Refusing the default

Friday Links

2012-01-27T18:18:00.000Z

HarpyMarx: Work Capability Assessment and the ATOS experience
[trigger warning] Sian and Crooked Rib: It is never her fault
[trigger warning] A Radical TransFeminist: Under Duress: Agency, Power and Consent, Part Two: “Yes”
Trans Youth Takes On World: Gender recognition under threat in UK universities and Update on the HESA gender statistics affair
Echidne of the Snakes: Internet Misogyny For The Day
Lisa at Where's the Benefit?: And in the news...

Friday Links

2012-01-20T18:11:00.001Z

s.e. smith: Beyond the Binary: But What Does It All Mean? I Don’t Get It!
Complicity: Fining so-called “no-show” patients is a bad idea
[Helen G at The F-Word: Online campaign to stop enforced sterilisation of TS/TG and gender variant people in Sweden
Philip N Cohen at Sociological Images: Undoing Gender Math Stereotypes
Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit?: Just a form - some benefit myths
Zero at the Bone: Personal space

Friday Links

2012-01-13T18:04:00.002Z

s.e. smith: No Disability at the Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Cures, and Eliminationism and Truly Costing A Home-Cooked Meal
Diary of a Goldfish: The Welfare Reform Bill: What's Wrong with Personal Independence Payments?
[trigger warning] Ministry of Truth: Rape and CJS/CPS performance (revised)
Obesity Timebomb: The YMCA's Body Confidence campaign and the All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image
Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit?: Government filthy tricks subvert parliamentary process
[trigger warning] A Radical TransFeminist: Under Duress: Agency, Power and Consent, Part One: “No”

Oh. The Greens have got a think tank.

2012-01-11T21:37:00.003Z

When people talk about "providing a voice to future generations"the first thing I think of is the anti-choice lobby. Obviously this reportfrom a Green think tank isn't that, but it's still more than alittle bizarre.

And yes, I know, one doesn't have think tanks for the purpose ofcoming up with workable or sensible ideas, but I was hoping for betterfrom the Green Party, as the closest we have in England to anelectable left wing party, than to be encouraging this sort ofthing.

If it had been some think tank for Labour or the Conservatives I'dprobably just have laughed and ignored it: it's more disappointingwhen associated with a party I might want to vote for someday.

The basic idea is that there would be a panel of people forming a"third chamber" of the legislature, who...

[...] would have a power ofveto over legislation that were likely tohave substantial negative effects forsociety in the future, the right toreview major administrative decisionswhich substantially affected futurepeople and the power to initiatelegislation to preserve the basic needsand interests of future people.

Right. Now, okay, there is a very definite conflict between theincentive to mainly act and plan for short-term successes thatelective democracies have, and the need to make longer-term plans tohave a sustainable society. Certainly, this is going to be a problemwith pretty much any political system in which the faction "in charge"can change over a shorter timescale than that needed for long-termplanning. (Of course, a political system in which the faction incharge can't change over short timescales has its own severeproblems)

The proposed solution claims to address a weakness that despitedemocratic reforms, no present democracy considers the needs of futurevoters. So, this panel would guess what their needs might be and forcelegislation to be made accordingly.

Decision 1: road maintenance budgets should becut. People in the future will all have flying cars.

How do we know that something will be a problem in the future? Ingeneral, we don't. A big hint is "is it a problem today". But if it'sa problem today, then a system of government that did an adequate jobof representing all currently-existing people would deal with itanyway.

Even assuming the panel have perfect access to and interpretationof all current human knowledge, their decisions are going to be basedon "best guesses" about the future. Those guesses are going to bewrong at least as often than not.

And since the purpose of all legislation is its effect in thefuture (generations or years or days), why would the panel besignificantly more likely to get "impact on the future" right than theexisting legislative bodies?

The panel - and the report recognises this, though not for thereason I give - could not be elected. If it were, then we'd elect theCommons to make decisions, then we'd elect the Lords to disagree withthose decisions, then we'd elect the "Guardians of the Future" (No,really, that's what they're called) to veto anything that gets pastthem.

So, instead, they'd be selected at random in a manner similar tojury service. It's a tempting idea - I've seen it suggested for Houseof Lords reform before - but it just wouldn't work. The suggestion isthat anyone on the electoral register who doesn't tick the "I don'twant to be a Guardian of the Future" box would be eligible for randomselection. Once selected, they could opt-out at that stage, but ifthey didn't there would be a year of training followed by a multi-yearterm of office.

So, who's going to opt out (either on the register or when selected)?

People who are ineligible to register.
People who do not register.
People who have health conditions incompatible with an intensive multi-year commitment.
People who have caring commitments likewise incompatible (the report talks about subsidised or free caring services, but not everyone will want to take up that offer)
People who do not wish to be in an extremely public role likely to come under considerably more public scrutiny than the average MP gets.
People who don't really care about legislative politics.
People with low self-confidence in their own abilities.

And so on, and so on, and so on. See also s.e. smith's Civic Engagement: Only For the Wealthy! which inspired a lot of this section.

Notice that a major common factor of all of those groups is thatthey are also strongly under-represented in our current politicalsystem for much the same reasons, and that they are correlated withvarious lacks of privilege.

Not needing to campaign and sign up to a political party mighthelp, but not much.

The number of Guardians would be relatively small (7 to 144 is therange suggested, with 12ish being preferred) - which means that to geta representative group would be very tricky. But then, that's not a particular aim. From Appendix B, which sets out selection:

For such demographically-based pre-sortitional selection woulddetract from the sense, already indicated above, in which thisgrandest of juries must represent the voiceless, a task for us allwhich is in important respects equally hard, one might venture, forany of us.

Well, yes, in the "predict the future" sense. And no, in the"interests of future people who are not like me" sense. Given thatrepresenting the "interests of people not like me" is - due toprivilege - one of the major failings of our current political system,a lack of concern for the same failing in a body of significantpolitical power is disturbing.

(Now, a footnote points out that if you select by certain demographics you can bias away from demographics not selected by - I've mentioned that problem before and it's especially serious for small groups)

There's a footnote referenced in the context of the length of thecommitment which is also worrying.

⁴⁷ Given the vastly longer duration of the role, it would benecessary to provide the Guardians with some kind of salary. Probablythis should simply be the salary they were getting in their regularjob, plus generous (but not corruptly so!) expenses. Alternatively,all the Guardians could get the average national wage (as, arguably,MPs should, too). [...]

Emphasis mine. Spot the really obvious problem with that bit thatsignificantly biases ability to be a "Guardian"... The alternative isnot great either, but at least the bias it inserts is somewhat counterto current privilege.

So, okay, we have our randomly selected sample of people who willbe protecting the future from the present. So, how will they decidewhat to do? This perfect access to the world's information won't makeitself.

The Guardians would be supported both in their training and intheir day to day roles as Guardians by a high- level and diversesupport staff of administrators, facilitators and experts, includingof course legal experts. It would be very important to stop thissupport staff serving the Guardians from becoming too powerful (asperhaps the civil service is too powerful in relation to governmentministers, in Britain). Primarily, those serving the Guardians closelyshould consist literally of assistants, secretaries and administrativemanagers and facilitators, plus a cohort of top academic etc. advisorsemployed on retainers. The Guardians would have strong rights -including if necessary subpoena style rights, to call any and allfurther actors and experts that they wished to hear from, to help themin their deliberations.

Okay. With a very small number of Guardians, the chances of any ofthem being themselves an expert in a specifically-named field issmall. If the selection was representative, most of them will haveaverage mathematical and scientific knowledge. A year's training willnot give them the knowledge to really tell which of two conflictingexperts has the best theory. Is X safe or will it cause seriousproblems in 200 years? Who knows - the experts disagree, the Guardiansdon't have the expertise to assess the claims, and bewareof experts anyway.

So ultimately they will pick the most persuasive expert. Who isprobably themselves wrong.

The existing House of Commons is already perfectly capable ofpicking the wrong expert advice; it seems unlikely that somerandomly-selected people would be significantly better. (And they needto be significantly better, not merely equal, or they're not actuallyhelping)

That's if the Guardians can agree at all. They're randomly selectedin part to avoid party political considerations. But it also meansthat they will have a broad spread of political views. So, how willthey make decisions? By consensus.

They would be given training forexample in consensus decision making,in a group with a common purpose.

Consensus decision making is really quite difficult between peoplewith completelydifferent core assumptions. So in practice most things would comedown to a vote between different political factions. The factionsmight not be there already - political party membership is so rarethat perhaps one of the Guardians might have it - but they'd formpretty rapidly.

See also: Tyranny of Structurelessness - even though this wouldn'tbe unstructured, it still applies: at least with the selection methodfor MPs there are so many big egos that they cancel out, whereas witha random selection a couple of charismatic big egoed people can end upvery dominant.

In practice then we have a third chamber that will tend to alwaysfall on the same side of political debates about whether a policy is agood idea or not. What side that is is selected randomly, but thatdoesn't really help. It also gives the "centrist" Guardians the mostpower as the "swing" voters - in a mini-representation of a marginalParliamentary constituency, or a slightly enlarged version of thecurrent US Supreme Court.

Perhaps their belief in a common objective would help. Perhapsnot. There's a suggestion for their "oath of office":

"I promise to do my utmost torepresent and uphold the basic needs offuture people in the present. I willwork to ensure that the future people ofthe United Kingdom are cared for byus all, and that nothing that we in theU.K. do hurts them or prevents themfrom being. I vow therefore to executefaithfully and to the very best of myabilities the office of Guardian forFuture Generations."

Emphasis mine, again. Are you thinking "oath of allegiance toextremist anti-choice group?" I'm sure it's accidental, given theGreen's general policies, but still! Especially given that theexplicit point of this group is to prevent Parliament passinglegislation that benefits currently-existing people at the perceivedexpense of potential future people, how do you stop the anti-choicersbeing all over that with "Look, it says right in your job descriptionyou have to ban abortion. You took an oath of office to that effect."(The draft wording is creepily anti-choice, but the group's purposeprobably precludes anything without that flaw¹. At least it by doing soavoids the eugenicism that previous "protect the future" movementshave had, though it does still allow for invading other countries to take their land for future UK generations)

Let's back up a bit to the start of my criticism. I said "How do weknow that something will be a problem in the future? [...] A big hintis 'is it a problem today'."

The major problem with our existing system of government, in myopinion, is that it does not give a voice and sufficient considerationto the concerns of large groups of people, especially those who arefar from being the default human. If we can't get a system ofdemocracy that listens to real existing people and considers them tohave equal humanity and worth - and that extends to "Well, this wouldbe great for the UK, but really mess up the lives of a bunch offoreigners who aren't part of UK democracy." of course - do we reallyhave any business trying to represent some hypothetical futurepeople.

Conversely, if we actually took seriously therepresentation of people in all their interests - including,especially, those who won't become MPs themselves - would we needspecific care about future generations? What thing could we possiblydo that would not significantly harm a group of people in theshort-term but would harm a group of people in the long-term?

Nuclear waste has been suggested as meeting that, but I don't thinkit does: we know nuclear waste is dangerous now, and either we storeit properly in which case future generations are going to be fine -and will have better storage and reprocessing technology to make upfor our inadequacies - or we don't store it properly and some currentpeople in the short-term will get hurt (and we don't, and they are).

You don't need an appeal to the needs of future people to do this -an appeal to the needs of certain current people would be enough. Ifwe can't care about those current people now, we have no businessprivileging the needs of our hypothetical future people above boththem and their hypothetical future people.

I get the motivation - embedding good environmental decisions ingovernment decision making is going to be necessary for us tosurvive. But all of the environmental problems facing us today arealready having massive negative effects on currently existingpeople. If that's not enough for us to do something, what does it sayabout us if future existing people is? And we have structures thatcare about some currently existing people already - they just don'tcare about all of them. But that's not a problem with the democraticstructures as much as with the people inhabiting them - and theirprivilege. Adding more people with the same sorts of privilege won'thelp matters.

Footnote

¹ Yes, I'm fully aware that this hypotheticalanti-choicer's argument contains several major logical flaws. But itsounds superficially convincing if you loudly ignore those flaws.

Political strategy mistakes

2012-01-09T18:22:00.000Z

So, as previously covered, EdMiliband wants Conservative voters, but isn't willing to defect tothe Tories to get them.

How's that working out for him?

According to YouGov polling, notwell. The polling is mainly about the Lib Dems loss of voters, butthere's a bit about the change from May 2010 vote to current votingintention.

According to the polling, 3% of those who voted Conservative in May2010 would now vote Labour. Yes! Clearly the strategy of driftingrightwards is paying off!

Unfortunately, also according to the polling, 3% of those who votedLabour in 2010 would now vote Conservative. So allowing for margins oferror, the net move from Conservative to Labour is indistinguishablefrom zero. Oh.

I can't say I'm entirely surprised. The second preference polling -back when AV was in the news - always gave extremely low proportions(around 5%) of Conservative or Labour voters who were willing to givetheir second preference to the "other side". Those voters arenaturally also the most likely to transfer their first preference fromone party to the other. And there's hardly any of them.

Similarly, page 5 onwards of the pollresults gives "like/dislike" figures for each party, broken downby 2010 and current vote. Only around 10% of the 2010 or currentvoters for each party even slighty likes (6 or above out of 10) theother party. There's really not a lot of scope for persuasionthere.

Now, the right wing of Labour will say, Blair won 3 elections bydrifting rightwards. And this is somewhat true ... but, on the otherhand:

Correlation is not causation. Pretty much any manifesto would have beaten Major's Conservatives in 1997, and given their disarray, 2001 as well.
Sooner or later, voters are going to decide that if they want Conservative policies, they might actually just as well vote for the Conservatives.
The Conservatives can tactically retreat and win by losing.
There's a major confusion between "position" and "rate of change of position" in the argument. Even if you accept that it's true that Labour moving to the right both caused their 1997-2005 wins and was a good position for Labour to be, that doesn't mean that a further move rightwards is still good strategy.
For a sports analogy, football players in their 20s tend to perform better than football players in their teens. So, says the Labour election strategist, the team with players in their 50s will be even better.
The usual comparision is with Labour's terrible 1987 election performance. But the Conservative party have not moved so far to the left since then that there are no meaningful political positions between "nationalise everything" and "the Conservative manifesto".
Meanwhile, there isn't a lot of viable space between the "current Conservative position" and the "current Labour position" on a lot of issues.

The polling figures

...but then, what about the polls? Lib Dem and Other support hasbeen roughly constant, and the relative levels of Conservative andLabour support seem to go up anddown as you'd expect from good and bad things for one party or theother hitting the news.

The thing that's forgotten there is that the headline polls exclude¹ "don't know" and "wouldn't vote".

Good or bad news for a party will probably cause some voters toprefer or drop it - but for or from "don't know", "wouldn't vote", ora minor party. When the impact of the news fades, then they might welldrift back to their previous position. Because the polls arenormalised, then this effect can look like one party is gaining at thedirect expense of another - but, at least with the Conservatives andLabour, this is not actually happening on any detectable scale.

The relative positions of Conservatives and Labour have changed byroughly 10 points since the election, based on currentpolling. Essentially none of this net movement has beendirect transfers. (Indeed, currently, both parties are doing better inpercentage share terms than they did at the election itself)

Footnote

¹ Some polling companies instead attempt to reallocatethese people instead, to improve the accuracy of their forecast. Theoverall effect is similar, though.

(It's still) Friday (somewhere) Links

2012-01-07T10:20:00.002Z

Diary of a Goldfish: If I were a rich man
Dances With Fat: Avoid Holiday Weight Shame
[trigger warning] Not a zero sum game: Why is it victim blaming to talk about rape and drinking?
Anna Bawden and Denis Campbell at the Guardian: NHS accused over deaths of disabled patients
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Photo of the Day
Esther Choi at Racialicious: Private Danny Chen, and why I will never again reach out to OWS about something that matters to me
Forty Shades of Grey: Female Privilege Checklist-agogo!
Laura Woodhouse at The F-Word: Diane Abbott racism non-story

Beware of experts

2012-01-04T18:22:00.002Z

Well, not so much "beware of experts" as "beware of definitions ofexperts".

It's fairly obvious that the way one recognises an "expert" in onefield is not going to be the same that one recognises an "expert" inanother field.

Obviously expertise and specialisation is a good thing. The problemis that identifying expertise in a field that you have littleknowledge of is itself a tricky problem. So there are conventions asto what experts "look like" - some of those conventions are themselvesdirectly rooted in privilege: they look like middle-aged middle-classwhite men - others are only indirectly so: academic experts tend to befound in research institutions because that's a major way that theybecome experts, but not everyone can get the chance to work at aresearch institution even if they have a strong aptitude in andinterest for that particular field.

There are lots of problems with recognising expertise from theoutside - a lot of my former posts on bad science reporting are causedby precisely that - and even on the inside experts will disagree witheach other - but I think there's a particular issue in the way thatacademic expertise is identified and defined that matters.

This is: all science is basically statistical.

An expert in metallurgy is not an expert on every individualatom within a metal block (you need a different expert for the nextblock...) but on their statistical behaviour. An expert in economicsis not tracking every penny separately but looking at the statisticalmovements of much larger sums of money over time. We recognise this.

An expert on psychology or health or other fields that consider thegeneral behaviour of living creatures in particular conditions alsoonly has statistical knowledge. We do not recognise this as much.

An atom of metal, or a penny, individually, may well not react inthe overall way that a metallurgist or economist predicts that itwill. This doesn't usually matter - the overall effect will still bewhat they predict. (And the individual variation between atoms orpennies is small)

When discussing people, however, a person not behaving in the waythat the expert predicts is important. The expert's knowledge of thesituation is statistical. They can tell that of 100 people, 90 will doa certain thing. The other 10 will not.

When attempts to predict are taken to the individual level theywill regularly fail. The expert is an expert in general behaviour andsituations. The individual is an expert in theirown personal situation. So an individual's perception of their ownsituation - and what they should therefore do - should in general betreated as more reliable than the expert's¹.

What actually happens is that the median behaviour the expert hasidentified - and their identification of such can be quite incorrectthrough their own privilege issues, of course, but even if all ofthat is somehow avoided - tends to become regarded as correct anddeviation as incorrect. (And, further, stay regarded as correct evenif the median behaviour later changes)

It also gets to a point about the difference between a claim that"X is a problem" and "X is an [adjective] problem" - which often getsintentionally ignored.

To make a claim that a particular thing affects a particularproportion of people, or that its prevalence has been changing overtime or space, or that a particular counter-measure is in/effectiveone needs to do a very carefully designed study, probably more thanonce. This is really difficult to do well.

To make a claim that a particular thing occurs at all, seriouslyaffects those it occurs to, and therefore should be countered ... youneed to listen to a few people. This is also really difficult to dowell, especially for people with the "anecdote is not evidence"attitude that works well in particular scientific fields and forstatistical research and works very badly when exported fromthere.

Unfortunately, that sort of person is likely to fit right in to anacademic environment where they can become a socially-recognisedexpert, because our expert recognition is insufficient.

We need a separation in the way that society recognises expertsbetween "experts in statistical behaviour of people" and "experts inindividual behaviour of people".

Footnote

¹ The obvious exception is when the expert - who may inthis context not be a socially-recognisable expert - has knowledgehighly material to the individual's situation which they know theindividual does not have. Of course, in most cases, not giving thisinformation to the individual is intentionally forcing a mistake ontheir part.

Friday Links

2011-12-16T15:20:00.001Z

Gay Christian Geek: Bad Science, Bad Hermeneutics
Philippa Willitts at The F-Word: You're frightening me
Zero at the Bone: Why I’m not an anthropologist
Mindy at Hoyden About Town: Queen Victoria and now
[trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Quote of the Day
[trigger warning] Forty Shades of Grey: Shocking News! Rapists live in the same society as we do!
DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog: UK Study: kids who are put into foster care tend to get heavier
s.e. smith: ‘It’s all in your head’
nominatissima: Courtesy & Respect

Two quick thoughts

2011-12-07T17:53:00.000Z

ATOS are apparently getting rid of internal email. Apparently it's to improve productivity, which may be true, but I expect - given the dubious nature of what our government employs them to do - that the more transient nature of instant messages compared with email is a big bonus.

Meanwhile, in good news for future ATOS contracts, polling suggests an increasing number of people are blaming poverty on poor people and less willing to pay taxes to help others. Mark Easton says:

One would expect that when the economy goes down people become a little less judgmental of those in need but this year's report finds 26% of people feel poverty is the result of 'laziness' or 'lack of willpower'. In the mid-1990s that figure was down to 15%.

I'm not sure - benefit of hindsight! - one would expect that. Obviously as people get into worse financial situations, their likelihood of being in favour of extra taxes on them personally decreases. Also, of course, there's an important psychological effect of blaming poverty on the poor - if it was due to flaws in character or morals which you, of course, do not share, then it won't happen to you. It's not surprising in these times that the increased number of people who need reassurance it won't happen to them outweighs the increased number of people who know so many exceptions that they know the causes are bigger than that. So far, anyway.

Friday Links

2011-12-02T18:20:00.003Z

HarpyMarx: Workfare means exploitation
Obesity Timebomb: Stereotyping Fat and Capitalism
Another Angry Woman: Female orgasms and cheating risk: in which evolutionary psychology actually tests a hypothesis
Andrew at Generalising: His and hers … cameras?
Amadi Talks: Siri Failures, Illustrated
echidne at Echidne of the Snakes: Autism. It's The Uppity Women's Fault.
[trigger warning] A Bee of a Certain Age: So exactly who is at fault here?
Lisa Wade at Sociological Images: Molson’s Divergent Marketing: Cosmo vs. Playboy
[trigger warning] s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: Violence Against Women With Disabilities: Probing the Scope of the Problem

Correlation is not causation, and other easy statistics

2011-12-01T21:24:00.003Z

The local free paper's property section had ~~an article~~ areprinted press release from a property website, which noted thatodd-numbered houses were more valuable than even-numbered houses, andthat lower numbers are more valuable than higher numbers. The articlenever explicitly claims that the difference in house prices iscaused by the numbering - but on the other hand the existenceof the article, and much of its wording, strongly implies that theywould like their readers to believe this.

Anyway, it makes a good uncontentious example of "correlation isnot causation" (and a few other statistical lessons), so I'm going tostep through their claims in detail in case I need such an examplelater. Yes, clichés involving aquatic creatures and roundwooden containers may come to mind.

So, the figures:

House type	Average price (£)
Odd number	207,202
Even number	206,664
Number 1	229,411
Number 2	222,273
Number 13	203,892
1 to 20, except 13	"near the top of the list"
No number - name only	"an average 90,000 more than numbered homes"

So, obviously - with one exception - the number of a house is notdirectly affecting its price. The reduction in price - by around 1-2%- for being the famously "unlucky" number 13 is understandable: manypeople won't buy a house numbered 13, so the number of potentialbuyers is lower, so the number of offers will be lower, which will(slightly) reduce the average price.

That's that one explained. What about the rest?

Firstly, note the fairly small difference between odd and evenhouses: around 500 pounds in 200,000 - or around 0.25%. They don't sayhow big the sample size was in total, but that's unlikely to be astatistically significant difference. The numbers have all been quotedto the ridiculous precision only available by taking a mean of a largesample (which lets us conclude which sort of average was in use, too)- both round to 207,000.

In so far as there is a real effect, the relatively largedifference in price between 1 and 2 is likely to explain it.

So what about lower numbers being higher priced? This is a realeffect, but it's not (of course) as simple as lower numbers beingintrinsically more valuable. It's a combination of two factors, andtheir relation with the allocation algorithms for house numbers.

House numbering is most commonly either done sequentially with oddnumbers on one side of the street and even on the other side,ascending in the same direction - or for less linear housingdevelopments, sometimes as a single sequence of numbers along thestreet. Numbers are generally not skipped unless there's a "gap wherea house could be".

So, as a consequence, on an average terraced street, house 1 (andoften, but not as often, house 2) will be end-terrace houses, whichare much more valuable. There will also be another set of end-terracehouses at the other end of the terrace, but there is nostandardisation whatsoever in terrace lengths, so the increase invalue there is scattered throughout the house numbers.

Then there's street length. In general, shorter streets have betterhouses. 138 Smith Street is almost certainly going to be an urbanstreet, or maybe a main road in the suburbs with lots oftraffic. Either way, not the greatest for house prices. 6 JonesStreet, on the other hand, could be on a similar street, or it couldequally be on a side street in an expensive rural village. So thataveraging explains lower numbers being higher priced.

The final figure: un-numbered houses are significantly - over 40% -more expensive than numbered houses has much the same sort of obviousreal cause. Un-numbered houses will include mansions, converted farms,actual farms, and other large isolated buildings, with asking pricespotentially into the millions of pounds.

This is why "correlation is causation" is so tempting - the housenumbers don't cause the price differences; position on the street andtype of street do. However, position and type (plus local standardnumbering algorithm) also cause the numbers - so there's a verynoticeable correlation on a statistical level. Additionally, house number and house price are really easy to measure quantitatively - "type" and "numbering algorithm" are much more qualitative.

Note that the correlation is therefore no use as an individualpredictor: what street a house is on will tell you far more about itsprice than its position on the street, and the effect is sufficientsubtle that - apart from end terrace effects - it probably won't bereliably visible on a single street. This is another usefulstatistical reminder: a difference in averages can be virtuallyirrelevant if you're looking at individual cases.

The "insanity" defence

2011-11-30T10:19:00.000Z

[trigger warning]

The news that the murderer of 77people in Norway has been declared "insane" is notsurprising. After all, he was white and not a believer in some scaryforeign religion - if he was "sane" he wouldn't have done what he did.

The psychiatric report concluded

[...] he lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions"

Okay - this has probably been translated from the originalNorweigian, and may well have lost some nuance, but let's break itdown:

His beliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate
His thoughts and actions were based on his beliefs about the nature of reality.

The second part of that is essentially what everyone does.

So the "insanity" must be concluded from the first part - that hisbeliefs about the nature of reality were inaccurate. But this is trueto at least some extent of everyone, too.¹

Furthermore, plenty of people share his particular belief thatthere is a Muslim invasion of Europe planned and that our governmentsare complicit in it. Most of them do not commit mass murder as aresult, however.

So: the Norweigian murderer has a commonly-shared mistaken belief,and chose highly illegal actions as a consequence. He therefore cannotbe held - by "insanity" - to be criminally responsible for thoseactions.

