Hello Evelin:
On continuing daily 'small' events of humiliation that eventually get connected, become one and explode, I was reading the text below by Prof Ali Mazrui who I think felt deeply hurt and wrote the following piece out of that feeling. What surprised me was the last sentence that came as a challenge by a person of the stature of BBC's Triple Heritage series. Its an affirmation of what you and the core group have said again and again albeit in difference words that Humiliation can lead to defiance, retaliation and violence in words and deeds at different levels of social or even intellectual stratum.
Quote:
"However, I am not complacent. I am afraid it could happen again, the Lord preserve us. But we shall not be intimidated. Amen".
Sultan Somjee
(Member of the Advisory Board of HumanDHS)

Counterterrorism at Miami Airport?: A Personal Experience
By Ali A. Mazrui

Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
Binghamton University State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, U.S.A.
Chancellor, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology Kenya

There was a time during the Roman Empire when Christians were thrown to the lions for sport. Modern day religious persecution is rarely so callous. But are there global war-games unfolding at the expense of the Muslim world in this day and age?
Muslims under direct military occupation include Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. Muslims militarily struggling for self-determination include Chechnya and Kashmir. Muslims on the radar screen for possible military intervention by Western powers include Iran, Syria and Somalia. Muslims being harassed under new anti-terrorist legislation already include Tanzania, Kenya, potentially South Africa and a host of other countries under pressure from the Bush administration. Muslims under other methods of oppression include the appalling suffering of the Muslims of Gujerat in India. In comparative number of victims, Muslims of the world are more sinned against than sinning.
Muslims who are harassed at American and international airports are beginning to multiply. On August 3, 2003, on arrival from overseas, I was detained at Miami airport for seven hours under repeated interrogation. Detaining a 70-year-old man as a potential terrorist is a case-study of the new paranoia at airports.
I was interrogated by (a) immigration; (b) customs; and (c) Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Force in that order. They all focused on security. Paradoxically, the last interrogators were the most apologetic and the most courteous. But they still questioned me behind closed doors. Of course, I was truthful about all the Muslim organizations I belonged to, including the Muslim American Congress, the old American Muslim Council and the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy [CSID].
In fairness to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, they subsequently booked me a hotel room for the night in Miami and paid for it. They arranged for me to be taken to the airport hotel. And they paid for my dinner that night (giving me $25 for it). The Homeland Security interrogators were the most friendly. Yet I felt that I would not have been kept for so long if they had not been interested in interrogating me personally. I was kept waiting until they arrived.
After living in the United States for more than a quarter of a century, did I arouse suspicion on August 3, 2003 because of where I was coming from? Was I coming back from Afghanistan? Had I visited Baghdad? Perhaps I was coming back from Indonesia?
NEGATIVE to all of those! I was coming back from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. My primary mission in Trinidad had almost nothing to do with Islam. I had been a keynote speaker to mark Emancipation Day - commemorating the end of slavery in the nineteenth century.
The questions I was asked at Miami on my return included whether I believed in Jihad and what did I understand by jihad? What denomination of Islam did I belong to? Since I was a Sunni, why was I not a Shi'a? I reacted: "If you were a Catholic, and I asked you why were not you a Protestant, how would you deal with that?"
Since I was coming from Trinidad and Tobago, had I seen Yaseen Abubakar, the Islamic militant who had held the whole cabinet of Trinidad hostage in the Parliament building nearly fifteen years earlier? That was a much more sophisticated question.
I replied at Miami Airport that I had not met Abubakar, but I had tried to see him in Trinidad. After all, I was teaching a course at Cornell on "Islam in the Black Experience". I had also taught "Islam in World Affairs" at Binghamton. It was my business to study the Abubakars of this world!
The Miami airport officials allowed me one phone call. I called my home in Binghamton and raised the alarm. My wife mobilized my three adult sons and their families. She also mobilized some colleagues at Binghamton University. Their phone calls of alarm to the relevant authorities might have speeded up my release. My ordeal at Miami airport ended amicably, with a few embarrassed smiles. However, I am not complacent. I am afraid it could happen again, the Lord preserve us. But we shall not be intimidated. Amen.

Dear All!
As mentioned in an earlier posting, I just read the following book:
Ray, Paul H. and Anderson, Sherry Ruth (2000). The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.

In this book the authors present three Americas struggling to define what the country should be: Traditionals, Moderns and Cultural Creatives. The authors show how each one emerged historically, and how the Cultural Creatives in particular grew out of the social movements of the Sixties right up to Seattle's WTO demonstrations, and from the consciousness movements in spirituality, psychology and alternative health. They conclude that all the different kinds of movements are converging now, with the Cultural Creatives at the core.

One of the "side-effects" of this social development is that many women ask the question that is also a Section Title in the book: ”Where are all the Good Men?” I transcribe the text of this section for your further down and place it also into our Non-arrogant Elite Women Network project on our Intervention Agenda.

Most warmly!
Evelin

”Where are all the Good Men?”
Ray & Anderson (2000), pp. 23-24

Only one demographic statistics stands out about the Cultural Creatives: 60 percent of them are women. In the Core group, the proportion rises to about 67 percent, or two-thirds. The way women formulate issues of caring, family life, children, education, relationships, and responsibility for others is reflected in Cultural Creatives’ values and beliefs. Women’s ways of valuing are finally coming out of the private domain into public life. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are not enough men to go around.

Our friend Carol is visiting from Boston, and once again she’s complaining about a too-familiar problem that faces many women Cultural Creatives: “Where are all the good men?” An outgoing, attractive woman in her fifties, Carolyn certainly looks as if she should not have the least bit of trouble attracting male attention if she wants it. She wants it, she tells us, but the pickings are slim. And she wonders if she’s done something wrong in her life.
“Will you stop psychologizing about it?” Paul burst out. “It’s not about you, and it’s not your fault.” He’s shouting a little, which isn’t the least bit necessary since he has Carolyn’s rapt attention. “There’s an objective scarcity of men who fit your values and lifestyle,” he explains. “Core Cultural Creatives like you are two-thirds women. It’s like being in a tribe with too few eligible mates. So long as you’ll settle only for men who are like you, with your perspective and your values, it’s going to feel like there’s a scarcity of good men.”
“Oh, fine,” she retorts. “So where are all the others hiding out?”
“I guess they’re playing with their techno-toys and are caught up with the bottom line and getting ahead. Your values of personal growth, spirituality, and ecology might show up way down on their list. In your social class, more men are Moderns. Too many women are inclined to blame themselves when they don’t find the partners they want. But what can you do? The fact is that women are leading the way here. The new cultural development and new values are coming mostly from them.”
She looks at him despairingly.
“And men are lagging somewhat,” Paul adds weakly.
“Yes, they do grow up slower than we do, don’t they?” She laughs lightly. “Well, I’m certainly glad to hear it’s not my fault!”
It’s hard not to hear the catch in her voice.

Dear Ruth!
Thanks so much for alerting us to the following book (see more details further down):
Marmot, Michael (2004). How Our Position on the Social Gradient Affects Longevity and Health. London: Bloomsbury.
Ruth Lister (please meet her on our Advisory Board) writes today: "there is a new book out here about the impact on health etc of social hierarchy."
Most warmly!
Evelin

Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot
Stress thrills the rich, but kills the poor
By Marek Kohn
18 June 2004
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/

In his political credo, pronounced at the beginning of the year, the Conservative leader Michael Howard declared his disbelief that one person's poverty is caused by another's wealth, or that one person's sickness is made worse by another's health. It seems safe to assume that his disbelief is shared by his opposite number, and by most people with any influence over how such matters are nowadays arranged. To think otherwise seems to hark back to a bygone age in which one person's wealth was another's poverty because there was not enough to go around. Greed is a virtue - though it is now gauche to put it so bluntly - but envy remains a vice.
It's hard to imagine things any other way, dazzled as we are by the spectacle and onrush of unleashed wealth-generation that has surrounded us for the past quarter-century. But, during this period, research- ers such as Michael Marmot (now Sir Michael, and professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London) have been gathering evidence that offers the possibility of transforming our understanding of health, happiness and how to make a good society. Michael Howard's disbeliefs are beside the point. What we need to grasp is that one person's health may be made worse by another person's wealth.
For this to make sense, we have to stop thinking of wealth simply in material terms. Once there is enough to assure the basics of life for all, one person's wealth is not harmful because it reduces the amount left for another, but because it raises the wealthy person to a higher rank. As social status rises, so do health prospects and life expectancy.
Marmot pioneered this understanding with his studies of Whitehall civil servants, in which he discovered a steady gradient in the risk of heart disease from the lowest grades to the topmost. Men at the bottom were four times more likely to die than men in charge - and less than a third of the gradient disappeared when the usual suspects, such as smoking and cholesterol, were factored out. (Status Syndrome is generally surer of itself about men than women.)
Elsewhere, similar effects were observed in baboons, leading to predictable amusement and a theory of how status is related to health. Low status leads to stress, forcing the individual into permanent crisis mode, inducing physiological changes that can lead to heart disease. For Marmot and his colleagues, control is at the heart of the matter. The more control you feel able to exert over your situation, the more likely stress is to be stimulating rather than corrosive.
Other studies display the other side of the coin: having a sense that one is supported by relationships with others, rather than oppressed by them, is very good for health. One researcher exposed volunteers to cold viruses, having quizzed them about their friends, family and colleagues. The more numerous and varied the relationships, the less likely the volunteers were to catch colds.
By contrast, Marmot conveys the effects of solitude not with data but with a quote of exquisite aptness from Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, in which a marooned man is overcome, to the point of suicide, by "a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and scepticism have no place".
Adorned with epigraphs, bubbling with findings, discreetly illuminated by the light of social justice, written considerately for ordinary readers, Status Syndrome is packed with ideas that should have been coursing through public debate for years now. Marmot's understated voice makes him more comfortable as raconteur than as crusader.
He is not the thinking person's Michael Moore, nor this year's Naomi Klein, though he is presenting more radical ideas than they are. Despite its conversational tone, and contrary to some media coverage, Status Syndrome is not a conversation piece about social climbing. It is about how to save lives, and how to live good lives.

The Status Syndrome
June 08, 2004
http://theresident.typepad.com/

'Status Syndrome: How Our Position on the Social Gradient Affects Longevity and Health' is the title of book by Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London.
In his book, Sir Michael outlines the very real possibility of the connection between status and longevity (and health). His research found that:
"People with PhDs live longer than those with masters degrees. Those with a masters live longer than those with a degree, while those with a degree live longer than those who left school early.
Similarly, actors who have won an Oscar will live on average three years longer than those who were nominated for the award but missed out. "
Sir Michael says that our health and longevity is influenced to a high degree to our social standing. Status it seems, is more important than genetics, supersize fast food or even smoking - and yeah, even money.
"Your position in the hierarchy very much relates to how much control you have over your life and your opportunities for full social engagement."
These feelings, he and others argue, profoundly affect one's health. Sir Michael believes that giving people more control over their lives and ensuring they play a full part in society will boost health and extend lifespan.

Status syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy.
High status - not financial resources - makes you healthier
http://www.eurekalert.org/

Autonomy, a sense of control over your life and social connectedness - rather than actual financial resources or access to medical services - have the greatest impact on your health and life expectancy. That is the core argument of Michael Marmot's, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College London (UCL), new popular science book "Status Syndrome," launched by Bloomsbury Publishing, on 7th June from 6pm at UCL, Gower Street.
"The lower in hierarchy you are, the less likely it is that you will have full control over your life and opportunities for full social participation," says Michael Marmot in the book. "Autonomy and social participation are so important for health that their lack lead to deterioration in health."

"Status Syndrome" is based on more than three decades of research by Michael Marmot that began with the Whitehall Studies in the 1970s. These showed that even among white-collar employees with steady jobs there is a clear social gradient in health. Marmot's subsequent work took him round the world as he puzzled out the relationship between health and social circumstances. From the US to Russia, from the Mediterranean to Australia, from Southern India to Japan, similar patterns emerged.

In addition, class systems are not just at play in England – they are just as bad, if not worse in Australia, America and other so-called classless societies. Studies in Sweden have shown that men with a doctorate had 50 per cent lower mortality than men who had tertiary education. In the US those in the poorest households have nearly four times the risk of death of those in the richest. In the UK, office workers are more likely to die of coronary heart disease the lower down the hierarchy they go.

Some of the key questions raised within "Status Syndrome" include:
Why are the poor more likely to get heart disease, AIDS, cancer, mental illness and all of today's other common killers?
Why do Oscar winners live for an average of four years longer than their Hollywood actors?
Who experiences most stress – the decision-makers or those who carry out their orders?
Why does life expectancy rise by twenty years over the twelve-mile subway ride that divides poor black downtown Washington DC and rich white Montgomery County?
Why does Japan have better health than other rich populations of the world and the province of Kerala in southern India have much better health than other poor populations of the world – and what do they have in common?
In the Whitehall Study 11 of British Civil Servants, the higher their position in the hierarchy, the more happiness they enjoyed. This is not a quirk of the British Civil Service. Colleagues in Wisconsin looked at two American studies – and found exactly the same thing: the higher the social position the greater the level of happiness.
Michael Marmot answers these questions and more in an agenda-setting book with huge implications for social and health-care policy and the worlds of education and finance.

Status Syndrome
http://www.bloomsbury.com/

How Our Position on the Social Gradient Affects Longevity and Health
by Michael Marmot
Bloomsbury Publishing 2004
ISBN 0747570493
Format Trade paperback, B format 288 pages. 234x153 mm.

We have remarkably good health in the rich countries of the world. Malaria is long gone from Europe and the USA. Parasitic diseases do not wreak havoc with our lives. Infant mortality is below one in a hundred. Yet even so, where we stand in the social hierarchy is intimately related to our chances of getting ill and to how long we live. And the differences between top and bottom are getting bigger.

This eye-opening book is based on more than twenty-five years of front-line research that began with the Whitehall Studies in the 1980s. These showed that even among white-collar employees with steady jobs there is a clear social gradient in health. Michael Marmot's subsequent work took him round the world as he puzzled out the relationship between health and social circumstances. Everywhere from the US to Russia, from the Mediterranean to Australia, from Southern India to Japan, similar patterns emerged, showing that control over our lives and opportunities for full social participation are key factors for good health.

