“Sexual abuse, gore, racism, bullying rampant on Australian school Facebook pages”

Taken from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sexual-abuse-gore-racism-bullying-rampant-on-australian-school-facebook-pages/story-e6frg6n6-1226514669372

November 12, 2012

STUDENTS at almost 500 schools are running Facebook sites dedicated to humiliating their peers as more and more children are forced to carry the incessant burden of cyber-bullying outside the school gates.

A News Ltd investigation of more than 4800 Australian primary and high schools has revealed more than 10 per cent have a Facebook page on which students are taunting each other and teachers with abusive language and offensive pictures.

Many of the posts are too offensive to reprint, but include graphic sexual discussion of students and teachers, shocking gore photos of suicide and accident victims, underage girls labelled “sluts”, male teachers named as pedophiles and references to Nazism. The majority of pages – many which carry the school’s full name and logo – contain homophobic, racist and misogynist jokes and drug references. Some of the most insidious pages, typically called “burn books” or “goss pages”, name and tag students in vicious rumours, which are then “liked” and shared around other students’ social networks.

One of the most shocking pages, from a school in Queensland, features gory photos of suicide and accident victims and a horrific picture of a battered child with an accompanying “joke” about domestic violence, all alongside references to the school and photos of the campus. Also on the page, which has accrued more than 760 fans since being launched in late August, is a photograph of a baby with a gun to its head with the caption “one like = one baby shot”, and a cartoon advocating methamphetamine use.

Another school page, from NSW, names a teacher as a “child molester” and calls another a “c***”, while students who have posted complaints have been abused with homophobic slurs.

A page from WA featured a photograph of a male teacher and female students overlaid with the logo of a pornography website, accompanied by snide comments joking that he was a pedophile.

The page, which accrued more than 600 fans since its launch in mid September, also featured photographs of students fighting, jokes about female Year 7s being “sluts” and arguments between students using extremely offensive language, all underneath the school’s official logo.

That page has since been deleted, but two others using the school’s name still exist.

One principal admitted his school had little control over what students did on the internet outside of school hours. ”You can block all these things on our intranet and they can’t do it at school but they have their own ways from home,” he said. But another principal added: “If students make threats over Facebook we are going to deal with them … as if it were an incident in the schoolyard.”

Cyber-bullying expert Dr Barbara Spears, from the University of South Australia, said “liking” nasty Facebook posts was the new face of schoolyard bullying. ”Clearly, `liking’ such pages contributes to the ongoing humiliation of others, and bystanders – those who contribute to bullying by not doing anything about it – are actively supporting it,” she said. Studies suggest 15 to 30 per cent of children are bullied at school, and around 10 per cent have been cyber bullied. Dr Spears said bullying was not shifting from the schoolyard to the screen, but “expanding” there. Constant access to technology meant “there is no escape”, she said.

Child psychologist and National Centre Against Bullying founder Michael Carr-Gregg said traditional playground bullies were taking their warfare online. ”What we’re finding now is that a lot of these kids are using the technology to literally make other people’s lives hell and the burn books are a really good example of this because so many people see it,” he said. Dr Carr-Gregg said vulnerable children could not brush off that kind of humiliation. ”For them, they’ve already got depression or they’ve already got anxiety so the gun is already loaded and the cyberbullying, the burn book, simply pulls the trigger,” he said.

The most serious forms of cyber bullying can attract stalking, harrassment or defamation charges. And it is illegal to use a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence under federal law, but a Federal Police spokeswoman said no minor had ever been charged. She said parents should try to deal with cyber-bullying through schools and only go to police as a last resort.Dr Carr-Gregg said too few people were charged over their heinous online behaviour. ”Some of these burn books can result in young people harming themselves so I don’t think the law is up to scratch,” he said. ”I think we need a social norm that says this type of behaviour is unacceptable and it needs to be enforced.”

