Social Science

Crime rates unaffected by 'Ferguson effect,’ study finds

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

Crime rates unaffected by 'Ferguson effect,’ study finds Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/04/2016 - 00:00

Julie Poppen

A new study finds no evidence of a widespread surge in total, violent or property crime in large U.S. cities in the aftermath of the highly publicized police shooting of Michael Brown. But the research does show the overall rate of robberies across the country has increased, as has the murder rate in certain cities.

The study – the most comprehensive of its kind to date – tests the hypothesis that the shooting of Brown, a young black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri – and a string of similar incidents across the country – have led to increases in crime across the U.S., a phenomenon known as the “Ferguson effect.” Researchers analyzed monthly crime data from 81 large U.S. cities the year before and year after the events in Ferguson on Aug. 9, 2014. The results were published today online in the Journal of Criminal Justice.

"The finding that crime rates are essentially unchanged means that a ‘Ferguson effect’ cannot be singled out as the driving factor of any widespread increase in crime other than robbery.”

“We have seen crime rates drop to historic lows over the last two decades so any potential increase in crime, especially violent crime, is of great concern,” said lead study author David Pyrooz, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. “However, the finding that crime rates are essentially unchanged means that a ‘Ferguson effect’ cannot be singled out as the driving factor of any widespread increase in crime other than robbery.”

The high-profile shooting took social media by storm and has fueled ongoing national discussions about policing in cities across the nation. Pyrooz said the national discourse surrounding the so-called “Ferguson effect” as the cause of an upswing in crime rates has been “long on anecdotes and short on data.”

“The one crime that is showing signs of increasing is robbery,” said study co-author Scott Decker, foundation professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. “Robbery drives fear of crime among the general population and is among the most feared crimes, so that’s concerning.”

Another concerning finding is the increase in homicide rates in select American cities. Pyrooz said cities with increases in homicide after the Ferguson shooting shared certain characteristics.

“These are cities with historically high levels of violence, high concentrations of socioeconomic disadvantages, more police per capita and a demographic makeup that differs from cities where homicide rates remained flat,” said Pyrooz.

For the study, researchers gathered monthly crime data from police departments and websites in cities with populations of at least 200,000. Offenses reviewed included homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft. These are the offenses used by the FBI in measuring serious crime in the U.S.

Some law enforcement, criminal justice experts, commentators and policymakers have raised concern that rampant social media sharing of messages critical of law enforcement amplified the effect of the Ferguson shooting.

Specifically, some have argued that social media sharing caused police not to intervene in certain criminal settings for fear of criticism or lawsuits and also led to a widespread mistrust of police. However, the finding that crime rates are not significantly higher since Ferguson means that these factors are not causing an increase in crime, the researchers said.

“What we do know is that if de-policing or a legitimacy crisis is occurring, neither is impacting crime rates systematically across large U.S. cities,” said co-author Scott Wolfe, assistant professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. “Future research should examine these issues since they are critical to the effective administration of justice in the U.S.”

John Shjarback of the department of criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso also contributed to the study.

Julie Poppen is a senior news editor for the CU Office of News Services.

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Trust in adults affects kids’ willingness to delay gratification

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

Trust in adults affects kids’ willingness to delay gratification Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/03/2016 - 00:00

Trent Knoss

A child’s ability to delay gratification is correlated with their perception of an adult’s trustworthiness.

One marshmallow now, or two later? For children, the decision may partially depend on social trust.

A child’s perception of an adult’s trustworthiness can affect his or her willingness to resist a small, immediately available reward in order to obtain a larger reward later, a new University of Colorado Boulder study has discovered.

The findings, which were recently published in the journal Developmental Science, indicate that preschoolers who observe an adult behaving in an untrustworthy manner give up on waiting for a delayed reward at a rate that is nearly three times that of preschoolers who observe an adult behaving in a trustworthy manner.

The experiment highlights the importance of social trust in a child’s willingness or unwillingness to delay gratification, an ability that previous studies have linked to better life outcomes such as higher SAT scores and lower rates of obesity.

Laura Michaelson

“It doesn’t make sense for kids to delay gratification if they don’t trust that they’re actually going to get the reward they’re expecting in the future,” said Laura Michaelson, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU-Boulder and the lead author of the new study. “We wanted to explore how trust might contribute to that.”

The researchers recruited 34 children between the ages of 3 and 6 years old with parental consent. The children were randomly assigned to one of two groups in which they observed an adult interact with another person in either a trustworthy or an untrustworthy manner.

In the “untrustworthy” group, the adult in the room lied to the other person in an obvious fashion, allowing the children to witness the dishonest behavior. In the “trustworthy” group, the adult behaved honestly toward the other person.

Then, children were seated at a table and provided with a single marshmallow. The adult told children that they could eat the marshmallow right away if they liked, but if they waited while she went to do something in another room, they could have two marshmallows once she returned.

All children preferred to wait for two marshmallows. However, the children who had observed the lying adult waited less time overall, and were far less likely to hold out for the second marshmallow, choosing to eat the first marshmallow before the 15-minute period elapsed. By contrast, children who observed the honest behavior waited more time overall and obtained the second marshmallow far more often.

