Sunday, March 25, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
The Warlord Vs. The Hipsters
Monday, Mar. 26, 2012
The Warlord Vs. The Hipsters
The town of Obo lies on a bend of a remote river in a nameless forest in a country whose name--Central African Republic--is generic.
A few miles from Africa's pole of inaccessibility, its farthest point from any ocean, Obo's 15,000 residents build houses of cane and palm thatch, have neither power nor running water and come together at the town church, where the priest still summons his flock with a wooden drum, or at its rudimentary hospital, which boasts a single doctor. Outside town, in any direction, are hundreds of miles of forest, home to nomads, Pygmies and hippos. Yet Obo is on somebody's map. On a bluff down a dead-end track on the western edge of town, past a police post to which a baby chimpanzee is tied by a string, stands a new construction: a 7-ft.-high (2 m) reed fence enclosing several grass huts. When a TIME photographer and I approach, two stern white faces pop up on the other side. "You're not allowed in here," says one, in American-accented English. "Speak to our public-affairs office in Entebbe [Uganda]." And the face disappears.
What are 30 U.S. special-operations troops doing in one of the most far-flung places on earth? Special ops' code of secrecy notwithstanding, their mission is a matter of public record. In May 2010, Congress passed the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, mandating that the President "eliminate the threat to civilians and regional stability" posed by the LRA. That November, President Obama said his strategy was to back local efforts in Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic (CAR) "to maintain pressure on the LRA, both militarily and diplomatically ... specifically, the urgent challenges of apprehending or removing Joseph Kony from the battlefield." That led, in December 2011, to the deployment of 30 special-operations troops to the CAR and 70 more to Uganda, Congo and South Sudan to help advise local forces on how to hunt down the LRA and arrest or kill its leader, Kony.
To which a reasonable response might be "Who?" Or it might have been until March 5, when a San Diego--based advocacy group called Invisible Children released a 29-minute film on the Internet called Kony 2012. Invisible Children called on activists to make Kony the most famous war criminal on earth, thus raising the political will to speed his arrest or death. It was one of many films about the LRA the group has made since 2003, but for some reason Kony 2012 became a phenomenon. Invisible Children wanted 500,000 views. According to the group, the film got a million in 24 hours. After 48 hours, it had a million every 30 minutes. Six days after its release, 85 million people had watched the film, by then translated into 50 languages.
Invisible Children found itself the sudden focus of lavish praise and scathing criticism. Effusive backing came from a host of Senators, Representatives and celebrities as well as International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who told the BBC, "They've mobilized the world." But academics and bloggers, particularly Africans, criticized the group for overstating the threat--with 150 to 200 mostly barefoot fighters, the LRA has never been weaker--while Ugandan video blogger Rosebell Kagumire became a Web hit herself when she attacked Invisible Children's staff for casting themselves as "heroes rescuing African children." Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell, who has starred in a number of the group's previous, less popular films, seems genuinely surprised by the furor. The film is "changing the world," he told TIME as Kony 2012 approached 100 million views. At the same time, he added with equal bewilderment, "people are calling me the devil."
Who are Invisible Children? Why are 100 American commandos helping local forces pursue a tiny guerrilla army in Central Africa that poses no threat to the U.S.? Did the phenomenal interest generated by Invisible Children help shape the President's decision to send in the troops?
Stumbling upon a Cause
It is March 2003, a few days before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and three San Diego slackers, childhood friends now wearing baseball caps and goatees, are explaining to the camera why they are going to Africa to make a film about a 47-year civil war that has cost 2 million lives. "We are naive kids that have not traveled a lot, and we are going to Sudan," says Bobby Bailey, 21. Laren Poole, 19, rambles on about how "media is life, it defines your life. So it's an obvious choice for three kids who want to find the truth." In a voice-over, a 24-year-old Russell adds, somewhat superfluously, "None of us knew what we were doing."
Russell, Poole and Bailey make it to Sudan but find no fighting. After filming themselves vomiting, setting anthills on fire and chopping a snake in half, they follow a trail of Sudanese refugees south to northern Uganda. When they approach the town of Gulu, a truck in front of them is shot at and two people are killed. Forced to stay in Gulu, they film as thousands of children show up at nightfall and sleep on street corners, in a bus park, in hospital corridors. "Needless to say," narrates Russell, "we found our story."
Bailey, Poole and Russell had found the fallout of the LRA's war: tens of thousands of children who wouldn't sleep at home for fear of being abducted by the rebels. The crisis was not new. The LRA was founded in northern Uganda in 1986 to oust Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, whose troops tore through the north when Museveni, a southerner, seized power that year. The LRA never seriously challenged Museveni, and the group might have remained forever obscure but for one thing: Kony is one of the cruelest and most twisted men ever to hold a gun. His MO runs to rape, murder, mutilation and cannibalism, and he sustains his group by pillaging villages, stealing food and abducting children to take as soldiers and wives.
