boulder sociology professor shows that for many prisoners, gang affiliation tends to drop off once they are released back into their communities

Nearly everyone who enters prison in the United States eventually leaves. In fact, every year about 600,000 people are released from federal and state prisons, according to U.S. Department of Justice data.

Meanwhile, other data suggest that nearly 20% of the prison population belongs to a gang, which prompts the question: Do prisoners who are gang members maintain their gang affiliations after being released?

Perhaps surprisingly, there has been very little empirical research into that topic until now, according to David C Pyrooz, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of sociology whose research focus includes gangs, incarceration and reentry, and criminal justice policy and practice.

David C Pyrooz, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of sociology, researches gangs, incarceration and reentry, as well as criminal justice policy and practice.

“In terms of gangs, it’s a harder topic to study,” he explains. “For one, there’s a lot of sensitivity around it. Information about gangs is generally treated as intelligence in the sense that it’s privileged information that law enforcement and correctional agencies don’t necessarily want to share with the general public.”

Additionally, tracking an inmate after their release can be challenging because, as Pyrooz notes, “former prisoners often live chaotic lives. Once they’re out, they’re worried about food insecurity, about family reunification, about jobs, about housing and all these other things. So, it’s a tough population to study. Research obviously ranks low on their list of priorities.”

Convinced there was value in knowing whether people maintained their gang ties once released back into their communities, Pyrooz and his fellow researchers conducted a survey of 802 men in Texas prisons—representing a mix of active gang members, ex-gang members and non-gang members—who were interviewed once prior to their release and reinterviewed twice afterward. Their research findings were published in Justice Quarterly, the flagship publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

The study findings showed that gang activity declined for all three groups—including active gang members—as the pressure to maintain gang involvement subsides, contrary to what some speculation and anecdotes would indicate, Pyrooz says.

While some active gang members do maintain their involvement after being released, “it simply doesn’t occur in a manner that we expected—it’s not like it’s a straight line from the prison to the street. There’s something specific to the prison environment that gives rise to this sort of excess gang activity,” he says.

Pyrooz recently spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about this research. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Why did you choose to focus on Texas prisons for your study?

Pyrooz: It’s the largest state prison system in the country. It’s large and it’s diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. The prison population is about a third Black, a third white and a third Hispanic. So, it gives a good racial ethnic representation. …

And it’s got a large gang population as well. There’s a large number of white, Black and Hispanic gangs with a lot of variation in how they’re organized and structured, which gives us an opportunity to examine whether patterns of behavior are consistent across gang types.

Question: Do you have thoughts about why prisoners were open to speaking with you, particularly when sharing details about gang activity?

Pyrooz: There was the longstanding belief going into the study that prisoners would not be open to speaking with researchers, much less telling the truth. In fact, it’s one of the major reasons that people have offered us to as to why we don’t know a lot about prison gangs, even setting aside the reentry issue.

Every year, nearly 600,000 men and women are released from state and federal prisons. Up until now, little empirical research has been done on whether prisoners who are active gang members maintain their gang affiliations after they are released. (Photo: Tom Pennington/Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

So, we treated the prison interview like an exit interview, in the sense that we tried to target a period of time where we thought ties to gangs … could be waning, such that gangs couldn’t exercise as much influence over a prisoner … as much (because prisoners are removed from the general population prior to their release). Interviewing prisoners about 48 hours prior to their release is something that we targeted. That was strategic. …

As to why they spoke with us, we’re a neutral party. It’s not like speaking with a correctional officer, where incriminating information might be used against them. It’s not like a girlfriend who is making decisions about whether she wants to stay with you, an estranged child or anything of that sort with incredible emotional baggage.

There’s no past history between us and the person. It’s like a blank slate. So, it just gives them the opportunity to be able to reflect on things that they felt comfortable sharing with us.

There were times during interviews where prisoners would say, ‘I haven't told anybody about this in the entire time I’ve been incarcerated. It felt great to just get it off of my chest to talk to someone.’

Not everybody was like that. There were some interviews that were difficult.

Question: In your paper you say, ‘Not all gang members are created equal.’ What do you mean by that? Does it relate to what you refer to in your paper as ‘gang embeddedness’?

Pyrooz: A lot of people have this black or white view of, you’re a gang member or not. But that doesn’t really tell the full picture; it doesn’t really capture the different dimensions of involvement…

Gang embeddedness captures immersion in gangs. In the same way that you could differentiate people who are really religious—they’re going to church more than one time a week, they’re praying at home and they may be a church volunteer for church activities. In contrast, you have people who are sort of the Christmas and Easter crowd, or agnostic or completely atheists. These two groups aren’t the same, and there are many shades of gray between them.

There’s a belief that, just like you give religion importance, you give the gang importance, and just like people fall away from the church, people fall away from gangs.

Question: As part of your research, your team interviewed prisoners once while in prison and two separate times after their release. Why was that format important?

Pyrooz: We really wanted to get a first interview while they were inside of prison. We wanted to understand, while they were in that environment, what they were thinking.

But we also wanted to understand, for continuity and change, what spills over from the inside to the outside, versus what stays inside. So, what’s sort of this remnant of their past life, of being an incarcerated person, versus returning back to the community. …

That’s what we really were trying to understand, and then to differentiate between, the short-term changes, like within a couple of weeks of getting out, versus how did you start to settle in your life 10 months later? And what percent of them went back to prison, got arrested or were killed after their release?

