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Unforgiven, directed by Lee Sang-Il
Ken Watanabe et al
135 minutes, UK Release Date: 28 February 2014
Review by Chris Corker
The original Unforgiven was a major critical success, hailed as one of Clint Eastwood's best films and considered one of the finest westerns ever made. It didn't glorify violence or sugar coat any of the hard truths faced by the killers or their victims, but had a philosophical, existential form that was well-crafted alongside the minimalist cinematography and dialogue. The most surprising thing about this remake, directed by Korean Lee Sang-Il and starring Ken Watanabe, is how closely it sticks to the source material, and how successfully it does so considering the wildly different settings. It may replace some of the meditative feel with a visceral aggression, which doesn't – despite its best attempts – make the film any more emotionally impactful, but it still remains incredibly close to the original.
When the Shogunate is defeated and his reason to fight has been torn away from him, Jubei Kamata (Watanabe) is forced to flee from the pursuing opposing forces. Jubei, exhausted and clearly desperate, defeats the soldiers in the snow-laden woods, before disappearing. Many years later, Jubei is now living with his two children on a small and remote farm, completely isolated from the outside world. This isolation, however, cannot hide him from his past. The movie does a great job of recreating the small farm setting from the original, and the wide panoramic shots in the sunset are nostalgic for those familiar with Eastwood's film. This familiarity can be felt throughout the movie, with scenarios being recreated and, more importantly, certain dialogue (or at least the translation of dialogue) being identical to the original. Strangely, however, some of the more profound and memorable script ('we all got it coming, kid,' being a notable exception) is absent. Watanabe, as Jubei – the name of a traditionally heroic figure in Japanese legend – does a good job with his delivery, and portrays a grief-stricken man very well, despite lacking the stoic presence and subtlety of acting that Eastwood oozes. This lack of subtlety – something that critics would say Japanese filmmaking lacks in general – does feel ill-placed in certain scenes, but the film as a whole remains understated.
It is while Watanabe is on the ranch, that his friend Kingo (Akira Emoto) visits him and asks him for his help with a bounty placed on two men by a group of prostitutes. The men are said to have cut the face of one of the women, leaving her horribly scarred. Kingo refers to Watanabe as 'Jubei the Killer', giving us an indication of his infamy. After consideration, Jubei sets off to the town with Kingo. Here the story diverges from the original, in which the younger Schofield Kid tries to recruit Eastwood, before Eastwood, as Munny, approaches his friend. This, along with the more comic version of the kid – a representation of the naivety and innocence that is drawn to violence, followed by its disillusionment – creates a different dynamic among the trio. And while the kid, played by Yuya Yagira, is probably the weakest character, his origin and ethnicity as an Ainu adds a new element to the story, representing the biggest divergence from the source material. Where the undesirable element of the original are mainly those who go from town to town and bounty hunters, the undesirables here are the Ainu race.
The Ainu, indigenous to Japan, underwent a similar – though less severe fate, as did the Native Americans. They were mainly shunned and ostracised, being considered little more than barbarians. In Unforgiven, as towns grow and the expansion of commerce spreads throughout the forest, there is little room left for the Ainu with their simple practices and pagan religion. As the kid and Jubei's deceased wife are both of Ainu ancestry, this racial tension between them and the authorities adds a depth to this version that the original lacks.
Also a welcome addition to the film is the focus on the prostitutes' plight, as they begin to realise the tragedy they have set into motion. This is also shown in the original, although I feel that it is more fleshed out here, giving an insight into a group that were considered unimportant beyond their practical uses, considered as only slightly more deserving of compassion than animals.
In an age where remakes are perhaps more common than original ideas, it is still difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is that so often makes them inferior. Of course, for anyone familiar with the original, the remake could never have the same initial impact. There is also something intrinsically pointless about another version of a movie that is already critically acclaimed and loved. The remaking of foreign films – more common in reverse, with Japanese films being made into American – is a different challenge altogether. A film is often made out of a social matter that is personal to that particular country, to a set of beliefs which are indigenous there. It can feel strange when we take those social issues and thrust them into a new environment, where they don't have the same gravitas. Unforgiven, however, has done very well with these challenges, creating a new tension and doing a great job of transferring the remainder into a foreign context. Perhaps this is a testament to the universal appeal of the original. This transference, however, is where most of the films strengths and weaknesses lie. The kid, for example, has undergone a necessary transformation – an aspiring samurai would make a lot less sense in an age where they are becoming obsolete, than an aspiring cowboy assassin – and his Ainu roots create an interesting tension. In this process, however, he has also become more comical, less believable and likeable, making his later regret less meaningful.
Overall, this remake does a great job of transforming a familiar idea into a new context. With its amazing scenery and impressive cinematography, it is a treat for the eyes, but it lacks some of the depth and philosophy that Eastwood's film seemed to intertwine so effortlessly. Fans of the original may find certain scenes and dialogue nostalgic, but those same fans may wonder about those that are missing.


EveryMom'sPage: Keen To Purchase Your Own Vacation Home Abroad? Here's What You Need To Know!
Keen To Purchase Your Own Vacation Home Abroad? Here's What You Need To Know!
Perhaps you have been thinking about it for a while, and love the idea of having your own vacation home abroad. However, you might also be feeling a little anxious and unsure about the idea - after all, choosing to purchase a holiday home abroad is a big deal and there's a lot that you need to consider. The good news is that when it comes to buying a vacation home abroad there are various benefits that come with doing so, and it's a decision that you are unlikely to regret. That is, as long as you get the ins and outs of the process right.
The fact is that while you might want to purchase a vacation home abroad, you might also feel as if it's somewhat of a risk. After all, there is a lot that comes with making this kind of financial investment, which is something that tends to hold a lot of buyers back. However, there's no need to stress as there's plenty of advice available to make the process as stress-free as possible.
For everything that you need to know about buying a family vacation home abroad, have a read of this.
First things first, it's essential that you spend some time focusing on your budget. The chances are that you already have an idea of the budget in your head, so it's crucial that you work this out properly. Consider how much you can afford to spend as a deposit and what you can afford to pay each month for the mortgage. It's vital that you get this sorted beforehand, as there's a lot that you need to consider.
You should also take the time to think about things like how you will make owning the property affordable. If you are worried about this, then you might want to consider letting it out for holiday lets while you aren't using it, as that way you would have the potential to make a fantastic income from the property. This could make purchasing the vacation home of your dreams far more affordable.
Step one of buying a house abroad is thinking about what it is that you and your family need from a second home. What you need to consider is what you need in the short-term as well as what your family will need in the long-term as your family grows and changes. What you need to consider is the fact that you won't be heading off to your vacation home for a one-off break, this will be your family's go-to travel destination for many years to come, so you need to get it spot on. This property would need to perfectly meet your family's needs.
You need to consider where the property is situated in relation to where the main attractions of the location are located. How close to different amenities do you want to be? Where are the shops, the beach, the city centre, and so on? Where are attractions such as cinemas, water parks, theme parks, and various other interesting things to see and do?
You also need to think about the space that this property will give you - is there enough room for your family as it grows and develops? It might be fine now but what about as your kids get older - will there still be adequate room? Are there enough bedrooms and bathrooms? Does the property offer outdoor space? Does it have facilities like a pool? You need to think carefully about what any property offers you and your family.
Where ever you plan on buying from, whether it's online from https://rumahdijual.com/kalkulatorkpr.php or from a local estate agent, it's essential that you take the time to do plenty of research into the area before you make your offer. If you are going to ensure that the property that you pick is ideal for your family, you need to do as much research as possible into the area and what is on offer there. The truth is that the best decisions are always informed ones, so when it comes to making the decision to purchase a holiday home abroad, it's essential that you take the time to do adequate research. The last thing you want is to rush into a decision that you later live to regret.
A great way to learn more about the local area and what it actually offers is to talk to the local people. You will find that local people have the best insight about an area because they live there, so if you want to get the low down on a destination it's best to take the time to talk to them. You could also talk to other holiday homeowners from the area to see what they think about the location as a destination for your vacation home. They should be able to provide you with a fantastic insight into the area and what it offers.
If you are considering buying a vacation home, you may have some questions that you feel that you need answers to. The fact is that if you can't find these answers yourself, then you might want to consider seeking some expert advice. It's important that when it comes to purchasing a property abroad, that you know what you are letting yourself in for, and experts in this area are the perfect people to talk to you about this.
It's crucial that you understand what you are doing in terms of the legal side of things, and that you have an expert on hand to help you grade any potential properties to ensure that they don't have any serious structural problems. You need to consider seeking assistance from a legal expert in property purchasing abroad, in addition to an expert in checking the property for any problems before making a purchase. As the last thing that you want is to buy a property only to find a few months later that it has serious stability issues or that it has internal problems that are going to cost thousands to fix. That's why it's best to be clued up regarding property checking and not be afraid to work with the experts to ensure that a property is actually in as good condition as it's said to be.
If you are keen to purchase your own property abroad for you and your family to use as a vacation home, then you most probably have a lot to think about. The fact is that when it comes to buying property abroad, it's not easy to understand the ins and outs of the process. There is a lot that you need to consider, which is why it's so important that you take the time to get things right and don't rush into anything. It might be beneficial to have a read of resources like https://www.emigrate2.co.uk/how-to-buy-a-property-abroad-in-6-steps/, for instance. The more you read, the more informed you will be.
The chances are that you will love owning a home abroad, as it will make family vacations simpler, easier and far more affordable, but what you have to remember is that there's a lot that you need to carefully think about before choosing to go down this route, as the last thing that you want is to regret your decision to make the purchase.


