Everyday Sociology Blog

War, Suicide, and Emotional Labor

By Sally Raskoff

Janis Prince Inniss recently blogged about the cost of war and mentioned the rising rate of military suicides. As the New York Times reported, the suicide rate within the military is higher than that in the general population. The graph on the right shows the “self-inflicted death” rates from the Department of Defense from 1980 through 2008. While the peak in 1995 is disturbing, it is clear that the rates have been increasing since 2001.

Military bases overseas and at home, including Fort Hood and Fort Bragg, have seen tremendous rates of – and been in the news for – suicides, domestic violence, and sexual violence. They have instituted many different programs to prevent and deal with the stresses of military life.

For example, Fort Hood instituted a "Resiliency Campus" on the base where soldiers and their families can get help coping with the emotional, financial, and mental health issues they face before, during, and after deployment.

However, the source the source of the stress has not abated. We are fighting two difficult wars and no one can predict when they will end.

The shootings at Fort Hood were allegedly carried out by an army psychiatrist about to deploy, whose job was to counsel soldiers coping with combat stresses. He was also apparently vocal about his objections to about the war. This event and other such mass shootings, including the workplace shooting in Orlando, Florida the day after the Fort Hood incident, remind me of a phenomenon familiar to law enforcement, “suicide by cop” in which a suicidal person attacks others as targets of their anger and frustration yet fully realizes they themselves will die as a result of that act.

Some news coverage has focused on how Major Hasan’s interpretation of his Muslim faith may have been a primary factor motive for his behavior. However, there are many Muslim soldiers who have not acted violently toward themselves or their peers. Further, there are soldiers of many different faiths whose personal opinions about the war are not positive. Some of the soldiers who have acted violently towards themselves and their peers may have said a prayer before their violent acts, but religion is not the main issue here.

To understand this act of violence, I’d like to go back to basics: basic training, actually. Sociologically, the high and increasing rates of violence within the military, violence focused on loved ones and on oneself, can be traced to basic military training and culture.

In basic training, your identity is stripped away, literally. When you arrive, your clothing and personal items are locked away, not to be seen again until you’re heading for home or for your training base. You are given new clothes to wear, identical to everyone else. If you are male, you lose all your hair; if you’re female, you have strict guidelines as to how your hair can appear. You wear no jewelry, or embellishment of any kind. If your clothes have buttons or zippers, they need to be buttoned or zipped up. Your classes teach you how and whom to salute, the customs and courtesies of the service branch you’ve joined, including ranks and insignia.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marine_Corps_Platoon.jpg

You rise in the morning with everyone else, dress quickly, and get in formation to march to breakfast, march to physical training, march to classes, march to your other meals, and march to anywhere else your training instructors want to take you. You look like everyone else and you must act like everyone else. Any individualistic expression is not encouraged.

These are my memories of basic training. Although I’ve been out of the Air Force for almost 30 years, I still remember much of that six-week period. I still eat meals too fast because of basic training!

At mealtime, we filed into the mess hall, picked up our trays, and filled them with food as we went through the line, much as anyone would in a cafeteria. You had to be sure not to take food you weren’t going to eat since you cannot throw any food away. When you approach a table, no one could sit down until there was a person at all four chairs. When your peers who were seated at the first table get up from their meal, people at the last table only have minutes to exit – with all food eaten – and the entire group gets into formation outside the mess hall. The first people cannot linger to allow the others more time since the training instructors are also in the room making sure that these rules are followed.

These rituals and restriction reshapes people into soldiers. You learn to finish what you start. You learn to work together with the other people in your unit to get the job done and get it done the right way. (The “right” way is the Army way, or the Air Force way, or the Marine way, or the Navy way, you get the picture.) You learn to suppress any emotion or feelings about what you are doing since you took an oath to do the job and your peers depend on you. You learn to respect the hierarchy of authority even if you don’t agree with the details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BasicCombatTraining.jpg

People who serve in the military can hold whatever personal opinions they want about political issues. However, they must do the job that they hold no matter if they agree with it or not.

In the military, to acknowledge emotional issues is to appear weak. To acknowledge emotional problems is to appear unable to do one’s job. To appear weak and not do one’s job, you leave your unit to do the job without you and that is not an acceptable alternative.

If one gets physically injured, that can be a tolerable way to leave the front and/or your unit and not suffer any stigma. But psychological injuries have not traditionally been considered within military culture.

We are now paying a lot of attention to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to explain the high rates of suicide and interpersonal violence within the service. Vietnam-era veterans experience more depression, anxiety, and PTSD compared to pre-Vietnam era veterans and their rates of deaths from suicide, drugs, accidents, and homicide continue to be high many years after that conflict ended.

The military has created new programs to deal with PTSD, including public talks by high-ranking members on their own family losses or their own experiences of PTSD. They have also pointed out that PTSD affects brain structure and has physical causes, attempting to re-categorize it as a physical problem, not just an emotional one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Air_Force_Military_Training_Instructor.jpg

Sometimes when boys and men are socially isolated they turn to violence. Social isolation is an important factor in explaining aspects of suicidal behavior, yet the gender distinction is important. The typical military context involves a combination of suppressed emotion, dangerous situations, and a competitive environment and this is the very definition of a masculine culture.

Sociologically, what is happening is that soldiers may use the tools of this culture – aggression and violence - when they experience high levels of prolonged stress and are unable to adequately deal with the situation due to the suppression of their emotions.

The bigger issue is that the masculine and patriarchal culture of the military undercuts its ability to effectively deal with issues of stress in prolonged times of war and deployments. The military features that make good soldiers can also create troubled and damaged people.