Question: How does this latest paper on gang involvement in and out of prison fit in with your overall areas of research?

Pyrooz: I’ve been studying gangs for upwards of 15 years, focused on the contours of gang involvement: when people join, how long they stay, when they leave and what the long-term consequences are.

There was this longstanding perception that once you join a gang, you can never get out of these groups—which is a myth. Since I’ve been doing my research, we’ve found that not only does it happen, but that’s the norm—as opposed to the exception—that people do leave.

I took my first job out of grad school at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, which is known colloquially as Prison City, USA, because there’s so many prisons within not just the city limits, but within Walker County, Texas, including one that was just about two blocks from my office.

There was this longstanding perception that once you join a gang, you can never get out of these groups—which is a myth. Since I’ve been doing my research, we’ve found that not only does it happen, but that’s the norm—as opposed to the exception—that people do leave."

And not only is that where the state conducts all of the executions, but it’s also one of the major (prisoner) release centers in the state of Texas. So, continuing with the theme on continuity and change, prisons represent this next frontier to understand whether these gang associations spill out of the prisons to the street and also, when these transitions occur, are (ex-prisoners) able to leave these associations behind when they return to the community?

It fits within a broader agenda of focusing on gangs, but also on this broader criminological interest in continuity and change in the life course.

Question: What can corrections officials and law enforcement gain from your latest research, both as it relates to felons while still in prison and once they are released?

Pyrooz: To me, what it suggests right off the bat is that the prison systems need to do something about gangs in their institutions. And by do something, I’m not just talking about housing them differently, akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. … I’m talking about actual prevention and actual intervention. In other words, blocking the onramps and widening the offramps to gang involvement. Housing might be a part of it, but it could also be work programs; it could be therapeutic interventions; it could be religion; it could be a whole host of different things that are done to keep people occupied, to change mindsets and to alter risks and threats to their livelihoods.

Given that prisons are operating as this vector of gang activity, (prison administrators) need to be doing something more than just business as usual, because that certainly hasn’t put a dent in the activity or the violence behind bars. …

You want to keep (prisoners) occupied, versus stewing and getting into trouble. It’s like the saying, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.’ And behind bars, there’s a lot of idle hands. …

Once people are released, one factor that can determine gang involvement is if they go back to a gang-active neighborhood. If they do, they are more likely to be gang active. So, there’s a lot of practical relevance here that matters for parole officers and anyone involved with the supervision of people after their release.

Question: Is there anything else from your research that you would like to share?

Pyrooz: I think that for a lot of people, when it comes to prisoners, they’re sort of out of sight, out of mind. They may not have a lot of concern for people who are behind bars, in part because they believe that they’ve earned that prison sentence.

But when you really start thinking about the fact that (ex-prisoners) do return home—and we don’t want them to go back to prison—it really starts reshaping the public’s calculus with regard to the sort of humanity afforded to people in prisons.

And once you realize that they can be your neighbors, that they could go to your church and work similar jobs, for most people, it starts to give you a different meaning behind imprisonment. What are we willing and what aren’t we willing to do? And just how much we care about what happens to these people in prisons?

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Research from CU Boulder sociology professor shows that for many prisoners, gang affiliation tends to drop off once they are released back into their communities .

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Understanding crime through both victims and offenders

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:04:45 +0000

Understanding crime through both victims and offenders Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/03/2024 - 18:04

Blake Puscher

The new edition of CU Boulder Professor Jill Turanovic’s book explains how and why victimization happens, as well as what can be done about it

Understanding why crime happens and how to prevent it depends on taking into account both victims and offenders, including their behaviors and decisions, and the factors that lead to increased vulnerability.

This is one of the themes highlighted in the recently released second edition of Thinking About Victimization by Jillian Turanovic, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of sociology, and University of Cincinnati fellow Travis Pratt. In it, they explore victimization and its study in detail, addressing how victimization is measured, the theories explaining victimization, why crime is committed, how to respond to it and myths about particular types of crime and victimization.

Measuring victimization

One of the most basic issues facing the study of crime and victimization is getting accurate data, Turanovic says. For example, police reports only tell part of the story, because only a fraction of all crimes are reported to police.

CU Boulder researcher Jillian Turanovic, an associate professor of sociology, studies victimization and why crime happens.

To more accurately gauge the true amount of crime happening in society, researchers in the 1960s developed self-report victimization surveys. The prime source of survey data is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

As NCVS data came out, the so-called “dark figure” of crime was revealed: Nearly twice as much crime is committed than is reported by official sources.

“We are able to capture more victimization through self-report surveys than we can capture through official police records—especially for crimes like sexual assault and intimate partner violence,” Turanovic says. Rape and sexual assault are less often reported to the police than any other crime, with just 21.5% of incidents recorded by the NCVS also reported to the police, according to a figure from the book. This speaks to several factors that stop people from reporting crimes: shame, fear of retaliation, and hesitance to involve law enforcement.

Even for less serious crimes, people may hesitate to involve law enforcement, which is why only 26.1% of petty thefts are reported. In many cases, Turanovic explains, filing a police report does not seem worth the effort because of the low value of the stolen goods and the slim chance of their recovery.