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Q: Bootstrap scrollspy with angular-ui I've been banging my head trying to make scrollspy work. I'm currently doing a project scaffolded by yeomans angular generator with angular-ui router. It seems i'm in bad luck using any of the data-spy things.
Can anyone take a look what could be the cause?
Code snippets:
index.html

        .. omitted

Identity

Attributes

Skills

Spells

Passives

Equipment

Consumables

...

            <my-notification></my-notification>

...omitted

character.html

The character page is built up by several partials, this is the page i wish to spy on.
Any of the pages in my list of ng-includes start with a header like so:
Identity

A: This AngularStrap project can help you.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Home News PC Hardware Second Gen Intel Xe graphics Cards to Support H/W Level Ray Tracing
Second Gen Intel Xe graphics Cards to Support H/W Level Ray Tracing
According to the latest round of rumors from Intel China, the company will be integrating hardware level real-time raytracing support into its 2nd Gen Xe graphics card lineup. In a video shared on Weibo (China), one of the heatsink designs were shown off. These are the same ones we saw during Computex, earlier this year.
The cards can be seen in all their glory with a metal built and blue LEDs. Seems like Intel is going to adopt this design for the second-gen Xe lineup scheduled for launch in 2021. These GPUs will leverage Intel's upcoming 7nm node and considering NVIDIA and AMD both will be supporting ray-tracing on a hardware level by then, it's only fair that Intel does the same.
A while back Intel had teased that its Data Center graphics cards will be supporting real-time ray-tracing on a native level but that was a very low-profile claim. Not to say that this is an official announcement, but one of the biggest GPU wars are about to take place next week, so it's the perfect time for Intel to remind gamers that if team red or green don't satisfy them, they've got another option.
I believe it would be fair to say that ray-tracing has successfully taken off. The race ignited by NVIDIA's Turing RTX GPUs will be carried on by the next-gen consoles (Xbox Scarlett and PS5). AMD is also going to support the technology in its next-gen Navi lineup (RDNA+) in 2020 and has already made it clear in its roadmap. Lest to say that ray-tracing is set to become a standard in the next couple of years, and we'll soon be seeing way-prettier games.
16 Core AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Overclocked to 5.4GHz, Breaks Records Again
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Faster than Titan Xp, 11 TOPs of Performance
7nm
AMD navi
Intel Graphics Card
Intel Xe
RDNA
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I love computer hardware and RPGs, and those two things are what drove me to start TechQuila. Other than that most of my time goes into reading psychology, writing (and reading) dark poetry and playing games.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Car buyers with bad credit often ask us if they can get preapproved for a car loan because they've heard they can from the information they've read on other web sites.
The fact of the matter is that here at Auto Credit we know a great deal about what buyers with poor credit should and should not expect when it comes to getting preapproved for auto loans. That's because we've spent the past two decades helping car buyers with bruised credit find those new car dealers that can give them their best opportunities for auto loan approvals. It also inspired us to design our website so that credit-challenged car buyers could learn about the loan process they will be facing and covering topics ranging from BHPH dealers to what we'll be discussing today: the fallacy of getting a preapproved car loan if your credit scores are poor.
From what we can tell, there seems to be a great deal of deception when it comes to the topic of car loan shopping for car buyers with poor credit.
Whoever wrote this has either never done poor credit auto finance or, if they have, they're trying to convince people to believe in something that isn't true - probably in order to get their credit information.
• If your credit report is really bad – such as a history of multiple repossessions - there's a good chance you won't get approved for any kind of auto loan – certainly not without a hefty down payment – and possibly not even then.
• Comparing high risk car lenders can be very difficult. Most of these companies only lend indirectly through franchised new car dealers. This means that consumers won't know the interest rate they qualify for until they visit a dealer that's signed up with one or more of these lenders. Even then, the lender (provided there is more than one approval) is typically chosen based on the overall terms of the credit decision (down payment, loan term, dealer acquisition fee and interest rate tier), not necessarily on interest rate alone.
If you have experienced past credit issues you need to know how this particular loan process works so that you'll know, beforehand, what it will take to reestablish your auto credit. Web sites that purport to offer preapproved auto loans for people with bad credit are simply hoping you'll fill out their credit application. The fact is, none of what they tell you can represent a true offer of credit since they don't even know what your FICO score is because they haven't seen it yet.
One more thing you should know: at Auto Credit Express we specialize in helping applicants with damaged credit find those dealers that can give them their best opportunities for approved auto loans.


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Q: Boot Option : ACPI=off acpi=off is the only way to USB Live Ubuntu/Lubuntu, which eventually shows up only 1 processor (for i7 6700HQ), no power option, no brightness control etc.  There are couple of people suffering from the same,
Unable to run Ubuntu on a MSI laptop without disabling ACPI
Sony VAIO laptop SVF11N11CLB not start Ubuntu 16.04 without acpi = off
Booting Ubuntu with "acpi=off" grub parameter
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1336451
How to resolve the issue? Such that processor, power options, brightness control and other ubuntu options are normalized. Such things need to be sorted out.

A: I have the same processor. Have you tried nomodeset?
If you have an nvidia optimus machine like me probably nouveau is freezing the computer on boot.If that's the case you can try nouveau.modeset=0. In my case only this is needed.
Nvidia is hostile to free open source drivers and newer cards are very problematic with nouveau. After that you should be able to install the propietary drivers.


text:
Reel Talk Online
Film News, Reviews and Commentary - Minus the Filter
Get Social with 'Reel Talk'
Director Sacha Gervasi Presents..."Hitchcock," Starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren and Scarlett Johansson [TRAILER]
I'm sure there will be other trailers clamoring for your attention as we breeze through the rest of 2012, but I assure you there has been no other trailer I was anticipating more than Hitchcock, which details the events that occurred before and throughout the production of one of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest works, Psycho, in 1959. And now it's here!
But before I unveil the clip (and in case you haven't already skipped to the bottom of this post to gaze at the trailer), I figured I'd chat a little bit more about it. Recounting the groundbreaking moments surrounding an iconic filmmaker is quite the endeavor to take on, so a strong cast is essential to tell the story honestly and convincingly as was the writer ad director (after all, this is a movie within a movie). Thankfully, based on the trailer, they seem to have gotten it right by having Anthony Hopkins step into Hitchcock's giant shoes, virtually disappearing into his tubby body and signature pout classically remembered in black and white silhouette in his films and on The Twilight Zone.
The film itself seems to be seems to be twofold--getting Psycho made and the relationship between Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, who was apparently never shy about adding her two cents into any of his productions. The official plot is after the jump:
HITCHCOCK is a love story about one of the most influential filmmakers of the last century, Alfred Hitchcock and his wife and partner Alma Reville. The film takes place during the making of Hitchcock's seminal movie PSYCHO.
Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins as Dame and Sir Hitchcock! SIGN ME UP!
The film nicely rounds up the rest of the cast with actors portraying key characters in Hitchcock's life and career at the time--Scarlett Johansson as the fated shower victim Janet Leigh, James D'Arcy, who's a dead ringer for Anthony Perkins, Ralph Macchio as Psycho scribe Joe Stefano, Toni Colette and Hitchcock's production assistant Peggy Robertson, and...Jessica Biel as Vera Miles????
I was on board with all the casting decisions (since I've been obsessed with he making of this film since it was first announced), but must have completely blocked out the fact that Biel had wiggled her way onto the cast. So, this was a bit of a shock to see her in the clip here, as the actress who played the sister of Leigh's character Marion. It's an interesting choice, to say the least.
It's also interesting that director Sacha Gervasi, whose claim to fame before this was the 2008 documentary Anvil: The Story of Anvil (his only other credit), is helming the project. And John J McLaughlin, who wrote the exquisite screenplay for 2010's Black Swan, is also behind this script, which makes me think that there may be more than what meets the eye in this trailer (which is part dark and mysterious with clever dialogue). I am incredibly intrigued.
So without further ado, I present you Hitchcock (which will reportedly be limited release in theaters on November 23rd):
Posted by Candice Frederick at 9:15 PM
Labels: alfred hitchcock, james d'arcy, jessica biel, john j mclaughlin, psycho, ralph macchio, sacha gervasi, scarlett johansson, toni colette, trailer
Think it looks impressive, trailer really peaked my interest more than any other trailers in the last few months.
I had completely missed this until the last few weeks, it's really sprung up on me, but I think this could be a real dark horse for the Oscars.
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Writer/Director Justin Simien (DEAR WHITE PEOPLE) Signs On for a Hair-Rising Horror Satire
None of that headline is actually me being facetious. It's true. Justin Simien, the writer/director behind both the TV and film versions...
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The world has been in desperate need for an epic drama from a black woman director for quite some time time (Ava Duvernay's Selma w...
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Let's all hail George Takei, who made it off the Starship Enterprise decades ago and since become a nerd icon and important human ...
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PHOENIX — An attorney claimed in court Tuesday that utility regulator Bob Stump deliberately destroyed thousands of text messages from his state-issued phone specifically to hide what he was doing from the public.
"We have a public official conducting public business on a public phone," Dan Barr told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Randall Warner. He wants the judge to issue an order essentially censuring Stump for what even commission attorneys have admitted was his routine practice of deleting emails. Barr represents an effort calling itself the Checks and Balances Project, which gets some funding from solar interests.
LaSota pointed out that a special master appointed to review deleted messages that could be recovered from Stump's current phone — he threw out his earlier phone — concluded there was nothing there that fit the definition of a public record.
"There is absolutely not one shred of evidence that happened," LaSota said. He said nothing his client deleted fit the definition of a public record.
Barr conceded that what the Attorney General's Office was able to recover may not be public. That, he said, remains to be litigated. There's also some question of whether more deleted texts might be found with a new examination, he said.
But Barr told the judge that it's a matter of common sense.
For example, he said, a request to the Arizona Corporation Commission to turn over Stump's emails from a 10-month period ending in mid-2014 produced 232 documents, only one of which was actually written by Stump. Yet over that same period, a log showed that Stump exchanged more than 20,000 texts.
"It became pretty clear what was happening is that Commissioner Stump was using his state-issued phone to conduct state business by text message," Barr said.
It was not until last year, when the flap erupted about Stump's deleted messages, that Jodi Jerich, the commission's executive director, obtained software that creates a backup of all texts sent and received on state-issued phones.
David Cantelme, hired by the commission, said there are several problems with Barr's request. One is that the public-records request came after Stump tossed the state-issued cellphone he was using at the time.
And even then, Cantelme said, there is no requirement that every text, even ones considered public record at the time, be kept forever. He said many are "transient" in nature, like someone sending a message asking for an appointment.
Barr, however, said Stump and the commission cannot take the position that it doesn't matter what was on the phone at one time because it's gone.
All that left Warner wondering how he could adjudicate the case and determine if Stump had broken the law. The judge said Barr's request essentially asks him to determine that certain records no longer available were public records that should have been maintained.
Barr, however, said the task is not impossible. For example, he said Stump and those he was messaging could be called to tell, under oath, what they recall of the texts. "It then becomes a matter of credibility," Barr said.
Warner gave no indication when he will rule.
Would allow ACC commissioner Andy Tobin to vote on solar electric cases before panel.
Opponents say the plan will make it hard for ratepayers to avoid major bill increases.
Allows government agencies to reject requests they deem "unduly burdensome or harassing."