Those who do emotional labor, such as flight attendants and service workers, often have a backstage where they can vent or let down their performance of managed emotions. There is no backstage in the military since soldiers must control those emotions while in combat, with their units away from the front, and even with their families.

To limit wartime stresses we could include end war or decommission the entire military. Most would agree that these are not likely or optimal options. Changing the culture of the military is another logical option, but intentionally changing culture of any kind is not an easy task. How would military culture change to allow the full range of expression for human emotions yet still create soldiers who can effectively protect the country?

As long as the military is defined by aggression and emotional suppression, we have to expect that there will be a toll on service members (and their families), especially when there are prolonged exposures to wartime stresses. What might be a solution to this problem of increased violence within the service?

Postmodern Theory and the Balloon Boy Hoax

By Karen Sternheimer

By now you have probably heard that the runaway balloon supposedly containing a six-year-old boy was a hoax, according to his mother's admission. The story received hours of “breaking news” coverage on October 15, and has since consumed countless hours of news coverage about the scam perpetrated on the news networks and concerned viewers.

If French sociologist Jean Baudrillard were still alive, I dare say he would not be surprised that a father would allegedly cook up such a scheme, or that he contacted the local news, the police, or the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He might even say he’s surprised it took so long for something like this to happen.

As I recently blogged, Baudrillard described our contemporary mediated age as one where the boundary between image and reality has blurred to the point where they can no longer be neatly separated. Where once we might have had clearer distinctions between entertainment and reality, the two have fused, and the 24-hour news cycles and the Internet have helped them come together.

It has never been easier to enter into what was once a rarified space of celebrity: with YouTube and “reality” television, fame is increasingly based on promoting one’s private life rather than on professional achievements. It’s not that there weren’t people who were “famous for being famous” in the past, but we have so many more avenues to achieve instant celebrity now. There are more celebrities and they get famous faster. We likely forget about them more quickly now too.

Cable news is a big part of this equation. In competing for viewers of “fictional” programming and the myriad of other entertainment choices we have now, the news has morphed into infotainment: a hybrid that is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality.

Baudrillard suggests that hypperreality creates a uniquely entertaining experience, what he called the “thrill of the real.” This thrill is something we might experience when that “Breaking News” banner unfurls on the screen. But the thrill constantly weakens and extinguishes itself unless something even newer happens. So news becomes more about live action excitement than analysis and investigation.

Perhaps that’s why the same networks that pre-empted their regular programming to cover this story for hours later turned on the family by trotting out angry commentators condemning the family and talking with legal analysts about the charges they should face. The news networks sent reporters to dig up dirt on the family and reported that they couldn’t find evidence that the parents worked steadily, and interviewed neighbors and other acquaintances on camera to malign the father’s character.

Let’s face it, the news networks that covered this event got Punk'd (another example of postmodernity where celebrities thought they were living their private lives but were in fact part of a television show) but seem reluctant to admit it. Maybe behind the scenes news directors will see this as a wake-up call about the folly of chasing shiny objects—literally in this case—during a time when they could be covering other more meaningful stories in greater depth. I’d like to think that the next time a story like this “breaks”—and you know there will be a next time—news directors will think carefully about how much attention it really deserves.

Yes, the Heene parents deserve the bulk of blame for breaking the law, and for using their children to fulfill their own dreams of fame. They took advantage of our fascination with the real, the private, and the exciting. While they might not reap the financial rewards for diving into the fishbowl for the rest of us to watch, many clearly have (I believe their names are Jon and Kate).

All of this recalls the 1998 movie, The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey’s character finds out that his entire life is actually a television show, and that everyone in his life has been cast by the producers. Truman is devastated to find out that his whole world is a set.

Fast forward a decade later, and many people clamor to turn their lives into a television set, to convert their friends and family members into cast mates. Yes, money and attention are huge motivators. Baudrillard might add that the “real world” and the “television set” can no longer be distinguished from one another. It could be that many of us feel like life might be more thrilling if someone was watching, and that to matter in the twenty-first century is to be observed by others, a character in our own Truman Show. What other sociological theories do you think might help explain this phenomenon?

Drawing Lines in the Sand for Interracial Dating

By Janis Prince Inniss

Boy and girl meet. Boy and girl decide to wed. Boy (Terence McKay) and girl (Beth Humphrey) decide to marry. Girl calls justice of the peace to arrange for them to seal the deal.

And that’s when what may be a fairy tale romance came to a screeching halt: The justice of the peace was Keith Bardwell who refused to marry the pair because McKay is black and Humphrey is white. Bardwell said his refusal to marry the pair was not due to racism, but because of his concerns for children that the union might provide According to Bardwell, neither group accepts such children.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Boy and girl did marry, but no thanks to Justice Bardwell.

What do you think of the justice of the peace’s decision? Even if we agree with Bardwell, how would we decide who should get married? I take it that this justice of the peace would not have married President Barack Obama’s parents: The president’s mother was S. Ann Dunham, a white woman from the American Midwest, while his father was a black Kenyan, Barack Obama Sr. (Click here to have a look at some of the President’s family tree in pictures.)

The president self-identifies as African American and to most of us probably “looks” black, so I take it that if President Obama showed up at this justice of the peace’s with a woman who was the same color his mother was, the justice of the peace would refuse to perform such a marriage.

But what about Malia and Sasha Obama, the daughters of the President and his wife? Only looking at their recent paternal genealogy, we know that one of their grandparents and two of their great-grandparents were white. What if one or even both of the Dunhams was really “passing” for white?

Hmm, to simplify our thinking, let’s put aside the idea that one or both was really of mixed race. So going ahead with the idea that their paternal great-grandparents were white, would a prohibition against interracial marriage mean that neither girl should marry a white person?

