Abstract
Debating Trafficking
While activists against human trafficking—the illegal trade of human beings mainly for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor—claim that it is one the most egregious forms of exploitation, scholars say that such claims are vastly overstated.
Sociologist Ronald Weitzer (“Sex Trafficking and the Sex Industry: The Need for Evidence-Based Theory and Legislation,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2012) notes that dominant discourse, influenced by anti-trafficking activists, inaccurately presents human trafficking as a problem involving millions of victims, and that it makes sweeping generalizations about the individuals involved. But as criminal justice scholars Ko-Lin Chin and James Finckenauer (Selling Sex Overseas: Chinese Women and the Realities of Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking, 2012) show, migrants’ degree of consent and knowledge of working conditions vary widely. What they have in common is the desire for upwardly mobility.
These and other scholars also challenge sinister caricatures of the trafficker, showing that many third-party recruiters and facilitators are parents, relatives, friends, and associates, and are not necessarily exploiting innocent victims.
While sex and labor trafficking can be coercive and highly exploitative economically, these more nuanced social science analyses can help policy analysts identify specific risk factors for genuine cases of victimization.
Sarah Duda
Apps for Autism
TOBY Playpad by Autism West
Apple’s application marketplace boasts over half a million apps, ranging from games to productivity tools. Now, the store also offers apps for autism.
In fact, there are currently over 200 apps for autism, according to speech pathologist Lois Brady. Some apps, like TOBY Playpad, help caregivers teach children early learning concepts. Others, like Proloquo2go and TapToTalk, help users overcome difficulties with speaking and communication. AutismXpress helps users identify emotions. And one app, called Look in My Eyes, helps individuals practice eye contact. Some suggest the technology has revolutionized autism treatment.
Technology has transformed how we diagnose disorders, understand illness, interact with medical authorities, and even relate to our own bodies. In a 2010 article in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, sociologists Monica Casper and Daniel Morrison argue that these transformative technologies include vaccines, ultrasound machines, artificial joints, genetic mapping, and even electronic medical records.
Some suggest that these technologies help drive medicalization, the process through which personal problems are defined as medical concerns. But sociologist Andrew Webster, writing in Current Sociology in 2002, argues that technology is not necessarily expanding medicine’s domain. By “open[ing] the medical black bag,” he writes, technology may in fact loosen doctors’ control over treatment.
While some therapists incorporate apps into their treatment, one doesn’t need to consult a doctor or obtain a prescription to benefit from them. Clearly, they allow consumers to take medical treatment into their own hands. But apps aren’t for everyone. Nor can everyone afford these technologies. And some people, in the end, prefer to interact with a good old-fashioned human being.
Better Helmets, Worse Injuries
Last May, when former San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau, who had suffered from numerous concussions, committed suicide, fans and pundits called for the improvement of helmets, suggesting they would reduce the risk of concussion. But safer helmets could exacerbate violence in sports such as football and ice hockey.
In their 1999 book chapter, “Rock Climbers and Rugby Players: Identity Construction and Confirmation,” sport sociologists Peter Donnelly and Kevin Young discuss the idea of a macho culture in sports that encourages players to play aggressively and be reckless. Players often fear that if they do not conform to this culture they will be ridiculed by peers, jeered by fans, and punished by coaches. By providing players with the impression that they can play more aggressively, with less fear of getting hurt, safer helmets may exacerbate the risks in this aggressive sports culture.
Rather than improve safety technology, football and hockey leagues need to address the underlying aggressive sports culture. Some are already doing so, enforcing rules about head contact and emphasizing in-game penalties instead of exclusively using fines or suspensions—changes designed to make players slow down and think about their actions, and avoid in-game penalties that hurt the entire team—versus fines or suspensions, which target an individual. These changes are more likely to promote safer play.
Sayada Ramdial
Dangerous Shame
In recent years there have been 17 incidents of school killings in the United States, resulting in 189 deaths, 280 injuries, and 11 suicides. The murder of school children is a growing social problem, as the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut showed. Yet relatively little is known about the motives of those who kill children.