“Kids are very tuned in to truth and honesty,” said Michaelson. “They have an acute sense of fairness and lying. It’s striking that children simply observing one adult’s interaction with another can have such strong implications for their trust in that adult going forward.”

The study implies that children who opt for an instant reward over future ones may not always be acting impulsively or irrationally, but rather may do so because they have observed something that makes them distrustful of the person promising the reward.

Future research in this area may examine whether or not promoting greater social trust can increase the ability to delay gratification in certain groups (such as drug addicts) who tend not to be good at doing so.

The study was co-authored by Yuko Munakata, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU-Boulder. The National Institute of Mental Health provided support for the research.

Trent Knoss is a science editor at the CU Office of News Services.

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Prof dives into ‘messy’ role of animals in history

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Prof dives into ‘messy’ role of animals in history Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/09/2015 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Underneath and alongside human history is a history involving animals, as one might note here: President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir ride horses along a road in Yosemite Valley in 1903, with Half Dome in the distance, accompanied by Park Rangers Archie Leonard and Charles Leidig, followed by unidentified man on foot; left to right, Leonard, Muir, Roosevelt, Leidig. Photo courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.

Andrews wins NEH award to explore American history from ‘an animals’-eye view’

Thomas G. Andrews, associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, is writing a whole book exploring humanity’s relationships with the non-human animal world, but he can sum up his thoughts on the matter in a single word: messy.

Consider, as Andrews does in his essay, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” how the child slave Charles Ball viewed the horse that bore him away from his mother to the plantation of his new owner: “Charles Ball rode into an uncertain future perched atop a trotting horse in his new master’s clutch,” writes Andrews of a passage in Ball’s famous 1836 slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of Charles Ball.

“The animal was hardly the agent of Ball’s suffering. Yet it populated Ball’s narrative nonetheless. The horse mattered, not just because it was present but also because it lent the Maryland slaveholder the power he needed to rip Charles Ball away from his mother.”

And in his 2008 Bancroft Prize-winning bookKilling for Coal: Energy, Work, and Power in the Colorado Coalfield Wars of 1913-1914, Andrews examines both how mules were used and abused by miners, and how the men kept mice not just as mammalian stand-ins for the proverbial canary, but also pets.

The “messiness” is readily apparent on a glance at social media today, where some users both fawn over images of cute kittens and puppies and celebrate their abiding love of bacon, a product of the confinement and slaughter of animals more intelligent than cats and dogs.

Next year, supported by a $50,400 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he’ll delve even deeper into the “range, complexity and richness of human-animal relationships in the last 600 years of American history.” He’s signed a contract to publish the resulting book with Harvard University Press, which also will publish his latest work, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies, in October.

"The root of the word ‘education’ means ‘to lead outward.’ The goal should not simply be to figure out how one can be a cog in this sort of bigger system and punch out a role to provide a livelihood.”

Andrews is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West. He first grew interested in the subject of human-animal relationships while researching Killing for Coal. He later created a senior seminar on the topic at California State University, Northridge.

“I think I’m as confused as a lot of people. I wouldn’t say I have a totally clear ethical perspective on human-animal relationships,” he says. “As a historian, I’m interested in complexity, and what I’m really interested in is how messy our relationships with animals really are.”

Such complexity—for example, contrast American Indians’ use of dogs as hunting companions, beasts of burden and a source of food to the view of many Americans that they are members of the family—is ripe for deeper examination.

“The way I’m imagining it, I’ll probably start out by really focusing on pets and livestock to get at that contradiction, that whole set of weirdnesses,” says the Boulder native, whose father is an emeritus faculty member at CU-Boulder, and whose mother was a long-serving staff member at the university.

Andrews is one of 36 scholars, journalists and writers to receive the first Public Scholar awards, which are part of a new NEH initiative to “bring humanities into the public square” and promote publication of deeply researched nonfiction work that is “accessible to general readers.”

At a time when many politicians, parents and even some educators view higher education as primarily an avenue to getting a high-paying job, the humanities are experiencing a steep decline in the number of students majoring in those fields of studies. Andrews is alarmed at this trend.

“The root of the word ‘education’ means ‘to lead outward.’ The goal should not simply be to figure out how one can be a cog in this sort of bigger system and punch out a role to provide a livelihood,” he says.

“Instrumental education is necessary, but it’s woefully insufficient. … I just haven’t met that many business or thought leaders who earned their undergraduate degrees in business. The real guiding lights in the contemporary world learned to think in ways that extend far beyond the narrow instrumentalist conception of education so ascendant today.”

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.

Thomas G. Andrews, associate professor of history, is writing a book exploring humanity’s relationships with the non-human animal world, but he can sum up his thoughts on the matter in a single word: messy.

