Harmful Social Practices Research Articles

Empowering Communities against Harmful Social Practices through Integrated Water Hygiene and Sanitation and Alternative Rites of Passage Model in Kajiado County, Kenya

Background: In Kajiado County, water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions have been independently implemented in communities that have been targeted with sexual health rights interventions. This approach only achieves a set of disjointed achievements and thus the need for integration. This project implemented and tested the effectiveness of the Integrated Water Hygiene and Sanitation and Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR)Model to address harmful practices against young girls in the county. This model was implemented on the assumption that addressing a pressing need of the community through providing access to Water hygiene and sanitation services provides a platform to discuss SRHR matters leading to positive change towards WASH and SRHR behaviours such as reduction of FGM, teenage pregnancies and early forced marriages. Methods: A before and after design that compared baseline and endline evaluation data was used to establish the effectiveness of the model. The study was conducted in 4 sub-counties. Data was collected through household surveys. Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW) aged 10-24 years were included. Data were analysed using proportions, frequencies, odds ratios, and adjusted odds ratios. Results: Prevalence of FGM/C dropped to 55.2% from 91% at baseline. More circumcised women (79.5% end line; 28% at baseline) reported that they wished they had not been circumcised. An increase in participants who had ever heard messages of ARP (91.6% end line; 47% baseline) was reported. Approximately 98.1% believed that ARP is acceptable to the community as a means of progressing girls to womanhood. Young girls and Women were more likely to undergo FGM/C if they did not have access to a toilet (AOR, 2.32; 95% CI, 1.50 to 3.59), had never heard of ARP (AOR, 2.50; 95% CI, 1.54 to 4.04) and were not sure if ARP would be acceptable in the community (AOR, 0.51; 95% CI, 0.27 to 0.97). Odds of ever being circumcised were less likely among those that stated that FGC should not continue (AOR, 0.11; 95% CI, 0.01 to 0.81) and had been part of the intervention (AOR, 0.25; 95% CI, 0.17 to 0.38). Conclusions: There is a link between addressing WASH gaps (community-felt needs) in Kajiado and the reduction of FGM/C. Addressing community pressing needs provides a platform to address sensitive social-cultural practices. Recommendations of further studies to explore contextual factors that affect the implementation of this model.

COVID-19 in the United States as affective frame.

In this paper I attempt to contribute to the developing field of “political philosophy of mind.” To render concrete the notion of “affective frame,” a social situation which pre-selects for salience and valence of environmental factors relative to a subject’s life, I conduct a case study of a deleterious socially instituted affective frame, which, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, produced individuated circumstances that came crashing down on “essential workers” who were forced into a double bind. We saw here an untenable and ultimately fatal situation that forced a choice between, on the one hand, increasing the risk of their failing to provide financial support for their family if they quit their job or reduced their hours, and on the other, increasing their risk of contracting the virus by continuing to work. The case study will thus be itself an affective frame that will bring to the fore for its readers a nexus of harmful social practices of contemporary American society. Form is reinforced by content here, as this particular affective frame brings forth a further emphasis on affect when we focus on workers simultaneously socialized into roles as breadwinners and as members of the caring professions. For those people, quitting work becomes even more difficult as they come to affirm their self-identity of being providers of affective labor for those in their care at work and of being the affective anchor of family life at home, the one who financially helps keep a roof over the heads of their loved ones as well as being the emotional backbone of the family. Hence the affective frame of “essential workers in Covid times” renders salient and affirmatively valenced their affectively laden self-image as caring helpers of those in need, at home and at work.

The Mass Media and Gender-Based Violence in Imo State, Nigeria: A Critical Analysis

The study examined the mass media and gender base violence in Imo State. The investigation was anchored on the agenda setting and social network theories. The survey method was adopted for the study, while the sample size of 385 was drawn from a population of 5,408,756, using the Australian sample size calculator. The multistage sampling technique was adopted using questionnaire as the instrument of data collection. The researcher used simple percentages and mean analysis for the statistical analysis of data. Findings revealed that the extent to which residents of Imo State are exposed to media reports and programmes on gender-based violence is high at 44%. Analysis also revealed that, at a mean average of 3.5 (N=379), the knowledge level of residents on gender-based violence is high. It was also revealed that, at an average mean of 3.5 (N=379), media programmes and reports have been able to induce perceptive/attitudinal change on gender-based violence positively. This is so because the respondents perceive the menace or act as a threat to human, family, societal and national development. The study further revealed that adequate awareness campaigns, enlightening programme, media programmes/reports on the need for the abolition of harmful social practices were the factors that can aid media efforts in actualizing perceptive/attitudinal change on gender base violence. The researcher recommended that more media programmes aimed at discouraging all forms of violence against women should be put in place by both the state government and non-governmental organisations.