Meanwhile, for less default-y terrorist suspects - black, Muslim,non-European, etc. - the idea that they could rationally decide tokill people (even if the decision was based on faulty premises) iscompletely accepted, and they're tried as criminals.

The idea of that form of "insanity"² being treated as insome way excusing him of responsibility is completely wrong.

Footnote

¹ For an entirely uncontroversial example that affects almost everyone: optical illusions. They're artefacts of millions of years of evolved visual processing where an "optimisation" that works most of the time gives the wrong result in a few cases.

² Using the definition of "mistaken belief aboutreality", anyone who had no reasonable way of knowing based on theirperceptions that their action would have a particular criminalconsequence should not be held criminally responsible³ -and most of our laws recognise this fact: there are exceedingly few"strict liability" laws.

³ I'm aware that, given what we know about rapists, manyof them would be able to use this "defence" on the grounds that theyare also deeply mistaken about the nature of reality. However, theprecedent that people whose mistaken beliefs make them a generaldanger to society - highly rare among those considered "insane" bypsychiatrists - may be separated from it for as long as those beliefsremain is well-established, and would have much the same effect. Atany rate, if we get to the stage where accused rapists are advised bytheir lawyers to plead "not guilty due to insanity", we'll be at astage where rape culture is generally considered a "mistaken belief" -and, minus the ablism in that sentiment, I'd be happy with that.

Friday Links

2011-11-25T20:08:00.002Z

Phillipa Willitts at The F-Word: Divide and rule works both ways
[trigger warning] Polly at Too Much To Say For Myself: Guest Post: It doesn’t make it all right
Paul Krugman: Taxing Job Creators
HarpyMarx: The Left and representation
Same Difference: Compulsory PE? My Worst Nightmare
[trigger warning] Another Angry Woman: Minicab rapes and victim blaming

Transgender Day of Remembrance

2011-11-20T11:33:00.002Z

[trigger warning]

Today is the 13th International Transgender Day of Remembrance.

There have been atleast 221 murders of trans people in the last 12 months - whenmurders of trans people that didn't make the news, and moreindirectly-caused unnecessary deaths - suicides, cissexism-causedpoverty or lack of access to medical treatment, and so on - areaccounted for, the number will be far higher.

Bigotry and hatred of trans people are extremely commonplace. Legalprotections are rare, and even when they do exist they're often moretheoretical than practically useful. Even in countries with someprotective laws, there are harmful laws too - Sweden's mandatorysterilisation, for instance. It's not surprising, given the supportfor hatred by states, companies, and others among the powerful that somany trans people are killed.

"Not surprising" doesn't mean "inevitable". With enough work, thiscan be changed.

Assume a spherical frictionless population

2011-11-19T11:07:00.000Z

So, we've got the government sponsoring a review of sick leave,that essentiallyrecommends that we treat people with acute health conditions inthe same way that we now deal with chronic and terminalhealth conditions.

Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit? has more on the particularproblems with this proposal, which I won't try to duplicate here. I want to focus on the last sentence of the article for what it says about government overall:

The DWP spokesman said: "The economy loses £15bn in lost economic output each year due to sickness absence and we cannot continue to foot this bill."

Interesting claim... After quite a bit of searching, I can't find a source for this. I have found:

Several other unsourced repetitions of the figure, sometimes accompanied by a claim that there are 150 million working days lost annually in the UK due to sickness absence.
One claim that £12bn (instead) in economic output is lost, but 200 million working days are lost
Claims in the original press release for the review that the total cost of sickness absence (which is not the same as lost output) is £100bn, £60bn of which is paid by the government.

However, it does seem fairly clear that the main assumption forlosses and costs is as compared with an economy where no-one wasever ill.

On that measure, we "waste" about £70 million annually on streetlighting, compared with an idealised country which flies around theworld on jet engines so that the sun never sets on it, or a country populated entirely by people genetically modified to have sonar.

People are people. They get ill. I'm all in favour of reducing theamount that people get ill through advances in medical science,good¹ public health initiatives, improved safety measures,more efficient treatments, and so on. But anyone seriously basingtheir government policy essentially on the assumption that peopleshould never be seriously ill has such a bizarre idea² of what humansare that they shouldn't be in charge of the country.

And it leads to policies like this where the sickness absenceitself, and by extension the person who is ill, gets treated asthe problem - when actually it's a symptom of the facts that we don'thave sci-fi medical technology now, that we have unsafe and unhealthyworking environments (especially for mental health), that we placetoxins into the environment far more than we should be, and so on.

That's what's "costing" us the £15bn in "lost output", not people beingill. Not getting that distinction - and so making a policy based onthe belief that people shouldn't be ill (whichis not unique to our current central government) - means policieslike this, which are likely to make the situation worse, not better,and so cost the economy even more overall - and a lot of ill people agreat deal personally.

Footnote

¹ i.e. non-dehumanising

² Admittedly, the ablist idea that "not ill" is normaland "ill" is deviant is so common that finding a member of governmentwho doesn't believe that may take some work - but as with manydiscriminatory assumptions they just sound silly if you say themexplicitly.

Friday Links

2011-11-18T17:38:00.001Z

[trigger warning] Diary of a Goldfish: Be Nice & Grow A Thicker Skin
Zero at the Bone: In whose favour are the rules of politeness made?
Paul Krugman: Austerity then and now and The 1% Across Space And Time
Lucinda Marshall at Occupy Patriarchy: Empowering The Feminist Voice At Occupy–Confronting The Silencing Of Mic Check And Other Misogynies In The Occupy Movement
Another Angry Woman: …but is it evidence?
nathanjurgenson at Cyborgology: The #OWS Raid at the Intersection of the Physical & Symbolic
HarpyMarx: War on the poor: then and now
[trigger warning] tigtog at Hoyden About Town: Rape Culture Datapoint
Lisa Ansell: Scab (which reminds me of this FWD post by s.e. smith
DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog: The Edmonton Staging System: Post 2, Discussion
Complicity: Employment, The Equality Act and My Transsexual Summer
wahine1 at Feminist Philosophers: The future of Philosophy – Men, still?

Loitering within tent

2011-11-16T18:51:00.002Z

[trigger warning: state violence]

Why aren't the people in charge simply ignoring the Occupymovement? It's not obvious to me.

Petitions, protests, marches, letter-writing campaigns, voting -all can be and are largely ignored by elected politicians. Arepresentative who is already sympathetic to their cause can use thesethings to be more forceful in Parliament. With consistent effort ofthis sort over many years, then the number of sympatheticrepresentatives in Parliament can be grown and public opinion can bealtered - but this is an extremely slow process and as, for instance,the blatant racism or heterosexism shown by some MPs todaydemonstrates, can be ignored at will by an unsympatheticrepresentative.

The "ultimate sanction" of making them lose elections is only astatistical deterrent. A party may occasionally lose power temporarily- though that was going to happen anyway - but individualrepresentatives in safe seats (and there are equivalents in almost allelectoral systems) can stay in office as long as they want.

So, given that, what is it about Occupy that stops it beingignored. Look at it entirely from an abstract point of view - ignore the aims, just look at the methods.

A protest march will, if it's large enough, block off multiple streets in a major city for several hours. Normal day-to-day life is disrupted over a large area. Then, everything returns to normal, and it gets pushed back in to the pile of previous marches.
Occupy take an area of public space, put some tents up, and stay there. The vast majority of the city continues as normal - indeed, from a distance, it's not obviously there - and even nearby it's generally relatively straightforward to walk around them. Generally, far fewer people are participating at any one time, in any particular Occupy location, than would appear at any medium-sized protest march in the same city.

The only thing that makes it more "disruptive" than a protest marchis the permanence in a public space. But alone, that's notparticularly disruptive¹. They may be a reminder of somethinggovernments and the powerful don't like to be reminded of - but theyshould be an easily avoidable and ignorable reminder. The late BrianHaw camped outside Parliament for years without changing policy, andonly really made the news on the (many) occasions where they tried tohave him removed.

Likewise, while the Occupy movements are - toa greater or lesser extent - trying to develop alternatives to theestablished order, that they're doing so in a square in the rain,instead of on an internet forum or on a commune somewhere out of theway, shouldn't be particularly threatening. It's not as if peoplemerely walking by are going to pick up the interesting details ofthat, as opposed to a few messages and slogans on signs.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if the governments and powerfulhad completely ignored Occupy Wall Street, giving non-committalplatitudes about the right to protest and "they can stay if theywant[, I don't care]" if anyone asked, then it would not have reachedthe numbers it has - across North America and Europe - and not havereceived anything like as much press coverage.

Occupy LSX has pretty much only been in the news since it startedover disputes as to whether they should be "allowed" to stay there orforcibly removed. The reasons they're actually there are getting verylittle press coverage. If they'd been passively allowed to continuewithout interference, then they'd still be there, of course - butno-one who didn't physically go past them would have noticed.

Similarly, the recent attacks on Occupy Oakland - and now New Yorkand Seattle, at least - and the slightly less aggressive ongoingpolicing and "health and safety" disruptions of the sites - may havedeterred some people from attending ... but they've also kept theprotests in the news, encouraged the protestors, often grown theirnumbers overall, and made them think that their strategy is working.

Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then theyfight you, then you win" statement has been repeated to the point ofcliché about Occupy - but while their eventual victory (andwhat that might mean, anyway) is still nowhere near inevitable,they're larger in number and angrier as a result of governments andthe powerful not being content to remain at the "ignore" stage.

So why try to repress them so much? It can't be the ideas alone. There's nothing new in their ideas (and that is not a criticism!) - and there's nothing new about a significant angry minority holding those ideas. The economic collapse has made more people receptive to those ideas, and the Occupy camps mean that (a few) more people hear about those ideas.

It also can't be about permission to hold those ideas and expressthem publicly. The only part unique to Occupy is "in a square" or "ina tent". Again, if ignored, they wouldn't be powerful there.

It can't be personal inconvenience or conscience. If the powerfulhad those, then plenty of other forms of protest would either be morerapidly effective, or more heavily restricted, or both.

It can't be about "health and safety" or other such concerns. Theonly health and safety potentially being affected is generally that ofthe people inside the Occupy camps - which they obviously don't careabout. Yes, the protests may after legal argument be found to bebreaking some technicality of the law. But probably most protestmarches could after the fact be found to have done the same. It'slargely irrelevant to whether they can be ignored, and it's more focuson enforcing every single law at once than ever gets applied anywhereelse. Enforcing laws - and making up new laws to enforce - is a means,but it can't be the end in itself.

It shouldn't be about personal fear - hundreds of thousands ofpeople in a square like Tahrir Square can be threatening to agovernment: that's enough people that if they did turn out to be armedrevolutionaries they could do some serious damage to the governmenteven if the police and army stayed loyal - and a sign of enoughpopular support that a dictator can't rely enough on their loyalty. SoEgypt's government fell.

But a few hundred people? Maybe a few thousand at the biggest?That's not dangerous. They're not even particularly close togovernment buildings, or the offices of the truly powerful. Even ifthey were all armed to the teeth if they tried anything violent theywould go down very quickly in the "fatally failed revolutionaries"list. And clearly if they were armed and shooting, the loyalty of thepolice and army is nowhere near weak enough yet in North America orEurope to end up defecting: the recent police assaults on Occupyshould show they don't have a problem there.

So - there seems to be nothing to lose by simply ignoring Occupylike they ignore every other protest and fringe movement. And muchmore to lose by attacking them through the courts and throughviolence, thereby increasing anger and public sympathy. So why pickthat strategy?

I really don't get it. What do the rich and powerful know that Idon't that makes Occupy so specifically threatening to them thatthey're willing to take such disproportionate and panicked action totry - counter-productively - to stop them? What am I missing here?

Footnotes

¹ If the public space is "across a major motorway" or"in the middle of Oxford Street" or "right where you wanted to build ablock of flats" or "in front of the gates of a military base", thenit's definitely very disruptive. But that's not what Occupyis doing.

Friday Links

2011-11-11T17:52:00.001Z

Zero at the Bone: Who counts in talking about social justice?
Jon Robison at the HAES Files the HAES files: is the body mass index a good measure of health?
eeshap at The Crunk Feminist Collective: Boom!? 7 Billion People on Earth Fosters Population Alarmism
planeshiftwrites: The way to employ people is to fire them
[trigger warning] Too much to say for myself: Assange loses appeal against extradition
Echidne of the Snakes: Chiseling Through The Writer's Block: On Mini-Skirts in Finland
[trigger warning] LMarshall at Occupy Patriarchy: Why Safety Is Essential In Order For Women To Fully Participate In The Occupy Movement
Helen G at The F Word: Intersex Day of Remembrance
Incurable Hippie: Workfare: Exploitative and cruel, especially for disabled people

We are the 70-100%. Tax the 40-70%.

2011-11-09T19:36:00.000Z

While writing mythoughts on Occupy, I was thinking quite a bit about howrevolutionary and protest movements are often either explicitly aboutthe interests of the relatively-privileged upper-middle and middleclasses, or end up co-opted towards their interests anyway.

And then an example comes along.

I wrote about the tuition fee plans last year when the original BrowneReport was published. At the time I thought they were surprisinglygood, all things considered - though with some potentially verydangerous and largely ignored consequences.

Political changes to the report's proposals in the process ofturning it into legislation took away the most dangerous consequences- but at the cost of taking away most of the proposals' internal logicand consistency too.

My general assessment, though, remains about the same: asurprisingly good deal for students and universities. The protestsagainst the tuition fees - and they're mainly about the tuition fees -are effectively a protest by the rich against the poor. That's not tosay that the participants think that's what they're doing - but theprotest and anger has been quite effectively co-opted byupper-middle-class interests.

Lets look at the current system first.

A student on a typical undergraduate course will pay around £3.5kin fees a year, and take out around £4.5k in maintenance loans eachyear, for either 3 or 4 years. This will leave them with a maximumpayment requirement of either £24k or £32k (indexed to inflation), tobe repaid at a rate of 9% of all gross earnings over £15k. Becausethat £15k earnings figure isn't indexed to inflation, just abouteveryone will repay all of it - in 25 years, when the debt is writtenoff if not repaid, the median wage is likely to be around £40k inabsolute terms (assuming an average 3% nominal inflation). Repaymentswill therefore be over two thousand a year even for that salary - and agraduate 25 years after graduation is likely to be earningconsiderably more. Total real-terms payments are therefore going to beapproximately the full value of the maintenance and fees "loan".

Furthermore, if this scheme were to continue, the gap between £15kand nominal salaries would increase, so repayment sizes wouldrise.

Now compare this with the new system.

Repayments are now at 9% over £21k, but the repayment threshold isitself linked to changes in median wage. This means - usingthis calculator, which seems accurate - that, depending on theexact assumptions made¹, to repay more than (real terms)£24k under the new system would require a salary greater than around£29k in real terms. A slightly higher salary would be required torepay more than £32k.

On the one hand, £29k is not a huge salary. On the other hand, it'squite a bit higher than the median income - it's currently around 70thpercentile of income. It's also higher than the median income foralmost any age-band, gender and region combination: that is, themajority of people² will not earn more than £29k (in realterms) at any point, never mind as a career average salary!³

So under the new scheme: The bottom 30-40% don't pay anything undereither scheme. The next 30-40% or so pay less than now both in totaland per year. The top 30% (by income) pay more in total (though stillless in the early years). The ones who have to repay the greatestadditional amount under the new scheme compared with the old are thetop 10-20%⁴.

Very approximately, therefore, the protests are about trying topersuade a right-wing mostly-Conservative government that it shouldcharge the rich less and the middle more for their education. Evenmore strangely, the government is refusing: tax rich graduatesinstead, they say.

Footnotes

¹ I pinned personal salary growth in the simulator toequal the average earnings growth (both at RPI+1 or RPI, it makeslittle difference) to mimic having a fixed real salary over the wholetime period. That's not realistic, but it allows a comparison withmedian wages.

² Now, graduate salaries are generally higher thannon-graduate salaries, and there's nothing like a bit ofself-interest, but even then it's mainly benefiting the richergraduates. It's verytricky to assess by how much and there are several conflictingsources (and the premium varies by degree, too) - but it probablyworks out, on average, at only around £3-4k additional gross earningsa year. Even the median graduate is therefore unlikely to be earningmuch more than £29k in real terms.

³ And this is also assuming continuous employment forthe full 30 years after graduation. Take time off to raise children,or become unemployed for more than a couple of months, or become illand spend a year off work on long-term sick leave, etc. etc. and thelikelihood of repaying more than £24k falls further.

⁴ Above a very high threshold - in to the top 5% or so -total repayments start falling again because their earnings clear theloan before the higher interest rates only charged on higher earnershave much effect. But they'll still even in the absolute best/worstunrealistic case (walk straight out of university into a £400kcorporate directorship) repay almost twice as much under the newscheme as they would under the old scheme. And someone with that sortof immediate earnings potential probably has sufficient family wealthand connections that the cost of university is largely irrelevantanyway.

A distant but relevant memory

2011-11-03T18:22:00.000Z

Strange how seemingly unrelated events can remind you of things youhadn't thought of for years, isn't it.

Back in the mid-90s, there was a computer game called Frontier:First Encounters, an approximate sequel to the old Elite. Itwas set in 3250, with humanity spread across over hundreds of lightyears of space and 3 major political alliances.

Anyway, one of the side plots related to a legal dispute. An influential person had arranged the assassination of an opponent, whose family tries to have him brought to trial. He hires a bunch of lawyers who advance the following argument:

Our client is "innocent until proven guilty"
He hasn't been proven guilty, so therefore he is innocent
Since he's innocent, the accusation of murder is libellous, and so we're suing you.

(The dispute is only resolved when the lawyers are bombed from orbit.)

There's a bit of text explaining why their legal strategy works -the influential person had spent years lobbying for the law in therelevant star system to be rewritten in his favour. There seem to be alot of people who think that's how "innocent until proven guilty"already works, which just shows the difficulty of developingsufficiently implausible satire.

Occupy Ambivalence

2011-11-01T21:16:00.000Z

I have very ambivalent thoughts about the Occupy Placenamemovements. On the one hand, they're highlighting that there are manyareas in which the cosy political consensus does not have the supportof the population, in a way that governments don't quite know how torespond to and can't entirely ignore. On the other hand, while themovements aren't likely to fall to party-political co-option, there'sa definite problem with default-person co-option, Tyranny ofStructurelessness, and so on. While some Occupy groups are tryingto explicitly deal with these problems, some are very definitely not -and it makes their claim to be for "the 99%" rather dubious.

Part of the reason for the ambivalence, of course, is that there'sno one Occupy movement - other than vague solidarity and similarity insome aims, and a global slogan and broad methodology, there's nothingto connect Occupy City A to Occupy City B. The actions and decisionsof one don't directly affect the actions and decisions of another.

So the actions of one group can make me hopeful that this attemptat a revolution might really be a revolution - while the actions ofanother make me sure that it's just another attempt to reshuffle thepeople at the top (or as MelissaMcEwan puts it, "[...] you're not staging a revolution: You'restaging a change in management.")

Differences between the US and the UK

One of the questions regarding the UK protests has to be "whynow?". The practical answer - that the US protests, themselves havingat least some similarities in form to the Egyptian and Tunisianrevolutions - have been successful and encouraged people elsewhere,isn't sufficient.

But the situation in the US and the UK is rather different. Therecent news that the USmedian weekly wage for 2010 was $507, for instance. On hearingthat, I needed context. So, I converted it to pounds, adjusted for the(small) purchasing power parity difference between the two nations,and then started comparing it with the ASHE resultsfor the UK in the same year.

I live in the North East of England. It's a region that's beenlargely abandoned by successive governments, has high unemployment,high social deprivation, very little incoming investment, and wasn'tin good shape even in the boom years. On a regional basis, it has thelowest median wage in the UK.

It also has a median wage - after currency conversions - around10-15% higher than the US equivalent. Furthermore, the socialsafety net is more generous, and health care is both free andavailable.

The US as a whole is noticeably worse off than the worst bits ofthe UK. It's not surprising that the US is rising up in protest; noris it surprising that it didn't before.

10% or 30% or 99%

The UK, meanwhile... there are some seriously deprived parts of theUK. But most of these have been hated by governments for years. Theprotests in the UK - their appearance at this time - aren't aboutthose bits. They aren't about the consistent demonisation of disabledpeople that has been ongoing for decades. They aren't about theconsistent racism and classism that set off riots in the 80s and riotsthis summer. They're - in many ways - about the worry on the part ofthe middle classes that they'll end up poor too.

The UK economy is heading into a severe mess, inflicted by the"expansionary austerity" beliefs of the government - and this ismaking the middle classes less secure. Not unreasonably, they'reworried. But the people at the bottom of the classism pile, and thepeople seriously affected by other marginalisations, have been therefor a long time, and failed by our governmental and economic powerstructures for a long time. People could have come out on the streetsto criticise those structures any time in the last decade.

And part of it - part of it - is that just as you can't have a riotby yourself, you can't have much of a protest - the late Brian Hawexcepted - by yourself. The success of the US protests gives some ofthe discontent in the UK the knowledge that they could do this and notbe alone. That might be why the Occupy camps in the UK appeared, andstayed. But there have been protests before.

Who are the protests for? Are they for those who were never at thetop of society but thought that if they followed the rules they couldlead a comfortable mostly-privileged life, or for the rest of the 99%as well, who knew that they'd never get that far as things stood? Arethe efforts of the very poor, disabledpeople, womenand [trigger warning] rapevictims and other generally marginalised groups to be heard whenspeaking for themselves considered a part of Occupy, or separate? Theanswer varies from camp to camp, and even within a camp, ofcourse. But the general trend I'm reading about in the UK is notmaking me optimistic.

We know best, now rise up and revolt

Claiming to be representing the 99% is rather tricky. That's a lotof people, who, collectively, agree on absolutely nothing. While thewealth and power may be concentrated in a very small group - farsmaller than "the 1%" - that doesn't mean that the rest are going toagree, even on the necessity of overturning the established order.

But the standard response to anyone disagreeing with the approachis to point out that they are in the 99% too. It reminds me a bit ofthe contemptfor people who make the "wrong" voting decision that s.e. smithtalks about in the context of the US urban/rural divide.

Why assume that everyone below a certain extremely high wealthlevel should agree on:

The current system being unjust (when many of those protesting now didn't think so until it started obviously hurting them)
The proposed solution being better

It can't be better for all of the 99%, even afterwards.

If the revolution makes a fair effort to dismantle all privilege,then many mostly-default people are going to take some steps down inrelative social position. If they really dismantle capitalism,globally, and end inequality, then almost everyone in the UK and USAis going to take several steps downwards relatively, and probably afew in absolute terms too, at least in the short term.

But if it doesn't make that effort and succeed, why should peopleother than the mostly-default take part in risky, dangerous, anduntested revolution to choose who rules them with contempt¹. We alreadyhave elections for that.

The assumption is the old socialist-lefty one that classism is somuch bigger than every other form of oppression that if you endclassism and capitalism the rest will just disappear. It might benecessary to end it, in practice - but it's nowhere nearsufficient.

Ambivalence

So, yes, ambivalence. The Occupy movements are well-intentioned andin some cases well-implemented. The power structures they are fightingagainst are deadly and oppressive, and need to go. But there's atension there between destroying the power structures andcommandeering them - and I don't have confidence that those wishing todestroy them will be able to shape the movements.

They're not going away, for now, and the escalation of violentresponses from some governments suggest a panic about where they couldgo next. But where do they go next? Their very existence is achievingsomething - but not yet enough. Where they go - and what they do -depends on why they want to do it. Which aspects of privilege do theywant to defeat and which do they want to accept? Hopefully the answerswill become obvious soon.

Footnote

¹ If the rulers are bad enough, the people can becomedesperate enough to believe that bringing in a new set of bad rulerson a tide of blood can't possibly make things worse. And often,they're right, especially in the short term. But it can hardly be saidto be congruent with the original noble goals of the revolution.

A tale of two anti-rape posters.

2011-10-28T17:08:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning]

On the bus this morning I saw a poster I'd not seen before - Ithink it's a new one - from the local police forces. It was ananti-rape poster, and unlike this recently spotted poster fromSouth Wales Police, it was actually a fairly good one.

I cannot find a picture of it anywhere online, and I wasn't able totake one myself, so I'll try to describe it from memory. (If anyone has a picture of this poster, please let me know!)

Right quarter of the poster: image, grey scale, of the casually-dressed upper legs and body of a light-skinned man, holding the bars of a cell with both hands.
Most of the rest of the poster is text, which I'm not going to get word-for-word - but in paraphrase. Top line: "don't commit rape or this could happen to you". Then, below that, three examples of things which are rape.
First example: "If she's too drunk to say 'yes', she's too drunk to say 'no'"
Second example: "If she's under 16, even if she consents, it's illegal and you could be arrested."
Third example: "No matter how many times she's said 'yes' before, she can still say 'no'. Rape of your wife or partner is still rape."
Finally, the phone number for the local police forces, and their logos.

I'm sure experts in the field could suggest areas for improvement,but compared with the usual standard for these posters, I was actuallypleased to see it. It keeps its focus on the perpetrators, making veryclear that their self-justifications for their actions will not beaccepted - while at the same time also giving the same message to theenablers who help perpetuate these myths, and the victims who mightend up being told them so much they come to believe them.

It also reminded me, because of its contrast to the South Walesposter, that I had a letterto write - so here it is. I thought about sending it directly tothe government departments, but my MP - unsurprisingly - tends to getmore useful replies than I do.