Competing theories

Although national crime rates of the late 1960s were not especially high in comparison to those of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Turanovic says, most forms of crime were rapidly increasing during this period. This spurred theoretical development among academics, as criminologists had previously believed that crime would go down as economic conditions improved, as they did in America after World War II. To help explain why the United States could be both rich and crime ridden, criminologists developed two new theoretical frameworks to better understand the phenomenon: lifestyle and routine activity theories.

Lifestyle theory is based on observations of demographic trends—namely, that young men victimize others and are victimized most often. Behavioral differences are one explanation, according to Turanovic, as young males expose themselves to greater risk through their activities, the situations they enter and the people they associate with than either females or older males.

Routine activity theory was established to explain why people are victimized when they aren’t doing risky things. It is based on the idea that as certain routine activities increase over time in society, people’s risk for victimization also increases. For example, it was theorized that women increasingly participating in the labor force could lead to an increase in burglaries because it left more houses empty during the day.

Both theories have limitations, Turanovic says, so both must be applied to answer the fundamental questions of criminology and victimology.

Thinking About Victimization addresses how victimization is measured, the theories explaining victimization, why crime is committed, how to respond to it and myths about particular types of crime and victimization.

Why do people commit crimes?

“A well-established fact in criminology is that a small proportion of people engage in the majority of crimes,” Turanovic says. Research indicates that more than half of all crimes are committed by less than a tenth of the population. Recognizing the characteristics of these habitual offenders is necessary for preventing crime on both the individual and systemic levels, she says, given that the former entails avoiding dangerous people and the latter involves restraining or rehabilitating them.

So, what do criminals tend to have in common? One answer is a lack of self-control, Turanovic says.

“People with low self-control have a hard time thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions, and they tend to react impulsively in the moment without stopping to think if what they’re doing is the best,” she says, adding that it’s not hard to see how this can lead to crime. For example, most people have wanted something that wasn’t theirs at one point, and the less self-control a person has, the easier it is for common feelings like this to turn into theft or another type of crime.

In keeping with the overlap between victim and victimizer seen in demographic trends, people with low self-control are also victimized more often, according to Turanovic. “It’s not like such individuals are choosing to be victimized,” she explains, but “people with low self-control have a hard time assessing risks around themselves.”

However, Turanovic says, self-control is just one factor: “There’re a lot of other environmental, cultural, and social factors that also play a role in why people are engaging in crime or are disproportionately likely to be victimized.” Low self-control is “typically developed in youth who are subject to dysfunctional home environments,” she says, and it “is also found to be lower in socially disorganized, disadvantaged communities, so it’s important to also take into account those factors.”

How can crimes be prevented?

Considering that people of a certain age are particularly likely to commit crimes, a simple response is to avoid giving them opportunities to offend.

There is another approach to decreasing crime that doesn’t involve avoiding risky people or contexts, however: capable guardianship. This can take the form of anything from security cameras to guards. Essentially, even if someone is in a risky situation, like a mall where people in their peak offending years congregate that is located in a state where the rate of shoplifting is high, establishing defenses against crime can thwart or even prevent it, Turanovic says.

“From a situational crime prevention standpoint, if you assume that a crime is occurring because there are motivated offenders around suitable targets with a lack of capable guardianship, you can increase guardianship and reduce target attractiveness by making crime seem more difficult, more risky, and less rewarding,” she explains. She adds that this is just one example of how the same theoretical framework and evidence base can lead to different conclusions.

Another is the broken windows theory.

“Broken windows theory assumes that if there are visible signs of disorder in a community, it gives a signal to would-be offenders that no one cares, and so it’s acceptable to move into that community to start engaging in crime,” Turanovic says. So, if a building’s windows have been broken and remain so for a while, for example, it may seem that breaking more windows, stealing from the building, or using it for some illicit purpose would be less risky.

Despite recognizing these important criminological facts, broken windows theory has fallen out of favor, along with the aggressive policing of disorder and minor offenses that it inspired. This is partly because of new evidence suggesting that people are not very afraid of small signs of disorder and partly because of negative reactions from affected communities.

To best prevent crime and understand why crime happens, you have to take into account the behaviors and decisions of both parties, and the factors that lead people to be in risky situations or situations where they’re more vulnerable."

“There seem to be a lot of consequences of broken windows policing,” Turanovic explains. “It erodes community trust and clogs the criminal justice process. Finding and arresting people for minor things can ultimately result in more consequences for them, disrupt prosocial aspects of their lives, and even increase their future likelihood of further contact with the criminal justice system,” adding that such practices may also impact community collective efficacy.

“Collective efficacy is essentially this feeling of mutual responsibility to look out for each other and to take care of the community. When that breaks down and there is no real informal social control of youth or willingness to intervene if crime is happening, that’s when crime develops in the community,” Turanovic says.

Myths and misconceptions

Aside from these theoretical and systematic considerations, people need to understand how different crimes typically happen to prevent victimization, Turanovic says, adding that the public’s perception of crime is often distorted by the news and entertainment media’s tendency to focus on particular sorts of incidents. Rape and sexual assault are major examples.