Former LRA abductees describe Kony as a messianic sociopath--amiable one minute, murderous the next. Emmanuel Dada, 33, who was abducted from Obo in March 2008 and forced to fight and kill for the LRA before escaping a year later, tells TIME that Kony, a preacher, had a unique take on the Bible: "Kony told us, 'The Bible says if you are going to do good, do good all your life, and if you are going to do evil, do evil all your life. I chose evil, and that's what I will always do.'"
Over the years, the LRA, fleeing intermittent attacks, spread from Uganda to Congo, then South Sudan, then the CAR. Kony raised the cost of confronting him with a series of massacres. "I killed too many to count," says Dada. "They forced me to kill an old man. He was just doing nothing, just sitting there, and I beat him to death with a stick." By the time Bailey, Poole and Russell stumbled across the LRA, the cumulative damage was staggering. Despite the LRA's never having mustered more than a few thousand fighters, the U.N. estimated that the group had killed tens of thousands, abducted tens of thousands more and displaced 1.5 million.
In 2005, Kony became the first individual to be indicted by the newly established International Criminal Court in the Hague. Editing their first film, titled Invisible Children: Rough Cut, back in San Diego in 2003, Bailey, Poole and Russell told themselves they could help bring Kony to justice by showing people what the LRA was doing. "In our world," says Russell, "abducting children, cutting people's faces off, making children eat their friends--that just doesn't happen. We thought, Once people know about this, it's going to end in a year." For greater impact, the three decided on direct distribution. In 2004 and '05, they traveled from high schools to college campuses, screening Invisible Children for hundreds of thousands of students. To translate their swelling support into government action, they linked up with four other college kids who had recently returned from a student exchange to Uganda and had formed a Washington lobby group called the Uganda Conflict Action Network, later Resolve. John Prendergast, founder of the Enough Project, known for its effective use of celebrities like George Clooney and Don Cheadle, became the anti-LRA groups' big gun.
So far, so do-good. But Invisible Children was different. Its founders were young, privileged and goofy, and its DNA was more tech start-up than humanitarian. The three broke the standard advocacy-group rules of conduct too. They horrified established campaigners with films as much about them as the war. They disregarded principles of neutrality and noninterference. They simplified and sensationalized. In particular, while military action was anathema to most humanitarians, the anti-LRA campaigners came to see it as essential. Addressing the need for food and shelter but studiously ignoring a crisis' political cause in the interest of securing access--the traditional aid-worker stance--is merely a way of "managing pain," not fixing it, says Ben Keesey, 29, Invisible Children's CEO since 2006. In Invisible Children's eyes, direct military action was a reasonable, even necessary option.
Established humanitarians find that argument outrageous. LRA specialist Ledio Cakaj, with the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey--who quit Prendergast's Enough group over his support for military intervention--says, "The idea that you have organizations that worry about things like children and rights advocating for a military solution, it's a real paradox. They lose the moral high ground." Russell retorts, "That's really old school. What's more humanitarian than stopping a war? I understand the conviction that violence begets violence. But either you just go on pulling people out of the river or you go upstream, find out who is pushing them in and stop them."
Whatever worries some harbored over Invisible Children's methods, there was no denying its influence. By 2008, the campaign had made the LRA and Kony the No. 1 foreign issue for American students, on a par with the antiapartheid campaign for an earlier generation. Invisible Children, Resolve and Prendergast then channeled that vociferous energy toward Washington, arguing in meetings with Senate and House leaders and White House staffers that U.S. intervention was imperative. In 2009 the campaigners helped draft a bill demanding executive action. By early 2010, a time of corrosive partisanship in Washington, they had secured cross-party, dual-chamber backing for their proposed law. When Senator Tom Coburn, known as Dr. No for his habit of blocking legislation on budgetary grounds, tried to kill it, activists slept outside his Oklahoma office for 11 nights in midwinter until he relented. After the passage of the law, a dozen members of the House of Representatives publicly praised Invisible Children for its effective campaigning in support of the bill. One of them, Representative Susan Davis, a Democrat from California, told the House, "These young members of the Invisible Children organization ... have helped make the children of Uganda visible to us. And now, with this legislation, we have a chance to truly join in this cause." Once the bill was law, at least four anti-LRA campaigners found U.S. government jobs--in the White House and the Departments of State and Defense. Resolve's executive director, Michael Poffenberger, says, "They worked on the bill, then went over to the Administration to help it." The level of engagement, says Prendergast, was unprecedented. "It's a social movement of mostly young people attempting to address a moral issue halfway around the world which had little or no ramifications for them," he says. "It's amazing."
Setting a Precedent?
