violence

The Bakersfield Californian welcomes 2010 by reflecting on the past decade:

Naming this decade — and we must, because we are Americans, and we name things — isn’t going be so easy. Some decades, at least in retrospect, are easy calls. The Gay Nineties. The Roaring Twenties. The Psychedelic Sixties. But naming the ’00s is a challenge best postponed, because nothing we’ve considered rings with authenticity.

So,

All we can do is look at the evidence that historians and sociologists not yet born will consider. And one thing, beyond the bookend disasters of 9/11 and the Great Recession, stands out: Technology reshaped who we are and how we interact. Social media took hold of America in the last few years of the ’00s, with 350 million users on Facebook, 100 million on MySpace, and 18 million using Twitter.

Sociologist Rhonda Dugan weighs in:

“I’d call it the Decade of Self-Importance,” she said. “Everyone is networking online, but they’re not doing it just to find jobs. They’re doing it to talk about themselves. The ‘Me Decade’ was all about me. Now it’s about me and telling everyone about it. I use Facebook myself. And now I’m asking myself, ‘Why am I posting that I ran a half-marathon?’ We’ve become more narcissistic, and social media has helped push it along.”

Retired sociologist Russell Travis also comments:

“I’d call it the PTSD — the Post-Traumatic Stress Decade,” he said. That name “reflects the cumulative stress from the aftermath of two ongoing wars and the many coming home afflicted with (real) PTSD; the aftermath of a seriously tanked economy; … and the aftermath of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers.”

Maybe this is how we’ve come to deal with events just too big and too profound to process — by blocking out the wider world and turning inward, going to our own, personal safe place where the mundane trumps the abstract, the ordinary blocks out the incomprehensible, and 140 characters (or less) just about covers it.

Nr.187A recent piece in the New York Times challenges the conventional wisdom that bad economic times are a hotbed for criminal activity:

[New York] Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime.

“The idea that everyone has ingrained into them — that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse — is wrong,” said David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It was never right to begin with.”

To make sense of this, let’s call in the sociologists….

Experts have long studied how shifts in crime might be attributed to economic indicators like consumer confidence, unemployment or a faltering housing market, particularly when it comes to property crime, burglary and robbery. The findings have been “rather equivocal,” said Steven F. Messner, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied homicides in New York City.

While there is generally thought to be a lag between changing economic conditions and new crime patterns, he said, it is curious that there has been no pronounced jump in street crimes associated with the most recent recession, which took root last year.

“But it could take a while to work its way through the system and into people’s psychology,” he said. “I would say the jury is still out on the impact of this most recent economic collapse.”

Jesenia Pizarro, a criminologist at Michigan State, said that crime is indirectly related to the economy:

Most crime is committed by the poor and uneducated, she said, and a bad economy can aggravate poverty in ways that are not obvious.  “The bad economy leads to social processes that are then more directly related to crime,” she said, citing “less services for youth and young people who are less occupied and don’t have the guardianship they need” or cuts in education “that can lead to crime.”

The New York Times reports on “soul-searching” in Turkey after the murder of a gay man last year:

For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.

Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom.

A sociologist comments on this “honor killing”:

Until recently, so-called honor killings have been largely confined to women, who face being killed by male relatives for perceived grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in Istanbul as a result of honor killings, while the United Nations estimates the practice globally claims as many as 5,000 lives a year. In Turkey, relatives convicted in such killings are subject to life sentences.

A sociologist who studies honor killings, Mazhar Bagli, at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, noted that tribal Kurdish families that kill daughters perceived to have dishonored them publicize the murders to help cleanse their shame.

But he said gay honor killings remained underground because a homosexual not only brought shame to his family, but also tainted the concept of male identity upon which the community’s social structure depended.

“Until now, gay honor killings have been invisible because homosexuality is taboo,” he said.

Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey.

Read more.

Ohio Lottery and PayDay LoansSociologists have found that it’s not just individuals who pay a high price for payday lending practices. Whole neighborhoods pay, too, in more than just monetary ways.

As reported by Reuters:

As Congress debates financial regulatory reform and the Obama Administration advocates for greater consumer financial protection, a new study finds a need for Congressional action on fringe banking practices used heavily by financially vulnerable families. The study released today details the toll on communities with a high concentration of payday lending business and finds a clear association between the presence of payday lenders and neighborhood crime rates. The study recommends that Congress take action to cap payday lender interest rates at 36 percent, enacting for the entire country protections Congress put in place for U.S. military families.  The new study, entitled “Does Fringe Banking ExacerbateNeighborhood Crime Rates? Social Disorganization and the Ecology of PaydayLending,” was conducted by The George Washington University professors Charis E. Kubrin and Gregory D. Squires, along with Dr. Steven M. Graves of California State University, Northridge.

