debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

25.6.05

Vulnerability To Rape, Or Resilient Rape Control

The hot topic in the modern risk literature is vulnerability. The issue goes back to the founder, Gilbert F. White, who pointed out that natural hazards are about the intersection of human and natural systems. The deaths from a flood are not just a matter of the size and strength of the water, but also of the decisions of people to live in ground-level houses along the shore without flood insurance. This theme was pushed farther by the "radical" school, the founders of Political Ecology, who blamed class relations for putting some people in risky situations and depriving them of coping resources, while others lived in relative safety. The term "vulnerability" became a major buzzword over the last 20 years in sustainability science, as social scientists emphasized that we should ask not only "how can we prevent climate change?" but also (and perhaps more importantly) "how can we make societies and ecosystems able to cope with climate change?"

The notion of vulnerabiliy is important. Addressing vulnerability is often easier than changing the hazard event. More importantly, a vulnerability focus incorporates the lessons of resilience, emphasizing flexibility and learning, whereas a hazard event focus relies on a technocratic attempt to control nature (e.g. through dams, or cloud seeding) -- an attempt that resilience theory teaches us is doomed.

However, the association of vulnerability-focused analysis with more resilient policy prescriptions is not universal. A good example comes from a recent flurry of posting by Amanda Marcotte and others about rape. Specifically, they challenge the common reaction to stories of rape, which is to ask how the victim could have avoided the rape. At its worst, this line of thinking leads to speculation about whether the victim was "asking for it." This is a vulnerability-based analysis. It's a part of the picture, and given the prevalence of rape, it behooves potential rape victims to take precautions to reduce their vulnerability.

But as Marcotte and others point out, the vulnerability analysis alone is not enough. We have a problem when the first and only discussion that happens after a rape report is about the role of vulnerability and ways to reduce it. Focusing too much on vulnerability takes what is basically a moral choice -- the choice by the rapist to rape -- and turns it into a natural hazard. This claim is often made explicit, with crude sociobiological claims that "all men are dogs" and thus it's inevitable that some of them will rape. By this logic there's no more point in trying to attack the problem from the rapist's side than there is in trying to build huge levees to stop all floods.

Marcotte and others have pointed out that the vulnerability-only focus is wrong both morally -- because it lets rapists off the hook -- and empirically -- because all men are not in fact dogs, and none need to be. What I would add is that in this case it's the hazard reduction strategy (stop men from raping) that is more resilient, rather than the vulnerability reduction strategy.

Chris Clarke succinctly explains how the focus on victims' self-protection necessitates a rigid control-based strategy:

The whole of American society's response to rape, it seems, runs along the lines of the old bad joke in which the patient says "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Society's response: "So don't do that."

"Don't go out at night. Don't relax with your friends on vacation. Lock your doors. Don't be friendly with men you don't know. Don't trust the men you do know." It's a prescription for a very large prison, one that women are expected to carry around with them every minute of their lives.

Reducing vulnerability to rape is all about reducing women's options, reducing their flexibility and resources, protecting them from rapists at the expense of the rest of their lives.

According to the macho crowd and the sociobiologists, attacking the hazard event -- stopping men from trying to rape -- also requires a rigid control strategy. All we can do is build levees around the raging floods of testosterone, levees that will inevitably crack or be overtopped, levees that are in some cases prohibitively expensive to build. Perhaps there are a few psychopaths who that's true of -- but those few can hardly be solely responsible for the rape epidemic. What's really happening is that men face countless small and large messages every day telling them that they're entitled to power, that they should get their way with women (sexually and otherwise), that male agression is natural. This cultural theme comes from so many angles that it becomes highly resilient, able to withstand feminism, rape laws, and other safeguards that keep most men most of the time from raping.

What we need, then, is a shift to a robust anti-rape culture. If equality is woven into every strand of our culture, if it's a constant message from every corner, rape would become unthinkable. Men who are now horrified at the thought of losing the dominance they think the world owes them should become horrified at the thought of violently dominating another person. Note that vulnerability reduction contains a trade-off with other values -- a woman has to sacrifice other things she wants to do in order to avoid being raped. But a resilient hazard reduction strategy would not only combat rape, it would also reduce countless other forms of sexism that spring from the same cultural nexus. Anything we would "lose" -- e.g. the privileges of dominance and the advantages men get because unlike women they don't have to spend resources dealing with sexism -- is a loss only when seen through the lens of present-day attitudes.

Unfortunately this isn't a policy prescription. It's not the kind of concrete advice that the vulnerability-siders offer. But it suggests that resilience is an important criterion for an effective response to rape (and that resilience can be found in a hazard-size solution). A control-based reduction in vulnerability is not an adequate solution to the resilient sexism of our culture.