WORST OF THE WORST

Examples of depravity on Australian schools’ Facebook pages

• Photo of a baby with a gun to its head, a photo of a battered child, gory pictures of suicide and accident victims, graphic pornography (QLD)
• Photo of a male teacher with female students captioned that he is a pedophile (WA)
  
• Male teachers pictured and captioned as “child molester” and “raper” (NSW)
  
• Messages telling students to kill themselves (NSW)
  
• Students threatening to rape other students (NSW)
  
• Female student named as having an affair with a teacher (NSW)
  
• Female student named as having AIDS (QLD)
  
• School classrooms pictured and captioned as “rape dungeons” (WA)
  
• Male student named as having had sex with goats (SA)
  
• Graphic sexual discussions about a female teacher (SA)
  
• Female teacher called “slut” and “hooker” (WA)
  
• Student with a speech impediment pictured and teased (SA)
  
• Black male student pictured and called a “n****r” (WA)
  
• Page with a profile picture that reads “kill yourselves” (QLD)
  
• Pictures of Hitler and references to Nazism (NSW)
  
• Praise for students who egged a teacher’s car (VIC)
  
• Message to students about a particular teacher: “spit on her shoes and s*** on her face” (VIC)

“Why Microsoft’s So-Called ‘Avoid Ghetto’ App Is Really American”

Taken from: http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/why_microsofts_so-called_avoid_ghetto_app_is_really_american.html

January 31, 2012

Microsoft has recently been at the center of a whirlwind of controversy over a new app that critics allege is downright racist. On January 3, the company was granted a patent for technology related to its “Pedestrian Route Production” application, a tool that that the company says would navigate the user “safely through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold.”

While the patent makes no explicit references to race, the project has been unofficially dubbed the “Avoid Ghetto App” by various online news sites. Microsoft, for its part, has been silent throughout the ordeal, and declined to comment on the matter to Colorlines.com. But intentions aside, the fact that the app was so quickly racialized begs the larger question of how and why technology perpetuates systemic racism, and why consumers should care.

“Almost the moment this patent got granted, [this app] got racialized so that ‘violent crime’ became ‘mugging’, which became ‘black and Latino people’, which became ‘ghetto,’ ” says Sarah Chinn, a professor of English at the City University of New York and author of the book “Technology and the Logic of American Racism.” Chinn has been among Microsoft’s most vocal critics.

Microsoft’s app has stirred so much discussion, Chinn says, because the United States is a “very racist country. When you say the words ‘violent crime’, in the public imagination that turns into ‘dangerous urban black man or Latino man.’ “

Others disagree. Industry analyst Rob Enderline told NPR last week that Microsoft’s project is just a matter of technology trying to make life easier for users. “It’s part of an overall effort to make navigation systems more intelligent so they keep you out of danger, whether you’re driving or you’re on foot,” Enderle told NPR.

Yet even if that’s the case, it’s based on the widely held misconception that violent crime is more likely to hit random strangers. In fact, the opposite is true. The vast majority of violent crime happens to people who know each other. For instance, 75 percent of rapes are committed by someone the survivor already knows, according to statistics provided by San Francisco Women Against Rape. The majority of murders are committed by members of ones own racial group. Missouri has the nation’s highest black homicide rate, and when the Violent Prevention Center looked at statistics from 2009, it found that—whenever the relationship could be identified—76 percent of black murder victims were killed by someone they knew.

In Washington, D.C. and New York City, robberies are on the decline.

Huffington Post’s Black Voices points out that the FBI’s 2010 crime report revealed that whites were arrested more often for violent crimes that year than any other race. But, according to Chinn, the myth that black men in particular are more likely to perpetrate violent crime against white strangers resonates so strongly because it’s become an indelible part of America’s racial identity.

“This is a myth that’s been with us since the days of Reconstruction,” Chinn told Colorlines.com, calling the period an era of “terrorism against black people.” Chinn noted that whites unconsciously knew that they were the perpetrators of violence against black people, particularly sexual violence against black women. Thus the myth of dangerous black men evolved as way to justify racist violence against black communities. The logic, Chinn says, was “you’re violent so we have to criminalize you, we have to put you in jail, we have to stop-and-frisk you, and we have to move out of your neighborhoods.”

Microsoft’s new technology is just the latest in a series of scientific parallels with the past.

