Sisters fight to save ancient African language from extinction

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culture, extinction, Identity, Languages, linguists

Sisters fight to save ancient African language from extinction

A 95-year-old woman is helping a last ditch effort to preserve an ancient African language before it goes extinct.

Hanna Koper and her two sisters are thought to be the last remaining speakers of the San language N|uu, rated as critically endangered by Unesco. The San, also known as “bushmen”, were the first hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

N|uu, which has 112 distinct sounds, was passed on orally down the generations but never written down. Now Koper and her siblings have worked with linguists to design alphabet charts with consonants, vowels and 45 different “clicks” that are typical of San languages, as well as rules of spelling and grammar.

Matthias Brenzinger, director of the Centre for African Language Diversity at the University of Cape Town, who is working on the project with British academic Sheena Shah, said: “It’s the most indigenous language of southern Africa.”

N|uu and related languages were spoken in most parts of southern Africa, he added, but were wiped out by white settlers, sometimes with the support of locals. “Very often they kept the young girls, but they killed all the men. Genocide is the major reason for these languages in southern Africa to be extinct now, and then forced assimilation. Farmers were taking their land so there was no subsistence for them any more.”

Brezinger has overseen the teaching of N|uu at a local school, where pupils learn basics such as greetings, body parts, animal names and short sentences. One teenage girl in particular is showing huge promise in the language but “at one stage there will be no fluent speaker any more”, he said.

That does not mean N|uu will necessarily be doomed to the archives, however. “With these languages, you never know,” said Brezinger. “Hawaiian was extinct basically, and then there was a movement 35 years ago and you have 2,000 mother tongue speakers of Hawaiian.

“This is why it’s very important now for us to record as much as possible with the speakers so we have material, spoken language on video tape and so on.”

N|uu has one of the biggest speech sound inventories in the world, he added, including more than 45 click phonemes, 30 non-click consonants and 37 vowels. “Language is the most important cultural asset, so if you lose your language, you lose your culture. In Canada, there is a clear link between those indigenous people who lose their language and suicide rates. In this globalised world, local identity is essential,” Brezinger.

Koper, who lives near Upington in Northern Cape province, told South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper that when she was a girl in the days of white minority rule, she and her siblings were told their language was ugly. “We were told not to make noise and the baas [a Dutch word for supervisor] would shout at us if we spoke the language because they believed we were gossiping,” she was quoted as saying.

“This is my language. This is my bread. This is my milk. I didn’t learn it, but I ate it and this is how it is my language.”

Koper’s sister Katrina Esau, 82, who has received an award from President Jacob Zuma for her work to preserve San language and culture, added: “Other people have their own languages. Why must my language be allowed to die? It must go on. As long as there are people, the language must go on.”

Exporting trauma: can the talking cure do more harm than good?

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civil war, community, coping strategies, counsellors, crisis, cultural insight, cultural practices, culturally sensitive, culture, Depression, Genocide, group therapy, interventions, mental health issues, NGOs, post traumatic stress disorder, psychological therapy, psychosocial, PTSD, rape, talking therapy, traditional, trauma, treatment, tsunami, well-being, western

Exporting trauma: can the talking cure do more harm than good?

A few years ago Andrew Solomon had to get into a wedding bed with a ram. An entire village, taking a day off from farming, danced around the unlikely couple to a pounding drumbeat, draping them both in cloth until Solomon began to think he was going to faint. At this point the ram was slaughtered along with two cockerels, and Solomon’s naked body was drenched in the animals’ blood, before being washed clean by the village women spitting water onto him.

Solomon had been taking part in a traditional Senegalese ceremony to exorcise depression as research for his book The Noonday Demon. “I discovered that depression exists universally, but the ways that it’s understood, treated, conceptualised or even experienced can vary a great deal from culture to culture,” he says now. He describes being the subject of the ceremony as “one of the most fascinating experiences of my life”.

When in Rwanda, interviewing women raising children born of rape for another book, Solomon mentioned his experience in Senegal to a Rwandan man who ran an organisation helping these women. The Rwandan told Solomon they had similar ceremonies in his country and that the disconnect between the western and traditional approaches to treating mental health had caused problems in the immediate aftermath of the genocide. “Westerners were optimistically hoping they could heal what had gone wrong,” says Solomon. “But people who hadn’t been through the genocide couldn’t understand how bad it was and their attempts to reframe everything were somewhere between offensive and ludicrous. The Rwandan felt that the aid workers were intrusive and re-traumatising people by dragging them back through their stories.”

As the Rwandan, paraphrased by Solomon, puts it: “Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.”

The best way to improve mental health after a crisis is something NGOs working in Ebola-hit countries are currently considering. International Medical Corps (IMC) recently released a report assessing the psychological needs of communities affected by the disease. IMC’s mental health adviser Inka Weissbecker is aware that they must avoid previous mistakes by international NGOs. “Whenever there is a humanitarian crisis agencies flood in,” she says. “Though with good intentions, counsellors turn up from the UK [for example] and often create more problems … It’s a very foreign concept in many countries to sit down with a stranger and talk about your most intimate problems.”