What to do with all of those scraps of fabric left over from larger quilts? Create home decoór with Quick-to-Quilt Coasters. Create darling seasonal, holiday and floral coasters! This book features 83 quick-to-quilt coaster patterns.
83 coasters to stitch for yourself or to give as gifts!
What to do with all of those scraps of fabric left over from larger quilts? It's time to make coasters. Look inside for designs for all seasons of the year. This book features 83 quick-to-quilt coaster patterns to give as gifts to family and friends or to keep for yourself! Whether you enjoy appliqué, strip piecing or paper piecing best, you'll find something you'll want to make from this fun collection.


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Victoria Megan Arbour is a Canadian evolutionary biologist and vertebrate palaeontologist at Royal BC Museum, where she is Curator of Palaeontology. An "expert on the armoured dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs", Arbour analyzes fossils and creates 3-D computer models. She named the possible pterosaur Gwawinapterus from Hornby Island, and a partial ornithischian dinosaur from Sustut Basin, British Columbia (now named Ferrisaurus), and has participated in the naming of the ankylosaurs Zuul, Zaraapelta, Crichtonpelta, and Ziapelta.

Early life and education
Born in 1983, Arbour is from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her mother, a math teacher, and father, a soil scientist, supported her science interests. Arbour completed a B.Sc. Honours Thesis supervised by Milton Graves, An ornithischian dinosaur from the Sustut Basin, British Columbia, Canada, and graduated from Dalhousie University in 2006. She completed her master's thesis, Evolution, biomechanics, and function of the tail club of ankylosaurid dinosaurs (Ornithischia: Thyreophora) in 2009, and her Ph.D. thesis, Systematics, evolution, and biogeography of the ankylosaurid dinosaurs, in 2014, both advised by paleontologist Philip Currie at the University of Alberta.

Career
Arbour became Curator of Palaeontology at Royal BC Museum in 2018.

She previously worked as a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and Royal Ontario Museum. As the top-ranked female candidate for the fellowship, she also received a supplement available to applicants who demonstrate "exemplary involvement in science promotion, mentorship, and leadership".

From 2014 to 2016 she was a postdoctoral researcher with a joint appointment at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University.

Arbour primarily studies dinosaurs in the group Ankylosauria, including biomechanical analyses of tail clubs. Arbour has studied microfossils from Nova Scotia. She has also named the possible pterosaur Gwawinapterus from Hornby Island, and a partial ornithischian dinosaur from Sustut Basin, both locations in British Columbia. She has participated in the naming of the ankylosaurs Zuul, Zaraapelta, Crichtonpelta, Ziapelta, as well as resurrecting Dyoplosaurus, and publishing a new phylogenetic analysis on the interrelationships of Ankylosauridae.

According to Brian Alary of the University of Alberta, "She's contributed to history-making research by analyzing fossils and creating 3-D computer models, developed course materials and taught 35,000 students at a time through the Dino 101 MOOC." Philip Currie credits Arbour for involving the paleontology discipline with the University of Alberta's "Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science & Technology", making study of dinosaurs more appealing to women.

References

External links

L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science (video, 1:56)

Living people
1984 births
Canadian paleontologists
21st-century Canadian biologists
Canadian women biologists
21st-century Canadian educators
21st-century Canadian women scientists
Dalhousie University alumni
People from Halifax, Nova Scotia
University of Alberta alumni
Royal Ontario Museum
Women paleontologists