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Firearm suicide linked with opiates, hangings with antidepressants

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Firearm suicide linked with opiates, hangings with antidepressants Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/08/2015 - 00:00

Meagan M. Taylor

Newly discovered connection between specific drugs and violent suicide raises public health questions

As of 2013 in Colorado, suicide was the seventh leading cause of death and the number one cause of violent death. It is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States.

In studying social elements and risk factors related to suicide, sociologists at the University of Colorado Boulder recently found a surprising association between specific drugs found in victims at the time of death and the method by which they committed violent suicide. Opiates were considerably more likely to be found in victims who died by self-inflicted gunshot wounds, while those who hanged themselves were more likely to have taken antidepressants.

Jason Boardman

“The postmortem presence of opiates was associated with a 92 percent increase in the odds of suicide by firearm relative to the odds of suicide by hanging,” says study co-author Jason Boardman, director of the Health and Society Program at the Institute of Behavioral Science, and a professor in the Department of Sociology.

Meanwhile, the presence of antidepressants is associated with a 45-percent increase in the odds of hanging compared to firearm-related suicides. But the authors are particularly interested in the sociological implications of death by firearm related to opiates.

Lead author Connor Sheehan, who obtained his master’s degree in geography at CU-Boulder and is now a Population Research Center trainee at the University of Texas at Austin, explains the combination may shed some light on the timeline of a suicide.

“What I really think is going on is that some people may suffer from longer-term depression and thus seek out, and are prescribed, antidepressants,” Sheehan says. The use of hanging may indicate a planned event over a long period of depression or mental health problems.

“On the other hand, someone might go through a very stressful or abrupt event and choose to self-medicate with opiates and then use a firearm,” Sheehan says.

On the broader social level, “the opiate and firearm combination potentially gives us clues about the relevance of anomic suicide,” Boardman explains.

"Our results can assist policymakers in breaking the vicious cycle between drug use and violent deaths, including some suicides.”

Anomic suicide, a term coined by famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim, occurs when a person doesn’t feel as though they have a place in society or a group that helps define their aspirations, purpose and direction.

Basically, people who have a healthy level of inclusion, through relationships, cooperation and reciprocal exchange, are less likely to commit suicide than people who aren’t fully engaged in these underlying social structures.

“Antidepressants and hanging, in combination, give us psychiatrically oriented information, whereas the gunshot, in combination with opiates, may be an indicator that preventative social mechanisms aren’t in place,” Boardman says.

Co-author Richard Rogers, sociology professor and director of the Population Program at IBS focuses on the public health implications of the new findings. Rogers researches demographic factors that contribute to health, longevity and mortality.

“It is useful to look at suicide because it contributes to premature death,” Rogers says. “If you can prevent suicides, you can potentially contribute to many more years of life someone can gain.”

Hanging and firearm suicides are particularly relevant because they make up 71 percent of suicides in Colorado and 78 percent nationally.

“Our results can assist policymakers in breaking the vicious cycle between drug use and violent deaths, including some suicides,” Rogers says.

The researchers used the Colorado Violent Death Reporting System (COVDRS) to analyze 3,389 hanging and firearm suicides from 2004-2009. A state-based initiative of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the data are collected from law enforcement officials, medical examiners and coroners, and crime laboratories.

The COVDRS represents a special opportunity for researchers because it provides detailed demographic and mortality information on every violent death in the state, as compared to data sets that only sample certain populations.

“It’s rare you get information on toxicology reports and method of suicide,” Rogers says. “We can drill down much further than one could with larger but less detailed data sets.”

Although the data clearly show a connection between method of suicide and specific drugs, the authors stress that the information cannot be used to draw causalities, nor should it be used to speculate on the probability of committing suicide.

“It’s hard to know whether the drug itself is a cause or if just an indicator of a lifestyle,” Rogers observes. “Also, at no point do we make comparisons to people who kill themselves and those who don’t.”

To properly study the nature of the relationship between drug presence, drug use and suicide, the researchers would need to have longitudinal data collected between a range of contexts.

“It’s a baseline,” Rogers says of the study, published in Journal of Drug Issues. “We have established a foundation that others can develop over time and use as a springboard for the next research project.”

“This may be one small but critical piece that could contribute to alleviating some suicides.”

Meagan M. Taylor is a CU alumna and an Advanced EMT student at St. Anthony Institute of Emergency Medical Training. For information about suicide prevention, click here.

'Our results can assist policymakers in breaking the vicious cycle between drug use and violent deaths, including some suicides,’ researcher says.

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Racial bias colors recognition of angry faces

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Racial bias colors recognition of angry faces Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/08/2015 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

‘If you are an eyewitness and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?’ Probably not, CU researcher finds.

In 2006, J.M. Ackerman and several co-authors published a paper in the journal Psychological Science with this provocative title: “They all look the same to me (unless they’re angry): From out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity.” Not surprisingly, the study caused a stir among social psychologists.

The research started with the well-demonstrated “cross-race effect” (CRE)—perceivers typically recognize faces of people in their own racial group more accurately than those of other races. Surprisingly, however, the study concluded that when those faces were black and angry, white perceivers showed enhanced recognition.