Now factor in their maternal ancestry. The New York Times recently published a family tree of First Lady Michelle Obama. Included among the First Lady’s ancestors are Dolphus T. Shields, Michelle Obama’s great-great grandfather whose mother was an enslaved African. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that Michelle Obama is African American. However, Mr. Shields’ father was white!

And how would the “American Indian” strands of the First Lady’s ancestry that the The York Times mentions factor in to the equation? Exactly how much ”white blood” would the younger Obamas need to have to marry someone white?

Going back to the case of boy and girl being asked to wed elsewhere by the justice of the peace in Louisiana, a look at the video of the groom being interviewed about this dust-up suggests to me that the new husband, McKay, is “mixed”. (Given our tangled ancestries, such terms really should have “recently” as a prefix.) Suppose McKay has white ancestors, how recent would they need to be for his marriage to Humphrey not to be considered interracial and therefore problematic?

President Obama once would have been considered mulatto (of one white and one black parent) —a term formerly employed by the U.S. Census Bureau. In fact, in 1890 the Census Bureau tried to be more specific by adding the terms quadroon (one-fourth black blood) and octoroon (one eight black blood) to mulatto and black.

What ”portion” black are Malia and Sasha? Are you dizzy with the amount of math this way of thinking requires? More dizzying to me is that all of these terms and prohibitions (such as those from the justice of the peace) suggest that we know who is “fully” white or black or whichever race. In the context of trading enslaved Africans, the desire and need to “measure” black blood makes sense, at least economically and politically.

But given that we often don’t have to look very far to find “race mixing” in America, how can we make even attempt to regulate such unions? (Have you heard of Strom Thurmond? Thurmond was the longest serving Senator in U.S. history at the time of his death in 2003. He vehemently opposed Civil Rights but after his death, the daughter he had with a black woman revealed he was her father.)

As you might imagine, the Louisiana case has attracted lots of attention, including a call by the state’s Governor for Bardwell’s removal. Interracial marriage has long controversial, enough so to gain a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court: In the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, the Court struck down state laws against interracial marriage. The ruling reads in part: “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state." Just as well…unless you have a bright idea of how we could, with great efficiency and clarity, actually define someone’s race. This case and others like it highlight that race is not as clear-cut of a concept as many of us might think. While we often view race as a biological construct, it is a social construct that we constantly struggle to define and make meaning of, often with serious consequences.

Sex: It's Not What it Used to be

By Karen Sternheimer

As Sally Raskoff recently blogged about, the news of Roman Polanski’s arrest has sparked a conversation about how we think about rape and sexual assault of children. If Polanski loses his extradition fight and returns to the United States, he will return to a very different country than the one he fled. In 1978, the year he became a fugitive, the Rams still played in Los Angeles, Jimmy Carter was president, and the average price of a gallon of gas was 61 cents.

And as the New York Times recently noted, Polanski would also return to an America that has decidedly different mores about sex than we did during the 1970s. While in some ways we might have more liberal attitudes about sex, we are much more likely to condemn sexual assault today than we were in the 1970s, especially if children are involved.

Much of the sexual openness we attribute to the 1960s actually took place in the following decade, after birth control became more widely available. Oral contraceptives only became legal for unmarried women in all 50 states after the 1972 Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird, which effectively legalized sex between unmarried men and women. Sex outside of marriage was technically illegal in many states, although these laws were not enforced often, but they remained on the books in some states until the Supreme Court ruling struck them down.

By the 1980s, sex was no longer viewed as an expression of freedom—with the discovery of AIDS, it was potentially dangerous. Ideas about recreational sex began to shift during the late 1980s and early 1990s as the disease spread and teen pregnancy rates rose.

Adults’ attitudes about teen sex are less lenient today too. In 1986 the General Social Survey, a nationally representative household survey, first asked respondents about their attitudes about teen sex (defined in the survey as sex between fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds). That year 67 percent of respondents answered that it was “always wrong,” compared with 73 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which we have data.

Just as concerns about consensual sex began to rise, legal responses to rape became more serious in the 1980s. For example, spousal rape was often considered an oxymoron, and it wasn’t until 1993 that all 50 states recognized it as a crime.

Acquaintance rape, or sexual assault committed by someone one knows, (and frequently called “date rape”) had barely entered everyday language in the 1970s, and states only began passing rape-shield laws – which made a victim’s sexual history and physical appearance inadmissible in court – in the 1970s. Michigan was the first state to pass a statute in 1974, with most states passing their own by the early 1980s.

Awareness about sexual violence had been increasing during the 1970s, thanks to small conscious raising groups and books published by feminist authors like Andrea Dworkin (Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, 1974) and Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 1975). These books were influential in literary and academic circles, but with the explosion of confessional daytime talk shows on national television in the 1980s, such as Oprah (which debuted in 1986), a much larger swath of the population heard stories from survivors of rape and child sexual abuse further opened the eyes of the public to sexual violence and led to calls for tougher punishment for sexual offenders. Allegations of sexual abuse at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California made for scandalous headlines in the 1980s, though all involved were acquitted in 1990.

Also drawing media attention were celebrity accounts of abuse. Former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur spoke publically about being sexually abused by her father in 1991. That same year, 1960s teen star Sandra Dee spoke of similar victimization from her step father.

In response to the increasing awareness about sexual abuse, social workers, medical professionals, and educators were expected to be on the lookout for tell-tale signs in children they encountered. Dramatic headlines kept sexual abuse in the news: Ellie Nesler famously shot her son’s accused molester in court in 1993, the same year that Polly Klaas was abducted from her bedroom by a stranger, and later found dead, causing national outrage and later prompting the passage of California's Three Strikes law, which mandates life in prison for an individual’s third felony conviction.

