Tag: Great Britain

Jon Holbrook on Domestic Violence in Great Britain

Jon Holbrook recently wrote an interesting analysis (The law and the ‘one in four’) about British government claims that 1 in 4 women in Great Britain have been the victims of domestic violence. According to Holbrook, the government figures intentionally exaggerate domestic violence incidence in order to recast how domestic violence is perceived in that country.

Holbrook writes,

It is interesting that [Home Secretary, David] Blunkett has not relied on the Home Office’s own research of 1999, which dealt in detail with victims’ perceptions of domestic violence. What this showed was not that people thought domestic violence was acceptable, but that only 17 percent of most recent domestic violence incidents were considered by their victims to have been crimes.

Probably part of the reason for victims being reluctant to criminalize their partner’s violent behavior is the fact that, as the researchers say, many of the incidents were perceived ‘as too trivial in intent or action to warrant the attention of the criminal justice system.’

Holbrook notes, for example, that the overwhelming majority of incidents used to support the 1 in 4 claim did not result in any sort of injury, but was instead characterized as either a push, shove or grab.

Such actions are not appropriate, but do they rise to the level of criminal behavior? Clearly most of the “victims” of such acts did not think so. As Holbrook puts it,

But another related factor is that victims of domestic violence, and no doubt other members of the public as well, are able to distinguish between something that is wrong and something that is criminal. Or to put it another way, they are able to distinguish between something that is a private matter to be sorted out by those affected and something that warrants criminal justice intervention.

But, of course, such ideas presumes the sort of autonomy on the part of women which domestic violence rhetoric tends to diminish and deny. Can a woman really decide on her own whether or not to prosecute when her husband or boyfriend grabs her during a heated argument? The answer, of course, is no if you buy into current domestic violence ideology (ironically, when men are the victims of such behavior, the feminist line is that this isn’t really domestic violence at all).

Sources:

The law and the ‘one in four’. Jon Holbrook, Spiked-Online, July 23, 2003.
Thursday, September 4, 2003.

British Gov’t Workers Required to Report Inter-Office Sexual Liasions

UK newspaper The Observer reports that fears of sexual harassment lawsuits have prompted many government agencies in Great Britain to require employees to report any sexual relationships they are having with their colleagues to their respective human resources department.

And such fears appear to be well-founded. According to The Observer,

Research by academics at the University of Sydney suggests that almost a quarter of failed office relationships end in sexual harassment cases, and a survey in America by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 52 per cent of companies believe they suffer in some way because of romance in the workplace. Nearly a third of employees quizzed said they feared office affairs would end in claims of sexual harassment. Small wonder then that 95 per cent of personnel managers said they believed office romances should not be allowed or, at least, should be discouraged.

Which, of course, takes further along the road to where Daphne Patai predicted the sexual harassment industry was eventually headed — to stigmatizing heterosexual relationships as inherently suspect.

Are two of your coworkers sleeping together? Well, clearly, somebody should be watching that situation to make certain it doesn’t get out of hand. As Patai put it, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women and men.”

Clearly the former are in charge in the UK.

Source:

Personnel affair. The Observer, July 20, 2003.

They’re Stealing Our Nurses!

The BBC ran two stories over the last few days that offer an interesting juxtaposition on the source of problems that African nations face.

Today it is running a story about complaints that Great Britain’s health care system is stealing nurses from Kenya. Kenya and other African nations have longstanding complaints that their most experienced nurses leave the continent to work in Western countries where they can receive higher pay.

The BBC quote Evelyn Mutio, who heads up a Kenyan nurses union as complaining that,

The UK is poaching our nurses though agents. The agents are here and they are opening up offices. They say ‘If you want to get a job in Britain, come here’.

So the obvious question is why don’t they simply pay nurses more money in Kenya, and then they wouldn’t all run off to Great Britain. Could Kenya be too poor to increase nurses wages? Perhaps, but Kenya isn’t poor enough that it can’t pay tens of thousands of non-existent government workers,

Kenya is considering a sweep of its civil service to track down “ghost workers”, imaginary employees created on the payroll by corrupt workers to pad their pay packets.

The government was worried that despite a 10% reduction in headcount under the previous government, the wage bill had in fact swelled by 2%, Finance Minister David Mwiraria told Parliament.

Cleaning out these “ghost workers” would, along with tightened tax collection controls, help bring the deficit down from a predicted 62bn shillings to about 47bn shillings (£390m; $621m) for the year to June 2004, he said.

