Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Some good insights by researchers Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Michael Chwe but hard to square the core recommendation that those ‘elite influencers’ within ethnic or other groups admonish hate or disrespectful speech when so much of the tone comes from the President-elect:

How do we stop this violence? Looking in from the outside and reporting events after they occur is not enough. We must understand the perpetrators’ motivations.

We often think that perpetrators simply mimic the hateful speech and actions of others. In doing so, we discount the effects that community or peer pressure can bring to bear. In fact, research shows that potential perpetrators of hate crimes and bullying are actually quite conscious of the degree to which their community supports or condemns their actions. 

For example, research has found that when a person hears others tell racist or sexist jokes, his or her tolerance for gender or racial discrimination increases. At an extreme level, it can encourage genocide: David Yanagizawa-Drott has shown that inflammatory messages played on a hate radio station, aimed at motivating Hutus to murder their Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, had a greater effect when people in surrounding neighborhoods were also exposed to the same radio messages. In other words, hate radio alone did not increase individual hatred or violence; rather hate radio coupled with widespread exposure resulted in greater community support for violence.

Potential perpetrators do not simply “imitate” Trump but rather are encouraged to act by the fact that he garnered so many votes and supporters. They infer that they have a better chance of escaping social and legal sanction than before.

To stop hateful actions, potential perpetrators must be convinced that those in their community are opposed to this behavior. Who can best communicate this opposition? 

Kevin Munger recently found that white males who racially harass others on Twitter reduced their use of slurs when another white male with a large number of followers admonished them with a tweet (black males, and white males with few followers, were not as successful). In schools, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Hana Shepherd and Peter Aronow showed that students who receive the lion’s share of attention in student social networks have an outsized influence over school social norms: when they stand up against bullying and student-on-student harassment, student conflict drops by up to 30%. 

These studies suggest that some people are better than others at delegitimizing hatred and violence. These “elite influencers” are more likely to come from a community considered important by a potential perpetrator—whether their racial community or their friendship group. Also, these influencers are more likely to be higher status—connected to many people within those networks.

But whether or not you are an elite influencer in your own community, evidence shows that the old-fashioned strength-in-numbers approach also works. Large numbers of people who assert values of inclusiveness and tolerance in a big, public way can change minds and behavior. Large media events or assemblies that create “common knowledge” of these values, that show each member of the community that every other member shares these values, are the most successful.

For example, a public service announcement during the Super Bowl that encourages people to report domestic violence is more successful in deterring domestic violence than an ad in a magazine; a potential perpetrator infers that the millions watching the Super Bowl find domestic violence unacceptable and are more likely to stand against and report offenders. 

A recent study also showed that people who watched a political speech in the company of a crowd (in this case, a speech by U.S. House Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, on the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act), are more persuaded by the speech. Listening together, as opposed to watching alone or watching a video viewed by others at different times, is more effective because when communities synchronize their attention, people process the message in a deeper and more serious manner. 

The alternative, in which communities do not collectively bear witness to and support anti-hate speech, is a scenario in which potential perpetrators will feel more and more emboldened.

Schools, universities and localities cannot just play defense and wait for their members to be victimized. Potential perpetrators must clearly understand that everyone around them, regardless of their political views, believes that hate is unacceptable. Elite influencers in every community can help to broadcast this message. Standing with them, there is strength in numbers, and as individuals and communities, we need to come together to speak as loudly and publicly as possible.

 Source: Stop Playing Defense on Hate Crimes | TIME

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Government consistently fails to fix mistakes, Auditor-General says [need for citizen-centred program delivery]

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Strong condemnation, widely noted. Despite the many years and efforts with respect to performance management and reporting, shows just how entrenched the government remains in measuring process and outputs, rather than results for citizens.

And ‘deliverology’ is unlikely to change this, as it is easier to track political commitments met, than actual benefits and outcomes for citizens.

During my time at Service Canada, we spent considerable time and effort to develop service strategies that aimed to place the citizen at the heart of service delivery, not the program management. There was considerable resistance from the various program branches, who were more comfortable, given the nature of accountabilities, to operate within silos. The slide below highlights the nature of change proposed, with the left showing the program and service maze, the right showing a more citizen-centric way of organizing programs.

ssso_implementation_plan_-_scmb_dec_2005_-_v5_08dec2005_e_scmb

Canada’s Auditor-General says the federal government must adjust the way it does business after a broad evaluation in which he says departments fail to consider whether their services actually benefit Canadians, cannot stay ahead of emerging trends and do not correct inadequacies even after they have been pointed out.

In marking the midpoint of his 10-year term, Michael Ferguson used his fall report to take an unusual step back from the assessments of specific programs to point to more systemic problems. Parliament, said Mr. Ferguson, uses his reports to learn about things that have gone wrong but does not ensure that changes are made to set them right.

“What about programs that are managed to accommodate the people running them rather than the people receiving the services?” asked Mr. Ferguson. “I am also talking about problems like regulatory bodies that cannot keep up with the industries they regulate, and public accountability reports that fail to provide a full and clear picture of what is going on….”