Jason Gwinn

Jason Gwinn and his colleagues suspected that a controversial study on recognition of angry faces of different races was flawed, so they embarked on their own study.

Those results drew skepticism from many researchers. One was Jason D. Gwinn, a recent doctoral graduate of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The argument was that the ‘angry black guy’ stands out, so (white perceivers) pay more attention,” says Gwinn, now living in Seattle. “But are they remembering that guy better, or just remembering an angry black guy? We were suspicious.”

Gwinn and his colleagues suspected that the earlier study was flawed, in part because the “angry black faces” used were distinctive beyond simply being angry, “appearing weird and more memorable, but not because they were black and angry.”

Others had found the same results as Ackerman, but they generally had used the same facial photos as Ackerman, with the same potential flaws—using faces that were memorable apart from their angry appearance.

So Gwinn and colleagues set up two studies with new facial photos, and with the publication of “Face recognition in the presence of angry expressions: A target-race effect rather than a cross-race effect” in theJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, they contradicted the earlier finding of the Ackerman study.

“We ran the same sort of studies and found that this actually goes in the other direction, toward more error. (White perceivers) remember the black faces even less when they are all angry,” he says.

"The argument was that the ‘angry black guy’ stands out, so (white perceivers) pay more attention. But are they remembering that guy better, or just remembering an angry black guy? We were suspicious.”

In the first study, the researchers exposed a pool of white participants to photos of 32 “target individuals,” featuring white and black faces with a mix of neutral and angry expressions. They were later shown 64 photos, the previous 32 along with 32 new individuals, and asked whether they recognized each face as one they had seen before.

The study found that, “contrary to the earlier findings of Ackerman et al. (2006) and others, participants were particularly poor at recognizing black, angry faces.”

Like most research on the topic, the findings have implications for the criminal justice system, Gwinn says.

He frames the issue this way: “If you are an eyewitness, and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?”

The second study used the same methodology with a group of black perceivers and, perhaps surprisingly, found the same, though weaker, effect.

“The racial bias cuts across both groups,” Gwinn says. “Even African Americans showed bias, though it was much weaker.”

In other words, like their white counterparts, African-American perceivers also appeared to have a little trouble remembering angry black faces. So what’s going on?

“Given that blacks in America are commonly stereotyped as angry and threatening”—the paper cites research to that effect—“we suspect that our participants were more likely to process black, angry targets in a categorical manner, because of their consistency with the socially shared stereotype,” the authors conclude.

In other words, anger led both white and black perceivers to focus more on the race or the “blackness” of the face, rather than paying attention to the unique features of the face that would distinguish one face from another.

Among African-Americans, this sort of self-directed bias is not uncommon. As an example, Gwinn cites a well-known story told by former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, an African-American, who said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps … then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

Jackson’s implication was that he feels guilty about his relief in being followed by someone who is white rather than black. Since both whites and blacks can stereotype blacks as threatening, both are affected by racial bias, including biased, inaccurate memory for angry black faces, Gwinn observes.

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.

If you are an eyewitness, and have implicated a suspect not of the same race as you, are you accurate in recognizing and telling that person apart from others?’ Probably not, CU researcher finds

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RAP lab's work ranges from Polish hip-hop to prison

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

RAP lab's work ranges from Polish hip-hop to prison Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/08/2015 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

Adam Bradley is a study in contrasts: a hip-hop expert who grew up in Salt Lake City, dissecting the literary devices of Shakespeare in one breath and Slick Rick in the next. He teaches in English, but his RAP Lab is in the chemistry building

Relatively few sentences juxtapose the words “professor” and “hip-hop.” Ditto for “Mozart” and “Mos Def” or “Emily Dickinson” and “Lauryn Hill,” or even “literature” and “laboratory.” Adam Bradley, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, is assiduously changing that.

Adam Bradley in the RAP Lab, which is in the Cristol Chemistry Building. Photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Now beginning its third year, Bradley’s Laboratory for Race and Popular Culture—or RAP Lab—at CU-Boulder is spreading the scholarship of hip-hop around the world and into K-12 classrooms.

It’s also striving to help Colorado prison inmates break the cycle of destructive behavior without severing their social ties.

Like his scholarship, Bradley is a study in contrasts. He’s a hip-hop expert who grew up in Salt Lake City. He can dissect the literary devices of Shakespeare in one breath and Slick Rick in the next. He teaches in the English Department, but his RAP Lab is in the Cristol Chemistry Building, bustling with chemists wearing lab coats and eye protection.

"We want to understand what’s going on with the language and the flow of lyrics, but also what’s going on culturally when something like hip-hop, which is born in an African-American context, gets taken over to a country like Poland, which is 98 percent white.”

The RAP Lab is a “humanities hothouse” for cutting-edge research, teaching and outreach. Here, Bradley and a cadre of student and post-doctoral researchers are striving to understand the differences and similarities between American hip-hop and Polish hip-hop.

“We want to understand what’s going on with the language and the flow of lyrics, but also what’s going on culturally when something like hip-hop, which is born in an African-American context, gets taken over to a country like Poland, which is 98 percent white,” Bradley says.