The organization's marshaling of forces was impressive, but Invisible Children was, to an extent, pushing at an open door. In 2008, President Bush had sent 20 special-operations advisers to assist an assault by the Ugandan and Congolese armies on Kony's base in Congo's Garamba National Park. Prendergast says the anti-LRA campaigners never asked Obama to send in troops. "He went further than anything we were advocating for," he says. A senior Administration official says the President's action reflected "a common wisdom" shared with the campaigners "that this needs to be addressed." Addressing an Invisible Children rally in Washington at the time, Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said, "The fact is, nothing good happens and nothing bad ends unless like-minded people come together and demand change."
For Obama, as for Bush before him, the combination of a low-risk military mission and bipartisan support, created in part by Invisible Children, appears to have made the decision to send the special-operations advisers relatively easy. "When I decide to stand up for foreign aid or prevent atrocities in places like Uganda," said Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 3, "it's not just about strengthening alliances or promoting democratic values or projecting American leadership around the world, although it does all those things, and it will make us safer and more secure. It's also about the biblical call to care for the least of these--for the poor; for those at the margins of our society."
Opinions are divided on whether the LRA operation sets a precedent. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor insists that it does not: "We look at these things on a case-by-case basis based on the facts on the ground and U.S. interests. It would be wrong to interpret this as meaning there will be additional missions in the future." Prendergast says the operation gives new military might to the Responsibility to Protect, a U.N. initiative, but adds, "I don't think the Administration roams around the world looking for places to do the same." Invisible Children, on the other hand, is determined to see that the LRA mission establishes a new benchmark for world justice. Says Russell: "We want to take this campaign from a one-off to a world-changing moment. Was the U.N. created just for picking up dead bodies? We need a new proactive machine to protect those being slaughtered. Then we can have a world where genocide and child soldiering do not exist."
Beyond proclaiming such lofty ambitions, Invisible Children is short on specifics. That helps feed the criticism the group is now attracting. Kony 2012 "simplifies the story of millions of people in northern Uganda," says blogger Kagumire. "This war is not just about Joseph Kony [or about] one bad guy against good guys and against 'we, the mighty West.'" In response, Invisible Children said that while it sought to "explain the conflict in an easily understandable format ... in a 30-minute film, however, many nuances ... are admittedly lost or overlooked." It also rejected outright the accusations of a "savior complex." "Over 95% of [Invisible Children's] leadership and staff on the ground are Ugandans on the forefront of program design and implementation," it said.
But ultimately the legacy of the LRA operation hangs on how the special ops perform. There are several worries on that score too. Manhunts take time and money--it took 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. to find and kill Osama bin Laden--and the LRA operation has little of either. The senior Administration official cautions that the deployment is not open-ended--maybe a year, three at the outside. And it is an open question whether 100 U.S. troops, whatever their skills, are enough to succeed where the Ugandan army has failed for a quarter-century. The Americans are meant to limit themselves to coordinating the various armies, gathering and sharing intelligence and providing logistical support. The operation is run on a relatively shoestring budget of $35 million, which means the LRA's pursuers have no attack helicopters, and U.S. aerial surveillance of a thickly wooded area the size of France is limited to one airplane flown by a contractor whose thermal detectors do not work at night. In addition, the 2008 assault ordered by Bush backfired. Kony carried out a series of reprisal massacres and split the LRA into groups as small as five, scattering them as far as Darfur. The next few months are critical. "We don't want them to come back empty-handed," says Prendergast.
In Obo, the heart of LRA territory, expectations are high that Kony will soon face a Hollywood kind of justice. Claude Longbango, 38, fled to Obo from Passi in northern Congo in June 2009 when the LRA killed his uncle, brother and cousin and abducted his 18-year-old sister, her 2-month-old baby and a 6-year-old cousin. "They killed Osama," he says. "They must kill Kony like they killed Saddam Hussein." Guinikpara Germaine, 19, who was abducted from Obo in March 2008 and forced to become one of Kony's wives for three years, says the LRA leader himself also expects the worst. "He recognizes he is weak. He used to laugh and enjoy himself, but now, when he thinks about what he wants and his ambitions, he's like a man on drugs. He stays in his room and watches DVDs."
At night, the villagers of Obo express their new hope in dances around giant xylophones and congas. "The Americans are here/ Our saviors are here/ Our hope is here/ Let's dance," goes one composition. During the day, at a school in a Congolese refugee camp, a drummer calls the children to their own celebration dance wearing something familiar: a 2008 Obama campaign shirt. CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN, reads the slogan. The LRA may yet return. But for now, however improbably, change has come to Obo, and the people are allowing themselves to believe.
The Rich get Richer
Click on link below and just take a look at and read the graph titles "The Rich get Richer"
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2012/Notebook.pdf
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/spring2012/Notebook.pdf
Monday, March 12, 2012
The Independent Project
What kind of education would we have if students were given the keys? What would education look like if student could design their own education program with no teachers to teach them? Students would be responsible for teach each other and themselves. Can you picture this kind of education model?
http://theindependentproject2012.blogspot.com/
http://theindependentproject2012.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Teachers swap ideas on how to stop bullying
Teachers swap ideas on how to stop bullying
- Article by: KIM McGUIRE
- Star Tribune
- March 5, 2012 - 8:24 PM
Students at Taylors Falls Elementary in Chisago Lakes get daily recognition for good deeds such as holding the door open for others and picking up dropped food in the cafeteria.
