Reintegration into society is crucial for ex-combatants who were previously involved in armed conflict, yet repeated offenses often impede successful transitions. This problem can be seen first hand in Colombia, where approximately 20 percent of former combatants from guerrilla and paramilitary groups engaged in illegal activity since demobilization of armed conflict. The Colombian government has responded by supporting educational resources, counseling, health care, employment, and financial assistance programs for former combatants. Successful reintegration, however, also involves determining which individual and social factors influence some ex-combatants to commit crime and others to lead a crime-free life.

 Oliver Kaplan and Enzo Nussio use event history analysis to predict the time until ex-combatants are arrested, combining 2008 Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP) survey data of 1,485 ex-combatant men and women from both guerrilla and paramilitary groups with police records documenting arrests and captures through June 2012. Additionally, they conducted 98 interviews with ex-combatants from 2008 to 2010 to determine potential motives for returning to criminal activity.  Studies like this show a clear link between “street crime” and other forms of armed conflict — and the common reintegration challenges they pose for individuals and societies. 

Findings indicate that former combatants who initially joined guerrilla or paramilitary groups for personal motives are more likely to commit crime after demobilization. This effect was even stronger for former paramilitaries. In contrast, those who are deterred by police, held strong family ties, achieved more education, and had children are less likely to return to illegal activity after armed conflict. Factors such as threatened security and worsening economic opportunities, however, showed little effect on recidivism. Kaplan and Nussio also note the importance of gender reintegration, as women may face sexual violence and men may experience feelings of emasculation after losing their military status. Studies like this show a clear link between “street crime” and other forms of armed conflict — and the common reintegration challenges they pose for individuals and societies.  

Men today express a greater commitment to an equal division of labor at home than in the past and some workplaces continue to implement supportive work-family policies, like paid leave for fathers in San Francisco for example. However, women are far more likely to take advantage of work-family policies like parental leave and data suggest that a large gap still exists in the division of household labor for straight couples. So, how can we get men to take advantage of work-family policies? In a recent study, Sarah Thebaud and David Pedulla attempt to answer part of this question by exploring how the existence of supportive work-family policies influences young men’s preferences for different types of work-family arrangements.

Using experimental survey data, Thebaud and Pedulla asked unmarried men without children, ages 18 to 32, how they would prefer to divide work and home responsibilities with a potential partner. One group of respondents was told there were supportive policies in place to help with work-family balance (paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and options to work from home), while the other group did not receive any information about work family policies. The researchers also measured men’s gender ideology with a five-question scale, as well as men’s perceptions of their male peers’ preferences for the division of work and home responsibilities.  Men who learned about supportive work-family policies were more likely to prefer progressive work-family arrangements, but only if they thought other men shared those preferences. 

The researchers found that the men who learned about supportive work-family policies were more likely to prefer progressive work-family arrangements, but only if they thought other men shared those preferences. When respondents believed their male peers did not prefer progressive arrangements, information about work-family policies actually decreased the likelihood of men having gender-progressive preferences.

These findings indicate that supportive work-family policies may actually have unintended consequences if male colleagues have more traditional beliefs about work and household division of labor. Men may worry about the stigma of taking advantage of these policies if they believe the policies contradict masculine norms. Thus, changing men’s individual beliefs may not be sufficient for getting them on board with supportive work-family policies and more gender-progressive relationship arrangements. Instead, we must challenge the masculine culture that pervades male peer groups and reproduces gender inequity.

The character of Black boys is often questioned in American society. Much of the focus is on their clothing style or physical size and they are often portrayed as “thugs,” deserving of whatever violence that befalls them. The fatal shootings of boys like Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin garnered widespread attention to this perceived dangerousness of African-American boys. Despite better access to economic resources, many middle- and upper-class Black mothers fear they cannot adequately prepare their sons for the gendered racism likely to pervade nearly every aspect of their social lives. In her recent study, Dawn Marie Dow explores these challenges Black mothers face raising their sons in a society that views black boys as “thugs.”