Further…

These broader community costs include higher rates of violent crime.  The study found that the association between payday lending and violent crime remains statistically significant even after a range of factors traditionally associated with crime are controlled for statistically.

The sociological commentary…

“As a criminologist, I can attest to the fact that there is woefully limited research on the impact of the behavior of financial institutions on neighborhood crime.  As our research demonstrates, these connections can no longer be ignored by criminologists and law enforcement officials across the country,” said Charis Kubrin.

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

Read more.

caution tapeEarlier this week USA Today ran several articles  on the tenth anniversary of the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. They called upon several sociologists to talk about how the Columbine shootings changed the culture of American high schools.

The first featured work from sociologist Katherine Newman…

School shooters almost always tell classmates of their plans, so schools should provide “confidential avenues for reporting what they hear,” says Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, who co-authored Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. It’s tough to get teenagers to “tell,” since creating a social culture apart from adults is so important to adolescent development, Newman says. But if adults guarantee confidentiality, results can be dramatic. Examples:

•Colorado has a Safe2Tell anonymous tipline that covers any potential threat to safety. The program also includes anonymous and encrypted Web-tipping, says Susan Payne, special agent in charge of school safety and homeland security for the state. In the past 4½ years, the line has prevented 28 planned school attacks, she says. In one incident, there were 33 weapons found. About two-thirds of the calls come from kids, Payne says. “All of us have seen these unspeakable tragedies. I can’t think of one that could not have been prevented.”

•Safe School Ambassadors is a program created by the non-profit Community Matters in 2000. It has trained staff at more than 650 schools in 23 states on how to set up so-called ambassadors — influential student leaders of varied cliques who learn how to squelch minor fires of bullying and other behaviors, and to report potential rampages.

The second highlighted sociologist David Osher…

The Secret Service found that 71% of shooters they studied felt “persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others.” In several cases, they’d experienced school bullying and harassment that was “long-standing and severe.”

“These kids didn’t pick the local movie theater to blow people away, and there’s a reason they picked school,” says David Osher, a sociologist and vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

Schools that tolerate lots of bullying and look the other way from petty acts of violence are more vulnerable to escalating violence, including rampages from shooters, he says.

And where relations between teachers and kids with emotional problems are harsh or distant, violence becomes more likely.

“These are rage shootings,” he says, “kids suffering from depression largely creating public suicides in school environments where they feel alienated.”

Read more on how ‘Post-Columbine Programs Help Prevent Rampages.’

Read more on ‘Lessons from Columbine.’

Desert Eagle 9mmThe Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story earlier this week in which a number of criminologists were consulted about whether recent shootings, murders, and other violent crimes could be linked to the economic downturn in the United States. The paper cites a number of cases that have made the headlines in recent weeks:  “Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.”

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood. On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

Read more.

Live Science reports on work by sociologist Sampson Blair suggesting that the recession may fuel more family murders and suicides. They write:

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says. The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell, however, several studies have found that suicides as well as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such events can be tied to poor economic situations such as the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist at University of Buffalo.

“I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation,” Blair said. Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and deadly domestic violence.

But there does appear to be some disagreement between sociologists about the link between economic trouble and suicide…

While several studies have linked unemployment to suicides, it’s not clear that overall terrible economic times cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on suicides and author of “The Copycat Effect” (Pocket, 2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during times of social and economic stress: “Historical studies conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent events when there is society-wide anguish, for example, in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars and economic depressions.”

Suicide is more common than most people think, though. Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it every year, according to researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women. (Women are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men apparently succeed more often, as they are four times more likely to actually die from suicide.)

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray and his colleagues in the November online version of the journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler’s despair, of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

“Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide,” Wray said.

Read on…

CRW_2893Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story about how undercover sheriff’s operatives from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office, along with an FBI informer, worked to infiltrate the ‘RNC Welcoming Committee,’ a group that was planning blockades for the Republican National Convention this past September.

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune… For a year Deputy Hedstrom led a double life as Norma Jean Johnson, filing her recollections, often daily, with the Special Investigations Unit, as did the other operatives. The covert operation was not without drama. When one informant was accused of being a cop, he broke into tears, convincing his accusers that they were mistaken, according to a report.

As the result of information collected by Hedstrom and the other operatives, these undercover operations led to the arrest of eight members of the Welcoming Committee…

A sociologist expressed concern over these developments:

…But David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says that while authorities may have had probable cause to infiltrate anarchist groups, he is concerned about a potential chill on civil liberties. Cunningham, author of “There’s Something Happening Here,” a history of covert FBI activities in the 1960s and ’70s, said there needs to be more oversight of undercover work from Congress. He also believes local law enforcement agencies should be required to obtain court approval for undercover operations.

Read more.