And as a result, Principal Joe Thimm told other school officials at the second Minnesota Summit on Bullying, students want to help their classmates -- not hurt them.
"This turns around the atmosphere in school," he said.
About 275 teachers, administrators, guidance counselors and school nurses attended the summit at the University of Minnesota on Monday to exchange ideas about how to thwart school bullying. Those efforts are particularly relevant in Minnesota, where several high-profile suicides linked to bullying have drawn national media attention.
Much of Monday's discussion centered on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, an international program the local Hazelden Foundation and Clemson University help schools around the country to implement. It takes a school-wide approach, in which prevention is taught to everyone connected to the school. Marlene Snyder, a national bullying expert and Olweus' development director, said bullying tends to be a pervasive problem even though schools are making tremendous strides to quell it. Verbal attacks are among the most common ways kids bully each other, while cyber bullying is the least common but often has the most devastating results, she said.
"Many of the kids who committed suicide were cyber-bullied," Snyder said. "It can be one of the last things that happens in a child's life."
Snyder said one reason that bullying continues to infiltrate schools is that some students, parents, teachers and administrators still choose to do nothing or show little empathy for victims.
Olweus has conducted over a million student surveys about bullying. Among the more troubling statistics is the drop-off in the number of students who try to help bullying victims. In third grade, almost half the students surveyed said they would try to help a classmate being bullied. By sixth grade, that percentage starts to drop and by ninth-grade, only 25 percent of students say they would come to the aid of another being bullied.
But many Minnesota students want to do their part to prevent bullying, teachers and administrators said.
Minnetonka High School Principal David Adney described how staffers have helped create a school-wide culture in which students take pride in good behavior and are ashamed of bad behavior. Also key are informed parents who take action when bullying problems arise, he said.
"The comment we get that just shatters us is when a parent comes in to the office and says, 'You know this has been going on for months.'"
Also instrumental in combatting bullying, summit attendees agreed, is having strong laws in place.
Minnesota's current bullying law has been widely criticized. At just 37 words, it prohibits bullying without ever actually defining the term.
In late January, however, a bipartisan group of House members proposed legislation that would set statewide standards for reporting and disciplining bullying. The original legislation was proposed in November by Attorney General Lori Swanson. The bill defines bullying as in-person or online conduct on school property, on school buses or at any school-sanctioned activity that is "so severe, pervasive or objectively offensive that it substantially interferes with the student's educational opportunities," or places him or her in harm's way or in fear of harm, or substantially disrupts school operations. The measure would also require educators to report a bullying incident within 24 hours of learning about it, and to develop procedures to document, investigate and discipline the students involved.
And as a result, Principal Joe Thimm told other school officials at the second Minnesota Summit on Bullying, students want to help their classmates -- not hurt them.
"This turns around the atmosphere in school," he said.
About 275 teachers, administrators, guidance counselors and school nurses attended the summit at the University of Minnesota on Monday to exchange ideas about how to thwart school bullying. Those efforts are particularly relevant in Minnesota, where several high-profile suicides linked to bullying have drawn national media attention.
Much of Monday's discussion centered on the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, an international program the local Hazelden Foundation and Clemson University help schools around the country to implement. It takes a school-wide approach, in which prevention is taught to everyone connected to the school. Marlene Snyder, a national bullying expert and Olweus' development director, said bullying tends to be a pervasive problem even though schools are making tremendous strides to quell it. Verbal attacks are among the most common ways kids bully each other, while cyber bullying is the least common but often has the most devastating results, she said.
"Many of the kids who committed suicide were cyber-bullied," Snyder said. "It can be one of the last things that happens in a child's life."
Snyder said one reason that bullying continues to infiltrate schools is that some students, parents, teachers and administrators still choose to do nothing or show little empathy for victims.
Olweus has conducted over a million student surveys about bullying. Among the more troubling statistics is the drop-off in the number of students who try to help bullying victims. In third grade, almost half the students surveyed said they would try to help a classmate being bullied. By sixth grade, that percentage starts to drop and by ninth-grade, only 25 percent of students say they would come to the aid of another being bullied.
But many Minnesota students want to do their part to prevent bullying, teachers and administrators said.
Minnetonka High School Principal David Adney described how staffers have helped create a school-wide culture in which students take pride in good behavior and are ashamed of bad behavior. Also key are informed parents who take action when bullying problems arise, he said.
"The comment we get that just shatters us is when a parent comes in to the office and says, 'You know this has been going on for months.'"
Also instrumental in combatting bullying, summit attendees agreed, is having strong laws in place.