From 2009 to 2011, Dow interviewed 60 middle- and upper-class Black mothers in the San Francisco Bay Area who had at least one son under the age of 10, talking with them about how they prepare their sons to successfully avoid the “thug” perception. Mothers’ incomes ranged from $50,000 to $300,000 and 63% held advanced degrees. Dow found that middle – and upper-class Black mothers employ multiple strategies to combat negative stereotypes about their sons. Some mothers use “experience management” that focuses on involving their sons in various empowering and challenging activities, like baseball leagues or music lessons. Others use “environment management,” such as moving to predominantly white neighborhoods or limiting their son’s interactions with other neighborhood kids in order to curb the amount of discrimination they face in certain social settings. Mothers also teach their sons how to engage in “image and emotion management” by prohibiting certain styles of dress and telling them not to show frustration and anger. The mothers Dow interviewed saw these techniques as essential in navigating the “thug” image and keeping their children safe from the discrimination of teachers and the brutality of law enforcement.  Black mothers of all economic backgrounds use stigma management to try and keep their sons safe, whether it be teaching them to manage their environment, their experiences, or their emotions.  

Dow’s findings suggest that while middle- and upper-class mothers acknowledge additional resources afforded by their socioeconomic status, they believe their sons are still treated poorly by educators and law enforcement officials because of their racial identity and gender. As a result, Black mothers of all economic backgrounds use stigma management to try and keep their sons safe, whether it be teaching them to manage their environment, their experiences, or their emotions. With all the work Black mothers and their sons are doing to keep Black boys safe, here’s hoping others start putting in some effort too. 

 

While social media sites have certainly benefited for-profit companies, providing unprecedented visibility and the ability to target key demographics, non-profits have also been utilizing these sites to promote their causes and collect donations. Their goal is usually for a cause to “go viral” and spread within and across social networks in the form of likes and shares. The Kony 2012 campaign is a perfect example of this, which reached 120 million people in just five days and garnered $32 million in donations. But recent research finds that this level of online social contagion is rare and “likes” are not often likely to lead to donations.

Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis, and Angelo Mele studied charitable donations on Facebook and Twitter over a two-year period to determine if and how online social contagion occurs. They collaborated with HelpAttack!,  an application that allows users to donate to charities through social media sites. The HelpAttack! application lets users “broadcast” their initial pledge and subsequent donations to friends in their network, and the researchers analyzed how often users who broadcast a pledge to donate actually fulfill that pledge. While they found that broadcasting a pledge is related to actually making a donation, a large proportion of users “opportunistically broadcast a pledge and then delete it.” Further, they did not find evidence of a social contagion effect after pledges were broadcast. Although the campaigns in their experiment reached 6.4 million users and received numerous clicks and likes, only 30 donations were made. Although the campaigns in their experiment reached 6.4 million users and received numerous clicks and likes, only 30 donations were made.

This study shows that social media sites enable “costless” support in the form of likes and shares, which might raise awareness of a cause or organization, but that these likes rarely lead to support in the form of donations. What’s more, it appears that a lot of people use donation pledges to boost their social image but then quickly delete their pledge to avoid actually shelling out any cash for the cause. The researchers conclude that, despite initial optimism that the Internet and social media sites would make campaigning for causes easier and more effective, it seems that offline, face-to-face campaigns are still needed to turn costless likes into capital.

 

Parents undoubtedly play a role in their children’s understanding of gender and sexual health. But can children have any effect on their parents? In a study investigating how becoming a father influences men’s sexual behavior, sociologist Abigail Weitzman finds that the gender of a father’s firstborn child has a significant influence on that father’s likelihood of being sexually promiscuous later in life.