Public contempt for those that harm children—especially if the harm is sexual—rose to a fever pitch in the 1990s. Celebrities such as Woody Allen and Michael Jackson were accused of sexual abuse. (Allen was never charged; Jackson was charged in 2003 and later acquitted). Widespread allegations of sexual abuse by priests rocked the Catholic Church. Reports of sexual abuse allegations against teachers, coaches, and others became regular news stories, and from the coverage it seemed that children were under constant sexual threat.

Perhaps because of our increased awareness and concern about sexual violence, rates of rape have declined significantly since 1977. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, a nationally representative survey conducted annually by the U.S. Department of Justice, respondents in 1977 aged twelve and older were almost three times more likely to have been raped than those who completed the survey in 2008.

Child sexual abuse cases have been declining along with reductions in rape. A study conducted at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire found a 50 percent reduction in national sexual abuse rates between 1992 and 2006. While accurate measures of all cases of sexual abuse are impossible, this decline is still important, particularly at a time when awareness about abuse might encourage more reporting.

But concern about sexual violence against children has not subsided. If anything, it has increased. The public is seldom aware of decreases in crime. Add to that fears about new media, like social networking sites on the Internet and anxiety about sexual imagery in pop culture, and concerns about young people and sex only increase.

Polanski would have been better off dealing with his case—and fighting alleged prosecutorial misconduct—in the 1970s. Not only would attitudes about sex and acquaintance rape have been more favorable to him in the 70s, it would have been the right thing to do, given his admission of guilt.

Equality in Justice: Cognitive Dissonance and Fame

By Sally Raskoff

Two cases involving the rape of a young girl have been in the news: one involving Roman Polanski's arrest and the other about Elizabeth Smart's court testimony. While these cases have the “adult male-minor female” rapes as their basic similarity, most other things have been very different, especially in news reports and public reactions.

The “Polanski” case actually involves this Academy Award winning director’s flight from sentencing after his guilty plea and conviction in the rape of the 13-year-old girl. After 32 years, he was arrested recently in Switzerland to await extradition back to the United States for sentencing and additional charges of evading justice. The news reports focus on what a terrible time he’s had in life, from his family’s losses in the Holocaust to the murder of his pregnant wife by the Manson “family”, and on the fabulous movies he’s produced since living in Europe after he fled Los Angeles.

Until recently, little had been mentioned of the rape survivor, who is now an adult woman. A recent article fully identifies her and discusses the apparent civil settlement in which Polanski allegedly was to pay her half a million dollars, although no public documentation can confirm that she received those funds. Her lawyers’ requests to the court for him to pay the settlement past its due date ceased about the time she wrote a public letter stating that she thinks he should be able to return to the country, ostensibly to attend the Academy Awards show when he was nominated in 2002.

The "Smart" case involves the nine month long abduction of Utahan Elizabeth Smart. Her alleged kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, subjected her to a “plural marriage” ceremony and according to Smart repeatedly raped her. She is now 21 and gave her testimony at the mental competency hearing of Mitchell just before leaving on her religious mission to France. Mitchell is cast as a religious fanatic who told her that he was doing what the lord wanted him to do. As of this writing, he has not yet been convicted of the crime as it has not yet been established if he is mentally competent to stand trial.

Let’s look at these cases sociologically.

Note the language used in the reporting of each case. Is it clear who the victim is in each case?

Many news reports and editorials about the Polanski case lament his treatment by the justice system, and some even suggest that he is the victim. Some articles discuss the cost of bringing him back to court, which makes the taxpayers the victim. Some articles focus on how the rape survivor, the actual victim, said that he should be free to live his life and if she says that, well, we should let her decide, which reinforces the idea that he is the victim.

The Smart articles focus on her as the rape survivor and certainly do not cast Mitchell as a victim. They cast him as crazy or as a crafty rapist who acts like a religious fanatic so as not to take the blame for his actions.

The headlines use “Polanski” and “Smart”, not “Mitchell” or “Geimer”.

Polanski’s name is certainly a familiar one since he is famous. Smart has become famous as an icon of parental fear – the girl who was abducted from her bedroom at night. As is typical in rape cases, Samantha Geimer’s name was withheld when she was a minor yet she herself went public when she wrote the letter in support of Polanski. Mitchell is not a name familiar to people even though most know that some man abducted and raped Elizabeth Smart.

From this point forward, I will refer to the “Smart” case as the Mitchell case.

Note the basic features of each case: an adult man raped a young girl.

Is this contested in either case? Yes and no. Mitchell has been in a mental institution since his arrest in 2003 and the recent hearing was to establish whether or not he could stand trial. Polanski testified that he did the crime (although in his plea agreement he plead guilty to “unlawful sex with a minor”) and his latest issues revolve around his flight from the justice system to escape sentencing and serving more time. Mitchell has not been convicted yet Polanski has. However, in the news articles, Polanski’s guilt is downplayed and Mitchell’s is assumed.

Note the social class differences in each case.

While Polanski is clearly a member of the upper socioeconomic strata, Mitchell and his co-defendant wife are in the lower strata. Polanski was able to flee to Europe, continuing to make his films and generate his substantial income. While the social class status of Ms. Geimer is not fully apparent, it is likely that she and her family live a middle class life, even if she did not receive the settlement. The Smart family are firmly in the upper middle class of suburban Salt Lake City, while the Mitchell couple were basically homeless and firmly ensconced in the lower echelon of society’s social class levels.

Social class alone can explain much of the dynamics of these cases. Those with the higher class status tend to gain more favorable coverage in the press. Polanski received more favorable coverage than his victim did, and Smart certainly received more media attention than her abductor did.