“This crime is most likely to occur between people who know each other, and often both parties are involved in some form of consensual interaction prior to the assault,” Turanovic says. “Especially in the news and on crime shows, we see sexual assault typically depicted as a stranger attacking a woman, maybe in a dark alley alone at night. While that can happen, it does not reflect the majority of these kinds of crimes.”

Popular concepts of school violence have also been biased by the media, she says: “School violence in general hasn’t actually been increasing at the rate that you may expect based on what you see on the news.”

The idea that school violence is completely unique from other forms of violence is another misconception, Turanovic says, noting that “a lot of violence that starts in the community bleeds into the school context.”

Understanding why crime happens

Turanovic emphasizes that “the study of crime is almost exclusively focused on offenders’ behaviors and decisions, and it leaves victims out of the equation a lot of the time. As the victimization literature developed, it became highly focused on the victim, the victim’s behaviors and their risk factors or vulnerability factors, and the offender’s side of things is left out.

“To best prevent crime and understand why crime happens, you have to take into account the behaviors and decisions of both parties, and the factors that lead people to be in risky situations or situations where they’re more vulnerable,” she says. “We can better understand and study the situations and contexts by which victimization happens, and who’s most vulnerable, without engaging in victim blaming. Although broad social and cultural changes may be needed to eliminate crime, there are also things that we can learn or do in our daily lives that make it less likely that we may be targeted. It is important to keep in mind those things as well to best prevent victimization.”

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The new edition of CU Boulder Professor Jill Turanovic’s book explains how and why victimization happens, as well as what can be done about it.

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Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:40:23 +0000

Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:40

Bradley Worrell

German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during CU Boulder colloquium

Is democracy in crisis?

It’s a question Paul Nolte, an eminent German historian, has been ruminating on for more than a decade.

“I’ve been concerned with the history of democracy since about 2010. And it was about that time when (I had) the first idea that something was going in the wrong direction,” Nolte noted Tuesday afternoon in a research colloquium titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020.”

Nolte was the invited scholar for the event that was jointly organized by the University of Colorado Boulder Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation. His visit was co-sponsored by the CU Boulder Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

At a Tuesday colloquium, attendees listen to German historian Paul Nolte discuss the outlook for liberal democracy in the 21st century. (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

During the colloquium, Nolte noted that while it’s not possible to predict the future, it seems unlikely that democracies will return to what some might call the “good-old democracy” days of the 1970s through 2020—what could be called the Liberal Age for democracies in Europe and the United States.

“The good old times for many European countries, in which there were just three or four political parties, center left and center right … the classical Westminster model, they’re probably gone for good. It’s not a very likely expectation that this will return,” he said. “There is a broad understanding (among historians) that we’ve entered a new period of history where things are not as they were in the 1970s.”

Specifically noting democracy in the United States, Nolte cited the work of author Daniel Rogers, who wrote the 2011 book Age of Fracture, detailing the disintegration of shared American values.

“The (book) title speaks volumes,” Nolte noted. “If we’re in an age of fracture economically, and also in social rifts, and the old working class does not exist, why would we expect anything else for the state of democracy?”

Nolte also said people need to understand previous developments in “rough politics” in Europe and the United States during the late 18th and 19th centuries and the “new roughness” in recent years as politicians on both the political right and left have embraced populism.

“Will we spend two more decades lamenting a persistent crisis, or even conjuring up the imminent downfall of democracy, somehow yearning for the good old days that never return?” Nolte asked in a paper shared ahead of the colloquium. “Or will we take up the challenge, academically and politically, of democracy not being steady-state, but changing in larger historical contexts? Welcome, then, to the old-new rough democracy.”

Top image: Paul Nolte (left) and Thomas Kaplan, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and interim director of the CU Boulder Program in Jewish Studies (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

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German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during CU Boulder colloquium.

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Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:04:30 +0000

Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/12/2024 - 13:04

Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover

One of Germany’s leading contemporary historians will present a research colloquium addressing the stage of crisis that liberal democracy has entered in the early 21st century—asking whether the golden age of democracy over and is on course for eventual collapse, or whether it can recover.

Historian Paul Nolte will present the colloquium, titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020,” which is jointly organized by the University of Colorado Boulder Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Historian Paul Nolte will discuss the crisis in liberal democracy at a research colloquium Tuesday.

It will be from 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday in Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE) E422. To receive the pre-circulated text on which the discussions will be based, please RSVP by email to cujewishstudies@colorado.edu.

At CU Boulder, the visit is co-sponsored by the Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

As one of Germany’s leading contemporary historians, Nolte holds a chair in modern history with a special emphasis on contemporary history and international relations at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. His research areas include social, intellectual and political history of the 18th to 20th centuries, especially post-1945 Germany and the United States; transatlantic history of democracy; public intellectuals and social, economic and political concepts and mentalities; urban history and metropolitan cultures; religion and civil society in Western societies; and public history and cultures of memory.

Research colloquium

What: Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020

When: 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 13

Where: CASE E422

More information

Nolte has written more than a dozen books and has served as a fellow or guest professor at Oxford University, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Among his many transatlantic undertakings is chairing the academic advisory committee of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, which brings American PhD candidates to Germany.

His colloquium will focus on the current state of crisis in which liberal democracy exists, when they are under attack from neo-authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes, externally as well as from within. He will address what a potential recovery could look like, asking, “What if we were not witnesses to a crisis of democracy, but rather to its transformation, with the current predicaments being the new normal?”