Minnesota's current bullying law has been widely criticized. At just 37 words, it prohibits bullying without ever actually defining the term.
In late January, however, a bipartisan group of House members proposed legislation that would set statewide standards for reporting and disciplining bullying. The original legislation was proposed in November by Attorney General Lori Swanson. The bill defines bullying as in-person or online conduct on school property, on school buses or at any school-sanctioned activity that is "so severe, pervasive or objectively offensive that it substantially interferes with the student's educational opportunities," or places him or her in harm's way or in fear of harm, or substantially disrupts school operations. The measure would also require educators to report a bullying incident within 24 hours of learning about it, and to develop procedures to document, investigate and discipline the students involved.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Kentucky tornado victim's miracle survival
If this story doesn't make you into a believer nothing will.
Stuxnet: Computer worm opens new era of warfare
Computer virus's evident success in damaging Iran's nuclear facility has officials asking if our own infrastructure is safe. Steve Kroft reports.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7400904n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7400904n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
The Myths Of Bullying
Time Mag. 3/2/12
By John Cloud
At around 7:30 A.M. on Feb. 27, a 17-year-old named T.J. Lane allegedly walked into a high school outside Cleveland with a .22 Ruger handgun. The shooter chose the Chardon High School cafeteria to begin his attack and got off 10 rounds. Police say he managed to hit five students. Three are dead.
Motives for the killings remain a mystery--the local prosecutor says Lane chose his victims at random, but a fellow student suggested that one victim may have been dating a girl Lane had courted. Yet even as police worked to secure the crime scene, one word quickly attached to the unfolding drama: bullying. Early reports described Lane as a "bullied outcast." Anguished callers to local radio stations decried bullying. The day after the shooting, reporters at the White House asked President Obama's chief spokesman whether bullying had caused the crime. The spokesman demurred, but the idea stuck: a bullied kid had struck back.
As more details emerged, the story shifted. Lane, a well-built kid who had a group of friends and a lively Facebook account, didn't look like a classic victim. What is clear is that he survived a rough childhood. His parents were both arrested for domestic violence, and his father served time in prison for assault. Lane was living with his grandparents when he was arrested. He will almost certainly be charged as an adult, and brutal truths will emerge. But for now, Lane seems like both a bully--he shot five kids--and a victim.
Approximately 400 miles from Chardon, in a New Brunswick, N.J., courtroom, bullying also became the focus of a trial that began a week before the Ohio shootings. Dharun Ravi is accused of having so viciously tormented his Rutgers University roommate, a gay 18-year-old named Tyler Clementi, that in September 2010, Clementi leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Partly because of the bridge's proximity to the nation's media capital and partly because of Clementi's gut-wrenching Facebook sign-off--"jumping off the gw bridge sorry"--the case ignited a furor over bullying that swept the tragedy from a local to an international story.
Details of the Clementi case show that it too is more nuanced than was initially reported. No one disputes that Ravi secretly set up a webcam to spy on Clementi after the latter asked to have their room to himself. No one disputes that Ravi watched as Clementi kissed another man, tweeted crudely that Clementi was gay and allowed at least one friend to watch Clementi's assignation. But in part because Ravi never posted the webcam video online, prosecutors are struggling to prove their case that he is guilty of "bias intimidation." The same day that Lane was shooting in Ohio, one of the New Jersey prosecutor's star witnesses, a friend of Ravi's, declined on the stand to testify that Ravi was biased against gays. In short, what began as a clear-cut case of bullying has led to a muddle that looks like a roommate dispute gone terribly wrong. Clementi was already out to his parents and others; he and Ravi both instant-messaged foolish and brutish things about each other. After the webcam incident, Clementi initially dismissed it: "he just like took a five sec peep lol," he IM'd a friend. The suicide came three days later.
The Bullying Conundrum
Very little about bullying conforms to popular belief. Not all that long ago, it was dismissed as an unfortunate rite of childhood. But because of high-profile cases like the Clementi tragedy and the 2010 suicide of Phoebe Prince, a Massachusetts girl, bullying has become cemented in public opinion as a growing epidemic. Measures rushed into place following these tragedies reinforce the sense of a spreading plague: today only two states, Montana and South Dakota, lack antibullying laws, and the White House has staged two antibullying conferences. The President has called on school districts to adopt antibullying policies, and his chief civil rights litigator, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, thundered at the second conference that "we're sailing into an undeniable headwind of intolerance." So when the news of a teen gunman in Ohio broke, it was easy for many to jump to the conclusion that bullying had claimed more victims.
But as painful as bullying can be, and as horrible as its victims' scars may be, research suggests that the talk of an epidemic may be exaggerated. At the same time, some of the supposed remedies swiftly implemented in response to tragedies like Clementi's are having unintended consequences. Some teachers feel forced to escalate routine playground spats into cases to present before school boards. And while tough sanctions against accused bullies are now everywhere, educators are divided on how effective they are at actually helping kids.
