Speaking Out Online:The Benefits and Risks of Speaking About Sexual Violence for Young People

Speaking out about sexual violence has been a fundamental part of feminist politics since the 1970s. The practice of narrating experiences of violence, either publicly or to friends and family aims to combat the culture of silence and stigmatisation that surrounds sexual violence while also helping individuals to gain a sense of empowerment and connect with other survivors. However, speaking out also contains inherent risks, especially for young people. Survivors may meet with stigmatising or disbelieving responses, and they may lose control over who knows their story and the way in which it is told and retold.
These risks and benefits are altered, and potentially exacerbated, in an online environment. While social media may increase survivors’ ability to contact and connect with others with similar experiences it also makes it harder to control when and how their story is shared. The disjuncture between online and offline environments may also increase feelings of stigmatisation and isolation.
There is a need to explore the specific risks and benefits of speaking out online given both young people’s extensive use of social media for social interactions and the increasing tendency for support and educational services targeted at young people to make use of social media and online environments. This paper draws on literature and some preliminary research to consider both risks and benefits of speaking out online and to open a conversation about the creation of supportive spaces and mechanisms for young people to speak about sexual violence in online environments.

What’s behind Russia’s military build-up in Syria?

It seems unlikely that Moscow can hope for an outright victory in Syria’s civil war, so some kind of political compromise with the moderate opposition is in the offing. This, however, is at best a long shot given the hostility to Assad in the West and the intensity of the conflict in Syria.

Instead, the immediate priority seems to be to ensure a survival of the Syrian state and military institutions in the areas it can control, what one Russian observer called an “Alawite Israel” – a strip of land from the Mediterranean coast to Damascus, able to at least contain IS with some external support.

The Kremlin has consistently prioritised stability over revolutionary change and sovereign rights over humanitarian intervention. In fact, from the Russian point of view, the Western interventionist agenda of democratisation, which ignored local conditions, has made the situation in the Middle East worse – from Iraq to Libya and Syria.

Status and security: how Russian media is spinning airstrikes in Syria

Even before the Russian air force launched its first strikes over Syria, there was already a Russian presence on the battleground. These were not the spetsnaz, Kremlin’s special forces, but war correspondents from the leading Russian media outlets. This was as clear a sign as any that the Russia’s priority has shifted from Ukraine, where these reporters spent most of the past 18 months, to Syria.

There is, however, no unanimity on Russia’s latest escalation in Syria. As Russian state TV stations report successes of Russia’s high-precision weapons projecting an image of a high-tech Russian military equal to the US, doubts persist about the latest adventure in the Middle East.

19th-century diplomacy can help deal with 21st-century Russia

The West has failed to properly integrate Russia into its worldview since 1991, and there is an obvious vacuum of ideas for how to deal with it. The default reaction is to fall back on the Cold War paradigm - sanctions, containment, and hopes of Russian regime change.

This is folly. There’s no knowing how long it will take for Russia to change tack, if it ever does; nothing guarantees that a new regime in Russia would be any more pro-Western. There’s also apparently no idea how to handle Russia in the meantime, especially while it remains a crucial part of crises like those in Iran and Syria.

Ukraine has shown that the placeholder post-Cold War order Europe and Russia inherited urgently needs replacing. With a ceasefire in place at last, the search for an alternative is on. The Geneva talks in April this year could be its basis; but nothing truly transformative will be achieved until the US, EU, Russia and Ukraine all recognise the need for compromise.

‘Twenty-six things at once’: Pragmatic perspectives on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings

Created over a couple of Sunday mornings in the Fall of 1960, the twenty-six collaborative Poem-Paintings of the artist Norman Bluhm and the poet Frank O'Hara represent what Bluhm later called a spontaneous 'conversation' between the painter and the poet. In this essay, Catherine Gander adopts a number of pragmatist positions to reconsider these overlooked works as essential examples of verbal-visual interaction that extend their 'conversation' to greet and involve us in a relationship that is at once interpersonal, integrated, and embodied. The works, Gander argues, constitute what John Dewey terms 'art as experience'; in their back and forth exchange of verbal and visual gesture, abstraction and denotation, the Poem-Paintings are the 'cumulative continuity' of 'the process of living', dramatising the shifting, spontaneous and multiple dimensions of interpersonal conversation, and in so doing, indicating a new path toward interconnective and equal exchange between word and image.