‘Despite the widespread belief that molecular biology will soon vanquish disease, there remains the discomfiting fact that health can be predicted to an astonishing extent by being poor, feeling poor, and being made to feel poor. Any discussion of this subject inevitably comes to the Rosetta stone of this field, Michael Marmot's Whitehall Studies. Now Marmot offers a book that deciphers this phenomenon for the general public. Amid pages of wisdom, he proves himself to be a fun, accessible writer. Status Syndrome is a wonderful, important book’ Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

‘Michael Marmot is a world-class scientist who writes deeply about matters of life and death with the grace of a world-class essayist. This important new book encapsulates a quarter century of his research that shows how toxic inequality, hierarchy, and social isolation can be. Anyone concerned about the health of our society should read this book’  Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and Better Together
‘Status Syndrome, beautifully written by the founder of the field, explores the life-shortening effects of social stress and lack of control. Michael Marmot combines the findings and the insights of many disciplines into a fascinating story of the nexus of social life and individual death’ Daniel Kahneman, professor of psychology and public affairs, Princeton University, and winner of the 2002 Noble Prize in Economics
‘Anybody who gives it a moment's thought knows that poor people tend to have more health problems than do the rich. But why? In Status Syndrome, Michael Marmot tells us not only why being poor is lousy for one's health, but what can be done to bring health equity to the world. He has done us a great, great favor by writing this eminently readable, informative, and spectacular book.’ Laurie Garrett, author of Betrayal of Trust.

International Centre for Health and Society
2004 Public Seminar Series, UCL
Monday 7 June 5.00pm (followed by drinks at 6pm)
Professor Sir Michael Marmot, UCL
'Status Syndrome'
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/

Abstract
Go on a 12 mile subway journey from Washington DC to suburban Maryland. Life expectancy for men at the city end is 20 years shorter than for men in the wealthy suburbs. Being at the bottom of the social pile is bad for health, but so is not being at the top. Not only do we see fine gradations in health according to status in the Whitehall studies, but we see them everywhere. In Sweden, if you have a PhD, you have longer life expectancy than if you have a professional qualification. A Master's degree will gain you longer life than a bachelor's. Why among people who are not deprived should there be a social gradient in health? In his new book, Status Syndrome, Michael Marmot draws on his own research, and others', to show that the social gradient in health is related to the nature of the society in which we live and work. Although all societies have social hierarchies the magnitude of the gradients in health vary. A gradient in health among non-human primates suggests that the usual suspects - medical care, health behaviours - will not do as an explanation. An important gateway to health inequalities is through the brain. How much control an individual has and opportunity for full social engagement in society are crucial for health. These are related to early child development, material well being, the nature of work and communities and the circumstances in which older people live. All offer prospects for reduction in health inequalities.
Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and Director of the International Centre for Health and Society at University College London, has been at the forefront of research into health inequalities for the past 20 years, as Principal Investigator of the Whitehall studies of British civil servants, investigating explanations for the striking inverse social gradient in morbidity and mortality. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000 by HM The Queen for services to epidemiology and understanding health inequalities.
This public seminar will be followed by a reception to mark the launch of Professor Michael Marmot's book 'Status Syndrome - How Our Position on the Social Gradient Affects Longevity and Health', Bloomsbury, June 2004. ISBN 0747570493.
RSVP seminar attendance not later than Friday 04/06/04 (indicating any special needs and for direction to the seminar room). Seats are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.
International Centre for Health and Society Dept of Epidemiology & Public Health UCL, 1 - 19 Torrington Place London. WC1E 6BT T: +44 (0)20 7679 1708 E: ichs@public-health.ucl.ac.uk

Status Syndrome
by Professor Sir Michael Marmot
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/
Presented here with the permission of
Alexandra Brew, Media Relations Team, University College London

Why do Oscar winners live for an average of four years longer than other Hollywood actors? Why does life expectancy rise by 20 years over the 12 mile subway journey that divides poor black downtown Washington DC and rich white Montgomery County? Who experiences more stress – the decision makers or those who carry out their orders? These are just some of the questions posed by UCL’s Professor Sir Michael Marmot in his new book, ‘Status Syndrome’.

Spanning 30 years of research, including the Whitehall studies, which examined the gaping differences in the health of employees of the British civil service, ‘Status Syndrome’ examines the link between people’s position on the social ladder and their corresponding health. “Despite having no extremes of rich and poor, Whitehall was an ideal laboratory to discover how subtle differences in social ranking can lead to dramatic differences in health,” says Professor Marmot. For example, men at the bottom of the office hierarchy had, at ages 40 – 64, four times the risk of death than administrators at the top of the hierarchy. Similarly, smokers in lower grades were found to have a higher risk of heart disease than smokers in higher grades. Additional research from Australia, Sweden, Russia, the United States and India, also reveals similar findings.

Did you know…
In Sweden, men who are educated to Doctorate level have a 50% lower mortality rate than men who are just educated to degree level.
Oscar winning actors live four years longer on average than their co-stars and the actors nominated who did not win. However, scriptwriters who win Oscars do not live longer than scriptwriters who did not.
Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world, at 81.3.
A study, conducted in Britain, found that people who have access to a car have lower mortality rates than those who do not. Similary, people who own their house have lower mortality rates than those who do not.
extracts taken from ‘Status Syndrome’ by Professor Michael Marmot

Two key factors are identified as having the greatest impact on health and life expectancy – a sense of control over your life, and opportunities for social engagement. “The lower in the hierarchy you are, the less likely it is that you will have full control over your life and opportunities for full social participation. Autonomy and social participation are so important for health that the absence of them leads to deterioration in health,” says Professor Marmot.

“The book will not tell you what to eat for breakfast or how many times a week to go jogging, important as these things may be. Its aim is to help, by understanding the causes of the status syndrome, change the way we think about what we can do to lead more fulfilling lives and how we can shape the society in which we live to achieve that end,” says Professor Marmot.

Sir Michael Marmot has been at the forefront of research into health inequalities and was awarded a knighthood in 2000 for services to epidemiology and understanding health inequalities.

Dear All!
Yesterday, I started reading the following book:
Ray, Paul H. and Anderson, Sherry Ruth (2000). The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.
I think this book is fascinating. I assume most of us are "Cultural Creatives"!
Just read an introductory text further down, that I took from
http://www.culturalcreatives.org/.
Most warmly!
Evelin

Section 1: INTRODUCING THE CULTURAL CREATIVES

Imagine a country the size of France suddenly sprouting in the middle of the United States. It is immensely rich in culture, with new ways of life, values and worldviews. It has its own heroes and its own vision for the future. Think how curious we all would be, how interested to discover who these people are and where they have come from. In Washingon and on the Sunday morning news shows, politicians would certainly have strong opinions about what it all means, and pundits would be expressing their views with their usual certainty. Businesses would be planning strategies to market to this population, and political groups would be exploring alliances. The media, of course, would be blazing with first-person interviews and inside stories of the new arrivals, instead of the latest Beltway scandals.

Now imagine something different. There is a new country, just as big and just as rich in culture, but no one sees it. It takes shape silently and almost invisibly, as if flown in under radar in the dark of night. But it's not from somewhere else. This new country is decidedly American. And unlike the first image, it is emerging not only in the cornfields of Iowa but on the streets of the Bronx, all across the country from Seattle to St. Augustine. It is showing up wherever you'd least expect it: in your brother's living room and your sisterÕs backyard, in women's circles and demonstrations to protect the redwoods, in offices and churches and on-line communities, coffee shops and bookstores, hiking trails and corporate boardrooms.

Shaping a New Culture

This new country and its people are the subject of this book. We report thirteenyears of survey research on more than 100,000 Americans, hundreds of focus groups and about sixty in-depth interviews that reveal the emergence of an entire subculture of Americans. Their distinctive beliefs and values are shown in the self-scoring questionnaire on page xiv. The underlying themes express serious ecological and planetary perspectives, emphasis on relationships and women's point of view, commitment to spirituality and psychological development, disaffection with the large institutions of modern life, including both left and right in politics; and rejection of materialism and status display.

Since the 1960s, 26 percent of the adults in the U.S.Ñ50 million peopleÑhave made a comprehensive shift in their worldview, values, and way of life Ñ their culture, in short. These creative, optimistic millions are at the leading edge of several kinds of cultural change, deeply affecting not only their own lives but our larger society as well. We call them the Cultural Creatives because, innovation by innovation, they are shaping a new kind of American culture for the 21st century.

One useful way to see the idea of "culture" is as a large repertoire of solutions for the problems and passions that people see as important in each time period. So these are the people who are creating many of the surprising new cultural solutions required for the time ahead. In the chapters that follow, we tell their stories and the story of how they are changing our civilization in fundamental ways.

A long anticipated moment

When we say that a quarter of Americans have taken on a whole new worldview, we are pointing to a major development in our civilization. Changing a worldview literally means changing what you think is real. Some closely related changes contribute to and follow from changes in worldview: changes in values, your fundamental life priorities; changes in life style, the way you spend your time and money; and changes in livelihood, how you make that money in the first place.

As recently as the early 1960s, less than 5 percent of the population was engaged in making these momentous changes wereÑtoo few to measure in surveys. In just over a generation, that proportion grew steadily to 26 percent. That may not sound like much in this age of nanoseconds, but on the timescale of whole civilizations where major developments are measured in centuries, it is shockingly quick. And it's not only the speed of this emergence that is stunning. The extent of it is catching even the most alert observers by surprise. Officials of the European Union, hearing of the numbers of Cultural Creatives in the U.S., launched a related survey in each of their 15 countries in September of 1997. To their amazement, the evidence suggested that there are at least as many Cultural Creatives across Europe as we reported in the United States.

Visionaries and futurists have been predicting a change of this magnitude for well over two decades. Our research suggests that this long anticipated cultural moment may have arrived. The evidence is not only in the numbers from our survey questionnaires but in the everyday lives of the people behind those numbers. The sheer size of the Cultural Creative population is already affecting the way Americans do business and politics. They are the drivers of the demand that we go beyond environmental regulation to real ecological sustainability, to change our entire way of life accordingly. They demand authenticityÑat home, in the stores, at work, and in politics. They support women's issues in many areas of life. They insist on seeing the big picture in news stories and ads. This is already influencing the marketplace and public life. Because Cultural Creatives are not yet aware of themselves as a collective body, they do not recognize how powerful their voices could be. And if the rest of us are blind to the paradoxical gifts that their awakening brings, then we may well be left wondering where all the changes are coming from.

This book aims to sharpen our collective awareness with an in-depth look into who the Cultural Creatives are and what their emergence means for them and for all of us. Whether you are a Cultural Creative or share an office, a home, or a bed with one, or whether you simply want to create new projects or do business with Cultural Creatives, youÕll discover what differences their presence will make in your life.

FAQ
Here Ray and Anderson reply to frequently asked questions:

1. Why do you call them the Cultural Creatives?
Because they are literally creating a new culture. Innovation by innovation they are shaping a new American culture for the 21st century.

2. Aren't they all just... New Age?
No the New Agers are only a tiny postage stamp on the corner of this envelope-about 5% of population compared to 26%, and half of the New Agers aren't Cultural Creatives either. Most Cultural Creatives are very mainstream and would be offended if you called them New Age. They're very grounded and practical people.

Baby Boomers?
No they're all ages: 18-70. This is not about generational differences.

Liberals?
No there are fewer liberals than conservatives, and fewer of either than people who don't see themselves as either left or right. This is about a new kind of politics.

Californians?
No they're from all parts of the country, and they're quite mainstream Americans.

Upper Middle Class?
No, they're all income levels from working class to very affluent.

Whites?
No, they're all ethnic groups as well.

Self indulgent, hot tub Yuppies?
No. The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is not about yuppies and self-indulgence, it's about the people who care, and who are taking steps to make it practical and real.

3. Why are the Cultural Creatives important: why should I (or my readers/audience) care?

The sheer size of the CC population at 50 million people is already affecting the way Americans do business and politics. They're making new kinds of businesses and nonprofits, and they're also driving the demand for:
· ecologically sustainable products and services, and concern for the whole planet.
· to insist on authenticity, personally, at work, in business & politics.
· bringing women's issues into public life.
· doing the news differently, to see the big picture, and first person stories, and good news too.
· bringing spirituality into American life.

If people don't know about the Cultural Creatives they may be left behind, wondering where all the changes are coming from. After all, any time one in four Americans are changing their minds in fundamental ways, it's worth paying attention to, because it's going to change your life too.

What the Cultural Creatives value and the kind of new solutions they're creating, give us reason for optimism about the future.

There are more Cultural Creatives than voted for Clinton in the last election. If they get it together, they can win.

Cultural Creatives are redefining what success means, away from success at work and making a lot of money, toward a more soulful life focused on personal fulfillment, social conscience, creating a better future for everyone on the planet.

A new industry is appearing: Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, and it's $230 Billion in the U.S. this year, and $540 Billion worldwide. And the Cultural Creatives are their entire market.

4. If they're so important how come I haven't seen them before?
a) Actually you have seen them: They're the huge populations who support all the new social movements from the Sixties right up to the present day: Civil rights, peace, environment, women's, jobs and social justice, gay lib, alternative health care, new spiritualities, new psychotherapies, etc.

b) If you look at values, you'll see them. But most of the surveys you hear about study only opinions that are very transitory, while values are slow changing and very deep. Values are much deeper than the demographic categories most surveys use. And that's why most surveys don't show what we've found.

c) The Cultural Creatives have been invisible to public view:
How can 50 million people be invisible?
1) The national media don't cover the things they care about, or distort them. So, if you form all your impressions from the mass media, you'll never guess that they're there, because the media are really intolerant of world views other than their own.
2) The Cultural Creatives don't talk about what they value in public or at work. In part this is because they draw their conclusions that their values aren't shared by very many people, and they don't want to be embarrassed, put down, or harm their career prospects.
3) Most Cultural Creatives got to where they are in life almost alone. You probably didn't arrive at the values you've got now with your whole high school graduating class.

5. So what are all these creative solutions you're talking about, and why do you think that can make a difference?
How can the Cultural Creatives make a difference with all that big money sloshing around?
We're at a tipping point in history, a time when a creative minority can get the leverage to really make a difference. Part of the reason is that these activists and schoolteachers, and artists, and spiritual people, and scientists are following the normal American pattern for success. They are turning their grass roots social movements and their projects and ideas into new institutions.

Many of the most respectable institutions of today started as controversial grass roots movements. Citizen involvement turns into a huge variety of civic associations like: lobbying groups, political parties, unions, civic clubs, think tanks, institutes, foundations, charities, unions, clinics, and churches. This is what we Americans do, and we're better at it than almost any other country in the world. And that's what's happening now with the Cultural Creatives.