The problem isn’t the technology itself, but what people imagine the technology will do. So while DNA and finger printing may on the surface be seemingly race-neutral technologies that only offer specific information about someone’s body, they’re quickly used to reinforce people’s preconceived ideas about race. “Once they enter the public discourse in the United States it’s all about how can we identify [people of color] and prove that they are not as good as white people, or prove that segregation is justified,” says Chinn.

Chinn does not expect that Microsoft will market the app as it is now, but will fold it into its next generation of mapping technology. ”It’s really about why we should be afraid of certain neighborhoods and certain kinds of people. People take these technologies and they use them to ‘prove’ things that they actually already believe about people of various racialized groups.”

“Closing the Girl Gap in Science”

Taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/closing-the-girl-gap-in-science.html?ref=edlife

November 4, 2011

GIVE me an “S”! Give me a “T”! Give me an “E”! Give me an “M”! Yaaaaay STEM!

O.K., that’s not exactly what was said last summer at a cheerleading camp on the Southern Illinois University Carbondale campus. But that was the hoped-for spirit as dozens of kinesthetically gifted girls in ponytails savored their first taste of college life — three days at Southern Illinois perfecting their pyramids and pikes, sipping Starbucks in the student center, staying up late texting friends at home and across the room. If all goes according to the university’s new recruitment plan, hosting camps for middle and high school cheerleaders serves a higher purpose: to help shrink a longtime gender disparity at Southern, a leafy campus of more than 20,000 students about five hours south of Chicago.

At most colleges and universities, women outnumber men — at 57 percent nationally. But Southern finds itself among a smattering of campuses with a few too many good men: women make up just 44 percent of undergraduates. And over all, only about 30 percent of Southern’s students in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — are women.

Flanking the cheer camp director at an evening pep rally last summer, two university recruiters tossed out beach balls and pumped up Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” whipping an already raucous crowd into a frenzy of gleeful shrieking. They passed out raffle prizes to the girls who had diligently completed “Saluki V.I.P.” information cards. Within 24 hours, the office of admissions had created for each an individualized Web page so recruiters could keep in touch, encouraging the girls to visit Carbondale and, ultimately, apply for admission.

“The idea is that any pre-college-age group of girls who are visiting the university should be in touch with our recruitment staff, not in a heavy-handed way, but as an opportunity to get the message out that coming to S.I.U. can transform their lives,” says Rita Cheng, the university’s new chancellor and first woman in the post.

While the gender disparity dates back more than two decades — in 1991, women represented just 41 percent of the student body — officials have also been alert to a drop in overall enrollment of roughly 5 percent over the past few years. One of Ms. Cheng’s first tasks was to roll out a recruitment overhaul in summer 2010 aimed at all-girl high schools and camps. This semester, almost half of incoming freshmen are women.

Still, men dominate, especially in some of the university’s most well-regarded programs — just 10 of 171 students in aviation management, for example, are women. This is happening as a growing chorus of educators and officials at the Department of Education make pointed efforts to steer young women to STEM majors. “These P.R. efforts at universities may get a few girls from the cheer camp to apply, but the real trick is to get them interested way before then,” suggests Patricia Albjerg Graham, a professor of the history of American education at Harvard. “We need to change the culture for little girls who are growing up now, and start expecting them to not only ‘get’ math and science, but to do well, take more A.P. classes, and join the math and science club.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is lopsidedly male (37 percent of all students are women), dispatches female students to schools to share their enthusiasm for STEM and hosts a math contest for young girls that awards $25,000 to the winner. “The real issue is women are falling out of STEM fields all along the pipeline, starting in middle school and high school,” says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions. “To increase gender balance, it’s all a matter of getting the right story out about science and engineering to young women, that it’s not about sitting at a desk doing math all day.”

At M.I.T., he says, “we don’t have to go beating the bushes” to attract women applicants. Indeed, for undergraduate programs this fall, 5,466 women applied, of which 16 percent were admitted. But more than twice the pool, 12,443, was male. Only 7 percent were admitted. Mr. Schmill is firm that there is no admissions advantage in gender. “The applicant pool for women is more self-selecting,” he says. “The women who are interested are very passionately interested.”