During the recovery from Haiti’s earthquake five years ago mental health researcher Guerda Nicolas was even stronger in her message to American counsellors who wanted to ease the trauma of survivors. “Please stay away – unless you’ve really, really done the homework,” she said. “Psychological issues don’t transcend around the globe.”

The fact is that different cultures have different views of the mind, says Ethan Watters, the author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. “In the west a soldier coming home might be troubled by their battlefield trauma. They think of the PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] as a sickness in their mind and they take time away from responsibilities to heal. That makes sense to us and it’s neither wrong nor right but conforms to our beliefs about PTSD. For a Sri Lankan, to take time away from their social group makes no sense because it is through their place in that group that they find their deepest sense of themselves.”

While researching his book Watters spoke to anthropologists who had in-depth knowledge of Sri Lanka’s culture and history. They said that western approaches after the tsunami had done real damage in the country where there were certain ways to talk about violence due to the long-running civil war. He says: “Into that very delicate balance came western trauma counsellors with this idea that the real way to heal was truth-telling, where you talked about the violence and emotionally relived it. That’s a western idea, it makes sense here, but it does not make sense in these villages. It had potential to spark cycles of revenge violence.”

International NGOs describe dealing with the mental health of a community after a disaster as the “psychosocial” response – meaning caring for individual and collective psychological wellbeing. The UN advertises dozens of jobs under this keyword and the American Red Cross says that since the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami there has been “increasing recognition of the need for psychosocial responses”. It also says – perhaps implicitly acknowledging that mistakes have been made in the past – “we are still in the process of identifying and documenting good practices”.

As awareness has grown that the western talking cure is not always the answer, global organisations have tried to find better ways to help. In 2007 WHO issued guidelines to advise humanitarians on their work to improve mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in emergencies. Coordination between the organisations working in the post-disaster zone as a key recommendation. Weissbecker says that this is crucial. “We reach out to organisations who might not know about the guidelines to coordinate,” she says. “It’s part of every agency’s job to watch out for other organisations doing this kind of work.”

The guidelines also stress learning local cultural practices. IMC now always start with an initial assessment that looks at the understanding and treatment of mental health that exists in that country before putting any programmes in place. “We usually don’t provide direct mental health services to the affected population because we feel that most of the time that’s not culturally appropriate and not sustainable,” says Weissbecker. In many communities, she has been impressed with indigenous coping strategies. “In Ethiopia people say depression is related to loss,” she says. “So the community takes up a collection and they all give them something. This is very positive.” IMC meets with traditional healers and builds up relationships with them.

Many argue that for some mental illnesses western expertise can be genuinely helpful. In Ethiopia Weissbecker’s team discovered a man with schizophrenia who had been tied up in a goat shed for seven years. “Once this family was connected to our services he started taking medication was unchained and participating in family life,” she says. “The father held up the chains to the community and said, ‘look I used these chains on my son and now he’s part of the family again’. People will throw stones because they are understandably frightened [of people with severe conditions].”

The Rwandan that Solomon met questioned whether talking therapy helped survivors of the Rwandan genocide. “His point of view was that a lot of what made sense in the west didn’t make any sense to him,” says Solomon. But Survivors Fund, a British NGO that works in Rwanda, has found that western-style group therapy sessions have really helped women who were raped. “It’s 20 years since then but many of the women our groups have never told their story before,” says Dr Jemma Hogwood who runs counselling programmes for the charity. “A lot of women say it’s a big relief to talk,” she says.

Hogwood has been working in Rwanda for four years but hasn’t heard of traditional ceremonies like the one described by Solomon. The group therapy sessions incorporate local practices such as praying before and after, as this is something the women wanted to do. Weissbecker adds that one-on-one therapy with expats can help people who have experienced extreme violence, rape or torture. “Some of them want to talk to foreigners because they don’t trust people in their communities,” she says. “So then it’s also important for them to have that one-on-one option.”

Some feel that aid should be focussed on food, medicines, shelter, and stay away from mental health. International relations academic Vanessa Pupavac has researched the effect of the war in former Yugoslavia, and has argued that “trauma is displacing hunger in western coverage of wars and disasters … Trauma counselling, or what is known as psychosocial intervention, has become an integral part of the humanitarian response in wars.” The problem with this, she believes, is that blanket-defining a whole population as traumatised becomes “a reinforcing factor that inhibits people from recovery”. Her recent work with Croatian veterans found that the PTSD label stops them from moving on with their lives and contributing to society.

“There are more Croatian veterans on post-traumatic stress disorder pensions now than there were ten years ago,” she tells me. “The international-PTSD-framing of people’s experiences has not only inhibited recovery but has also created social, economic and political problems for postwar Croatia.” She believes NGOs should stop psychosocial programmes altogether because they disrupt communities’ own coping strategies.

But this point of view is rejected by Weissbecker and her colleagues, who don’t accept “the romantic idea that without intervention everything will be fine”. The response to mental illness in many countries is often harmful, she says: “Psychotic patients are chained. Children with developmental disorders are at risk of abuse. Mothers with depression have a higher risk of malnourished children. People with anxiety are often given benzodiazepines which can be very addictive.” The solution, Weissbecker says, is to bring together global and local expertise.