One might hope that people who have been victimized would receive more careful and supportive press coverage, this certainly didn’t happen in the Polanski case.

Note the issues of fame and social power in each case

Social power derives from social class but also from fame. Smart was featured on America's Most Wanted and has spoken in public and to Congress about sexual predator issues and legislation.

Most particularly in the Polanski case, fame insulates the perpetrator from paying his full debt to the justice system. So much so that some even call into question his guilt even though that had been firmly established in court. (See Harvey Weinstein’s quote about the “so-called crime” in the Los Angeles Times). Reaction to the Polanski case avoids discussion of his guilt in this crime of rape and focuses on other issues that are not salient. Consider how Mr. Weinstein might react if a female family member of his had been the victim in this case - might he advocate the release of that person as he does Polanski?

The exploitation of women in the entertainment industry is a related topic— some may not see why having sex with someone at a photo shoot was wrong – even if she was underage and under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Some also point to the mother who dropped her off at the house where the rape took place as culpable.

However, only the rapist is responsible for the rape, no matter what bad decisions others might have made.

What isn’t being talked about?

In the Polanski case, the exploitation of women is not a topic that many are choosing to discuss. How many other girls and women have been raped by people with power over them? We’ll never know, especially if those powerful people are not held to the legal standards that govern our society.

Absent from the discussion of the Mitchell case are the cultural underpinnings of how religion played a role in the abduction and rapes. The “plural marriage” as it was called when she was first rescued, was code for rape yet the word "rape" was not uttered for some time after she was freed. That this particular crime took place in a specific religious and cultural environment with a history of patriarchy (and, decades ago, of plural marriage) isn’t a coincidence. Elizabeth Smart was raised, as most of us are, in a culture of male dominance and female obedience.

It is also likely that Smart, like Patty Hearst and many other children abducted by sexual predators, was experiencing something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome. When she was first discovered, she did not readily identify herself. When held long enough under certain circumstances, people may “go along” with their captors and not escape when they might have had the chance.

So, how can we explain the different ways that we are reacting to these cases?

While both cases have at their core the rape of a 13- or 14-year-old girl by an adult man, public discussion and reaction to these cases is notably different. Social class, power, and fame all have their influences yet cognitive dissonance is also taking place.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when people have to reconcile two conflicting ideas at the same time. We often try and alter one of the ideas to be consistent with the other. For instance, people generally want to like and respect people with fame and power. When those people do bad things, we can react in many different ways but in the Polanski case, so many years after the event, some want to believe he paid his debt to society by having lived such a troubled life. Thinking of someone as both a good person and a rapist is very difficult to reconcile. Normally we decide that someone who commits rape is no longer a good person. In this example, many people, especially many in the entertainment industry, have chosen to downplay his actions to maintain the idea that their conflicting image of him as a good person.

But the justice system doesn’t see it this way, and after all, time spent living in a Swiss chalet isn’t the same as “doing time”. How do you think we would talk about the case if Elizabeth Smart’s alleged rapist had fled the country for more than three decades and evaded justice?

Knowledge Matters

By Janis Prince Inniss

On September 8, 2009, President Obama gave a back-to-school speech described by the White House as inspirational and pro-education to elementary, middle, and high school children in the U.S. Even before the speech there were reports of parents who thought this was inappropriate. (President Obama is not the first U.S. president to hold such an address; President George H. W. Bush did so in 1991 and President Ronald Reagan talked politics with students in 1988.)

Some parents worried that the president’s speech would be political, and that it was a way to reach parents through their children. Other parents complained that they were not notified about the event before-hand and asked to give consent via a permission slip as they do with activities such as watching R-rated movies. In response to parental complaints, some school districts allowed parents to opt-out and have their children take part in a different activity while other upset parents kept their children at home.

Some of the furor about President Obama’s speech may have been related to an assignment created by the Education Department to have students write essays to say how they could help the president. When some critics of the president protested that the assignment was too partisan, the lesson plan was revised to ask students to write about how they can achieve their short and long-term goals.

Recently, Former President Carter said “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man”. (The former president was responding to Rep. Wilson’s outburst during the President’s speech to Congress.) Whether President Carter is correct and whether the president’s race is related to the fears parents expressed about him addressing their children is a debate I’ll leave for another time.

The furor over the President’s address does raise the question of what constitutes information that should be central to our education. What should you be learning? Have you ever thought about who decides what you learn? Clearly your teacher does. But what influences your teacher to make the choices he or she does in selecting class materials?

There are the so-called three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. These are considered the basics, seen as fundamental to other knowledge acquisition. Do you agree that these are fundamental? What about all the other subjects taught in school? I took a music appreciation class as a college freshman. The class was designed to give me an appreciation of classical music. Who decides what classical music is? Turns out that we only studied classical European music (two words that tend to go together—classical and European), but should music from other areas of the world have been included in such a class?

What about in your English literature classes? In my overview American literature course, we read from an anthology that is more than 2500 pages thick. (Yes, I still have the book and just checked!) Given the racial/ethnic make-up of America, should such a course include non-white authors? (About four African Americans are included in the edition we used.) Who makes decisions about what is considered classical literature and decides what books you should read?

A 16 year-old International Baccalaureate (IB) student in Florida objected to passages in the highly regarded book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a book on the list of the prestigious IB English class curriculum. The student objects to sexually graphic content in the Haruki Murakmi novel and has been allowed to select an alternate book. Have you or your parents ever objected to any material that you were being taught? On what grounds? How likely do you think it is that you would be able change the information you are responsible for knowing in any of your classes?