Dear [MP],
I was today pleased to see an anti-rape poster, produced by the localpolice force, that focuses strongly on the perpetrators and sets outexamples of situations where they do not have consent despite theirbeliefs. This reminded me of the large continuing regional variationin the success of the criminal justice system in this area, asrevealed most recently by the BBC through Freedom of Informationrequests athttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/uk/11/acpo_rape_stats/xls/rapestatistics.xls
As Baroness Stern found in her report on rape prosecutions, theexisting guidance is followed extremely inconsistently. If everypolice force had the report to charge rate of Durham (60.8%), and ifevery CPS region had the ability to avoid dropping cases before trialthat Dorset has (only 5.4% dropped), and if every CPS region had thesuccess in securing convictions at trial of regions such asWarwickshire (87.0%), then half of all reported rapes would result ina conviction for the rapist (either of rape or a lesser offence)
This rate is potentially achievable without any new policies orprocedures - simply by following existing best practice. Furthermore,the rapidity with which some police forces and CPS regions haveachieved improvements in detection and conviction rates recentlysuggests that - with enough political will - this conviction ratecould be achieved within a decade at most.
Would you be able to contact the relevant Ministers at the Home Officeand Justice to ask them:
if they will set as a national target that by 2020 the police andCPS will secure convictions in at least 50% of all reported serioussexual offence cases?
what steps they are taking to ensure that best practice isreplicated quickly across all police forces and CPS regions?
what additional steps will they take in future to ensure that thesituation improves?
Thank you
Yours sincerely
[me]

Feel free to adapt this letter to your own MP, of course.

Friday Links

2011-10-28T17:07:00.000+01:00

Thorns: Wibbly-wobbly classy-wassy
Trouble: The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: True Tales of Gender Essentialism at the Dog Park
Spark in Darkness: On reporting statistics and monitoring
It's Not a Zero Sum Game: Portable safe spaces and occupying the occupation
Erica at Shakesville: Systemic Sickness
Dances with Fat: Why Weight Loss is Not the Solution
F Young at LGBT Asylum News: Kenyan court recognizes traditional same-sex marriage
s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: Who Exactly IS The 1%?
[trigger warning] Renee Martin at Womanist Musings: Who Was Zurana Horton?
DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog: New study: body's resistance to food restriction is long term.

More research on weight

2011-10-25T19:42:00.000+01:00

DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog reports on a Canadian study on weight and health in Manitoba. Full report (PDF).

A few interesting points

Mortality rates

The results - not surprisingly, by now - confirm the previous US, Germanand Canadianpopulation studies. There is no statistically significant correlationbetween mortality and BMI - a person with a BMI of 19 and a personwith a BMI over 40 have virtually identical chances of dying in anyyear. (Chapter 6)

There does seem to be some difference in causes of death -respiratory conditions are less common causes of death in "obese"people, and endocrine and metabolic conditions are more common - butasthe German study pointed out - that just means we have a betteridea of what statistically kills fat people. It doesn't make thinpeople any less dead.

Health service usage

The study also includes a very interesting look at health serviceusage by BMI in Chapter 5. Fat people do use more health services thanthin people - to a statistically significant degree for some but notall services - but generally not by a very large margin. For instance,for visiting GPs, were the campaigns to get men to visit the doctor tosucceed, bringing male GP visit rates up to the same as female GPvisit rates, this would increase visits considerably morethan if everyone visited the GP as often as a government-approvedweight person of their gender.

Comments on the Big Fat Blog piece point out some reasons whycorrelation may well not be direct causation here - misdiagnosis offat people necessitating repeat visits and weight gain caused as aside effect of medical treatment - and the German study also notesunderdiagnosis in thin people of conditions popularly associated withobesity as another possibility.

The study doesn't cover health care costs directly - but they did do a brief literature review. Emphasis mine.

Studies of health care costs (not analysed in this report) showsignificant positive associations with BMI level (Andreyeva et al.,2004; Borg et al., 2005; Raebel et al., 2004; Thompson et al.,2001). This is consistent with the higher use of some healthcareservices as shown in this report, though the differences appeared tobe higher in those studies than results from this study wouldsuggest. Some of this may be due to differences in the context andcosts of healthcare, as most of these studies were done in the UnitedStates.

Or, paraphrased, if your health system is massively inefficient,expensive to use, and encourages people to only seek treatment inemergencies, you might well have very distorted costs. That doesn'tmean that countries with more sensible health provision will havecomparable costs.

Arbitrariness

Unlike many previous studies, this one recognises the arbitrarinessof the BMI measures. After describing the World Health Organisationcategories:

These categories were created by examining relationships betweenBMI, mortality, and morbidity. However, the cutoffs remain somewhatarbitrary and have changed over time: a BMI of 27 used to separate thelow risk from the high risk categories [...]. Furthermore, thesegroupings may not be equally useful for older adults [...] ordifferent ethnic groups, including Aboriginal peoples[...]. Therefore, analyses in this study used continuous BMI valueswhenever possible, with summarized data for the standard groups shownabove as well.

I've mentioned the "step change" attitude that public health seemsto take - it's good to see a study that explicitly takes the oppositeapproach, and doesn't take the WHO-set boundaries as definitionallyaccurate.

They also acknowledge many problems with BMI as a measure of weight categories (including assumptions of white European as default) - but note that they need to use something and

[...] it is the only measure available in existing data sourcesthat covers a large and representative sample of the population (excluding residents of First Nations)

Changes over time

There are a couple of graphs in Chapter 2 noting that weightdistributions have been basically static since 2000 in Canada (verysimilar to the situation in the UK). One of the things they note isthat "overweight" is more common in men than women.

I suspect that a partial explanation for this may be due to flaws in theBMI measurement. BMI is based on a ratio of weight andheight². But that's not a ratio found in nature¹ - scalingsomething up generally involves a ratio of weight toheight^2.5, because of the way circulatory and nervoussystems work at small scales.

So the simplification - which makes BMI possible to calculatewithout a scientific calculator or a log table - means that for peopleof the same build, BMI will increase with height.

Men tend to be taller than women, so will tend to have higher BMIsfor the same build. (Also, there's not actually any reason, given thatmen and women have statistically different anatomies, that the BMIdistributions shouldn't be different)

Afterthoughts

Studies like this leave governmental "obesity" strategy not as"correlation equals causation" but as "lack of correlation equalscausation". There's no evidence that heavier weight harms lifeexpectancy (though it may have some statistical effects oncause of death), and the effect on health care costs islikely to be trivial. It will be interesting to see if theManitoba government, which commissioned this study, changespolicy as a result.

Unfortunately the popular belief that "obesity" is both morallydisgusting and voluntary² means that research into "howobesity is bad" gets far more attention and support than research into"is obesity actually bad for health?"

Footnote

¹ If you can view images, there's an unintentional"uncanny valley" effect in theseimages, where simple rescaling of the image of a person gives aslightly unusual effect. The relative sizes of body parts aren'tsupposed to be identical at each size, so it gives a strange effect.

² Even aside from the studies suggesting that weight and build are to a large part genetic, and that the "diet and exercise" mantra is so oversimplfied it's almost useless, this ignores the concept of constrained choices and so also contains a lot of classism, disablism, and other forms of discrimination.

Friday Links

2011-10-21T17:55:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning] Helen G, Jess McCabe, Philippa Willitts and zohra moosa at The F-Word: We are the 49%?
[trigger warning] Forty Shades Of Grey: Occupations, Safe Spaces and The Privilege Denying Left
[trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: Bad News Round up
s.e. smith: Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Pardon Me, Your Contempt Is Showing
[trigger warning] We Mixed Our Drinks: A tale of two rape prevention campaigns
Fineness & Accuracy: Too Big to Judge

Useful tools: Write to Them

2011-10-18T18:30:00.002+01:00

One of the most useful tools for interacting with party politics,on the occasions it becomes necessary, is Write to Them. It alwaysslightly startles me when I see someone encouraging people to write totheir MP about an issue and not linking to Write to Them,because it's just so useful. So: a quick summary, to hopefully make itmore widely known about.

Enter your postcode (they have advice if yourpostcode isn't obvious) and you will then be able to contact anyof your elected representatives (local councils, devolvedadministrations, MPs, and European representatives) - advice on whichrepresentative deals with what - or any member of the House of Lords.

Essentially it takes all the boring work out of:

Finding out who your representatives are
Finding out what party your representatives are
Finding out how to contact them
Finding stamps, fax machines, or whatever devices are needed

...leaving much more time to do the necessary hard work of researching the issue and constructing a persuasive message.

Sadly, it can't guarantee a reply (and certainly not a useful one),but most messages are replied to within 2-3 weeks.

Friday Links

2011-10-14T18:38:00.001+01:00

Philippa Willitts at The F-Word: Wearing a pair of tottering heels...
Bird of Paradox: Videos: ‘What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?’ and ‘Aurora From Orbit’ and Poland: Parliamentary elections look set to return woman MP
richie79 at Big Fat Blog: A rare moment of sense from the BBC and UK Government Policy encourages dieting, could be worse
s.e. smith: In Historical Preservation, Accessibility Doesn’t Have to Mean Inaccuracy
[trigger warning] Flavia Dzodan at Tiger Beatdown: In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits and MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!
Surprising Science: Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know
Mary at Hoyden About Town: Copyright hell: larrakins and astrologers
Spark in Darkness: On the mess that is #catgate
[trigger warning] LGBT Asylum News: Why don't UKBA believe Ugandan asylum seeker Ms P is a lesbian?
Christine Silva and Nancy Carter at Harvard Business Review Blog:New Research Busts Myths About the Gender Gap
[trigger warning] s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: On Blogging, Threats, and Silence
Two Whole Cakes: ‘Round the Mulberry Bush: Kids, food, and the hierarchy of needs.
Sebastienne at Lashings of Ginger Beer: Feminism is not a club you join

And finally, for those with video: Cat and Girl Stories we make up about ourcats. (For those without video, a series of pictures of cats, withtext indicating their occupation and/or lifestyle, set to music)

Season's Greetings

2011-10-11T20:01:00.002+01:00

Happy northern temperate autumn!

Or, actually, any season.

Spring-looking crocuses, with winter-looking berries, on a bright summer's day in autumn.

These photos were taken on a recent trip to Kew Gardens. More photos from Kew

Atheism and the kyriarchy

2011-10-07T21:59:00.000+01:00

There have been quite a few high-profile incidents of racism andsexism among some atheist communities recently. These have beenfollowed by the predictable pattern of soul-searching about what canbe done to prevent them and get more people who aren't white meninvolved in atheism, countered by the predictable denial that there'sany problem at all by theselectively skeptical.

Now, obviously any community that exists in this society is goingto be vulnerable to reproducing this society's ideas of the defaultperson, even if its aims are apparently unrelated to structuraldiscrimination. Privilege is designed to be invisible to its owners,so without a concerted effort to work against it (and even then...),people will inevitably repeat dominant social values even if theydon't want to.

But I think these particular atheist communities have morefundamental problems than that.

Firstly, what Tami said in the post linked above:

But there is a difference between seeking to use reason and making skepticism and reason an identity. The latter, I'm beginning to think, results not in injecting more reasonableness into public discourse, but less, as people who are invested in touting their own superior logic are rarely self-aware enough to spot and acknowledge the places where their thinking has been colored by bias. And make no mistake--no one is immune to the biases inherent in our society--not even the guy who calls himself a Skeptic and fancies himself the smartest person in the room.

Secondly, their aims are, by definition incompatible withthe ending of kyriarchal systems of privilege.

Their rhetoric makes it very clear that they¹ wouldn'tbe satisfied with a society in which religious belief and lack ofreligious belief were treated as equal. They want to be abovereligion, with religious people the subject of disdain for their "irrational"and "obsolete" beliefs.

And there is the problem. They want to be on top of the heap. Theydispute the construction of the heap - why are atheists not at the topof it² - but they don't object to its existence. It's nosurprise therefore that debates over "what should the relativeposition of men and women in the heap be?" are frequent - thealternative answer of destroying the heap entirely is unthinkable.

All forms of oppression are so strongly entangled that it cannot bepossible to eliminate one³ without attempting to eliminateall of them. By supporting and encouraging the existence of the heap,they make it impossible to eliminate the other parts of the heap theydisagree with.

Footnote

¹ I've had to be fairly non-specific about exactlywhich atheist communities I'm referring to, because it's notas if there are official denominations of atheist. So the definitionis going to have to be somewhat circular: "the sort of atheist I'mtalking about is the sort of atheist who fits the description Igive". But I hope nevertheless it's obvious enough that there are manyatheists and atheist communities that are not like this, andwho I'm not talking about here.

² How far down they are of course varies considerably bycountry and region, as well as many other factors. Trends suggest thatthey will get to the top of the heap and be the defaulteventually, at least in some places, just through weight ofnumbers.

³ That's not to say that I believe, ad absurdum,that all existing forms of oppression will end simultaneously or notat all. Clearly on some day in the distant future it may be thatracism ends but some heterosexism continues, or vice versa. For now,however, all forms are so entangled that trying to end one (or a few)in isolation is doomed to failure.

Given the attempts by some of these atheists to, for instance,redefine religion as mental illness, I think they're more likely toincrease the entanglements between oppressions than decrease them.

If you like their voters so much, why don't you join them?

2011-09-30T20:33:00.002+01:00

So, Ed Miliband MP, leader of the Labour Party, has declared "I want Conservatives voting for us – that's how we win elections".

It's worth noting that "getting Conservative voters" has generallyworked out far better for the Conservatives than it has for Labour,and the Conservatives haven't managed to get a convincing electionvictory since 1987.

I've previouslynoted that charging past the centre ground in an attempt to giveyour opponents no space for their own policies is extremely risky: anypolitical opponent thinking long-term will respond by becoming moreextreme so that the centre of politics gets shifted towards them.

However, it's not even good short-term strategy at the moment.

There's some interestingrecent polling on how likely people are to vote for variousparties. It's only a rough guide, of course - note that at least 43%of people will always vote either Labour or Conservative, but only 36%would never vote Lib Dem. So at least 7% of those polled will alwaysvote Labour or Conservative, except for those times not counted in"always" when they occasionally vote Lib Dem. However, with thosecaveats...

42% of people would never vote Conservative. 42% of peopleis enough to win a UK election on its own with a massive majority -and in practice Labour could pick up considerably more than that frompeople who might in theory vote Conservative but aren't doing so thistime.

The calculation in "Principles or Power" regarding two-partyelections (and, with First Past the Post, most crucial marginal seatscan be simplified to two-party) means that it can be more effective interms of short-term votes to move towards your opponent than away fromthem - every voter you convince directly from your opponent isworthwhile provided you don't lose two voters to apathy orminor parties in the process. The 2:1 ratio is what makes this sopowerful for short-term electoral success.

Labour, however, has been moving towards the Conservatives forquite some time now, and is running in to diminishing returns.

Year	Conservative voters	Labour voters	Total voters
1997	9,600,943	13,518,167	31,286,284
2010	10,703,754	8,609,527	29,691,780

During the entire protracted recovery from their disastrous defeatin 1997 to their partial victory in 2010, the Conservatives gainedonly a million votes.

Labour lost almost five million in the same timeperiod.

Very roughly, their net losses were:

1 million to the Conservatives
1.5 million to the Lib Dems
1.5 million to declining turnout¹
Less than 1 million to minor parties

Conservative voters who voted Conservative in 1997 are probablycompletely unwinnable for Labour. So, at most, Labour can recover 1million votes by getting former Conservative voters - and that's in abest-case landslide victory scenario. They would need, on 2010figures, to win almost all of them to have a plurality of the popularvote, assuming they don't win over anyone else.

They're not, as far as I can tell, trying to win over anyone elsewith their policy announcements.

The alternative strategy has far more space to work - there arealmost 4 million voters there, most of whom left Labour for aleft-of-centre party² or now don't vote at all.

In a situation with turnout generally declining, there's a hugeopportunity to not only win, but win by a landslide, by getting thosevoters back³. The Conservatives - thanks to Thatcher - arevastly unpopular with most of the country; despite their manyfailings, Blair and Brown did not make Labour "toxic" in the sameway.

These are the voters who would respond most to a party in completeopposition to Conservatism - not to a faint attempt to cosy up toit⁴ and pick its pockets.

Sadly, deep down, "just to the left of the Conservatives, butdefinitely not the Conservative Party", is where Miliband and the restof the senior figures in Labour want to be.

Footnote

¹ Some of this decline in turnout, of course, will bebecause many of those who voted Labour in 1997 were dead in 2010. Butin normal conditions they should have been replaced by newer voters,since the size of the eligible electorate has increased slightly. Asit happens, turnout hasplummetted, as fewer voters see the point any more.

² No arguing over whether the Lib Dems count asleft-of-centre... For the period 1997-2010 they were generally left ofLabour on a wide range of issues: I doubt there was that much Labourto Lib Dem swing from people who thought the Lib Dems were to theright of Labour on their preferred issues.

³ While FPTP gives disproportionate importance to thevotes in a few Conservative-Labour marginal seats, a party that is afew million votes ahead in total is still unlikely to lose themarginals.

⁴ That's not to say that Labour shouldn't be trying toconvince swing voters and moderate Conservative voters that Labour'spolicies are good for them, or be explaining its policies in termsthat resonate with them. Absolutely they should. There's a bigdifference between that and changing policies to the right to becloser to what those voters currently want, though.

Friday Links

2011-09-30T18:17:00.001+01:00

Bird of Paradox: Bread, love and dreams
Alex Wellman at Inside Housing: Wandsworth rejects call to halt riot evictions
Kellie Turtle at The F-Word: The fight for abortion rights in Northern Ireland
Diary of a Goldfish: The Disability Hierarchy 6: Old Age & Treachery
HarpyMarx: The future is blue. The future is Glasman
DavidG at Where's the Benefit?: Ed Doesn’t Get It
Shamik Das at Left Foot Forward: Miliband quizzed on disability reforms, apologises for omission from speech
[trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: Bad news round up
LGBT Asylum News: Want to lodge a UK asylum claim? Good luck with that

Eviction of people loosely connected to a riot.

2011-09-27T21:23:00.000+01:00

Here's the consultationon eviction of social tenants. Question 1 is perhaps the mostimportant question, which would allow social landlords to evicttenants where they - or a member of their household - was convicted ofcertain violent crimes anywhere in the UK. Got to keep the tabloidshappy.

Wandsworthand Southwark councils are trying to get ahead of theconsultation, and are just doing it anyway. An actual law explicitlyallowing it would mean that the only practical challenge might be tothe European courts - well beyond the financial and legal means ofmost social tenants.

Here's what they're proposing.

We are therefore proposing to include additional provisions in Ground 2 ofSchedule 2 to the Housing Act 1985 and Ground 14 of Schedule 2 to theHousing Act 1988 so that the court may grant possession where a tenantor member of their household has been convicted of violence againstproperty (including criminal damage and offences such as arson), violenceagainst persons at a scene of violent disorder or theft linked to violentdisorder. There would in these circumstances be no requirement that theoffence had been committed within the locality of the dwelling house,subject to it being committed in the United Kingdom.

Note that violence against persons must be connected to "a scene ofviolent disorder", but violence against property need not. Well,property is more important than people to the government. Weknew that.

So, here's my response to that suggestion.

Question 1: No. The current grounds for possession should not beextended in this way. Where a tenant has been convicted of a seriouscrime, there already exists legal mechanisms for them to be fined,imprisoned, or given a community sentence - whatever the courtbelieves appropriate in this particular case.
A major problem with eviction as proposed is that it makes all membersof the household responsible for the behaviour of all other members ofthe household. Where the eviction applies to long-standing anti-socialor criminal behaviour committed in the immediate locality of thehousing, then requiring this mutual responsibility may be justifiablein some cases - other members of the household may have been aware ofthe anti-social or criminal activity for some time, and been able todiscourage or prevent it. However, a de facto requirement for allmembers of a household to keep a sufficiently close watch on eachother so that they cannot possibly commit criminal offences elsewhereis not justifiable.
Forcing someone to lose their tenancy in response to criminalbehaviour committed by a fellow tenant completely unrelated to thehousing or their own actions seems completely unjust, and would seemto open the landlord to challenges on human rights grounds.
Furthermore, it brings about perverse incentives. Other members of thehousehold who might ordinarily testify against a person accused ofcriminal offences would in this situation know that doing so couldresult in them losing their own tenancies! The temptation to help theaccused construct an alibi would be very great.
A third problem is that the original power, by applying to criminal oranti-social behaviour in the vicinity of the housing, has an importantuse in protecting others living in the same housing from thisbehaviour - though, as paragraph 1.5 of the consultation documentpoints out, it may sometimes only move rather than solve problems.
Where applied to crimes committed a long distance from the housing,this use vanishes. The crime is not connected to the housing, soremoving the tenants from the housing cannot affect the crimes. Theconvicted tenants have to live somewhere, so removing them from theirpresent housing will make little difference.
Imprisonment is already available as an option to the courts wheresomeone needs to be removed from general society to prevent crime, andthis is both more appropriate and avoids punishing people who did notcommit the crime.

If you have time, please read the consultation document and send inyour own response. I know I haven't covered everything that's wrongwith the proposals in mine. With the riots falling away into thedistance - and the underlying causes ignored to produce more later -the need to do this to appease the reactionary press might beavoided.

Review: "Yes, Prime Minister"

2011-09-26T20:52:00.000+01:00

"Yes,Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" were among my favourite TVshows when I was younger, and have continued to be so. When I heardthat there was a stageplay being produced, again written by Anthony Jay and JonathanLynn, I knew I had to make an effort to see it.

After all, what could go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it happens...

[trigger warning: child sexual abuse]

The play is in 2 acts and lasts approximately 2 hours. There areapproximately four scenes (or three scenes, one cut in half by theinterval), all set at the PM's office at Chequers. The programme talksabout the changes in the process of government since the originalseries was written, and the decline in the power of the civil servicedue partly to MPs bringing in special advisors - SPADs - representedin the play by the character of Claire Sutton, and partly to theefforts of Thatcher and later Blair to break their entrenchedpower.

The first scene sets up a typical situation, easily recognisable inthe style of the original series. Hacker has organised a conferencebetween EU states to discuss the economic crisis, and it's not goingwell. However, help is at hand, as the oil-rich fictional formerSoviet state of Kulmenistan is offering a multi-trillion Euro loan, inexchange for the construction of an oil pipeline and the futurepurchase of their oil.

The conflict between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker appears out ofthis - Sir Humphrey has tried to hide in the loan terms British entryinto the Euro, which Hacker strongly opposes. Bernard's conflictedloyalties to his two bosses are well characterised, and Claire's entryas the special advisor helping Jim get the better of both Humphrey andthe press seems to be setting up further inter-character conflict, andintroduce a new source of humour.

In the second scene - and the third scene which continues it afterthe interval - however, things take a very different turn. This is the"darker and edgier" Yes, Prime Minister ... and it all goesvery wrong.

As the conflict between Jim and Humphrey grows, and the BBC phonewith requests for Hacker to appear on a "Government in crisis" TVprogramme, Bernard rushes in with bad news - the Kulmenistan foreignminister, staying overnight at Chequers, has demanded [triggerwarning] to be given an underage girl to rape¹, with the strongimplication that the loan deal - and with it the European economy -will be dead if he doesn't get his way.

So ... the next hour or so is mostly jokes that are either directlyor indirectly about rape. That - as well as being generally unpleasant- distracts from the satirising of political life. There were plentyof other issues the writers could have used to convey the moraldilemma - can you secretly and illegally sacrifice an unwillingindividual to save a country - which would have fitted more closelyinto the atmosphere of the first scene.

It's at this point that the characterisation falls apart. Bernard -having been established to be torn between his loyalties to his bosses- never has to make that decision again in the entire play. Claire'santagonism with the civil servants, too, is forgotten, and her briefappearances in the first scene have to suffice for her characterdevelopment. Since even long-term fans of the series will never havemet her before, she ends up unable to rely on merely re-establishingan existing character, and becomes rather 1-dimensional as a result.

Hacker - portrayed in the TV series as well-meaning, but rather outof his depth at times among the civil servants and press - is exposedin the play as solely concerned for his career, and incrediblymisanthropic. The original Hacker was trying to do the best for thecountry - the Freedom of Information Act, for instance - and thecorruption of power, and trying to avoid press scrutiny, came withthat. He was naive and frequently outclassed, but not incompetent. Thenew Hacker is solely interested in being Prime Minister so that he canbe Prime Minister - he appears to have no particular goals in mindother than that. He's arrogant and ruthless - but also incompetent:the complete opposite of the old Hacker. Is this complete personalityreversal Claire's doing? If so, that didn't really come across.

Now, admittedly, there are quite a few professional politicianswhose sole goal seems to be self-perpetuating electability - it's notunrealistic as such - but it doesn't work here. Unless you cansympathise with Hacker, and view him as someone who is trying to dogood despite the situation he's in, then why should you care whenHumphrey foils him, or cheer on the rare occasions he gets a smallvictory?

Humphrey himself seems hopelessly outclassed by this new ruthlessJim Hacker, and unable to defend himself against Hacker's repeated -and monotonous - threats of bringing in a Civil Service Bill. Surelyafter the first time he'd have started considering ways to counterthis "ultimate weapon" of Hacker's? Why does he even continue helpingHacker at this point, rather than taking the rather obviousopportunity to rid himself not only of Hacker but of Claire Suttontoo, in exchange for a more pliable PM?

Meanwhile, the focus of the show shifts from character-drivenconflict between the four principal characters, to them workingtogether to decide whether or not to provide the foreign minister'svictim, and having decided fairly quickly to do so, considering thelogistics of doing so and getting away with it. In the end, theforeign minister gives up on them and goes to sleep long before theythemselves give up on the idea.

Then, of course, there's Kumranistan itself. You keep hoping forsome kind of twist ending, where the foreign minister and ambassadorwere testing their host's moral courage - but no, everything isexactly as it originally seemed in that regard. The country couldeasily have been called Generistan (they're all interchangeableanyway, right?) - it's a simple caricature of an eastern Islamicdictatorship.

Where the characters - mainly Hacker - used racist slurs, they weregenerally called out on it by the other characters. Unfortunately thesame can't be said about the setting details and plot, or the rest ofthe character's interactions. The inconsistency of calling out slursbut condoning treating foreigners lives' as worthless² maytheoretically have been an intentional point - but given how unsubtlymost of the other hypocrises and moral issues the play raised werehighlighted, that seems unlikely.

The eventual solution to the original problem of the failingconference - distract the press from it with an unrelated policyannouncement - does return to the show's roots quite well, in a shortfew minutes in the final scene, but this could have happened at theend of the first scene with no real loss of continuity. It's as if thewriters, having written a good 40-minute show, that would have made anexcellent start to a new TV series, realised that they needed to fillin an extra 80 minutes of play, and lacking any better ideas filledthe majority of it with rape jokes that went precisely nowhere.

Near the end, Bernard laments that he thinks he has lost his moralcompass. The play's problem is that it does the same. A promisingstart very quickly hit the bottom and kept digging.