The best experts to bridge the gap between international and local experience are those who might not have a health or psychology background, but have deep knowledge about cultural differences: anthropologists. Since the Ebola outbreak there is a growing recognition of this discipline’s role in emergencies. The American Anthropological Association has asked its members to become more involved in the west African countries hit by the disease. It argues that if anthropologists had been more involved from the start of the outbreak more people wouldn’t have caught the disease due to misunderstandings over traditional burials and conspiracy theories about westerners spreading the illness.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has employed anthropologists to inform their work for years but one of them, Beverley Stringer, says there’s been a “surge” in interest in what they can offer humanitarian work. “I was at a seminar at the Royal Anthropology Institute recently where they said ‘finally the humanitarian world is interested in our perspective’,” she says. “They’re quite excited about that.”

But Stringer warns that getting anthropologists to work for NGOs should not just be a case of parachuting in an expert; aid workers and volunteers on the ground need to recognise that their own experience gives them insight. “If mums aren’t coming to get their kids vaccinated you don’t need to be an anthropologist to work out why,” she says. “My work is to encourage curiosity and to equip teams with the skills to be able to understand.”

Whether it’s through working more with locals and anthropologists – or ideally both – there is recognition that cultural insight is essential for preventing aid workers from causing damage when they are trying to do good.

“I think enlisting the anthropologists in this process – people who truly know about how to go into other countries and be culturally sensitive – is very important,” says Watters.

“One anthropologist asked me to imagine the scenario reversed. Imagine that after 9/11 or Katrina these healers come from Mozambique to knock on the doors of family members of the deceased to say ‘we need to help you through this ritual to sever your relationship with the dead’. That would make no sense to us. But we seem to have no problem doing the reverse.”

If psychosis is a rational response to abuse, let’s talk about it

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abuse, cbt, culture, diagnosis, hearing voices, medication, paranoia, psychological support, psychosis, schizophrenia, trauma

If psychosis is a rational response to abuse, let’s talk about it

There is something of a sea change in the way we understand experiences that have traditionally been labelled as psychotic. In our culture at least, experiences such as hearing voices or seeing visions have long been viewed by the medical establishment as unequivocal symptoms of mental illness. Treatment has tended to focus on the suppression of such “symptoms” using antipsychotic medication.

Research (often funded by drugs companies) has been largely concerned with the brain as a physical organ, rather than with the person within whose head it is housed, or indeed with their life experience. And, because of the presumption that psychotic symptoms are the preserve of mentally ill people, estimates of the numbers affected have been based on the numbers who have received a particular diagnosis.

But a report published last week by the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology, challenges many of these assumptions.Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia presents a compelling case for trying to understand psychotic experiences as opposed to merely categorising them. It argues that such experiences can be understood from a psychological perspective, in the same way as other thoughts and feelings, rather than being placed on the other side of an artificial sick/healthy divide.

And, indeed, they appear to be much more common than is frequently supposed. According to the report, up to 10% of the population has heard a voice speaking when nobody was there and almost one in three holds beliefs that might be considered paranoid. Two in three people who had heard voices or seen visions did not seek help because they were untroubled by them. And, of course, there is huge diversity in the way such experiences are understood and valued in different cultures.

For those who find their experiences unwelcome and disturbing (and they can be extremely disturbing; I don’t think anyone questions that) the range of help on offer is decidedly limited. Despite the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommending that everyone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia is offered cognitive behaviour therapy(CBT), only one in 10 has access to it. Treatment by medication alone, forcibly if needed, is the norm.

It is widely accepted that early life experience, trauma, abuse and deprivation greatly increase the risk of developing psychosis. Indeed,research suggests that experiencing multiple childhood traumas gives approximately the same risk of developing psychosis as smoking does for developing lung cancer.

Many people object to the psychotic label because they consider their experiences a natural reaction to the abuse they have suffered, and even a vital survival tool. What they want above all is space and time to talk about their experiences and to make sense of them. It is shocking how few are given this opportunity.

Of course, psychological approaches to helping those with psychosis will not suit everyone. There are those for whom a diagnosis can come as a welcome relief. Many people find medication helpful, as treatment on its own or alongside talking therapies.

In fact, one of the most persuasive messages of the report is that people should be allowed to understand their experience in their own way, without professionals insisting on a particular interpretation.

It is a highly collaborative approach and fitting that at least a quarter of those who contributed to the report have lived experience of psychosis. Their opinions and experiences are as varied as you would expect with any group of individuals but together they comprise an enormously powerful and vivid testimony to the full range of human experience and to the many and varied ways in which we can help each other to make sense of it.

Culture: Diverse diagnostics

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autism, culture

Culture: Diverse diagnostics

In rural South Africa, young children may look at adults’ faces while having a conversation, but they don’t usually make direct eye contact because it is considered disrespectful. Yet a lack of eye contact is a hallmark of social deficits in people with autism, and as such it is something Western clinicians look for when diagnosing the disorder.

There are other examples of children’s behaviour — such as finger pointing to draw attention to something, or conversing with adults as if they are peers — that are commonplace in the West and included in tests of autism.