For now, the Colorado-Poland work is in the “proof of concept” stage—to show there’s valuable information to be gleaned by comparing American and Polish rap.

Bradley and a colleague in Poland are compiling a global catalog of artists and scholars. So far, they’ve found potential collaborators in 26 countries; they could help answer questions about how hip-hop is expressed in other cultures and countries.

Why start with Poland? A Polish scholar of hip-hop contacted Bradley and told the CU-Boulder professor how much his scholarship had influenced him.

Adam Bradley works with students in the RAP lab. Photo by Glenn Asakawa.

The Polish scholar had even published two books that mirrored two of Bradley’s own, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-hop, which Bradley wrote, and The Anthology of Rap, which he co-edited.

Like the global hip-hop initiative, the RAP Lab got involved with Colorado prison inmates after an unsolicited contact.

Lisi Owen, executive director of the Colorado Prison Law Project, heard Bradley on Colorado Public Radio discussing his Hip-hop in the Classroom initiative, which helps students understand how hip-hop and literature employ many of the same devices—thereby helping students relate to and possibly even study literature.

Owen told Bradley that two inmates had been developing something called the Gang Awareness Program (GAP) and suggested that Bradley make a hip-hop-related presentation to them.

After extensive discussions with the inmates, Bradley decided what they needed was not “for me to go in and run my own little show, but rather to support what they’d already done.”

The inmates themselves have developed GAP, “the idea being, quite radically, to conceive of something driven by the inmates themselves rather than imposed from the outside.” The core principle is to “occupy but not abandon” the gangs in the prisons.

This differs from most gang-related programs, which insist that inmates renounce their gang affiliations, resulting in very low rates of success.

The inmates have created a program that allows for self-transformation, “sometimes revolutionary change, without renunciation.”

The RAP Lab’s role is primarily supporting the inmates’ work: sending books, making connections to outside experts, providing an ear. Bradley’s students are also researching other prison programs’ efficacy so as better to support GAP’s development.

Bradley emphasizes that the work with inmates reflects a common theme in literature, “that people are complex, far more capacious than we allow—that they can contain contradictions and can transform themselves.”

“We see it in literature. We allow it in literature, but sometimes we don’t allow it in life.”

To learn more about the RAP Lab, see http://raplab.colorado.edu.

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.

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When does U.N. give peace a chance? Follow the money

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

When does U.N. give peace a chance? Follow the money Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/08/2015 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Economic ties to U.N. powers a factor in where peacekeepers go

Civil wars have killed some 17 million people since the end of World War II. And while they rage mostly within national borders, their costs all too commonly metastasize to their neighbors, even sometimes causing havoc regionally.

The World Bank has gone so far as to label civil wars “development in reverse” because they increase poverty, spread disease and provide a safe haven for illegal activity. And once a nation falls into the “civil war trap,” it can be hard to get out: Almost half of all civil wars in which hostilities cease are reignited within five years.

One proven tool in breaking that cycle is the presence of U.N. peacekeeping troops. Sending in the blue helmets can reduce the chances that a low-level conflict will erupt into full-blown civil war by more than 50 percent, according to studies.

Jaroslav Tir

Yet U.N. troops are deployed to just 38 percent of civil conflicts, says Jaroslav Tir, professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“U.N. peacekeeping stands out as a fairly effective to prevent civil wars from restarting,” says Tir, a native of Croatia, which struggled with civil conflict in the 1990s. “It’s not cheap, but compared to other things, it also cost-effective.”

Tir and Symon M. Stojek, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, wondered why, given that the tool is known to be effective, it’s used in only about a third of civil wars around the world. In their paper, “The supply side of United Nations peacekeeping operations: Trade ties and United Nations-led deployments to civil war states,” published recently in the European Journal of International Relations, they conclude that the answer can be found—as with so many things—by following the money.

Specifically, nations torn by civil strife that have strong extant trade relations with the United Nations’ key decision-making states—notably the five permanent members, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China, and Germany and Japan, which between them fund nearly three-quarters of all peacekeeping missions—have a 20-percent higher likelihood of receiving peacekeepers and hence, breaking the cycle of war.

"If the U.S. goes it alone into some country, it looks like it’s out for self interest. In some parts of the world, that smells like imperialism or neo-colonialism."

“Our model suggests that conflicts in economically isolated countries are less likely to receive attention from the U.N. than are conflicts in more economically engaged states,” the authors write.

That makes economic sense, Tir says. War destroys markets and trade, so nations have more incentive to invest their peacekeeping resources in places where the cessation of violence will have tangible economic benefits.

United Nations’ peacekeepers in Sudan in 2012. UNAMID photo/Albert González Farran.

The permanent U.N. Security Council members, known as the P5, “are, so to speak, looking for a good return of investment of their peacekeeping dollars,” the authors write. “The intensity of the economic relationship between the P5 and the civil war state at the time when the civil war nears its end represents a credible signal of future economic value.”