Footnote

¹ The characters, despite spending most of the playtalking about or around the topic, of course never use the'r'-word. Not even Bernard, who is the most uncomfortable of the fourwith the idea, and attempts to discourage it, will call it what itis.

² Hacker's remaining moral issues with providing theforeign minister's rape victim are resolved when he realises that shedoesn't have to be British, and suggests finding a trafficked foreignprostitute instead. He then without a second thought or a hint ofmoral conflict has the girl he was considering sending to the foreignminister arrested by the military police as a terrorist suspect,solely to save his own career.

"Genuine and continuing"

2011-09-19T15:33:00.000+01:00

In my earlier post on consultations,I found one by the UK Borders Agency on familymigration.

If you're interested in that area, and would like to encourage thegovernment not to put too many additional barriers in the way ofbringing families together (family values, right?), then it's worthcompleting the consultation if you have time.

The first question is complex enough in itself. From theconsultation document, emphasis mine:

2.8 Migration based on marriage or partnership must be based on a genuine and continuing relationship, freely entered into by both parties. It must not be based on a marriage or partnership of convenience, entered into in an attempt to gain immigration advantage. And it must not involve coercion.

This seems all very well, but the problem that arises is what does"genuine and continuing" actually mean, beyond an "I'llknow it when I see it" definition that varies depending on the viewsof the immigration officer in question. In practice there's a riskthat relationships sufficiently different to a "default" relationshipwill be excluded, depending to at least some extent on the privilegeand heterocentrism of the immigration officer.

So, it's understandable that the government wants to have a moreformal definition¹ of "genuine and continuing", and therewould be benefits in the transparency of the process if they did - butof course I don't really trust them to get the definition right².

The current rules significantly privilege people who are eithermarried or in a civil partnership, or intend to do so in theUK. Coming to the UK to live together but not marry or enter a civilpartnership is more difficult.

Existing marriages and civil partnerships are taken into account -but of course, there are relatively few countries where same-sexmarriages are allowed at all, and many of those are inside the EUanyway.

If the applicants are not civil partners or married (or intendingto become such), then they must have lived together "in a relationshipakin to marriage" for at least two years, already in the UK.

"Akinto marriage" is an interesting term. In practice, it implies anexclusive monogamous relationship. Again, this gives an unusualinconsistency - someone could be in a poly relationship and able tosponsor a partner to whom they were married but who had been outsidethe country for years to come to the UK, but not a partner to whomthey were not married but had spent several years living with in theUK.

A codification of the existing rougher standards would be veryproblematic. On the other hand, a codification of a broader standardcould be very useful to families wishing to move to the UK.

The first consultation question asks how they could go about makinga written standard for "genuine and continuing" relationships. Iwasn't able to suggest an answer to that - how do you write astandard that isn't exclusionary? - but I did recommend some areas notto include in the definition, and that if they did make a definition,that was itself put to further consultation.

Footnote

¹ This of course doesn't just affect migration - if thecodification of a definition of "genuine and continuing" appears"successful" to the government when used there, it may well beextended to other areas of government work.

² And in the current anti-immigration political climate,they have quite a bit of incentive to get it wrong.

Friday Links

2011-09-16T19:21:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning] A Cunt of One's Own: On Privacy on Cyber-Enabled Violence
Hayley Price at Sociological Images: Neurology vs. Psychiatry: The Social Production of Knowledge
Sady at Tiger Beatdown: With Dim Lights: On Feminism and Virtue
Diary of a Goldfish: The Disability Hierarchy 5: Wheel Life Drama
Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit?: Welfare Reform Bill: what next?
Nominatissima: Food Fetishization and Global Poverty: Or, Sometimes a Melon is Just a Melon
Monkey at Feminist Philosophers: Nottinghamshire police pay £20,000 to student arrested over research material

Government-mandated weight. The inevitable consequence.

2011-09-12T19:02:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

Unfortunately, I'm not at all surprised that this has happened. AUK Council is taking steps to have four of a family'sseven children forcibly adopted (or fostered without contact).

Why? Because the children are fat, and have continued being fatagainst the local government's demands. Clearly the solution is to take themaway from their parents - and perhaps away from each other, too - inthe hope that the massive added stress will cause weight loss.

According to all the press reports, the family have "faced noaccusations of deliberate abuse or cruelty". Their solicitor haspreviouslystated that "obesity was the main reason for the children beingtaken from their parents".

The rather flawed research on "obesity" is a contributing cause,but this goes way beyond that. I'm unimpressedwith the government's research on "obesity" in children. But, evenif that research is accepted at face value, the only detectableeffects of "obesity" in children are "low self-esteem and behaviouralproblems" and a greater chance of being "obese" in later life.

On the basis of that research - even accepting that research ashigh quality and accurate, which I don't - there is absolutely nocause for intervention in this case. Either:

Weight is largely not under a person's control. In this case, adoption won't change their weight. But it probably will harm their psychological state, especially since there's no reason to do it. Despite this stance being supported by the scientific literature, "everyone knows" means that more likely the council believe option 2...
Weight is entirely under a person's control. In this case, the effects of being heavy at their age are comparable to the effects of being adopted. There being no evidence of abuse or cruelty, the only effects are psychological - which must be compared with the psychological harm of adoption, including the effects on their older siblings. The children, when they get to adulthood, can then "choose to be thin" and suffer no long-term effects.

In either case, there's no reason to forcibly remove them from their family. Which should be obvious.

The only case where it isn't obvious is where you believe that"obesity" is basically an evil zombie cult. Fat people will exist nearyou and brainwash you into being fat. It's therefore imperative to getthose children who could be un-brainwashed away from their family assoon as possible. Accepting that premise, Dundee Council's actionsseem reasonable.

It's also not impossible that the Council's actions have beencompletely misreported. With multiple news entries several yearsapart, a verifiable trail in public record for at least some of theevents, and several different news organisations covering this indifferent ways, though, that seems less likely. The Council hasn't deniedany of it - merely issued a vague statement that "The councilalways acts in the best interests of children, with their welfare andsafety in mind." which seems to be the well-known PR tactic of"lying outrageously" rather than a severely misreported case.

Big FatBlog has contact details for four senior Council officers. I'vesent them the following message.

Dear Sirs,
The recent news that Dundee Council is planning to place four childrenfrom a family of seven to either be adopted or fostered withoutcontact, for the sole reason that they are heavier than the Councilapproves of, and in the absence of any deliberate abuse or cruelty bytheir parents, are, if accurate, extremely disturbing.
I hope that if the press reports are accurate you will bereconsidering this decision and the policies which led to itimmediately, as it seems to me to be a strong infringement of thefamily's rights, and not in the interests of any of their sevenchildren.
I realise that you are unable to comment on the details of anyindividual case for the family's privacy, and so therefore I amconfining my questions to general Council policy. If the reporting isinaccurate, then your policies should provide sufficient evidence ofthis without the need to discuss this specific case.
1) Under what circumstances, if any, does the Council take the weightof a parent or child into account when deciding what interventions arenecessary?
2) Under what circumstances, if any, would the Council require anindividual to alter their weight?
3) If there are any circumstances as described in my first twoquestions, could you explain the reasoning behind these policies, andprovide me with any research used in developing these policies.
Thank you

Since I don't live anywhere near Dundee, which is itself in adifferent legal and administrative jurisdiction to my own, I doubtI'll get a reply.

Regional variation in rape prosecutions.

2011-09-10T15:57:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

The BBC has collated statistics from all English and Welsh policeforces to compile dataon rape investigations. A spreadsheet(Excel) with the full data is available.

In summary - and much more details below: there is massive variation between police regions in how well rape cases are handled, but if every force followed current "best practice", then over 40% of reported rapes could result in the rapist being convicted.

The BBC's angle in the reporting is in the massive variance in "nocrime" classification of reports. This is an update of very similarresearch they did, which I wrote about briefly twoyears ago.

As in the BBC's previous study, and as in earlier similar studiescarried out by the Fawcett Society, the main finding is of massivevariation from region to region.

Reporting rates by region do not vary significantly - though thereis a little variation between Cheshire (0.17 per 1,000 population) andLondon (0.43 per 1,000 population).

On marking reports as "no crime", the rate varies between 2.4% inGloucestershire and 30.0% in Kent. A small number of "no crimes" isexpected - Kelly, Lovett and Regan's 2005 study gives several goodreasons (other than the stereotypical "false accusation") why thismight occur. However, it's clear from the discrepancies that a lot ofpolice forces are heavily overusing this method of closing a case.

The "sanction detection" rate also shows significant variationbetween regions. This is the rate at which reported cases result ineither a charge against a suspect, or the police formally cautioning asuspect. (The latter is relatively unusual in rape cases, though stilluncomfortably common).

In Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, only 11.1% and 11.8% of casesinclude a "sanction detection". In Durham, the figure is 60.8%, and inSouth Wales, 49.8%. Again, there's clearly a major difference inprocedures.

Once the case has moved to the CPS for prosecution, there are againregional variations. Ignoring Lincolnshire as an outlier, as thepolice are clearly only passing the most obvious of cases to the CPSthere, Nottinghamshire CPS drop 36.3% of cases before court. DorsetCPS only drop 5.4%.

Then, in court, the conviction rates again vary - Surrey,Dyfed-Powys, and Hampshire have conviction rates in court less than60%. (Dyfed-Powys occasionally getconfused and prosecute the victim instead). MeanwhileWarwickshire, Devon and Cornwall, and Leicestershire are able tosecure a conviction in around 85% of court cases (not always for rape,though - sometimes for lesser offences).

Multiplying the various attrition rates together isn't completelyvalid (the figures for prosecutions are not for the same cases as thesanction detections) but gives a rough indication of the combinedeffectiveness of the local police and CPS, without having to do themassive longitudinal studies that Kelly, Lovett and Regan did, wherethere is almost a five-fold difference between the most andleast effective forces. (Since this is only a rough estimate, I won'tname the 'best' and 'worst' regions)

Baroness Stern's report on rape prosecutions strongly noted thatinvestigation and prosecution would be considerably more effective ifeveryone just followed the guidelines that had already been written.

Cross-tabulating the various figures against each other suggeststhat - with the exception of a few outliers such as Nottinghamshire -the effectiveness of the CPS in prosecuting cases doesn't depend much(or even at all) on what proportion of cases the police pass tothem. In other words it is generally not the case that the policereferring more cases to the CPS will just lead to the CPS eitherdropping those cases or being unable to secure a conviction.

We can therefore also look at a theoretical "best" region, whichimproves its "sanction detection" and "conviction" rates to the bestfound in real regions, by application of best practice.

The result of this is not particularly surprising, perhaps. Thetheoretical "best" region - merely on current best practice inpolicing, investigations, prosecutions, and court cases - would beable to secure convictions, if not for rape then at least for somesexual offence¹, in around 40% of all reportedcases.

Furthermore, best practice is continuing to improve - that"theoretical" figure is itself noticeably increased from even twoyears ago.

It wouldn't be impossible - police forces have made significantimprovements in only a few years before - for that 40% figure to beachieved by the end of this decade. If that doesn't happen, it will be solely because it wasn't considered a high priority.

I'll be writing to the Ministry of Justice (responsible for theCPS) and the Home Office (responsible for the police) soon to ask whatplans they have to ensure that under-performing police forces arerapidly brought up to the level of the best.

Footnote

¹ In practice, around half will be for lesser offences.

Friday Links

2011-09-09T19:48:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning] s.e. smith: Debunking Mythologies About Mental Illness and Domestic Violence and The Devil, Disability, and Fatness: How Divorced Are We From ‘Medieval Thinking?’
[trigger warning] On Fat Hatred and Eliminationism
Left Outside: Today’s worst person in the world goes to the managers over at Phillip Morris
Diary of a Goldfish: The Disability Hierarchy 4: Diagnosis Matters
David Banks and David Strohecker at Cyborgology: QR Codes and Digital Exclusivity?
Paul Lewis, James Ball and Matthew Taylor at the Guardian: Riot jail sentences in crown courts longer than normal
Incurable Hippie: Banks are Bastards When You're Poor.
Obesity Timebomb: Stereotyping fat in the visual language of the Left
yatima at Geek Feminism: Annette Laming-Emperaire, archaeologist
Zero at the Bone: An Education in Racism
Spark in Darkness: The attack on legal representation scares me
Sally Outen at Lashings of Ginger Beer: Can feminists be funny?
[trigger warning] Too much to say for myself: Disparities in rape crime figures

Abortion rights - convince your MP: this could be a very close vote

2011-09-01T12:29:00.000+01:00

More anti-choice work from the usual suspects, in the continuing attempt to gradually introduce US-style "you can only have an abortion if the moon is full on a Tuesday with the agreement of three doctors, two vicars, and a greengrocer, with a 32-hour waiting period" restrictions to the UK.

More information at Abortion Rights and The F-Word.

If you are a UK citizen or resident please write to your MP and ask them to vote against these amendments if they are discussed at Report Stage.

Initial assessments in the press suggest that the amendment might pass but by a very narrow margin. It is therefore crucial that pro-choice MPs are reminded that they need to turn up and vote against it, that wavering MPs are convinced to vote against it, and that anti-choice MPs are given sufficient doubts that they abstain.

You can get a rough idea of how MPs are likely to vote at Public Whip - anyone who voted 'No' on that vote will likely vote 'No' on the amendment too. However, it's quite possible that many of those who voted 'Yes' can also be convinced to vote 'No' this time. If your MP isn't newly-elected, then you may be able to use this information to tailor your letter to their views.

Also potentially in our favour is that the Health and Social Care Bill itself is highly controversial - it has already been returned to Committee for a massive rewrite once, after major public objections and serious Lib Dem uneasiness with its content. Adding an entirely separate controversial issue to it has the potential to wreck the whole Bill, and this may explain the news that the government is now unlikely to support the amendment.

Nevertheless, we can't take any votes for granted.

Here's my letter.

I am writing concerning the amendments proposed by Nadine Dorries MP and Frank Field MP to the Health and Social Care Bill.
The amendments would prevent any non-NHS body that provides termination of pregnancy (including those providing those services on behalf of the NHS) from also offering counselling to women considering abortion.
This principle - that advice should be given by someone entirely unrelated to the provider - is not demanded, and nor should it be, for any other medical procedure.
Furthermore, women seeking abortions who feel that they would like counselling already have the choice to go to any provider that they wish to, and can already choose a separate provider if they feel this would be beneficial.
These amendments act to reduce their available choices, but also - by requiring women who would not otherwise do so to seek out a separate provider for advice and counselling - will increase the time between a woman deciding to obtain an abortion and actually being provided with one. Since the earlier an abortion can be carried out, the easier and safer it is for the woman concerned, this is extremely unhelpful.
Field disingenuously portrays this as being similar to advice on pensions, where there is a conflict of interest if the company selling the pensions is also advising customers on their choice of pensions. However, this reveals more about the mindset of the amendment's sponsors than about the real situation:
medical care is not a commercial product, and it is considered beneficial for all other medical procedures for advice to be given by the provider of the procedure. Termination of pregnancy is no different.
counselling is explicitly not about giving advice, but about allowing a client to come to their own decisions.
neither the NHS nor non-governmental abortion providers have an interest in maximising the number of abortions carried out (unlike a pension company which does have an interest in increasing the number of pensions it sells)

The amendment is based on a transparently false caricature of the motivations of medical professionals, and a massive underestimation of the ability of women to make decisions about their own bodies.

I ask you to please vote against these amendments if they are discussed at Report Stage on the 6th and 7th September, and to encourage your colleagues in all parties to do likewise. It is also rumoured that the Department of Health intends to implement some or all of the measures set out in these amendments without the need for legislation, and I therefore also ask you to put pressure on the Department not to do so against the will of Parliament.

Thank you

Useful tools: government consultations

2011-08-31T16:33:00.000+01:00

On some issues, the government has a firm idea of what it wants to do, and it will go ahead and do it regardless of public opinion, expert advice, whether what it wants to do is even physically possible, and so on.

Government, however, is huge. The vast majority of issues it deals with never make it to Parliament itself, and are not so much of a party-political line in the sand. On these, the government departments tend to have more of an interest in making sure that their actions are reasonable, and that there are no embarassingly obvious-in-retrospect details that they happen to have overlooked.

Enter, the government consultation. It's easy to be cynical about them, since the majority of high-profile consultations are on the high-profile "we're doing this anyway" issues. The majority of consultations, however, are not high-profile. Some of them, the department running the consultation may consider itself lucky to get even 10 replies.

These consultations take place in the background - away from the shouting matches of Parliament, and the criticism of the tabloid press - and so they're one of the easier ways to get the government to actually listen. Of course, they won't be listening on a topic of supreme importance, but there is a good opportunity here to get some small improvements made.

I've responded to several of these "background" consultations, and in all cases the final proposal was better than the original proposal in at least one way that I had requested. Furthermore, in a couple of cases where the consultation results were published in enough detail, I was the only respondee raising certain points that became part of the final proposal.

This is not due to my secretly being an influential lobbyist (I'm not) or particularly persuasive (likewise) but because the set up of consultations is very favourable to the government listening, and because the response rate is so low that one's submissions rarely get lost in the noise.

It's therefore a great opportunity to get some non-default perspectives into government thinking.

So: a few tips for replying to consultations.

First, find your consultation. This is harder than it looks. Well-known organisations may get an invitation to the consultation, if it's relevant to their field. Ordinary citizens and residents do not. So, you either have to hear about it in passing elsewhere, or go looking for it. There is a search. It's not particularly good. (Still, this keeps most of the reactionary journalists away - too much effort for them - so the obscurity isn't all bad)
Remember that you don't need to answer all the questions. If you only have things to say on one or two, it's still worth saying them. You don't necessarily have to spend a lot of time replying.
If you are aware of research studies that support your argument, provide the references in your reply when summarising what they say. This will make it much easier for the civil servants who process your response to also obtain the research, if they want to.
"Form" responses to consultations are almost certainly pointless (though having several people co-sign a single submission is fine)
Check the deadlines. Consultations usually run for a few months, though because of the first point there's a fair chance you'll only find out about it a few days before the deadline.
Remember that you don't need to have formal qualifications or experience in an area to put forward an opinion. (Though it may be worthwhile to mention them, if you do). Generally you will be required to specify whether you are replying as an individual or on behalf of an organisation.
Submission formats for consultations vary. Try to use their preferred format unless it's inaccessible for you. (This being the government, they should be reasonably good about providing accessible formats if you ask)
Finally, tell other people about the consultation! That's how I usually find out about them.

A few current consultations that you might be interested in. The first two I've already posted about - the rest are ones I've just found now:

Sex education (closes 30 November 2011) - more details, and my response
EHRC religious discrimination law (closes 5 September 2011) - more details, and my response
Family migration (closes 6 October 2011) - a consultation on the criteria for allowing family members who are not EU citizens to move to the UK.
A new mandatory power of possession for anti-social behaviour: Consultation (closes 7 November 2011) - a consultation on allowing social landlords to evict people involved in criminal behaviour, as a reaction to the riots. This one probably counts as "we're going to do it anyway" but there may be some scope for toning down the worst aspects.
Making Open Data Real: A Public Consultation (closes 27 October 2011) - a good opportunity to ask for a more consolidated consultation list?

Feel free to link to other consultations and/or your responses in comments.

Friday Links

2011-08-26T17:51:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning] The Rotund: Food, Glorious Food; Talking About Food From A HAES Perspective In FA Spaces
Den of the Hyena: Moral Collapse
Diary of a Goldfish: Disability Hierarchy Part 2 and Part 3
[trigger warning] sian and crooked rib: Why it's Diallo, not Strauss-Kahn, who has been on trial
TransGriot: It Takes A Village To Enforce The Gender Binary
[trigger warning] Ami Angelwings: It's easy to say you'll die to prevent rape, will you live to prevent rape?
Lisa at Where's the Benefit?: "Swimmer admits benefit fraud charge"
[trigger warning] Ben Achtenberg at LGBT Asylum News: Are asylum seekers lying when their testimony is inconsistent? A personal story

Allowing religion as an excuse for discrimination: consultation response

2011-08-20T15:39:00.000+01:00

Spark in Darkness highlights an Equality and Human Rights Commission consulation (Word document) on its intervention in a number of religious discrimination cases.

As pointed out by Sparky, the consultation wording is pretty bad, and seriously downplays the discriminatory nature of the inactions that two of the plaintiffs were rightly barred from. The consultation also makes it quite difficult to find the details of the cases - they give you a link about six steps out in the convoluted court website, and then approximately describe the first two steps needed to find them (one of which no longer works as described). As linked below, there are perfectly good¹ direct links to the case descriptions!

The cases in question are:

The two cases Eweida and Chaplin, in which the plaintiffs were forbidden from wearing particular visible Christian symbols as part of their work uniform.
The two cases Ladele and McFarlane, in which the plaintiffs hold that requiring them to carry out all aspects of their jobs with all clients was discriminatory, since heterosexist discrimination is part of their religion.

In all four cases, the UK courts have decided that the plaintiffs were not subject to unfair discrimination.

Currently the EHRC's position is that the UK courts were wrong in the first two cases, and correct in the last two. They also ask if a concept of "reasonable accommodation" should be applied to religious discrimination.

It is crucial, of course - to prevent religious exemptions and "conscience clauses" from making equality laws useless - that the European courts uphold the decisions against Ladele and McFarlane. It's also therefore important that the EHRC does not ask those courts to rule in favour of Ladele and McFarlane. Please send a response to their consultation if you have time (contact details on the final page of the consultation document, deadline 5 September.

Here's my response:

Regarding your consultation on intervention in four religious discrimination cases before the European courts:

Response to question 1:

In the case of Eweida, I believe that the courts probably made the correct decision based on current law, given that "In the interim, British Airways had offered to move the applicant without loss of pay to work involving no public contact, but the applicant had chosen to reject this offer and instead to stay away from work and claim her pay as compensation.".
Whether or not this decision was correct would depend in my view on whether the alternative work offered was at a similar standard - not just in pay but in working conditions, opportunities for promotion and skills development, fit with the plaintiff's skillset, and so on - to the original work. If it was - and the UK courts appear to have found that it was - I can see no reason for BA to make payments based on the plaintiff not taking up this offer.
In the case of Chaplin, I believe that the court's response was also correct. The hospital's uniform policy was designed to minimise risk of infection and preserve health, and so requiring employees to follow it should be considered a legitimate restriction "necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, [and] the protection of [...] health".

Response to question 2:

In both of these cases I believe that the domestic courts made the correct decision. Both plaintiffs were required to carry out particular tasks as part of their jobs, without discrimination based on the sexuality of their clients. This is not a case where the religious discrimination claimed is largely unrelated to the performance of their jobs, but one where their religion is definitionally incompatible in their view with the duties of their job. In this case, there should be no responsibility upon the employer to vary the duties, especially where such variance would require discrimination against other protected groups. Protection against religious discrimination should not extend to being able to pick and choose which aspects of ones job should be carried out.

Response to question 3:

A "reasonable accommodation" test for religious discrimination would seem - on the basis of the four cases presented - to be superfluous with current law.
In Eweida, the employer attempted to make reasonable accommodations - firstly by offering a job in which the contested restriction would not apply, and secondly by amending the contested restriction. This was found under current law to be sufficient, and so an explicit "reasonable accommodations" law would have been unlikely to make a difference to the outcome.
In Chaplin, Ladele, and McFarlane, the cases fall outside the scope of "reasonable accommodation". The actions requested by the plaintiffs were incompatible with the duties of the job, and so no "reasonable accommodation" could have been made. Furthermore, in the cases of Ladele and McFarlane, no accommodation of the plaintiff's stance could have been provided without harming the employers' provision of service towards LGB people. Again, a "reasonable accommodations" law would have been unlikely to have made a difference. (Had, in Chaplin, a way of displaying the crucifix been available that was compatible with infection control and health and safety requirements, it seems unlikely that neither the employee nor the employer would not have suggested this at some point in the dispute)
The "reasonable adjustments" part of disability law is in my view to reflect that the infrastructure of society is generally set up by default in a way that is not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it may not be possible - especially for a small business or organisation with a very limited budget - to provide a fully accessible environment. There is therefore only a requirement to do what is financially and physically possible unilaterally, rather than requiring a multilateral rebuild of social and physical infrastructure to truly eliminate environmental disability discrimination.
There is not an analogous situation with religion - no buildings need be completely rebuilt, no tools need to be completely redesigned, and so on - and therefore the concept of "reasonable adjustments" seems unnecessary.

Footnote

¹ Well, in so far as the court website itself isn't particularly accessible or user-friendly.

Friday Links

2011-08-19T18:48:00.004+01:00

Diary of a Goldfish: The Disability Hierarchy 1 - An Introduction
What Privilege: Language privilege and regionalism
[trigger warning] Simon Hattenstone and Afua Hirsch at the Guardian: Layla's story: jailed after reporting a sexual assault
DavidG at Where's the Benefit?: DWP, The Dodgy Figures Come Home to Roost
The Nuclear Unicorn: In Faith, I do not Know Thee by Thy Name
Flavia Dzodan at Tiger Beatdown: Moving away from Social Justice towards Social Wellbeing
[trigger warning] LGBT Asylum Watch: Is self-harm in detention centres a 'bargaining tool'?
Thorns: Yes, that is exactly how to fix the problem
Andrew Nielson at Left Foot Forward: Choosing short sentences over community service for looters will increase reoffending
Latoya Peterson at Racialicious: London Fallout: The Post Riots World
Spark in Darkness: The EHRC needs guidance on whether to be bigots or not

Inconsistencies in attitudes to the legal system

2011-08-16T18:50:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

Okay, so we have a group of crimes where:

There are very harsh sentences for those convicted, with even the least serious offences in this group likely to give several weeks if not months in jail.
Bail is generally refused for those charged, so there's a good chance of being in jail on remand for months while a full trial is scheduled, even if completely innocent.
The police may batter down your door at 5 in the morning to arrest you if suspected, and then hold you for days.
There can be serious damage to one's reputation within the local community for those suspected and especially convicted of these crimes, and the police and media widely report (more widely than usual) on convictions to ensure this.
Those accused are mostly male.
The government, police, companies, charities and media are encouraging anonymous reports of these offences to try to ensure as many offenders as possible are caught.
The courts have been condemned by many observers and legal experts for attempting to rush the legal process at the expense of justice.