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Category: Crime and Deviance
Evaluate the View that Crime and Deviance are Inevitable and Beneficial for Individuals and Society as a Whole
One answer to this AQA A-Level Sociology crime and deviance exam question drawing on Functionalist, Marxist and Labelling Theory perspectives.
This question was the 30 mark essay question on the June 2022 Crime and Deviance A-Level Sociology exam paper.
I have to say TOP MARKS for a fantastic question, lots in here to unpack.
The question came with an item that candidates had to apply which explicitly referenced Functionalists thinking crime was inevitable because not everyone could fit into the norms and values of society, and also that crime was beneficial.
The item also referenced that Conflict Theorists were critical of this view because crime is 'constructed' in such as way that it benefits certain individuals.
Quick Question decode….
The question breaks down into two chunks of two…
Evaluate the view that crime is inevitable (and evaluate the theory behind this)
Evaluate the view that crime is beneficial – i. for society and ii. for individuals.
The easiest way to structure this is probably to start off discussing and evaluating the Functionalist view – on inevitability and then whether it's beneficial and use mainly conflict (Marxist/ Feminist/ Interactionist) views to evaluate Functionalism.
This question also screams out 'talk about different types of crime and contrast them'.
And I'd also spend some time talking about PostModernism/ Cultural Theories of Crime – but again using these to critique Functionalism and Conflict Theories too.
I'd recommend NOT just doing a paragraph list answer – DONT' start with Functionalism then do Marxism then do Feminism – that will probably limit you to a mid mark band, C grade – for Bs and As I'm thinking the examiners are going to want an answer that really focuses on using material to critique Functionalism!
However, having said that – it's kind of hard to avoid discussing Durkheim's theory – all of it first – it's how you critique the different aspects of it that will help you avoid a 'listing the theories' answer'.
Below is a rough guide to how I'd answer this question….
Evaluate the view that Crime is Inevitable and beneficial for Society and Individuals…
Functionalism
Here you can outline Durkheim's theory of the 'Society of Saints' – in which he theorised that even in a near perfect society very small acts would become deviant and end up being criminalised because 'society needs crime', and in fact that crime is beneficial.
Durkheim in fact argued that crime performed three positive functions – social regulation (people are reminded of the boundaries when criminals are punished), social integration – people bond together more closely against criminals and then it also allows social change to take place (without deviance there can be no change!).
Durkheim's idea that crime is 'inevitable' seems to make sense as it is difficult to conceive of a society in which there is no crime, let alone no deviance. It also allows for the fact that some individuals are always going to break the rules, and so are not entirely controlled by society.
However this is quite a weak theory – it doesn't say very much – Durkheim didn't really talk about what kind of acts he was talking about – if bad manners are 'always going to be inevitable' then Functionalism as a theory kind of holds together, but if more serious crimes are inevitable in ALL societies – such as murders, treason, revolutions, that undermines the whole of Functionalist consensus theory because if all societies eventually end in conflict, then consensus is only ever a temporary state and societies don't evolve in the way Durkheim thought.
It's a very difficult theory to assess this – in terms of minor acts of deviance YES they are always going to be around it seems, but in a way who cares because these don't harm people or upset the balance of society, but in terms of the more serious crimes – mass organised crimes, terrorism aimed at social change – mass shootings in America by lone individuals – are these the inevitable?
It is impossible to measure at a global and 100 year historical level with any degree of accuracy but as a general rule there do seem to be LESS violent, serious and destabilising crimes in wealthier European Countries, suggesting where we have wealth and inclusion and democracy and human rights, more serious crimes that are going to blow society apart are less likely, but in poorer countries, in Africa for example, which has the highest amount of civil wars for the last half a century, violent crime seems more likely.
But then the most violent States on Earth are the very richest – the USA, Russia, China, all commit human rights abuses but generally against people in remote territories and against people deemed to be 'enemies of the state' – so maybe crime is inevitable when we have huge power differentials in the world….?
This brings to mind the Marxist perspective on crime – this essentially argues that 'crime' in the form of revolution is inevitable as oppression causes increasing exploitation which eventually leads to violent revolution (which by definition are criminal against the existing State) – however this doesn't really seem to fit the historical record any better than Functionalism, real communist revolutions are far and few between, much more war is about desperation or colonial conquest.
Marxists also argue that things like low level street crime are the outcome of poverty and oppression caused by the inequalities and injustices of Capitalism – this seems to make more sense as a theory of the inevitability of crime than Durkheim's as there is a correlation between these types of crime and poverty.
In contrast Durkhiems' theory can't be tested because he was never specific enough, thus it's probably better to dismiss the idea as it can't be proven.
There are also problems with Durkheim's theory of crime being beneficial is that it comes from the logic 'that if something in society exists then it must have a function' – Durkheim was kind of tunnel visioned here and he couldn't accept the view that some things were just plain dysfunctional and had no social benefit at all.
It is difficult to argue, for example, that domestic abuse has a useful social function – as it is hidden and never seen, and obviously one can't argue it benefits the victims.
In order for a crime to be deemed beneficial – to perform one of Durkheim's social functions it needs to be visible….. In this case one might be able to argue that domestic abuse does enhance social integration as people may come together to kick out local abusers from their neighbourhoods – HOWEVER – it's not a very positive basis for 'unity' and not that healthy where people are just united against something else – also there's no real need for this type of integration is there? I mean doesn't sport and music and many other things do the same without the crime and harm?
Also with social regulation – maybe crimes being punished remind people of the boundaries – but Marxists have pointed out that some crimes are much more likely to get punished than others – such as working class drug dealers bet punished, not the middle class users who take them.
And thus the Marxist take on crime benefiting some individuals more than others maybe fits better with social reality – we have selective law enforcement and punishment – the working classes are kept in their place while elites are more likely to get away with doing corporate and white collar crime without being noticed.
And when we look at some white collar crimes it's hard to argue they benefit society – such as the fraud that led to the collapse of Enron – which led to massive losses for ordinary investors and job losses for workers – very few people in fact benefitted from that other than a small amount of criminals who skimmed profit before the crash.
The item references crime being constructed in such a way that it benefits certain individuals more than others – this is an interactionist point of view – it means that what is criminal is determined by the law which in turn is determined by people.
We can see this most clearly in the way certain drugs are made criminal – for example with cannabis gradually being decriminalised in some states in America – when it used to be criminal law officers could prosecute people for growing and selling it, now in those states were it is decriminalised people can't be prosecuted – this shows up the varying nature of how some States deem this act to be harmful, others beneficial.
But what's maybe more important is how some kind of violent acts are not labelled as criminal – for example state violence in war, presumably because whichever territory is being 'liberated' is going to benefit from that particular wave of state violence, while ANY violence by ordinary people on the streets is deemed to be NOT beneficial in any way.
Personally I'd dismiss the idea that crime is inevitable as it's too broad a statement to be meaningful.
As to the Functionalist idea that crime is beneficial for society – this is too generalised to be true, but it certainly seems to be the case that crime does indeed benefit some people more than others – maybe for that reason it is inevitable, after all, but it's impossible to say with any certainty WHAT types of criminal and deviant act are inevitable.
Good question, cheers!
This isn't a definitive answer, I just thought I'd have some fun with it!
The Functionalist view of Crime
The Marxist View of crime
For further help with how to answer exam questions on the Crime and Deviance with Theory and Methods paper you might like my page on exam and revision advice, scroll down for paper three.
The material above is usually first taught as part of the Crime and Deviance topic within A-level sociology
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on September 6, 2022 October 11, 2022 Categories A-levels, Crime and DevianceTags A-level, AQA, crime, essays, FunctionalismLeave a comment on Evaluate the View that Crime and Deviance are Inevitable and Beneficial for Individuals and Society as a Whole
Sociology Applied to #GentleMinions
Shock Horror – groups of older children have been 'descending' on cinemas recently to 'disruptively watch' the latest Despicable Me Movie – Minions: The Rise of Gru.
These children have been meeting up at cinemas in groups as large as 50, dressed in suits and calling themselves 'Gentleminions' and filming themselves getting up to various antics such as walking in slow motion through cinema lobbies with hands held in a particular 'pointy finger' despicable me pose and being rowdy during viewings of the movie – doing things such as cheering when Gru appears on screen…
@lyndon.c
Despicable af 🍌 #fyp #minions #riseofgru #cineplex #gentleman
♬ original sound – billh
Some of these children filmed these antics and uploaded them to TikTok where some videos received hundreds of thousands of views, some into the millions.
Cinema staff and management weren't so amused by the actions of the 'gentleminions' with some cinemas banning groups of older children in suits from buying tickets for the movie, and with some parents of younger children saying they were scared by these antics.
These acts of minor deviance by young people should be of interest to anybody studying the Crime and Deviance aspect of sociology – as such disruptive and rowdy behaviour is clearly deviant in the context of a cinema where the social norms are that viewers keep themselves to themselves in the lobby are and are quiet during screenings.
But there's a lot more Sociology we can apply to this contemporary event!
Sociology Applied to the #GentleMinions
First off – I call them older children because I can't quite bring myself to call them young men, which in terms of their biological age at least some of them are. (At least I think most of them are 16-20 judging by their physical appearance, it's hard to tell – the older I get the younger the young seem to be!).
So the first sociological concept this event reminds me of is the 'social construction of childhood' – it reminds me that childhood is something flexible, and in this case we have young adults actively choosing to regress into a state of childhood for an evening.
Think about it – these people would have grown up with the 'Despicable Me' Franchise, being actual biological children when most of the movies were screened – and now, once the five year wait is over for the next instalment they want to regress back into that time that was probably more comforting for most of them!
So this is an illustration of the blurring of the boundaries between adulthood and childhood and in this case of adults choosing to act like children for a short while.
A Thoroughly Postmodern Event!
Obviously (hopefully) Despicable Me and the Minions are not real, they are a media construction, a cartoon.
This event couldn't have happened without the media – and probably wouldn't have happened without TikTok.
These kind of stunts are much more appealing to get involved in if your going to feature in a video that gets hundreds of thousands of views, after all!
An attempt at Belonging…?
Becoming a #GentleMinion, engaging in minor disruptive stunts in the cinema, filming them and uploading to TikTok is a pretty accessible way of feeling like you're part of of something larger.