“Most autism research originates in the West, and we have a particular view of what autism is, a particular view about how children behave and interact with adults,” says Courtenay Norbury at Royal Holloway, University of London, who worked with children with autism from ethnically diverse backgrounds in east London¹. “Other cultures might have very different expectations of how children behave.”This viewpoint makes it challenging to use behavioural diagnostic tests for autism in places where the disorder may look — and even be — different from in the West. But with growing interest in autism’s true prevalence worldwide and the need for autism services in poor countries, researchers are grappling with the best ways to objectively diagnose the disorder.Parent support groups for autism exist in more than 100 countries. “We know that autism is diagnosable and observable across cultures,” says Mayada Elsabbagh, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who is leading a group within the International Society for Autism Research on cross-cultural issues. “But the exact details of how different cultures or settings modify autism is unknown,” she says.

For many years, the relevance of culture to autism was ignored. Some researchers believed that autism was intrinsically linked to modernity and Westernization, and was rare in other cultures. Others assumed that because autism is a neurobiological disorder, its expression should be the same everywhere².

But many researchers are beginning to take a subtler point of view. “While autism itself, the neuropathology of it, may not be culturally determined, our interpretation of those behaviours and our response to those behaviours is,” says David Mandell, associate director of the Center for Autism Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

Diagnostic differences

Before they can assess autism worldwide, researchers must measure how often various behaviours occur in different cultures and establish the norm, says Charles Zaroff, a psychology researcher at the University of Macau in China. They will also need to work with parents of children with autism to identify how it might manifest in a given culture.

In many Asian cultures, for example, children are expected to express respect for their elders through their language and behaviour, but these aspects of social interaction can be tricky for children with autism to master. Such difficulties would hardly be noticed in much of the West. “Lacking that deference would appear completely appropriate in the United States, but that lack of attention to the strata in society based on age would appear very abnormal in places like China,” Zaroff says.

Because the most widely used screening tests for autism were developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, researchers are finding that they have to adapt the tests to identify autism in other countries. For example, part of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), one of the gold-standard diagnostic instruments for the disorder, involves observing a child having a pretend birthday party — singing ‘Happy Birthday’, cutting and distributing slices of cake, and so on. But in rural areas of South Africa, birthdays often aren’t celebrated, so even typically developing children might be unfamiliar with this ritual.

So, for a study of early autism diagnosis in KwaZulu-Natal province, researchers developed an alternative scenario of shared excitement, involving a traditional African song. “It’s finding the intention of what you’re trying to elicit, and then finding an alternative,” says Amy Wetherby, director of the Autism Institute in the College of Medicine at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who led the work.

Wetherby developed a list of 22 early signs of autism based on studies of several hundred children in Florida. Unpublished data from 19 children show that many of the same red flags differentiate children with autism from their typically developing peers in South Africa as well, says Wetherby.

“The amazing part to me is the unusual gestures,” says Wetherby. For example, rather than pointing or looking together at an object, children with autism in the United States may communicate by taking an adult’s hand and moving it to the object. “That’s an early sign of autism, and we see that [in South Africa] as well.”

One reason the patterns of autism symptoms appear to be similar across cultures may be that the participants in this study are only 18–36 months of age. “The earlier we go,” Wetherby says, “the more similarities we will see.”

More culturally specific or environmentalsymptoms of autism may emerge as children grow up. For example, according to one recent study, 5–12-year-olds with autism in the United States are more sensitive to sights and sounds than are children with autism in Israel — although the authors note that genetic, cultural and environmental factors might be an influence, as well as the parents’ reporting of their child’s behaviour³.

Subtle speech

If cultural differences emerge later in childhood, this could further complicate the diagnosis of autism. The disorder tends to be diagnosed later outside the United States and Western Europe, in part because of a lack of awareness of both developmental norms and autism. A parent who notices that a child is withdrawn or has a language delay may not recognize that as a symptom of autism.

In-depth interviews in Goa, India, show that the parents there aren’t attuned to early social and communication milestones, and they usually become alarmed only when a child starts preschool and has trouble connecting with peers⁴. “What really concerns the parents initially is, ‘he’s not fitting in with everybody else’,” says Gauri Divan, a paediatrician working with the child health organization Sangath in Goa.

In some cultures, parents may notice symptoms that are not typically associated with autism. Among Latino migrant workers in Florida, for example, “the first complaint seems to be that the child is a picky eater,” says Roy Richard Grinker, a George Washington University anthropologist in Washington DC, who is collaborating with Wetherby on a study of autism in this community. “But then, if you go into more detail, you start to see that these children the mothers are describing are probably going to fall on the autism spectrum.” Grinker speculates that these mothers are particularly aware of eating habits because they are poor and food is scarce.

Some evidence suggests that doctors need to be trained to spot the signs of autism from oblique comments made by parents. For example, Mandell says, white parents in the United States often emphasize a child’s lack of communication by saying, ‘my child doesn’t respond when I call his name’, while black parents tend to use phrases like ‘my child won’t mind me’. Doctors may be less apt to consider a diagnosis of autism when they think a parent is describing a disobedient child rather than a socially impaired one — possibly helping to explain why autism is diagnosed less frequently among black children.