Stentor Danielson, 14:19, ,

23.6.05

Sensitive Veterans

I don't want to waste too much time on this flag burning thing, but I did have one other thought. Anti-flag-burning measures are usually justified as a way of showing respect for veterans. So I started thinking about Republican policy toward the military.

Things Republicans are not willing to do for our soldiers and veterans: provide them with armor, increase their pay, provide decent health care, protect them from bankruptcy, keep promises about how long they'll be deployed to Iraq.

Things Republicans are willing to do for our soldiers and veterans: protect them from having to serve alongside gays and lesbians, shield them from an extremely rare form of symbolic protest.

I notice a pattern. Republicans don't seem interested in anything that would substantively improve the lives of our soldiers and veterans, but they're all over anything that would protect their delicate sensibilities against being offended.

Stentor Danielson, 10:15, ,

22.6.05

Let Me Put This Simply

If you support a ban on flag-burning, you are not a patriot. You are an idol-worshipper.

Stentor Danielson, 23:34, ,

21.6.05

Vulnerability vs. Resilience

In preparing for my oral exams, I've been thinking about one of the classic questions -- what's the difference between resilience and vulnerability? My answer runs something like this:

First, we need to define the two terms as they're used in the human-environment literature. Both address the question of the impacts of a disturbance on a human or ecological system. Resilience refers to how far a system can be pushed and still bounce back to its old equilibrium. Vulnerability refers to how much impact a given degree of disturbance will have on a system.

1. The two terms are inverses. This is the most common -- and to many, the only -- difference. A vulnerable system lacks resilience, and a resilient system is not very vulnerable. This is true, to some extent. In particular, their moral valence is inverse -- vulnerability is bad, while resilience is good. This is a result of these terms' use mostly in research on environmental and technological hazards, where the interesting changes in the system are the negative ones (forests and houses being flattened by a hurricane, for example). Researchers in the resilience community, however, have pointed out the possible benefits of a lack of resilience -- a process akin to Schumpeterian "creative destruction" that clears out old structures and allows fresh building.

2. The two terms use different types of scales, and imply different visions of the world. Resilience describes a limit -- push the system up to this limit and it will always bounce back, but push it just a bit farther and it will settle into a quite different equilibrium (or disintegrate altogether). This is a categorical type of measurement. Vulnerability, on the other hand, is a continuous measure -- for any amount of disturbance, there is a corresponding degree of change wrought on the system. Thus the idea of resilience is designed for a system that has several discrete equilibrium points (as well as conditions of system destruction) to which the system will gravitate. On the other hand, vulnerability works well for a linear system.

3. Vulnerability is a broader concept. In determining the vulnerability of a system, you must consider both its ability to spring back from disturbance (i.e., its resilience) as well as its resistance to being disturbed. Consider two towns on a hurricane-prone coast. Both towns will collapse (perhaps because the local economy becomes unviable and thus the remaining residents move away) if 50% of the houses are destroyed by a single storm. Yet perhaps for Northtown, a category 3 hurricane would be sufficient to destroy 50% of the houses, whereas Southboro has been blessed with better architects and thus only a category 5 storm will be sufficient to destroy 50% of its houses. Both towns have equal resilience, yet Northtown is clearly more vulnerable, because it has less resistance.

4. Resilience has a built-in time frame, whereas the apparent vulnerability of a system is dependent on the post-disturbance time. Resilience implies the existence of discrete equilibrium points. Thus, to determine a system's resilience, you simply wait for it to arrive at an equilibrium, and then look at whether it's the same as the starting point. With respect to vulnerability, however, it's not clear when the springing-back process can be considered to be finished. In the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, some people may seem to have been extremely vulnerable, as they've lost all their posessions. But if you come back a year later, they may be back where they started (or even better off) because they got a check from the insurance company or rich uncle Phil. On the other hand, in the immediate aftermath the local store may look like it did great, since it was the only undamaged store and thus business is booming. But a year later, enough people may have given up and moved away that the store is facing bankruptcy due to a lack of customers.

None of this is meant to imply that there's a choice to be made between these two concepts, and that one must be a partisan of one side or the other. Each is useful for analyzing different questions, and a clarification such as the above is useful in deciding when each is most applicable.

Stentor Danielson, 18:00, ,

19.6.05

Specter vs. Santorum

Pennsylvania's two Senators may both be Republicans, and they may be close allies on the campaign trail. But there are some definite differences. One is willing to entertain the idea that inmates at Guantanamo Bay are human beings with rights, while the other insists that they're criminals recieving far better treatment than they deserve. One is willing to push for medical advances that could save countless sick people, while the other obsessed over a single terminally ill woman. Perhaps that's why one of them has a 54% approval rating while the other has only 45%.

Stentor Danielson, 14:40, ,