On the whole, in fact, it's quite clearly about vengeance and being seen to be doing something, rather than justice, rehabilitation, and repairing the damage caused to society by these crimes.

One would have naively thought that the usual suspects would have been very vocal about the need to guard against the possibility of malicious accusations, and to give defendants in these cases anonymity to protect their reputations, but I haven't - including doing some searches specifically to look for them - found a single one.

Actually, I'd have been surprised if I had - but it just goes to show how little "reputation", "fairness" or "justice" are actually concerns of theirs.

Rape prevention: reply from Ofcom

2011-08-13T13:30:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning]

Here's the answer I received from Ofcom regarding the Broadcasting Code. It's good enough on paper, but how it gets applied in practice is the key.

After confirming that "violence" in section 2 did include "sexual violence", despite a distinction being drawn between the two earlier in the document, I got this answer to my question on section 3.

The application of Rule 3.1 is essentially concerned with incitement, that is - very broadly speaking - the active encouragement of crime or disorder. Were a broadcaster to include material that actively encouraged or procured the commission of sexual offences it would be in breach of the rule. I think the prospect of such material being screened is remote.

Our application of the Code to the portrayal of sexual violence is strict. We recognise it as an especially sensitive area - from the point of view of offence as well as of harm (particularly in respect of its possible effect on those (few) men with violent sexual impulses towards women) - and regulate it accordingly.

From that answer it seems most likely that challenges to Ofcom regarding the screening of sexual violence portrayed as legitimate sexual behaviour are more likely to succeed under Rule 2.4 than Rule 3.1. I watch very little Ofcom-regulated broadcast material myself, so I expect that I won't personally be putting in any complaints - but if you do, drop a note in comments to say how it went.

Riot Links

2011-08-12T18:41:00.002+01:00

Most of what I've been reading this week has been about the riots. Potential trigger warning for violence on all of these. Normal links post back next week, probably.

Ms Afropolitan at Black Feminists: Riot, rage and rebellion
Paul Raven at Futurismic: This is London (map)
Reni Eddo-Lodge at the Guardian: Twitter didn't fuel the Tottenham riot
Ponticelli and Voth: Austerity and anarchy: budget cuts and social unrest in europe, 1919-2009 (dense academic paper: see the graph on page 3 and the conclusions page 25/26 for a quick summary)
Charmaine Elliott at Black Feminists: I loot, therefore I am
Polly at Too much to say for myself: White Riot
Joseph Harker at the Guardian: For black Britons, this is not the 80s revisited. It's worse

Riots and responsibility

2011-08-10T18:35:00.000+01:00

[Trigger warning: violence, also applies to most of the links]

So, riots. Some other reading on the subject first:

Hangbitching: Peckham Monday
Camila Batmanghelidjh at the Independent: Caring costs – but so do riots
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: On UK Riots Part 1 and Part 2
Andy's Miscellany: Thoughts on riots
Left Outside: Even Rioters with Blackberrys can be Poor
Kevin Sampson at the Guardian: Liverpool riots: I remember the buzz of mob mayhem from 1981

And for some idea of the general public response:

This rapidly-growing petition to remove all benefits from rioters (presumably after they've been released from jail) is by far the most signed petition on the government's new petitions site.
YouGov polling reports significant majorities in favour of major escalations of force against the riots, and 33% in favour of the use of live ammunition.

My own thoughts...

There are two things that the government needs to do. Immediately, it needs to restore an approximation of order to the affected cities. The people involved in the riots do need to be arrested and tried if possible. The government are taking this - after a shaky start - pretty seriously¹, with a large police presence in city centres at night, and rapid work to arrest the rioters during the day. The rioting isn't going to be completely over for a while - but provided nothing escalates it (see footnote¹ again) then normality should return fairly soon.

As soon as that is done, however, the government needs to do a much more important task - stop this happening again.

Riots could in theory break out at any time. There are nowhere near enough police across the country to stop this. If thousands of people decide at the same time that they want to make a point through violence, it's really difficult for the police to stop this happening.

Generally, they don't, however. Most of the time, people feel they have better choices available to them, or don't co-ordinate their attempts to riot.

The police can maintain a strong presence enough to stop these riots. They cannot maintain that presence indefinitely - already officers have been on duty for much longer than they should have been. Eventually they will need to stand down - and then, if nothing has changed, it will only be one more spark needed for more riots to start.

Unfortunately, the government seems to be determined not to change anything.

Its all too clear that we have a big problem with gangs in our country. For too long there has been a lack of focus and a complete lack of respect shown by these groups of thugs.
I am clear that they are in no way representative of the vast majority of young people in our country who despise them frankly as much as the rest of us do. But there are pockets of our society that are not just broken, but frankly sick.
When we see children as young as 12 and 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society.
For me the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years: it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society.
People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well they do have consequences.
We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society in every town in every street in ever estate is something I am determined to do.

That's David Cameron PM (Conservative) there. But with all that talk about how people should "take responsibility", it could easily have been his Opposition counterpart, Ed Miliband MP (Labour). As the Guardian reports:

He said: "Then we have got to look into the causes, why people are going around doing this. And I think there are a complex number of causes."

He said he thought it was "partly about parental responsibility, partly about gangs and some of that culture".

Pretty similar thoughts from both. In summary, the causes of the riots are that "the rioters are scum, and their parents are scum, and their culture is scum, and we should punish the lot of them".

And with that level of shallow political analysis and responsibility-dodging from our political leadership, there are always going to be people who feel that society is giving them nothing.

Today's rioters can be dealt with. Arrested. Tried. Imprisoned. Tomorrow's rioters are still going to grow up in the same hopeless situations, being blamed by the politicians for being in those situations. And in a few years we'll arrest them too, because that's far easier than trying to figure out what the real underlying problems are and then fixing them. Far easier than treating people as actual people and listening to them and taking them seriously before they get so desperate they take to the streets to loot and destroy because that's all that's left. But no. They're scum, their families are scum, and they deserve what they get. Political consensus acheived, Parliament adjourned.

I think tomorrow's Parliamentary debate will be very reluctant to look "soft on crime" and consider why these riots might be happening. Why decades of social deprivation and institutional racism and cuts to what few bits of social safety net there were might be giving people nothing left to lose by rioting. I hope I'm wrong about that, but if I am it'll have to come from the backbenches.

Footnote

¹ Populist but dangerous and largely useless measures such as water cannon and plastic bullets aside, that is. Because they worked so well in Northern Ireland.

Friday Links

2011-08-05T18:11:00.001+01:00

Another Angry Woman: A toolkit for spotting prejudice
[trigger warning] Jess McCabe at The F-Word: Mystery shoppers expose lies told by crisis pregnancy centres
s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: The Google+ Nymwars: Where Identity and Capitalism Collide
Jender at Feminist Philosophers: Why women are the natural computer programmers
[trigger warning] Flavia Dzodan at Tiger Beatdown: Al Jazeera shocked because female politicians in Latin America do not identify as feminists. Here’s some context
Queen Emily at Questioning Transphobia: When am I trans?
[trigger warning] Ian Cobain at the Guardian: UK's secret policy on torture revealed

Sex education and rape prevention: consultation response

2011-08-04T21:03:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning]

Earlier, the Department of Education recommended this new consultation regarding the department's work on rape prevention.

Here's my response - if you have any opinions on this issue, oradditional evidence for them to consider, I strongly recommend thatyou send a response to them as well (the consultation is open untilthe end of November). Many of the questions relate to details of thecurriculum or teaching process, or request case studies for bestpractice, neither of which I'm able or qualified to provide. Therewere a few more general questions as well, though.

I am responding to the consultation Review of Personal, Social, Healthand Economics (PSHE) Education. This is a response to question 2,though elements of this answer have relevance to questions 1 and 6c aswell.
I believe that the teaching of sexual consent needs to besignificantly extended, and begin (in age-appropriate terms and levelsof detail) at a young age. A discussion and debunking of the variouscommon myths around sexual consent should take place before any of thechildren are likely to become sexually active with their peers, andthis should be reinforced throughout the PSHE curriculum.
The current guidance, while covering the concept of consent, does soonly in broad terms. Discussion of sexual violence is largely limitedto that perpetrated by adults against children, with sexual violenceperpetrated by children against each other ignored.
Children should be encouraged to see consent as an active rather thana passive state ("Yes means yes" rather than "No means no",colloquially) and to avoid tolerating a disrespect for consent bytheir peers.
Research supporting this view:
Lisak and Ivan found that sexually aggressive men wereconsiderably more likely to believe the various myths about rape andconsent (e.g. that flirting indicates consent to sex). By making surethat these myths are firmly and consistently counter-acted throughoutschooling, the number of people believing in them could be reduced,thereby reducing the numbers of rapists and potential rapists in thepopulation.
Weinrott and Saylor found that the vast majority of convictedrapists were serial rapists with an average of around 10victims. Studies on undetected rapists (e.g. Lisak and Miller orMcWhorter et. al.) show a similar pattern, though with a loweraverage. Many of these rapists had begun their offending duringadolescence. It is therefore important to begin education aboutconsent early, before the idea that sexually aggressive behaviour isnormal takes hold.
Lisak goes on to say:
the research on undetected rapists tells usthat actually a very small percentage of men - serial sexual predators- are responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of the sexualviolence in any community. These men cannot be reached oreducated. They must be identified and removed from ourcommunities. Our prevention and education efforts must be focused onthe vast majority of men who will never themselves cross the line intocriminal behavior, but who by their participation in peer groups andactivities either actively or passively provide support or camouflagefor the sexual predators in their midst. By laughing at their jokes,by listening uncritically to their stories of “conquests” and“scores,” men become facilitators or passive bystanders of criminalbehavior.
Educating children early enough that they do not become serial sexualpredators themselves, and have the confidence to avoid creating asupportive environment for those that do, is therefore vital inreducing the current high levels of sexual violence among adolescentsand young adults.

Season's Greetings

2011-08-01T22:17:00.003+01:00

Season's Greetings! Happy Northern-Hemisphere temperate summer to you all!

Various plant photos, again.

- I still can't remember what this plant is, but it's come back nicely since last year.

- I really like these large daisies. (I've noidea if they're actually daisies, or just look a bit like them)

Coming up later in summer ...
- sunflowers!

Rape prevention: trying hard to avoid giving out useful information

2011-07-30T17:22:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

So, here's the second reply on rape prevention from the Equalities Office / Home Office.

Thank you for your interest in the Home Office’s work on sexualviolence. We are happy to confirm that the Home Office is currentlyplanning a new communications campaign on sexual violence; work on thiswill begin in November.

I suppose "will begin in November" is more information than I previously had.

The Home Office collaborates with a number of other governmentdepartments on the issue of rape and sexual violence. In particular,but not exclusively, we work closely with the Department of Health, theMinistry of Justice, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Department forEducation, and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Home Office officials have regular contact with the academic communityon a variety of issues relating to sexual violence policy. Thesecontacts form a useful part of the policy development process. Officials are always happy to take into consideration any usefulresearch and would actively encourage discourse with anyone who has aresearch interest which is aligned with the policy area.

I had asked what research they were currently using, ofcourse. Such a vague answer - the second time I've got that sort ofvague answer to a fairly specific question - suggests that they maynot actually be using any.

I might try using FOI requests instead. (I prefer not to, sincethey're inconvenient to be on the receiving end of, so I try to makeinformal requests first)

Anyone else know what this campaign in November is going to beabout? Other than somehow about rape and other sexual violence?

Friday Links

2011-07-29T18:12:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning] nominatissima: My Worst Nightmare Comes to Life for Northern Ireland Couple
[trigger warning] Den of the Hyena: Know your right
[trigger warning] Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Today in Rape Culture
Mary at Where's the Benefit?: Repeat
zohra moosa at The F-Word: Govt policy set to undermine women's political power? New report
A Cunt of One's Own: Anomalies at the Airport
Simon Farnsworth: On the cost of regulations
Sally Outen at Lashings of Ginger Beer: The Enemy

Statistical dehumanisation

2011-07-28T18:47:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

Dorset, Leeds, and now Nottinghamshire. Yet again, applying a century-old statistical population measure to individuals gives an utterly meaningless result.

I've already said what I want to say about the science behind this, so I'll just link to that and summarise below. I still have more to say about the attitudes, though.

[Director of Public Health Chris Kenny] said: "Obesity is on the rise in this country and what this weight management programme is designed to do is to raise the issue with parents.
"I wouldn't want this one particular case to undermine the whole programme."

Nor, I suppose, would he want the fact that the "science" he'susing is notactually supported by the evidence to undermine his programme.

Or the fact that it's counter-productive and bullying of childrenwho really should be considered too young¹ to be given MyFirst Body Issues sets.

The problem isn't really the horribly flawed science. That's bad -and there's a serious group-think problem within the "obesityresearch" field that stops this getting much time.

The problem is the attitude to people that current "public health"schemes seem to regularly get sucked into.

"Public health" is not an easy job. Done well, it can save lives,improve health, and free up valuable funds that are no longer neededto deal with preventable diseases. However, it's something that onlyreally works at a population level.

The infamous bacon cancer study found that the risk of a particulargroup of cancers increased from 5% to 6% through increased consumptionof processed meats. Now, as was pointed out at the time, this meansthat for 99% of people, whether or not they eat bacon will makebasically no difference to their risk of cancer. For many of thosepeople, bacon is a tasty food, and giving it up or cutting back willmake them unhappy.

From an individual perspective it's highly unlikely to be a gooddeal - permanently give up bacon now, to marginally decrease yourchances of getting cancer thirty years later? Most of the people whowould take that deal probably didn't like bacon that much in the firstplace, and so probably didn't eat enough for cutting it out to make adifference.

From a public health perspective the calcuation is completelydifferent. If everyone stopped eating bacon, rates of this group ofcancers would drop about 20%, saving millions of pounds a year, andsaving thousands of lives. Who wouldn't want that?²

The conflict comes between the individual view and thepopulation-statistics view of public health policy. It's very easy toforget that those statistics are made of individuals, all of which -even if they're identical on the measured statistics - have their ownvery different lives.

Population statistics is the "easy" way to do "public health". It'salso - because it reduces people to a few broad numbers - inherentlydehumanising. With that, it becomes easy to see why they won't bedissuaded from this course: they're saving [abstract] lives, so if afew [real] lives are harmed as a result, it's still worth it.

Because the underlying attitude is itself dehumanising, some badscience that reduces health to a couple of convenient numbers is veryattractive. Rather than looking at individual health, fixing thenumbers becomes the goal - and if your numbers are "wrong", that makesyou a problem. For people who are already dehumanised regularly on an individual level, the effects combine very strongly

The "hard" way to do public health does also happen, and there areprofessionals working very hard towards it - providing green spaces,looking at food availability, considering safety issues, and so on -rather than blamingindividuals for making the "wrong" choices. An approach thathumanises rather than dehumanises is not only more compassionate, it'salso more effective.

Not surprisingly, those public health professionals don't make thenews for things like this.

Also not surprisingly, the government is quite happy to, for instance, cut funding to local councils and so force them to close leisure centres (something that is certainly bad for public health), but continues paying for schemes like this to shame people with non-approved bodies.

Footnote

¹ No, there isn't an appropriate age. The product failedsafety tests.

² Given the current high unemployment, anyone whose jobdepends on people eating bacon, for a start.

Rape prevention: response from Education

2011-07-26T18:03:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

Here's the reply from the Department of Education, which I receivedyesterday, on rapeprevention (with minor edits for readability on the web, that donot affect meaning, and contact details removed)

Thank you for your email dated 4 July 2011 asking for informationabout the department's role in safeguarding teenagers from abuse. Ihave been asked to reply.
The Department for Education is committed to making a strongcontribution to the cross government Action Plan on Violence AgainstWomen and Girls which is led by the Home Office. This reflects ourresponsibility for safeguarding young people and our strategicleadership of the education system.
The Department`s actions include:
Taking forward recommendations from the independent Reg Bailey report on sexualisation and commercialisation of young people.
Considering the teaching of sexual consent within the Personal Social and Health Education Review. The issue of consent is already covered within the Department's guidance on sex and relationships education (SRE) which can be viewed from our website.
Anti bullying and behaviour - every school must have measures to encourage good behaviour, respect, and to prevent all forms of bullying amongst pupils. These measures must be part of the school's behaviour policy. Following consultation a final version of guidance for school leaders and governors will be published at the end of July 2011.

They also suggested I contacted the Ministry of Justice, which I'dalready done.

The guidance is fairly sparse on consent, as it happens. There's acouple of bullet points on helping people 'avoid being abused' (whichis not great wording), half a bullet point on "avoiding [...]exploiting others".

The concept that school children might be committing rape isentirely ignored, though the document does contain a fair amount ofinformation on the possibility of them being victims.

The guidance (2000) predates the repeal of the heterosexist"Section 28" (2000 in Scotland, 2003 elsewhere), so contains thebizarre phrase "There should be no direct promotion of sexualorientation." which I'm fairly sure is universally interpreted as"only directly promote monogamous heterosexuality".

There's also a note about what the National Curriculum contains onthe subject, which is mainly about the biology of sexual reproduction,and the enforced requirement to learn some oversimplified rubbishabout "sex determination" in humans that very harmfully erases theexistence of trans and intersex people (and so makes it harder forpeople to accept their existence later on). I understand why topicsneed to be simplified for school, but there's "simplified" and there's"outright wrong".

It'll certainly be better than whatever it replaced - I wentthrough SRE well before this guidance was introduced, and I don'trecall consent being mentioned at all. (In fact, they tried very hardto avoid mentioning that sex might involve people¹) - butit definitely needs some significant updating.

Here'sthe review they mentioned - they opened a consultation on it onthe 21 July. I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in improving teaching about consent replies to the review (which will be open until the end of November 2011) to make their points. If you have relevant evidence and research papers, especially recent ones, make sure that you include them in your response (and share them here, too, if you like, so that other people can use them too).

Many of the questions in the consultation are asking about casestudies from schools, but they explicitly say you don't need to answerevery question - many of them are more general and can be answered bypeople other than PSHE teachers.

I'll post my own response to the consultation once I've writtenit.

Footnote

¹ Not in a pro-masturbation way (that wasn't mentionedat all), in a "this is an abstract rather than physical activity"way.

Friday Links

2011-07-22T17:52:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning] Diary of a Goldfish: "Clare's Law", Domestic Violence and a little knowledge being a dangerous thing
tigtog at Hoyden about Town: I wish to make a deeply heartfelt apology to all motorists
It's Not A Zero Sum Game The DoH Responds to Our Letter
s.e. smith: I’m Pretty Sure I Am the Best Determiner of What’s In My Best Interests. Thanks, Though! and Why Disability Tropes Matter: Supercrips and Accommodations
Miranda at Bad Reputation: Found Feminism: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Say No To The Special K Lady
Denis Campbell at The Guardian: Doctors' anti-abortion views could impact on women's access to service
Left Outside: Migration Watch UK thinks Maurice Glasman is being over the top
Skud at Geek Feminism: Who is harmed by a “real names” policy?
[trigger warning] Monkey at Feminist Philosophers: Legal aid, domestic violence and immigration
Flavia Dzodan at Tiger Beatdown: Media Analysis, the Butterfly Effect and how Rebekah Brooks hair is forced to eat humble pie
Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit?: Why won't ATOS let us record our Work Capability Assessments?

The overtallness epidemic

2011-07-21T19:01:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning: body issues]

Researchers have announced that (BBC) being overtall givesan increased risk of cancer.

I haven't looked at the study itself, so I can't comment on whetherit was well-conducted or not. I'm just interested in how the reportinghas gone, so I'll assume it was well designed.

Essentially the study has found that an increase in height in womenfrom around 150cm to around 170cm was associated with an increase inthe cancer rate from 0.75% a year to 1% a year. Not a large effect forindividuals, but certainly a noticeable one at the population level.

They also carried out a meta-study that suggested that a similareffect existed in men, though the BBC article goes into less detailabout this.

There's a suggestion that this effect is in part behind the rise incancer prevalence, since average height has risen by about 1cm everydecade in Europe.

Cue panic and press articles about how the so-called "overtallness"epidemic is ruining our health, and we're all going to die if we don'twear heavy shoulder pads to shrink ourselves back down to 19th Centurylevels, all illustrated with photos of headless tall people.

No? My mistake.

The BBC article is actually calm and measured on this topic. Itpoints out that there's no known mechanism by which overtallness couldaffect cancer prevalence, though a couple of theories aresuggested. It doesn't blame tall people for bringing it uponthemselves or suggest that they need to do more to reduce theirheight¹. Nor does it ignore the structural issues that makeit hard for people to avoid being tall, pointing to better childhoodnutrition and fewer diseases as reasons for overtallness.

One of the theories even suggests that overtallness doesn't causecancer at all, but is merely a marker for underlying conditions thatcause both overtallness and cancer. Correlation is not causation,after all.

If every medical research sub-discipline was so cautious about claimingcausative relationships between health conditions and physicalattributes, and similarly restrained about suggesting drasticindividual measures to change the physical attributes, then we mighthave considerably better public health policy.

Footnote

¹ As I've said before (almost), there is no known safeway to permanently reduce height, though there are several methodswhich will appear to give noticeable effects if the follow-up periodof the study is - no pun intended - too short, There are also somesurgical methods that appear somewhat more effective but haveextremely dubious safety records and large side effects.

The Invisible Hand II: This time we'll leave it in the rain

2011-07-18T18:01:00.003+01:00

~~No photos this time, because my camera battery is flat, but~~ Itappears that the market-drivenincentives to be a really useless delivery company have gone, forYodel, from mere incompetence to signature fraud and possibly other illegalities.

Well, hey, that's capitalism for you - it's not illegal if it'sprofitable.

Description: Another new safe place - behind a plant pot, in the rain, next to all the dirt and some very small slugs.

This time, the package was left outside behind a buddleia. Theinstructions on the shipping note say that it can only be signedfor by people 16 or over.

Description: A soaked cardboard package. The shipping label reads "Delivery Instruction: Only leave with person aged 16 or older"

The buddleia, for reference, is slightly over 1 year old, andhas real trouble holding a pen.

Checking the tracking information on Yodel's website gives the line:

Status	Date	Time	Signatory	Branch
Delivered	18/07/11	13:16	[recipient's surname]	STOCKTON ON TEES SERVICE CENTRE

Now, either there's an amazing coincidence and the delivery driverhas the same surname as the package addressee - and Yodel has thebizarre policy of allowing delivery drivers to sign for receipt - ormore likely they forged the signature.

Unsurprisingly, after being left out in the rain for several hours,the cardboard case was very damp. It would actually have been safer inthe compost bin. There was also no delivery note left, so if it hadbeen stolen, there would have been no trace of it, and the packagecontained over-the-counter medicines, so that "16 or over" requirementwasn't just for laughs.

But, I'm not their customer, so I expect they'll ignore mycomplaint about this one too.

Rape prevention: next stop, Ofcom

2011-07-16T14:37:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning]

So, following up on the advice from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to contact Ofcom, I've sent them the following message:

I am writing to ask for more information about two aspects of theBroadcasting Code.
Section 2.4 reads "Programmes must not include material (whether inindividual programmes or in programmes taken together) which, takinginto account the context, condones or glamorises violent, dangerous orseriously antisocial behaviour and is likely to encourage others tocopy such behaviour."
In Section 2.3 a distinction is drawn between "violence" and "sexualviolence". Does Section 2.4 also forbid material which condones orglamorises sexually violent behaviour? If it does, would you considermaking this explicit in the text the next time that the Code isrevised, for the avoidance of doubt. If it does not, could you give memore information on the reasoning behind making this distinction inSection 2.4.
Section 3.1 reads "Material likely to encourage or incite thecommission of crime or to lead to disorder must not be included intelevision or radio services."
Could you please give me more information about how Ofcom applies thissection of the Code concerning crimes of sexual violence (rape, sexualassault, etc.) and what research on the psychology of sexual offendersand potential sexual offenders is used to inform Ofcom's policy inthis area.
Thank you for your time

I'm going to try to suggest that section 3.1 should includerape-culture-promoting materials to a greater extent than it currentlydoes, because of the encouragement and enabling environment theyprovide for rapists.

If you have any papers, studies, books, research, etc. that theyshould be taking into consideration on this, let me know and I'll addthem to my next message to them. So far (and many thanks to commenterGlauke at Shakesville for pointing me at these) I have a few of papersand reports by the long-standing researcher of serial rapists, DavidLisak, and a lot of references to look up:

Lisak and Ivan 1995: Deficits in Intimacy and Empathy in Sexually Aggressive Men, J Interpers Violence (subscription required)
A summary of existing research by Lisak for the New England board of higher education
Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence: Another Lisak summary, with lots of references I haven't had time to look up yet

If you have suggestions for other papers I should read or thatOfcom should be using in its judgements, especially in the area of theeffect of rape-culture-supporting material on the behaviour andprevalence of serial rapists, that would be very useful - please leaveideas in comments.

Friday Links

2011-07-15T18:08:00.001+01:00

Latentexistence at Where's the Benefit?: What's wrong with ATOS
Spark in Darkness: On diversity and the judiciary
Incurable Hippie: The worst kind of postcode lottery
Vikram Dodd at the Guardian: 'Racist' stop-and-search powers to be challenged
s.e. smith: Food and the Difference Between Knowledge and Access and On fat and spectra
Den of the Hyena: The Damage Done
Valentina Pop at euobserver: EU parliament backs female quotas for top corporate jobs
Gwen Sharp at Sociological Images: Hidden Beneficiaries of Federal Programs
Heg at Feminist Philosophers: Which of these things is not like the others? and Spark in Darkness: The Equality and Human Rights Commission fights against equality
[trigger warning] Another Angry Woman: I think Julian Assange is a rapist. I still like Wikileaks.
Alan Travis at the Guardian: Poor to be banned from bringing spouses to the UK from overseas
Paul Canning at LGBT Asylum News: In UK, legal aid cuts will make LGBT asylum even harder
[trigger warning] Sian and Crooked Rib: Media reporting on rape, the daily mail and Strauss-Kahn
[trigger warning] Philippa Willitts at The F-Word: Yet another victim-blaming travesty
Jenni at Bad Reputation: On Getting Hurt and Being ‘Pretty’
Andy's Miscellany: Labour and principles
Complicity: CRB Checks and Trans Folk
[trigger warning] eastsidekate at Shakesville: A Slight Consistency

Assange's extradition, and what English law actually says about rape

2011-07-12T18:27:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

So, Assange's appeal against his extradition started today. As withlast time, his lawyers are going for a "it wasn't illegal"/"it's onlyillegal in Sweden because they're weird" approach.