Using 61,801 Demographic and Health Surveys from 37 developing countries, Weitzman looks at how the sex of a firstborn child influences the father’s sexual health and behavior. The survey provides information about whether or not fathers pay for sex, use condoms, have extramarital sexual partners, and report having genital ulcers or genital discharge, which may be signs of an STI. Through fixed effects models that control for differences between countries, Weitzman finds that fathers with firstborn sons are significantly more likely than those with firstborn daughters to pay for sex, and they are also less likely to use condoms. Fathers of firstborn sons also have a higher probability of reporting genital ulcers or genital discharge. Additionally, fathers with firstborn sons reported having slightly higher opposition to women’s sexual autonomy. In short, fathers with firstborn children who are male are associated with higher rates of promiscuity.

Interestingly, these differences among fathers tend to emerge when their firstborn child reaches adolescence, suggesting that family gender dynamics shift as children reach puberty and young adulthood. Though the data cannot fully explain why firstborn adolescent sons are associated with more promiscuous behavior among fathers, Weitzman speculates that perhaps fathers of firstborn adolescent males are more likely to engage in sexual promiscuity as a means to maintain, reinforce, and teach masculine behavior and identity. Weitzman’s study may have just scratched the surface of an important set of new questions about how fatherhood, gender identity, and sexual behavior around the world intertwine with family.

We expect co-ops to be places where employees and customers are free to be themselves, empowered by collective ownership and unencumbered by the corporate control of scheduling, dress code, and workplace policies. However, sociologist Elizabeth Hoffmann finds worker cooperatives are not always utopian work spaces. Instead, they rely heavily on a specific kind of emotional labor to achieve conformity and productivity among their employees.

Hoffmann studied emotional labor like verbalizing support for your coworkers and smiling while on the job in worker cooperatives in the U.K. and the U.S. across four industries: coal mining, chemical manufacturing, taxicab driving, and organic food distribution. Through interviewing co-op employees and observing their behavior on the job over a number of years, Hoffmann found that working at a co-op can actually demand more emotional labor than working for a conventional company. For example, while employees at co-ops are encouraged to display emotions not typically condoned in other work environments, like anger or love, they are also expected to truly identify with the cooperative’s ideology and ethos. And while workers in conventional workplaces are expected to maintain a façade of good relationships with customers and co-workers, worker cooperatives often expect their employees to truly feel the emotions they display at work. Not only should they smile and help, the workers at the co-ops that Hoffman studied expected that employees actually want to help their co-workers.

So while co-ops appear to promote individuality and choice among their workers, they often require a much deeper, possibly more insidious level of conformity and self-control than one might imagine. Perhaps it’s just one more case of how the most powerful forms of social control are those we exert—or are expected to exert—on ourselves.

The alarmingly high rates of suicide among transgender people have received national attention, prompting larger questions about health-harming behaviors among the transgender population. When one’s gender expression strays from cultural expectations, how does it influence discrimination and health?

Using data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, Lisa R. Miller and Eric Anthony Grollman examine this relationship. Survey respondents answered a number of questions about how their gender is perceived by others, what types of discrimination they have faced, and whether they have attempted suicide and/or abused alcohol or drugs. Miller and Grollman find that transgender adults report substantially higher rates of health-harming behaviors than cisgender (that is, non-transgender) adults report in other surveys.

A staggering 44% of transgender respondents said they had attempted suicide. Those who thought others saw them as transgender were significantly more likely to have attempted suicide than those who “passed” (were perceived to be cisgender) and reported higher rates of discrimination. Taken together, Miller and Grollman suggest that transgender adults perceived as gender nonconforming face more types of both daily and major discriminations; this may increase self-harming behavior.

Being transgender, the authors write, does not necessarily lead to health-harming behaviors; rather, being visible as transgender (or gender nonconforming) increases health-harming behaviors. It seems to be the social responses to gender nonconformity that negatively impact transgender health and wellbeing.

Suicidal behavior has been found to cluster in and around certain areas and groups. For example, the nine western states that make up the “suicide belt” in the United States, including Arizona, Oregon, and Wyoming, consistently report higher suicide rates than the rest of the country. Research also finds that suicidal behavior can “spread” between individuals; when someone experiences a friend or loved one’s suicide, he is much more likely to attempt his own suicide. If suicide is contagious, how and why does it spread?