Nolte will discuss how, from a historical point of view, “pre-crisis” democracy corresponded to social structures, cultural milieus and technological environments that will never return. Further, this longing often projects a relatively short period in the trajectory of democracy, participation and liberal society as an ideal state, while it was in itself full of shortcomings, rigid structures and privileges for the few.

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Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover.

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Legal rights and legal reality diverge for single women in Nepal

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 18:29:58 +0000

Legal rights and legal reality diverge for single women in Nepal Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/13/2023 - 11:29

Pam Moore

CU Boulder PhD candidate Tracy Fehr’s research examines the intersecting identities limiting Nepali women’s access to disaster relief funds following the devastating 2015 earthquakes

The devastating 2015 earthquakes in Nepal affected nearly 30% of the country’s population, causing an estimated 9,000 deaths, displacing 2.8 million people and destroying or severely damaging more than 800,000 homes.

In the years following the disaster, entrenched cultural, political and economic inequalities and social practices meant post-disaster recovery did not happen uniformly among those affected. Nepal’s National Planning Commission even acknowledged in a 2015 report following the earthquakes that differentiated gender norms and divisions of labor for women in Nepal—including a narrow asset base, the burden of domestic labor, limited access to economic resources and a lack of alternative livelihoods—could lead to a longer and more difficult recovery.

For many widows, or single women, in Nepal’s mid-hill region, existing social stigmas were often exacerbated following the earthquakes.

CU Boulder researcher Tracy Fehr (right) with a single woman who lives in Gorkha, Nepal.

However, newly published research by Tracy Fehr, a University of Colorado Boulder PhD candidate in sociology, shows that the complexities and contradictions of post-earthquake recovery for single women in Nepal is only part of the story. With more than 125 caste and indigenous nationality groups, Nepal is one of the most diverse countries on earth. And the widows’ experiences reflect that heterogeneity.

Despite housing reconstruction relief often being predicated on citizenship and property ownership, precluding many single women, the post-earthquake development context “provided an opportunity to create local women’s centers that provided space for single women to unite in a collective identity, facilitating a shift of longstanding stigma and an emerging renegotiation of what it means to ‘be a widow’ in Nepal,” Fehr wrote.

Observing inequality

Following the devastating earthquakes in spring 2015, Fehr volunteered with Women for Human Rights Nepal (WHR), an non-governmental organization (NGO) helping single Nepali women—including widows and women who are separated, divorced, are unmarried after the age of 35, or whose husbands are disappeared—gain socio-cultural, economic and political rights. The organization also provided post-disaster relief and support for single women across the country.

During her time in Nepal, Fehr observed how difficult it was for many single women to get relief funds. And she noticed that their access to resources often depended on the intersection of various aspects of their identities.

Motivated, in part, by what she learned and observed volunteering with WHR, Fehr returned to Nepal in 2018 as a graduate student and researcher to formally study how social factors intersect to inform Nepali widows’ post-earthquake experiences.

“I think there’s this monolithic story of widows in Nepal as victimized and non-agentic,” she says. But through 33 interviews and three focus groups, Fehr’s research told a different story—one that was more nuanced and more accurate. “In fact, each woman’s experience is dependent on so many different intersecting identities and social factors beyond marital status,” she explains.

Social factors influencing women’s experiences

In response to the earthquake’s widespread destruction, the government of Nepal created an “owner-driven” housing reconstruction (OHDR) program to offer financial assistance to those who had to rebuild their homes. Under the program, only Nepali people with citizenship and documentation of property ownership were eligible for assistance.

But while the law stipulates that widows have the right to their deceased husbands’ property, many women have found it difficult or impossible to take ownership of it—which cut off their access to the government assistance that they desperately needed. “There’s statutory law, which is what’s on the books, and then there’s customary law, which is what’s actually happening,” says Fehr.

Factors like education and location played major roles in women’s access to relief resources. “Education allowed women to understand more about what their rights were and how to access them,” Fehr says. Meanwhile, the farther women lived from the district center, the harder it was to access services. For example, government services and NGOs had difficulty reaching rural communities, which often lacked roads, says Fehr.

The hope is that with a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of legal and cultural forces on women’s lived experiences, government relief programs can become more effective and inclusive, now and into the future.”

At the same time, Fehr found that women’s experience in the public sphere—or lack thereof—also impacted their access to aid. Women who worked, whether as teachers, merchants, or manual laborers, were generally more comfortable navigating social spaces, a skill that helped them go through the appropriate channels to utilize relief funding.

Complicating matters further were women’s relationship with their in-laws, says Fehr. Because Nepali women typically live with their husband’s family, many widows were socially and financially dependent on their in-laws. Some experienced conflict with their in-laws in relinquishing the deceased husband’s property—especially if they were young enough to remarry. Meanwhile, many higher-caste families adhere to stricter gender norms, which in some cases made it more difficult, if not impossible, to assert their rights or challenge their in-laws for property, says Fehr.

Implications for children

While Nepali social norms have shifted significantly over the past two decades—women can now inherit property without the consent of involvement of a male relative, and they can document their citizenship without requiring permission from a male—there is still progress to be made, Fehr says. “One of the most pressing concerns at the moment for single women is the legal right for Nepali women to confer citizenship to their children, which is a legal right for men in Nepal.”