Raising rates

If parents in different cultures developed the same sense of autism awareness as in the West, research suggests, autism prevalence around the world might look no different to — or may be even higher than — in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this is a study of more than 55,000 children in South Korea, which estimated autism prevalence at 2.64% (ref. 5). That’s more than twice the autism prevalence in the United States estimated by the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, and more than 50 times higher than the South Korean government’s figure for autism prevalence of 0.046% (ref. 6). One reason for that higher estimate may be that the researchers screened children in the general population for autism symptoms, rather than recruiting them only from clinics for autism and other developmental disorders.

In South Korea, researchers suggest that one reason for the underdiagnosis in autism may be that the stigma attached to the disorder is particularly strong in that country⁷. The diagnosis of a Korean child with autism diminishes the marriage prospects of siblings, and it can even affect his or her parents’ careers. Parents often prefer that their child be labelled as having ‘reactive attachment disorder’, or ‘lack of love’ as it’s known in Korean, a diagnosis that affects the mother’s reputation.

Still, about two-thirds of the children the South Korean study identified as having autism attended mainstream schools and were not receiving any autism-related services. This widespread mainstreaming raises the question of whether a Western-defined autism diagnosis is meaningful if children are able to function reasonably well in their cultural context. “That’s an interesting issue,” says Norbury, who questions “whether we should be worried about these kids, and whether we should be making families worried about them, if there wasn’t any kind of worry before.”

Other children identified in the study may be what Koreans would call a ‘border child,’ a new term that is emerging to describe some who would probably be diagnosed with autism in the West⁷. “This is a child who is high-functioning enough to be in a mainstream school, but who has significant social impairment,” Grinker says. Parents prefer this label, he says, because it implies that the child is only impaired socially, not intellectually, and that the condition is temporary.

In stigmatizing autism, South Korea is not unique. But Elsabbagh points out that attitudes towards a disorder often change as more resources and services become available. That, she says, is one powerful argument for more cross-cultural research on autism.

Another is that it will advance understanding of the biology of autism. “We’ve constrained our participant pools to those of European ancestry, and we have also not considered very thoroughly some of the cultural determinants that may shape autism in different ways,” says Elsabbagh. “Taking a more global perspective would allow us to see that underlying commonality much more easily.”

References

1. Norbury, C. F. & Sparks, A. Dev. Psychol. (published online 5 March 2012).
2. Daley, T. C. Trans. Psychiatry 39, 531–550 (2002)
3. Caron, K. G. et al. Am. J. Occup. Ther. 66, e77–e80 (2012)
4. Divan, G. et al. Autism Res. 5, 190–200 (2012).
5. Kim, Y. S. et al. Am. J. Psychiatry 168, 904–912 (2011).
6. Kang-Yi, C. D. et al. J. Autism Dev. Disord, (published online 22 June 2012)
7. Grinker, R. et al. Autism Res. 5, 201–210 (2012)

Lesson one: We’re students, not slags

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culture, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual objectification

Lesson one: We’re students, not slags

“Rappers and Slappers”, “Slag and Drag”, and “CEOs and Corporate Hoes”. They may sound like adult films, but these are the names of some of the university-affiliated freshers’ week parties that undergraduates have been invited to attend on campuses and nightclubs across Britain.

When I chronicled the highly-sexualised freshers’ week experiences that female students have reported to the Everyday Sexism Project in an article for Independent Voices last week, I expected a trickle of responses.

But I received a deluge of similar stories from hundreds of students – male and female – who are appalled by the macho culture that seems to set the tone of social life at UK universities.

Parties at which female students are pressured to dress in revealing or sexualised outfits appear increasingly common. To pick just one example, a woman described a freshers’ week initiation for male rugby players: “All the rugby freshers had their trousers around their ankles and were standing in their boxers. They were encouraged to pick one of us to “grind” with them (gyrate against them). One guy grabbed me and pulled me on to the dance floor and then told me I had to grind on him or else he’d have to do a forfeit. When I refused he told me I was frigid and grabbed a different fresher.”

Another reader, Sorrel Kinton said: “I attended one of these events and was turned away at the door for wearing normal clothing … I was told I could come in if I flashed.”

The idea that students must choose to participate or risk being labelled “uptight” is a recurring theme. Nesrin Samli, who graduated from Liverpool University this summer, told The Independent, “it’s very different for people who feel more shy or uncomfortable, because you don’t have a choice – there were strict initiations and you had to do what everyone else did or you were just missed out.”

Of course, students can choose to avoid such events altogether, and many universities offer a wider range of activities, from chill-out nights to afternoon teas. But there remains a strong sense of pressure to participate in the main events, as students experience the nerve-wracking process of finding their feet for the first time away from home. Samli says: “Even if you don’t want to dress like that, it’s a matter of whether you want to be part of the group and have friends.”

Emma Carragher, vice president of the Cardiff University Women’s Association, agrees: “There’s a danger that new students feel pressured into taking part because ‘everyone else is doing it’ – if they want to take a stand against objectification they’ll be seen as weird which is obviously not the first impression they want to make.

“More than that, these events … send the message to freshers that this is normal … The first year of university is where your political and ideological views are challenged and reformed, so universities should be striving to promote the idea that women are not objects rather than encouraging it.”