Religion, family structure, and the perpetuation of female genital cutting in Egypt

AbstractHow are harmful social practices brought to an end? Female genital cutting (FGC) is extremely common among ever-married women in Egypt, but the practice has declined among younger women and girls. While much of the recent literature on abatement of FGC has focused on individual-level determinants of a mother's choice to circumcise her daughters, we focus on meso-level factors, particularly norm change within religious communities and attitude formation within families. We find differential FGC trends across Muslim and Coptic Christian communities as well as an effect of the gender of a woman's first-born child—an exogenous variable in Egypt where pre-natal sex selection is rare—on attitudes toward FGC. The effect of the first-born gender varies by religion and birth cohort, however, suggesting ways in which meso-level factors interact to impact women's attitudes and associated FGC outcomes.

Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection

Effective Altruism (EA) encourages affluent people to make significant donations to improve the wellbeing of the world’s poor, using quantified and observational methods to identify the most efficient charities. Critics argue that EA is inattentive to the systemic causes of poverty and underestimates the effectiveness of individual contributions to systemic change. EA claims to be open to systemic change but suggests that systemic critiques, such as the socialist critique of capitalism, are unhelpfully vague and serve primarily as hypocritical rationalizations of continued affluence. I reformulate the systemic change objection, rebut the charges of vagueness and bad faith and argue that charity may not be worth doing at all from a purely altruistic perspective. In order to take systemic change seriously, EA must repudiate its narrowly empiricist approach, embrace holistic, interpretive social analysis and make inevitably controversial judgments about the complex dynamics of collective action. These kinds of evidence and judgment cannot be empirically verified but are essential to taking systemic change seriously. EA is thereby forced to sacrifice its a-political approach to altruism. I also highlight the importance of quotidian, extra-political contributions to perpetuating or changing harmful social practices. Radical efforts to resist, subvert and reconstruct harmful social practices, such as those involved in economic decision-making, could be just as effective and demanding as charity. But such efforts may be incompatible with extensive philanthropy, because they can require people to retain some level of affluence for strategic reasons but to repudiate both the acquisition of significant wealth and charity as is currently organized. The wealth and status of some critics of charity may indeed be incompatible with effectively contributing to social change, but the altruistic merits of charity are neither as obvious nor as easily demonstrated as EA believes.

The Obligation to Know: Information and the Burdens of Citizenship

Contemporary persons are daily confronted with enormous quantities of information, some of which reveal causal connections between their actions and harm that is visited upon distant others. Given their limited cognitive and information processing capacities, persons cannot reasonably be expected to respond to every cry for help or call to action, but neither can they defensibly refuse to hear and reflect upon any of them. Persons have a limited obligation to know, I argue, which requires that they inform themselves and others about their role in harmful social practices, with a view toward challenging the norms that sustain such practices. In this paper, I explore this obligation to know, and the related idea of excusable ignorance, offering accounts of the epistemic burden that it entails for persons in their capacities as citizens and in the context of global climate change and of reproach as a potentially effective tool for rectifying rather than excusing ignorance.

Towards gender equality in health in Afghanistan

The Afghanistan gender inequality index shows that 70% loss in development is due to the limited participation of women in the workforce, low education and poor women's health outcomes. However, since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2002, gender inequalities in health have improved. This paper will review factors that led to these improvements. The review draws upon information from various sources, including formative and applied research, surveys and existing information systems. The review showed gender differentials in morbidity, mortality and accessing and utilising health services. Health professionals have expressed inadequate medical knowledge and interpersonal skills to address sensitive issues, such as domestic, physical and sexual violence. Discussing sexuality and its impact on health remains taboo both within and outside of the medical profession. Strict cultural norms restrict a woman's autonomy to seek health care, choose a marriage partner and have control over her body, indicating a need to increase awareness about how harmful social practices adversely affect health. The policy review showed that the Ministry of Public Health has made a commitment to reducing gender inequity in health and developed a two-pronged action plan to improve health providers' skills in handling gender-sensitive issues and mass media campaigns to change social norms.