This issue came up in several interviews during her research, because citizenship will significantly affect access for single women’s children to future post-disaster relief and government services.

“Although legal changes are slow to be reflected in day-to-day life, having laws in place does provide some legal and political leverage for single women,” says Fehr. “The hope is that with a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of legal and cultural forces on women’s lived experiences, government relief programs can become more effective and inclusive, now and into the future.”

Top image and images below by Tracy Fehr

CU Boulder PhD candidate Tracy Fehr’s research examines the intersecting identities limiting Nepali women’s access to disaster relief funds following the devastating 2015 earthquakes

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Alone in the woods … but not screaming for help

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:55:34 +0000

Alone in the woods … but not screaming for help Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/15/2023 - 12:55

Maxwell Garby

CU Boulder sociology instructor Laura Patterson details how feminism is influencing female roles in horror films, expanding them far beyond the ‘damsel in distress’ trope

Halloween may be over, but it’s still not safe to return to Camp Crystal Lake.

Even as we put away the costumes and pack up the skeleton decorations, things are still going bump in the night. It’s a spooky time of year and a scary time to be at the movie theater, with It’s a Wonderful Knife opening last Friday and Thanksgiving opening Friday (don’t be fooled by the title—it involves a brutal murderer dressed as a pilgrim).

And what about the women in horror circa 2023? Are they still tripping through the woods in impractical shoes, screaming for the help that may or may not come? Whimpering behind flimsy doors and hoping to be saved by a man? Or has horror finally discovered feminism?

In recent years, the genre has become a place to explore feminist themes and redefine the roles of women within its narratives, revealing its potential to challenge, reinforce or even redefine traditional gender roles, says University of Colorado Boulder researcher Laura Patterson.

CU Boulder sociology instructor Laura Patterson studies the sociology of horror and co-hosts a podcast focusing on the genre's sociological implications.

It is this potential that has fascinated Patterson, an instructor in the Department of Sociology who has long been interested in the sociology of horror. She even co-hosts a podcast examining the sociological implications of horror films called Collective Nightmares.

Patterson recently spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about feminist tropes in horror movies, how female characters have evolved beyond screaming and crying for help and the recent uptick in feminist representation throughout the genre.

Question: What got you into horror movies?

Patterson: I've loved horror as far back as I can remember, but my favorite thing about horror films, and why I really like to watch them, is because it's an art form that's devoted to looking at how we as a collective navigate the worst parts of our lives. I think there's a need for a space to artistically express the worst things that happen to us.

We have plenty of movies about happy, wonderful things, but that doesn't do a whole lot to help us deal with the deepest, darkest things that we must face in our lives. Horror is a great place to play around with these ideas, and to give us some place for cultural conversation about some of the hardest stuff that we must face. Through looking at these issues, horror movies can do a really great job of making us feel empathy and realize what it's like for people going through situations that are very difficult.

On that same note, the visceral reaction that the genre evokes in us can be helpful for making moral arguments. If we watch something and we're aghast at what's happening on the screen, that can really be a good emotional place to come from if you're trying to have a conversation about actual injustice that’s happening in our society.

Question: Does this make horror movies controversial?

Patterson: Horror often skirts the boundaries of what we find acceptable to talk about. There’s this dual idea that we're aghast at seeing something, and yet at the same time it's a very real problem that we’re facing in our society, is what makes horror sit at an interesting place in being able to address those sensitive issues.

Rape-revenge is a really great example of a corner of the genre because it’s a very prevalent cultural problem that we face. In some cases, rape-revenge horror films can be done well and make strong moral arguments to try and shine a light on a situation that's negatively impacting our society on a vast scale, but it's also something that can be done as exploitation.

By digging into topics that are the types of things we like to tend to look away from in our society, there's a lot of room for very meaningful conversation, but there's also room for very harmful conversation as well.

Question: How has feminism influenced the evolution of female portrayal in horror?

Patterson: We can look at two female character tropes: the victim-turned-final-girl and the villain.

When you're looking at gender, according to Carol Clover, the character you're watching in the film doesn't cry and cower and run because they’re a woman—but rather, because the character is going to cry and cower and run, that character is made a woman. Gender gets imposed in certain roles. If you're watching a film where you've got a victim and the victim is going to be fleeing the monster, our society is more comfortable seeing a woman in that role because we don't want to see a man crying and cowering and running.

If you look at some of the early final girls, such as Laurie Strode in Halloween, there's a very classic ending to that film in that she can't quite save herself. She's the last one standing; she’s fighting and taking on this monster but in the last second needs a man to step in to kill the villain.

When slasher films really started to emerge in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you see the final girl shift from that to someone who can save herself. She doesn't need a man to step in and save her. Carol Clover, who coined the notion of the final girl, made a point to say that the final girl is not some sort of feminist icon. The final girl came at a time when our society was ready to see a woman taking care of herself in film, and that is at least somewhat a result of feminist movements. To some extent, the final girl represents a society that’s able to see a woman as a self-savior.

Question: You mentioned women as villains; can feminism inform that role, too?

Patterson: I think the way that we villainize women is important to look at. Women tend to be villainized in horror films in very stereotypical ways that usually revolves around their sexuality, puberty or reproductive functioning.