While most of us now take education for granted, schooling is a relatively recent phenomenon—its modern form was developed in the early nineteenth century. This change was related to industrialization which created a need for an educated workforce. In the modern era, job opportunities have increased with education; today higher education is associated with increased income and less likelihood of unemployment (see chart in previous post). Is this how what is taught is decided—based on the kinds of information that are likely to keep us employed?

If you think about some of the more recent changes to curricula it seems that what is “worth knowing” changes. For example, after the civil rights movement and student activism, fundamental changes were made that resulted in the inclusion of more information on people of color and the creation of ethnic study departments on several university campuses. As you may recall from an earlier posting, standpoint theory suggests that even what we know depends on our affiliations. And is all knowledge ”equal”? Do you think there is an objective way to decide what knowledge matters?

The Wages of War: The Oldest Profession

By Sally Raskoff

The other day I heard from someone currently on active duty in the Army. During a discussion on the difficulties of overseas deployments in wartime, he mentioned that female soldiers often make extra money “servicing” their fellow soldiers (i.e., sexual services if you didn’t get my innuendo). He said that this was common knowledge and due to the fact that the deployments are long and there were so few available women, especially American women.

Are you shocked? Surprised?

Historically, there are usually prostitutes available where a military congregates whether they are provided by the local economies or by the sponsoring governments themselves. Rarely, however, are those selling their bodies also members of the active duty military. (For example, the Comfort Women of World War Two)

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Whether or not my acquaintance is right about this phenomenon, the pressures of the situation – and the structure of the situation –could easily lead to this kind of prostitution.

After I was active duty (Air Force) and started taking college classes, I wrote most of my sociology class papers analyzing my experiences in the military. This was a few decades ago when women made up a smaller percentage of the armed forces, but today women are still a minority – less than 15% - of those on active duty.

At that time, it was very clear that a woman, no matter what her job skills, was considered “available” unless she was married. If a woman stayed single, the chances that she would develop a “reputation” were quite high. It didn’t matter if she was exploring her sexuality with one or many partners or if she was celibate, many colleagues saw all single women as fair game. A civilian parallel is the phenomenon that early developing girls are sometimes called “sluts” whether they are sexually active or not. (Leora Tanenbaum wrote a great book on this phenomenon called Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation.)

When I was in the military, the pressure to get married was intense, especially for those concerned about maintaining a good or professional reputation. The service also encouraged marriage as it made more stable soldiers even if those soldiers were married to each other. Married soldiers got paid more, better housing, more services and family support.

Anyway, back to what my friend was saying about female soldiers prostituting themselves.

When does prostitution occur? The research literature points out a number of patterns. The buyer buys sex when they can’t get it elsewhere or don’t want the encumbrances from getting it elsewhere. The seller sells sex when they have no other options.

Alienation exists in each case as each person is exchanging their body for cash, thus their body becomes an object and commodity rather than remain a personal subject of experience and emotion.

There is more prostitution in societies with greater gender inequality since the more powerful gender can exploit the less powerful in a variety of ways. When there is more gender equality, those in the different gender groups are considered more equal and thus there’s less exploitation based on perceived differences in value. Social interactions are much less likely to enter into the commercial arena where pricing and negotiation assume power differences and competition.

What is it like to be deployed, especially in today’s wars?

Isolating. Alienating. Fearful. One doesn’t know if one is going home intact or at all.

Many members of the military struggle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and the suicide rate is higher in the military than it is for the general population. It often takes outside organizations to help soldiers deal with the conditions of their service, such as Suicide.org and Gold Star Families Speak Out, but those organizations are not meant for those currently deployed.

When you consider these unique stresses, is it surprising or shocking that an underground economy of sexual services emerges on overseas deployments, especially when outside purveyors of sexual services are not available in the areas to which these troops are deployed?

It’s not surprising at all when you consider: (1) single female soldiers face intense pressure to be socially and sexually active; (2) there are a minority of women compared to men thus there are not equal opportunities for heterosexual social interaction; (3) there is much inequality between women and men as men are more likely than women to have positions higher in the authority structure; (4) people are isolated from home, family, and even those in the host country; (5) they are in fear of their lives and may have no hope for their futures.

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An additional factor has to do with the age of these soldiers; most are in their twenties, some older, some younger. For these generations, oral sex is not as taboo as it was for previous generations. In fact, to many in these generations (and some others), oral sex isn’t really considered sex. Rather, it is something friends may do in the absence of a steady partner. And yet oral sex is considered a form of sexual intercourse, particularly by the Centers for Disease Control, and one can spread sexually transmitted diseases through it.

If indeed some soldiers are making extra money by doing sexual favors for their colleagues, it can be explained by the structural demands of the overseas deployments.

If our military leaders wanted to decrease the chances of this happening, what could they do to ease the strain of these conditions and ensure an effective egalitarian military force?

What Does War Cost?

By Janis Prince Inniss

(Spoiler alert: In this post, I describe important plot lines of the movie In the Valley of Elah as well as some grisly details of a homicide.)

Recently, I saw the film In the Valley of Elah. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, the film tells the story of a retired Vietnam veteran named Hank (Jones) who is informed that his son Mike is absent without leave (AWOL) having just returned from a deployment to Iraq. Finding this to be out of character for his son, Hank quickly heads from his home in Tennessee to his son’s base in New Mexico to investigate. Because he was a military police officer, Hank spots a number of holes in the stories he is told about his son who has apparently vanished.

When police find Mike’s body dismembered and burned in a field, there is the usual silence and stonewalling from various military officials . How did this happen? Who would have done such a thing? Was Mike a drug dealer? What might Mike have been involved with that might explain his death? What happened to him in Iraq? Hank finds Mike’s cell phone and with the help of a technician is able to look at some of the video on the phone. The videos on the phone are jarring to say the least but they provide a lens by which Hank—and movie goers—see some of the grim reality that Mike experienced before his death.