Think about it – the Minions 'belong' – they are like a very large community that work together, for the most part, for shared purpose, something that it is somewhat lacking in our real world postmodern society that is increasingly divisive and fractured.
But just by wearing a suit and pranking in the cinema for an evening and being part of a TikTok upload you get to be part of a global 'movement' that for a fleeting moment share their love of this movie.
It may be a fleeting and desperate attempt at belonging, but I kind of get it – and it's harmless enough.
A minor moral panic….?
They're hardly the mods and rockers but these cinema antics were/ are deviant and they did upset people and this did cause a response from the cinema-authorities, who banned some youths in suits from watching the Despicable Me movie…
So we have present three aspects of Stan Cohen's classic moral panic theory….
However, in terms of degree of deviance these events are clearly not that harmful, and more interestingly it's the youths themselves sharing their antics on TikTok – not the mainstream media exaggerating how deviant or disruptive they were.
#GentleMinions – Final Thoughts…
Personally I see this as relatively harmless youthful antics, not great for young kinds watching the movie with their parents, but in the grand scheme of things this is on the low end of social harm!
And this is hardly a challenge to the social order – if anything it reinforces it – it's young people saying how much they like to consume mainstream media – I mean if any of these people were a threat to existing power structures they'd be out campaigning with a real social movement and probably wouldn't spend so much time identifying with a cartoon!
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on July 5, 2022 Categories Crime and DevianceTags Media, moral panic, SociologyLeave a comment on Sociology Applied to #GentleMinions
The Mass Shooter Database…
Mass shootings per year in America are increasing, and some recent research from the Violence Project aims to help us understand why this is.
For students of A-level Sociology this is a useful case study relevant to both research methods and crime and deviance.
The project has interviewed hundreds of people convicted of mass shootings and their family members to better understand their life histories (nice link to secondary qualitative data here!) and then fed this information into a database in oder to quantify it and to see what the main characteristics of mass shooters are.
Interestingly the data shows that there is a broad difference between people who do mass shootings in restaurants, bars and retail establishments compared to people who shoot up workplaces, religious institutions or schools and colleges. In the former, the victims tended to be strangers to the shooters, in the later type the shooters were much more likely to have known their victims.
The main characteristics of mass shooters in America….
Out of 172 cases only four were women, two of these acted with a man.
50% are white, 50% from other ethnic backgrounds
65% of shooters had a criminal record, 63% had a history of violence
The most common 'motivation' was a history of psychosis (30% of shooters) where the shooter was loosing their grip on reality.
Half the shooters acquired their guns legally.
You can explore the database for yourself at the link below.
These seem to be a very 'postmodern' set of findings…
The researchers note that the data reveals that there is 'no one type of shooter' – mass shooters in America come from a diverse array of backgrounds and have diverse motives for what they are doing.
Although personally i can see one clear trend from the data which is the huge bias towards to males – as is the case with many other crimes!
And another is the recent shift to grocery store shootings – the first of these wasn't until 2018, and since then there have been 'copycat' cases following it – Shooters tend to take lessons from other shooters who have done the same before!
Controlling Gun Crime…
The project suggests two main solutions to bring down the number of mass shootings…..
Monitoring people with high risk characteristics and restricting gun sales to these people (nice link to Actuarialism here within crime and deviance).
Stopping giving attention to mass shooters – which should help stop the copycat spreading of such hideous acts!
The Violence Project
Article in The Conversation discussing the rise of mass shootings in Grocery Stores.
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on May 31, 2022 May 22, 2022 Categories Crime and DevianceTags crime, research methodsLeave a comment on The Mass Shooter Database…
Advanced Information for A-Level Sociology June 2022: Crime, Deviance, Social Order and Social Control….
The AQA have 'very generously' informed A-level sociology students that the 30 mark essay question in the June 2022 exam will be on the topic area of 'crime, deviance, social order and social control'.
The problem is that this doesn't necessarily narrow down the specific content of the question that much. In fact, this 'advice' is probably a good candidate for the most useless piece of advice given for any A-level.
I mean, they've basically given you the general title of the crime and deviance module, which pretty much gives them license to ask you about ANYTHING in that 30 mark question, so keep that in mind.
But let's be forgiving, and let's assume for a moment that the senior sociology examiners were thinking like the text book authors, teachers and students when they wrote this year's 30 mark question (yes, it's almost certainly already been written folks!), this means the MOST LIKELY focus of the question should be on any or all of:
The Functionalist Perspective
The Marxist Perspective
BUT ALSO…..
The role of the community in controlling crime
The role of the police in controlling crime
The role of prison and other forms of punishment in controlling crime
The role of surveillance in controlling crime.
Right and Left Realist theories and surveillance theories sound like they should be the most relevant.
For links to all of the above – see my Crime and Deviance page!
My A-level sociology senses are telling me that Surveillance might well feature heavily in this 30 mark question – that would make sense given the role of Surveillance in controlling Covid-19 AND given that it's a difficult topic, it would be fair of the examiners to give you advanced warning.
But you're probably better off NOT gambling on one very specific topic coming up and being prepared for the whole general topic area.
ALSO, don't forget they can still combine the above with other topic areas – you might be asked to assess specific theories of crime control, or why women are more 'controlled' than men, or you might be asked to think about crime control in relation to globalisation, the later would make sense in any exam these days!
Possible Crime and Deviance Exam Essay Questions for June 2022…
Just a few suggestions, NB I don't know what's coming up….
(Using material from the item….)
Evaluate sociological perspectives on the role of surveillance in controlling crime and deviance (30)
Evaluate sociological perspectives on the role of informal or formal agents of social control (30)
Evaluate the view that informal agents of social control are more effective at controlling crime than formal agents of social control (30) (Nice question, huh?!?
I might, over the coming weeks, have a crack at some of these myself!
NB – top tip for this paper: go HARD on using Covid-19 rules as evidence to illustrate your points!
More details about [advanced information for the June 2022 A-level sociology exam here.
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on February 17, 2022 April 12, 2022 Categories Crime and DevianceTags A-level sociology, crime, exams8 Comments on Advanced Information for A-Level Sociology June 2022: Crime, Deviance, Social Order and Social Control….
The Ben Kinsella Trust – A Useful Resource for Knife Crime Teaching Resources
Knife Crime statistics have remained stubbornly high over the last few years, and this is in spite of ongoing campaigns to reduce it.
One such organisation which campaigns to reduce Knife Crime is the Ben Kinsella Trust, named after a teenage victim of Knife Crime from 2008.
The charity has produced numerous teaching resources aimed at key stage four students focussing on the laws surrounding carrying knives and the consequences of carrying them.
Unsurprisingly it has a very victim centred focus, featuring lots of videos with victims of knife crime.
This is obvious relevance to the Crime and Deviance module and I see two uses to teachers – firstly, some of the resources can be downloaded and adapted, there's lots relevant to the topic of victimology especially.
Secondly you could get students to analyse the work of the trust itself – getting them to consider how effective such campaigns are, and why they exist.
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that it's left to the relations of a murdered teenager to spend the rest of their days campaigning to reduce knife-crime, after all.
One would hope that either progressive social change would reduce such incidents OR the police would have sufficient funding to tackle knife crime and at least hold it level (rather than seeing it increasing like it has done recently), but neither of these seem to have been the case, hence why we have a need (a function, in functionalist terms) for charities such as the Ben Kinsella Trust.
It's a tough one this – a charity doing very positive work, but honestly I'd rather there were no need for it in the first place!
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on November 24, 2021 Categories Crime and DevianceTags crime, knife crime, victimsLeave a comment on The Ben Kinsella Trust – A Useful Resource for Knife Crime Teaching Resources
Women are Receiving more Online Abuse than Ever…
Social Media can be a toxic place for women who are getting more online hate than ever, while companies such as Facebook prefer to profit from this trend rather than protect the female victims, and the police lack the expertise (or the resources/ willpower) to do anything about it either.
This is based on research outline in a recent Panorama documentary fronted by Marianna Spring – BBC's disinformation and social media reporter.
Social media platforms such as Facebook direct people who show an interest in it to hateful content in order to increase their profit margins.
Why do men think it's oK to send women hateful messages online?
The extent of online hate against women
The documentary consists of Marianna's own experience, interviews with very minor celebrities and politicians and some more quantitative analysis, so all in all not a bad mix of methods.
Marianna herself has been keeping an 18 month video diary about the online abuse she's been receiving – which include rape threats, frequent use of C and F word and lots of sexualised commentary – much of it is too explicit to publish on the BBC!
DEMOS analysed more than 94 000 posts and comments about Love Island and Married at First Sight.
Women received more abusive comments that men and the abuse was focused on their gender – with women being accused of being manipulative and sexual while men were accused of not being masculine enough.
Ethnic minority women also received more abuse than white women.
Women MPs also receive a disproportionate amount of hate – the show features Ruth Davidson who used to be an MP who got a lot of online abuse and who thinks men might target such women as they don't like powerful women voicing their opinions.
The UN asked over 700 women prominent on social media – 1 in 5 women said they'd experienced harm in the real world and that this was linked to their online activity. Women who reported on disinformation were more likely to be targeted in real life.
Ineffective policing of online hate against women
In Spring 2021 Marianna started to receive more violent comments, one possibly by someone with a prior conviction for stalking.
She reported this to the MET in April – but by the shooting of the documentary (late summer I think this was) nothing has been done – she had been passed around liaison officers who seemed to lack the 'expertise' to do anything about it, her latest doesn't know how to use Instagram for example.
There has been more than a 100% increase in women reporting online hate in the past four years, but only a 32% increase in the number of arrests.
New research suggests that 97% of accounts reported to Twitter and Facebook (Instagram) for posting hate messages about women are not taken down.
Facebook spreads Online Hate against women
The final section of the documentary involved an experiment in which a fake profile was set up with the same interests as some of the accounts well known for posting abusive comments against women.
The account didn't post anything itself, it just followed other accounts and got recommendations based on that.
TikTok and Twitter didn't recommend any misogynistic content, YouTube recommend some but not too much.
But Facebook and Instagram were the worst- they directed the new account towards a whole online world of hate against women.
The evidenced outlined in this documentary is an unfortunate reminder that women are still more likely to be victims of abuse than men, in this case, online abuse in the public realm.
This is most relevant to the gender and crime topic studied as part of the Crime and Deviance module, usually taught in the second year.
