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Policy Analyst, Corrections Statistics Program
Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice
810 7th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20531
PH: 202-353-2132
FX: 202-514-1757
christopher.mumola@usdoj.gov
Press office contact, Kara McCarthy. She can be reached at Kara.McCarthy@usdoj.gov or at 202-307-1241.
Saturday’s massacre in Juárez, Mexico, of 16 high school and college students created a shock wave that continues to rumble across a city numbed by years of brutal and unstoppable violence, reports the El Paso Times. Twelve victims are still hospitalized with gunshot wounds, four in critical condition. Officials said investigators were questioning a suspect and that the massacre may be linked to a November shooting in which an El Pasoan was killed. (more…)
A new United Nations report estimates that Afghan opium kills 100,000 people every year worldwide, reports CNN. About 15 million people around the world use heroin, opium or morphine, fueling a $65 billion market for the drug and also fueling terrorism and insurgencies. The Taliban raised as much as $600 million over the past four years by taxing opium farmers and traffickers, according to the report. (more…)
Misunderstanding of abuses like trafficking is still widespread, even among liberals, as a new book demonstrates.
After three years of discussion, the United Nations General Assembly last month adopted a resolution to restructure gender institutions in the UN system. The UN Development Fund for Women was merged with the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues, and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women.
UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon announced the next day that the new single entity will be headed by an undersecretary general, and will promote gender equality and women’s well-being. Noting that “sexist attitudes lead to sexual exploitation,” he declared that its establishment underscored the UN’s commitment to combat violence against women. “There can be no security without women’s security, and we need to shed the silence that shields perpetrators,” he said.
The significance of his announcement was underlined by its setting: a special panel at the UN’s Trusteeship Council Chamber organized by the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), to mark the publication of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a book by New York Times journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
The book’s title comes from the Chinese proverb, “women hold up half the sky,”
And it reads as a collection of life stories of women in the developing world who have been subjected to gender-based violence: beatings, acid burnings, human trafficking, rape (including war rape), female genital mutilation, medical negligence and honor killings.
It is particularly ironic that Kristof and WuDunn preach what our country cannot practice. The United States has yet to ratify three of the most important global treaties related to this issue: 1979 Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child; or the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Although the panel (and the book) dealt with violence against women in general, sexual trafficking was an important sub-theme
Global Failure
And on this subject, the failure to develop an adequate legal response is global. A recent UNODC report shows that half of UN member states have yet to convict a single perpetrator of human trafficking. The lack of political will plus widespread corruption help explain this disturbing statistic. Even where there is legislation, there is a lack of enforcement.
Of course, the success or failure of the struggle against human trafficking is hard to measure with numbers alone. UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said at the panel that he was unable to report whether human trafficking had increased or decreased in the last three years. “Anyone providing you with numbers to argue either way is simply shooting from the hip,” he said.
Ironically, the limitation of such “shoot-from-the-hip” responses was underlined by the book itself. Half the Sky is a gory read for newcomers to these issues—and a tedious read to those familiar with them. But as someone who teaches this material to undergraduates, I found it surprisingly annoying.
Kristof and WuDunn have facile explanations for gender-based violence. They ignore men as perpetrators (indeed, they are as invisible in their book as women have been invisible in the past), cite research results when those results support their arguments, and offer simplistic (albeit well-meaning) solutions. At the same time, they ignore the vast body of research on violence against women, and perhaps most importantly, considering the panel’s setting, they ignore relevant international law and UN efforts in this arena.
Much of the book is ethnocentric. There is a chapter about Islam and misogyny, where the authors admit to being “politically incorrect” without realizing they are also ignorant of the nuances that plague the study of world religions and gender. While there is much discussion of the developing world, there is little discussion of the violations of women’s rights in the developed world, including the United States.
And although Kristof argued “detailed examples that judiciously use evidence” are the best mechanism for raising consciousness, the authors appear ignorant of the strides made by other countries, even if such strides fall short of guaranteeing full human rights for women.
India’s Innovative Approaches
India, for example, receives quite a bit of criticism. Yet it enacted a landmark domestic violence law in 2006 and established all-female police units to respond to domestic violence (see Women Police in a Changing Society by John Jay College Professor Mangai Natarajan). The authors’ own employer, The New York Times, last month called attention to some of India’s innovative approaches, such as establishing all-female commuter trains in large cities to protect women from so-called “Eve-teasing” (groping and harassment) on public transport.
Natarajan, director of John Jay´s international criminal justice major, who also attended the panel, observed afterwards that “countries who are making efforts to improve need to be encouraged, not chided. Oftentimes, although they seem behind, they have come a very long way.”
In what was perhaps an indirect critique of the authors’ approach, UNODC Director Costa said that his agency is responsible “for the whole sky, not just half the sky”—thus emphasizing that both men and women are responsible for gender equality. Such points may already have had their desired effect: one of the main messages in the book, “women are not the problem; they are the solution,” now appears on the book’s website with the afterthought “… along with men.”
The authors made no secret that their strategy of avoiding hard numbers and examples that might soften their thesis was central to their notion of developing a “grassroots” movement to broaden the campaign against gender violence, which would contain elements such as microfinance and education programs. WuDunn bluntly told the UN audience, largely made up of NGO representatives, that “psychological and neurological research demonstrates that statistics have a dulling effect on human motivation.” As if to make the point clear, their final chapter is entitled, “What You Can Do: Four Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes,” followed by an appendix listing organizations that help women worldwide.