Voir Hitler en peinture

Voir Hitler en peinture / On Seeing a painting of Hitler
The article “Voir Hitler en peinture” (literally “On Seeing a painting of Hitler”) focuses on a painting by Oliver Jeffers entitled “Ginger Hitler”. This article suggests that, whatever Jeffers’ intent and inspiration were, his painting “defamiliarizes” Hitler (V. Shklovsky) and forces us to look at him afresh. For decades, Hitler has been demonised and dehumanised; yet, however unsettling this may be, he was human. As Professor Richard Evans, a leading expert in the history of Nazism, put it recently: “Viewing Hitler as a human being, which he undoubtedly was, is more challenging to our understanding, surely, than simply writing him off as a cartoon villain” (The Guardian, 30/04/2015).

Tullis Rennie's Muscle Memory: Listening to the Act of Listening

This paper explores a recent, broadly 'electroacoustic', fixed medium composition by Tullis Rennie, which uses his background in ethnographic fieldwork to explore (in this case through auto-ethnography) modes of listening, and the role of technologies in mediating this listening. Muscle Memory: A conversation about jazz, with Graham South (trumpet) (2014) begins to answer questions about how one work can comment on and analyse or critique another through its own agency as music, bringing composition and ethnography together in fruitful collision, and illuminating the human capacity to manipulate and be manipulated by musical activity. The paper uses the piece to test the extent to which four functions, identified by Simon Frith (1987. Towards an aesthetic of popular music. In R. Leppert & S. McClary (Eds.), Music and society (pp. 133-49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) as crucial to the meaningfulness of popular music may, in the context of ubiquitously technologised music, have broader application than he originally intended.

Refugees and Human Rights: The Future of International Protection in the UK

The global refugee crisis is raising profound questions for the future of international protection. This article, based on a talk given as part of Refugee Week 2015, offers reflections on the current debate. The need to internationalise the conversation is underlined. Although no one state can resolve the problems of the world, it is precisely in the response to the plight of the forcibly displaced that commitments to human rights and refugee protection are tested in practical terms. This article argues that the UK’s approach remains inadequate and problematic.

BOOK: Property Rights and Human Rights in a Global Context

Property as a human rights concern is manifested through its incorporation in international instruments and as a subject of the law through property-related cases considered by international human rights organs. Yet, for the most part, the relationship between property and human rights has been discussed in rather superficial terms, lacking a clear substantive connection or common language. That said, the currents of globalisation have witnessed a new era of interrelation between these two areas of the law, including the emergence of international intellectual property law and the recognition of indigenous claims, which, in fundamental ways, speak to an engagement with human rights law.

This collection starts the conversation between human rights lawyers and property lawyers and explores analytical approaches to the increasing relationship between property and human rights in a global context. The chapters engage with key theoretical and policy debates and range across three main themes: the re-evaluation of the public/private divide in the law; the tensions between the market and social justice in development and the balance between the rights of individuals and those of communities. The chapters adopt a global, comparative perspective and engage in case studies from countries including India, Philippines, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom and includes various regions of Africa and Europe.

Historical Dialogue and Memory in Policing Change: the Case of the Police in Northern Ireland

This paper explores the complex relationship between organisational change and historical dialogue in transitional societies. Using the policing reform process in Northern Ireland as an example, the paper does three things: the first is to explore the ways in which policing changes were understood within the policing organisation and ‘community’ itself. The second is to make use of a processual approach, privileging the interactions of context, process and time within the analysis. Thirdly, it considers this perspective through the relatively new lens of ‘historical dialogue’: understood here as a conversation and an oscillation between the past, present and future through reflections on individual and collective memory. Through this analysis, we consider how members’ understandings of a difficult past (and their roles in it) facilitated and/or impeded the organisations change process. Drawing on a range of interviews with previous and current members of the organisation, this paper sheds new light on how institutions deal with and understand the past as they experience organisational change within the a wider societal transition from conflict to non-violence.

Wounded Spaces: When Planning Degraded Cairo’s Urban Memory

This paper examines the position of planning practices operated under precise guidelines for displaying modernity. Cultivating the spatial qualities of Cairo since the 1970s has unveiled centralised ideologies and systems of governance and economic incentives. I present a discussion of the wounds that result from the inadequate upgrading ventures in Cairo, which I argue, created scars as enduring evidence of unattainable planning methods and processes that undermined its locales. In this process, the paper focuses on the consequences of eviction rather than the planning methods in one of the city’s traditional districts. Empirical work is based on interdisciplinary research, public media reports and archival maps that document actions and procedures put in place to alter the visual, urban, and demographic characteristics of Cairo’s older neighbourhoods against a backdrop of decay to shift towards a global spectacular. The paper builds a conversation about the power and fate these spaces were subject to during hostile transformations that ended with their being disused. Their existence became associated with sores on the souls of its ex-inhabitants, as outward signs of inward scars showcasing a lack of equality and social justice in a context where it was much needed.