These are expensive lawyers... have they actually read Englishsexual offences laws?

TheGuardian's coverage of the case contains a few very odd statementsfrom the lawyers.

11.27am: In one case Assange is accused of having sex with a woman without a condom – but Emmerson [Assange's lawyer] says deceiving someone on this issue is not illegal under English law.

Yes, it is. Quite seriously illegal. Section76 of the English¹ Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that it is to be"conclusively presumed" that the "complainant did not consent" if:

(a)the defendant intentionally deceived the complainant as to the nature or purpose of the relevant act;

A "conclusive presumption" is really strong - it basically saysthat the condition by definition implies the outcome. So if deceptionwere proved in an English court, it would mean that "but sheconsented" was legally virtually impossible as a defence.

Slightly later:

11.35am: The so-called "minor rape" allegation – when Assange was alleged to have had sex with one of the alleged victims, known as SW, when she was asleep or half asleep – was an "entirely consensual sexual encounter", Emmerson says.

Again, not under English law. Section 75 of the Act states that there is an "evidential presumption" about a lack of consent if:

(d)the complainant was asleep or otherwise unconscious at the time of the relevant act;

and the defendant was aware of this.

An "evidential presumption" isn't as strong as the section 76"conclusive presumption", but it's still fairly strong - it says thatit will be assumed that there was no consent unless evidence can beprovided to suggest that there specifically was - a "defence mustprove you didn't" rather than the default "prosecution must prove youdid" question.

The 11.35 quote also doesn't fit well with some of the other things Emmerson says - for instance

10.50am: The Assange team is promising not to attack his accusers and not to doubt their discomfort about his sexual conduct.

So... it was "entirely consensual sexual conduct" that was "[feltto be] disrespectful, discourteous, disturbing or even pushing at theboundaries of what [the victims] felt comfortable with." (Liss has more on this at Shakesville)

Or later on

12.22pm [...] this is not intended to challenge "the genuineness of their feelings of regret about having had consensual sex with Mr Assange or trivialise their experiences". [...]
[...] But the sexual activities that occurred had taken place with consent, he argued, and, unlike in Sweden, could not be criminalised in the English jurisdiction. [...]

Except that they're saying it wasn't consensual, or there wouldn'tbe a case to answer here.

And the judge in the original extradition hearing ruled - quitecorrectly - that under English law the accusations amounted to 3accusations of rape and 1 of sexual assault.

A brief comparison of Swedish and English sexual offences laws

English law defines a broader range of assaults as rape. The Swedes are trying to extradite Assange on 1 count of rape and 3 of "sexual molestation". In English law, 3 would be rape, and only one the lesser offence of sexual assault.
English law also defines, though this is not relevant directly to this case, several types of assaults as "sexual assault" that are not criminalised at all under Swedish law, as far as I can tell.
English law has far stronger penalties for rape. The average custodial sentence on conviction is 8 years - the maximum a life sentence. The maximum sentence that Assange could serve in Sweden if convicted is only 4 years.
English law has explicit definitions of consent to say that someone who is asleep did not consent, and someone who was deceived as to the nature of sexual activity did not consent - strong enough that the question of consent should not need to be proved in court if there is no argument about the circumstances. Swedish law, as far as I can tell, does not.

But it's the Swedes who apparently have this ridiculouslytough law that criminalises normal sexual behaviour. The fact thatEnglish law is in fact tougher - and rightly so - in just about everyarea doesn't stop people believing this - or Assange's lawyer claimingit in court:

11.31am Emmerson argued that Assange was a victim of a "philosophical and judicial mismatch" between English and Swedish law over what constituted sex crimes.

Such mismatch as there is actually works in his client's favour, atthe moment, since the extradition would move him to a jurisdictionwith less strict laws and less strong punishments.

Footnote

¹ Wales uses the same Sexual Offences Act. The laws inScotland and Northern Ireland are different, but I'm not completelysure how. Unless Assange flees to Glasgow, and Scotland then declaresindependence, it won't become particularly relevant to this case.

New guidance for prosecutors regarding retracted allegations of rape

2011-07-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

The new Crown Prosecution Service Guidanceon charges related to perverting the course of justice in rape anddomestic violence cases is now up.

I didn't think they'd go with mysuggestion to stop doing so entirely, but the guidance is improved on theoriginal draft in several areas. Fortunately they did take therecommendation I and others made on DPP oversight:

All cases involving an allegation of rape or domesticviolence in which consideration is given to prosecuting thecomplainant for perverting the course of justice or for an alternativeoffence such as wasting police time must be referred to the Directorof Public Prosecutions.

That, hopefully, will cut down on some of the worst abuses of thischarge, and make the DPP very clearly accountable for any futuremistakes.

Friday Links

2011-07-08T14:32:00.001+01:00

Laura Woodhouse at The F-Word: Harrods and make-up: women's faces aren't good enough
DavidG at Where's the Benefit?: Picklesgate: How Many DWP Ministers Have Lied to the House? and Need the Loo? Book a Time Slot.
[trigger warning] Flavia Dzodan at Tiger Beatdown: Systems that force us to lie
[trigger warning] twice_immigrant: This is why I'm not part of movement atheism
Paul Canning at LGBT Asylum News: Eddy Cosmas freed from detention after one last (?) humiliation and Is it getting worse for UK LGBT asylum seekers?
sian and crooked rib: Hands off my uterus!
Jender at Feminist Philosophers: Biases about gay and lesbian professors
nominatissima: Coming Out as A Nonbeliever Vs. Coming Out as Queer Vs. Coming Out as Disabled
[trigger warning] A Bee of a Certain Age: Just not with you, Sunshine
Renee at Womanist Musings: We Don't Usually Allow Scooters
[trigger warning for many of the included posts] What Tami Said: My Planned Parenthood blog carnival and Shakesville: My Planned Parenthood: The Carnival Collection
Den of the Hyena: Why press?
[trigger warning] Two whole cakes: Real Quick: Weight loss is easy, if you marry your diet.

Rape prevention: Culture, media and sport

2011-07-07T21:19:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

So, the first department to reply to mymessages about rape prevention policy is the Department of Culture, Media andSport, who sent me a reply on Thursday.

(This was actually quite a surprise - I was expecting them to be overwhelmed with all the messages they were getting recently about News International and so take longer to reply)

As I'm now coming to find is usual for government departments, itdoesn't quite answer the question I asked.

Thank you for your recent email about media regulation.
I appreciate your concerns on this matter, but must emphasise that under current broadcasting arrangements, responsibility for what is broadcast on television and radio rests with the broadcasters and the organisations that regulate broadcasting - the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the BBC Trust and the Welsh Fourth Channel Authority (S4C) - within the overall framework set by the Communications Act 2003 and the BBC Charter and Agreement.
It is a long-standing principle that the Government does not interfere in programme matters, either on arrangements for scheduling or on content. It is important to maintain the principle of freedom of expression which political interference could undermine.
Ofcom, the BBC Trust and S4C are independent of the Government and responsible for safeguarding the public interest in broadcasting. They set out the rules and guidance with which broadcasters must comply. Within this framework, it is the broadcasters' job to make judgments about what individual programmes should contain and the time at which they are broadcast.
You may like to raise your concerns by writing to Ofcom at Riverside House, 2a Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1 9HA.
For printed media, the Government is likewise committed to the effective self-regulation of the press, and believes that maintaining the principle of freedom of expression is fundamental to our democracy. Therefore the Government does not - and cannot - interfere in what a newspaper or magazine chooses to publish. With this freedom, however, comes great responsibility. Newspapers must, of course, abide by the law, but they also sign up to a Code of Practice, overseen by the independent Press Complaints Commission (PCC). The Editor's Code of Practice sets a benchmark for the standards the press is expected to maintain. More information on the PCC and the Editors' Code of Practice, including details of how to make a complaint about a particular article, can be found on their website at: www.pcc.org.uk.
Whilst at present we do not believe that there is a convincing case for further Government intervention in media regulation, we recognise that for the public to have confidence in a system of self-regulation it must be effective and robust. We therefore continue to monitor the behaviour of the press and their compliance with the Code.

Let's leave aside the difference from the normal definitions of"effective" and "robust" required to apply them to the PCC's"regulation" of the press.

Anyway, my reply:

Thank you for your reply to my earlier message.
I agree that the responsibility for what is broadcast or reported inthe press rests with the broadcasters and the media, and that thegovernment is rightly cautious about taking actions which could limitfreedom of expression. I will contact Ofcom as you suggest regardingthese matters.
However, there seem to be some areas in which the DCMS could takeaction without interfering with commercial and individual freedom ofexpression.
The government - along with other public bodies such as policeforces and local government - are major advertisers and producers ofmedia content in their own right. Are there any relevant guidelinesfor this content and advertising to ensure that it fits in withgovernment rape prevention strategies?
In its role as a funder (directly or indirectly) of individuals ororganisations media and arts projects, the government could encouragethe recipients of this funding to avoid inaccurate portrayals of rapeand sexual assault, that condone or glamourise the crimes. This wouldnot be a restriction on freedom of expression - people wishing tocondone or glamourise rape would have many non-governmental fundingsources still willing to fund them - but would ensure that publicmoney is spent in the public interest, rather than counter to it. Arethere any policies of this nature within the department, or in itsagreements with the bodies the department commissions to indirectlyfund cultural activities?
Again, thank you for your time, and for your prompt response to myinitial query at what must be a busy time for your department.

I'll write the letter to Ofcom soon. Here's the Broadcasting Code, which is the guidance that would apply.

A few relevant pieces seem to be:

Section 2 - I am concerned that "violence" and "sexual violence" are listed as separate categories in paragraph 2.3, but only the condoning and glamourising of "violent [...] behaviour" is restricted under paragraph 2.4.
Section 3 bans material "likely to encourage or incite the commission of crime". Can they be convinced that material supporting rape culture counts? - there's plenty of research to suggest it should.

The rest of it seems less relevant at an initial glance - are there any bits I've missed?

Assessments of credibility in rape culture

2011-07-05T20:38:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

One of the things about rape culture is that because the defaultassumption is that men are always not rapists and women are alwayslying it becomes very hard to get a fair trial because usualconclusions about witness credibility are completely discarded.

The Strauss-Khan case is - as was predictable from the start inoutline if not in details - an example of this.

The news over the last few days has been full of "revelations" thatthe victim in this rape case is not in fact herself perfect in theeyes of the privileged. As a result of these statements of theobvious, Strauss-Khan has been given bail (because he's consideredless of a flight risk if he thinks he can win the case? I don'tknow...)

I'm making this post on the assumption that the news reporting isaccurate. There are plenty of reasons - "unnamedsource" "close to the defence" - to believe that at least some ofit is rubbish, but I'm going to discuss the scenario in which it's alltrue.

There's been the usual rape apologism about how clearly if she liedabout one thing ever she can't be trusted as a witness and is probablylying about this too. Now, if we're going to exclude anyone who hasever lied about anything from being a witness in a trial, we're goingto find both prosecution and defence incredibly short on witnesses... but it's okay if it's a rape case, because it confirms the beliefthat women lie about rape. (DSK's own initial lie that he hadn't beenthere, until the forensic report came back, gets ignored)

There's been quite a bit of effort put in by various writers topoint out that this is largely irrelevant, and none of the leakedevidence remotely challenges the statements about what happened inthat hotel room. That's true, but I think it goes further than that -these facts about the victim, if true, actually make it morelikely that she is telling the truth, by making the alternativesless plausible.

Before these leaks, the scenarios were these:

DSK, a man with a reputation for sexual predation, raped a woman in his hotel room, and then attempted to leave the country.
DSK was in his hotel room, where he had consensual sex with a woman who had originally turned up to clean his room, who then went to her manager to claim she had been raped by a customer for no explicable reason.

It wasn't looking particularly good already, but if the leaked evidence is true the scenarios are instead these:

DSK, a man with a reputation for sexual predation, raped a woman in his hotel room, and then attempted to leave the country.
DSK was in his hotel room, where he had consensual sex with a woman, who after finishing her shift went to her manager to claim she had been raped by a customer, despite having numerous reasons to want to avoid drawing police attention to herself.

It hasn't changed the details or plausibility of the scenario whereDSK is guilty at all - as has been repeatedly said, this evidence isirrelevant to the key question of "what happened in that hotelroom?".

It has quite significantly decreased the - already verylow - plausibility of the other scenario. It's not completelyimpossible, but his defence should have to work very hard to get backto "reasonable doubt". Instead, because of the massively skewedassessments that rape culture provides¹, the case might noteven make it to trial now.

Of course, for the various apologists who think "A [vaguelyleft-wing] man? Commit rape? Impossible!" and have been sticking tothat from the start, the calculation is quite different - since one ofthe scenarios is to them completely impossible, the other can beutterly implausible and still be true.

Footnote

¹ Outside of rape trials, in other areas of the law,this sort of assessment is obvious enough. A man walks into a policestation, and reports that the previous night he was assaulted andhis coat was stolen.

The police ask for descriptions of the attackers, which he gives,and open a case. It's quite likely at this stage that the attackoccurred, but people do occasionally lie in crime reports. Maybe hewas at a boxing club, left his coat behind, and doesn't want to tellhis friends that's where he was because he'd promised to meet them in the pub that night.

The police then ask if there was anything in the pockets, and hesays they contained all the drugs he was going to sell. Not only candrug dealers be mugged just like anyone else (so the fact he's adealer should be irrelevant in the coming mugging trial), but it makesany theory that suggests he made the report up almost impossible (itwas a pretty unlikely theory to start with, of course).

But, of course, rape culture discards all this assessment in favourof "well, obviously she was lying."

Someone in government must be trying to prevent rape, right?

2011-07-04T21:44:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

As I mentionedearlier, the letter from the Equalities Office regarding thegovernment's rape prevention strategy had several areas I was going tofollow up.

I've now sent messages to the various departments I'd earlieridentified as potentially relevant, and I'll post again as andwhen I get replies.

The full text of the letters is below, for reference (long!)

I've gone for writing the letters with the assumption that there isa cross-departmental rape prevention strategy which covers a widerange of areas, informed by the substantial volume of publishedresearch on rapists, and treated as a high priority byministers.¹

If you think I've missed an area of rape prevention that adepartment should be responsible for - or an entire department - thenplease let me know and I'll ask them. If you've asked any governmentdepartments about rape prevention yourself, could you let me knowwhich ones, and how useful their answer was?

Home Office / Equalities Office

This is a follow-up to their earlier reply.

Thank you for your recent response to my questions. There are a fewquestions arising from that for which I would like more information.
You said that "The Home Office is planning a new campaign which will raise awareness of elements of the Sexual Offences Act". Are more details about this planned campaign currently available?
You said that the Home Office is the lead department regarding rape prevention. Could you tell me which other departments are currently involved in the government's rape prevention strategy?
With regard to research into the prevalence and taxonomy of perpetrators of rape, you said that the Home Office currently has no plans to commission research in this area. Could you tell me what pieces of existing research in this area the Home Office is using to inform its rape prevention strategies?

Education

I am following up a conversation with a representative of the HomeOffice on the topic of the prevention of rape. While the Home Officehas lead responsibility for this, there seem to be several areaswithin your department that would be covered by a governmental rapeprevention strategy, and I would like to know more about the specificactions being taken by the Department of Education on this issue.
As you will be aware, numerous surveys have found that teenagers areat high risk of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by otherteenagers. Could you please tell me what actions the department hastaken to ensure that:
All children receive appropriate teaching in consent and relatedissues (not necessarily solely as relates to sexual activity), toreduce the likelihood that they will commit rape or other sexualoffences either as a teenager or as an adult, and to reduce theprevalence of common myths about rape among children and young adults.
Teenage perpetrators of sexual offences are dealt with as befitsthe seriousness of the offence, and the urgent need to preventreoffending.
In addition, could you tell me what research the department uses toinform its policy regarding the prevention of rape and effectiveeducation on consent issues, and if applicable what additionalresearch the department has commissioned or intends to commission.

Culture, Media and Sport

I am following up a conversation with a representative of the HomeOffice on the topic of the prevention of rape. While the Home Officehas lead responsibility for this, there seem to be several areaswithin your department that would be covered by a governmental rapeprevention strategy, and I would like to know more about the specificactions being taken by the Department on this issue.
As Lord McNally stated (Hansard HL Deb, 24 May 2011, c1682)
"I agree with the noble Baroness that it is time to publicise the seriousness of rape, and I think that that could be started in the schools and by looking at some of the worrying things in advertising, in pop music and in some of the newspapers [...] Some of those should look at where they put the position of women in society and whether they encourage young men to give women the respect that they should have."
As the department responsible for many of the areas mentioned in LordMcNally's speech, could you please tell me what steps the department istaking in the following areas:
Encouraging private media and creative industries to refrain fromproducing or distributing creative works which condone, normalise orminimise rape and sexual assault, promote myths about rape, orotherwise work against the government's strategy of rape prevention.
Ensuring that publicly-funded media, advertising, and creativeworks do not condone, normalise or minimise rape and sexual assault,promote myths about rape, or otherwise work against the government'sstrategy of rape prevention.
Encouraging accurate and myth-free reporting of both specific rapeand sexual assault trials and the general prevalence of rape andsexual assault, and discouraging the sensationalising of thisreporting.

Defence

I am following up a conversation with a representative of the HomeOffice on the topic of the prevention of rape. While the Home Officehas lead responsibility for this, there seem to be several areaswithin your department that would be covered by a governmental rapeprevention strategy, and I would like to know more about the specificactions being taken by the Ministry of Defence on this issue.
Could you please tell me what steps the Ministry is taking in thefollowing areas:
Given the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war, what is beingdone to protect civilian populations in areas in which UK forces areinvolved?
Studies such as McWhorter 2009 [1] show that a significantproportion of military personnel have themselves committed rape. Whatsteps does the MoD take to detect these people to reject them duringrecruitment and to protect fellow soldiers and civilians from them ifthey remain undetected at the recruitment stage?
Additionally, could you tell me if the MoD has any plans to commissionresearch similar to McWhorter's, and what existing research in thisarea it already uses.
[1] Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male NavyPersonnel by Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., published in Violence andVictims, Vol, 24, No. 2, 2009. The study found that around 13% ofmale new recruits to the US Navy had attempted or committed rape, manyon multiple occasions.

Justice

I am following up a conversation with a representative of the HomeOffice on the topic of the prevention of rape. While the Home Officehas lead responsibility for this, there seem to be several areaswithin your department that would be covered by a governmental rapeprevention strategy, and I would like to know more about the specificactions being taken by the Ministry of Justice on this issue.
While, obviously, the Ministry has a major role to play in theconviction, imprisonment and possible rehabilitation of rapists andother sex offenders, to reduce the number of future offences that theycommit, I am also interested in what steps the Ministry is taking inthe following areas:
Ensuring that prisoner education and rehabilitation includesprograms intended to reduce sexual offending, including thoseprisoners who were not arrested for a sexual offence.
2) Preventing rape and sexual assault within the prison environment.
3) Working to rehabilitate those sexual offenders whose detectedoffences do not merit a custodial sentence so that they do not commitmore serious sexual offences later in life.
I would also be interested to know what research on the behaviour andtaxonomy of rapists and other serious sexual offenders the Ministryuses to inform its policies in these areas.

Footnotes

¹ Also, a pony.

I'd happily never hear this again

2011-07-01T19:22:00.002+01:00

There are of course many hate speech phrases and words I'd rathernot have to hear again, but this one is a little moreseemingly-innocuous: "Elections have consequences".

I'm seeing this phrase a lot at the moment - both in a UK contextas the coalition government brings out terrible policy after terriblepolicy, and in the USA as State and House Republicans bring inever-worse laws to eliminate anyone not like them.

Specifically I'm seeing the phrase used a lot by centre-leftieswhose centre-left party was defeated in an election (for beinggenerally not very effective) as a way to say "We told youso. Hopefully you'll make a better choice next time.".

It of course very nicely fits the centre-left (and general right)narrative of "personal responsibility" and seeking individualsolutions to structural problems.

Firstly, it assumes the existence of a meaningfulchoice. For people whose interests do not align with the interests ofthe default people, while a left-wing party might be a little betteron average, thisis only on average. On many issues the choice is between "bad" and"terrible" on policy. On some, the choice is between "terrible" and"terrible, and they enjoy it".

Furthermore, the electoral system in both the UK and the USAseverly restricts voters' choice of candidate. Electoral boundariescan render votes entirely irrelevant (and with the partisan boundarydecisions that much of the USA has, this is even more likely) short ofa tremendous swing in opinion. First-past-the-post voting makes itvery difficult to have more than two locally-viable parties in anyseat: three-way marginals are incredibly rare in the UK, and barringthe occasional charismatic independent candidate, completely absent inthe USA.

It's hard to vote for a decent candidate if there are literallynone standing in your constituency. It's not always the best idea forminimisation of harm even if one is, if they're unlikely to actuallywin.

Throw in electoral fraud and it's quite possible that the voterscollectively were fully aware of the consequences of electing aparticular candidate, and if the votes had been counted properly thatwould have been clear. Similarly, polling station inaccessibility, ormalfunctioning voting machines, or errors in the electoral roll, canprevent someone casting a vote that they should have been able to.

Elections might have consequences, but that's not the same thing asvoters being able to do anything about them. Blaming the voters forthe fact that the system often entirely disregards their votes isabsurd.

Secondly, there's a serious informationproblem. In the 2010 general election I hadgreat difficulty deciding who to vote for. I had a lot ofadvantages - many of them privilege-related - in getting informationabout the candidates - time to read manifestos thoroughly, time tolook up previous voting records of their parties on issues that matterto me, enough knowledge of recent political history to be aware ofwhat they weren't saying, and so on.

Even with that information I still wasn't entirely sure at the timewhether I was voting the right way¹. The average voter isnot going to have all that information - may not even be aware thatthe information exists, in some cases - and is often not going to havethe free time to find it out. In theory, the press should help fillthis information gap... in practice, of course, they're often moreinterested in extending it.

Where some of the most unpleasant policies of a government weren'teven mentioned in their pre-election speeches and publicity,it's even less fair to blame the voters for not seeing it coming.

There are a lot of things that could be done - nationally,structurally - to reduce the voter information gap. Individual votershave very few options for doing the same.

Thirdly, it's such a smug statement that betraysthe speaker's attitudes towards voters. "Well, you see, elections haveconsequences. Did you not realise that? Did you think that it was justan exercise in who could sort and count bits of paper faster?". Yes,quite obviously elections have consequences. That's why we havethem. Voters², believe it or not, are actually quite awareof this. Mostly, it does not fill them with hope.

It's not as if smug political explainers are particularly good atpredicting the real consequences of elections either (see also:"progressive majority").

Voters who have seen the speaker's party also fail to deliver whilein power or usefully oppose while out of it will of course treat thestatement with the contempt it deserves.

Footnote

¹ It's a testament to Miliband's recent direction asleader of the Labour party that I'm still not sure.

² In which I include people who could vote but choosenot to. (For instance, on the grounds that they're aware that allpossible consequences are really bad, and can't bring themselves toadd legitimacy to any of them) Abstention is a legitimate decision.

Friday Links

2011-07-01T18:24:00.001+01:00

Andy's Miscellany: The costs of dual-discrimination legislation
Modus Dopens: Can anarchy be kind?
Blue Milk: The sky is falling in
Laura Woodhouse at The F-Word: Latest pro-choice news
eastsidekate at Shakesville: Important News: I'm Packing Nail Polish For My Vacation
s.e. smith: More On the Institutional and the Personal
Rob Mulligan at Bad Reputation: Unsung Heroes: Maria Agnesi
[trigger warning] Sarah Learmonth at The F-Word: Silence of the survivors: giving the victims a voice

Study shows researchers ignore structural issues

2011-06-30T20:16:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

The BBC has yetanother badly-researched story about "obesity". I'll skip over theunmentioned assumption that "obesity" is such a bad thing it needs tobe prevented at all costs, and move on to places where the articlefails even in its own terms.

Firstly, the article talks about how average calorie intake hasincreased significantly in the US since the 1970s. Naturally, because"obesity" is a personal problem with no structural issues whatsoever,the article completely omits that since the 1970s the USA's problemswith perverse food-production subsdisies, "food deserts" and so on, inmany places it's difficult or impossible to get foods other than theenergy-dense ones, and more expensive even when they areavailable.

This is also something that does not really generalise to themajority of the UK, or other Western European countries, despite theclaim in the article that "many of the factors causing the obesityepidemic there are mirrored in the UK".

The recommendations of the researchers - police what peopleindividually eat, rather than making it easier for them to getnutritious food cheaply - are equally predictable.

Secondly, the article in a box-out includes a note that:

The recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 for women, and 2,500 for men (NHS Choices)

If we assume that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women,and gender is the only factor that affects energy needs, metabolicrates, digestion efficiency, and so on - but does so with 100%predictive power (which is ridiculous, but is what the recommendationneeds to be assumed) then that gives an average recommendation of2,250 calories daily for each person.

Compare that with the figures from the article on US average - the article doesn't specify if it's mean or median - calorie intake:

1977-8: 1,803 calories
1994ish (implied): 2,145 calories
2003-6: 2,374 calories

So, comparing with the "recommended" average, we can see that it'sonly in the last decade or so that US residents have stopped being (onaverage) underfed.

The average hides a lot of rich/poor disparity, of course, and alot of people in the US are still malnourished - my point isthat even in terms of pretending these averages mean anything at all,the conclusion isn't the one that the rest of the article implies.

Of course, this is fairly typical of "anti-obesity" research andcampaigning: set an unjustified target for calorie intake - and thenclaim it's bad when people get anywhere near it. "Pro-malnutrition"might be a better term for them: perhaps if they didn't have theprivilege not to remember the effects of widespread malnutritionthemselves, they'd think more carefully about what they weresaying.

An ineffectual response for the scale of the problem.

2011-06-27T18:30:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

Last month I asked the Government Equalities Office what the government was doing to prevent rape.