A 2010 National Union of Students study revealed that 1 in 7 of the female students surveyed had been the victim of sexual assault or violence.

Yet several of the reports we have received reference “rape-victim themed” fancy dress parties and “banter” about sexual assault. One woman said that when she was at university two years ago, 15 members of a male-only drinking society were suspended when a “hit list” they had compiled of female students as sexual targets became public. Another wrote: “I the only girl in politics tutorial on feminism. No real discussion. Just jokes on women and kitchen. Including from the tutor.” Another student showed us a copy of a poster she said was used to advertise unisex football trials at her university. The top half consisted entirely of a picture of a woman’s breasts in a bra. Beneath, the text began: “Now I have your attention lads…”

Many would dismiss some of these incidents as harmless, or claim that themed events like “Pimps and Hoes” have little real impact on student welfare. But these reports suggest a disturbing culture of female students facing sexual objectification and demeaning labels, and the use of such names for official university and student union events sends a powerful message by implying the institutions’ acceptance or approval of this culture.

The idea of complicity is of great importance here. From the number of reports we have recently seen emerging in the national press on the theme of sexual harassment in the workplace over the past 30 years – most notably the Jimmy Savile scandal – it has become clear how easily victims can feel oppressed by a culture of normalised acceptance within a large institution. Likewise, young students at a vulnerable life stage might be affected by the suggestion that certain attitudes towards women are condoned by their educational institutions. It should be the responsibility of all universities to behave proactively to eradicate any implication that they might support the sort of damaging, victim-blaming ideas associated with labels such as “slag”, “hoe” and “slapper”.

Also: Cambridge University Graduate Blogs On Horrifying Misogyny In Catalogue Of A Barmaid

The Americanization of Mental Illness

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culture, mental health issues

Note: There is a symbol of a speech bubble on page 9 of this document.  This is to highlight that although the practices mentioned in that paragraph occur in Zanzibar which is a predominately Muslim country, some of these practices, e.g. dancing, are not part of the Islamic faith in warding off spirits.

The Americanization of Mental Illness (2010)

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

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alcohol, assimilation, Burma, citizenship, culture, customs, decompression sickness, dive, education, employment, fish-bombing, gambling, integration, Language, livelihood, Moken, nomads, sea cucumber, sea-gypsies, stateless, Thailand, traditions, tribe, tsunami

Moken nomads leave behind their ‘sea gypsy’ life for a modern existence

Ngui takes one last breath and disappears with a tiny splash. Tunnelling through the turquoise waves, he dives past brightly coloured fish and coral, until he reaches the sandy bottom of the seabed, 20 metres deep, where he begins scouring for tonight’s dinner.

He wears no mask, no fins, and no diving tank. He prefers sarongs and button-down shirts decorated with seashell and starfish motifs but the most startling thing about him underwater is his eyes. They are wide open.

Ngui, 30, belongs to the Moken, a nomadic, seafaring tribe of hunter-gatherers who live in the southern seas of Burma and Thailand. Little is known about their origins, but it is believed they descended from migrant Austronesians who set sail from southern China around 4,000 years ago. Spending eight months of the year at sea, the Moken roam in small flotillas of kabang – boats fashioned from a single tree and shared by a nuclear family – and return to land only to barter fish and shells for essentials such as rice and petrol, or to wait out the monsoon season in temporary shacks. It is a way of life that has existed, unchanged, for centuries – but one that may not last for much longer.

The 2004 tsunami greatly depleted the source of the Moken’s only livelihood: the ocean’s once-abundant array of seafood. International fishing boats are now wiping out the little that’s left. Those Moken who have moved ashore are often forced to take dangerous jobs for menial pay. Those who stay at sea are sometimes arrested for lacking papers or permits. Others return to land after months afloat only to find their huts destroyed and luxury tourist resorts built in their place.

“The sea has changed and life has changed,” explains Ngui’s father, Jao. “Things we used to do we can’t do any more. Places we used to go we can’t go any more. Life isn’t fun any more.”

It would be difficult to find a family that represents the changes wrought on the Moken as well as Jao’s. He was born on a boat and spent his childhood at sea. He married at 16 and nearly pursued a traditional, aquatic lifestyle – until he and his wife decided to settle on land.

“Life was hard being illiterate,” says Jao in the cramped house in Kuraburi they now share with a 13-member extended family. “I wanted my children to go to school and have options.”

Education is still a relatively new concept to the roughly 2,000 Moken who live in the waters around Burma and Thailand, most of whom are stateless. A recent push by various charities and the Thai government to issue Thai identity cards has granted some access to state-run schools and healthcare, but claiming full-blown citizenship – by proving that they, or a parent, were born in Thailand – is a complex issue for a nomadic people who hardly use numbers and mark the date according to the tide, not the Gregorian calendar.

Even getting children to school can prove trying, said Sumana Sirimangkala, headteacher at the only school on Koh Lao, an island of 50 Moken families on the Thai-Burmese border. “Moken lack supplies like clothes, food, stationery, textbooks, shoes, raincoats, lifejackets, umbrellas – all the things that are necessary for children to come to school,” she says.

“Moken can’t afford any of these things, so the school has to provide it all – otherwise they don’t want to come.”

