Rural, White Women Getting Sicker, Dying Quicker

Sarah Catherine Billups on April 21, 2016
Graphic via Washington Post. Click for original and animation.
Graphic via Washington Post. Click for original and animation.

The Washington Post highlights the growing morbidity and mortality rates of rural white women. The rates of sickness and death for white women have climbed steadily over the past couple of decades, but the most dramatic increase is in rural areas. Sociologists and demographers have long investigated these trends. Poverty, stress, and timing of childbirth all matter for mortality, but the combination of these factors have stronger effects on rural, white women—surprising, because poverty confounds our typical understandings of race and inequality.

Mortality rates have decreased overall since the latter half of the 20th century, though several factors, many related to poverty and education, contribute to the increasing death rates of certain groups. Those with less education tend to have higher mortality rates and rates of heart disease and lung cancer.
Less education tends to correlate with lower socioeconomic status and difficulty finding employment. Sociologists Link and Phelan point to poverty as a “fundamental cause” of mortality and morbidity. Low socioeconomic status means difficulty is accessing resources: not only do poor people have trouble obtaining the means to maintain a healthy life, they also tend to lack the time, transportation, social networks, and money to help them recover from sickness.
Some of the health issues tied to poverty affect women more than men. Women with high stress levels are more likely than men to die from cancer-related illnesses. Other health patterns related to social class, such as the timing of childbirth, matter, too. Poorer women are more likely to have children before age 20, which correlates with increased risk of death, heart and lung disease, and cancer.

Spring Cleaning

Sarah Catherine Billups on April 18, 2016
Vintage postcard via Blue Mountains Library, Flickr CC.
Vintage postcard via Blue Mountains Library, Flickr CC.

This is the time of year that many people throw open their windows and begin their yearly spring cleaning. Long ago, springtime cleaning had religious significance and coincided with holidays such as Passover and Easter. By the 19th century, spring cleaning had become more about practicality than piety. Particularly in places that suffered cold, wet winters, March and April were a perfect time for dusting because it was warm enough to open windows, but still too chilly for bugs to fly in the house. Ideally, the wind would help blow the dust out of the home instead of swirling it around the rooms.

The blame for a dusty shelf tends to fall on women’s shoulders because the home has traditionally been “her place” in society. Although the 1950s vision of June Cleaver has shifted and more women now participate in the labor force, women still tend to take on the bulk of the housework. Women employed outside the home have a “second shift” of cooking, cleaning, and childcare when they come home from work.
Women who work in more masculinized jobs tend to do more cooking and cleaning, and men with feminized professions engage in more “manly” tasks like yard work and auto repair to neutralize their gender-atypical occupations. Even in couples that are not comprised of a cis-man and a cis-woman, the gendered division of household labor persists. In couples consisting of trans*-men and cis-women, the women end up taking on the “Cinderella roles,” which they often link to personal preference rather than socialization or gender roles.
And what of the sociological significance of dust? A dusty book can show a lack of interest in the material, and the old adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” speaks to the moral implications of a dust-free, spotless home. Dust and dirt are out of place in the well-tended home, and their presence highlights a lack of control over the environment. Additionally, a lack of cleanliness has long served as a social indicator of moral disorder in Western Culture, acting as rallying point of social solidarity over what is socially acceptable.

Bringing Harm Reduction to America’s Heroin Problem

Austin Jenkins and Allison Nobles on April 12, 2016
Urban Seed, an Australian organization, considers harm reduction programs part of their mission to help disadvantaged communities. Flickr CC.
Urban Seed, an Australian organization, considers harm reduction programs part of their mission to help disadvantaged communities. Flickr CC.

The mayor of Ithaca, New York recently proposed a facility for people to use heroin and other injected drugs safely. It’s part of a larger plan to focus on prevention and treatment of drug use, and the facility’s trained medical staff would provide clean needles, referrals to treatment programs, and naloxone, an opioid overdose antidote. Today’s opioid epidemic—which kills an estimated 78 Americans every day—has shocked many, given that other forms of illicit drug use have generally declined in prevalence and mortality during recent decades. Ithaca’s plan falls under the umbrella of “harm reduction” approaches, which attempt to mitigate personal and societal harm from drug and alcohol use. Social science shows us how and why these programs work.