6. Well, what kinds of things are they doing?
In between the pure profit making business and the begging-for-money charity there's a whole rainbow spectrum of new kinds of organizations and social experiments.

Take a yoga center for example: is it a business, a spiritual place, an education center, a health and exercise place, or a way of life? The answer is Yes to all the above. We're crossing categories all the time.

We interviewed a sculptor named Vijali Hamilton who travels around the world creating something she calls the World Wheel. In each community she creates an environmental sculpture and she does community building. She asks the people to go deep into who they are and how they connect to the rest of the world, and from their answers they create a piece of theatre, and music, and a community ritual. Is this art, community building, entertainment, spirituality, ecology? Again, Yes, to all the above.

6. Why have the social and consciousness movements made such a difference?
Or, I don't see how all those movements from the Sixties could make such a difference today - that stuff is forty years old, it's history.
Or, Why do you relate the Cultural Creatives to all those movements?

The reason why this makes such a difference is that all these movements have been doing something new in history. They have been trying to change our minds about what is important and how the world works.

There's a lot more to the movements than just the people on the ramparts, or just the obvious meditators on their cushions, there's also a huge culturally circle around those active people who are reframing how we see the world every day. You have to see what a whole movement is: there's the most active people at the center, but around them like a target, there's a huge population of less involved people who give the money, read the literature, keep track of what's happening, and really believe in it. There may be a few thousand activists, and hundreds of thousands giving money, but tens of millions who are changing their minds and their lives.

We have evidence that a typical CC cares intensely about, and is often involved in, half a dozen of these new social and consciousness movements, while the rest of the country care about none, or maybe one or two. When you're involved in several movements who do reframing, it changes your whole world view. That's where the Cultural Creatives came from. And thatÕs where a lot of our new direction is coming from.

What's more, there's an enormous overlap of all the movements, and the Cultural Creatives are right at the center of all of it. They are the common constituency of all the movements.

It's exactly the opposite of what many pundits have claimed: it really isn't true that if you're dealing with your own personal growth you've dropped out of social life. Or if you're an activist, you don't have time for an inner life. In reality, the more people are involved in ecology issues the more they are involved in spirituality and personal growth on the one hand, and social justice issues on the other hand.

7. Why does all of this make such a difference?
Or, Isn't it all just politics?
So what? What difference could all this make?

What makes Cultural Creatives different than most Americans is that when you're involved in several movements you've been exposed to their reframing a lot of times, because that's what these movements do.

Reframing is a big deal. It lets us look at our old problems from a new angle of vision. And it gives a new way of explaining them, and a new way to state our moral concerns. For example:
What was Martin Luther King, Jr. saying, "The Blacks gotta get theirs?" No, he said, It's about freedom, and justice, and what the Constitution means, and who are we as a people?
What did Rachel Carson say, Keep pollution out of your back yard? No, she said that this is about the death of Nature.
What did Betty Friedan say, The women need more pay? No, she said This is about who we are as human beings.
What did the alternative health care movement say, Chiropractors gotta get insurance coverage? No, they said, This is about real health and wellness, not just medical care for catastrophic illnesses.

The Cultural Creatives are the ones who have been really paying attention, applying those reframings in their own lives.

Reframing means you start to question the unspoken assumptions of the social codes all around you. It's not okay to let big business destroy the environment. It's not okay to have nuclear power. It's not okay to let the foreign policy elite send our young people off to wars without involving the citizens. It's not okay to put down, or harm, people who are different than you are. And so on.

If you are exposed to half a dozen big reframes, two things happen: the content changes your whole world view, and you get comfortable with the process of questioning the unspoken assumptions of the old culture. That's where the Cultural Creatives came from.And that's where a lot of our new direction is coming from.

All those people who have questioned the unspoken assumptions had to rely on their own direct experience. How else could you take off the old culture's eyeglasses? This has an incredible potential potential for opening up creativity in our lives. It gives us some comfort in going into the unknown. And that is where our whole society is going anyway at this time in history.

This is a part of the personal life changes that so many Cultural Creatives have gone through. So often they said to us that they had to live more authentic lives after opening up questions they really cared about, and having to live through the experiences they've had. The Black Freedom Movement called it "walking your talk" and this need for authenticity was picked up by every social and consciousness movement since then.

This emphasis on authenticity is at the center of who the Cultural Creatives are today, and is one of the key values they've brought into American life.

New Book from the Nordic Africa Institute:

Hansen, Karen Tranberg and Mariken Vaa (Eds.):
Reconsidering Informalities: Perspectives from Urban Africa
ISBN 91-7106-518-0, 235 pp.,
Published by the Nordic Africa Institute, 2004
Price: SEK 250, Euro 25, GBP 16.95

Keywords: Informal economy, land use, livehoods, planning, urban housing, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe

This book brings together two bodies of research on urban Africa that have tended to be separate: Studies of urban land use and housing, and studies of work and livelihoods. Africa’s future will be to an increasing extent urban. Nevertheless, the inherited legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate. The recent decades of neo-liberal political and economic reforms have increased social inequality across urban space. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious for most urban residents. Extra-legal housing and unregistered economic activities proliferate. Basic urban services are increasingly provided informally. The result is the phenomenal growth of the informal city and extra-legal activities. How do urban residents see these activities? What do they accomplish through them? How can these “informal” cities be governed?
The case studies are drawn from a diverse set of cities on the African continent. A central theme is how practices that from an official standpoint are illegal or extra-legal do not only work but are considered legitimate by the actors concerned. Another is how the informal city is not exclusively the domain of the poor, but also provides shelter and livelihoods for better-off segments of the urban population.

Karen Tranberg Hansen has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology, University of Washington (Seattle), 1979. She is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Professor of Anthropology

Mariken Vaa (b. 1937) obtained her Mag. Art. degree in sociology from the university of Oslo in 1967 and has been working in institutions of higher education and research since then, primarily in Urban and Regional Studies.
From 1997- 2002 she was coordinator of the programme Cities, Governance and Civil Society in Africa at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and is currently professor of development studies at Oslo University College, Norway.

For more information see the enclosed attachment or visit our
website
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The Nordic Africa Institute
P O Box 1703 , SE-751 47 Uppsala, Sweden
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Order the Nordic Africa Institute's publications online!

Reviews
One of the most striking aspects of African cities today is the extent and scope of informality. Based on original and recent research in nine African countries, this carefully edited book takes a fresh look at the interface between the formal, legal system, and the informal, often illegal or extra-legal system that is so pervasive in the organization of people’s livelihoods, and in shelter and basic services. In fascinating detail, the authors explore such issues as the conversion of urban space from planned to unplanned, the transformation in power arrangements between men and women, and the challenges that municipalities face when the bulk of their people live in poverty. To the extent that Africa’s place in the emerging global system reproduces informality in her cities, the editors call for contextualized local research and a "continuous reconsideration" of Africa's informal urban economies. Aid agencies and national government planners take note! A very important collection.
Richard Stren, Professor of Political Science, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, Toronto, Canada

Contents
Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction
Karen Tranberg Hansen and Mariken Vaa

SECTION I: LOCALITY, PLACE, AND SPACE
Chapter 2. Sharing Public Space in Pointe-Noire, Congo-Brazzaville Immigrant Fishermen and a Multinational Oil Company
Gabriel Tati

Chapter 3. The Right to Stay in Cato Crest Formality and Informality in a South African Development Project
Knut G. Nustad

Chapter 4. Who Rules the Streets? The Politics of Vending Space in Lusaka
Karen Tranberg Hansen

SECTION II: ECONOMY, WORK, AND LIVELIHOODS
Chapter 5. Trade and the Politics of Informalisation in Bissau, Guinea
Ilda Lourenço-Lindell

Chapter 6. Home Based Enterprises in a Period of Economic Restructuring in Zambia
Barbara Mwila Kazimbaya-Senkwe

Chapter 7. Home Industries and the Formal City in Harare, Zimbabwe
Amin Y. Kamete

SECTION III: LAND, HOUSING, AND PLANNING
Chapter 8. Land Use Planning and Governance in Dar es Salaam. A Case Study from Tanzania
Marco Burra

Chapter 9. Actors and Interests. The Development of an Informal Settlement in Nairobi, Kenya
Rose Gatabaki-Kamau and Sara Karirah-Gitau

Chapter 10. The Law and Access to Land for Housing in Maseru, Lesotho
Resetselemang Clement Leduka

Chapter 11. Upgrading an Informal Settlement in Cape Town, South Africa
John Abbott

Chapter 12. Beyond the Formal/Informal Dichotomy. Access to Land in Maputo, Mozambique
Paul Jenkins

Abbreviations
Glossary
Biographical Notes
Index

No Sex Please — We're Japanese

By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-02-japan-women-usat_x.htm

TOKYO — Junko Sakai was nervously looking forward to a romantic getaway with the man she'd been seeing. But when they arrived at a seaside hotel last fall, her beau requested separate rooms.
Masahiro Yamada, the Tokyo Gakugei University sociologist who coined the phrase "parasite singles", in a coffee shop in Tokyo May 17th.By Andy Rain, Getty Images
Stunned, Sakai nonetheless anticipated a late-night knock on the door. It never came. "Nothing happened," the Tokyo writer says.
Nothing is happening with depressing regularity between Japanese men and women these days. Marriages, births and hanky-panky are all spiraling downward with troubling implications for the nation's future: A sagging birthrate means that fewer working-age people will be around to support a growing population of elderly; a social crisis looms.
Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: "Young people, don't hate sex," AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels."
More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. "They don't want a complicated life," says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself.
And so, to an astonishing degree, men and women go their separate ways — the women to designer boutiques and chic restaurants with their girlfriends or moms, the men to karaoke clubs with their colleagues from work or the solitude of their computer screens to romance hassle-free virtual women.
"Men don't want to spend time with their girlfriends, especially shopping," says Takayuki Mori, 40, a single man who works for a Tokyo advertising agency. He says he isn't dating.
Better educated, more widely traveled and raised in more affluence than their mothers, young women no longer feel bound by the Japanese tradition that says a woman unmarried after age 25 is like a Christmas cake on Dec. 26 — stale. Men, meanwhile, seem intimidated and bewildered by assertive young women who are nothing like their moms.
As a result of the disconnect between genders, Japan, just emerging from a long economic slump, is experiencing a social recession in:

•Marriage. Japanese are postponing marriage or avoiding it altogether. Weddings dropped last year for the second straight year. Fifty-four percent of Japanese women in their late 20s are single, up from 30.6% in 1985. About half of single Japanese women ages 35 to 54 have no intention to marry, according to a survey in January by the Japan Institute of Life Insurance.

•Births. Just 1.1 million babies were born in Japan last year, the third straight decline. The average Japanese couple now produces just 1.32 children, well below the minimum 2.08 needed to compensate for deaths. As a result of plummeting birth rates, Japan's population is expected to peak in 2006, and then decline rapidly.

•Sex. In a 2001 survey, condom maker Durex found that Japan ranked dead last among 28 countries in the frequency of sex: The average Japanese had sex just 36 times a year. Hong Kong was next to last with 63. (Americans ranked No. 1 at 124 times a year.)
AERA reports that condom shipments are down 40% since 1993 (probably in part because Japan finally legalized birth-control pills in 1999) and love-hotel check-ins are off at least 20% over the past five years. What's more, an increasing number of those visiting love hotels aren't there for romance, AERA says; they've found that love hotels offer the cheapest access to karaoke machines and video games.

I won't get married!
Over tea in the sunlit lobby of the Akasaka Prince Hotel near the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo, and later over soba noodles and chicken yakatori at a nearby restaurant, Japanese writer and television personality Yoko Haruka describes the shortcomings of love and marriage Japanese-style. The husband works long hours and carouses into the night with his pals from work. The wife is expected to stay home, clean house and take care of kids. If the children behave badly, she's a bad mother. If her husband has an affair, she's a bad wife.
The author of Kekkon Shimasen (I Won't Get Married!), Haruka abandoned her own plans for marriage a decade ago when she realized her fiancé wanted her to give up her career and lead the traditional life of a Japanese housewife. She says Japanese men sometimes propose to women with lines like: "I want you to cook miso soup for me the rest of my life." Not surprisingly, Japan's increasingly educated and well-traveled young women are not impressed.
"I'm not expecting men will change," Haruka says.
Her assistant, Miho Higuchi, who has kept silent throughout the conversation, suddenly blurts out: "Never again!" A mother of three, she divorced her husband because he refused to do anything to help her clean house and take care of the kids.
In fact, Japan's divorce rate rose steadily to 2.3 divorces for every 1,000 people in 2002 from 1.3 in 1990; it appears to have dropped a bit last year, partly because fewer people have been getting married. (The divorce rate in the USA was 4 per 1,000 people in 2002. )
As for men, they seem bewildered by the rising assertiveness of Japanese women.
"Men are getting weaker," says Takayuki Tokiwa, 23, a student at a Tokyo vocational college. "Women don't have to rely on men anymore. They can live on their own."
Masahito Wakauchi, 24, would seem to be a good catch. He has fashionably wavy hair and a good job with an advertising agency in Tokyo. Is he dating? Wakauchi shakes his head sadly.
"It's very, very difficult" to meet women these days, he says.
Rather than risk rejection or summon the energy to maintain a modern relationship, many Japanese men simply pay for affection in the country's ubiquitous hostess bars and brothels.
Others prefer virtual women online to the real kind. "They seem to find the relationship cumbersome. ... You have to be attentive to your partner," says Kunio Kitamura, president of the Japan Family Planning Association's Family Planning Clinic. "A quick way to get satisfaction is so-called cybersex."
In fact, as many as a million young men — mostly teenagers, but increasingly older men as well — suffer from what is known here as hikikomori. It's a condition in which they seclude themselves in their rooms for weeks at a time (though the causes seem to go well beyond fear of women to traumatic experiences from the past, such as being bullied at school).
But most young Japanese seem to enjoy the single life. In 1973, a Japanese government survey found that the happiest people in the country were those over age 60. A similar survey 24 years later found that the happiest people were in their 20s, and twentysomething women were the happiest of all: 77.7% said they were content with their lives. Maybe Gloria Steinem was right: Women need men like fish need bicycles.
Many young Japanese women live carefree lives, staying at home with their parents, paying little if any rent, letting their mothers cook their meals, clean their rooms and do their laundry. Many work dead-end jobs that don't pay much but don't cause much stress and give them enough spending money to buy designer handbags, shoes, clothes and jewelry and enough time to take overseas holidays with their girlfriends.
Emerging from the Louis Vuitton shop on Namikibashi street in the heart of the Ginza shopping district, Tokyo secretary Yukiko Matsumoto, 38, says she's happily single and living at home with herparents.
"I don't want to change my rhythms," she says. "Men expect women to stay home and take care of them." Not likely: Matsumoto travels abroad twice a year with her best friend and shopping companion, Terumi Yanagibashi, 38. They've already been to Hawaii together three times.