Statistics showing that bullying is a growing problem are contradictory at best. The U.S. Department of Justice has reported that 37% of students don't feel safe at school because of bullying. That figure, while disturbing, has remained stable over decades. And despite fears that cyberbullying via Facebook and Formspring has exploded, the Bureau of Justice Statistics' most recent figures, from 2007, show that only 3.9% of bullied students say they were bullied outside school grounds.
Other numbers suggest that many students are both victims and victimizers. In a survey of 43,000 high school students completed in 2010, the Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics found that 47% had "been bullied, teased or taunted" at school but that 50% had been bullies themselves. This suggests a lot of overlap between the two groups, meaning that the world isn't cleanly divided into bullies and victims. Psychologists have long known that those who are brutalized are more likely to strike back than mere bystanders. It's not always easy for a teacher busy in the classroom to distinguish the bullied from the tormented.
What's more, the zeal to stop bullies has resulted in vague statutes that have collided with the law of unintended consequences. In one notorious incident in New Jersey--whose stringent law requires any school employee, even a bus driver, to report any possible bullying incident within hours to a designated official who informs the school board--the parents of a kid at Benjamin Franklin Middle School who called a fellow student a "retard" had to meet with school officials. Because of the antibullying law, the boy's insult had to be filed with the state's education department. If in a few years he applies to a state university, admissions officers will see the charge that he was a bully. "I think the new law crosses the line because it is trying to legislate good manners," the superintendent of New Jersey's Central Regional School District, Triantafillos Parlapanides, told his local paper, Bridgewater's Courier News. "That is what parents are supposed to be teaching."
The laws are costing schools even as recession-strapped states cut education budgets. Both for-profit and nonprofit companies offer antibullying packages that schools can adopt to meet the new legal expectations--for a fee. The largest antibullying company, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, charges thousands of dollars to large school districts that need to train educators to recognize and report warning signs of bullying, like repeated introverted behavior among possible victims. A common technique is to pair two kids who may have argued in the past and ask them to name something they like and something they dislike about the other person. Local firms have also entered the game. A New Jersey education consultancy, Strauss Esmay Associates, offers schools a $1,295-minimum deal that provides a two-hour video, three hours of training for two staff members and a manual on preventing bullying.
Other programs, like the San Francisco--based nonprofit No Bully, offer cheaper services, but the financial toll on schools is neither trivial nor clear. The U.S. Department of Education collects no statistics on how much schools are spending to prevent bullying, and the many antibullying companies that have emerged in recent years haven't formed a trade group. Many officials have begun to fight the new rules. In January, New Jersey's independent budget authority ruled 7 to 2 that the new antibullying legislation violates the state's constitution because it provides no funding for local districts to meet its requirements, which include assigning an administrator who can initiate proceedings against alleged bullies within the required 24 hours. One township in rural Warren County, New Jersey, has claimed that the new law will cost $6,000 even though the township has only 427 students.
How to Fix the Problem
Amid unintended consequences and wasted funds, what can we do to stop bullying? Dr. Stuart Twemlow, co-author of Why School Antibullying Programs Don't Work and a former Baylor College of Medicine professor, recommends targeting antibullying efforts at neither bullies nor victims but a third party: bystanders who watch bullying--either on Facebook or in the hallway--and either laugh or cringe but do nothing more. In a 2004 study of nine schools, Twemlow and a colleague found that schools that focus on punishing bullies and counseling victims report more violence than schools that engage bystanders--and their parents--in understanding that saying something about what you see isn't always tattling.
Many educators on the front lines agree. One school administrator who deals regularly with new forms of bullying is Robin Lowe, principal of the biggest middle school in Houston: Pershing, home of the Pandas, of whom there are 1,750 on any given day. Lowe says that "probably once a week" she meets with a parent clutching a printout showing Facebook wall posts that degrade one of her students.
Most of the time, it turns out that the kids have been engaged in typical middle-school feuds over breakups or hallway slights. Lowe, who has been a principal in middle schools for 25 years, has found that bullying incidents are rarely simple cases of cool kids attacking outcasts. Once she starts poking around, she says, "I can guarantee you that no one is an innocent on any of this. Something has come before." Many of the same parents who burst into her office with Facebook printouts later have to meet with her to see the aggressive Facebook posts their own kids have written. Lowe says "99.9%" of parents on both sides of alleged bullying incidents are shocked to realize what their kids have written. The best way to stop bullying, she says, is to get bystanders to step up: post a Facebook message telling both sides to calm down, or grab a teacher when students in a hallway are scrawling obscenities on lockers.
Lowe also says that although many argue that the digital era has escalated bullying, she disagrees. Just 20 years ago, a student might spray-paint "Whore" on a girl's locker. That insult might stay up for days, to be seen by many students or be scrubbed instantly. Anonymous insults on Formspring aren't so different: they can be deleted in a matter of seconds.