Supervised injection facilities are relatively recent, originating in the Dutch and Swiss harm reduction movements of the 1970s and ‘80s. The first site in North America opened in Vancouver in 2003 and is linked to drastic declines in public injection and overdose deaths. Today a number of supervised drug consumption rooms operate throughout northern Europe, Canada, and Australia. Ithaca’s would be the first in the U.S.
Substance use was once a popular element of social events, like election day, but by the 20th century, “drug scares” stigmatized drug use, associating it with racial stereotypes, immigration, and crime. Smoking opium was first outlawed in the U.S. in the 1870s, for instance, as a result of anti-Chinese sentiments in California. Non-smoking opioid use remained popular among the white middle class—for supposed medical reasons, but by the turn of the century though, users who preferred injection became the stigmatized face of opiate addiction.
Stigma remains a critical issue in drug treatment, preventing users from accessing clean injection tools, uncontaminated opiates, information about safe injection practices, and life-saving overdose antidotes. Harm reduction efforts, like needle exchanges, have the potential to restore self-respect and autonomy to populations generally believed to lack these characteristics. Programs that provide work to formerly incarcerated individuals who have undergone drug treatment has been shown to reduce certain crimes, like robberies. Harm reduction communities also offer a space for drug users to empathize with and support each other, creating networks that bolster success.

Colorism and Divisions Among Black Women

Amber Joy Powell on April 3, 2016
Zoe Saldana, left, and Nine Simone, right. Image via ABC News Entertainment.
Zoe Saldana, left, and Nine Simone, right. Image via ABC News Entertainment.

Zoe Saldana’s portrayal of singer and activist Nina Simone in an upcoming biopic has proven controversial, even before the film’s premiere. In press photos, Saldana, a light-skinned woman of color, is clearly wearing dark makeup and a prosthetic nose to appear more like the late singer. Some argue using “blackface” in order to cast Saldana is particularly troubling considering Nina Simone’s own life-long dedication to encouraging the acceptance and embrace of dark skin tones. It also ignores the realities of colorism, which reproduces social inequalities and hierarchies among people of color.

Several studies address the benefits that accrue to light-skinned women. Employers, for example, often evaluate women applicants on physical attractiveness, regardless of job skills. This includes privileging physical features that suggest lighter-skinned women are friendlier and more intelligent. Lighter skin tones also make their female bearers more likely to marry spouses with higher incomes, report less perceived job discrimination, and earn a higher income. In schools, studies find that teachers expect their lighter-skinned students to display better behavior and higher intelligence than their darker peers, and public health research shows lower rates of mental and physical health problems among lighter-skinned blacks.
Colorism may provide socioeconomic, educational, and health benefits to light-skinned women, but it also challenges their identity as black women. Other blacks may perceive them as not “black enough,” assuming that they are more assimilated into white culture and lack awareness of black struggles. Those with lighter skin may feel isolated as members of their ethic group openly question their authenticity and belonging.

The Social Ties of Terrorism

Evan Stewart on March 31, 2016
Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria have skirmished with ISIS/ISIL militants said to especially fear death at the hands of a woman. The unofficial militias have been reluctantly accepted as allies in global attempts to destroy terror cells. Photo: Flickr CC https://flic.kr/p/qkxigM
Kurdish YPG fighters in Syria have skirmished with ISIS/ISIL militants said to especially fear death at the hands of a woman. The unofficial militias have been reluctantly accepted as allies in global attempts to destroy terror cells. Photo: Flickr CC https://flic.kr/p/qkxigM

From last year’s attacks in Paris to recent bombings in Ankara, Brussels, and Lahore, transnational terrorism is at the forefront of public concern. The media often gravitates toward focusing on who the perpetrators are and what drove them to commit these heinous acts. There is a wealth of research on the individual and psychological factors that may be at play, but sociological studies highlight the strong influence of social context and institutions in turning people toward terror, challenging easy explanations that focus on individual ideology alone.