'Parasite singles'
A few years ago, Tokyo Gakugei University sociologist Masahiro Yamada coined the phrase "parasite singles" to describe young people who sponge off their parents and use their rent-free incomes to splurge on designer goodies, expensive dinners and trips abroad. It came from the 1997 Japanese horror movie Parasite Eve and applies to young, live-at-home men and women alike, though Yamada says the most carefree of the parasite singles tend to be women; the men are more serious about establishing careers and moving out on their own one day.
The phrase caught on. Some single women even printed up business cards defiantly describing themselves as "parasite singles."
In the past, it made sense for young people to leave home early. In the 1940s and 1950s, Japanese families were large. Staying at home meant sharing a room with brothers or sisters. But after decades of prosperity and falling birthrates, many young adults are pampered only children. Leaving home to marry means the drudgery of housework (especially for women) and the poverty of having to pay your own bills.
Sociologist Yamada says the single life in Japan isn't as blissful as it seems. For one thing, many young women still want to marry: They keep waiting for the perfect man — a rich handsome guy who either helps with the housework or can afford to hire help. But Prince Charming never quite arrives. "They hold on to the illusion they will find a man with a high income," Yamada says.
"The good men are all married," writer Junko Sakai says. "Those left behind are all nerds or without jobs or violent or not nice-looking."
And what happens to the parasite singles when their parents become infirm or die? Yamada says their future is grim. He cites one case study that he fears will be a model for the future. A woman lived with her parents until they died, inherited the family home but found that her job didn't pay enough now that her parents weren't around to foot the bill for groceries and other necessities. She ended up bankrupt after borrowing heavily in a futile effort to maintain her lifestyle.
The phenomenon of parasite singles also is creating a demographic nightmare. Japan now has about four working-age people to contribute to pension plans to support one of today's retirees. By the middle of the century, there will be just two workers for each retiree, which will create huge financial problems for the country.
Yamada says young men and women need to get more realistic. Men need to start helping with the housework and supporting their wives' careers. Women need to stop waiting for the flawless man who's never going to show up. "They've got to compromise," he says.
But it's going to take a lot of convincing to get Japanese women to give up their independence. Sakai says Japanese society still thinks there's something wrong with unmarried women over the age of, say, 30. She calls spinsters like herself "losing dogs." But fewer and fewer women care about tradition. "I know I'm a losing dog," Sakai says, "but I'm quite satisfied with my life."
Contributing: Naoko Nishiwaki in Tokyo

Social Withdrawal and Other Maladies: A New Paradigm for Understanding Japan's Contemporary Deadlock

http://ieas.berkeley.edu/events/2004.03.08.html

Michael Zielenziger (Journalist, Business / Economics, Knight Ridder Newspapers)
Discussant: Steven Vogel (../faculty/vogel.html) (Professor of Political Science, UCB)
Discussant: Scott North (Associate Professor of Sociology, Osaka University)

DATE:     Monday, March 8, 2004
TIME:     4:00-6:00 p.m.
PLACE:    IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Fl.
FORMAT:   Colloquium
SPONSOR:  Center for Japanese Studies (../cjs/), Institute of East Asian Studies (../)

Some 14 years after the Japanese "bubble economy" collapsed, the nation still searches for a means for economic revitalization and needed political reform. Conventional understandings of Japan's long deadlock have failed to account for the long period of stagnation, the halting progress towards reform, and the rising unhappiness in a prosperous, but increasingly pessimistic society.
By examining an unusual array of dysfunctional social behaviors now emerging in Japan, including falling birthrates, rising numbers of suicide and depression, and social withdrawal syndrome ("hikikomori") a new paradigm for understanding and diagnosing Japan's long malaise can be considered.

Michael Zielenziger was Tokyo bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers for 7 years, until May 2002. He is now a visiting scholar in the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, while finishing a book to be published in 2005 by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday.
Copyright © 2004 UC Regents. All rights reserved.
Site maintained by the Institute of East Asian Studies (../),
a unit of International and Area Studies (http://ias.berkeley.edu/),
at the University of California, Berkeley (http://www.berkeley.edu/).

Hidden Away: Stigmatized, abandoned, often locked up, Asia's mentally ill are left to inhabit a living hell

A TIME special report by Hannah Beech
November 10, 2003 / Vol. 162 No. 18

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/printout/0,13675,501031110-536274,00.html

If a boy disappears and nobody notices, is he really gone? Hisaki Fujishiro's withdrawal had been almost imperceptible, as hard to gauge as the ebb of a high tide. Even his mother failed to see the signposts, Fujishiro recalls: the elementary-school bullying that broke one of his fingers, the obsession with computer games, the increasing hours spent cloistered in his cluttered bedroom. These were, it seemed, the normal teethings of a preteen in postindustrial Tokyo, just another geeky kid wandering awkwardly through childhood. But gradually Fujishiro retreated completely.
The first tangible danger sign was an obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested in Fujishiro when he entered junior high. He would write a character, erase it and rewrite it hundreds of times. Or he would frenetically wash his textbooks, as if the act of scrubbing them would somehow cleanse his troubled mind. Despite his eccentricities, Fujishiro managed to enter Tokyo's Chuo University in the mid-1990s. But soon he had withdrawn almost completely into the safety of his little room in student housing. Most days he would go to bed early and sleep through the morning, only venturing outside for exams or to buy a stash of junk food at the local 7-Eleven. He had no friends, preferring to spend his time with car magazines, which were stacked to the ceiling. "My curtains were always closed," recalls Fujishiro, now 29. "I didn't feel like I had a place where I belonged."
Fujishiro was hardly alone in his terrifying isolation. A generation of Japanese youngsters has dropped out of society entirely, unable to cope, it seems, with the rapid syncopation of life in Asia's most developed nation. The phenomenon has been dubbed hikikomori, or social withdrawal, by psychiatrist Tamaki Saito, who estimates that one in every 40 Japanese households has such a loner. That's an astounding 1 million social dropouts, most of whom are male. For Fujishiro, a support group at his university coaxed him out of his room, and he has now started reintegrating into society after eight years of seclusion. Today, he runs an online outreach program for other hikikomori slowly emerging from their shells. So far the disease has been diagnosed only in Japan, except for a handful of cases in South Korea. But these alienated youngsters might be a harbinger of what's to come for the rest of Asia, emblems of a continent hurtling so quickly into the future that its citizens have few tools to cope with the dizzying speeds.