Moken children regularly drop out to help their parents earn money, students say. Some boys as young as eight are sent to work in construction, while others help their mothers dig for shells – backbreaking labour in the hot sun.

Nearly all the men on the island are hired by Thai fishing boats to plant explosives on the seabed, or to dive for expensive and exotic rarities such as sea cucumber. Sometimes they are sent down with air run through thin plastic tubes hooked up to a spluttery, diesel-run compressor; other times they dive without any air at all. Many succumb to decompression sickness (the bends) from ascending too quickly; some don’t return at all.

“I’m afraid of being killed, it’s so risky,” admits a 30-year-old Moken who has just returned from a fish-bombing expedition. “We wire together four to five dynamite sticks, connect another explosive wire that hooks up to the boat, and then I dive down to the bottom of the sea. When I come back up, the sticks are ignited with a battery.”

Sitdit, a Moken elder whose son died from decompression sickness during a job in the Nicobar Islands, says risks such as these are increasingly part and parcel of a new way of life.

“We are running out of resources, so our skills have to be adapted to the new challenges,” he says simply. “Sometimes the big boats get caught by the Burmese military and Moken are arrested. I had four relatives arrested by the Burmese military and they all died in jail.”

Apart from a handful of researchers who had studied their language and customs – notably the French father-son anthropologist duo Pierre and Jacques Ivanoff – the Moken were a relatively unknown lot until the tsunami, when headlines described the mysterious “sea gypsies [who] saw signs in the waves”. Charities and religious groups poured in with free supplies – food, petrol, boats and building materials – at such a velocity that some communities were left bewildered by the handouts.

“We had to become Christian to qualify for a boat, so I became a Christian – I even became a church leader!” explains Sitdit, his charity-built, two-room stilt house facing the “church”, an empty wooden structure with a simple roof. “All we had to do was follow the gospel and sing songs. But then the church [group] cheated us, and now nobody goes to church any more.”

Today, a different kind of communion is going on, one where Moken women in sarongs while away the afternoon heat with card games and whisky so strong it makes the eyes burn. When the men return from their jobs at sea, they too take to drinking and gambling.

“There’s an issue with their drinking a lot of alcohol – it’s everywhere,” says Jitlada Rattanapan of Plan Thailand, a charity working to support Moken children.

At Baan Tung Wah, a Moken village of around 70 families in the mainland resort town of Khao Lak, children with snotty noses and dirty T-shirts beg for sweets while elders take shots of strong drink. Most of the parents are away doing menial day jobs – working in construction, spraying insecticides, or scavenging for recyclables along the beaches and streets – leaving the children to play among puppies and chickens in the rubbish-filled streets.

“Everyone in this village drinks – they hit their kids, too,” says a shopkeeper, Kong Kwan, 35, who spends all day selling sweets and crisps to Moken children and petrol and whisky to Moken elders. “Sometimes the police come, but they can’t be bothered to deal with it.”

The community’s 20-year-old youth leader, Big, says that life in the village can be stifling, forcing many youths to look for a way out.

“We’re restricted to living in this area only – about five acres [2 hectares] – and because of the influx of hotels and resorts around here, the sea has been polluted,” he says. “That makes it difficult to go fishing. So a lot of young people just choose easier jobs, like working in hotels or at 7-Eleven.”

Big adds that the Moken youth have pretty much “assimilated seamlessly” into Thai society, so much so that “whatever ‘bad Thais’ do, Moken do now too”, he notes. “Drugs, stealing, marijuana, glue-sniffing. We never saw this before, and it’s getting serious.”

The village is trying to counter such behaviour by offering classes in Moken language and customs to the children, many of whom are unaware of their traditions. Other classes, directed at teens, offer training as tour guides.

The community leader, Hong, who heads the classes and created the village’s Moken museum, hopes that turning Baan Tung Wah into an ecotourism destination may help get people back on track.

“Moken are supposed to travel, to be nomadic, to travel freely. So if we cannot travel freely, we are dead, culturally at least,” he says. “Moken children use mobile phones, study English and choose to be educated. We’ve abandoned our old traditions so much we risk losing them entirely.”

While many charities working for the Moken promote education and citizenship as giving new “options” to such a vulnerable group, Narumon Hinshiranan – a cultural anthropologist at Chulalongkorn University who speaks fluent Moken and has studied the group for the past decade – says this kind of “one-size-fits-all development … limits their nomadic background”.

“I don’t see education as an ‘option’, I see it as integration into Thai society – so that they are essentially cut off from their roots.”

Those who have pursued this new kind of life – such as Jao’s 23-year-old daughter, Kang, who is so far the only Moken to have graduated from university – may determine what choices the Moken make next.

“I see myself as a bridge between the Moken community and the outside world,” says Kang, who this month starts her first job, as the only Moken teacher at the school on Surin island.

She will be living with her brother Ngui, along with some 200 other Moken villagers, but they will be parallel lives in what seems like a parallel world.

“I like to be out doing things,” says Ngui, thrusting a hand out to the sea to explain why he chose not to stay in school. “I dive to collect seafood, gather it up bit by bit, and sell it to shops. It’s enough to make a living for now.”