Quantitative analysis shows how radical Islamic groups are motivated by many of the same social and political factors as older radical groups. Social and political change, especially international development, urbanization, and western military dependency, is associated with more frequent attacks. Higher foreign investment associates with a lower frequency of attacks, however, and research on terror in Israel shows this kind of conciliatory action may do more to limit terror than repressive strategies alone.
Research also shows that individual attackers are actually fairly “normal.” They are not more likely to be poor or poorly educated, and, often, they are not psychologically pathological. Instead, scholars look to the social arrangements of the institutions and networks that recruit and empower individuals. These terror groups are rarely centralized, hierarchical organizations that train bombers from on high; attacks stem from struggles for power among fractured organizations, local splinter groups, and state forces. As these conflicts escalate, local groups mobilize network relationships to recruit attackers and build the autonomy to develop their own motivational strategies to spur attacks. These local relationships and networks matter much more than individuals’ beliefs alone.

FBiPhone and Coders’ Free Speech

Jacqui Frost on March 22, 2016
Photo by Faris Algosaibi, Flickr CC. https://flic.kr/p/j7hLsu
Photo by Faris Algosaibi, Flickr CC.

The FBI now says they may not need Apple’s help to break into a terrorist’s iPhone, but for months they have insisted Apple’s programmers must write a program enabling them to bypass security on this and other Apple devices. The demand raised questions about security and surveillance in a time of rapid technological change. Apple’s refusal to comply stemmed from both a philosophical stance on privacy and concerns that such a program could easily be exploited. The company and its programmers further argued that code should be covered by free speech protections—no one can be forced to write code against their will. Sociological research shows how assumptions about the objectivity of computer code work against arguments like Apple’s and how these assumptions are often used to legitimize the policing of already marginalized populations.

Apple’s concerns about controlling how and when a “break-in” program gets used are valid. Not only can it fall into the hands of hackers and the like, technologies like this can be used by law enforcement to maintain social inequalities and reinforce harmful stereotypes. Sociologists show how computer code and surveillance technologies are not value-neutral, but are instead composed of the values and opinions of those who write and use them. The result is that the police often use these presumably objective technologies to justify intrusive policing of the already at-risk.
From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand code as speech. Codes are the expression, intentional or otherwise, of the values and beliefs of the programmer. What makes code in some ways more powerful than speech is that it is also highly functional. Jennifer Peterson explains that code is at once the writing of a program as well as the program’s execution—it is both expressive and functional—but the legal system overlooks the functional capacity of code as speech and the ways that it can be used to protest, dissent, and discriminate.

And for a great read on surveilling sociologists, check out Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology by Mike Forrest Keen.

Milgram’s Shocking Social Science

Ryan Larson on March 10, 2016
Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram in "Experimenter."
Peter Sarsgaard as Stanley Milgram in “Experimenter.”

Late last fall, Experimenter brought classic experimental social science to Hollywood (it’s currently streaming on Netflix). The film depicts Stanley Milgram’s classic experimental obedience studies, where participants were asked by an experimenter to deliver a series of escalating shocks to a “learner” when he/she committed an error on a test. Unbeknownst to the participants, the “learner” was actually a confederate, and no shocks were actually delivered. Milgram found that 65% of the participants escalated to “delivering” the final 450-volt shock—far past dangerous levels. Milgram performed 19 variations of the experiment, including increasing the proximity of the participant and learner (that is, making them better known to each other, which decreased participant compliance) and using only females (which yielded similar results). Apart from the studies’ success at demonstrating the social forces that shape behavior, they have been a cornerstone of ethics in research debates in the social sciences.

Early critics claimed that the participants’ well-being was put at risk, due to the “distress [that] may have resulted from shock at what the experimenter was doing to them as well as from what they thought they were doing to their victims” (Baumrind 423).
  • Stanley Milgram. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378.
  • Stanley Milgram. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. London: Tavistock Publications.
  • Diana Baumrind. 1964. “Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram’s ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience,'”American Psychologist 19(6): 421.
Numerous quasi-replications of the study have tweaked Milgram’s methodology to match contemporary ethical considerations. Milgram’s findings have been corroborated in replications that do not go to high voltage levels and in virtual simulations of the experiment. More recent work has added nuance, as well, finding variance in “obedience” based on the legitimacy of the “teacher” and the personality propensities and beliefs of the participant.