While Southern Illinois University, too, insists it pays no heed to gender in admissions, at Carnegie Mellon “there is no question that we do consider gender in fields like computer science and engineering, where women are critically underrepresented,” says Michael A. Steidel, director of admissions. For example, there is no shortage at Carnegie Mellon of wonky men who delight in writing computer code in their spare time, but only 18 percent of freshman applications to the computer science program for this fall came from women.

Women@SCS supports academic, social and professional opportunities for women in computer science at the university. Carol Frieze, director of the group, says the percentage of female majors there peaked in 2000 at 39 percent. “But of course, the dot-com bubble burst, and applications dropped for both men and women,” she says. By 2007, the number of female majors had fallen to just 20 percent. But with word out that computer science is weathering the ailing economy, interest is climbing, Ms. Frieze says. This year women represent 32 percent of incoming computer science majors, and a quarter of undergraduates in the field.

Texas A & M, which began accepting women in the 1960s, is now 47 percent female. While some parity carries into the fields of biology, chemistry and math, the number of women drops significantly in engineeering, which is 80 percent male.

To keep its statistics even, Texas A & M officials reach out to girls as young as sixth grade with gender-specific programs like “Expanding Your Horizons,” one-day workshops held on campus to immerse middle schoolers in hands-on science experiments. In one physics lesson, for example, teams create devices that will slow the velocity of a falling egg and cushion it from breakage when dropped from the balcony of the science building.

“It would be great if the girls decide they want to go to Texas A & M someday, but most of all, we hope they are getting the bigger picture that going to college isn’t scary and terrifying, and they start to think, ‘I can do that,’ ” says Nancy Magnussen, director of the university’s Educational Outreach and Women’s Programs. Recruiters here also seek out promising girls at cheerleading, softball and basketball camps held on campus, says Karan L. Watson, executive vice president and provost at Texas A & M.

Undergraduate “big sisters” keep tabs on student interests. When the collegiate chaperones encountered a group of girls who were unable to pry themselves from watching a collection of “C.S.I.” DVDs, recruiters tracked down a woman forensic science professor to drop by to deliver an impromptu lecture in the dining center. And for a group of visiting girls addicted to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a sociology professor was dispatched to a pizza party to chat about her ethnographic research on fandom.

Officials at Texas A & M, like those at Southern Illinois, acknowledge that they frequently find themselves assuring parents of prospective students that their daughters will be safe on campuses made infamous for partying and incidents that have spun out of control. For years, tens of thousands of revelers fueled by alcohol would party in the streets of downtown Carbondale on Halloween Devil’s Night, which was banned by the city in the late 1990s. Similarly, after the Aggie bonfire claimed the lives of 12 students at Texas A & M in 1999, the autumn tradition celebrating the school’s football team was abolished. “We are a fairly conservative school, but we have had our raucous moments, and there are parents who question what kind of influences their daughters will find on campus,” Ms. Watson says.

At the Southern Illinois cheer camp, the recruiter Tedgie Hennel had greeted the girls’ parents upon arrival, helping them lug pillows, suitcases and bags of junk food up to the dorm rooms in Neely Hall. “Parents who were in college during the 1970s and 1980s will ask me, ‘Is Southern still a big party school?’ And when I tell them, ‘No, it’s really not,’ some of them laugh and say, ‘You can’t fool me,’ ” Ms. Hennel says. “So I ask them, ‘Who did you hear that from, our current students or other parents?’ And then I invite them to come back down for a visit with their daughter.”

At the camp, Ms. Hennel’s unflagging school pride was put to the test. Not a single girl showed up for her specially scheduled one-hour afternoon tour of the campus. And alas, college was not on their radar, especially when there were free water bottles and T-shirts. “I really liked the Chinese food in the dining center,” one girl said about what impressed her at Southern. Said another: “It seems fun and exciting, but it’s the first college I’ve visited.”

But a few months later, Ms. Hennel’s efforts appeared to be paying off, or at least held a glimmer of hope. All three of the seniors who attended the cheer camp from nearby Du Quoin, a hardscrabble town of 6,100, applied and have already received letters of acceptance. Still, the young women are veering toward nursing and physical therapy, fields usually dominated by women.