Search results for who would you shoot

There is a whole social science to the optimal balance of victory and defeat in social movements and social change. Consider two political cartoons by Mike Luckovich. One, from June 21, counterposes a person carrying a sign saying “black lives matter” and a Confederate flag subtitled “S. Carolina rebuttal.” Another, from June 25, features a black man weighted down by chains and padlocks saying “voter ID laws,” inequality,” “police brutality,” and “mass jailings.” A white man in front of him jumps up high and lifts his arm, saying “The Confederate flag’s coming down, high five!”

Did he really just demand the removal of the Confederate flag and then mock people who would celebrate its removal? Is that how much things change in a week? But in periods of social change, moving the goal posts is what it’s all about. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The Charleston massacre was a horrific reminder of how it seems some things never change. But they do change. Dylann Roof was caught and may be put to death, legally. And it turned out that, not only had the Confederate flag only been flying at the South Carolina capitol for a few decades, but it actually could be taken down in response to public outrage. And yet, that’s not the end of racism.

Anthea Butler, a religion and Africana studies professor at Penn, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, was on the On Point radio show. She was talking to host Tom Ashbrook, when she got this:

Tom Ashbrook: If you ask me, I understand that feeling and that vivid response. At the same time, I, and maybe you, Anthea Butler, Dr. Butler, don’t want to lose, or not recognize, or lose the progress that has been made. And this is nowhere near paradise…

Anthea Butler: But what kind of progress? What kind of progress? This is what we keep talking about. And I don’t understand, when you say, “We’ve made progress.” How have we made progress when the president of the United States has been constantly questioned because he is partially a Black man? And so you talk progress — and this is the kind of talk we’re going to hear all week long after this.

TA: But he’s president, madam.

AB: He is president.

TA: Well, that’s a pretty big deal…

AB: That is a big deal, but to some people in this country, like Dylann Roof, that is the end of this country. That’s why you had the kind of phrase that he said, that all your politicians, the right Republican politicians have been saying, “Take our country back.” And so, I want to talk about the rhetoric that’s happened…

Ashbrook has a point about progress, of course, but it’s just the wrong time to say that, days after a racist massacre that seems as timeless as a Black-churches burning. At that moment there could be no progress.

For whatever reason, Ashbrook turned to progress on the interpersonal level:

TA: We did see White people in South Carolina, in Charleston, pour into the churches alongside African Americans over this weekend.

AB: Yes we did. But you need to understand the distinction here. I don’t doubt that there are well-meaning, good White people, good White Christians, who are appalled at this. I understand that. But when you have a structural system that continues to do this kind of racial profiling, the kinds of things that are going on with the police in this country, the kinds of issues that we’ve had. The problem becomes this: you can talk about progress all you want, but reality is another thing altogether.

Again, it’s progress, but focusing on it at that moment is basically #AllLivesMatter. President Obama also tried to keep his eyes on the prize, in his appearance on the WTF podcast:

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.

Outrage ensued about his use of “nigger,” but White House Press Secretary Josh “earnest non-racist white guy” Earnest doubled down:

The President’s use of the word and the reason that he used the word could not be more apparent from the context of his discussion on the podcast.  The President made clear that it’s not possible to judge the nation’s progress on race issues based solely on an evaluation of our country’s manners.  The fact is that we’ve made undeniable progress in this country over the last several decades, and as the President himself has often said, anyone who lived in this country through the ‘50s and the ‘60s and the ‘70s and the ‘80s notes the tremendous progress that we’ve made.  That progress is undeniable. But what’s also undeniable is that there is more work that needs to be done, and there’s more that we can do.  And the fact is everyone in this country should take some inspiration from the progress that was made in the previous generation and use that as a motivation and an inspiration to try to make further progress toward a more perfect union.

Now is no time to talk about progress, some say. With Black church members being gunned down and churches burning, and one appalling, outrageous video after another showing the abuse of Black citizens by police, having a Black president is not a victory. So much so that maybe he’s not really Black at all. Frank Roberts writes of Obama’s “Amazing Grace” moment:

With Obama … blackness has been reduced to a theatrical prop; a shuck-and-jive entertainment device that keeps (black) audiences believing that the President “feels their pain” — at precisely the same time that he fails to provide a substantive policy response to black unemployment, over-incarceration, and/or racialized state violence.