Hank realizes that Mike’s buddies in his military unit are lying about their last night together, but Hank knows that this does not suggest their guilt because soldiers do not kill each other. Or do they? The truth is that Mike’s comrades murdered him and then lied about that night, the night after they all returned from Iraq.

Initially, I was surprised to learn that this film was based on the real life murder of Army veteran Specialist Richard T. Davis in 2003. As in the movie, Davis was reported AWOL to his retired veteran father who then investigated his son’s disappearance. One night after returning from Iraq, Davis and some other soldiers went out; they drank and fought and one of the soldiers stabbed Davis (Alberto Martinez) at least 33 times. The soldiers then bought lighter fluid, returned to the crime scene, lit Davis’ body on fire and then buried it in the woods.
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How is this possible? Why would soldiers “on the same team” commit such a heinous act on one of their own? Martinez’s defense lawyer says the solider was delusional at the time of the killing. Another is said to have been experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during this time. Recent research on the issue indicates that 37% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have sought care at VA medical centers were diagnosed with mental health problems—primarily PTSD and depression and another 10% have alcohol and drug use disorders. A RAND study of veterans found that 14 percent screened positive for PTSD and the same number screened positive for depression, rates higher than found in the general U.S. population (3.5% and 7.0% respectively). Further, RAND extrapolates that if these rates hold for all military deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan , 300,000 people are experiencing depression and PTSD.

As alarming are the numbers of suicides by U.S. soldiers which have skyrocketed since the start of the Iraq war to more than 2,100 attempts in 2007 compared to 350 in 2002, the year before the war began. The New York Daily News headline “More soldiers committed suicide in January than killed by Al Qaeda” highlights the fact that the suicide rate in the Army is the highest it has been in 30 years—143 in 2008. The other leading concerns discussed—PTSD, depression, and drug use—might both be related to these suicides as returning soldiers find their relationships unraveling as they struggle with untreated, maybe undiagnosed mental health problems. They turn to drugs and alcohol for comfort and some finally commit suicide. (Thirty-one year old veteran Josh Barber’s suicide illustrates some of these complex relationships among these factors.)

You may recall that I was initially surprised to learn that In the Valley of Elah was based on a real homicide. Although I found the answer to the “whodunit” in the movie shocking and continue to be distressed by the crime, as a mental health professional and sociologist I have often worried and wondered about the impact of war on soldiers. (This is distinct from issues related to the impact of war on civilians in war-torn countries.) How do soldiers train for and act on that training to destroy others but reintegrate into a peaceful society? What do we owe veterans as they grapple with these experiences? Are these questions related to ideology? In other words, are those “for” either war more or less concerned with these questions than those “against” them?

Surely you’ve heard various dollar figure costs of the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan. But what about the psychological toll experienced by soldiers? How do we measure those costs? What other psychological and sociological costs do you think wars create?

When Is Silence Golden?

By Janis Prince Inniss

More than 40 years ago, Kitty Genovese was fatally stabbed as she arrived home from work at 3 am. Although there is now some debate about exactly how many of Ms. Genovese’s apartment neighbors heard her cries for help, it seems clear that some did hear her.

From their Kew Gardens apartments in Queens, New York, neighbors reportedly heard her scream and some even looked out and saw Ms. Genovese struggle with her assailant. Someone who heard her cries called out and the assailant fled, allowing Ms. Genovese to get closer to her building. A few minutes later the attacker returned and murdered Catherine “Kitty” Genovese.

I first learned about Ms. Genovese’s murder in an Introductory Sociology class and I know that it is still included in many textbooks. Perhaps you have read about this tragedy too. The reason that sociologists and social psychologists have referenced this story is that it highlights some important theoretical ideas about the way we behave: Initial reports said there were 38 witnesses who would have heard or seen some aspect of this crime being committed—a number now highly disputed—but still, the fact that not one single person came to the aid of this woman is baffling.

In May, a 13-year-old Walker Middle School student in Tampa alleged that he was sexually battered by two flag-football teammates while two others held him down in the school locker room. Three of the boys accused are 14 and one is 15. Apparently the victim said nothing while the attack occurred and nothing afterward.

He claims that the same boys had been bullying him for almost two months, during which time he said nothing to his mother, teachers, nor any other adult. Reportedly there were nine witnesses who saw and/heard various aspects of this assault. Yet none of them said anything to authorities until they were called in for questioning.

All of this silence has been confounding for school authorities. For example, School Board member Jack Lamb said, “I'm very surprised that this was taking place and nothing was said. It's kind of amazing." Another board member, April Griffin initially responded to the silence of the witnesses by suggesting that they should be punished: "If they watched these situations take place….I would like some repercussions for those students.” (Griffin later acknowledged that punishing youth who witness bullying will not serve to make them more likely to report such behaviors.)

A variety of explanations have surfaced to explain the silence of the witnesses. Perhaps the witnesses thought it was a joke and didn’t realize it was as serious as it was, or maybe they assumed that the victim would report behavior this brutal. Even if these young witnesses recognized it as an attack and not a joke, perhaps they thought that “somebody” else would report the assault.

The Bystander Effect - Kitty Genovese
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Social psychologists developed the idea of bystander effect which might help us understand the behavior of witnesses in both cases. Simply put, the theory predicts that large groups of people are less likely to respond to an emergency than smaller groups are because in a large group there is diffusion of responsibility: We each presume that someone else will respond, or that someone else will handle the situation better. Sometimes people are even reluctant to help while others are looking on. Although continued experiments to test this theory have met with varied results, the notion is a compelling one and can be used to understand the lack of bystander response in these stories.