Criminologist Neil Websdale, who studied over 200 perpetrators who killed their own partners and children, provides one explanation. Using detailed materials provided by the Domestic Violence Fatality Review movement (a national group of volunteers which investigates incidents of domestic violence, interviewing police, surviving family members, and neighbors), Websdale found that a majority of the killings occurred in rages by men with a history of aggression. For a substantial minority of the killers, who were more middle class, there was no prior history of violence, and these murders were often carefully premeditated.
Websdale shows that rage is often a way of hiding shame and humiliation. Losing a job, for example, can lead to feelings of unbearable humiliation. His findings strongly support the thesis that secret shame is an important, underappreciated cause of violence—including violence against children.
War: Unhealthy for Children
“War is not healthy for children and other living things” was a popular slogan of the anti-war movements of the 1960s. But new research shows that it’s not just war that’s hazardous: excessive military spending also significantly increases children’s mortality rates.
Sociologist Steve Carlton-Ford, in a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver last year, suggested that when military spending per soldier substantially exceeds the average national income, child mortality rates jump dramatically.
While “moderate” military spending may not affect child mortality rates, spending on civil wars, the predominant form of war since WWII, destroys economies and leads to sudden increases in infant and child mortality rates.
Among the top 25 percent of countries in terms of military spending, child mortality rates are more than double those of lower spending countries, with an average of 117 child deaths per thousand, far exceeding average rates of between 30 and 50 child deaths.
The impact of military spending on child mortality rates holds even after considering the effects of civil war, basic levels of military spending, the size of armies, economic development, government corruption, and type of government.
It all goes to show that war isn’t healthy for children. And neither is military spending.
Freeway Fliers
It is no secret that part-time teaching staff are shouldering a larger percentage of the postsecondary teaching load, and are not receiving fair compensation. Commonly dubbed “freeway fliers,” these contingent faculty are flexible, ready on a dime, and seemingly inexhaustible. But at what cost?
Recently, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) in a national survey of faculty, found that approximately half of all college-level instructors in the United States now teach in contingent positions, off the tenure track—not including full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members or graduate student teaching assistants.
Freeway fliers tend to be paid rock-bottom wages: the median pay per three-credit course ranges from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges, to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities. (Unionized faculty adjuncts tend to fare a bit better.) Health and retirement benefits are scarce, and many experience little or no job security, even after years of teaching for the same academic employer.
Ken Bruzenak
Over 80 percent reported teaching part-time for more than three years, and over half for more than six years. These part-time faculty saw little, if any, wage premiums based on their credentials.
Approximately three quarters of respondents said that if a more permanent and secure position were offered, they would eagerly take it. Burdened by anxieties about course load uncertainty and often disconnected from other faculty and from general participation in campus life, theirs is a solitary business.
The enormous changes now taking place in higher education nationally have faculty of all ranks worried. Part-time faculty, the fastest growing sector of the academic labor force, are particularly vulnerable.
Making Food Slower
We love caramelized onions, but do we have the time to cook them? Slate writer Tom Scocca recently ranted about recipe writers’ widespread fabrication about the time it takes to do the job properly—45 minutes, he insists, rather than the five minutes some recipes claim. Scocca believes that consumers’ demand for quick and easy dinners is pressuring writers to mislead their readers.
This push for quick and easy dinners is driven in part by the entrance of women into the labor force and the greater profit potential of processed foods, says professor Marion Nestle in her [2002] 2007 book Food Politics; How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
In response, activists suggest that “slow food” unites enjoyment of food with healthy lifestyles, community ties, and environmental stability. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), reconnecting people with farmers, has also grown in popularity over the last decade.
Bridget Beorse
Most Americans now work more than 40 hours a week, making faster food convenient, if not essential. Sociologist Marcia Ostrom’s 2008 chapter, “Community Supported Agriculture as an Agent of Change; Is it Working?” [Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability] describes CSA members’ “supermarket withdrawal”: their complaints about lack of variety, unfamiliar produce, or an excess of veggies. While eating local may sound appealing, it may entail eating Swiss chard or kale for dinner three times a week.
All of the demands placed on us daily can, at times, make the simple act of making dinner feel like a herculean task. Sometimes it’s just easier to pretend that caramelizing onions only takes five minutes. But the slow food movement forces us to think carefully about the way we eat.