The social scientist in me objects, because the rate of progress is not determined by the victory or tragedy of the moment, or by the blackness of a man. And Obama probably has done more than any other president (at least recently) to address Black unemployment, incarceration, and racialized state violence. That’s not a moral or political statement — and it doesn’t imply “enough” — it’s an empirical one.

Movements use good news for legitimacy and bad news for urgency.  When something goes well, they need to claim credit and also make sure their supporters know there is more work to be done. When something awful happens they place the troubles in the context of a narrative of struggle, but they don’t want to appear powerless because that saps support and undermines morale.

An extended version of this post is at Family Inequality.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He writes the blog Family Inequality and is the author of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Studies of Americans’ unconscious beliefs shows that most people — white and black — think black people are dangerous and both average folks and police are quicker to shoot black than white people.

Where does the cognitive belief that black people are dangerous come from?

Partly, it comes from the media. A new study by Color of Change found that, while 51% of the people arrested for violent crime in New York City are black, 75% of the news reports about such arrests highlighted black alleged perpetrators.

Meanwhile, when people of color are arrested, they are more likely to be portrayed in ways that make them seem threatening than white people. This happened this week:

See also, portrayals of Mark Duggan and Mike Brown.

Each time we see a black person on TV who is linked with a violent crime or portrayed as a criminal, the neurons in our brain that link blackness with criminality fire. The same for people of other races. The more often a link is triggered, the stronger it becomes. Disproportionate reporting like the kind captured in this study make the neural links in our brain — it’s actual physical structure — reflect the racism inherent in the reporting itself.

These associations, unfortunately, are pre-conscious. Those neurons fire faster than we can suppress them with our conscious mind. So, even if we believe in our heart-of-hearts that these connections are unfair or untrue, our unconscious is busy making the associations anyway. Biased reporting, in other words, changes the minds of viewers, literally.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sociologists are interested in the workings of power. How is inequality produced and sustained? What discursive and institutional forces uphold it? How are obvious injustices made invisible or legitimized? Why is it so hard to change hearts, minds, and societies?

How does all this work?

Earlier this month, a sliver of insight was posted. It’s a clip of a speech by Anita Sarkeesian in which she reveals what it’s like for one person to be the target of sustained, online harassment.

In 2009, Sarkeesian launched Feminist Frequency, a series of web logs in which she made feminist arguments about representation of women in pop culture. In 2012, she launched a kickstarter to fund an ambitious plan to analyze the representation of women in video games. This drew the attention of gamers who opposed her project on principle and thus began an onslaught of abuse: daily insults and threats of rape and murder, photoshop harassment, bomb threats, and a video game in which her face can be beaten bloody, just to mention a few examples. Last fall she canceled a speech at Utah State University because someone threatened to commit “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if she went on. It’s been brutal and it’s never stopped.

So, is this power at work? Has she been silenced? And has her larger project – awareness of sexism and misogyny in video games – been harmed?

I’m not sure.

As an individual, Sarkeesian has continued to speak out about the issue, but how she does so and with what frequency has been aggressively curtailed by the harassment. In the four-and-a-half minute clip, with the theme “What I Couldn’t Say,” she talks about how the harassment has changed how she engages with the public. I offer some tidbits below, but here’s the full clip:

She explains:

I rarely feel comfortable speaking spontaneously in public spaces, I’m intentional and careful about the  media interviews I do, I decline  most invitations to be on podcasts or web shows, I carefully consider the wording of every tweet to make sure it is clear and can’t be misconstrued. Over the last several years, I’ve become hypervigilant. My life, my words, and my actions are placed under a magnifying glass. Every day I see my words scrutinized, twisted, and distorted by thousands of men hell bent on destroying and silencing me.

How she gets her message across has been affected as well:

[I cant’ say] anything funny… I almost never make jokes anymore on YouTube… I don’t do it because viewers often interpret humor and sarcasm as ignorance… You would not believe how often jokes are taken as proof that I don’t know what I’m talking about… even when those jokes rely on a deep knowledge of the source material.