Of course, not all P5 members are equal. The United States far outpaces all other members, funding 27.17 percent of peacekeeping costs in 2010, followed by non-P5 member Japan (12.53 percent), the UK (8.16), non-P5 Germany (8.02), France (7.56), non-P5 Italy (5 percent), and China (3.94). Russia, the fifth permanent member, comes in at number 11, funding just 1.98 percent of peacekeeping costs.

Despite the imbalance, Tir notes that by funding the lion’s share of peacekeeping costs, the United States gains numerous advantages. First, it can usually keep its own troops out of the field. In addition, U.N. peacekeeping serves as a kind of “Laundromat” through which the United States can protect its interests while participating as a member of the international community.

A United Nations’ peacekeeper in Lebanon in 2011. U.N. photo/Christopher Herwig.

“If the U.S. goes it alone into some country, it looks like it’s out for self interest,” Tir says. “In some parts of the world, that smells like imperialism or neo-colonialism.”

Meanwhile, given that the United States foots more than a quarter of the bill, other member states are typically willing to defer when it gets behind a peacekeeping effort.

A United Nations’ peacekeeper in Lebanon in 2011. U.N. photo/Christopher Herwig.

“If the U.S. wants peacekeeping troops somewhere and is willing to pay, China and Russia usually don’t care,” Tir says. “They may not put up money, but they won’t stand in the way.”

The implication of the study, in part, is that more trade and interconnectedness between major U.N. member nations and other countries can prevent civil conflicts from spiraling out of control. Tir cites the current war in Syria as an example of how isolation can translate into the world turning away.

“The regime there is very internationally isolated. So when rebels started making demands, the government had no pressure or incentive to making concessions,” he says. “There were so few levers the international community to get the government to agree to any sort of negotiated solution with the rebels.”

The result, in part, has been the spilling of that civil conflict across borders in the Middle East and the establishment of the Islamic State, which continues to embroil the region in conflict across thousands of miles of territory.

“(W)hile economic arguments may seem overly simplistic and ethically murky, increasing economic interdependence has a positive externality of placing the stability of important trade partners on the agenda of major powers,” the authors conclude. “Markets may not be humanitarian, but when humanitarian efforts are in line with the market interest, we can expect more trade, more peacekeeping, and, if peacekeeping research is correct, more peace.”

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.

U.N. peacekeeping forces have been proved effective in breaking the cycle of civil wars, but the blue helmets are deployed in only 38 percent of conflicts. Why? CU professor finds correlation between peacekeeping deployment and the economic interests of the United Nations’ Security Council members.

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Students explore Turkey’s Jewish/Muslim history

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Students explore Turkey’s Jewish/Muslim history Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2015 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

Nan Goodman, third from left, and her students in front of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey. The man with the button-down shirt at the center is Cem Durak, the group’s guide in Turkey and now a graduate student in religious studies at CU-Boulder. Photo courtesy of Nan Goodman.

When you think of Istanbul, you might think about its historical status as the center of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, or about its present-day status as a city straddling two continents, Europe and Asia, in the Muslim country of Turkey.

But, “When people think about Istanbul, they don’t necessarily think about Jewish life,” says Nan Goodman.

Goodman, professor of English and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, is starting to change that. This summer, she organized a university-sponsored global seminar in Turkey. It was called, “Jews & Muslims: The Multi-Ethnic History of Istanbul.”

Eight CU-Boulder students—six undergraduates and two graduate students—joined the seminar.

Turkey is the only Muslim country that has a thriving Jewish community, Goodman says. She first visited Turkey in 2011 as a visiting professor at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University. She returned to Boğaziçi University in 2012 to give two lectures on human rights for the Humanities program and again last year as a Fulbright Fellow.

There, she got encouragement to launch this year’s global seminar. Her Turkish colleagues agreed that it would be “incredible to take students to Istanbul to study Jewish and Islamic connections, of which there are many.”

“My goal for the future is to institute some version of this class on a more permanent basis, in which students from CU have the opportunity to really mingle with Boğaziçi students.”

The greatest payoff for the students was a first-hand experience of diversity and of the messiness and complexity of boundaries—“religious, disciplinary, cultural, you name it.”

“Seeing the connections rather than the separations between these forms of religious practice and belief and the lives of people in Turkey was invaluable,” Goodman says.

"Seeing the connections rather than the separations between these forms of religious practice and belief and the lives of people in Turkey was invaluable.”

In recent years, Goodman’s scholarship has found surprising connections between the Puritans and the Ottoman Empire. That scholarly inquiry will be part of her forthcoming book, The Puritan Cosmopolis.

Noting that Puritans believed themselves to be the second incarnation of the Jews, Goodman describes her current research on the link between Islam, Judaism, and the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was a center of the universe for nearly six centuries and was home, over the course of centuries, to hundreds of thousands of Jews “who were allowed to be Jewish there in a way they weren’t at various points in time anywhere else.” Many Jews arrived before or during the Spanish Inquisition.

This does not mean the Ottoman Empire was overly welcoming. Jews, like other minorities, were subject to a special tax and were officially prohibited from pursuing certain professions or living in certain places.