It's also a warning to stay away from Instagram and Facebook where you can – use TikTok and Twitter instead.
Facebook may change its ways, but clearly it's set up to put profit before ethics, this won't change.
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on November 1, 2021 October 29, 2021 Categories Crime and DevianceTags crime, Facebook, GenderLeave a comment on Women are Receiving more Online Abuse than Ever…
Organised Crime Thrived During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Criminal Contagion: How Mafias, Gangsters and Scammers profit from a Pandemic is a recent study produced by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.
As the title suggests the book is an exploration of how Organised Crime has exploited opportunties during the Pandemic, and been thriving as a result.
As lockdowns closed down businesses, Organised Crime stepped up and transformed their practices to take advantage of the opportunities provided with people losing their jobs and just the general fear and confusing.
How organised crime exploited the pandemic
There was a massive increase in Cyberscams targeting both businesses and individuals offering such things as free Coronavirus testing kits and some of the government sites offering financial helps were cloned by criminal organisations to phish for people's personal details.
There was even one website which offered 'Coronavirus anti virus software' which you could download to protect you from Coronavirus – playing on people's fear and confusion (NB people did actually fall for this). Of course this was just a virus which extracted information from any computer it was downloaded to.
Online porn also increased massively – along with the exploitation of people uploading 'home made content' – regulating this kind of thing is difficult, to say the least.
One case from South Africa outlined a case where local gangs were going around houses telling people that cash was one of the main things that was spreading the disease and that people should hand over their cash so it could be cleaned.
Mafia Loan sharking also increased – with loan sharks preying on the many people who lost their jobs during the Pandemic.
The drug trade, however, remained relatively unchanged by the Pandemic, which is surprising given the closing down of trafficking routes. This was because many organisations had large stockpiles of drugs ready to sell, and a lot of health shipments related to the Pandemic (PPE shipments for example) actually contained drugs.
On the street level, local drug dealers dressed as health officials so they appeared as legitimated public officials out and about during lockdowns.
The Pandemic also put extra pressure on Criminal Justice Systems around the world – courts closed, and public order officials were hardest hit with sickness as they were on the frontline, compromising their ability to police the pandemic.
There was also a mass release of criminals from prisons as these were a main vector of transmission of the virus, including four major Mafia bosses in Italy.
In many countries where there is massive corruption, a lot of the funds released for public health made their way to private hands.
Source: I took this summary from this most excellent Thinking Allowed Podcast. (September 2021).
This is fantastic resource for students studying the Crime and Deviance module in their second year!
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on October 25, 2021 October 16, 2021 Categories Aid, trade and debt, Crime and DevianceTags coronavrius, crime, organised crimeLeave a comment on Organised Crime Thrived During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Hidden Girls – A Documentary on the Exploitation of Girls in Gangs
Gangs in the UK are increasingly 'recruiting' very young girls, as young as 10, to hold and run drugs and weapons for them and, for the even more unfortunate, to use as sex-slaves.
It seems that girls are very much the victims within gangs, as they have very little chance of moving up the gang hierarchy. They may well make it to the status of 'youngers' but it seems that's where their progression stops – the best they can hope for is to be in the front line running drugs and weapons and recruiting more girls into sexual exploitation.
They have almost no chance of becoming elders, the people who run local gang cells.
If you want a thoroughly depressing watch, then Hidden Girls on BBC3 (available on iplayer) is for you.
The documentary focusses on two female victims of gang exploitation, exploring how they got involved with the gangs, what gang life was like and how they got out of the cylce of exploitation.
The main method used is semi-structured interviews with the two victims, and also some other professionals who work in the field.
Both victims had very unstable home backgrounds from a young age – one talks of how she experienced her mother (not herself) being abused constantly by her father, and when that relationship ended her mother eventually ended up with a new partner who was a gang member and her house became a base for drug dealing, she was roped into the gang that way, eventually ending up holding drugs and weapons for the gang, from when she was 12.
She doesn't recount too much about her life as a gang member, but she ended up in what she thought was a 'loving relationship' as a teenager with a gang member in their 20s, and I dread to think what kind of abuse she suffered, although this isn't talked about explicitly.
She went through years of self-harming but eventually managed to get out through finding a place in a 'safe-house' with a key worker to support her.
The other victim talks about how she was (basically) neglected at home with there frequently being no food or other amenities – washing her hair with cold water and fairy liquid was normal.
She ended up hanging around with a gang, from the age of 11, because she enjoyed the banter and jokes, getting giving stuff for free, and eventually being asked to hold weapons and drugs.
It sounds like she avoided sexual exploitation herself, but only because she had an older girl friend in the gang who advised her that if she wanted to avoid the dreaded 'line-up' ritual (where several male gang members have sex with one girl at once) she had to bring in other young girls and persuade them to be the sex-slaves.
She now regrets all the victims she created and runs Out of the Shadows – an organisation aimed to help young people out of a life of crime.
The documentary also talks about how social media is facilitating the sexual exploitation of young girls, although the links to gangs in relation to social media aren't really explored.
This post has primarily been written for students of A-level sociology and this material on female victims in gangs is mainly relevant to the Crime and Deviance topic.
More specifically it is relevant to the topic of gender and crime – it is support for the view that female criminals (because these victims are also criminals) usually come from a background of abuse and neglect at home.
It also reminds us just how much gangs are a male phenomenon, with females being victims within the gang structure.
So there is obvious relevance to the topic of victimology here too, these are good examples of hidden victims.
This topic is also worth exploring for research methods – according to the woman who set up Out of the Shadows it is very difficult to access these female victims while they are victims – they tend to keep quiet about their exploitation and suffer in silence, so methodologically this means there is no reliable data on the extent of female victimisation in gangs and it might only be possible to explore this from a historical point of view, once they are out.
Needless to say this is also a sensitive topic, so an interesting one from an ethics point of view.
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on October 18, 2021 October 6, 2021 Categories Crime and DevianceTags crime, gangs, Gender, victimsLeave a comment on Hidden Girls – A Documentary on the Exploitation of Girls in Gangs
What are the Impacts of Crime on Victims?
Students of A-level sociology are required to study Victimology as part of the Crime and Deviance compulsory module, which means examiners can legitimately ask them this question!
Victim Support notes the following ways in which crime can affect victims in the short and long term:
Feeling upset or angry (strong emotional reactions)
A victim may feel as if they have lost control of their life, things may spiral downwards (this kind of links to Anomie)
Victims may blame themselves.
Victims may develop physical symptoms linked to the stress of being a victim
Victims may develop longer term anxiety related disorders.
The site notes that the way an individual responds to a crime will depend on a number of variables such as the type of crime, whether they know the victim, the support they get from friends and family and their past experiences of crime.
NB – If you've been a Victim of Crime, Victim Support UK is a safe space to go get support and advice.
Personal Stories may be the best way to understand the impact on Victims….
The Cumbria police have put together a video series in which one Domestic Violence Survivor talks through how she got out of an abusive relationship…
Impacts on Victims' families
NB – it's not necessarily just the victim who is affected, all of the above can have negative affects on relationships and children if one member of a family is the victim of crime.
One of the most heart breaking crimes where this is felt in the UK is among the families of victims of knife crime, as outlined in this article here.
Secondary Victimisation
Secondary victimisation is when victims relive the trauma of their crime, which may occur when they are cross-examined by the prosecution team in court, or through harassment by agents of the media.
It is most commonly associated with Feminist perspectives on Crime and Deviance – historically victims of rape have also been subject to secondary victimisation when they are 'put on trial' by being accused of lying ny the prosecution, for example.
This report from the BBC provides stories from Victims who say they have been 're-traumatised by the system'.
Help for Victims of Crime
The Ministry of Justice is another place Victims can go to in order to find out more about whether they are actually victims of crime, and to seek further support as necessary.
Citizens Advice is another place offering advice about getting legal support as a victim of crime.
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on September 23, 2021 August 5, 2021 Categories Crime and DevianceTags crime, Deviance, victimsLeave a comment on What are the Impacts of Crime on Victims?
The Economic and Social Costs of Crime
AQA A level sociology revision resources | Revisesociology.com
This topic is an important part of the Victimology topic, which students of A-level sociology will study as part of the Crime and Deviance option in their second year of study.
The Economic and Social Costs of Crime in England and Wales
The Home Office produces an annual report on the Economic and Social Impacts of Crime, summarising the impacts of crime in England and Wales. The latest report was published in 2018, reflecting on the cost of crime in 2015-16.
The report notes the following costs:
The overall cost to individuals for 2015-16 was £50 billion.
The overall cost to businesses was £9 billion
Violent crime accounts for 75% of the total costs of crime to individuals, but only one third of crimes are violent crimes.
Homicide (murder) is the crime with the greatest overall cost, at just over £ 3 million per incident
Rape (to put it bluntly, but this is the words of the Home Office, has the highest 'unit cost' for non-fatal crimes – at just under £40 000 per incident.
TBH this is one of more bizarre tables I've seen…
How the Cost of Crime is Calculated
The Home Office includes all of the following when working out costs:
Value of property lost or damaged
Physical and emotional damage to the individual
Lost output as a result of being a victim
Policing and Criminal Justice costs (which will include prison)
Costs of preventing crime (such as security measures).
So if we take into account all of the above, we can see why murder has such as high unit cost – all that lost output from the victim and the cost of keeping the murderer in jail for over a decade (most murders are caught).
Limitations with this data
There are limitations with measuring some of the costs of security – the Home Office uses the revenue of cyber security companies to calculate this for example, but I guess it doesn't take into account specialists companies have to take on to install and maintain cyber security operations.
It might take into account emotional costs – but what about the costs of 'fear of crime' – which the media makes sure doesn't correspond to the actual risks of crime, which could be creating more anxiety disorders which in turn is linked to a reduction in economic output?
Finally, some of this sounds a bit harsh, such as putting a financial figure on the cost of being a victim of rape, it somehow doesn't quite get to the 'real' cost, maybe?!?
Author Karl ThompsonPosted on September 2, 2021 August 27, 2021 Categories Crime and Deviance, Sociological conceptsTags A-level sociology, crime, Statistics, victimsLeave a comment on The Economic and Social Costs of Crime