For reference, I asked them:

what campaigns to prevent rape and/or to discourage people from choosing to rape has the Equalities Office recently run or have planned?
what other government departments have or will soon run campaigns with similar aims?
what recent studies the Equalities Office has commissioned or is aware of concerning the motivations, psychology and methodology of rapists in the UK, and what, if any, future studies you intend to commission?

The relevant(ish) bit of the reply is as follows:

Turning to the issues you have raised in relation to public awarenessabout the severity of the offence of rape, the Home Office takes thelead within government on communications campaigns on rape and sexualviolence. The last campaign was run in 2006 and concentrated on theissue of consent in the context of the Sexual Offences Act (2003),which was introduced in 2004. Further campaigns have been run morerecently by individual police forces; a current example of this isthe joint Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary campaign: `Don't Cross the Line' - www.dontcrosstheline.co.uk. The HomeOffice is planning a new campaign which will raise awareness ofelements of the Sexual Offences Act as recommended by Baroness Sternin her recent review of the statutory response to rape in England andWales.
The Home Office does not currently have any plans to commission anyspecific research on the taxonomy of perpetrators of rape. However,officials are in regular contact with the academic community and arealways prepared to engage in active consultation on issues whichrelate to sexual violence policy.

Not unsurprisingly, the answer is "very little". I can't helpfeeling that if most other crimes with a potential life sentence - anda substantial average sentence - were being perpetrated by around 5%of the population, there might be a greater sense of urgency arounddealing with them than a few rare awareness campaigns mostly relianton the initiative of individual police forces¹.

For a rough numeric comparision, using an offence of equivalentsentencing, imagine that the government was aware of a plot by theresidents of Wales - yes, all of them - to drop a nuclear bomb onLondon. An awareness campaign that civilian possession of nuclearweapons is illegal and carries a potential life sentence might beconsidered to be a little ineffectual as the response.

The question of what recent studies they are aware of regardingperpetrators appears to have been ignored, too. I'm hoping that's justan oversight in replying to my questions, rather than an intentionalomission because they aren't aware of any, but on previous form I'mnot hopeful.

I'm going to send a few follow-up letters - to the departmentsnamed in my previous post to see what they're doing and suggest thatthey start; to the Home Office to find out more about this plannedcampaign; and to the Equalities Office to see if they are aware ofexisting research. As usual, I'll post the letters here after I'vesent them.

Footnotes

¹ While some police forces are definitely trying to deal with rapists as effectively as possible, others are ultimately siding with the rapists through inaction. The best-performing forces have a report:conviction ratio over ten times better than the worst-performing forces.

As Baroness Stern said (in far more academic and Parliamentary language than my paraphrase, of course): "If you actually paid any attention to the existing recommendations it would be a big help."

Friday Links

2011-06-24T16:34:00.002+01:00

Lisa at Where's the Benefit?: Those comments by Philip Davies...
[trigger warning] Same Difference: People not punchlines
Modus Dopens: Gratitude Sucks
[trigger warning] s.e. smith: Rape Culture, Above the Fold
Harri C. Weeks at The F-Word: Invisibility
Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: Meanwhile...
Jender at Feminist Philosophers: Pregnancy discrimination is on the rise

... and the Liverpool Daily Post reports that MP Frank Field set to tighten up abortion law without parliament vote. Can pro-choice MPs force a vote anyway?

It'll always be next year

2011-06-24T12:43:00.003+01:00

Various local papers are reporting that EdMiliband MP will no longer be attending the Miners' Gala thisyear. An un-named spokesman for Miliband is quoted as giving tworeasons.

He doesn't want to share a platform with Trades Union leader Bob Crow
"diary pressures"

He also says that "Ed has said he will come next year."

I predict, very confidently, that he won't come next yeareither. Nor any other year.

On the "diary pressures" side, the date of the Miners' Gala ishardly a secret. If he's too busy to make it this year - after sayingback in March that he would come - the same pressures will probablyexist next year, too. (Well, unless he gets replaced as leader, but Iexpect he won't come then either)

On the "not wanting to share a platform with people who disagreewith Labour" side, he's going to be somewhat out of luck at theMiners' Gala in most years. Perhaps if Labour (nationally, rather thanthe local party) actually cared any more about places like Durham andthe people who live and (try to) work there, he wouldn't have so manypeople criticising his leadership because of it.

Miliband's spokesman denies that it's because of the unpopularityamong wealthy Londoners of Bob Crow¹, but it's not a veryconvincing denial. His earlier speech on "responsibility" showed thathe was going for the same upper-middle class swing voters as NewLabour: refusing to attend the Miners' Gala because it might playbadly with the Telegraph would be part of the same strategy.

Meanwhile, the promise of "next year" is a perfect analogue of theway Labour treats the needs of non-default people. Maybe next year,when there's more time in Parliament and the right-wing have stoppedopposing it. (And if you don't re-elect us, there won't be a nextyear, and you definitely won't get it).

Footnote

¹: Bob Crow in many respects has one of the easiest(which is not the same as easy) Union jobs in the country. The workershe represents carry out a task that is worth millions of pounds a dayto London's economy (or at least, when they go on strike, that's whatit's claimed to cost), and have sufficient training that they can'teasily be replaced. Getting them a reasonable share in those millionsis therefore a much easier job than some other Union leaders have.

Of course, it does make him very unpopular with the rich people whothink those millions should belong to them. Edit: As Simon Farnsworth points out in comments, I should have explicitly mentioned that those are not the only people who Crow is unpopular with, and I didn't intend to claim that Crow is right either. Crow should be able to get a good deal for his members without aiding other employers in their attacks on their workers.

Friday Links

2011-06-17T17:49:00.003+01:00

s.e. smith: Stop With the Autoplay Already!
Den of the Hyena: Entitlement
Complicity: More on Poly and Trans erasure in the Census
Modus Dopens: Political add-ons
Renee at Womanist Musings: Safe spaces and intersectionality
Incurable Hippie: MP: Disabled people should work for less than minimum wage.

And a couple of important campaigns:

Asylum for LGBT people - more from Spark in Darkness: Campaigning for GBLT asylum
Equality Act consultation: Annalytica at Lashings of Ginger Beer: Save the Equality Act!

The moral equivalency of Miliband

2011-06-13T22:11:00.000+01:00

So, Ed Miliband MP (Labour, Doncaster North, Leader of the Opposition) gave this speech today on "Responsibility in 21st Century Britain"

The basic theme - and if you read the speech, you'll see that I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here - is that there is a moral equivalence between:

fraudulently running a business for years, stealing millions for your own pockets while leaving your vulnerable customers to face abuse; and
claiming benefits instead of getting non-existent jobs.

and between

causing a global financial crisis while taking millions in remuneration; and
having an overgrown and litter-strewn front garden

and that a future Labour government needs to deal with the peoplewho aren't "taking responsibility" for both.

I'm not going to pick apart the entire speech - it's quite long andjust about every line involves some sort of confusion, falseequivalence, and/or factual error - but a few examples.

The speech opens with:

While out campaigning during the local elections, not for the first time, I met someone who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade. He hadn’t been able to work since he was injured doing his job. It was a real injury, and he was obviously a good man who cared for his children.
But I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do.
And that it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him notto work, when other families on his street are working all hours justto get by.

Lisaand DaveGat Where's the Benefit? have both written on this already.

Misty's post at Shakesville - "ThosePeople" was written days before Miliband's speech, and about adifferent country - but could easily instead be about Miliband'sbizarre belief that there are tens of thousands of job vacancies justwaiting to be filled by disabled applicants, if only they'd apply.

The idea that looking after children is work - though not paidwork, which is the only real sort, of course - also appears to havepassed Miliband by.

In Manchester, as well as helping the most vulnerable with housing, they give priority to those who are giving something back to their communities – for example, people who volunteer or who work.
They also look to reward people who have been good tenants in the past and who have paid their rent on time and have been good neighbours.
This approach means that rather than looking solely at need, priority is also given to those who contribute - who give something back.

In other words, rather than basing benefits decisions on how muchyou need the benefit, they will in future also be based on how much EdMiliband MP approves of your life.

Well, no change from the current or previous government's policythere.

For too many people at the last election, we were seen as the party that represented these two types of people.
Those at the top and the bottom, who were not showing responsibility and were shirking their duties. From bankers who caused the global financial crisis to some of those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work – but didn’t.
Labour - a party founded by hard working people for hard working people - was seen, however unfairly, as the party of those ripping off our society.

So: Labour were seen as being "not tough enough" on people onbenefits. This is despite them bringing in massive restrictions onbenefits over the 13 years they were in power - reducing eligibility,making the forms longer, bringing in the widely-criticised assessmentsfor ESA, introducing an attitude of "better ten eligible people don'tget benefits than one ineligible person does" to tackling fraud, andso on.

His solution - despite acknowledging that the perception was unfair- is to do it again, only more so, in the hope that it will work thistime.

Well, so much for the claims that Labour under Miliband would bedifferent to Labour under Blair. I suppose we've got several moreyears of headline-chasing to look forward to. Perhaps if a few more MPs had experience of claiming benefits and being looked down on as "scroungers" they might come up with some decent policies instead.

Some actual Opposition would be useful right now

2011-06-11T19:45:00.002+01:00

The Welfare Reform Bill is currently working its way throughParliament, and unlike some of the other controversial Bills of thecoalition, it hasn't got much attention. The various protests againstit by disabled people have largely been ignored by the press, andLabour appear to have chosen it as an issue to be "reasonable" and"pragmatic" on.

If you have time, and are in the UK, please write to your own MPs to askthem to vote against it. Where's the Benefit?has a huge amount of background information on this Bill and thereasons why it's so bad.

Here's the letter I sent to my (Labour) MP.

Dear [MP]
The Welfare Reform Bill will be reaching its third reading in the Commons soon, and I ask you to vote against it when it does so.
Taking away benefits that people rely upon is a bad idea at the best of times, but while the economy remains stagnant and unemployment high, it is even worse. The idea that cutting someone's benefits will encourage them to find work - when hardly anyone is able to find work - is absurd, but the basis of this Bill.
In Durham, Wilkinson advertised 59 jobs when they opened. There were over 1,000 applicants - inevitably, hundreds of qualified applicants would have been turned away. Now, the government, through this Bill, wants to increase the pressure even more - by cutting benefits that people need to survive. People cannot get jobs that don't exist.
The changes to Disability Living Allowance, converting it to the misnamed Personal Independence Payment, will be particularly harsh. The government has already decided that too many people claim DLA, and aim to have a significant reduction in claims under the new PIP, on the grounds that some of the people currently claiming are "not disabled enough" to need benefits.
Their rhetoric against disabled people has been particularly vicious, with the implication from the government being that most people on disability benefits are "scroungers" and undeserving of government assistance - when in fact the disability benefits have the lowest fraud rate of any benefit, and also the highest successful appeals rate as people are impersonally assessed as fit to work against the recommendations of their own doctor.
Meanwhile, support and encouragement for employers to help them employ people with disabilities and pay for any reasonable adjustments required remains non-existent, and hate crimes and abuse towards people with disabilities has increased significantly since the coalition came to power.
Passing the Welfare Reform Bill will, quite literally, cost lives, and I hope you will vote against it and encourage your colleagues to do the same.
Yours sincerely
[Me]

Friday Links

2011-06-10T18:23:00.001+01:00

Rupert George at Left Foot Forward: A big society or a breached social contract?
Bird of paradox: Germany: Safeguarding the rights of intersex people
DavidG at Where's the Benefit?: Another Poison-Pen Letter from IDS
[trigger warning] Sarah, The Bringer of Tea: My Papers Are Not In Order
s.e. smith: Working In the Garden
magicalersatz at Feminist Philosophers: The health of potential baby-carriers
Andy's Miscellany: So who’s being unrealistic exactly?
The nuclear unicorn: Fatal error
Diary of a goldfish: Looking After Yourself as Radical Political Activism
[trigger warning] Sian Norris at The F-Word: Stop the deportation of Betty Tibakawa
[trigger warning] Sara Haji at Muslimah Media Watch: The DSK Rape Victim is Everything but a Victim, According to the Media
[trigger warning] Duck! Duck! Gay Duck!: Cruel and Usual
[trigger warning] What Tami Said: Comedy is not "equal-opportunity"
[trigger warning] Harpymarx: Fairy jobmonster
Sue Marsh at Where's the Benefit?: Really? This passes for Parliamentary Research?
[trigger warning] No comment: Leave them kids alone: On sexualisation
Misty at Shakesville: "Those People"

The Invisible Hand will compost your letters

2011-06-08T19:58:00.001+01:00

So, I got this delivery note through the door recently.

Description: A standard "we missed you" delivery note from Yodel (formerly Home Delivery Network). Most of the fields are unfilled, except for one row reading (handwritten part italicised): "1 [package in] a safe space in compost bin"

For reference, compost bins are almost the antithesis of a safeplace to store organic matter such as the cardboard and paper thatpackages are made from.

For further reference, a photo of the interior of the compost bin.

Description: The inside of our compost bin. A large slug is in the top-right, chewing on an old flour bag which is significantly damaged after only a couple of days. Further down, and somewhat hard to make out on this photo, is a colony of woodlice.
The pink flour bag in the centre of the picture is in approximately the position that the package was retrieved from.

Obviously my instinctive reaction, having retrieved the package andbrushed off two slugs and some sort of beetle, was to wonder howanyone could be so unthinking as to come to the conclusion that acompost bin - which they had recognised as such - was a safe place tostore post.

Having thought about it a bit more, though, the real answer isprobably that it would be commercially less competitive todo anything else.

Courier firms are selected by the sender, not the recipient. The sender is going to prefer cheaper couriers for the same nominal level of service.
Provided the courier doesn't lose or destroy the post too often, the cost of providing refunds and replacements to customers when they do may well not exceed the saving from using a cheap courier to start with.
Courier firms therefore have an incredibly strong incentive to cut costs.
Travelling to the same destination more than one for the same parcel is inefficient - if the parcel can be "delivered" first time, this saves costs on fuel, staff time, and elsewhere.

Therefore, it makes sense to instruct staff, as a matter of company policy, that a compost bin makes a usable safe space if nothing better can be found. (Probably not in those exact words, though)

The fact that the recipient will feel they've received bad serviceis beside the point - they're not paying for the service, and the factthat they're paying someone else to pay for the service is tooindirect for the market.

Crime statistics? Now why would journalists understand those?

2011-06-06T18:50:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning]

So the BBC has an article on the number of women who havebeen convicted for domestic violence. It's as bad as you'd expecta BBC article to be.

It notes a rise in convictions of women for domestic violencebetween 2005 and 2010 from 1,500 to 4,000.

The article then goes on for several paragraphs speculating aboutwhy this might be, cultures of violence in women, etc.

In the final paragraph, after most readers will have got bored andwandered off, they note that in the same time period convictions ofmen committing domestic violence rose from 28,000 to 55,000 - notquite as large a proportionate rise, but still big.

Further penalty points, too, for their heteronormative assumption thatall domestic violence is committed against someone of the 'opposite'gender to the attacker.

Domestic violence reduction is actually a relative success for our justicesystem and government - with the rates of assault significantlyfalling, and the rate of convictions significantly increasing. Itremains a serious problem - around 300,000 incidents a year - but thisis a third of what it was 15 years ago, and a vastly-increasedproportion (now around 1 in 6) of those perpetrators areconvicted (even if not all of them get appropriate sentences).

It's still really bad and there's much still to do - but there has been significant progress made. Not that you'd know that from this article.

Lots of quotes from un-named "some experts", too - presumably because no real expert would actually put their name to such uninformed speculation.

Here's the complaint that I sent them.

Regarding your article "Women's convictions for domestic violence'double'", I found it to be poorly researched and sensationalist,leaving a key piece of context for the final paragraph, and ignoringobvious research that could easily answer some of the "experts saythis" / "other experts say that" pseudo-debate in the article. Bydoing so, it gives a completely misleading impression, both about theextent of domestic violence generally, and the number of womencommitting it.
Firstly, convictions are not at a measure of the prevalence ofcrime. A doubling of convictions could mean twice as many crimes werebeing committed, or it could mean that the number of crimes wasconstant but the reporting rate had doubled, or it could mean that thereporting rate was constant but improvements in police and CPSprocedure meant that the chances of a conviction had doubled. Or -more likely - some combination of the three.
Fortunately, the British Crime Survey is a long-standing statisticalmeasure of crime, including domestic violence, and - together withother CPS and Police/Home Office statistics - can be used to answerthis. A quick summary of the figures can easily be found by searchingfor "BCS Domestic Violence" -http://www.dewar4research.org/DOCS/DVGovtStatsAug09.pdf for instance
It shows that - far from increasing, the rates of domesticviolence against both men and women have been generallydecreasing. The proportion of victims who were male is also roughlythe same as it has been over the last decade.
Secondly, the key piece of context - that there had also been amassive increase in convictions for domestic violence in general andby men specifically - is left for the last paragraph. This is a keypiece of context, which strongly suggests that much of the increase isdue to improvements in prosecution and investigation - contrary to thesuggestions in the early paragraphs - and yet it is buried at thebottom of the page where relatively few readers will see it.
This news of a massive increase in convictions for men is notaccompanied by "some experts" wondering if it is part of a "growingculture of violence" among men - despite the 2005 number for men beingseven times the 2010 number for women.
Thirdly, the article assumes throughout that all male victims ofdomestic violence were attacked by women, and vice versa. This isobviously not the case, but the article implies it anyway.
Please let me know what steps will be taken to ensure that such basicmistakes in reporting on crime statistics do not recur in future.

Equality is a left-wing issue? Not in practice.

2011-06-04T17:47:00.000+01:00

"Left-wing" traditional politicians are very often insistent thatthey are the party of "social justice" - especially when compared withtheir "right-wing" counterparts, but I'm not sure they're actuallyfooling anyone except themselves.

Obviously there are traditional politicians here and there who haveindeed also been great campaigners against privilege anddiscrimination - but they're very much the exception.

Certainly it is also true that, on average, in modern UKparty politics, more advances have been made on equality matters whena "left-wing" party has had the balance of power, and there has beenless progress and more regression when "right-wing" parties have hadmajorities.

I'm not claiming that's a coincidence, but nor do I think ithappens because social justice matters are definitionally "left wing"issues.

Left and right

"Left-wing" and "right-wing" are of course simplifications, and"everyone knows" that they don't represent modern politics very well.

Except... depending on how you define politics, they mostly do. Inthe traditional default definition of politics - the sort of thing thatappears in the Politics sections of the papers and news websites, thedebates between political parties, the election campaigns and thescandals and so on - a single axis mostly works, at least forpoliticians and parties relatively near the "centre". Moving away fromthe centre towards the political fringes, the simplification breaksdown - but it works well enough that it's still widely used.

So - what would it mean for equality to be a "left-wing"issue. None of the obvious meanings appear to be true.

It's certainly not the case that all or almost all left-wingtraditional politicians are against privilege - many of them are happyto make use of privilege and prejudice to gain some transientpolitical advantage.

Nor does it seem particularly plausible or useful to claim that the"ultimate" left-wing position (if one exists) is a social justiceone. It erases the many "right-wing" people who are working for someor all aspects of equality while holding "right-wing" views in otherareas, and it likewise conveniently ignores the rampant ablism,cissexism, fat-hatred, and so on present and unchallenged in many "farleft" groups.

I've seen it stated as a definitional thing - equality activism is"left-wing", as is environmentalism, or socialism, or liberalism, orvarious other causes. In practice this seems to end up as defining"left-wing" as "not right-wing" which is utterly useless as adefinition, especially when it's followed up with attempts to get thevarious "left-wing" ideologies to make bad compromises with each otherbecause "they must work together to defeat the Tories".

As a statement of hope and expectation - "equality should be aleft-wing issue" - it's hard to argue against; but then, why notequally "equality should be a right-wing issue"? I'll come back tothis meaning of the statement below.

In practice, it's not

In practice, I don't see that equality activism doesassume that equality is particularly a left-wing issue; while onaverage there may be more pushing for progress under left-winggovernments and to avoid regression under right-wing ones, that's onlyan average. Our last "left-wing" government had an appalling record onmany equality issues - disability rights, fat hatred, immigration, andmany more. The approach to traditional politicians of all parties isgenerally to demand better of them, with very little hope that they'llalready be doing enough.

Conversely even our¹ current "right-wing" government, while as bador worse in many areas, has a few areas they're noticeably better -the parental leave proposals in their Modern Workplacesconsultation are substantially better than Labour's were, forinstance.

The expectation is that being critical of the government andcampaigning strongly will be needed whoever is in charge.

The broader political landscape

Rather than imagining the political landscape as a line or a plane,imagine it as a crumpled ball of paper.

The traditional political affiliations can be drawn on one of therelatively flat bits, set out along a fuzzy line from 'left' to'right'.

Some way round the paper ball, on a much crinklier bit, are thevarious areas of anti-oppression campaigning². As ithappens, if you cross the outside of the shape, the distance isshorter to the 'left' end of the traditional political line than it isto the 'right' end - but there are plenty of routes across the jaggedand folded surface, and some of them come out near the centre or rightof the line.

And so it's a struggle to even get most of social justiceconsidered as proper politics - which is to say traditional politics -which is to say the sort of politics which important default peoplediscuss. It's not even, when looking down on the face of traditionalpolitics, on the map. Equality issues get dismissed as "specialinterests" (collectively, the special interests of 99% of thepopulation, but of course only 0% of the 'important' defaultpopulation).

Until traditional politics considers the experiences and issues ofnon-default people to be of equal importance to the special interestsof default people, I don't believe there can be any real claim by anytraditional politicians to be "the party of" social justice andequality. The "left" may be marginally closer to making thatconsideration than the "right", but neither, for now, is anywherenear.

For now, most of them are still at best stuck in acompartmentalised mode of thinking where equality issues are separateto all other issues - and generally separate to each other. If it'snot a special "thinking about equality" day - they don't.

What would need to change

The majority of people who I see in practice stating that equalityis a left-wing issue are left-wing traditional politicians rather thanequality campaigners. So, if I take them at their word and assume thatthey want equality to be a left-wing issue, what would theyneed to do to actually make it one?

There are basically three things I'd be looking for to show that aleft-wing (or right-wing, for that matter) traditional politicalorganisation was actually considering equality to be a core part ofits ideology.

A recognition that there is so much overlap between various forms of discrimination that one cannot productively either consider them in isolation or only work against some of them.
A complete renouncement of dehumanisation of both opponents and scapegoats, instead focusing on ending the effects of privilege; and the necessary readjustment of policies and justifications for policies to achieve this.
Successful efforts made to have the officers of the organisation, at all levels (including candidates for public election, if applicable) be at least as representative of all under-privileged groups as the population as a whole.

At the moment I can't think of any major left-wing organisationwhich is even attempting to do all of those things; quite a fewaren't even trying to do any of them.

Footnotes

¹ Certainly there are also right-wing parties andideologies whose ideology is explictly the maintenance and extensionof privilege and discrimination. However, just as not all left-wingparties are particularly good on equality, not all right-wing partiesare irredeemably terrible.

² To save space, I'm not even going into the fact thatmany campaigners against one form of oppression see nothing wrong withand/or deny the existence of other forms - though it is reflected intraditional left-wing politicians who might (for instance) votewholeheartedly for legislation against sexism while also expressingfat-hatred.

Friday Links

2011-06-03T19:17:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: An ex-gay therapist faces sanction - a wider look
Chitra Nagarajan at Black Feminists: Black women, beauty and advertising
An open letter by a feminist: Scotland's City Councils are Clearly in a Competition for 'Feminist Fail'
[trigger warning] s.e. smith: Exploitation Goes By Many Names
bird of paradox: DSM-5 and Transvestic Disorder
We mixed our drinks: Nigella and the feminist act of baking
What Tami Said: Quick rant: Stop saying "X is the last acceptable form of bigotry"
Laura Woodhouse at The F-Word: Why the Right has it wrong on the "sexualisation of children"
Sally Outen at Lashings of Ginger Beer: My Gender Identity
Fawcett Society: Another 150 years until women have an equal say
[trigger warning] The Broken of Britain: Imagine you're four
Harri C Weeks at The F-Word: F to M to feminist
earwicga: Revolution Will Be Feminist Or It Won’t Be

Scapegoating refugees for political advantage continues

2011-06-02T18:42:00.000+01:00

[trigger warning]

So the news today isreporting that the Home Affairs Committee has described the news that40% of asylum cases since 2006 have been given leave to stay in the UKas an "amnesty".

Well, of course they do. The idea that it's even remotely possiblethat anywhere near 40% of asylum claims might actually bejustified is hardly going to be considered by politicianswho view "immigrants" as a convenient scapegoat for all the country'sills.

Cue the usual comments from the usual suspects about "illegalimmigration" and "overstaying visas" - none of which apply to asylumclaims that are pending a decision, but it's useful to that argumentto pretend all immigrants are coming over here to take our jobs andclaim our benefits - and how the government hasn't yet succeeded inbuilding a ten-mile high wall around the country to keep those nastyforeigners out. Except the white English-speaking ones, of course.

The idea that people might actually be claiming asylum because theyface persecution and possibly death in their original country seemsirrelevant - and with large parts of the world being unstable -indeed, with the UK playing its part in keeping large parts of theworld unstable - the idea that 40% or more of claims might bejustified doesn't seem unreasonable.

Given that the [trigger warning] deportationof LGB asylum seekers back to Uganda and other unsafe countries continues, despite assurancesfrom the government that it wouldn't, it seems there's a very strongcase that the UK isn't being generous enough when it comes to savingpeople's lives.

Rape prevention and the government

2011-05-28T14:34:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning]

Inspired by the recent exchange between Baroness Gale and Lord McNally to find out what the government is up to regarding rape prevention, I've sent this letter off to the Equalities Office.