In looking for verdicts, I usually ask my students. I gave my seniors a New York Times Magazine excerpt from the book published in August, and assigned them to attend the UN panel event. “Where are their references in APA style?” one student angrily asked, referring to the authors’ selective and sparse use of scholarly evidence. Another argued in her critique that microfinance programs for downtrodden women are only one way towards gender equality. “We must educate boys about the value and respect for human life,” she wrote. “Laws must punish those who do not learn this respect, and we must understand that women did not cause the inequality and thus cannot be the only ones to fix it.”
Kristof and WuDunn are to be congratulated for pushing readers towards action. But their view of the issue still needs much more homework, including an understanding of gender, its intersection with crime and victimization, and the complexities of international norms.
Rosemary Barberet is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and a representative of the International Sociological Association to the United Nations.
They are accused of quietly smuggling hundreds of tons of Mexican marijuana into Houston for 21 years, but the lives of more than two dozen alleged conspirators seemed as ordinary as their plot was bold, says the city’s Chronicle. They include a truck driver, a mason, a construction worker, a firefighter, an auto mechanic, an expectant mother and a grandfather married to the same woman for 31 years. They owned homes in Houston, raised their families, paid their bills and drove American-made pickup trucks.
“This is a large, long-term, well-established trafficking conspiracy,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Craft said of an alleged scheme that stretched from 1988 to last week. “That these individuals haven’t been arrested before is a compliment to the sophistication of their scheme.” Inside a federal courtroom in Beaumont this week, family packed the gallery and poured into the hallway as they heard for the first time what federal agents had to say about a conglomerate of 26 people, including brothers, uncles, nephews, aunts, cousins and longtime friends. “They are all family, and you aren’t going to trust anyone outside the family,” said Kenneth Crowe, a narcotics agent.
Esquire columnist John H. Richardson wonders why the American media obsess on the death toll of the Mexican drug war (11,000 so far) while all but ignoring the human toll of our own drug war. He writes, “So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number. Until now. I’ve done some rough math, and this is what I found: 6,487. To repeat, that’s 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country’s paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.”
Richardson explains that he came up with the numbers based upon a formula from Neill Franklin, a former commander of Maryland’s Bureau of Drug Enforcement, who contends that half to three-quarters of all murders are related to narcotics. Richardson writes, “In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there’s plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.”
A year ago, tens of thousands of Mexicans filled the streets to demand safer streets and more honest cops. Yet, as activists marked the anniversary of those protests on Sunday, the collective momentum of a year past has yielded few concrete changes, says the Christian Science Monitor. While drug-trafficking violence fills headlines there, it is muggings, kidnappings and burglaries that concern the average Mexican. Kidnappings are up, more Mexicans report feeling unsafe, and slightly more say they have been victims of crime. And Mexicans still don’t trust the cops.
About 80 percent of citizens do not even bother to report crimes, despite government and civilian efforts to support victims. “We do not have a culture of reporting crime here,” says Elias Kuri, the national coordinator of “Light Up Mexico,” a nonprofit that organized the nationwide protests last year. “Mexicans feel that authorities are ineffective and dishonest; they fear that reporting crime to the authorities will make their problems worse.”
The New York Times describes Mexico’s as places where drug traffickers find a new base of operations for their criminal empires, recruit underlings, and bribe their way out for the right price. The system is so flawed that the Mexican government is extraditing record numbers of drug traffickers to the United States, where they find it much harder to intimidate witnesses, run their drug operations or escape.
The United States government, as part of its counternarcotics assistance program, is committing $4 million this year to help fix Mexico’s broken prisons, officials said. Experts from state prisons in the United States have begun tutorials for Mexican guards to make sure that there are clear ethical guidelines and professional practices that distinguish them from the men and women they guard.
In the summer of 1993, ten Chinese would-be immigrants drowned when the Golden Venture, the rickety vessel smuggling them and 276 others to America, ran aground on a New York City beach. After more than a decade of police work, authorities tracked down and convicted Sister Ping, the mastermind of the transnational human trafficking ring, who turned out to be an elderly grandmother living in New York’s Chinatown. The Crime Report’s Cara Tabachnick spoke to investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who documents the case in his recent book , “The Snakehead.”
THE CRIME REPORT: Exactly how did these snakehead organizations work?
KEEFE: The snakehead organizations were (and are) loosely dispersed transnational networks — non-hierarchical international collaborations in which groups of independent contractors might come together to move a load of people and then separate and go their separate ways. They’re built on connections and driven by opportunism, so a snakehead based in New York might have associates working in Fuzhou, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico.
The day after 16 drug dealers were told by Seattle police to go straight or go to prison, one of gthem was arrested for an alleged drug crime in an area that police are trying to clean up, reports the Seattle Times. The accused dealer had participated in an ”intervention” at which police, prosecutors, family members, friends and neighbors told the dealers they would no longer tolerate their lawbreaking. He was arrested on suspicion of a felony drug offense 24 hours later.
Borrowing a tactic pioneered in High Point, N.C., authorities gave 18 local drug dealers an ultimatum to attend the meeting, where they would get support to turn their lives around, or they would be arrested and prosecuted on felony drug charges. The 16 who attended the meeting were offered drug treatment, education, job training and housing assistance — but only if they stopped selling drugs along a targeted strip in the city.
