Understanding the Racial Nature of Police and Immigrant Relations In Finland. The Case of Africans in Turku

The focus of this study is to examine the role of police and immigrants’ relations, as less is known about this process in the country. The studies were approached in two different ways. Firstly, an attempt was made to examine how immigrants view their encounters with the police. Secondly, the studies explored how aware the police are of immigrants’ experiences in their various encounters and interactions on the street level. An ancillary aim of the studies is to clarify, analyse and discuss how prejudice and stereotypes can be tackled, thereby contributing to the general debate about racism and discrimination for better ethnic relations in the country. The data in which this analysis was based is on a group of adults (n=88) from the total of 120 Africans questioned for the entire study (n=45) police cadets and (n=6) serving police officers from Turku. The present thesis is a compilation of five articles. A summary of each article findings follows, as the same data was used in all five studies. In the first study, a theoretical model was developed to examine the perceived knowledge of bias by immigrants resulting from race, culture and belief. This was also an attempt to explore whether this knowledge was predetermined in my attempt to classify and discuss as well as analyse the factors that may be influencing immigrants’ allegations of unfair treatment by the police in Turku. The main finding shows that in the first paper there was ignorance and naivety on the part of the police in their attitudes towards the African immigrant’s prior experiences with the police, and this may probably have resulted from stereotypes or their lack of experience as well as prior training with immigrants where these kinds of experience are rampant in the country (Egharevba, 2003 and 2004a). In exploring what leads to stereotypes, a working definition is the assumption that is prevalent among some segments of the population, including the police, that Finland is a homogenous country by employing certain conducts and behaviour towards ethnic and immigrant groups in the country. This to my understanding is stereotype. Historically this was true, but today the social topography of the country is changing and becoming even more complex. It is true that, on linguistic grounds, the country is multilingual, as there are a few recognised national minority languages (Swedish, Sami and Russian) as well as a number of immigrant languages including English. Apparently it is vital for the police to have a line of communication open when addressing the problem associated with immigrants in the country. The second paper moved a step further by examining African immigrants’ understanding of human rights as well as what human rights violation means or entails in their views as a result of their experiences with the police, both in Finland and in their country of origin. This approach became essential during the course of the study, especially when the participants were completing the questionnaire (N=88), where volunteers were solicited for a later date for an in-depth interview with the author. Many of the respondents came from countries where human rights are not well protected and seldom discussed publicly, therefore understanding their views on the subject can help to explain why some of the immigrants are sceptical about coming forward to report cases of batteries and assaults to the police, or even their experiences of being monitored in shopping malls in their new home and the reason behind their low level of trust in public authorities in Finland. The study showed that knowledge of human rights is notably low among some of the participants. The study also found that female respondents were less aware of human rights when compared with their male counterparts. This has resulted in some of the male participants focussing more on their traditional ways of thinking by not realising that they are in a new country where there is equality in sexes and lack of respect on gender terms is not condoned. The third paper focussed on the respondents’ experiences with the police in Turku and tried to explore police attitudes towards African immigrant clients, in addition to the role stereotype plays in police views of different cultures and how these views have impacted on immigrants’ views of discriminatory policing in Turku. The data is the same throughout the entire studies (n=88), except that some few participants were interviewed for the third paper thirty-five persons. The results showed that there is some bias in mass-media reports on the immigrants’ issues, due to selective portrayal of biases without much investigation being carried out before jumping to conclusions, especially when the issues at stake involve an immigrant (Egharevba, 2005a; Egharevba, 2004a and 2004b). In this vein, there was an allegation that the police are even biased while investigating cases of theft, especially if the stolen property is owned by an immigrant (Egharevba, 2006a, Egharevba, 2006b). One vital observation from the respondents’ various comments was that race has meaning in their encounters and interaction with the police in the country. This result led the author to conclude that the relation between the police and immigrants is still a challenge, as there is rampant fear and distrust towards the police by some segments of the participating respondents in the study. In the fourth paper the focus was on examining the respondents’ view of the police, with special emphasis on race and culture as well as the respondents’ perspective on police behaviour in Turku. This is because race, as it was relayed to me in the study, is a significant predictor of police perception (Egharevba, 2005a; Egharevba and Hannikianen, 2005). It is a known scientific fact that inter-group racial attitudes are the representation of group competition and perceived threat to power and status (Group-position theory). According to Blumer (1958) a sense of group threat is an essential element for the emergence of racial prejudice. Consequently, it was essential that we explored the existing relationship between the respondents and the police in order to have an understanding of this concept. The result indicates some local and international contextual issues and assumptions that were of importance tackling prejudice and discrimination as it exists within the police in the country. Moreover, we have to also remember that, for years, many of these African immigrants have been on the receiving end of unjust law enforcement in their various countries of origin, which has resulted in many of them feeling inferior and distrustful of the police even in their own country of origin. While discussing the issues of cultural difference and how it affects policing, we must also keep in mind the socio-cultural background of the participants, their level of language proficiency and educational background. The research data analysed in this study also confirmed the difficulties associated with cultural misunderstandings in interpreting issues and how these misunderstandings have affected police and immigrant relations in Finland. Finally, the fifth paper focussed on cadets’ attitudes towards African immigrants as well as serving police officers’ interaction with African clients. Secondly, the police level of awareness of African immigrants’ distrustfulness of their profession was unclear. For this reason, my questions in this fifth study examined the experiences and attitudes of police cadets and serving police officers as well as those of African immigrants in understanding how to improve this relationship in the country. The data was based on (n=88) immigrant participants, (n=45) police cadets and 6 serving police officers from the Turku police department. The result suggests that there is distrust of the police in the respondents’ interaction; this tends to have galvanised a heightened tension resulting from the lack of language proficiency (Egharevba and White, 2007; Egharevba and Hannikainen, 2005, and Egharevba, 2006b) The result also shows that the allegation of immigrants as being belittled by the police stems from the misconceptions of both parties as well as the notion of stop and search by the police in Turku. All these factors were observed to have contributed to the alleged police evasiveness and the lack of regular contact between the respondents and the police in their dealings. In other words, the police have only had job-related contact with many of the participants in the present study. The results also demonstrated the complexities caused by the low level of education among some of the African immigrants in their understanding about the Finnish culture, norms and values in the country. Thus, the framework constructed in these studies embodies diversity in national culture as well as the need for a further research study with a greater number of respondents (both from the police and immigrant/majority groups), in order to explore the different role cultures play in immigrant and majority citizens’ understanding of police work.

