Wed, 31 Aug 1994 06:26:26 -0700 for Date: Wed, 31 Aug 1994 07:26:23 -0600 (MDT) From: rebel palm aitchison Subject: Re: fear To: Michael Gibbons Hi Michael---re: the q's in your post not being addressed: yeah, I noticed that. Same thing happened in my post about journals publishing only confirmatory findings and my q's about the integrity of our field. Anyway, without deliberately trying to sound fatuous, here's my contribution. Before we start, are we INDEED "one of the most brutal industrialized nations on the earth"?? What is the definition (i.e. operationalization) of "brutal"? Are we measuring it by murders by guns (in an earlier discussion, someone mentioned that more deaths occur by other means such as knives, beating with fists or other implements, etc). Do vehicular homicides count? Does involuntary manslaughter count? Or do we measure "brutality" by the barbarism (needs to be operationalized also) of such practices as vaginal circumcision or killing of female babies as in India (has India made it to the periphery yet or is it still considered underdeveloped? economic dependency isn't my area)? Seems to me there's plenty of brutality in lots of societies--did anyone see the segment on one of those "all look the same" TV magazines about the American who married a woman from an Amazonian tribe and brought her to the US? The segment followed them on their return to the Amazon to visit her family. She described being raped many times by men in her tribe as a child and it seemed like a practice endured by the women as a part of their "culture". Yet she still preferred to live there and ended up divorcing her American husband. Maybe it's what kind of violence you're used to. I digress. I agree that we, as a nation, seem to thrive on fear. We look for bogeymen in every passing face. Was it FDR who said, all we have to fear is fear itself? Sociologically speaking, it occurs to me that the fear has become as institutionalized as the things (we think) we're afraid of. And I think a lot of it has to do with the way statistics are reported. Such as, "there are 462 handgun deaths a year in the US". Okay, but out of how many deaths altogether?? Is that up or down in relation to the increase in population? And whose handguns? It seems to me that there are a lot of repeat offenders and (oh my God, scandalously politically incorrect!) a lot of repeat victims. That's just off the top of my head and one of these days I'll sit down and research it for real. It took several years for reporters of statistics to sort out that childnappings weren't being committed by strangers for the most part, but were in the majority being perpetrated by someone known. Yet the fear of strangers has been created and persists. Same with rapes, etc, etc. I think before we go off labelling nations are this or that, we ought (since that's what we're being trained to do, isn't it??) to make sure that statistics are being collected, operationalised, measured, and reported according to the standards we're being taught. Maybe that can be part of our social responsibility--to make sure that media types who aren't as well trained as we are (we presume) get their methods straight. Just keep calling them on their reporting blunders until they get it right. On Mon, 29 Aug 1994, Michael Gibbons wrote: > to join the discussion. how do we as a nation deal with a fear of crime > that is at least as debilitating as the fact of crime without ignoring the > real problems of living in one of the most brutal industrialized nations > on the earth? > > michael > >