Asia's mental health is, more than ever, in a perilous state. The Global Burden of Disease study commissioned jointly by the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Harvard University predicts that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of disability in Asia, measured by the number of years a person lives with a debilitating health condition. Already, mental illnesses account for five of the 10 leading causes of disability in Asia, including disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. That's a bigger health burden to the continent than cancer. A WHO study found that as many as one-quarter of all Indians currently suffer from some sort of mental illness. The region also boasts some of the highest suicide rates in the world. In China, for instance, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death among those aged 18-34, according to the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center. At least 250,000 Chinese have killed themselves each year since the mid-1990s.
Yet only a small percentage of these troubled individuals ever seek help—or even possess the opportunity to do so. In Asia's most developed countries, ordered, Confucian cultures are loath to confront mental illness. Its victims commonly endure workplace discrimination, receive scant family support and feel obliged to hide their symptoms for fear of unsettling the people around them. Du Yasong, a psychiatrist at the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, estimates that as many as one-third of all people who go to general practitioners in China are actually suffering from mental-health problems expressed psychosomatically through symptoms such as headaches or insomnia. Yet 95% of those with depression in China are untreated, according to Ji Jianlin, a medical professor at Shanghai's Fudan University who advises the central government on mental-health policy. Japan has the highest number of hospitalized, mentally ill patients in the world, yet psychiatry is still considered a crackpot discipline by many doctors there. "There is so much stigma when it comes to mental health," says Osamu Tajima, a leading psychiatrist in Tokyo. "The perception that it's a personality weakness prevails not just among 'normal' people. I've heard many doctors tell patients to stop complaining and tough it out."
Even when the severity of the problem is acknowledged, treatment is hampered by a disastrous lack of resources. This is especially true in Asia's poorer countries, where conditions for the mentally ill are often horrific. Many patients are locked up in hospitals no better than prisons. At the Panti Bina Laras Cipayung mental-health center in east Jakarta, just 10 minutes off a modern expressway, the air is thick with flies and the stench of feces. Originally intended for 200 patients, the government-run facility is crammed with 305 inmates. Most are naked, some are shackled or chained to window bars. Others, emaciated or showing oozing lesions, curl up on the soiled floor of the latrines. A doctor stops by the center only once a week for two to three hours; he has numerous other similar institutions to attend to. Though the center's number of patients has nearly doubled since 1996, its funding has not increased because of the weak economy—less than $1 is spent on each patient per day.
Indeed, most Asian nations spend tragically small amounts on mental-health care. In Cambodia, for instance, the country's entire mental-health budget is far less than what it would take to fund one topflight mental hospital in the U.S. In Pakistan, the government has all but given up on caring for the mentally ill and private donors have had to pick up the slack. More than 1,000 mentally ill patients live jammed together in the privately funded Karachi commune called Edhi Village, run by the prominent social worker Abdus Sattar Edhi. Iron gates lock the inmates in, some of whom, stark naked, slam their heads against the walls of their dark cells. "Our center is becoming a dumping ground for people who consider mentally ill people as the dirt of society," says Ghazanfar Karim, the complex's overburdened supervisor.
The grim irony of Asia's mental-health crisis is that it seems to be escalating even while much of the region is getting richer. Some experts see the continent's transformation as a profoundly mixed blessing, carrying with it dreams of cell phones and cable for all but also exacting an immense psychological toll on those who are struggling to keep up with the manic pace of change. Tradition and a sense of security have given way to upheaval and uncertainty. A farmer born of farmers, the father of future farmers, would work from dawn to dusk like everyone else he knew. Because he entertained no hope of an alternative lifestyle, he didn't agonize over one. But today the characteristics of a modern existence—the potential to get ahead, the rat race, even the crushing traffic—mean that Asians feel more psychological pressure than ever before. Psychiatrists in China, for instance, estimate that the rate of anxiety disorders is higher now than it was during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution. This, then, is the dark side of Asia's economic miracle.
Money Disorder
Born to peasants in china's south central province of Sichuan, Song L. had wanted to go to Shanghai for as long as he could remember. For him, China's biggest city was where dreams were made, where farmers morphed into millionaires. In truth, Shanghai is also where thousands of migrants lose their way in a pell-mell rush to riches. Fudan University professor Ji estimates that the incidence of mental illness among China's 100 million migrants might be twice as high as in the rest of Chinese society, due to the pressures of existing on the margins both economically and socially. But when Song headed to the big city in 2000 for construction work, he knew only of Shanghai's possibilities. At first, things went well for the then 19-year-old, but an altercation with a co-worker who accused him of shoddy workmanship cost him his job. "I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep and I felt dizzy all the time," Song recalls. "When I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, I had nightmares where everything was spinning."
Song soon landed another job, but the dizziness didn't subside—a dangerous condition for a man who was supposed to make his living scrambling up the half-built skeletons of Shanghai's skyscrapers. He was quickly fired again. After 19 years in a tightly knit village, he was now alone in the city. "No one could help me," says Song. "All I had to keep me company were my thoughts, but my thoughts were already bad." Details of events after his second sacking are jumbled in Song's clouded mind: there was a desperate 16-hour, standing-room-only train ride up to Beijing, where he had heard of a job opening; a curt foreman who wouldn't take Song because he didn't look sturdy enough; and—the final blow—a robbery that stripped him of most of his savings. After that, Song wandered the streets for days—or was it months? He doesn't remember. Everywhere he went, the dizziness followed, even to the jail where Song was locked up for 30 days as a vagrant. "Sometimes I would see other people like me, alone, walking the streets, and I wondered if they had problems too, and wanted to make friends," he says. "But when I would go up to them, they would turn away."
One morning last spring, Song decided he wanted to die. He gathered his final pennies, bought some pesticide and swallowed it. When he woke up in a hospital, a nurse derided him for being cowardly and a drain on medical resources. "The nurse told me not to waste her time," says Song. "She said I was so stupid that I couldn't even kill myself correctly." Upon finding out that Song had no money, she forced him to check out of the hospital the next day, even though his throat still burned from the poison. No one came to pick him up, because no one knew he was there. Even today, Song does not know what to call the dizziness and bad thoughts that continue to haunt him. He has never heard of the word depression. All he knows is that he is a failure. "I cannot go home now," he says. "I would be an embarrassment to my parents and they would lose face in our village."
The vast majority of China's burgeoning mental-health patients suffer in silence. The nation's psychiatrists have seen a remarkable upswing in the kinds of mental disease linked to fast-paced societies, particularly depression and anxiety disorders. But, says Professor Ji, "Outside the big cities, most doctors have never heard of things like anxiety disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorders or even depression. So most people are never treated." According to the Global Burden of Disease survey, mental health constitutes only 2% of China's health budget, but psychiatric disorders account for 20% of the nation's health burden. The situation is particularly acute for serious mental diseases. The same study asserts that although 60% of schizophrenics are treated in hospitals in the U.S., 90% of China's schizophrenics remain hidden at home without access to medication or therapy. "Many people in China just want to hide the mentally ill person at home," says Du of Huashan Hospital. "They don't want outside people to see their crazy relative and think they are crazy too." Not that most could afford the cost of treating such major illnesses. Only about 15% of mainlanders currently have health insurance, and in most places expensive antipsychotic medicine is not subsidized.
The continuing stigma of mental disease in China—and, indeed, in much of Asia—is so pervasive that even the caregivers fall prey to misconceptions. Nurses who worked with Canadian psychiatrist Michael Phillips in the town of Shashi in central China confided to him that they didn't tell their families the true nature of their work, because it was widely believed that mental illness is contagious. Such ignorance isn't surprising given that many nursing schools in China don't even offer courses on psychiatry—it only became a formal discipline in mainland universities in 1995. There are only 2,000 fully qualified psychiatrists for a country of 1.3 billion people, compared with 10.5 psychiatrists per 100,000 in the U.S. The majority of China's psychiatrists never chose their field: they were assigned to it by their medical school.
Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs that China is trying to combat its growing mental-health scourge. The country recently passed a law that tries to address the basic rights of victims through education and increased funding for mental-health care. But as is often the case in China, the law has been implemented fully only in the big cities. In Shanghai, mental hospitals are clean, safe and orderly. But several Western-trained Chinese psychiatrists in the metropolis wonder whether overmedication is the cause of the eerily quiet halls. Indeed, the country still combats mental health by focusing on control—a fundamental difference with the West, where psychiatric disorders are recognized as a medical condition that often can be treated with therapy as well as drugs. By contrast, in East Asia social deviance is an issue typically addressed by the law. In China, it is the Ministry of Public Security that oversees many of the country's mental-health policies, not the Ministry of Health. Until recently the security bureau was also in charge of the nation's suicide statistics—and did not make them public. "We are still not facing up to our mental-health problem fully," says Du. "Unless all of us face up to the crisis, things will not change enough. We will be rich, but we will be sick."
War Wounds
Perhaps no country in asia needs mental-health care more than Cambodia, a tormented nation where the scars of the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime are still fresh even a quarter-century later. According to a survey conducted by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO), an NGO with ties to the WHO, 75% of adult Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era suffer from either extreme stress or post-traumatic stress disorder. Children born to this broken generation haven't fared much better. Aid workers estimate that 40% of young Cambodians suffer from stress disorders caused by growing up in a tattered social network. Yet in all of Cambodia there is not a single inpatient mental hospital. The nation of 11 million has only 20 psychiatrists. Mental-health funding didn't even figure into the national budget until nine years ago. "The mental-health situation is bad in many countries," says Muny Sothara, a psychiatrist at an outpatient clinic at Preah Bat Norodom Sihanouk Hospital in the capital, Phnom Penh. "But I don't know of any place worse than Cambodia."
Every day, hundreds of bedraggled citizens line up from dawn at the Preah Bat hospital's mental-health clinic. Most have traveled for hours by oxen-drawn cart or packed bus to reach the venue. Chan Muoy, a gaunt, 41-year-old snack vendor, has not been able to sleep soundly for years. Images of past torture creep into her mind before slumber does. Now, though, things have got even worse. Cambodia has just gone through dangerously polarizing parliamentary elections, and many fear that violence might erupt once again. So nervous is Chan Muoy that she has lost her appetite and the tortured flashbacks are beginning to blur the line between reality and hallucination. While speaking to a psychiatric nurse, Chan Muoy's eyes bulge out and dart wildly as she recounts her trauma: how her father, brother and sister were killed by the Khmer Rouge, the latter for the crime of stealing a potato; how a troop of machete-wielding child soldiers came to get her one night when she was 18 and lashed her to a post in crucifixion pose before inexplicably releasing her hours later; how she wandered the streets for years after that, suffering rapes and beatings. "Everyone has gone through hard times here," says Chan Muoy, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by the nurse. "I'm not unusual. We all relive bad memories that make us shake and cry."
The lack of mental-health infrastructure gives Cambodians few options to treat their woes. Kum Kim, a 47-year-old from Kampong Thom province, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic by a health worker from TPO earlier this year. She says evil spirits poke sticks through the floor slats sometimes when she is resting in her wooden, stilted house. She says she must hop around her home to avoid the sharp jabs. Desperate for help, she goes to a krukmai, or witch doctor, named Son Mao. The krukmai's house—the only one in the village whose owners can afford a corrugated iron roof—has been prepared for Kum Kim's visit. There is an offering of fruit on the floor and whirls of incense meant to lure the village spirits in for a chat. As pigs squeal nearby, the krukmai touches Kum Kim's forehead and conjures up the spirits. They tell her that Kum Kim has been possessed by evil spirits. The reason? While Kum Kim's husband was commune chief many years ago, he promised to build a road for the village. Yet he never did. Now, the spirits are out to punish the whole family. "If the spirits are angry, you have to soothe them," explains Son Mao. "Once they forgive you, your craziness is gone."
Despite the krukmai's ministrations, Kum Kim's craziness has not disappeared. The spirits in her house still jab her with pointed sticks. Other families in the village have begun shunning her family, worried that the spirits might haunt them, too. In Cambodia, though, the haunted seem too numerous to avoid. "So many people are sick in the head here," says Chea Dany, a nurse at the Preah Bat hospital. "But no one wants to be with them. Our society is divided into two: people who are sick, and people who are O.K. and want to ignore the sick. We cannot grow up as a country if we are divided like this."
Suicide Nation
The placid postwar history of japan has little in common with the devastation Cambodia has endured. In Japan the streets are neat, and the government coffers are full despite more than a decade of economic stagnation. And yet there is a melancholy in the country that has caused more than 30,000 Japanese to commit suicide every year since 1998, compared with fewer than 15,000 a year in the 1970s. That's the highest suicide rate in East Asia, and one of the highest in the world. In part, the malaise that is gripping Japan seems to be a product of a hyper-commercial society where so many feel the need to compete—and so many fall apart when they slip behind. "We are very developed economically, but Japanese are still intent on getting ahead," says Yukio Saito, who runs a suicide-prevention hot line headquartered in Tokyo. "That pressure makes it very hard to sustain a healthy life."
To its credit, Japan has tried to heal its perennially depressed populace. Already, the nation has the most inpatient psychiatric beds in the world, and recent regulations have raised standards at private hospitals where care was often substandard. Government bureaucrats have also loosened stringent regulations on imports of Prozac and other badly needed medication. There has been a push to allocate more money for outpatient care and community-based education through posters. And on the Chuo train line, a well-known final destination for the terminally depressed, local authorities have installed mirrors in the train tunnel because studies show that looking at one's own reflection helps check suicidal impulses.
Yet, for all its efforts, Japan's suicide statistics remain desperately high. The phenomenon strikes most frequently among middle-aged men, precisely the same group most affected by Japan's long economic downturn and ensuing corporate restructuring. Among government bureaucrats, for instance, suicide is the second leading cause of death. "These people, who were used to lifetime employment, have seen a huge shift in the social system," says Saito. "But they can't admit to themselves that they're depressed, and they don't see any other noble way out." Even suicide itself is a shameful topic—ironic for a nation weaned on tales of kamikaze pilots and hara-kiri samurai. Saito remembers talking to a widow who couldn't admit to her family and friends that her husband had committed suicide. "She told everyone he died of a heart attack," he recalls. "That was the best way not to embarrass the family and his company."
In Japan, as in many other East Asian nations, such avoidance of social humiliation guides people's lives. "In America, people talk about going to the psychiatrist like going to the grocery store," says Tokyo-based psychiatrist Osamu Tajima. "But here, it's still quite taboo." Even after several nationwide education campaigns, mental illness is still widely seen in Japan as largely incurable. And though mental-health spending is higher in Japan than in other Asian nations, the country's legislation allows mental hospitals to have up to 48 patients per doctor, while regular hospitals are limited to just 16 patients per physician.
In tackling Asia's mental-health crisis, perhaps the most important task is to make smart spending a priority. Eight years ago, South Korean government officials tried just that, shifting resources from full-fledged mental institutions to community mental-health centers. The majority of patients who visit the 40 nationwide centers suffer from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. But with rehabilitation courses and occupational training, many can reintegrate into a society that once shunned them. "Helping patients realize that they can manage their illness without being institutionalized is my duty," says Hong Joo Eun, who heads the Sungdong district community mental-health center in Seoul. Still, Hong notes that staff at such centers are paid half of what those in general hospitals earn, and the turnover rate among center workers is high.
The weight of battling on the front line of Asia's mental-health epidemic seems to hang heavy on psychiatrist Tajima. Sitting in his claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit consulting room in Tokyo, he rubs his eyes and cups his head in his hands. He has a bad headache that simply will not go away. Then, Tajima looks up and smiles a peculiarly Japanese smile—half apology, half wistfulness, without a hint of humor in it. "You know, I fit the profile of a high-risk suicide candidate in Japan," he says, massaging his temples. "I am a middle-aged man who is overworked and can't see that situation changing anytime soon." And with that thought, Tajima bows his head ever so politely and walks slowly out of the room.
—With reporting by Bu Hua/Shanghai, Juliane Han/Seoul, Hanna Kite/Tokyo and Owais Tohid/Karachi

Where have all the young Japanese men gone?

By Richard Lloyd Parry
January 31, 2004
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2716-983567,00.html

One million recluses are threatening the foundations of society from their bedrooms

ON PAPER, at least, the phenomenon known as hikikomori does not look like a threat to the foundations of Japanese society. The word means simply social withdrawal and, in its early stages at least, the condition is as banal as a teenage sulk.
The typical hikikomori is a young man living at home who abandons his work or education, refuses to see his friends and retreats into his bedroom. He spends all his time alone, playing computer games, browsing the internet and emerging only for late-night shopping expeditions to refresh his supply of comics.

For periods of a few days at a time, such episodes are familiar to parents all over the world. But in Japan they have taken on the proportions of an epidemic.
More than a million Japanese, four in five of them young men, are believed to be suffering from long-term hikikomori. A third of them are over 30; a quarter of them have been living alone in their bedrooms for more than ten years.
Since identifying the condition five years ago, psychiatrists have come to recognise the misery which it causes to individual sufferers and their families. But it also represents a demographic time bomb, with devastating implications for Japan’s already troubled economy and overburdened welfare system.
With ever-increasing life expectancy and a shrinking birth rate, Japan is already in danger of running out of young people to man its industries, pay its taxes and support its growing retired population. If it is not tackled, hikikomori threatens to remove a million or more productive workers from this already dwindling pool.
“Economically this is a great burden,” said Shinako Tsuchiya, an MP who heads a parliamentary group investigating the problem. “Hundreds of thousands of adults are not working. When their parents grow too old to look after them, they will become a burden on the welfare system. We have to take measures to help people return to society, and prevent young people falling into a hikikomori state.”
Beginning this year, the Government is to multiply eightfold the amount of money that it spends on social services for parents in an effort to tackle the problem. But even this increase, from 300 million yen (£1.7 million) to 2.3 billion yen (£12.8 million), is regarded by those affected by hikikomori as wholly inadequate “The most you can say is that it’s better than nothing,” said Masahisa Okuyama, who runs an organisation of parents of hikikomori children. “Hikikomori are incapable of earning their own living, but they and their families are not entitled to any help from the Government.”
Mr Okuyama’s son has been a hikikomori for ten years and he knows as well as anyone the devastation which the condition can cause across entire families. The problem typically begins with bullying at school or betrayal or abandonment by a close friend.
“The kind of boys who become hikikomori are the sensitive, intelligent ones, with parents who are liberal and overprotective,” he said. “The kind of parents who read the Asahi newspaper (Japan’s equivalent of The Guardian).”
Refusal to go to school or to work is followed by increasing withdrawal and moodiness, and often aggression against parents. “In the West, family violence suggests the violence of a husband to his wife or children,” said Tamaki Saito, the psychiatrist who coined the term hikikomori. “In Japan, it is the violence of children against their parents.”
The causes of the condition are only vaguely understood, but it is clear that it is a peculiarly Japanese phenomenon. The intense pressure to achieve academically and conform to norms in school, at work and in society are cited as explanations. Hikikomori are those who snap under the pressure and, rather than competing, choose to withdraw from society altogether.
Affluence is a precondition, because without parents to feed them and provide them with a roof above their heads, most hikikomori would starve. But the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy has created a world in which, for the first time since the war, a lifetime of employment is no longer guaranteed.
Unlike Britain, it is normal for Japanese children to live at home until they marry. “People sometimes say that this is just a problem of self-indulgence and that is a very big misunderstanding,” Dr Saito said. “But the cultural background is very important. You don’t get this problem in developing countries, because people there have to work to live. This is a Japanese problem, uniquely so, because in Japan people expect to be supported by their families after they grow up.”
True social withdrawal is not just a passing phase. The most extreme case known to Mr Okuyama is a man of 53 who has been living in his room for 30 years. Hikikomori can be talked out of their rooms, but it requires persistent and dedicated work by counsellors and social workers. At present this work is done by networks of volunteers, many of them hikikomori parents, hopelessly ill-matched to the scale of the problem.
“Hikikomori are not mad or stupid,” Dr Saito said. “They are shy, gentle, clever people and this is a problem for all of us. A society that abandons the weak, and only values the strong — that’s no society at all.”
TACKLING THE PROBLEM
The Japanese Youth Development Association estimates that there are 600,000 to 1.6 million hikikomori.
A survey completed in July last year by the Japanese Health Ministry found that more than a third of hikikomori were over the age of 30. An earlier survey conducted by a group representing parents of hikikomori found that more than 70 per cent of sufferers were over 20. Symptoms normally appear around the age of 15.
Online counselling is the latest approach being adopted to help sufferers. Despite the belief that Japan’s increasing dependence on artificial forms of communication is one of the root causes of social withdrawal, counsellors report that hikikomori have tended to be far more forthcoming when communicating by e-mail.
January 31, 2004 at 01:12 AM in Japan

Deep pessimism infecting many aspects of Japanese society

By Michael Zielenziger
Posted on Wed, Dec. 18, 2002
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/4768129.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