Hotels of North America by Rick Moody. Little, Brown & Company, $25.
A Cure For Suicide by Jesse Ball. Pantheon Books, $24.
Any year a Jesse Ball novel is published is a good year. This was a good year. A Cure for Suicide — not dystopian, but creatively alternate in its description of a dramatic and irreversible kind of medical treatment at a facility for people who have suffered some final loss of hope — is easy to throw aside if you need to place it within a particular genre.
This book has a touch of the odd, systemic place where you are not given front or back, but that lingers in a liminal space that is both familiar and utterly estranged from reality as we know it — eerie, prison-like and existing under its own logic. The space of this novel is a gauzy room of mirrors that induces the feeling of being drugged and unclear, as most of the characters in the book are.
I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson. Speak, $10.99.
Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun is the winner of the 2015 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and lauded by publications and public libraries around the country. It's the story of Jude and her twin brother Noah, but really it's two stories. Noah draws unceasingly, and he's falling in love with the boy next door. Jude's a rebel, a daredevil and an aspiring sculptor. They used to be inseparable. Now, though they live across the hall from each other, tragedy has ripped them apart. The story they each tell is of trying to put themselves, each other and their family back together.
The chapters alternate between Noah's point of view and Jude's — but Noah's point of view is two years in the past. Sometimes what Noah doesn't yet know makes the reader gasp and want to shield him from what is coming. But in the present — or, from Noah's point of view, the future — Jude herself has only half the story to tell. This separation in time, irrevocable in the space of the narrative, serves to piercingly mirror the twins' emotional distance. The language in I'll Give You the Sun teems with simple, vivid, rhythmic authenticity. Nelson captures with startlingly exaggerated prose the feeling of being young and feeling like you're alive for the first time, like you're maybe the first person who has ever really been alive.
Vintage by David Baker. Touchstone, $16.
Taken as a whimsical romp through Europe with tantalizing descriptions of food and drink, this book is enjoyable. However, as someone who appreciates respectable protagonists with redeeming qualities, I also found it immensely frustrating.
Vintage tells the story of Bruno Tannenbaum, a washed-up food writer in Chicago who's circling the bottom of the drain, mostly due to his refusal to live in the modern world and his unabashedly flagrant passion for living the high life. Separated from his wife and sleeping on his mom's couch, Bruno dreams of redeeming himself by producing a brilliant novel, but it goes nowhere until he discovers a mysterious, WW II-era vintage wine in a storage locker and embarks on a cross-continental journey to track down its origin story.
His stops in France, Germany and Russia are delightful, capturing subcultures and culinary customs with intoxicating detail. The aromas of the meals, from honey-ginger glazed salmon to freshly baked French bread, waft from the pages.
Wind/Pinball: Two Novels By Haruki Murakami. Knopf, $25.95.
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 were Murakami's first two novels, which I am happy to see reprinted in this handsome volume, since I missed the opportunity to purchase them used when they were reasonably priced, prior to his becoming the popular author he is today. There is also a fantastic introduction in which Murakami gives a brief, intimate summary of the start of his writing career.
These novels are the first in a series often referred to as The Rat Trilogy, which contains a fourth volume, Dance Dance Dance, usually omitted for reasons I am unsure of. In terms of content, Wind/Pinball lack much of the surreal character of the later novels but are an interesting precursor to the rest of Murakami's oeuvre, and contain seeds of his later work.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel. Picador, $16.
Hilary Mantel is the sort of writer who makes other writers want to quit writing. Her prose is magnificent, resplendent, inimitable; it flutters off the page like a kind of breezy but acute argot, effortlessly meshing conversational shorthand with British pomp and registering the subtlest tones of class and gender and domestic conflict. But she is, first and foremost, a fantastic storyteller, given to details and observations that cause her fiction to burst alive in the reader's mind.
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26.
Restless yet assured, frenetic yet searching, the short stories of Lucia Berlin tap out like spooling subtitles deciphering the mad gibberish of unreconstructed reality. Berlin, who died in 2004 at the age of 68, lived a crazy life — itinerant childhood, boho youth, odd jobs, marriages, divorces, addiction, recovery, restless relocations across the U.S. and into Mexico — and her stories grab bits and pieces of this wooly existence, patching them together with an artfulness and honesty that feels truer than true. Innocence and wisdom, sin and salvation find a precarious balance in Berlin's fiction.
Her writing is confidential and intimate and revelatory, a family secret whispered on a vapor of sloe gin. Like Chekov, she drops you smack-dab into the action, after which you are carried along on a breathless narrative that thrums like a heartbeat, sometimes irregular, sometimes serene. One story opens: "Wait. Let me explain…" And the explanations are like a flare, lighting up the darkness.
Slade House by David Mitchell. Penguin Random House, $26.
Slade House could be labeled a dark fantasy or horror novel and is broken into segments that would be enjoyable as individual vignettes, but are nicely combined as episodic cycles.
Within each segment, someone's soul is stolen and the rules and circumstances surrounding the history and character of those doing the thieving are teased out, bit by bit. As the story progresses, ensnaring victims in their sinister net grows increasingly difficult. Though dark, the story is not gory.
It is ultimately a ghost story borrowing lightly from the annals of Western esoteric, mystical lore, which feels a little bit like Guillermo del Toro lite and has a playful edge. Scenery warps and shifts around its characters, but no plot elements are left to guesswork in terms of the mechanics of the paranormal realm and how and why they parallel a London neighborhood.
The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski. City Lights Books, $14.95.
Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist. OSU Press, $24.95.
I have one takeaway from this biography: Marie Equi was a badass. A suffragette, union supporter, lesbian and doctor in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Equi ran rampant throughout Portland and other regions of the West Coast, supporting causes she knew in her heart to be right, even if it meant going to jail. Author and historian Michael Helquist skillfully outlines the fierce tenacity and incredible courage Equi exemplifies throughout her life, giving equal attention to her passion for medicine, her lesbian lifestyle and her unwavering commitment to activism.
Equi and her story provide a tangible framework to the period of time in which she lived, and the book includes fascinating glimpses of Portland life and culture in the early 1900s.
David Downton: Portraits of the World's Most Stylish Women by David Downton. Laurence King, $65.
Snowden by Ted Rall. Seven Stories Press, $17.
There are a lot of moving parts to the Snowden saga, and it raises many uncomfortable questions about the tension between safety and freedom. Rather than addressing those questions openly, however, your government bent itself over backwards to silence, smear and discredit the messenger. Obama, who promised more government transparency at the dawn of his first term, scrambled desperately to bring Snowden down as quickly and quietly as possible. If you're still not outraged, consider the NSA program "Gumfish," which enables government agents to switch on your computer cameras remotely and snap photos of you in your home.
Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality by Pope Francis. Melville House Publishing, $14.95.
The Monopolists by Mary Pilon. Bloomsbury, $27.
The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty. St. Martin's Press, $35.
Critics have praised Tracy Daugherty's exhaustive Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, for being a brave and astute examination of one of America's most guarded writers. Certainly they're right to. Daugherty dug deep, tracing the origins of Didion's morbid fatalism back to her pioneer grandparents. He links her Spartan prose style to her early love of Hemingway and her time editing for Vogue magazine.
Considering Didion declined to be interviewed for the book, the level of detail Daugherty packs in is sometimes astounding. The trouble is, the story drags under the weight of so much minutiae. At close to 600 pages, Love Song's chronological tour through Didion's life often slams on the breaks in order to exhibit mundane anecdotes and pointless details. For example, we learn what entrée teenage Didion ordered on a dinner date. Daugherty devotes paragraphs to the time Didion's superiors at Vogue gently chided her for wearing a hat to work. He even reports Didion's menses and yeast infections.
M Train by Patti Smith. Knopf, $25.
Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystem Restoration by Tao Orion. Chelsea Green, $22.95.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson. Crown Books, $28.
I reached the halfway point of Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania the day after the Islamic State attacked Paris. It quickly became difficult to read accounts of civilians dying en masse, and I had to set the book aside for a couple of days.
I'm glad I finished Dead Wake. Larson's true-life tale of the final voyage in 1915 of the British ocean liner Lusitania reminds us that targeting civilians in times of war is far from a novel practice, and was every bit as horrifying, every bit as incomprehensible then as it is now.
For those of us in the 21st century attempting to make sense of tragedy, this might be cold comfort, but perhaps the book can add some context in a larger sense.
As with Larson's earlier works The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, the divinity is in the details. Through meticulous historical research, Larson makes his reader feel like an intimate of members of Lusitania's passenger manifest, of her crew and even of the German submariners that (spoiler alert) sink the ship as it nears Ireland.
The true wonder in Larson's work lies in his considerable ability to leverage his undeniable writing chops against his own submarine dive through historical records, producing a prose style as crisp and immersive as an oncoming tide. He furnishes a historical footnote you last thought about in 10th-grade history class with nuance, with meaning.
The story's frequent, fascinating digressions — from the practices of British naval code-breaking, to the odd confluence of spiritualism and architecture, to the unexpected amorous side of President Woodrow Wilson — flavor the narrative rather than thin it.
Wild in the Willamette by Lorraine Anderson with Abby Phillips Metzger. OSU Press, $24.95.
I'm always looking for new places to explore, and in Oregon, there is no shortage of adventures to take, although sometimes it's hard to select a path with so many choices. Wild in the Willamette helps narrow those choices as a detailed guide to the Willamette Valley, spanning the area's natural landscapes with hiking descriptions, nature essays and repeated advocacy for preserving our precious resources in the heart of Oregon.
The book splits the Willamette Valley into seven distinct watersheds: Marys, Calapooia, South Santiam, North Santiam, Luckiamute, Yamhill and Pudding. The Willamette River flows as a central theme throughout the guide. Illustrations and maps sprinkle the pages, though there is no photography, save for the cover.
A River Runs Again by Meera Subramanian. Perseus Books Group, $26.99.
Meera Subramanian's book is a timely investigative piece on the development that ravages India's environmental landscape, also focusing on the people working hard to repair the damages wrought by agriculture and industry. Subramanian, an investigative journalist who once worked at Aprovecho in Cottage Grove, writes with a deep passion for India, the country in which her father was born. She splits her story into five sections, each reflecting an element. The "air" section addresses India's declining vulture population and the biologists devoted to reviving it, while the "water" section features dried-up wells in Rajasthan, where villagers work to bring water back to the land.
Subramanian's story paints an often-grim portrait of India, as rampant use of chemicals in agriculture endangers the population and the environment. With tactfully used statistics and personal stories, A River Runs Again portrays India as a microcosm of the worldwide environmental crisis that our planet faces.
Building a Better Nest by Evelyn Searle Hess. Oregon State University Press, $18.95.
Building a Better Nest is a perfect example of a book that cannot be judged by its cover. The photo on front and synopsis on back may imply this to be the story of a family who built an eco-friendly home or perhaps an instruction manual for those wishing to do so themselves. Instead, found amidst these pages is a theoretical discussion of the global issues facing future generations posed in the warm, pensive voice of Evelyn Hess.
Fighting elements both natural and society-made, Hess and her husband strive to accomplish a humble dream of creating a sustainable place to live on the property that houses their nursery in the coastal hills. Undeterred by torrential downpours, landslides and other mishaps, the couple is finally paused by the defeating prospect of funding such a project.
Framed by a seemingly small example, Hess relates her individual circumstance to the global conundrum that we all face: How do we combine the necessities of life with the ability to sustain life on this planet?
While the book's conclusion is open-ended, it instills a sense of hope that with a little ingenuity and a lot of determination, we can rethink the way we reside in this beautiful world.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper. Featherproof Books, $18.
The Pacific Northwest of the '90s is a magical, moody, insular land — at least, through the eyes of Carrie Brownstein in her new memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl. And what better shoulder to sit on to explore this music-drenched place in space and time than that of Sleater-Kinney's guitarist and Portlandia's star, once a little kid in Redmond obsessed with playing pretend.
"I was a puppy dog for punk," Brownstein writes of her college days in Olympia, Washington — ground zero for the Riot Grrrl movement and any lo-fi, sludge-y alt bands looking for a place to give The Man the finger. It was in the basements of Olympia where Brownstein saw the likes of Elliot Smith, Rancid, Mary Lou Lord and Bikini Kill and on the stages of The Evergreen State College where she watched Nirvana and Mudhoney before they were names to know.
This artsy college town is where Brownstein met Corin Tucker, lead singer of pioneering Riot Grrrl band Heavens to Betsy. The two would go on to form Sleater-Kinney, who came out of hiatus in 2014 after eight years. Tucker brings Eugene into the book — she grew up here and attended South Eugene High School.
In the violent, polarized country we live in today, Ta-Nehisi Coate's Between the World and Me should be required reading for every man, woman and child. Coates, a preeminent writer and journalist (The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Time), has written a tender, heartbreaking and rousing work, framing it as a letter to his son, a 15-year-old black teen living in America — or to put it bluntly, a walking target for the aggression and the insidious (and not-so-insidious) racism that plagues the U.S. today.
Jackaby and Beastly Bones by William Ritter. Algonquin Young Readers, $17.95.
It's 1892 and Abigail Rook is looking for a job in New Fiddleham, New England. No sooner has she gotten off the ship she took from Europe than she meets the peculiar detective R.F. Jackaby. He uses Sherlockian deduction mixed with some Harry Potteresque cryptozoological beings to determine Abigail has recently been in Eastern Europe. Not that long after their chance encounter, the intrepid Abigail enters into his employ and meets the supernatural residents of his home.
Billed as Doctor Who meets Sherlock Holmes, the young adult novel Jackaby and its sequel Beastly Bones will appeal to the YA readers who are Harry Potter and mystery lovers, and judging from a plethora of videos and YouTube reviews (which are apparently a thing), the novels have gotten a loyal following.
Local readers will notice that there is a certain Lane County flair to the books, despite their New England setting. Author William Ritter lives in Springfield, and one of the characters — a homeless woman with a hint of supernatural powers, Hatun — bears a strong resemblance to Hatoon, aka Victoria Adkins, an unhoused woman who made her home near the University of Oregon bookstore, where a shrine to her remains. Adkins was hit by a car and died in 2005, and she was mourned by the many who knew her around campus.
A Series of Small Maneuvers by Eliot Treichel. Ooligan Press, $14.95.
"Sometimes things never make sense, but making sense is also sometimes never the point." Such is Emma's mother's reply when Emma inquires whether her younger sister understands the death of their father. His death and Emma's struggle to integrate it into her life and deal with her sense of guilt and loss spell the heart of this young adult novel. Many such poignant morsels of wisdom are littered throughout its pages.
This is not a sensational indulgence in the tragedy of death or an emotionally overwrought rollercoaster through exploding scenery. Emma's father does die while they are on a canoeing trip intended to bring them closer together and she feels a heavy responsibility for the accident, but that moment doesn't consume the rest of the story by acting as a cheap, charged motif to circle back to in an attempt to keep the drama alive.
The Shark Curtain by Chris Scofield. Black Sheep/Akashic Books, $13.95.
Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead. Wendy Lamb Books, $16.99.