Safer Sex for Male Inmates

Sara Anderson on March 1, 2016
Robert Elyov, Flickr CC https://flic.kr/p/8RUdpc
Robert Elyov, Flickr CC

In July 2015, four California state prisons began supplying condoms to prisoners, and more will follow suit in the next next five years. California, however, is only the second state to address infectious diseases in prisons. Prison officials are skeptical of the new law, though its ability to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases among inmates may prove significant.

Sexual contact amongst U.S. prisoners is a complex issue emanating from societal expectations of sexuality and masculinity. Many of those who are incarcerated are young, unmarried, working-class men who are effectively cut off from the outside world and heterosexual encounters. As a result, many who identify as straight engage in male-to-male sex behind bars. This “institutional homosexuality” separates sexual behavior from sexual orientation.

Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in prison populations is a complicated matter. In the past, condom distribution was refused for two main reasons: the denial that male-to-male sex occurred in prison, and the illegal status of such encounters. To slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in prison and when inmates are released, both facts must be acknowledged.

U.S. prisoners are guaranteed access to health care. Unfortunately, rather than receiving cost effective, preventive measures to combat STIs, inmates usually only receive treatment after contracting one—and that’s costly in terms of money and health.

Sara Anderson will graduate from University of the Pacific in May 2016 with a degree in social sciences. She will attend law school in the fall.

There’s Something in the Water

Sarah Catherine Billups and Caty Taborda on February 24, 2016
Photo by Keoni Cabral, Flickr CC.
Photo by www.liveoncelivewild.com, Flickr CC.

To cut costs, the city of Flint, Michigan moved its residents from the Detroit city water system to water sourced from the Flint River. It was a temporary fix until Flint could access Great Lakes water directly. Now, as the world knows, there’s something in the water: lead. In Flint, more than 40% of residents live below the poverty line, and the high lead levels (10 times higher than originally estimated) have caused skin lesions, hair loss, vision loss, memory loss, depression and anxiety, and Legionnaires’ disease. According to sociologists, it’s no fluke that a disenfranchised community pays the ultimate price for environmental damage.

Nature is a battleground where the privileges of wealth and whiteness prevail. Race and class inequalities perpetuate practices that harm the environment, and the poor, immigrants, and minorities are most likely to live in areas with environmental damage (some 60% of African Americans and Latino/a people live in in places with uncontrolled toxic waste sites). This is largely due to the ways that bureaucracies and the state exercise power over resources in a capitalist economy. Flint, MI is just one of many examples of wealthy governments and corporations exporting hazardous material to poor communities of color.  
Poor communities of color also receive lower government response and assistance in environmental emergencies. From Hurricane Katrina to the Flint water crisis, African Americans tend to lack the economic resources and transportation necessary to evacuate an environmental danger zone, exacerbating its impacts on minority communities.

Rape as a Weapon of War

Miray Philips on February 18, 2016
A sculpture in Bangladesh commemorates atrocities of wartime rape. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
A sculpture in Bangladesh commemorates atrocities of wartime rape. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Nadia Taha, a Yezidi woman, recently spoke to the UN about her horrendous experience as a sex slave for ISIS. The so-called Islamic State has also exploited Christian, Turkmen, and Shia women. Wartime rape is an age-old weapon, seen still in conflicts in Sierra Leone, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda. Social scientists reveal the power dynamics at play by studying both the victims and perpetrators.

Rape is an individual crime as well as a weapon of war that enforces social power. Social groups use it to help carry out genocide, instilling fear, and force displacement. Rape also alters the racial and ethnic demographics of the targeted group and intimidates groups where women are considered to be bearers and keepers of culture.
Women and men are victims of rape during conflict. Women are targeted according to their cultural beliefs, desirability, reproductive ability, and virginity. Rape is used against men to “feminize” them, emasculating and implying homosexuality and weakness.
Perpetrators of rape during conflict include agents of the state (military, police, etc.), political groups (paramilitaries, terrorist groups, etc.), and politicized ethnic groups (e.g., Rwanda’s Hutu). As such, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda decided that perpetrators of rape can be punished as individuals and states would be held responsible for either perpetrating sexual crimes or for failing to protect their citizens from such terror.