Among the modern horror films influenced by feminsm are a growing number directed by female filmmakers.

You could think about something like Monster, where Charlize Theron plays a serial killer. It's done differently because you don't just take what would have been a male serial killer and put a woman there. I think that film presents her differently; it doesn't just recreate that old trope, but also, it's not this sort of monstrous feminine portrayal that we see.

On some level, you can look at female villains as some kind of feminist progress. At the same time, the way that's done, it's often been done very stereotypically and that reflects problematic aspects of the patriarchy. For more on this, see Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous feminine.

Question: Should people continue watching these movies that perpetuate a patriarchal perspective?

Patterson: I don't think it means we shouldn't watch them, but I think it means we should watch them with our eyes open. Horror films in general give us a space to talk about the bad things that are going on in our society. Horror serves, at some level, as a mirror; it reflects to us what our society thinks is good and bad, and how our society characterizes people as victims and villains. That can be useful to think about. If we look in that mirror and we see something that we don’t like—we see that monstrous feminine portrayal, or women being victimized in a way that feels like exploitation—I think that it’s important that we look at our society and think about how we could do this differently.

I think it can be problematic when these films are consumed without thought going into that, because this messaging is getting into your brain whether you’re paying attention to it or not. You’ve got to be careful and think about what sort of messaging is being sent, and what does that say in the broader sense.

Oftentimes students in my class who don't like horror films but are interested in the topic, sometimes they come back to me and say that they’re no longer scared of the villain of the film but instead fear what the film is telling us about the society we live in.

Question: Now more than ever we've been seeing more filmmakers on the forefront of this feminist movement; what would be some names or recommendations of movies to keep an eye out for?

Patterson: Here’s a short list of recommendations for you:

Promising Young Woman–Emerald Fennell

Fresh–Mimi Cave

Black Christmas (2019)–Sophia Takal

Swallow–Carlo Mirabella-Davis

Unsane–Steven Soderbergh

Raw–Julia Ducournau

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CU Boulder sociology instructor Laura Patterson details how feminism is influencing female roles in horror films, expanding them far beyond the ‘damsel in distress’ trope.

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Scholar turns righteous anger into climate action

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 20:05:27 +0000

Scholar turns righteous anger into climate action Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2023 - 14:05

Doug McPherson

How PhD student Brigid Mark joined the fight for environmental justice after spending four years battling a pipeline that she says taints clean water, worsens climate change and erodes native treaty rights

In 2017, Brigid Mark felt an anger like she had never experienced before.

She was at a U.N. climate conference in Bonn, Germany, listening to Pacific Islanders describe how sea-level rise threatened their islands and lives.

She recalls Marshall Islands poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner reading her poem, called “Butterfly Thief,” which places blame for rising sea levels on fossil fuel companies, explaining the dramatic cultural and physical losses of her island, and calling for action: “You can’t save this (island). But you’ve gotta save the rest.”

“I felt angry at the injustice that, though the elite in the Global North are largely responsible for global climate emissions, the marginalized in the Global South are affected first and worst,” says Mark, now a University of Colorado Boulder PhD student studying sociology. “I felt inspired by Pacific Islands’ call to action.”

Top of page: Brigid Mark (right) joins friends at the Treaty People Gathering in Northern Minnesota in June 2021. Photo courtesy of Brigid Mark. Above: CU Boulder PhD student Mark (left) joins a protest at a Gichi-Gami gathering to stop Line 3 in September 2019. Photo courtesy of Brigid Mark.

Mark says she knew she needed an outlet for her anger. And she found it at the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota. There, she joined a climate action club and took a class where a professor, Corrie Grosse, explained that the marginalized often lead the fight against environmental harms that disproportionately affect them.

Grosse also introduced her to a movement resisting a tar sands pipeline, Line 3, right in her backyard. This pipeline carries more than 750,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta tar sands in Canada through northern Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin.

“I care about the pipeline because Line 3 threatens clean water and worsens climate change,” she says. “But the reason I care the most is that it violates native treaty rights. The pipeline . . . crosses Anishinaabe treaty territory, jeopardizing their ability to exercise rights to hunt, fish and gather wild rice; a spill could demolish the parts of the land that hold cultural and material importance to Anishinaabe people.”

Mark learned from Anishinaabe leaders that the movement against Line 3 is part of a continuing effort to confront colonization.

“We prohibit this (pipeline) from going through our homelands. . . . We want to heal and live in peace; we want to create a better world. . . . The time is now to honor those treaties,” Mark recalls Dawn Goodwin, an Anishinaabe leader, explaining. “Our Earth cannot take any more. This (pipeline) is a risk for spills, and, we all know, water is life.”

Inspired, Mark joined the Minnesota chapter of 350.org, a climate-justice nonprofit, and began collaborating with many others to organize resistance events against Line 3, some attended by nearly 2,500 people. She also co-published an article on the pipeline’s injustices in an international journal.

Mark attributes much of her passion and achievements to the mentorship and teachings of strong women, beginning with her mom. She says during her childhood in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, her mom instilled in her “a deep understanding of and dissatisfaction with” injustice.

“She would often read the newspaper aloud to me and the broken parts of our world would bring her to tears. She passed along her confidence that the brokenness in the world can and must be addressed.”