What about the idea that reporting criminal or other behavior is snitching? And that snitching is bad? Within the hip-hop community and accompanied by t-shirts, DVDs (one notably featuring NBA player Carmelo Anthony) and other such accoutrements, the “Stop Snitching” campaign tells people not to cooperate with law enforcement authorities. Busta Rhymes and Cam’ron are just two of the more famous hip-hop artistes to employ this philosophy. Despite some publicity about the “Stop Snitching” campaigns from mainstream press such as Anderson Cooper for “60 Minutes”, a code of silence prevails in many other arenas. Can you think of some of those? Is it likely that middle school students in Tampa have adopted the “Stop Snitching” philosophy?

Or consider the case of Lisa Torti, who pulled her co-worker Alexandra Van Horn out of a car after seeing Van Horn’s car hit a pole. Van Horn became a paraplegic and has sued Torti alleging that her condition is due to Torti’s actions. Do you think people resist getting involved to avoid trouble for themselves?

Have you witnessed behaviors that should be reported? Did you? What influenced your decision either way? What are your theories about how cases like these two occur? And what do we know from the social sciences that could help school boards, for example, to find ways of changing such behaviors? What have you learned from sociology that would help you to provoke a response from bystanders if you were in harm’s way?

Thinking Like a Sociologist: Deconstructing Polls

By Karen Sternheimer

A recent episode of The Daily Show satirized both left wing and right wing cable news shows for using questionable poll data in their broadcasts. Regardless of your political orientation, this clip is a great introduction to some of the core concepts sociologists use in research methods and statistics: survey construction, sampling, and margin of error. Think about these issues as you watch the video below.

 

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1. Survey construction

Did you notice the wording of the questions in the polls? Good surveys should not suggest how respondents should answer them, but some of the polls included wording that could certainly bias responses. Note how some of the questions in this clip tend to encourage one response or another, particularly the questions about taxes. Most people would respond negatively to a general rise in taxes. But there are a wide variety of taxes (sales and income taxes to name a few), and rates vary based on a variety of factors (such as location, income level, and family size). By contrast, the tax that excludes most potential respondents (raising taxes only on a small percentage of Americans) is more likely to generate favorable results.

A good survey question is worded as neutrally as possible and is specific so that respondents are very clear about the meaning of their response. A good question about taxes would be clear on what specific tax rate would change, by how much, and for whom. The word “tax” is so loaded that another word might even be used in its place, such as fee or levy.

2. Sampling

Let’s say we’ve written good survey questions. Our next step is to administer our survey to an appropriate sample.

What is a good sample? That depends on which group we are trying to learn about. If we want to get the opinion of sociology majors from across the country, then we certainly wouldn’t want to poll people who pass through the center of a couple campuses. For one, we would get a lot of non-sociology majors, and secondly, a small number of campuses would not adequately measure the nation’s sociology majors.

Many polls reported on the news imply that they represent views of Americans. That might seem like a daunting task, but it is possible to get a sense of public opinion this way.

You might be thinking that with a population around 300 million, it is nearly impossible to sample a thousand or so people and claim to know what Americans are thinking. To do so, pollsters need to construct a probability sample, which means that every American should have an equal opportunity to be chosen at random to be part of the sample.

Hypothetically, you can think of a random sample as similar to putting everyone in the population’s name in a huge hat which is shaken so anyone’s name can potentially be pulled.

But there isn’t a hat that big, nor is it practical for someone to write everyone’s name down on a slip of paper. Pollsters often rely on measures which are admittedly imperfect. One of the most common is random digit dialing, where a computer calls random phone numbers in hopes of getting respondents.

Have you ever gotten one of these calls? If you’re like me, you get a lot of calls that interrupt your busy day or evening, and caller id allows you to ignore the numbers you don’t recognize. This has created sampling challenges: if there are consistent patterns in who is more or less likely to participate then your survey results might be skewed.

So there are no perfect samples, but there are some really imperfect samples, like the ones in the Daily Show clip above. Some internet and television polls make no attempt to create a probability sample, so their responses are limited to the demographic already watching or logging onto their site.

There are also other factors which might make someone more or less likely to participate. For instance, if a television show asks you to text your response, viewers might be more likely to participate if their cell phone plan has generous texting privileges. Beyond that, some people are more motivated to respond than others. So these polls might be fun, but they are not very useful gauges of public opinion. That’s what “results not scientific” means if they flash it on the screen. But often shows do not.

3. Margin of Error

Even the polls with well-written questions and the best possible samples are approximations of public opinion, rather than a perfect reflection of what people really think about an issue. While we might not ever be 100% certain that a probability sample reflects the true opinion of a population, thanks to probability theory, we can be 95% confident that the actual opinion lies within a certain range.

Here’s an example. Gallup regularly conducts job approval surveys of political leaders. In an August 2009 survey, they found that 31% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. As you can see from the graph below, the approval rating appears to have fallen from previous months.

But every poll has a margin of error, since surveys are approximations rather than perfect reflections of a population’s beliefs. The margin of error is a measure that takes into account the sample size and the amount of variation of responses. In this case, the margin of error is ±4, meaning that we can be 95% certain that between 27% and 35% of Americans approve of the job that Congress is doing.

Now, if I were a member of Congress I wouldn’t be too excited about this range of scores, but because it is within the range of scores from earlier months we probably cannot say with confidence that Americans’ approval of Congress is declining. But no matter how you look at it, it’s pretty low.

You might notice that news shows reporting polls rarely discuss the meaning of the margin of error, if they mention it at all. Keeping this important measure in mind, you can use your sociological imagination to think critically about the next poll you hear about in the news.