Trilling race : the political economy of racialised visual-aural encounters

This thesis investigates the matter of race in the context of Finnish language acquisition among adult migrants in Finland. Here matter denotes both the materiality of race and how race comes to matter. Drawing primarily on an auto/ethno/graphic account of learning the Finnish language as a participant in the Finnish for foreigners classes, this thesis problematises the ontology and epistemology of race, i.e., what race is, how it is known, and what an engagement with race entails. Taking cues from the bodily practices of learning the Finnish trill or the rolling r, this study proposes a notion of “trilling race” and argues for an onto-epistemological dis/continuity that marks race’s arrival. The notion of dis/continuity reworks the distinction between continuity and discontinuity, and asks about the how of the arrival of any identity, the where, and the when. In so doing, an analysis of “trilling race” engages with one of the major problematics that has exercised much critical attention, namely: how to read race differently. That is, to rethink the conundrum of the need to counter “representational weight” (Puar 2007, 191) of race on the one hand, and to account for the racialised lived realities on the other. The link between a study of the phenomenon of host country language acquisition and an examination of the question of race is not as obvious as it might seem. For example, what does the argument that the process of language learning is racialised actually imply? Does it mean that race, as a process of racialisation or an ongoing configuration of sets of power relations, exerts force from an outside on the otherwise neutral process of learning the host country language? Or does it mean that race, as an identity category, presents as among the analytical perspectives, along with gender and class for instance, of the phenomenon of host country language acquisition? With these questions in mind, and to foreground the examination of the question of race in the context of Finnish language acquisition among adult migrants, this thesis opens with a discussion of the art installation Finnexia by Lisa Erdman. Finnexia is a fictitious drug said to facilitate Finnish language learning through accelerating the cognitive learning process and reducing the anxiety of speaking the Finnish language. Not only does the Finnexia installation make visible the ways in which the lack of skill in Finnish is fgured as the threshold – a border that separates the inside from the outside – to integration, but also, and importantly, it raises questions about the nature of difference, and the process of differentiation that separates the individual from the social, fact from fiction, nature from culture. These puzzles animate much of the analysis in this dissertation. These concerns continue to be addressed in the rest of part one. Whereas chapter two offers a reconsideration of the ambiguities of ethnisme/ethnicity and race, chapter three dilates on the methodological implications of a conception of the dis/continuity of race. Part two focuses on the matter of race and examines the political economy of visual-aural encounters, whereas part three shifts the focus and rethinks the possibilities and limitations of transforming racialised and normative constraints. Taking up these particular problematics, this thesis as a whole argues that race trills itself: its identity/difference is simultaneously made possible and impossible.