And she feels that, above all, she’s not allowed to talk about the harm that her harassers are doing:

I don’t’ get to publicly express sadness, or rage, or exhaustion, or anxiety, or depression… I don’t get to express feelings of fear or how tiring it is to be constantly vigilant of my physical and digital surroundings… In our society, women are not allowed to express feelings without being characterized as hysterical, erratic bitchy, highly emotional, or overly sensitive. Our experiences of insecurity, doubt, anger, or sadness are all policed and often used against us.

A youtube search for the video reveals a slew of anti-Sarkeesian responses were published within days.

——————–

Sarkeesian’s revelations put an inspiring human face on the sacrifice individuals make to fight-the-good-fight, but also reveal that, in some ways, her harassers are winning.

That said, their grotesque display of misogyny has raised Sarkeesian’s profile and drawn attention to and legitimized her project and her message. That original kickstarter? The original call was for $6,000. Her supporters donated almost $159,000. The feminist backlash to the misogynist backlash was swift and monied.

Ever since, the abuse she’s suffered as an individual has made the issue of both sexism in video games and online harassment more visible. Her pain may have been good for the visibility of the movement. I wonder, though, what message it sends to other women and men who want to pursue similar social justice initiatives. It is a cautionary tale that may dampen others’ willingness to fight.

The battle is real. The gamers who oppose Sarkeesian and what she stands for have succeeded in quieting, if not silencing her and have probably discouraged others from entering the fray. But Sarkeesian’s cause and the problem of gamer misogyny is more visible than ever. The fight goes on.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Iconic images — such as a single student standing stoic before Red Army tanks in Tiananmen Square, a protester leaning forward to put a flower into the barrel of a soldier’s gun, or two African-American athletes raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic victory podium — often seem to shape much of what we “know” about various historical events or social movements. In our social media, mass culture world, images and interpretations spread fast. But where do these images come from? How and by whom are they produced?

Last week, wire services photographer Noah Berger found himself behind the lens of a photograph that has the potential to become such an image. In it, a white, plain-clothes police officer in Oakland, CA, aims his gun at protesters and reporters, while his black partner holds down a black protester. At a historical moment when protests are sweeping the country, bringing issues of police violence and the unequal treatment of minorities into public consciousness with slogans like “Black Lives Matter,” it is perhaps not surprising that the photo seems to have gone viral.

Sociologist Joshua Page reached out to Berger to discuss the photographer’s experience in creating this powerful image. In an interview, the two talked about the social logistics of photographing protests, the life of a “stringer,” and the struggle to capture the essence—even the sociological significance—of events that have complex backstories and often conflicting meanings in single, silent photographs.

REUTERS/Noah Berger

1. The Photo.

Page: Why was the police officer pointing his gun at people?

Berger: In basic, loose terms, what happened on the night that the plain-clothes officer pulled his gun on the protesters began with protests on the Berkeley campus, about 7:00pm. They disrupted a lecture by, I think, one of the founders of Paypal, but they marched peacefully for a couple of hours. It was about 150 people, and they marched all the way from the Berkeley campus to downtown Oakland—about three miles.

When it reached downtown Oakland, at 14th and Broadway, which is sort of “protest central,” it started getting a little bit edgier. You could just feel it in the crowd… Pretty soon after that, the first window got smashed. Then the cell phone store got looted. I watched that happen. I couldn’t take any pictures, but I did watch it.

So, the protesters kept marching, banging on windows. There was some minor vandalism, and, according to the California Highway Patrol [CHP], when the cell phone store was looted, that was when two officers who had been in a car behind the protest group got out and started walking with the group. This is all according to the CHP.

I noticed the officers in the crowd, and I actually thought they looked kind of scary. I made a mental note to stay away from them. They didn’t strike me as cops, they just looked kind of scary. But as far as I saw, they just walked along with the crowd. There have been some reports of them doing other things… but all I saw them doing was walking along with the group.

About 20 to 30 minutes after the first vandalism started, a group of roughly 60 people were walking, and someone just turned on these two guys and started yelling that they were cops. Kind of taunting them. More people joined in. At that point, the San Francisco Chronicle photographer tells me, somebody ran up behind the cops and pulled the hat off one of the guys, threw it on the ground. Apparently another person hit one of the officers on the back of the head. This is according to the Chronicle.