Departments and agencies work in silos, he said, failing to learn from what others outside, or even inside, their own organizations are doing.

“Our audits come across the same problems in different organizations time and time again. Even more concerning is that, when we come back to audit the same area again, we often find that program results have not improved,” said Mr. Ferguson. “In just five years, with some 100 performance audits and special examinations behind me since I began my mandate, the results of some audits seem to be – in the immortal words of Yogi Berra – ‘déjà vu all over again.’ ”

For instance, said Mr. Ferguson, many past audits have revealed the government’s lack of focus on Canadians who are the end users of its services.

And that trend continues in a new study of the Beyond the Border Action Plan which was introduced in December, 2011, to enhance security and the flow of goods and people across the Canada-U.S. border. Five years and $585-million later, the departments and agencies involved cannot show how the measures that were part of the plan have made Canadians safer or accelerated the movement of either trade or travellers.

“We found that, where performance indicators were developed,” says the audit, “they measured whether activities and deliverables were completed, not the resulting benefits.”

Source: Government consistently fails to fix mistakes, Auditor-General says – The Globe and Mail

His full message is also worth reading beyond the excerpt below and soundbites above:

In the interest of assisting our still-new Parliament in carrying out its oversight role and of helping government “do service well,” I believe there is value in looking back over the body of work produced by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. This is a way to identify those issues that show up in audit after audit, year after year, and sometimes persist for decades.

These problems include departments and agencies struggling to work outside their silos, either to learn from what is happening within their organizations, or more broadly, to learn from what their external counterparts are doing.

And what about programs that are managed to accommodate the people running them rather than the people receiving the services? What about programs in which the focus is on measuring what civil servants are doing rather than how well Canadians are being served? In such cases, the perception of the service is very different depending on whether you are talking to the service provider or to the citizen trying to navigate the red tape.

I am also talking about problems like regulatory bodies that cannot keep up with the industries they regulate, and public accountability reports that fail to provide a full and clear picture of what is going on for a myriad of reasons—such as systems that are outdated or just not working, or data that is unreliable or incomplete, not suited to the needs, or not being used. Our audits come across these same problems in different organizations time and time again. Even more concerning is that when we come back to audit the same area again, we often find that program results have not improved.

Lack of focus on citizens

In our system of government, Parliament makes the rules, departments and agencies carry out the wishes of Parliament, and citizens receive the services. At least, that is the way the system is designed. Over the years, our audit work has revealed government’s lack of focus on end-users, Canadians.

Message from the Auditor General

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New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards

2016/12/01 Leave a comment

Good initiative and one benefit of having a policy is the discussion it engenders:

Canada’s leading association for corporate directors is hoping to nudge more companies to add women to their boards by offering a free template of a board-dversity policy.

The Institute of Corporate Directors has teamed up with law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLC to develop a general model of a board-diversity policy, aiming it at smaller companies that have not complied with new diversity-reporting guidelines. The template includes alternative wording options so companies can customize the content and it is free to download from both organizations’ websites.

ICD chief executive officer Rahul Bhardwaj said his organization launched the project after seeing the results of a review of diversity-reporting rules by securities regulators in September. The review showed that just 21 per cent of 677 companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange clearly disclosed that they have adopted a gender-diversity policy for their boards and their executive ranks. While that is an improvement from the 15 per cent of last year, it still signals slow progress since regulators introduced new “comply or explain” rules in 2015 requiring companies to report on their approach to gender diversity.

Mr. Bhardwaj said he was concerned about the lukewarm response by companies to the new reporting rules and concluded that many smaller companies weren’t acting because they didn’t know where to start or didn’t have the resources to hire consultants and lawyers to help them develop policies.

“The first step is to actually turn their mind to it,” he said. “For organizations saying, ‘How do we actually start to craft a policy?’, we’re saying, ‘Here’s an easy way to do it.’ It will get you into the game and thinking about it.”

He said his hope is that boards will not simply “tick the box” by quickly downloading the sample policy and adding it to their disclosure documents, but will instead have a discussion about their approach to diversity.

Osler lawyer Andrew MacDougall, who wrote the policy, said many small companies could find it helpful to have access to a model that is similar to policies adopted by larger companies with help from professional advisers.

“Often the hardest part about making any change is taking that first step,” Mr. MacDougall said. “We thought that the easiest way to jump-start a dialogue at the board level would be to help them with the first step, which is the adoption of a policy.”

The template allows boards to choose whether to make a general statement about diversity, including having an “appropriate number of women directors,” or whether to commit to a specific target level of diversity on the board. They can also choose to add a time frame for reaching the target.

The policy also includes a provision that any search firm hired to help identify board candidates will include multiple women on the possible hiring list, as well as a clause that says female candidates will be included on any “evergreen” list of potential nominees.

Mr. MacDougall said he hopes many who use the template will opt to implement a concrete target for women on the board, but that might be a step too far for some.

“We wanted to make sure that they at least had a policy that forced them to have a dialogue about whether or not to adopt a target,” he said.

Source: New policy template aims to encourage gender diversity on boards – The Globe and Mail

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