The Moken

• The Moken are one of many sea gypsy tribes across south-east Asia: there are the Orang Laut of Indonesia; the Bajau of Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines; and the Salone (Moken) of Burma

• Thailand is home to an estimated 12,000 sea gypsies, divided into three groups: the Moken, the Moklen and the Urak Lawoi

• A 2003 study by Lund University in Sweden found that the underwater vision of Moken children was twice as good as that of their European counterparts

• Food sourcing is subsistence-based: men traditionally spear fish, or use nets or traps, to find seafood, while women catch crabs and oysters by hand, or dig for shells. They also engage in basic agriculture

• The Moken are often described as sincere and peace-loving, preferring to flee trouble than engage in disagreements

• Traditionally animist, the Moken perform a large spirit-offering festival in the fifth lunar month and celebrate death by singing, dancing and drinking

• Though the Moken give themselves only one name, the Thai monarchy has created surnames for them, among them “Klatalee” (“brave person of the sea”)

• A bucket of sea cucumbers, which the Moken dive for, earns about $10 a day. A small dish of the stuff sells for $30 or more in Taiwanese restaurants

• Moken are often called “dirty islanders” by Thai people, a phrase that has encouraged many Moken youth to adopt Thai fashion and haircuts to fit in

• Surin island, home to a large Moken settlement, was turned into a national marine park by Thailand in 1981, rendering illegal traditional Moken activities such as fishing and logging (in order to make boats)

• Burma has been rumoured to be looking to permanently resettle many of its Moken and has already turned one Moken island into a military base.

Rape is not a dirty secret, it is a violent crime

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blame, crime, culture, myths, secret, sexual assault, shame

Rape is not a dirty secret, it is a violent crime

It is troubling enough that such a small proportion of reported rapes make it to court, worse still that so few victims come forward in the first place. But most disturbing of all is the reason why so many people keep their suffering to themselves: because they do not think they will be believed. That rape is still a dirty secret, hedged about with so much blame and shame that victims feel they cannot come forward, is testament to how far we still have to go.

There are, of course, great legal difficulties in rape trials. Sexual assault is one of the few crimes where proof lies not in the physical facts of the matter, but in the subjective intentions of those involved. One person’s word against another’s, with no corroborating witnesses, is highly problematic for a legal system predicated on the concepts of innocent until proven guilty and proof beyond reasonable doubt.

This is no call for the wholesale abandonment of basic tenets of justice. But simply to shrug our collective shoulders, blame intractable issues of principle, and thereby leave a swathe of victims of violent assault with insufficient legal protection cannot be acceptable in what purports to be a civilised society.

The latest statistics make gruelling reading. More than a third of British women have been subjected to some kind of sexual assault, and one in 10 has been raped, according to the Mumsnet social networking site. Barely a third of victims go to the police, and another third tell no one at all, not even close friends.

In fairness, there has been significant progress in terms of institutional procedures. In many areas of the country, for example, there are now specially trained police officers and court prosecutors for cases of sexual assault. But uneven regional conviction rates only underline the extent to which such practices remain an optional extra rather than standard.

Equally, although victims no longer face the prospect of being cross-questioned by their attacker in court, pursuing a case to trial remains a horrifying ordeal. As a witness for the prosecution, the victim has no legal support, and faces intensely personal questioning from defence lawyers, often while face-to-face with their rapist for the first time since the assault. Even within the framework of innocent until proven guilty, there is more that can be done to ease the burden on victims, not least allowing them legal representation in court.

But the shortcomings of our institutions are merely part and parcel of a wider cultural understanding of rape that still militates against justice. It is that culture that must change if victims are to be encouraged to speak up. Comments from the Justice Secretary last year that appeared to imply that some rapes are more “serious” than others have hardly helped, adding to the persistent fallacy – often stoked by the media – that a person being either drunk or dressed in a certain way must take some responsibility for the actions of their attacker.

Part of the problem is the myth that rape is primarily a threat on the streets at night. Far from it. In fact, rape rarely occurs in the proverbial dark alley. The truth is both more banal, and more appalling: two-thirds of victims know their attacker, and assaults commonly take place in the home of either the victim or the rapist. Perpetrators rely on shame to keep their crime secret. Too often they are proved right. And if the conspiracy of silence is a problem for women who are raped, it is even worse for men.

Mumsnet is, therefore, to be applauded for its efforts to create a climate where victims feel they can come forward. The current Survivors UK ad campaign encouraging male victims to seek help is also welcome. But each is just one small step. Rape is one of the more appalling things that one human being can do to another, and yet there is no other crime about which our society is so ambivalent. That must change.

The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village

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culture, delusion, psychosis, reality tv, The Truman Show

The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village

The article focuses on a type of delusion in which individuals believe they are being filmed and which they believe will be broadcast to others for their entertainment.

(Please click the above link to access the full article)

It’s a girl: The three deadliest words in the world

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abortion, Children, culture, daughters, documentary, economy, education, family, femicide, film, foeticide, gender, girls, infanticide, mothers, parents, poverty, women

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/01/16/it%E2%80%99s-a-girl-the-three-deadliest-words-in-the-world/

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughters, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.