It’s hardly Great Britain’s fault that Kenya would prefer to pay non-existent people to not work than it would on increasing wages and benefits for nurses.

The exodus of the best and brightest out of Africa is just one symptom of the disease of corruption and graft that has taken root in too many African states. If they would tackle corruption with the same zeal that they complain about the brain drain, African states might actually make some progress.

Sources:

UK still poaching African nurses. The BBC, July 21, 2003.

Kenya seeks ‘ghosts’ to ease budget woes. The BBC, July 18, 2003.

Great Britain Proposes Outlawing Secret DNA Paternity Tests

In response to a handful of bizarre cases, the United Kingdom is proposing outlawing DNA tests without the consent of all parties involved, which could make it very difficult for men who are suspicious about the paternity of their children.

This seems like an extreme position to take and the Human Genetics Commission chair Baroness Kennedy QC completely dismissed the position of men who are concerned about establishing whether or not they are really the father of their children saying,

A person may say, ‘what is wrong with a man knowing whether he really is the father of a child?’, but there are real repercussions for a family when that is done.

That is an outrageously patronizing attitude that would never be uttered in this day and age about women’s rights to know (or if it were, this woman would have faced immense pressure to step down immediately).

The cases of people trying to take DNA of celebrities or public figures can be handled without a blanket ban on all such private tests. Besides which the cost of genetic testing is falling so rapidly that it is doubtful such a ban will really prevent someone determined to do DNA testing from going forward.

Source:

Secret testing on ‘stolen’ DNA to be outlawed. Colin Brown, The Daily Telegraph (London), June 16, 2003.

Requiring Men to Wear Ties Is Sex Discrimination?

The Daily Telegraph reported in March that a 32-year-old civil servant had won his sexual discrimination complaint against his employer after a new dress code required men at the company to wear ties.

The actual dress code required employees at a JobCenter office to dress in a “professional and businesslike manner” and went on to say,

For men the basic standard is to wear a collar and tie; for women to dress appropriately and to a similar standard . . . Within these rules staff are free to decide what clothes to wear.

Matthew Thompson filed a complaint with an industrial tribunal that this was sex discrimination. Thompson argued that since the dress code mentioned a specific set of clothes for men — collared shirt and tie — but did not mention any specific clothes that women had to wear, that it was discriminatory.

And the industrial tribunal agreed saying, in part,

If we were to turn the argument round and the only mandatory item of clothing had been for a woman to wear, say, a skirt, and she was disciplined for wearing some other item, would that be deemed discriminatory against her on the grounds of sex? We believe it would be.

Can’t you wait until tribunals like this are scouring through our lives looking to abolish every hint of an imbalance between the sexes?

Source:

Telling men to wear ties is sex discrimination. Sandra Laville, The Daily Telegraph (London), March 12, 2003.

The Perils of Cross-Cultural Statistics

In an excellent article about the UK’s failed experiment in gun control, Janet Malcolm offer an amazing example of the perils of using statistics as-is from different countries. As we all know, the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The U.S. homicide rate, for example, is almost three time as high as that of Great Britain. Sort of. . . Well, maybe not …

The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isnÂ’t subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police “massage down” the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.

The same oddity occurs with infant mortality. You’d think that establishing when a person is born and when they die would be fairly straightforward, but in fact the United States records infant mortality statistics in a way that is out of step with the rest of the world and which artificially inflates the U.S. infant mortality rate (the short version is that in the U.S. many premature infants who die shortly after birth are counted in birth and death statistics, whereas in most of the world they are not considered live births).

Or take Reporters Without Borders report which ranks freedom of speech and puts Canada at 5th in the world while the U.S. comes in at 17. The U.S. comes in so low because of the relatively large number (for a Western nation) of reporters who are jailed, almost always because they refuse to reveal a source.

But this is largely an artifact of the United States’ peculiar prior restraint doctrine. In the United States it is almost impossible to for the government to prevent publication of anything in a newspaper. The government can go in later and subpoena a reporter or a person can sue for libel, but the odds of getting a court to enjoin publication is very close to zero except for a few extreme national security issues.

In many Western countries, there is no such limit and there are strict laws that prevent newspapers and broadcast outlets from reporting on certain topics. For example, most of the cases where reporters are jailed for not revealing sources are criminal cases. Most other Western countries, including Canada, place much stricter limits on what can be reported in coverage of criminal cases and don’t run into these sorts of problems.

Source:

Gun ControlÂ’s Twisted Outcome
Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S. Joyce Lee Malcolm, Reason, November 2002.

Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index. Reporters Without Borders, October 2002.