Recasting The Half-Caste

Recasting The Half-Caste Kumari Jayawardena (bio) In Sri Lanka, serious book reviews are not only few and far between, but authors also do not usually reply to reviews of their books. So while it was a real windfall to receive four reviews simultaneously, to comment briefly in reply is a rather unusual task. However, I really appreciate the reviews, and thank Shefali Chandra, Hilary Jones, Shoshana Keller, and Emma Teng for their perceptive insights and for opening up this discussion. On a personal note, my academic background is multidisciplinary. I am not a "historian" with a degree in history, but a political scientist who specialized in industrial relations. My interests moved on to feminist history and I continue to be active in the women's movement. Using these experiences, I have written on several issues ranging from working-class agitation to ethno-nationalism, feminism, peasant rebellion, and the rise of capitalism in Sri Lanka. In this book, I combine many of these themes, and as Shefali Chandra noted, I deal with "race, caste, class, sexuality, and nationalism"—a wide sweep, using examples from several countries. I should also make it clear that my book is not a history of Euro-Asians, but a political study of the roots of colonial dissenting movements, including feminism, and the role of Euro-Asians as pioneers of struggles for democratic rights and against semifeudalism in South Asia. The word "Euro-Asian" is coined to include persons of mixed European and Asian origin in the maternal or paternal line. Emma Teng calls this "an important contribution" and states that the "highly fraught" issue of nomenclature "has been of great symbolic importance for those struggling for recognition,"—especially, if I may add, since those of mixed origin have historically been referred to by derogatory names. In Sri Lanka, the Euro-Asian "public intellectuals," who had been educated in English, were inspired by the French Revolution and the European "Enlightenment." As Benedict Anderson has written, this had unintended consequences: "Vietnamese youngsters could not avoid learning about the philosophes and the (French) Revolution and Magna Carta … and the Glorious Revolution, glossed as English history, entered schools all over the British Empire."1 Radical Euro-Asians in the colonies became the earliest advocates of protonationalism, secularism, democracy, and pluralism, as well as the rights of women, peasants, and workers. These forgotten historical figures were, moreover, opponents of the caste system, religious intolerance, oppressive laws, unjust taxes, and harmful social practices—all this many decades before the emergence of [End Page 263] leaders celebrated today in the region as "national heroes." The Euro-Asians' critique was thus political and social but their contribution to South Asian national history was erased. The issues the Euro-Asians raised, however, were taken up by later dissenters. The importance of the social critique can be seen in Euro-Asian writings deploring ethnic and religious division and especially against the caste system, which still plagues South Asia. In the 1820s in Kolkata (Calcutta), the leading Euro-Asian iconoclast, Henry Derozio (1809–1831), a teacher, poet, and admirer of Byron, was inspired by the French Revolution and the movements for freedom in Greece and Italy. He promoted patriotism, rationalism, free speech, women's rights, and social criticism, sparking off the emergence of the Young Bengal movement, described as "a youthful band of reformers who … like the tops of the Kanchenjunga were the first to catch and reflect the dawn." A group of Hindu students, followers of Derozio, who, according to Sivanath Sastri, "broke asunder the shackles of caste and ate with their Eurasian friend."2 In mid-nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, at a time when the Sinhalese and Tamil intelligentsia generally accepted the status quo, it was a Euro-Asian lawyer, Frederick Nell, who wrote of the "leprosy of caste." In addition, Charles Lorenz and his radical Euro-Asians of the Young Ceylon group were persistent critics of colonial rule, articulating demands for political and social change.3 It is no wonder then that these Euro-Asians were denounced as "subversive hybrids" by British rulers in the colonies, who derogatorily referred to them as "half-castes," vagabonds and mischmaschvolk. Some ultranationalists in Sri Lanka also...