All of this argues for administrators and parents to take a deep breath and evaluate the scope of an incident before responding. Politically, the issue is a winner for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats can please liberal donors outraged by the Clementi suicide, and Republicans can proclaim tolerance at little cost. In New Jersey, only one legislator voted against the tough antibullying law, and Governor Chris Christie signed it without hesitation.
No one who says the antibullying efforts are going to extremes would argue against kids' learning to treat one another with respect. But exaggerating the "epidemic" is taking its own kind of toll. Bureaucratic procedures can't substitute for teachers' and parents' showing kids that those who are bullied can become bullies themselves and that students can and should stand up for one another. Most of us are both bully and victim. Bullying may be seen as less a contagion than an unfortunate fact of childhood.
Privacy In Public
Time Mag. 3/2/12
By Massimo Calabresi
the streets of New York City in 1949, E.B. White observed that a person could find the "gift of privacy" amid the crowds. More than 60 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that White's paradox may literally be true. On Jan. 23, the court said the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure when it used global-positioning-system signals to track a suspected drug dealer for four weeks without a valid warrant, even though the cops monitored only where the suspect went on public streets. Thanks to that decision, for the first time in American history there is now a legal right to privacy in public.
How much privacy? That's still in flux. In the GPS-tracking case, the Justices couldn't decide how much protection the Constitution gives Americans in public; they could agree only that the FBI had gone too far. But cases are coming up that will define the new privacy more clearly, and state and federal officials are working to fill in the contours.
In a pending case from Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will decide whether the police have the right to search, without a warrant, historical data from cell-phone companies showing the movements of phones' owners. Senator Al Franken of Minnesota has introduced a bill that would limit what wireless carriers can do with GPS data. "People have a fundamental right to control their private information," Franken said. On Feb. 22, the White House unveiled privacy guidelines meant as a blueprint for legislators and companies struggling to agree on how and when Americans can be tracked in public on the Internet.
The idea that we have any privacy in public is new. Over the years, the courts have found that Americans voluntarily gave up their Fourth Amendment protections almost as soon as they left their homes: garbage dropped at the curb was fair game for the cops, and--though you may not have contemplated your phone company's sharing its files--information given openly to businesses was deemed public knowledge too. But now, as cell phones, GPS devices and Web browsers generate massive amounts of digital information about us and make it available to others, the minute details of what used to be our private lives are collected and stored as never before. The McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated that 15 out of 17 sectors of the U.S. economy have more data stored per company than does the Library of Congress, and in the U.S. health care market alone, there is potentially $300 billion in annual value to be squeezed from those vast stores, McKinsey says. The upshot: much of this information from our daily interactions with retailers, communications companies and service providers is available not only to private companies that can make money off it but to law enforcement as well.
In the GPS case, the Supreme Court Justices found two things to worry about. First, they were concerned about how much information was being collected. The government's ability to track citizens "24 hours a day anyplace you go that's not your home" without a warrant necessarily breached Americans' "expectation of privacy," Justice Elena Kagan said in oral arguments in the GPS case. Four other Justices agreed, including the conservative George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito. Justice Sonia Sotomayor went further, saying Americans aren't worried just about how much information about them is collected but also who gets access to it, even if they appear to waive their right to keep it private. "I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government [by an Internet-service provider] of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year," Sotomayor wrote.
The Justice Department and other law-enforcement officials argue that once cops have probable cause to think a crime is being committed in public, they shouldn't have to get a warrant; in any case, they say, most Americans are happy to give up their privacy in exchange for safety or to save time or money. The law is still largely on the cops' side.
Five Supreme Court Justices found in the GPS-tracking case that it was Americans' expectations of privacy that would define what privacy should be: if you and most of your friends are comfortable revealing details of your daily life in public, you'll be setting the legal bar for privacy low. And the fact is, Americans do want some of what they're getting in exchange for technology's intrusion into their private lives. Anyone who's avoided a rush-hour bottleneck thanks to traffic-monitoring software can see the benefit of instant analysis of shared GPS signals. Airport body scanners aside, the post-9/11 era has seen the growing use of technologies like security cameras and facial recognition in public places, with little backlash from citizens.
Still, as the Supreme Court suggests, drawing lines is important because the data banks keep swelling, making their contents irresistible to some. In December a company called Carrier IQ said the FBI had asked for access to data the company collects from software installed on more than 141 million cell phones, including what numbers and text the owners type in and where the phones, and their owners, go. On Jan. 19, the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center asked tech companies how much it would cost to build software that would search, monitor and report on individuals using Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and other websites. The FBI is rolling out facial-recognition software to check individuals against criminal databases; the Department of Homeland Security already uses facial recognition at major public events like the Super Bowl.