Travel changes thought and men : a fresh perspective on the travels of a literary icon

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Maahanmuuttajaoppilaat erityiskouluissa

Immigrant Pupils in Special Education Schools The study focused on the opinions of immigrant pupils in the 1st–9th grades of basic education in four special education schools of the City of Turku and in need of special support about the following: 1. Their difficulties in going to school in general education before the transfer to a special education school. 2. Their opinions about the transfer process to special education and the changes in their school practice after being transferred to a special education school. 3. Their experiences about their school and coping in special education school. The study strengthened the idea that immigrant pupils need positive special treatment, linguistic support, individual guidance, small teaching groups and operating models that promote well-being on their integration and education path. The central educational idea of inclusive education is based on deconstructing the power structures concerning gender, ethnicity and “race” and approval of differences in the pupils. Shifting the emphasis from the pupil to working on the learning environment has resulted in special education no longer being primarily separate special education tied to a certain place, but directing the teaching more towards individuality. The central dimension of intercultural competence of a teacher working in a multicultural class seems to be the attitudes and approaches to a different pupil; the teacher must be interculturally sensitive when facing children and young people from a foreign culture. Education and teaching affect every sector of the pupil’s well-being. Learning and learning results have a connection with teaching, education and well-being. Every sector is important for the going to school and integration of an immigrant pupil in need of special support. The basis of the study is the equality of opportunities and the humanistic idea of the human being in the Finnish education policy. The immigrant pupils selected for the study represented the following language groups: Arabian, Albanian, Somali, Russian and Vietnamese. In the four special education schools, the number of immigrant pupils belonging to these language groups (2004) totalled 104. A total of 89 pupils i.e. 86% answered the questionnaire, which is sufficient considering the generalisation of the study. Although this is basically a quantitative study, the interviewing method was used in part of the study, because the questionnaires were in Finnish and consequently, it was difficult for some immigrant pupils to understand them. Understanding the questions was also affected by the fact that the age distribution in the study was very wide (7–18). According to the results of the study, the immigrants felt that the biggest drawbacks in general education were their inability to speak Finnish and lack of concentration. The actual process of being transferred to a special education class remained unclear for immigrant pupils, and they could do very little about the transfer themselves. The results show that immigrant pupils coped well in special education school; they felt that their learning ability and concentration improved in the small groups of the special education school. They considered the individual support given in the special education schools to be useful. The lower-grade immigrant pupils had a more positive attitude towards special education school than the upper-grade immigrant pupils. In all the special education schools the immigrant pupils experienced that they were in a good position in the class; girls felt this even a little more strongly than boys. The teacher-pupil-relationship was felt to be good. School bullying being so common was a negative feature experienced by immigrant pupils, who were often targets or bullies themselves. Immigrant pupils believed in their success at school and in the opportunities offered by special education schools. Generally they were of the opinion that pupils are not labelled by special school; however, upper-grade immigrant pupils were more hesitant than lower-grade immigrant pupils. This study aimed at bringing out the immigrant pupils’ own opinions. Teaching immigrant pupils in special education schools has not been very much studied in Finland, which made the topic new and even more challenging.

Kolonialismin pohjoismaiset jäljet

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Osattomasta osalliseksi : näkökulmia pohjoismaiseen kolonialismiin

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Kolonialismia ruoan avulla

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Use of individual race results in the estimation of genetic parameters of trotting performance for Finnhorse and Standardbred trotters

Selostus: Ravikilpailumenestysmittojen periytymisasteet ja toistumiskertoimet kilpailukohtaisten tulosten perusteella