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Lucie Silvas announces Manchester Ruby Lounge gig
Lucie Silvas has announced a return to the UK for a run of dates including a Manchester gig at The Ruby Lounge.
The gig follows Lucie Silvas' excellent show at Manchester's Deaf Institute in 2016. Mississippi native Charlie Worsham will also return to the UK as main support on all shows.
Born in the UK and raised part of her life in New Zealand by her Kiwi dad and Scottish mother, Lucie Silvas grew up listening to her parents favourites from Ray Charles to Nat King Cole to James Taylor and Roberta Flack. She started playing the piano and writing songs at age 10 but wasn't exposed to the music industry until she was 17 when she went out on the road as a backing singer for British singer/songwriter Judie Tzuke.
A few years later she released her debut album on Mercury Records, Breathe In, and toured Europe extensively for the following years with both her debut and second album. She went on to sell well over a million albums in Europe, alone. Lucie worked and toured with many artists at the time including the likes of Elton John, Jamie Cullum, Macy Gray, and Jamiroquai.
After achieving massive success for both her own music as well as songs written for other artists, Lucie packed up and moved to Nashville, TN. where she has now performed and written with some of the biggest and the best in their fields. She began sowing the seeds of this new chapter and hit the road touring with a vast array of artists ranging from Kacey Musgraves to James Bay, from Willie Nelson to Dwight Yoakam and from Little Big Town to Chris Stapleton for whom she is currently opening in the States. She currently has songs on both Miranda Lambert's and Reba MacEntire's new albums. Lucie has begun recording the highly-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed, Letters To Ghosts album which she self-produced and released this past year. You can read more about Letters To Ghosts in our interview with Lucie Silvas.
Where and when does Lucie Silvas perform in Manchester?
Lucie Silvas headlines at Manchester's Ruby Lounge on 16 November as one of four UK tour dates:
13 November – London, Islington Assembly Hall
15 November – Birmingham, O2 Institute 3
16 November – Manchester, The Ruby Lounge
17 November – Glasgow, King Tuts Wah Wah Hut
When do tickets for Lucie Silvas at The Ruby Lounge go on sale?
Tickets for Lucie Silvas performing at Manchester's Ruby Lounge go on sale at 9am on Friday 21 July.
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