Once outsiders can use that data to create what Chief Justice John Roberts called a "mosaic" of who you are, the pressure for safeguards may grow. All the technology is delivering to us in public not just the gift of privacy E.B. White wrote about but the right to it as well.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Should We Care That More Women Are Having Children Without Having Husbands?
Should We Care That More Women Are Having Children Without Having Husbands?
By Bella DePaulo, Ph.D.
Created Mar 1 2012 - 2:21am
Yes, I know all about the latest angst about single mothers, set off a few weeks ago by the article in the New York Times, "For women under 30, most births occur outside marriage." I wasn't going to go there. I have written about single parenting over and over again. In some ways, the myth that the children of single parents are doomed is one of the most exasperating to try to challenge. Too many people are just too sure it is true.
The issue is not personal to me because I'm a single mother—I'm not. It is not personal because I was raised by a single mother—I wasn't. It is personal to me as a social scientist and as a defender of singles of all stripes against insulting and untrue stereotypes.
The scientific problem with the sober and scolding claims that the children of single parents just aren't going to measure up to the achievements and well-being of the children of married parents is this: Often, it is the studies cited in supposed support of those claims that just don't measure up. I've explained this in detail in the chapter on the children of single parents in Singled Out. There is one reader in particular who likes to find my blog posts on this topic and write a comment with a long list of studies that purportedly do show that the children of single parents are doomed. That person misses the point. When I critique a particular study on the topic, my methodological criticisms are not specific to that one study. They are commonplace across lots of studies.
I changed my mind about addressing the latest hand-wringing about the growing number of under-30 women having children without having husbands because I discovered a great essay on the topic by Katie Roiphe. She is the writer I applauded in another recent post,What's the big deal about single people? (I think I have a new favorite cultural critic.) In her piece, she points to the ways in which the supposedly objective story in the New York Times was actually quite condescending to single mothers.
She also argues that the subtle judgmentalism of the Times is
It is a fairly lengthy essay, but even if you are not particularly interested in the topic of single mothering, I think you may appreciate the insights and the writing. One of the sections I especially liked was Roiphe's explanation of why the small stuff matters. It is an issue that I—and many other singles, whether parents or not—often confront. Why do we complain about small slights and minor injustices?
When Roiphe was pregnant, someone tried to talk her out of having her baby by suggesting that she "should wait and have a 'regular baby'." A pregnant friend of hers was told that she "should wait and have a 'real baby'." Here's Roiphe's analysis:
The issue is not personal to me because I'm a single mother—I'm not. It is not personal because I was raised by a single mother—I wasn't. It is personal to me as a social scientist and as a defender of singles of all stripes against insulting and untrue stereotypes.
The scientific problem with the sober and scolding claims that the children of single parents just aren't going to measure up to the achievements and well-being of the children of married parents is this: Often, it is the studies cited in supposed support of those claims that just don't measure up. I've explained this in detail in the chapter on the children of single parents in Singled Out. There is one reader in particular who likes to find my blog posts on this topic and write a comment with a long list of studies that purportedly do show that the children of single parents are doomed. That person misses the point. When I critique a particular study on the topic, my methodological criticisms are not specific to that one study. They are commonplace across lots of studies.
I changed my mind about addressing the latest hand-wringing about the growing number of under-30 women having children without having husbands because I discovered a great essay on the topic by Katie Roiphe. She is the writer I applauded in another recent post,What's the big deal about single people? (I think I have a new favorite cultural critic.) In her piece, she points to the ways in which the supposedly objective story in the New York Times was actually quite condescending to single mothers.
She also argues that the subtle judgmentalism of the Times is
"in many ways more pernicious than the overt moralizing of conservatives on the downfall of family and marriage. It is easy to dismiss the Santorum faction for its cartoonishly old-fashioned view of extramarital sex, and this group is at least forthright about its view, whereas the subtle psychologizing put-down of the New York Times-style liberal, the slight hint of self-congratulation that they are not a single mother in Lorain, Ohio, bringing their son to the bar where they work, is more poisonous for its pretense of fairness and open-mindedness."By following the links in "The New York Times condescends to single moms," I discovered another essay of Roiphe's, "Shaming the single mom: Do we all secretly think that single moms are crazy?"
It is a fairly lengthy essay, but even if you are not particularly interested in the topic of single mothering, I think you may appreciate the insights and the writing. One of the sections I especially liked was Roiphe's explanation of why the small stuff matters. It is an issue that I—and many other singles, whether parents or not—often confront. Why do we complain about small slights and minor injustices?
When Roiphe was pregnant, someone tried to talk her out of having her baby by suggesting that she "should wait and have a 'regular baby'." A pregnant friend of hers was told that she "should wait and have a 'real baby'." Here's Roiphe's analysis:
"Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it's in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to."Roiphe also offers an incisive take-down of another prejudice that many singles face, that they are "greedy, selfish, narcissistic, or anti-social." Take a look at that part, too, and share the good feeling of knowing that more and more people are writing about single life in enlightened ways.
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