The Jewish population in Turkey is dwindling now, but “they’re wonderful, lively and dedicated.”

Goodman describes Turkey as a place that has traditionally tolerated Jewish people. The concept of “tolerance” comes from the Enlightenment, specifically John Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration.

Tolerance is touted as “one of the great virtues of an enlightened, liberal democracy, an enlightened culture,” Goodman says. “But it’s an ugly word, because it suggests that if you are merely tolerated, you’re not fully participatory. That continues to be a problem for the Jewish community.”

For instance, Goodman notes, Jewish men will don a yarmulka upon entering a synagogue, but they are careful to remove it immediately when leaving. “Being visibly Jewish in that way is just not common.”

Questions of “hospitality,” “tolerance,” and the overlapping traditions among faiths are “what I tried to pick apart with my students.” While in Turkey, the students learned about Muslim and Christian Turks as well.

“Turkey has a heterogeneous past,” Goodman says. “It’s not clear what its future will be.”

The class was in Turkey from June 9 to June 25. Students lived in the Boğaziçi University dormitories. The university’s rector provided in-kind contributions to the program by giving the students free room and board.

The rector is very open to all kinds of new research and scholarship and wants to promote the study of the Jewish population in Istanbul in particular. Goodman plans to do another global seminar in summer 2016. The students who went this year are majoring in international affairs, Jewish Studies, religious studies and political science.

“For me, this was a wonderful inaugural event in my directorship (in Jewish Studies). What I really want to do in the Jewish Studies Program is … to educate people and inspire them to learn about the incredibly wide parameters of Jewish life all over the world.”

“To learn about Judaism through the past and present of Jewish life and its symbols in a Muslim land is to learn things I never knew before, and I believe that’s true for my students as well.”

To learn more about the Program in Jewish Studies, click here. To read a Turkish newspaper’s coverage of the CU global seminar, click here.

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.

“When people think about Istanbul, they don’t necessarily think about Jewish life,” says Nan Goodman. The professor of English and director of the Program in Jewish Studies is starting to change that.

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Unhappy marriages linked with risk of suicide

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 06:00:00 +0000

Unhappy marriages linked with risk of suicide Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/30/2015 - 00:00

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU study suggests that it may be better to end a marriage than to continue in an unhappy one.

Love and marriage, as someone once crooned, may go together like a horse and carriage. But if the horse goes one way and the carriage another, the danger of suicide increases.

That’s the key finding in “Marital Discord and Suicidal Outcomes in a National Sample of Married Individuals,” an article by four University of Colorado Boulder researchers published in the most recent issue of Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, the journal of the American Association of Suicidology.

“Across the U.S. there is a very strong association between marital discord, being unhappy in a marriage, and suicidal ideation and attempts,” says lead author Briana Robustelli, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, who co-authored the paper with Professor Mark A. Whisman and fellow students Anne Trytko and Angela Li.

The analysis was based on the responses of nearly 1,400 married Americans to a national survey given to nearly 10,000 adults in 2004. The researchers controlled for such factors as mood, anxiety and substance abuse disorders and concluded that marital discord “may be important to target in preventing and treating suicide.”

This doesn’t mean that unhappy marriages result in large numbers of suicides, just that discordant couples have a higher rate of suicidal ideation and attempts than happy couples.

“These events are still rare, happening in a low percentage of the population,” Robustelli says.

The researchers used as one starting point an “interpersonal theory of suicide” developed by researchers in 2010, which considers, among other things, such factors as “thwarted belongingness” and “perceived burdensomeness” in suicide.

“Those are two very poetic constructs,” says Robustelli, who has also been researching how gratitude can affect life satisfaction, “that seem to be especially important in predicting and explaining suicidal behavior.”

The first term has to do with feeling disconnected from others, while the second is the idea that one is a burden on others, both of which can contribute to suicidal thoughts and actions. Both can increase with marital discord.

Numerous studies have shown that unmarried people are more likely to consider or attempt suicide. Others have found that people who had been divorced, widowed or married in the preceding five years were at higher risk of committing suicide relative to those who had no change in marital status over the same time period.

And of course, satisfying marriages—researchers have actually defined that using a variety of markers including a 5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative interactions between spouses, Robustelli says—are generally beneficial, though studies have found that to be more the case for men than women.

This research indicates that an unhappy marriage may be more than just miserable, in some cases; it may be deadly.

“Some studies have found it’s better to be divorced or separated than stay in an unhappy marriage, that you may live longer if you get out,” Robustelli says.

Clay Evans is a free-lance writer in Boulder.

Love and marriage, as someone once crooned, may go together like a horse and carriage. But if the horse goes one way and the carriage another, the danger of suicide increases. That’s the key finding in an article by four University of Colorado Boulder researchers published in the most recent issue of the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior.

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What ‘I just wasn’t thinking’ really says about taking contraceptive risks

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 06:00:00 +0000

What ‘I just wasn’t thinking’ really says about taking contraceptive risks Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/30/2015 - 00:00

Laura Herrington Watson

CU researchers try to understand why women engage in risky behavior with regards to contraception.