In their analysis of suicide contagion among young adults, Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn use network data from a national survey of adolescents to analyze how the disclosed and undisclosed suicide attempts of one adolescent affects the suicide attempts and ideation of that adolescent’s friends one year later. They find that when an adolescent knows about their friend’s suicide attempts, they are more likely to think about and attempt suicide themselves. However, they find that undisclosed suicide attempts and ideations do not result in suicidal attempts or ideation among their friends.

Mueller and Abrutyn conclude that when an individual shares their suicide attempts with their friends, it “transforms the distant idea of suicide—as something that other people do—into something that people like them use to cope with distress, sorrow, or alienation.” They argue that suicide spreads when it becomes a “cultural script” for coping with emotional distress; the more someone is exposed to suicidal behavior among their peers, the more likely the generalized idea of suicide will become an acceptable option for how that individual deals with her own distress. When suicide becomes prevalent enough in a peer group or culture to qualify as an option, it is much more likely to spread.

The United States has seen a steady increase in the policing and mass incarceration of its citizens in the last few decades. The increased surveillance and imprisonment, primarily of poor and minority populations, has been called by social scientists a “culture of control.” This culture of control harms not only the individual, but also their community, since highly policed communities have worse health outcomes and less economic stability than their less-policed counterparts. In their study of the effects of out-of-school suspension on academic achievement, Brea Perry and Edward Morris find that the cultural mindset of control—and its consequences— has now found its way into the halls of America’s schools.

Using three years of data from over 15,000 students in a public school district in Kentucky, Perry and Morris report that higher levels of “exclusionary discipline” (out-of-school suspension rates) lead to lower math and science test scores even among non-suspended students. The increased use of suspension as a punishment for individuals, that is, reduces academic achievement outcomes for the student body as a whole.

To test for reverse causation—the possibility that the effects are working in the opposite way—the authors looked at test scores over three years and used suspensions at the beginning of a given semester to predict test scores at the end of that semester. Their analyses confirm that increased suspension leads to lower test scores, rather than lower test scores leading to more suspensions.

Like the destabilizing consequences of mass incarceration for communities, exclusionary discipline in public schools ultimately undermines rather than supports academic performance. Schools with highly punitive environments create anxiety and distrust, heightening tensions for both students and teachers.

The authors emphasize that their findings are presented as an addition to existing critiques of the overuse of exclusion as a means of social control. They conclude, “Punishment is not a discrete response to certain transgressions, but a system of social order that produces wider meanings and consequences.”

From guerrilla gardening and seed bombing to public book booths and homemade bike lanes, unauthorized alterations to public space are on the rise. In contrast to other, often illegal, alterations like graffiti and culture jamming, these interventions are meant to be functional improvements to local communities. After two years of fieldwork in 14 cities, including New York, London, New Orleans, and Toronto, Gordon Douglas coined this new form of alteration “do-it-yourself urban design”.

Douglas found three forms of DIY urban design in his study: “guerrilla greening,” which is converting unused land for gardening; “spontaneous streetscaping,” the painting of traffic markings or installation of signage to ease traffic accidents; and “aspirational urbanism,” which includes posting public notices or informational signs voicing community policies. While most media framing of these interventions is positive, Douglas calls for a more critical understanding of their implications.

On the one hand, Douglas argues that these DIY innovations signal a critique of the widespread professionalization of urban planning and design that is prominent in Europe in North America.  According to Douglas, the people in his study treat public space as “open to popular reinterpretation” as they set out to change their community’s infrastructure to better suit their needs. On the other hand, Douglas also points out that, although they are meant to be creative and helpful, these “improvements” can also inadvertently contribute to gentrification and the displacement of low-income and minority groups by raising property values and increasing outside interest in the neighborhood.

As individuals continue to take their community space into their own hands, it will be important to understand what these changes mean to them, but also to the community they are hoping to improve.  Or, as Douglas puts it, “To the degree that these actions are an indication of what some people actually want out of their urban surroundings, we could learn a great deal about how to design our urban spaces more responsively in the first place.”