At that point, one of the officers in the crowd and a guy just started scuffling. It just turned into a brawl, and the crowd started advancing on these two officers. At that point, one of the officers pulled out a baton, which you can see in some of the pictures, and he also pulled out his firearm. He kind of aimed at the crowd and swung it around, saying something to the effect of, “Stay back! Back off.” He held them off for about 30 seconds until the regular, uniformed officers swooped in from the end of the block. They formed a protective semi-circle around these two guys and the protesters they were detaining, and pushed the other protesters backwards to secure the area.

Page: At what point did he point the gun at the Chronicle’s photographer?

Berger: I very much doubt that the cop knew the guy was press and was specifically pointing at him. He was holding the crowd back. It was more general, to everybody, “Stay back.” And in the picture, his hand isn’t on the trigger. So, I don’t think he was specifically targeting the press. It was just that we were close to him.

Page: Have you been surprised at how widely that image has been circulated and the ways people have interpreted it on Facebook and elsewhere?

Berger: Very much so. Michael Short, the Chronicle photographer and I, when we talked about it right after it happened, we thought the story was gonna be, “How crazy is this that a group of protesters knowingly attacked undercover officers?” That’s what we thought was the amazing part of the moment!

But after that picture came out, it conveyed a different perspective: “How crazy is it that this undercover cop would pull his weapon on protesters?” It’s a really good case of the picture not showing the whole story. It’s not a lie. It definitely is part of the story, but it’s not the whole occurrence.

It’s led to a cascade of interest that I’ve never really seen before, which was weird and mostly good. Not all good, but mostly good.

2. The job.

Page: So, what is your job title?

Berger: I’m a freelance photographer, a “stringer.”

Page: Do you see yourself as a photojournalist?

Berger: Yeah, I kind of wear two hats. It changes depending on the season, but I spend about 60% of my time on the news and about 40% in corporate or government work. But when I’m out during the protests, I certainly consider myself a photojournalist.

Page: Are there particular assignments you like to take?

Berger: Definitely the protests, the edgier protests are high on my list. That, and wildfires. My favorite assignments are protests and wildfires.

The King Wildfire, 2014. © Noah Berger

Page: What is it you like about them?

Berger: The wildfires are great, because you’re in these volatile, somewhat dangerous situations, but no one’s aiming for you, unlike in the protests. You’re out in the woods, trying to get your shot, and you’re not dealing with the public relations side or negotiating society. You’re just on your own.

The protests, it’s just interesting to see when there are clashes and when the emotions and violence flare up. And on another side, it’s just interesting to see that side of life. It’s something a lot of people don’t witness.

Page: Are there particular types of images you’re looking for when shooting a protest?

Berger: Sure. Working for the wire services like the AP or Reuters, I try to keep in mind one image that sums up an event. I’m not just looking for one image from the night, but I like my images to say something. When you’re working for a wire service, it’s more important to consider an audience outside the local area and know that you’re looking for images that sum up the event.

Page: Those tend to be more dramatic images.

Berger: “Dramatic,” like for the police protests, obviously would be something that might have a policeman and a protester in it, and some interaction. But it doesn’t need to be. Reuters, another photographer, got a shot of this guy with fire around him and a sign that said “Black Lives Matter.” There’s no other context, but it just had a great feeling. So it doesn’t need to be both sides, but I think the photo needs to speak to the whole issue.

Page: How do you know when the picture represents what’s going on?

Berger: You just kind of know when it happens, I guess…

Page: Another shot you had the other day, of the freeway stopped in both directions, was just amazing.

Berger: That’s actually a little different than I normally shoot; it doesn’t tell the story as quickly as the images I would normally look for. It took me longer to warm to that photo, because it was harder to “read.” You need more context [to know that these are protesters stopping traffic on a freeway].

Page: What’s your process for shooting a protest? How do you know where to go?