Dear Government Equalities Office,
The response by the government to rape has been highlighted in themedia again recently. On 24 May in the Lords (Hansard HL Deb, 24 May2011, c1682) Baroness Gale asked Lord McNally
"Will the Minister give an undertaking to ensure that there is a public awareness campaign about the laws on rape and consent so that we make it absolutely clear that non-consensual sex is a serious offence?"
Lord McNally replied
"I agree with the noble Baroness that it is time to publicise the seriousness of rape, and I think that that could be started in the schools and by looking at some of the worrying things in advertising, in pop music and in some of the newspapers [...] Some of those should look at where they put the position of women in society and whether they encourage young men to give women the respect that they should have."
The exchange raises a very important point that is often overlooked:while there has been significant progress made in improving thejustice system's response to rape in investigation and prosecution,and in providing more support for the victims of sexual violence, thesheer prevalence of the crime, and the vast number of people willingand able to commit rape, means that such strategies, no matter howeffective, cannot alone solve the problem.
Could you please tell me:
what campaigns to prevent rape and/or to discourage people from choosing to rape has the Equalities Office recently run or have planned?
what other government departments have or will soon run campaigns with similar aims?
what recent studies the Equalities Office has commissioned or is aware of concerning the motivations, psychology and methodology of rapists in the UK, and what, if any, future studies you intend to commission?
Thank you
Yours faithfully
[cim]

Other departments that I might expect¹ to be involved inrape prevention:

Education: obviously good education on consent and respect in general, and in sexual behaviour more specifically, would be beneficial. But how to get around the attitudes normally associated with sex education?
Culture, Media and Sport: as Lord McNally hinted at, advertising and "pop culture" play a large role in reinforcing rape culture. Most of this is privately-produced, so there are limits to the government's powers - but I certainly don't want my taxes going to promote rape apologism and to portray rape or sexual assault as normal sexual behaviour.
Defence: Rape as a weapon of war is very common. There's a role here in both policing conflict areas that we're involved in, and in making sure that our own forces aren't committing rape.
Justice: Beyond the obvious "locking up rapists so they don't do it again", prevention of prison rape and attempting rehabilitation of convicted rapists should be on their agenda. Education of people who were caught for something other than rape would also be beneficial, given the correlation between rape and other violent crimes

Those seem like the obvious ones - I may have missed some. It will be interesting to see what reply I get.

¹ "Expect" as in "this should", not "this is", probably

Friday Links

2011-05-27T18:19:00.002+01:00

Sebastienne at Lashings of Ginger Beer: "Bad Science" and bad science
DavidG at Where's the Benefit: Disabled People, Still Labour's Whipping Boy....
[trigger warning] Too much to say for myself: The Rape Debate
Modus Dopens: An Open Letter
Sunny at Pickled Politics: Racial Profiling at the Met
[trigger warning] The Curvature: Omaha Teacher Retained Position After Multiple Student Allegations of Sexual Assault
redeyedtreefrog at Feminist Philosophers: Want to earn the big bucks? Don’t be fat and female
Richard Shrubb at Liberal Conspiracy: Unions need to do more to support workers with disabilities
[trigger warning] Kevin Healey at Muslimah Media Watch: Sexism and Islamophobia: An Under-Reported Link in Strauss-Kahn Coverage

Sneaking out of public view again?

2011-05-25T19:03:00.003+01:00

[trigger warning]

Parliament discusses rape quite a bit more often than makes thenews - since the latter only seems to happen if one side or anothercan see advantage in drawing journalist's attention to something theiropposition said.

Yesterday had a debatein the Lords with Lord McNally (Liberal Democrat), the Minister ofState for Justice in the Lords, answering questions on sentencing inrape cases.

(There was also a debate in the Commons on Monday - Cath Elliott at Too much to say for myself has more on that, and particularly commends Fiona Mactaggart MP's (Labour, Slough) speech - to that I'd add that the speeches made by Helen Grant MP (Conservative, Maidstone and The Weald) and Jenny Chapman MP (Labour, Darlington) are also well worth a read.)

A few of the exchanges in the Lords debate are interesting in themselves.

The first, from Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour). If you've been lurking here a while, you know what's coming next.

My Lords, would it not be quite wrong for the Government to duck legislating in the area of rape, given the problem we had this last week? In particular, the argument over whether men should have anonymity in rape cases remains outstanding, as does the question of whether women who make false allegations should enjoy the anonymity that they currently enjoy.

Lord McNally's reply is:

I know that the noble Lord has raised these matters on a number of occasions. The Government's sentencing and legal aid Bill will shortly come before the House-or, rather, before Parliament, as it will go to the Commons first-and it will give us a chance to consider again the issues that he has raised consistently. However, his assertion that there are large numbers of false claims for rape is not, as far as I am concerned, borne out by research.

I had hoped that issue was done with for this Parliament, but ofcourse while the Government might no longer want to pursue it, that'snot to say they'll stand in the way of a backbench amendment. TheSentencing and Legal Aid Bill isn't yet on the list ofbills, but it seems like it will need watching.

On the positive side, Baroness Gale (Labour) asks:

My Lords, all incidents of rape are serious and to indicate otherwise sends the wrong message to victims of rape. Will the Minister give an undertaking to ensure that there is a public awareness campaign about the laws on rape and consent so that we make it absolutely clear that non-consensual sex is a serious offence? I believe that this would clear up any misunderstandings that have happened over the past week.

Lord McNally replies:

I do not think that there are misunderstandings from over the past week. There has been no doubt that this Government take rape very seriously, and the Secretary of State takes rape very seriously. The amount of money, even at a time of difficulty in overall spending, has been maintained and the number of rape advice centres has been extended. However, I agree with the noble Baroness that it is time to publicise the seriousness of rape, and I think that that could be started in the schools and by looking at some of the worrying things in advertising, in pop music and in some of the newspapers, which have been so quick in their editorial pages to condemn my right honourable friend. Some of those should look at where they put the position of women in society and whether they encourage young men to give women the respect that they should have. That might be a start.

Effective government initiatives designed to directlyoppose rape culture, and especially to stop men from picking up theattitudes that lead to far too many of them becoming rapists, would beextremely welcome. Prevention is far more important thandetection and punishment, where rapists are concerned.

It seems to me to be worthwhile to try to get that bandwagonrolling by contacting the various departments and Ministers who mightbe most involved with this.

It would of course be essential for the government to actuallyconsult with rape victims and survivors, support organisations, and soon, to make sure that it was effective and to prevent a repeat of someof the disastrous victim-blaming campaigns that have come out in thepast.

Edit: Given that one of the key areas would be Sex and Relationships Education in schools, this is going to be an uphill struggle.

Useful Tools: They Work For You

2011-05-23T18:49:00.000+01:00

There are quite a number of useful tools for activists that oftenget ignored, or that people haven't yet heard about, which can save alot of time and effort to get the information you need.

This post looks at one that is very useful for keeping an eye onParliament: "They Work For You".

Please leave recommendations for other tools in the comments - Ihave a few more I want to do, but since these are far less famous thanthey deserve, there's probably plenty more that I don't knowabout.

They Work For You

They Work For You - http://www.theyworkforyou.com/- is a heavily reformatted Hansard (the official record of the UKParliament). It has several advantages over using the original:

A nicer interface than Hansard, with speeches more clearly separated; photographs, party affiliations, constituency and Ministerial responsibilities of MPs displayed; as well as inline links and cross-references for common terms.
An excellent search that actually has a good chance of finding what you were looking for. Having performed a search, you can then set up an alert (either email or RSS) and be updated every time a new entry matching your search appears.
Without this facility, the Parliamentary Timeline wouldn't have existed - it quite literally turned it from impossible to practical.
Link to a single speech on its own or in the context of the debate. You can do this with Hansard, but not quite as easily.
The same good interface covers Commons debates, Lords debates, Westminster Hall "informal" debates, and Written answers and statements. This is where a lot of the work of Parliament goes on, largely out of public view. Some of the answers include quite detailed quantitative data - it's often worth checking here before making a Freedom of Information request to a government department: you can save yourself some time if an MP has got a suitable answer already.
Summaries of MPs, including data drawn from other sites. Very useful for seeing what your own MP is up to, or finding out which Lords might be interested in your issues.
Also covers the three devolved Parliaments and Assemblies to the same standard, and with the same search interface.

It's extremely useful if the issue that you're dealing with is political in the Parliamentary sense. Less useful otherwise, but there might be something interesting hidden in a written answer or an un-publicised debate.

Friday Links

2011-05-20T17:55:00.001+01:00

Lisybabe: ♫...So scared of breaking it that you won't let it bend...♫
Phillipa Willetts at The F-Word: 1 in 6 women would rather be blind than fat - so?
Zero at the Bone: Who is “we”?
[trigger warning] s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: Getting Some Nuance Up In Your Reproductive Rights and ‘But, his reputation will be ruined! And what about France?’
Gwen Sharp at Sociological Images: Institutional Encouragement of Gender Norms
eastsidekate at Shakesville: Women: Should they have autonomy?
Diary of a benefit scrounger: Why Labour still have it wrong on ESA
[trigger warning] Two whole cakes: So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria*
Complicity: Free sex change and relationship breakup, thanks to the census
HarpyMarx: Stop demonising disabled people and To disclose or not to disclose that is the question…..
[trigger warning] The Curvature: New Congo Rape Statistics Inspire Competitive Headlines, Not Much Else
[trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: On GBLT genocide
[trigger warning] Ethar El-Katatney at Muslimah Media Watch: The Sexy Business of Political Uprisings: Sijal Hachem’s “Khalas”
Latoya Peterson at Racialicious: How to Debunk Pseudo-Science Articles about Race in Five Easy Steps
[trigger warning] Discipline and Anarchy: The DSK Affair – An Angry Rant
[trigger warning] Diary of a Goldfish: Abstinence, Victim-Blaming & Female Empowerment

On Clarke's policy and comments

2011-05-19T20:40:00.002+01:00

[trigger warning: rape, prison]

So, the big news recently is that Kenneth Clarke MP (Conservative,Rushcliffe, Minister for Justice) has made some comments aboutrape. As with a previousoccasion, what he said was appalling, but it still wasn'tparticularly good even just considering what he meant.

The BBC has helpfully provided atranscript of the interview.

A bit of background: Clarke is considerably more liberal onpunishment than the average Conservative, concentrating more onalternatives to prison. This has brought him into conflict with bothhis own party and with Labour, who generally support the "lock 'em upand try not to think too hard about what to do next" approach tosentencing.

At the moment, a suspect who pleads guilty can expect to have theirsentence reduced by up to a third. Clarke proposed that this beincreased to a possible reduction of a half, for all crimes.

Labour opposed this, and Clarke's junior minister, Crispin Blunt MP(Conservative, Reigate) gaverape victims as an example of people who would benefit from earlyguilty pleas. Sadiq Khan MP (Labour, Tooting) askeda follow-up question, which Clarke then answered.

The press reporting then concentrated on the effects on sentencingfor rape, and Clarke gave the interview above.

He has since clarified that he thinks "all rape is a serious crime"and that he had made the "wrong choice of words" earlier.

So, two things:

On Clarke himself

He is not the best person for picking the right words, which is apolitical liability, though not a moral one. However, I think hisproblems regarding the treatment of rape cases go beyond that.

I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt that, intellectually,he gets that all rape is serious, that rape without additionalviolence is still serious, that rape within a relationship is serious,and so on. The problem is that he doesn't appear to instinctivelyunderstand this.

So, when he's under pressure - in an interview or in the Commons -and doesn't have the luxury of thinking it through, he says thingsthat he wouldn't otherwise say.

I don't think he should be sacked as Minister for Justice over this- bad as his instinctive attitudes on this issue are, they're fairlytypical for a privileged man who's spent their whole life soaking uprape culture, and so I have no confidence that anyone the coalitionpicks as a replacement would be any better. (Yes, there are people onthe coalition benches who would be far better on this issue, butthey're not likely to get the job if Clarke steps down)

I would, however, recommend that he does a lot more reading of theresearch on rape and rapists, until it starts to sink in at aninstinctive level. It would - as well as the general benefits tosociety of having a Justice Minister who got this - make it lesslikely his verbal slip-ups would be in the pro-rape direction.

One of the exchanges in the transcript that hasn't yet been widelypicked up on is this one:

Derbyshire (interviewer): Have you met women who've been raped?
Clarke: I've taken part in rape trials. I was a lawyer, sort of, yes I've met women who've been raped.
Derbyshire: And have you put this idea to women who've been raped?
Clarke: No I haven't put this idea to women who've been raped because I haven't met one recently. My experience of rape trials….

Now, the idea of halving sentences for guilty pleas has been aroundfor a while. I can find news reports from late 2010 that talk about itas a policy proposal that had already been introduced by the coalition.

Quite evidently the chances that Clarke has met no women who havebeen raped since then are zero. He might not have sat down with anyoneto ask "as a rape victim, how do you feel about this plan?" (though,one might think that asking the people a policy will supposedlybenefit might be a good start) - but that's not quite the samething. (Derbyshire's first question from the exchange isn't useful formuch the same reason)

Intellectually, but not instinctively.¹

On the policy

It all comes down to the details, of course, but I think the policyin general is fairly good - and it would be a shame if it was lostbecause Blunt and Clarke can't keep their feet out of their respectivemouths.

Prison - in contradiction to former MP Michael Howard(Conservative, Lords) and current MP Jack Straw (Labour, Blackburn) -does not work all that well. For crimes so severe that lifeimprisonment is appropriate for the protection of society, it'snecessary.

For other crimes, society - those parts of society living outsidethe prison walls, at least - may be temporarily protected while theoffender is in prison, but unless successful work is done onrehabilitation, that often stops when they're released again.

We don't know anything like as much about rehabilitation as weshould - because it's been far easier for politicians to go for apopulist "lock 'em up" approach. So keeping people on average inprison for less time, and using the significant savings to fund moreand better rehabilitation programs, seems an excellent idea ingeneral.

What about for rape?

From what we know about rapists, any rapist who actually getscaught has probably committed several rapes that most people don'tknow about. (Weinrott andSaylor's research, for instance, estimates an average of 10,though with significant variance). Numerous studies into undetectedrapists have shown that they will readily admit to raping people -provided they're asked "did you do action X?" not "did you do action Xwhich is rape?".

The likelihood of a released rapist reoffending is therefore almostcertainly really high. Effective intervention and rehabilitation -given that we don't give most rapists a life sentence - wouldtherefore significantly reduce the number of rapes. Letting a rapistout after two years, with effective rehabilitation so that they don'treoffend, is far better than letting them out after four years withoutthat and having them continue their crimes (I'm assuming an average8-year basic sentence, halved for general parole, halved again for anearly guilty plea).

(Starting early on the rehabilitation might also prevent themcommitting more rapes while in prison, which is an aspect of the crimeand punishment debate which gets swept under the carpet rather toooften)

Can two years of prison costs, targeted on someone who entered avery early guilty plea and so is perhaps more likely to be reformable,deliver a highly effective rehabilitation programme? I've absolutelyno idea. That's for government researchers to figure out, and as Isaid, it all comes down to the details.

It seems, to me, that if after doing that research it looksfeasible, that it's got to be worth trying. We can't end rape bylocking up all the rapists - there's just too many of them by severalorders of magnitude. That's not to say that temporary imprisonmentof the ones we catch won't help, but it can't solve the problem.

Prevention of rapes, by preventing people from becoming rapists,and convincing existing rapists to stop, is the only way that rapewill stop being such a major problem. Imprisonment is a fairlyineffective way to convince rapists to stop - we need somethingbetter. If Labour and the Conservatives are going to unite behind a"tough on crime" populist stance every time alternatives aresuggested, this won't happen soon.

Footnote

¹As an aside, this is yet another problem with having MPs and seniorcivil servants mainly come from the most multiply-privileged sectionof society (which is unsurprisingly also the section least likely tobe raped). A government and civil service that more reflected whoactually lives in society would notice these things before the publicmistakes.

"Intellectually, but not instinctively" is the reason whywell-meaning privileged allies are no substitute for people with livedexperience, and that includes in Parliament. The counter-argument thatMPs have to represent all their constituents really misses thedifference. I've writtenabout this before.

Journalists downplay rape prevalence in DR Congo

2011-05-12T18:42:00.001+01:00

[trigger warning]

Several news sources are reporting on thisstudy on rape prevalence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Theheadlines are all along the lines of "48 rapes per hour" or "1100rapes a day". Here's the BBCarticle.

My first thought on reading the headline? "That's really low."Somewhere between study, press release and news article, they'velost some really important details.

The "shocking" figure they quote is - while absolutely terrible -only a fraction of the real problem.

The UK is a similar size to the DRC, in terms of population (62million and 67 million respectively). Going from British Crime Survey data, my lowbound for the number of rapes annually in the UK is around200,000. It's a low estimate because the BCS data doesn't coverchildren or people aged 60 or over, but it gives a rough estimate.

The reporting claims the figure for the DRC to be around400,000. Worse, even accounting for the slightly higher population,but not much worse.

"UK: 20 rapes every hour, study finds" would be an equally accurateheadline (and perhaps expressing it like that might shock a few peopleinto action).

The figure for the DRC is considerably higher - not just twice as bad as the UK

The study, according to the article, only covers women and girls aged 15-49. Like the BCS, that misses out a lot of people (and, indeed, the authors of the study acknowledge this)
The figure of just over 400,000 is not how many rapes occurred, but how many women were raped in the last 12 months. Like the BCS, it doesn't measure multiple victimisation. Given that the lifetime estimate is only four times higher, there must be a lot of multiple victimisation going on.
They also note a figure of over 3 million women experiencing "intimate partner sexual violence", though the abstract doesn't say whether this is lifetime or annual. It's not quite clear how this figure relates to the initial count, but from the Guardian reporting it seems to be a separate figure, and includes yet more rapes. Not at all surprising - but imagine how much better the UK's figures would look if they only counted stranger rapes; now think about what that implies for the DRC figures.
Unlike the BCS, the figures this study were based on don't appear to have had the same effort put into avoiding reporting stigma (Dr Peterman explicitly mentions this as a cause of underestimation).

Add all that together and this study is still a massive underestimate.

It's also a big increase on previous estimates - which says a lot about those estimates.

That rate is significantly higher than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the UN.

If anyone at the UN actually believed that figure - again, only about twice the number reported in the UK - to be remotely accurate, they would have been congratulating the DRC on its successful strategies against sexual violence. Clearly, no-one actually did - the UN staff are not naive! But again, it's measuring something completely different - and the DRC government points out that the difference between the two figures is due to reporting and collection, not a change in the number of actual rapes.

But I don't think the journalists get just how high rape prevalence is in countries like the UK, or they wouldn't print things like (BBC):

The highest numbers of rapes were found in war-ravaged North Kivu, where an average of 67 women out of 1,000 have been raped at least once.

...which, back of envelope, makes North Kivu noticeably safer than the UK. Or it could be - as the authors of the study state - a severe underestimate.

If UK journalists - and the public as a whole - were actually awarehow many rapes took place in their own country, then they might nothave to have the obvious underestimates here pointed out to them -underestimates that make the DRC's problems with rape look nowherenear as bad as they actually are.

In an effort to get the reporting to be more accurate, here's themessage I sent to BBCComplaints - I also sent a similar one to the Guardian regardingtheirarticle (to reader@guardian.co.uk). I didn't even get into theextra 3 million, since I wanted to keep the initial complaintshort. I'll mention it if they get back to me.

Dear Editors,
Your article reported that "A study by US scientists has concludedthat an average of 48 women and girls are raped every hour in theDemocratic Republic of Congo.". The study actually concludes somethingfar worse than this - the figure of 400,000 a year from which thehourly rate is derived is the number of women and girls raped at leastonce in the last twelve months. Dividing this into hours forgets thatmany will be raped far more than just once. Furthermore it ignores thestatements made - and reported on - by Dr Amber Peterman that theestimate from their study is likely to be a significant underestimate.
This becomes obvious when you consider the comparable rate for theUK. The British Crime Survey finds that around 70,000 people betweenthe ages of 16 and 59 have been raped at least once in the last twelvemonths. Studies on multiple victimisation suggest that many rapevictims are raped more than once, for an estimate of around 200,000rapes each year in the UK - or around 20 every hour.
Similarly, your article gives a lifetime victimisation rate for theworst area - North Kivu - of 67 in 1,000 - a rate that is actuallysomewhat less bad than the equivalent rate for women in the UK.
I'm not suggesting that rape in the UK is as prevalent as it is in theDRC - though "UK: 20 rapes every hour, studies show" is a horrifyingstatistic in its own right - but by doing a simple division yourheadline and article actually hides the true scale of the problem inthe DRC.
Please correct the article - especially the headline and ledeparagraph - to better reflect the original study.
Yours faithfully
[me]

More bad education policy, more misguided criticism of same

2011-05-11T19:39:00.000+01:00

Education funding policy is back in the news again afterjournalists noticed that David Willetts MP (Conservative, Havant,Minister for Universities and Science) had suggested that in additionto the publicly-funded places, universities should be able to offerunfunded places to UK students, with the fees payable up front.

Cue massive misplaced outrage about the rich being able to buyuniversity places.

The proposals had a lot wrong with them, and they appear to bebeing either quietly dropped or quietly hidden for a few weeks. Thatthey let the rich buy university places was not one of theproblems.

A quick recap

Undergraduate places available to UK applicants are subject to astrict quota, with universities facing harsh penalties to eitherunder- or over-recruiting to that quota¹. Since theuniversities have to make offers to most potential undergraduateswithout knowing if those undergraduates would make the grade, thiscauses a lot of tension among admissions departments, since making thewrong number of offers is a very costly mistake.

On the other hand, if there wasn't a penalty, then the governmentcould be required to pay for far more places than it had budgeted for(yes, they're going to end up doing this anyway)

Places for international undergraduates are not subject to anydirect² quota - universities can recruit as many suitablyqualified applicants as they can attract. However, there is no UKpublic funding for these students (though some may obtain grants fromtheir home country's government, of course) and so they must pay thefull costs of their degree - which can be whatever the universitydeclares them to be.

The proposal would allow (or rather have allowed) universities toalso supply "off-quota" places to UK students, on the same terms. Thiswould quite clearly not have worked.

Why it was (yet another) doomed idea

Students needing these places are the ones who have failed tosuccessfully compete with the other UK undergraduates for thepublicly-funded places. That doesn't make them underqualified -universities reject plenty of straight-A students - but it does meanthat they're unlikely to do any better competing against theinternational undergraduates for the off-quota places.

While there's no externally-imposed limit on how many off-quotaundergraduates a university can take, there are plenty of internallimits. Lecture theatre capacities, availability of academics toteach, and for some universities the availability of accommodation forstudents are all limiting factors. Being willing to pay the off-quotafees doesn't avoid competition - it just gives a second chance.

Since the students who go to study abroad tend to be the best acountry has to show, getting a place on this second chance is probablygoing to be even harder than getting one of the publicly-fundedplaces.

The idea was that the fees would be paid from corporate or charitysponsorship, rather than directly by the student - but what company³ isgoing to sponsor someone to go to university who couldn't get an offerthe normal way? Far more cost effective for them to provide someliving-cost grants to several students who did get in.

The number of UK students who actually took an off-quota place -and bear in mind anyone rich enough to do this could study abroadinstead - would be tiny.

Like many of this government's policy ideas, it seems to be a wayto generate controversy, reinforce their reputation (both constituentparties) as a party for the default, and not actually help any of thepeople they were nominally supporting.

Not buying places for the rich

What this outrage basically ignores is that the ultra-rich can anddo already buy university places for their children.

The admissions processes of universities try to be fair and judgeeach candidate on their merits. This just isn't possible from a fewexpected grades, a short personal statement, and maybe a 10 minuteinterview - especially not with the number of applications that needprocessing - but universities generally do their best.

The problem is that - as with everything else - a context-freeequality of treatment just gives the advantage to those who alreadyhave privilege. Rich families can give their children many of:

A home environment focused on academic learning⁴
Private schooling
Interview practice (especially for Oxbridge)
Private tutors
Access to expensive extra-curricular activities, including gap years, that look good on a personal statement

Middle-class families can give their children enough of thoseprivileges to give them a good chance at a place as well, which is whythere's not much wider complaint about this arrangement.

Being outraged that the rich would be able to buy their childrenuniversity places at market rates rather than subsidised rates israther strange, in that context - I'm sure that if a "left-wing" grouphad proposed means-testing fees support so that the ultra-rich weren'tentitled to any and had to pay up front, there would have been verylittle complaint⁵.

Footnotes (and extended asides)

¹ The total quota for all UK universities is smallerthan the number of people who would like a UK undergraduateplace. This is a major reason why the whole "market in highereducation" won't work - as can be seen by the vast majority ofuniversities declaring at £9,000 - demand outstrips supply. Thethreats of "A uni that as an Oxbridge graduate I consider a Third RateEx-Poly can't charge £9,000 - students will go elsewhere" thatministers were making were completely empty: applicants have nowhereelse to go except "not to university at all".

Then recall that students are effectively not paying the fees withtheir own money due to the extremely generous loan repayment terms(which resemble a tax more than a loan), for many students therepayments when/if they graduate on a £7,000 a year degree andon a £9,000 a year degree will be exactly identical; for therest there will be relatively little difference, and earning a salaryin excess of £40,000 a year^1a will probably make themuninclined to care.

So demand is higher than supply, and the difference between the lowand high prices is negligible. No-one has an incentive to charge a lowprice, and no-one has any economic reason not to pay. (Fear of debt,because of all the huge numbers being thrown around, is a reasonablebut not economically sound reason)

I've actually been quite surprised by how many universities haven'tdeclared £9k fees across the board - I expect by 2014 orthereabouts the fees will have crept up to this.

^1a I'm not saying all graduates will go on to a 40k orabove salary - I'm saying that only those who do will notice adifference in repayments between those two costs of degrees.

² The whole "wewill cap immigration to a round number whether it's a good idea ornot" policy that the government is imposing does provide a nationallimit. This has already led to conflicts on international studentnumbers between the government departments responsible for racism("keep those foreigners out!") and money ("they're willing to pay tensof thousands to UK organisations, let them in!")

³ Of course, a family rich enough to afford the up-frontfees can probably also afford a front company to pay the grant, butthey can probably also afford to just buy the place theold-fashioned way.

⁴ And because this is something that the rich provide,academic learning becomes morally more valuable than other ways inwhich a home environment can be good.

⁵ I would have objected to this, because the problemwith this means-testing (and it's a problem with the existing set-uptoo) is that it assumes that the only barrier to all young applicantsto university getting financial support from their families is theirwealth. Applicants whose families don't want to fund them throughuniversity but theoretically could get the short end of this stick.

The NUS LGBT campaign has been pointing out from years that thestudents they represent are particularly vulnerable to their familyrefusing financial support; they're not the only un-privileged groupof students this applies to.