TOKYO - Kenji has seldom left his bedroom in five years. On a good day, when he forces himself, he can almost get to the front door of his mother's small Tokyo apartment before fear overtakes him.
"It requires a lot of courage just to go downstairs and get the mail," said the 34-year-old shut-in, who is thin as a twig and nearly as fragile. "I have two personalities: One who doesn't want to go out and one who does. They are fighting with each other constantly."
Kenji's self-imposed confinement is surprisingly common in Japan today, after a decade of economic decline that has produced many worrisome effects. At least 1 million young Japanese adults, the vast majority men, imprison themselves in their rooms for months or even years at a time, according to Tamaki Saito, the first therapist to write a book on the subject. They sleep during the daytime and pace their rooms at night, hardly ever leaving except for a quick run to the 7-Eleven, if they can manage that.
Counselors and psychiatrists say Kenji's reclusiveness, known here as "hikikomori," is an illness that exists only in Japan and was unknown even there until a decade ago. Hikikomori sufferers shut themselves off from siblings and friends, even parents, whom they sometimes attack in violent outbursts.
Kenji's behavior is a symptom of Japan's decline. A growing number of professional counselors and other experts worry that the nation itself is becoming a lot like Kenji: isolated, apprehensive and unable to interact with the outside word. More than 10 years after the country's economic bubble burst, there is little prospect of a rebound.
"I fear that Japan, as a nation itself, is becoming hikikomori," said psychiatrist Satoru Saito, who treats shut-ins and counsels families in his Tokyo clinic. "It is a nation that does not like to communicate. It is a nation that does not like to take risks. So what these young adults are doing is a mirror of what they see around them in adult society."
The United States and other wealthy industrial nations are also being buffeted by rapid economic, technological and social change. But few nations are as wedded to conformity and resistant to change as contemporary Japan.
In the past year, Knight Ridder has interviewed dozens of counselors, psychiatrists, sociologists and social thinkers; attended group therapy sessions with hikikomori patients; visited clinics; and interviewed families to document Japan's splintering social structure. Most of the patients did not want their full names used, to protect their privacy.
These conversations suggest that the same forces that helped Japan achieve decades of strong economic growth after it was defeated in World War II - social coherence, shared goals and group conformity - now prevent it from moving forward, and its people are seeking social and psychological escape.
Japan's decline eventually will affect the United States. Japan is America's closest ally in Asia, the fulcrum of American security policy in the region and home to a number of important U.S. air and naval bases. Japan's usefulness as an ally will decline as its more dynamic neighbors outpace it.
Japan's trains still run on time, its streets are safe and most people live comfortably. Handguns are illegal, drug problems do not permeate schools or streets, and random violence is virtually unknown.
Still, deep pessimism has infected many aspects of Japanese society:
- Japanese are killing themselves in record numbers, more than 31,000 per year, three times the number who die in traffic accidents. Their suicide rate is the highest among industrialized nations and is steadily climbing. The rate among workers in their 30s has risen nearly 45 percent since 1996.
- Japan's birthrate is among the lowest in the industrial world and still declining, because young women are avoiding marriage and refusing to bear children. By 2005, Japan's population will begin to shrink, a trend that demographers say will be nearly impossible to reverse. The labor force, likewise, will dwindle drastically.
- Alcohol consumption is declining across the globe, but not here. Though alcoholism is rampant and accepted as a release from work and social pressure, it is almost never discussed by opinion leaders or at the workplace.
- Japanese workers are increasingly dissatisfied with their lives, stressed out and depressed, and modern antidepressants have become legal only recently. A survey of 43 nations by the Pew Research Center, released this month, found that Japanese are far more pessimistic about themselves and their children's future than the people of any other relatively prosperous nation.
- The demise of Japan's extended family structure is causing unprecedented strains. While divorce rates are low, couples are growing apart, living in sexless marriages, often in separate bedrooms. Stressed-out mothers force their children to study and go to "cram school" in order to pass competitive entrance exams to high school and college, while absentee fathers spend their time and energy at work.
"Whether it's hikikomori, alcoholism or sexless couples, these are all different manifestations of the same problem," said Masahiro Yamada, a prominent sociologist. "These are all symptomatic of the social and psychological deadlock of Japanese society.
"When you look around at Japanese society, you see that more and more people have just given up."
Men such as Kenji appear desperate to fit into society. Yet when they pursue even modest individuality, they generate friction that leaves them burned out or too weak to cope.
Though Kenji seldom leaves home, he agreed to speak about his condition after twice begging off, tearfully explaining on the telephone, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just can't come." When he finally did agree to talk, he said it was the first time in five years that he had left his apartment or spoken to anyone except his mother.
After just two trips outside their apartment, he became angry and "unstable," his mother said. He since has retreated to his room again, and his mother refuses to let him come to the phone, speak to outsiders or be photographed.
Kenji once was a mischievous child who loved playing third base. But he remembers being suddenly "frozen out" by classmates at his Tokyo grade school at age 12, when they inexplicably stopped talking to him.
"First it was just the boys, but within a week it was the girls, too," he said. "I thought it would pass after the winter school vacation, but it didn't change at all. Since I wasn't a student who studied hard, without having any friends I couldn't find a reason to go to school. It was too painful."
Today, some 20 years later, he talks about those events as if they had happened yesterday.
Articulate and thoughtful, he managed to graduate from a nighttime high school, then took correspondence courses and passed the exam to enter university. But he found himself paralyzed, unable to leave his family's small apartment to attend classes.
Now he spends his days reading newspapers, watching sports and thinking.
"Maybe I think too much," Kenji admitted, his thin eyebrows fluttering nervously, a large old bruise visible on his left eyebrow as he rubbed his thinning hair. "After 21 years of being different, I don't mean to sound arrogant . . . but maybe I think more deeply than others."
Psychiatrists describe hikikomori as a syndrome in which young adults, usually men in their 20s and 30s, shut themselves off from the world, away from friends, school or work, for six months or more. These individuals do not suffer from other known psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, autism or panic disorder. Hikikomori is different from agoraphobia, which occurs in the United States, whose victims fear leaving home to visit an unsettled social environment but can mix with friends or relatives in their homes.
Counselors and sociologists said Kenji's behavior was an extreme effort to escape the suffocating pressure for conformity that was preventing Japan from coping with global changes and devising a new future for itself.
"We were raised in a culture that didn't teach us to think for ourselves," said Dr. Hiroko Mizushima, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and also serves in Japan's parliament. "We were trained to fit in. But now we need to find a path that permits variable values," and allows more diverse thought and action.
Many Japanese children wear identical uniforms to school. They are taught the same lessons on the same day from a government-mandated textbook, and they're trained to regurgitate facts, not to think for themselves. From early childhood, they're trained to fit into the group and to stomp out diversity, often through the cruelest kinds of social pressure.
"This culture does not permit you to express your own individual feelings or thoughts, so you must hide them," said Yuichi Hattori, a California-trained counselor who treats hikikomori patients in his suburban Tokyo clinic.
Brutal coercion to conform in school, along with pressure to attend cram school, or juku, often pushes young adults to the breaking point. "Japan is like a cult, and those who deviate get bullied," Hattori said.
Many hikikomori sufferers said they lived in constant fear of judgment.
"If I left my home during the day, my neighbor would just give me that look," said Nori, a 26-year-old shut-in who fell off the rails after he failed a university entrance examination. "It was as if they were staring right through me, like I wasn't a person. I just couldn't stand it." Eventually Nori responded by going out only after midnight, when he was sure no one else in his parents' apartment block would see him.
Stress and fatigue also trigger the social isolation. Dai Hasebe dropped out of junior high school after his parents enrolled him in a juku designed to help him pass the competitive high school entrance exams. In elementary school, the 12-year-old hadn't gotten home until after 10 at night.
"After a while, I just got tired," said Hasebe, now 19, who has spent most of the past six years secluded in his parent's three-room Tokyo apartment. "There was no particular incident," such as bullying or a harsh conversation with a teacher, that made him stop going to school, he said. "I was just relieved not to have a schedule."
Hasebe now wears shoulder-length hair and a moustache and whiles away each afternoon building scale models in his bedroom. He constructs Japanese Zero fighter planes and French helicopters, draws precise diagrams of military equipment and designed a sort of 21st-century fantasy gladiator, a silvery pterodactyl with a rocket launcher that stands sentry in the entryway of his family's home. Hasebe hardly eats; his pants barely stay on his hips even when they're tightly belted.
He said he would love to work in computer graphics or design airplanes. About once a month, he ventures out to a so-called "free space," an alternative school he has visited regularly during the past five years for a trace of social interaction. At the center, he uses a desktop computer to churn out new computer-assisted designs of futuristic aircraft.
In some ways, Hasebe seems lucky, because he has found a social outlet. Many other shut-ins, such as Kenji, nurse psychic injuries 15 or 20 years after they first occurred. "Patients with hikikomori become totally isolated from human communities," counselor Hattori said. "The issues just fester."
"All my 16 hikikomori patients have more than two personality states," Hattori said. "Their personalities get split by traumatic stress." Unlike classic schizophrenics, however, hikikomori patients don't lose touch with reality.
Dr. Kosuke Yamazaki, a professor of child psychiatry at the Tokai University School of Medicine, thinks hikikomori reflects quintessential Japanese social values. "In Western societies, you suffer from antisocial behavior," such as slashing tires or shoplifting, he explained one afternoon in his hospital office. "Here in Japan, people suffer from nonsocial behavior," such as withdrawing from society
Yamazaki thinks hikikomori patients' frustration is the leading cause of domestic violence in Japan, as lonely, isolated and troubled adult children lash out in a cry for help. "They behave like brutal tyrants," he said.
Hattori said many of his patients often expressed fear that they would kill their parents by accident. "They say they have a personality that sometimes rages out of control," Hattori said.
To demonstrate the way patients suffer, he introduced Mariko, a 22-year-old graduate of a two-year college who, he said, suffers from a mild form of hikikomori.
She can hold down an occasional job, and went to some of her university classes. But she is unable to form emotional relationships, is frequently depressed and says social conversation completely fatigues her. She usually stays closeted in her bedroom.
Sprawled on a red couch in Hattori's suburban clinic, the young woman was transformed during a counseling session from an intelligent young adult into a whimpering 5-year-old who kicked her legs peevishly. Sometimes she seemed torpid and tranquil, a needy child in search of love. At other moments she lashed out, saying she wanted to kill her father.
"He's a coward. He's not respectable. I can never understand what he's thinking," Mariko said, speaking in a trance-like state. "I never see his emotions. He never played with me. I don't want to become like him."
With Hattori's prompting, she vividly recalled a time when, as a small child, her father put ugly cicada bugs on her arm, frightening her as she watched television.
During the three-hour session, Mariko often compressed her shoulders, narrowed her eyes and became flush-faced as she turned into a grade-school child and described trying to fit in without being bullied. "I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. I wanted to express myself, but I couldn't," she whimpered. "I played a role so I wouldn't be bullied by others, but I got very tired trying to keep up appearances.
"When kids get bullied, the parents should understand, but they don't," Mariko explained through tears. "They yell at their kids and tell them to fit in. I only wanted to be regarded as a normal person."
Mariko's violent anxieties are well understood by parents in the community center of Higashi-Omiya, a suburb north of Tokyo. One Sunday each month, more than 120 parents of hikikomori patients gather to discuss the illness and how they are coping with their angry, isolated children.
Masahisa Okuyama, whose son suffers from hikikomori, founded the KHJ support network, which now has 31 chapters across Japan. Its name is formed from the initials in Japanese for obsessive neurosis, persecution mania and personality disorder.
"Parents are also victims of this disease," explained Okuyama, a former advertising executive, who was beaten by his 27-year-old shut-in son. He abandoned the family's suburban home for a small apartment out of fear that his son would kill him.
"He hates me, but the relationship between parent and child is so strong," Okuyama said. "He can kill me or I could kill him. Let's face it, we've been dissolved as a family."
More than half the parents in the group said they'd been attacked by their children. One woman pulled up her sleeve and revealed an ugly black-and-blue mark, the result of being assaulted by her son. Another woman sleeps in her car for fear that her son will beat her.
Around one table, a group of 11 parents discussed how best to reach out to their children. Most cooked dinner for their children and left food outside their bedroom doors. Some said their children left their rooms only when their parents went to bed. With tinges of guilt, many admitted that they found it difficult to communicate with their children when they were younger.
Some fathers said they devoted so much time and energy to work that they had no choice but to neglect their domestic lives. "If I leave my work early, I would inconvenience my customers," one father said without apology.
Some psychiatrists think that only "tough love" will cure hikikomori patients, and that if parents stop feeding and supporting their adult children they will be forced to abandon the sanctuary of their rooms. But these parents said it wasn't that simple.
"If I don't feed my son, he'd just starve to death," one woman said. "I doubt I could let that happen."
Kenji desperately wanted to find a way to rejoin society. "I sometimes look back and say, `How did I become like this?'" he said.
Earlier this year, he wrote a letter to Okuyama, the head of the counseling group for parents, begging for help. "I just don't know what to do," he said in his letter. "I'm looking for a single ray of light."
Okuyama responded with a friendly note describing the work of KHJ and inviting him to attend a meeting. But Kenji never went. Okuyama later admitted that "maybe it was too far a step" to suggest that Kenji leave his house and go to a meeting with hundreds of strangers.
Psychiatrist Hattori said men such as Kenji weren't at fault, but were fighting a social order that created their illness. Japan, he said, "is like a community without escape. There is no way out. To survive here, you must conform to the will of the powerful. So all you can do is avoid conflict with other people by staying in your own room."
"When you are raised by a wolf you grow up a wolf," Kenji said. "You can't go back into normal society. That's how I feel. Teachers tell you, `You are free to grow up and become what you want.' But adults can't show us any example where that's true."

© 2002 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.realcities.com

Japan: The Missing Million

Sunday, 20 October, 2002, 19:50 GMT 20:50 UK
By Phil Rees, reporting from Japan for Correspondent
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/2334893.stm

Teenage boys in Japan's cities are turning into modern hermits - never leaving their rooms. Pressure from schools and an inability to talk to their families are suggested causes. Phil Rees visits the country to see what the "hikikomori" condition is all about.

I knew him only as the boy in the kitchen.
His mother, Yoshiko, wouldn't tell me his name, fearful that neighbours in this Tokyo suburb might discover her secret.
Her son is 17 years old. Three years ago he was unhappy in school and began to play truant.
Then one day, he walked into the family's kitchen, shut the door and refused to leave.

Families adjust
Since then, he hasn't left the room or allowed anyone in.
The family have since built a new kitchen - at first they had to cook on a makeshift stove or eat take away food.
His mother takes meals to his door three times a day.
The toilet is adjacent to the kitchen, but he only baths once every six months.
Yoshiko showed me pictures of her son before his retreat into isolation; he was a plump, cheerful young teenager, with no symptoms of mental illness.

Bullying tipped the balance
Then a classmate taunted him with anonymous hate letters and scrawled abusive graffiti about him in the schoolyard.
The boy in the kitchen suffers from a social disorder known in Japan as hikikomori, which means to withdraw from society.
One psychologist has described the condition as an "epidemic", which now claims more than a million sufferers in their late teens and twenties.
The trigger is usually an event at school, such as bullying, an exam failure or a broken romance.