Berger: Well, there are a couple different ways. To find out where the protest is gonna be, there’s a website that lists the bigger ones. Twitter has become huge. A lot of these protests are just organized a couple hours before by someone saying, “Hey, let’s meet at 7:00 at the corner of _______ and _______,” and that just creates the protest. So, Twitter’s good.

I also use a police scanner, and I’ll have that on, depending on what the protest is. Like, if there are multiple protest groups roaming the streets, that’s really useful…. The other way is following, if there are multiple groups, following where the police helicopters are. You can look up and kind of figure that out. But the scanner’s a really useful tool.

3. Interactions: Protesters, Police, and the Press Corps.

Page: Do you ever get pushback from protesters, get hassled?

Berger: All the time. When I’m out there, my primary concerns are staying safe from protesters, staying safe from the police projectiles or clubs, and just keeping my gear safe.

Page: I’m sure there must be times when the idea of a protest is to get the images out there and spread the word. Are there times when your relationship with the protesters is more collaborative than antagonistic?

Berger: It’s not necessarily true, actually, that they want the word out. There’s definitely a large group that does want the world to know what’s going on here… but a lot of people seem to want to be out there pushing the boundaries of police and society and don’t want it documented.

Page: Is there a sense in some protests that the press is part of the “system” people are protesting to begin with?

Flashback Friday.

Flipping through Safari magazine, something that struck me as odd.  Because the magazine is aimed, primarily, at selling hunting safaris, the vast majority of the pictures were people posing with their kills.

What I noticed was that, in nearly 100 percent of the pictures, the animals were posed so as to look alive: resting or sleeping. Most often, the animal was on its belly with its legs folded naturally beneath it and, even, its head held or propped up. The hunters posed behind the animal, often with a hand on it, as if they were simply petting the animal.  Further, there was almost never any evidence of the wound: no holes, no blood (though sometimes the weapon is included in the picture). It is almost as if the people are at a petting zoo and the animal is blissfully enjoying the human attention. A more systematic analysis of hunting magazines found the same pattern.

Imagine for a minute how challenging this must be to pull off.  If you shoot an animal, it likely falls into any number of positions, many of which make it look like it’s just been shot (legs akimbo, head at an awkward angle, etc).  The hunter and his or her companions must have to wrangle this 500, 1,000, 1,500 pound dead weight into the position in which it appears in the images.

Why do they do it?

I don’t know. But maybe it has something to do with the relationship to nature that hunter culture endorses.  Instead of a destructive, violent relationship to nature that would be represented by picturing animals in their death poses, these pictures suggest a custodial relationship in which humans take care of or chaperone a nature to which they feel tenderly.

That is, they don’t destroy nature with their guns, they tame it.

Originally posted in 2009.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Despite the cellphone video of two police officers killing Kajieme Powell, there is some dispute as to what happened (see this account in The Atlantic). Was Powell threatening them; did he hold the knife high; was he only three or four feet away? 

The video is all over the Internet, including the link above. I’m not going to include it here.  The officers get out of the car, immediately draw their guns, and walk towards Powell. Is this the best way to deal with a disturbed or possibly deranged individual – to confront him and then shoot him several times if he does something that might be threatening?

Watch the video, then watch London police confronting a truly deranged and dangerous man in 2011.  In St. Louis, Powell had a steak knife and it’s not clear whether he raised it or swung it at all.  The man in London has a machete and is swinging it about.

Unfortunately, the London video does not show us how the incident got started. By the time the recording begins, at least ten officers were already on the scene. They do not have guns. They have shields and truncheons. The London police tactic used more officers, and the incident took more time. But nobody died.  According to The Economist:

The police in and around Ferguson have shot and killed twice as many people in the past two weeks (Mr Brown plus one other) as the police in Japan, a nation of 127m, have shot and killed in the past six years. Nationwide, America’s police kill roughly one person a day.

The article includes this graphic:

I’m sure that the Powell killing will elicit not just sympathy for the St. Louis police but in some quarters high praise – something to the effect that what they did was a good deed and that the victims got what they deserved. But righteous slaughter is slaughter nevertheless. A life has been taken.<

You would think that other recent videos of righteous slaughter elsewhere in the world would get us to reconsider this response to killing. But instead, these seem only to strengthen tribal Us/Them ways of thinking. If one of Us who kills one of Them, then the killing must have been necessary and even virtuous.