Multidata inverse problems and Bayesian solution methods in astronomy

Statistical analyses of measurements that can be described by statistical models are of essence in astronomy and in scientific inquiry in general. The sensitivity of such analyses, modelling approaches, and the consequent predictions, is sometimes highly dependent on the exact techniques applied, and improvements therein can result in significantly better understanding of the observed system of interest. Particularly, optimising the sensitivity of statistical techniques in detecting the faint signatures of low-mass planets orbiting the nearby stars is, together with improvements in instrumentation, essential in estimating the properties of the population of such planets, and in the race to detect Earth-analogs, i.e. planets that could support liquid water and, perhaps, life on their surfaces. We review the developments in Bayesian statistical techniques applicable to detections planets orbiting nearby stars and astronomical data analysis problems in general. We also discuss these techniques and demonstrate their usefulness by using various examples and detailed descriptions of the respective mathematics involved. We demonstrate the practical aspects of Bayesian statistical techniques by describing several algorithms and numerical techniques, as well as theoretical constructions, in the estimation of model parameters and in hypothesis testing. We also apply these algorithms to Doppler measurements of nearby stars to show how they can be used in practice to obtain as much information from the noisy data as possible. Bayesian statistical techniques are powerful tools in analysing and interpreting noisy data and should be preferred in practice whenever computational limitations are not too restrictive.

Nordic alcohol policy in Europe: the adaptation of Finland’s, Sweden’s and Norway’s alcohol policies to a new policy framework, 1994-2013

The purpose of this thesis is to study how and to which extent Finland, Sweden and Norway have adapted their alcohol policies to the framework imposed to them by the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA) since the mid-1990s. This is done by studying the underlying mechanisms that have influenced the formation of alcohol policy in the Nordic countries in that period. As a part of this analysis main differences in alcohol policies and alcohol consumption between the three countries are assessed and the phenomenon of cross-border trade with alcohol is discussed. The study examines also the development of Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish alcohol policies between 1994 and 2012 and compares the Nordic alcohol policies with other alcohol policies in Europe as the situation was in 2012. The time frame of the study spans from the mid-1990s to the end of 2013 and is divided into three phases. Studying the role of the Europeanisation process on the formation of alcohol policies has a key role in the analysis. Besides alcohol policies, the analyses comprise the development of alcohol consumption and cross-border trade with alcohol. In addition, a quantitative scale constructed to measure the strictness of alcohol policies is utilised in the analyses. The results from the scale are used to substantiate the qualitative analysis and to test whether the stereotypical view of a strict Nordic alcohol policy is still true. The results from the study clearly corroborate earlier findings on the significance of Europeanisation and the Single Market for the development of alcohol policies in the Nordic countries. Free movement of goods and unhindered competition have challenged the principle of disinterest and enabled private profit seeking in alcohol trade. The Single Market has also contributed to the increase in availability of alcohol and made it more difficult for the Nordic EU member states to maintain restrictive alcohol policies. All in all, alcohol policies in the Nordic countries are more liberal in 2013 than they were in 1994. Norway, being outside the EU has, however, managed to maintain a stricter alcohol policy than Finland and Sweden. Norway has also been spared from several EU directives that have affected Finland and Sweden, the most remarkable being the abolishment of the travellers’ import quotas for alcohol within the EU. Due to its position as a non-EU country Norway has been able to maintain high alcohol taxes without being subjected to a ”race to the bottom” regarding alcohol taxes the same way as Finland and Sweden. Finland distinguishes as the country that has liberalised its alcohol policy most during the study period. The changes in alcohol policies were not only induced by Europeanisation and the Single Market, but also by autonomous decision-making and political processes in the individual countries. Furthermore, the study shows that alcohol policy measures are implemented more widely in Europe than before and that there is a slow process of convergence going on regarding alcohol policy in Europe. Despite this, alcohol policies in the Nordic countries are still by far the strictest in all of Europe. From a Europeanisation perspective, the Nordic countries were clearly on the receiving end during the first two study phases (1994–2007), having more to adjust to rules from the EU and the Single Market than having success in uploading and shaping alcohol policy on the European and international field. During the third and final study phase (2008–2013), however, the Nordic countries have increasingly succeeded in contributing to shape the alcohol policy arena in the EU and also more widely through the WHOs global alcohol strategy. The restrictive Nordic policy tradition on which the current alcohol policies in Finland, Sweden and Norway were built on has still quite a solid evidence base. Although the basis of the restrictive alcohol policy has crumbled somewhat during the past twenty years and the policies have become less effective, nothing prevents it from being the base for alcohol policy in the Nordic countries even in the long term. In the future, all that is needed for an effective and successful alcohol policy is a solid evidence base, enough political will and support from the general public.