It was also during her childhood that Mark fell in love with the environment.

“When I was a kid, you would find me climbing the two gnarled willow trees in my backyard and catching roly polies from underneath rocks. Everything in the more-than-human world amazed me.”

My understanding of environmental issues began as saving the trees and the polar bears. But climate justice scholars and activists shifted my view to see environmental issues as social, where environmental problems are deeply entangled with injustices like racism and colonialism.”

Mark adds, “My understanding of environmental issues began as saving the trees and the polar bears. But climate justice scholars and activists shifted my view to see environmental issues as social, where environmental problems are deeply entangled with injustices like racism and colonialism.”

Despite resistance to the pipeline, it began operating in October 2021. Mark says she’ll continue to fight to shut it down.

“President Biden could shut it down,” Mark says. “But also, the work would not be finished. The goal of the movement to stop Line 3—and also my goal—is to see a just transition away from all fossil fuel infrastructure, to a socially just, renewable energy future. That kind of transition requires simultaneously addressing the root causes of climate crisis and social injustice.”

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Sociologist explores the spiritual side of nurses’ care

Anonymous — Tue, 16 May 2023 23:18:58 +0000

Sociologist explores the spiritual side of nurses’ care Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/16/2023 - 17:18

Doug McPherson

Don Grant’s new book takes readers inside a hospital where nurses and others tending to patients are also navigating between science and spirituality

In talking about how his new book, “Nursing the Spirit: Care, Public Life, and the Dignity of Vulnerable Strangers” (Columbia University Press), came to be, CU Boulder sociology Professor Don Grant explains that he comes from a religious background (liberal Protestantism) but chose to work in the highly secular field of social science.

“As a result, I sometimes struggle with a feeling that I left something important behind,” Grant says.

That sense of unease compelled Grant to spend part of a sabbatical working as a chaplain intern at an academic medical school, where he tried to integrate the sacred and secular.

Columbia University Press officially publishes book, 'Nursing the Spirit: Care, Public Life, and the Dignity of Vulnerable Strangers' on May 23, 2023.

“After weeks of stumbling and bumbling in that role, I discovered that the advice I received from nurses about how to approach patients and address their spiritual needs was often more helpful than the advice I received in the chaplaincy training program,” he says.

That experience, along with serving as a liver transplant donor for his dad, furthered Grant’s interest in the tension between religion and science and led him to conduct a formal study of nurses' spiritual care—the basis for his book, which hits shelves on May 23. Grant surveyed 297 nurses—making it the most in-depth survey on spirituality ever administered at a major non-sectarian organization.

Grant says the main message of his book is that what makes religion socially powerful is caregiving. He adds that, in the past, religion’s power was largely about organizing otherwise irrational beliefs and experiences into doctrines and creeds.

Today, Grant argues that religion’s power increasingly depends on its “person-giving and presence-enhancing” capacity.

“Part of religion’s humanizing function is still carried out in the private realm by friends and family. But as the development of the human species continues to shift from small, informal groups like families to large, science-based institutions like hospitals, these organizations will be increasingly expected to provide humanizing cultures.”

Grant says he believes hospitals will not only offer the benefits of science, but their frontline-care workers also will play a key role in deciding the fate of spiritual care.

Of the 24 therapies that health care experts identify as “spiritual” in nature, Grant says five are recommended by a majority of nurses he surveyed: holding a patient’s hand, listening, laughing, prayer and being present with a patient.

Grant didn’t speculate on what percentage of nurses in the United States conduct spiritual care. “Whether those findings apply to other nurses is unclear,” he says. “But the fact that so many of the nurses I surveyed engage in these forms of spiritual care even within a highly scientized and secularized setting like a public university’s medical center suggests that they might.”

He adds that today, spiritual care of patients is expected of nurses and is reflected in nursing codes of ethics, nurse education guidelines and policy documents. For example, the International Council of Nurses Code of Ethics states that the nurse is to “Provide an environment in which the human rights, values, customs and spiritual beliefs [of the client] are respected.”

Still, Grant says hospital administrators give frontline staff little, if any, formal training in spiritual care. And he says several studies also suggest that colleges and universities do “an incomplete job” training nurses in spiritual caregiving.

Don Grant is a professor of sociology and fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and directs their Social Innovation and Care, Health, and Resilience programs.

“This means workers are pretty much on their own: their workplace provides support for meeting goals like efficiency and accuracy, but when it comes to affirming humanistic values like spirituality, workers must improvise.”

In his book, Grant says doesn’t make recommendations about how to address this problem, except to suggest some practical steps that hospitals might take to make staff more comfortable discussing spiritual matters, such as periodically reminding nurses that they probably share an unspoken interest in spirituality because of their constant exposure to human suffering.

On the question of how nurses perform a dual role, Grant says his results were mixed.

“On the one hand, nurses believe they’re able to reconcile science and spirituality through storytelling and even claim that they can provide more spiritual care than chaplains. On the other hand, nurses rarely talk about spirituality among themselves because they are concerned that their colleagues are uncomfortable discussing such matters. Nevertheless, by engaging in subtle practices that honor patients’ ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care.”

Don Grant’s new book takes readers inside a hospital where nurses and others tending to patients are also navigating between science and spirituality.

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