One CU researcher decodes a frequent explanation for unprotected sex

CU-Boulder Ph.D. candidate Laurie James-Hawkins conducted an original study on the CU-Boulder campus focusing on the underlying reasons for risky contraceptive behavior among college women.

Published in March in the Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, her research was based on interviews with women who initially self-reported having taken contraceptive risks. This research has implications for how clinicians can help reduce risky behavior and consequent unintended pregnancies.

Fifty-one percent of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and James-Hawkins says college-aged women (18 to 25) account for a large percentage of these accidental pregnancies. Not all the women she interviewed had become pregnant, but all had taken contraceptive risks at one time or another.

Before coming to ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ, James-Hawkins had looked at third-party surveys that asked women why they took contraceptive risks. She was frustrated by the frequent reply, “I just wasn’t thinking.” She wanted more meaningful answers.

In one-on-one interviews, James-Hawkins asked her subjects why they had taken contraceptive risks. Of the 45 women interviewed, 91 percent spontaneously said, “I just wasn’t thinking.”

She asked each woman what she meant by this.

“Some women were vividly uncomfortable when I pushed them on the question,” James-Hawkins says. “I think they saw their [initial] answer as not being politically correct. In our culture, in the middle class, it’s the social norm to use contraceptives.”

Because sexual risk-taking is considered inappropriate and irresponsible, women were compelled to come up with answers to make their behavior seem less deliberate.

"Some women were vividly uncomfortable when I pushed them on the question. I think they saw their [initial] answer as not being politically correct. In our culture, in the middle class, it’s the social norm to use contraceptives.”

“To some extent, the ‘I just wasn’t thinking’ answer was impression-management, both for me and themselves,” James-Hawkins says.

She found that women have multiple meanings when they say they “weren’t thinking,” and they generally fall under four major themes.

“Almost all of the explanations were based on erroneous risk calculations that led the women to believe they were not likely to experience a pregnancy,” James-Hawkins says. “Only a small minority of women interviewed meant they had literally not thought about the possibility of pregnancy.”

One group of women assessed their risk and then consciously chose to ignore it.

A second group of women incorrectly assessed their cumulative risk of pregnancy.

“It is true that one single act of unprotected sex is unlikely to lead to pregnancy,” James-Hawkins says. “The problem is that after ‘getting away with it’ once, you feel invincible and safer doing it more.”

Some women decide they must be infertile or have no need for contraception, she says.

But with multiple risks, or continuing incidence of unprotected sex, cumulative risk of pregnancy increases.

Other women may have been on the birth control pill for two years, but missed a few days, James-Hawkins says. “They assume they are safe, but when you stop taking birth control, your protection stops…Consistency is really important.”

For a third group of women, alcohol played a major role in their decisions to have unprotected sex.

“Some women said, ‘Oh, I just wasn’t thinking because I was really drunk.’ Or they were realizing in the middle of sex that is was unprotected. Or they were having sex and not remembering it.”

James-Hawkins asked the women who attributed their risky behavior to alcohol whether they knew beforehand that they were going to have sex. She found that many “underestimate how much they drink and overestimate the agency they have while drunk.”

"Even if earlier in the interview they had decoded the answer for themselves, they would give themselves the benefit of the doubt, but then they attributed that same behavior to a character defect in others.”

A fourth group of women accepted the risk of pregnancy and chose to deal with it later. In some cases, women didn’t want to risk their relationship with their partner by delaying sex. This group also had knowledge of Plan B birth control.

At the end of each interview, James-Hawkins asked each woman what she thought other women meant when they attributed unprotected sex to “just not thinking.”

While most subjects explained their individual decisions as a one-time choice, their explanations of other women’s behavior included those women being stupid or dumb, being in love or not thinking about the future, and social norms discouraging women from carrying condoms.

“Even if earlier in the interview they had decoded the answer for themselves, they would give themselves the benefit of the doubt, but then they attributed that same behavior to a character defect in others,” James-Hawkins says.

She is interested in researching this double-standard in the future, but for now she wants to focus on what her research means.

“‘Just not thinking’ is a blanket term that represents [women’s] attempts to explain behavior with which they themselves are not comfortable and for which they often do not feel they have an adequate explanation,” James-Hawkins says.

She hopes her research will impact the way clinicians approach birth control and address reasons for contraceptive risk-taking with women.

“You can give someone the pill but you’re not there to make sure they take it every day,” James-Hawkins says. “If [a physician] delves into a woman’s needs for birth control and gets answers like the women gave in my survey, then the pill is probably not a good idea.”

Instead, she suggests that long-acting and reversible birth control like an IUD might fit some women’s needs better.

Lara Herrington Watson is a CU alumna (’07) and freelance writer who splits her time between Denver and Phoenix.

When asked why they didn’t use contraception or took other contraceptive risks, women in a University of Colorado Boulder study overwhelmingly replied that they just weren’t thinking. What they meant by that varied widely, and the results have implications for how clinicians can help reduce risky behavior and consequent unintended pregnancies.

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