Unique condition
Dr Henry Grubb, a psychologist from the University of Maryland in the United States, is preparing the first academic study to be published outside Japan.
He says that young people the world over fear school or suffer agoraphobia, but hikikomori is a specific condition that doesn't exist elsewhere.
"It's really hard to get a handle on this" he told me, "there's nothing like this in the West."
Dr Grubb is also surprised by the passive, softly, softly approach followed by parents and counsellors in Japan.
"If my child was inside that door and I didn't see him, I'd knock the door down and walk in. Simple. But in Japan, everybody says give it time, it's a phase or he'll grow out of it."
If children refuse to attend school, social workers or the courts rarely get involved.
Most consider hikikomori a problem within the family, rather than a psychological illness.

Historical origins
Japan's leading hikikomori psychiatrist, Dr Tamaki Saito, believes the cause of the problem lies within Japanese history and society.
Traditional poetry and music often celebrate the nobility of solitude.
And until the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had cut itself off from the outside world for 200 years.
More recently, Dr Saito points to the relationship between mothers and their sons.
Most hikikomori sufferers are male, often the eldest son.
"In Japan, mothers and sons often have a symbiotic, co-dependent relationship.
Mothers will care for their sons until they become 30 or 40 years old."
After a period of time - usually a matter of years - some re-enter society.

The mystery remains
Increasingly, clinics are opening, offering a half-way house for recovering sufferers.
Another sufferer, Tadashi, spent four years without leaving his home.
Two years ago, he sought help and now has a part time job making doughnuts.
Tadashi is slowly re-entering society.
He still fears meeting strangers and is petrified that neighbours will find out that he once suffered from the disorder.
But what bothers him most is not understanding why he lost four years of his life.
"I want to know the reasons," he told me. "You could say it's related to Japanese traditions.
"I just don't know. I suppose people are still trying to find out what hikikomori is all about."

Phil Rees talks to Masayuki Okuyama about his violent hikikomori son (/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/2336883.stm)

Full programme transcript (/1/shared/spl/hi/programmes/correspondent/transcripts/2334893.txt)
Japan: The Missing Million: Sunday 20 October 2002 on BBC Two at 1915 BST
Reporter: Phil Rees
Produced and Directed: Darren Conway
Editor: Karen O'Connor
Deputy Editor: David Belton
Online Producer: Andrew Jeffrey

Blind Trust: Large Groups and their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror

a newly published book by

Vamik D. Volkan, M.D.

About the author:
Vamik Volkan is emeritus professor of psychiatry and founder of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI) at the University of Virginia, School of Medicine in Charlottesville, VA. He is a former president of the International Society of Political Psychology; and a former member of The Carter Center's International Negotiation Network; and is currently the Senior Erik Erikson Scholar at The Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA.

His book is written in an easy-to-read style for the layperson while including extensive footnotes for the scholar. It offers descriptions of field studies by the author alone and with members of CSMHI teams from locations such as: the US, Estonia, Macedonia, Turkey, Cyprus, South Africa, Croatia, Macedonia, and Georgia among others. The book introduces new theories structured in four parts:

• Theories of what comprises large group identity and rituals and what triggers large group regression;
• Studies religious fundamentalism from Waco to Iraq and terrorism;
• The role of leaders' personalities to either inflame or tame large groups and the use of political propaganda;
• A case example from Albania.

In praise of Blind Trust:

This book is the culmination of over three decades of profound immersion in the most pressing socio-political conflicts of our time, by a psychoanalyst with probably the most direct experience with such issues of any in the psychoanalytic world…the author applies his knowledge of depth psychology to the turbulent and destructive human experiences in the current cauldrons of the greatest unrest and disaster throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Volkan writes of activities of astonishing import, as he served as envoy, negotiator and consultant, on Commissions from the United Nations to the American Psychiatric, ...Israel to Egypt, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Kuwait, both halves of post-War Berlin and the Soviet Union. Utilizing his psychoanalytic knowledge to illuminate the etiologic bases of war, revolution, massacres and terror, as these have disturbed the world from ancient times to modern civilization; his voice speaks for the imperative of reason, the application of modern analytic knowledge for conflict resolution at the highest levels.

Volkan's subjects are large groups and their leaders…the prophet Muhammad…Stalin, Milosevic, and Osama Bin Laden, or David Koresh are interspersed with examinations of religion and fundamentalism, separately, each from both sides, and a sober study, including the Moslem view, of suicide attackers. Volkan's detailed and scholarly description of regressive movements in large group identities, complemented by an equal attention to progressive and creative reparative forces, is perhaps the most significant expansion of psychoanalytic group psychology since Freud's original breakthrough.

- Leo Rangell
Past President, International Psychoanalytic Association; Past President, American Psychoanalytic Association

For decades, Dr. Vamk Volkan has innovatively brought together the political and behavioral sciences to help explore and understand the role of political leadership. In this book he studies that role in times of crisis and terror. With greater severity and increasing frequency acts of terror are being directed at civilians. The responses of governments are not always appropriate or proportionate. In these complex and worrying times this study could not be more timely. It is written in an easy and accessible style. I found it fascinating and learnt much of value from it.

- Justice Richard Goldstone
Former Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Chairperson, International Task Force on Terrorism, The International Bar Association

Pitchstone Publishing www.pitchstonepublishing.com (888) 800-0891
Hardcover $26.95 Paperback $17.95

Order now and receive 10% off their regular price - including free shipping!
Book is available now at Pitchstone - and not anywhere else for 3 more months!

Dear All,
I found this article to be very concise, Sam Bahour forwarded the link to me. Thank you!
Please note that Howard Adelman and Ervin Staub are both on our Advisory Board.
Most warmly!
Evelin

Battling to understand our genocidal instinct
by Olivia Ward
Jun. 5, 2004
http://www.thestar.com/
Reproduced with permission - Torstar Syndication Services

"Animals fight, but they don't wage war," says the German social critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger. "Only man — unique among the primates — practises this large-scale, deliberate and enthusiastic destruction of his fellow creatures."

With scenes of near-anarchy in Iraq, murder and destruction in Israel and the Palestinian territories, slaughter in Sudan and new killings in Chechnya fresh in their minds, a group of international scholars will gather at University of Western Ontario this weekend to examine a topic that underlies much of the current news: Why Neighbours Kill.

Subtitled "Explaining the Breakdown in Ethnic Relations," it is the 10th international conference of the university's Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict Research Group. And at a time of ongoing warfare in many parts of the globe, it will look at such vexing questions as "how do groups that share economic ties, social space and public facilities come to engage in deadly violence against each other?"

For many people, such topics merely spark anger, anguish and despair. And as one war follows another with barely a pause for breath, they wonder if discussing them has lost its point. The urge to kill is widespread: Endless war has become part of the 21st-century psyche.

Howard Adelman, a visiting professor at Princeton University and senior scholar at York University, has studied the question closely, in the Middle East and currently Rwanda, where one of the worst genocides in modern history took place in the 1990s.

"We've learned a lot about why and when people kill each other," he says. "But we still haven't learned our lessons well enough. Countries can slide toward war, while people cry out for something to be done. In Sudan just now, a crisis has been going on for a year. There were many committed people willing to help, but the peace process foundered. The information was there, but it wasn't used for a constructive policy."

The case of Sudan has many of the elements of the catastrophic recent wars of Africa, Asia and Europe. There, in the western province of Darfur, two anti-government guerrilla groups began an uprising last February, and the government responded by backing local Arab militias, the Janjaweed, to attack suspected rebels. A humanitarian disaster followed, with thousands killed, a million driven from their homes and more than 100,000 fleeing to Chad.

The drastic outcome is similar to that of the ethnic cleansing wars that swept across the Balkans after the regime of strongman Josip Broz Tito, the destruction of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the killings in Rwanda.

One of the most powerful elements common to those cases was a breakdown of order and lack of institutions that provide a system of justice.

Once the slaughter begins, it is often too late to prevent the worst excesses. But the question of how individuals make the transition from neighbours to enemies, and eventually killers, is the one of the most vital to understanding the nature of conflicts.

Landon Hancock, a specialist in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University in Virginia, says seeds of war are planted from the time humans first develop a sense of identity as part of a group.

"It could be an ethnic group, a religious group, a tribal or purely national affiliation," he says. "The key element is that we all divide ourselves into those who are inside the group and those who are not: what psychologists call the `self' and the `other.'" Once trouble strikes, many people retreat to the security of that group, and polarize their identities. `Us and them' becomes the order of the day.

"One good example was the increase in patriotic sentiment in the United States following the attacks of Sept. 11," he says.

When the threat worsens, a "fear of extinction" sets in, says Hancock. The threat need not be real; it could be the result of propaganda. Governments and guerrillas often exploit primitive fears in a cynical way, to turn anxious people to violence.

"To get a war going you need the people on the top policy level to create the vision," says Adelman. "You need the people in the middle who administer the plan and give the orders. And you need the `little guys' who actually kill. They are usually not motivated at all. They need different kinds of inducements, like fear, peer pressure and drugs. It's a distasteful thing they are going to do, and it's hard work convincing them."

Most ethnic and religious wars are not spontaneous, analysts say. Although small skirmishes may result from local incidents, a network of planning is required to motivate a society to fight.

One element that drives the fighting instinct is a history of injustice. In time of instability, groups look back at a "chosen trauma" that reminds them who their enemy is. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, for instance, recalled a 14th-century battle in Kosovo that led to the occupation of Serbia by the Ottoman Empire, as added justification for "ethnic cleansing" of the Albanian Muslims from Kosovo.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Children must not be taught absolute obedience, even though it seems to contradict the wishes of the state'

Ervin Staub, University of Massachusetts

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When past and present traumas are part of the scenario, the result is even more intractable. Israelis and Palestinians, says Daniel Bal-Tar of the University of Tel Aviv, "violently confront each other through 100 years over social identity, territory, natural resources, self-determination, holy places, economic gains, personal and collective security and values."

Even more important to perpetuating killing is discrediting the enemy. Once a group is convinced its foe is untrustworthy and murderous, it is easier to endorse any form of violence against it.

"It's a progressive situation," says Adelman. "First you have to designate somebody as the `other,' then he becomes a lesser person. Then he's a threat. And finally, he must be excluded. If you can't force him out, the only way is to kill him."

Once killing starts, he says, the perpetrators will go to any length to exterminate their enemies: "You don't just kill, you dismember and humiliate. In Rwanda, sexual mutilation was common. It's a form of purification, a way of taking back the territory."

Ethnically, politically or religiously motivated conflict isn't waged only in Third World countries and dictatorships. Those who believe democracy is a bar to mass killing are wrong, says John Dovidio of Colgate University in New York state.

Studying black and white communities in the United States, Dovidio found that even when classic racism is no longer visible on the streets, subtle, unacknowledged racism can have destructive consequences.

The line between those who commit crimes against neighbours and those who resist the urge to kill may be skepticism about authority.

Ervin Staub, a psychology professor at University of Massachusetts, says that the pressure to conform is intense in democratic as well as authoritarian countries, but those who question propaganda, or orders that go against their morality, do exist in every society, though they may be in the minority.

"It's important for people to be educated not to have total respect for authority," he says. "Children must not be taught absolute obedience, even though it seems to contradict the wishes of the state."

Since Hungarian-born Staub was rescued from the Nazis at age 6, he has spent his life trying to understand why people turn against each other murderously. Working with Rwandans, he has applied his knowledge to preventing future massacres.

"When genocide happens it's because the victims were first dehumanized. The survivors also dehumanize the perpetrators. One of the first steps toward reconciliation is the humanizing of the people who committed these awful acts."

Once a war ends, Staub says, it's vital to begin reducing discrimination and building a pluralistic society in which everyone can speak out without fear. Freedom of expression and the media are keys to moving on from violence to tolerance.

"One thing to remember is that those who commit terrible acts are also wounded by what they have done. They must be able to talk about their suffering, and acknowledge the suffering of their victims. Otherwise, when new threats occur, people will retreat into their own traumas and feel they must lash out. That keeps up the cycle of violence."

And the cycle can very easily spin out of control. The wildfire looting of Iraq's national treasures by its own people in the recent conflict, and the trashing of hospitals, schools and sports facilities that serve the same community that vandalizes them, are as incomprehensible to outsiders as killing.

"In the collective running amok," says Enzensberger, in his essay "Civil War," "the concept of future disappears. Only the present matters. Consequences do not exist. The instinct for self-preservation, with the restraining influence it brings to bear, is knocked out of action. One is reminded of Freud, who felt he had no alternative but to postulate the existence of a death drive."

Before the bloodshed reaches that nihilistic level, however, analysts say there is often ample chance to stop it. Understanding how wars are launched is a first step.

But for observers on the sidelines, having the political will, decisiveness and experience to halt violence is more difficult:

Sometimes neighbours kill because they are allowed to.

"In Rwanda, it was the easiest possible scenario to stop," says Adelman. "But knowing what to do didn't translate into action."

I recollected how Mahathma Gandhi dealt with humiliation of the Indians in South Africa by the then White Government (sometime 1910-20): The government made a statutory stipulation that every Indian must carry an identity card. Gandhi found such mandatory demand humiliating. The government came down and offered to repeal the mandatory provision provided all Indians agreed voluntarily acquire the card. Gandhi consented. But after all the Indians acquired the card the government reintroduced it as a mandatory statute. A double humiliation. Gandhi then announced and carried out a program of burning of all identity cards in a bonfire in a public square. (I may be inaccurate on certain facts and nuances of the episode but I remember the episode broadly for the moral creativity of Mahathma Gandhi--getting even in a non-violent way with public, state-inflicted collective humiliation through collective public action of defiance. More accurate details must be available in Mahathma Gandhi's autobiography 'My Experiments with Truth' and Erik Erikson's classic, 'Gandhi's Truth: the Origins of Militant Non-Violence' and innumerable publications by and about Mahathma Gandhi). There are other episodes of humiliation in Gandhi's life which he has candidly recorded in his autobiography.

How Gandhi dealt with humiliation is a study that merits undertaking. His way was different from the way it was dealt with by other leaders of the Indian Renaissance. His weapon of 'Sathyagraha' is one normative response to humiliation.

The readiness with which we recognise and agree with the content and message of a book is the measure of its worth and greatness. That was, for example, my response when I read Jean Paul Sartre's discovery of immeasurable freedom in our psyche, buried deep beneath the debris of our individual and collective repressions. Again when I read Winston Churchill's moral of the II World War 'goodwill in peace; resolution in despair; defiance in defeat and magnanimity in victory'. and many other such writers.