Originally posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

This has been a hard week.  Another young, unarmed black man was killed by police. The Root added Michael Brown’s face to a slideshow of such incidents, started after a black man named Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by officers less than one month ago.  This week’s guilty verdict in the trial of the man who shot Renisha McBride left me feeling numb.  Nothing good could come of it, but at least I didn’t feel worse.

The shooting of Michael Brown, however, is still undergoing trial by media and the verdict is swayed by the choices made by producers and directors as to how to portray him. When Marc Duggan was killed by police earlier this year, they often featured pictures in which he looked menacing, including ones that had been cropped in ways that enhanced that impression.

Left: Photo of Duggan frequently used by media; right: uncropped photo in which he holds a plaque commemorating his deceased daughter.

As the media coverage of Brown’s death heated up, the image that first circulated of Brown was this:

Reports state that this was his current Facebook profile picture, with the implication that media actors just picked the first or most prominent picture they saw.  Or, even, that somehow it’s Brown’s fault that this is the image they used.

Using the image above, though, is not neutrality.  At best, it’s laziness; they simply decided not to make a conscious, careful choice.  It’s their job to pick a photograph and I don’t know exactly what the guidelines are but “pick the first one you see” or “whatever his Facebook profile pic was on the day he died” is probably not among them.

There are consequential choices to be made.  As an example, here are two photos that have circulated since criticism of his portrayal began — the top more obviously sympathetic and the bottom more neutral:

Commenting on this phenomenon, Twitter user @CJ_musick_lawya released two photos of himself, hashtagged with #iftheygunnedmedown, and asked readers which photo they thought media actors would choose.

Top: Wearing a cap and gown with former President Clinton; bottom: in sunglasses posing with a bottle and a microphone.

The juxtaposition brilliantly revealed how easy it is to demonize a person, especially if they are a member of a social group stereotyped as violence-prone, and how important representation is.  It caught on and the imagery was repeated to powerful effect. A summary at The Root featured examples like these:

The New York Times reports that the hashtag has been used more than 168,000 times as of  August 12th.  I want to believe that conversations like these will educate and put pressure on those with the power to represent black men and all marginalized peoples to make more responsible and thoughtful decisions.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Shock, frustration, and rage. That’s our reaction to the hate-filled video record that Elliot Rodger left behind. The 22-year-old, believed to have killed 6 people in Santa Barbara this week, left behind a terrible internet trail.

I cannot and will not speculate about the “mind of the killer” in such cases, but I can offer a little perspective on the nature and social context of these acts. This sometimes entails showing how mass shootings (or school shootings) remain quite rare, or that crime rates have plummeted in the past 20 years. I won’t repeat those reassurances here, but will instead address the bald-faced misogyny and malice of the videos. It outrages us to see a person look into a camera and clearly state his hatred of women — and then, apparently, to make good on his dark promises. It also raises other awful questions. Are these sentiments generally held? If you scratch the surface, are there legions of others who would and could pursue “retribution” as Mr. Rodger did? Is serious violence against women on the rise?

Probably not. Rates of sexual violence in the United States, whether measured by arrest or victimization, have declined by over 50 percent over the last twenty years. As the figure shows, the rape and sexual assault victimization rate dropped  from over 4 per 1000 (age 12 and older) in 1993 to about 1.3 per 1000 in 2012.  And, if you add up all the intimate partner violence (including all rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault committed by spouses, boyfriends, or girlfriends), the rate has dropped from almost 10 per 1000 in 1994 to 3.2 per 1000 in 2012. The numbers below include male victims, but the story remains quite consistent when the analysis is limited to female victims.

Of course, misogyny and violence against women remain enormous social problems — on our college campuses and in the larger society. Moreover, the data at our disposal are often problematic and the recent trend is far less impressive than the big drop from 1993 to 2000. All that said, “retribution” videos and PUA threads shouldn’t obscure a basic social fact:  22-year-olds today are significantly less violent than 22-year-olds a generation ago.

Chris Uggen is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and the author of  Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, with Jeff Manza. You can follow him on twitter and at his blog, where this post originally appeared.  Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.