Raja Ganesan

Cooperative Learning and Peace Education
By David Johnson, Roger Johnson, and Edythe Holubec

Peace education is a key component of what TSR seeks to bring to classrooms, and cooperative learning is seen as a teaching methodology that is particularly compatible with peace education. This article originally appeared in "The Cooperative Link," the newsletter of The Cooperative Learning Institute (http://www.co-operation.org/) Vol. 19, #1, March 2004. Editors: David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, Edythe Holubec.

The Nature of Peace and Peace Education
Given the current state of the world, reflecting on the nature of peace education seemed timely. In order to understand the nature of peace, it is necessary to understand the interrelationships among war, peace, cooperation, and conflict. War is a state of open and declared armed combat between states or nations, peace is freedom from war or strife (or a state of mutual concord between governments), cooperation is working together to achieve mutual goals, and conflict is the occurrence of incompatible activities (Deutsch, 1973; Johnson & Johnson, 1989). War and peace are two ends of a single continuum, so if there is war there is no peace and vice versa. Peace exists when there is cooperation among nations and war ends when cooperation is reestablished. Peace, however, is not an absence of conflict. Peace is a state in which conflicts occur frequently and are resolved constructively (war, in contrast, is a state in which conflicts are managed through the use of large scale violence).

One hope to establish and maintain peace is peace education. Peace education may be defined as teaching what peace is, how it may be established, how it may be maintained, and the factors influencing its continuation or demise. The ultimate goal of peace education is to give students the knowledge, procedural competencies, identity, and values required to maintain peace within themselves (intrapersonal peace), among individuals (interpersonal peace), among groups (intergroup peace), and among countries, societies, and cultures (international peace).

The broad nature of the definition of peace education makes it difficult for teachers to decide what to implement in their classrooms to help create a more peaceful world. There are at least four peace education programs needed in all classrooms: Constructive controversy, teaching students to be peacemakers, ethical judgment, and forgiveness.

Constructive Controversy
Establishing peace requires making decisions about difficult issues (often involving ethnic, cultural, or religious differences) that reflect the best reasoned judgment of everyone involved. Doing so is not easy. A procedure is needed that allows students to learn how to make effective decisions, such as constructive controversy.

In a controversy, participants make an initial judgment, present their conclusions to other group members, are challenged with opposing views, become uncertain about the correctness of their views, actively search for new information and understanding, incorporate others' perspectives and reasoning into their thinking, and reach a new set of conclusions.

This process results in significant increases in the quality of decision making and problem solving (including higher-levels of cognitive and moral reasoning, perspective taking, creativity, and attitude change about the issue), motivation to learn more about the issue, positive attitudes toward the controversy and decision making processes, the quality of relationships, and self-esteem. While the constructive controversy process can occur naturally, it may be consciously structured in decision making situations. This involves identifying the major alternative courses of action that may be taken to solve the problem, assigning two members to (a) develop the best case possible for the assigned alternative, (b) present it to the group and listen to the opposing positions, (c) engage in a discussion in which they attempt to refute the other positions and rebut attacks on their position, (d) reverse perspectives and present the other positions, and (e) drop all advocacy and seek a synthesis that takes both perspectives and positions into account. Then each year students are retrained in a more complex and sophisticated level of engaging in academic controversies from kindergarten through the 12th grade.

The educational use of controversy may be utilized in any subject matter. Engaging in the controversy process should pervade school life so that students develop considerable expertise in its use and incorporate the process into their identity. Any time students participate in the controversy procedure, they are getting a lesson in peace education and a lesson in democracy. By becoming skillful in the use of the academic controversy procedure individuals gain the competencies necessary to establish and maintain peace. The possibility of this taking place is strengthened by the foundation of theory and research on which the controversy procedure is based.

Ethical Reasoning
Peace depends on ethical judgment and ethical behavior. Ethical judgment involves reasoning about means and ends in light of principles (ethical codes) and context. Ethical judgment includes both moral reasoning and the cognitive skills involved in controlling, balancing, and guiding reasoning. Ethical judgment may be taught through the discussion of moral conflicts and dilemmas, particularly with peers who have different perspectives. Such discussions may emphasize optimistic thinking. Acting ethically includes a sensitivity to what is and is not ethical, reasoning about issues in the context of ethical principles, motivation to act in ethical ways, and the ability to actually engage in ethical actions. The more individuals strive to become ethical people, the more likely peace will exist.

Forgiveness
Establishing peace almost always involves forgiveness. In many conflicts, one of more disputant may believe that he or she has been unfairly wronged. Anger, righteous indignation, and a desire to hurt the offending disputant often result. In order for a constructive resolution of the conflict to be found, disputants have to forgive each other. Forgiveness involves willfully abandoning the negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors directed at the offender and instead developing positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward the offender. Forgiveness does not necessarily involve condoning (i.e., ignoring or subtly approving) an offense or reconciling with the offender, and it does not preclude constructive expressions of anger or reasonable redress of injustice. Students may be trained to be forgiving by developing four sets of competencies: Awareness (admitting that the offense took place and experiencing its negative consequences), making the decision to forgive rather than to focus on their negative responses, doing the internal work needed to forgive (such as reframing the offense and the offender so that forgiveness is possible), and experiencing the benefits of forgiveness (Enright, Gassin, & Knutson, 2003). Even in the most intractable, violent conflicts that continue for hundreds of years, individuals have forgiven each other and freed themselves from the anger, anxiety, and depression resulting from their exposure to violence.

Summary
One hope for peace is teaching all students in our schools the knowledge, procedural competencies, identity, and values required to maintain peace within themselves (intrapersonal peace), among individuals (interpersonal peace), among groups (intergroup peace), and among countries, societies, and cultures (international peace). Those competencies include how to engage in constructive controversies, negotiate mutually beneficial resolutions to conflicts, apply a high level of ethical judgment in resolving conflicts, and forgiving opposing disputants for what they have done in the past.

References
Deutsch, M. (1973). The resolution of conflict. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Enright, R., Gassin, E., & Knutson, J. (2003). Waging peace through forgiveness education in Belfast, Northern Ireland: A review and proposal for mental health improvement of children. Journal of Research in Education, 13(1), 51-61.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (1989). Cooperation and competition: Theory and research. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (Eds.). (2003). Frontiers in research: Peace education. Journal of Research in Education, 13(1), 39-91.

Narvaez, D., Herbst, R., Hagele, S., & Bomberg, A. (2003). Nurturing peaceful character. Journal of Research in Education, 13(1), 41-50.

This e-publication is for current members of this TESOL community (interest section or caucus); this issue was sent to TESOL member Francisco Gomes de Matos 02864.
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THIRD GLOBAL LINKING & LEARNING PROGRAMME ON ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS,
1-10 December 2004, Alcochete, Portugal

PROJECT PARTNERS
Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (Forum Asia), International
Human Rights Internship Program, International Network for Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net), Dignity International

WITH SUPPORT FROM
NOVIB, Oxfam Netherlands & the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland

INTRODUCTION
Eradicating poverty is one of the biggest human development challenges of
today. However global poverty cannot be eradicated by isolated projects
alone. It can only be achieved through the adoption and implementation of
consistent policies rooted in human rights, at the national, regional and
international levels.

Human rights provide a framework to tackle the root causes of poverty.
Increasing awareness of human rights can strengthen and invigorate efforts
for social change, as people learn what obligations and commitments their
governments have made to ensure the realization of human dignity for all.

The Linking & Learning Programme, organised for the third year, aims to
equip selected participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to
integrate human rights in their daily work. The programme is aimed at
activists from social and economic justice movements and at those working
directly with persons living in poverty.

The programme is implemented by Dignity International, in partnership with
the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (Forum-Asia), the
International Human Rights Internship Program,) and the International
Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net).

AIM OF THE PROGRAMME
The overall goal of this programme is to strengthen the knowledge and skills
of those working to empower people living in extreme poverty through the
adoption of a human rights framework and thereby contribute to build the
capacity of grassroots movements to better promote and defend basic ESC
rights.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROGRAMME
§ Provide organisations and grassroots activists from social and
economic justice movements with knowledge and a better understanding of ESC
rights and equip them with the skills necessary to become active in
promoting and defending ESC rights;

§ Engage in a process of enriching the meaning and content of ESC
rights as the grassroots participants collectively bring their on the ground
realities to the human rights dialogue;

§ Provide a space for the exchange of experiences and ideas in the
area of ESC rights and facilitate, where necessary, collaborative action
across regions through appropriate follow-up after the learning programme.

PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS
The programme will bring together twenty "catalysts" from the different
world regions. These persons will be in a position to spread knowledge and
skills they have acquired from the programme and to introduce/implement what
they have acquired within their own organisations or community. These
participants will be drawn from development organisations, and groups
fighting for social and economic justice. Priority will be given to women
and those coming directly from the grassroots organisations.

Concerning the participants and their profile - they should:
· play an active role within an organisation, movement or community,
and plan to continue this work in the near future;
· be in a position to act as multipliers or trainers within their
organisation of service;
· work directly with or be from the communities experiencing poverty
and social exclusion;
· have already some qualification or experience in terms of training
and project work;
· be committed to attend the full duration of the course;
· have their application supported by their organisation/community or
group and only one application per organisation will be considered;
· be able to present the context of their work, their way of tackling
problems, the challenges they meet and identify;
· be able to work and communicate in English.

Applicants from previous years who were not able to participate may resubmit
their applications.

FINANCIAL & PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Participation Fee - The organisers will charge a subsidized participation
fee of 200 Euros. This participation fee will cover course materials, lunch
and coffee breaks.

Travel Expenses - All selected participants are requested to cover their own
travel, board, lodging and other incidental expenses. A limited number of
scholarships will be available for selected candidates with no alternative
financial means to participate.

Scholarships - Please note that no one will be excluded for financial
reasons and that limited scholarships will be available for those with no
alternative financial means to participate.

Types of scholarships:
Category A: Fee waiver (to waive the participation fee of 200 Euros)
Category B: Partial Scholarship - Fee waiver + board & lodging
Category C: Full scholarship - Fee waiver + board & lodging & 80% of the
cheapest available economy class ticket

HOW TO APPLY ?
Please complete the attached application form. The application form can also
be accessed at http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/2004applicationform.doc
Applications should be sent to Dignity International with a valid signature
and stamp from the sending organisation, community or group.

For further details of the Call for Applications, please see
http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/2004callforapplicationfinal.doc

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS
Application forms should be sent to Dignity International no later than 15
AUGUST 2004, by email to: applications@dignityinternational.org by Fax: +
351 21 08 78 400 or by ordinary mail Dignity International, Vivenda Metta,
Avenida do Canto do Pinheiro, P-2890-154 Alcochete, PORTUGAL

The International Trauma Studies Program at New York University
is accepting applications until July 15, for its 2004-2005 training program.

This unique program, enriched by the participation of a diverse student body, offers a dynamic combination of academic studies, research, and practical experience working with trauma survivors in New York City, the U.S., and abroad.

The coming year’s visiting faculty of international pioneers in trauma studies includes Soeren Buus Jensen, MD, PhD, Claude Chemtob, PhD, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Pauline Boss, PhD, Judith Landau, MD, Nancy Baron, EdD, Carlos Sluzki, MD, and Sara Cobb, PhD., leading presentations, workshops and case consultations.

The one-year graduate certificate training program includes:

An overview of history, current theories, and controversies in the field
Assessment of the impact of traumatic events on individual, social and cultural systems
Practical skill building for everyday work and life
Training in effective interventions includes: body-oriented, cognitive behavioral, narrative/testimony, expressive arts, family systems, community resilience, public health, and culture based approaches
Multidisciplinary perspectives on representations of trauma, and on the arts, literature, and media as resources for recovery
Best practices in international psychosocial training and response
Current approaches in the field of collective trauma, resilience and co-existence
The political, moral and human rights dimensions of traumatic loss and suffering

For more information about the program, please contact:
Jack Saul, PhD, Director
International Trauma Studies Program
New York University
155 Avenue of the Americas, 4th Floor
New York, New York 10013
Tel. 212.691.6499 Fax 212.807.1809
trauma.studies@nyu.edu
http://www.nyu.edu/trauma.studies

Dear All

This is to inform you that Francisco Gomes de Matos (please meet him on our Advisory Board), a peace linguist from Recife, Brazil, has accepted an invitation from the International Reading Association to join its Editorial Advisory Board
for the new edition of that organization's The Literacy Dictionary: The Vocabulary of Reading and Writing.

Francisco is active in Terminology, and is especially interested in the phraseologies used in connection with Dignity, Humility, and Humiliation.
His e-mail is fcgm@hotlink.com.br.

Most warmly!

Evelin

DIGNITY INTERNATIONAL: MONTHLY NEWSBULLETIN - June 2004

Dignity News
* Dignity´s field visit to East Africa - Tribute to the local heroes
* Development & Human Rights ­ Dignity at the Interaction Forum 2004
* Advisory Council Member Minar Pimple visits Dignity office for talks
* The European Roundtable on ESC Rights

Other News
* The G8 Summit underway ­ An appeal by the Humanitarian Leaders
* Spanish NGOs join forces for Shadow Report on ESC Rights
* World Social Forum updates
* Dam affected Pak Mun residents write to the World Bank President
* Oxfam Coffee Shops ­ Progress´o´ in the Fair Trade Campaign
* Play Fair at the Olympics ­ campaign updates
* Children’s World Congress on Child Labour (Florence, Italy)
* The Global Population Forum 2004
* FAO European Regional Conference - Montpellier, France

Publications
* Social Watch Report 2004 ­ official presentation
* WSF new book - ”The World Social Forum: challenging empires”

Announcements
* Human Rights & Religious Freedom ­ Call for True Stories
* 1000 women for the Nobel Peace Prize ­ Call for Nominations

Upcoming events
* International Forum on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, 10-15 July

DIGNITY NEWS

*** Dignity´s field visit to East Africa: Tribute to the local heroes ­ “It
was a very humbling experience” said Thomas Nzumbi, Dignity´s Coordinator
for East Africa upon concluding a ten day field visit to Kenya and Tanzania
with Dignity´s Executive Director Aye Aye Win from 3 to 13 May. The Dignity
team met with a range of indigenous NGOs working with marginalized and
excluded groups as well as those working on a range of human rights and
development issues. The team also met with international development NGOs
and some government officials drafting Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. In
Nairobi, the team visited Korogocho and Kibera slums where residents from
the latter are facing large-scale evictions.

The Dignity team was impressed by the deep engagement of many organisations working hard on the ground to make a difference to people’s lives.

After 10 days of intense exchanges with indigenous NGOs and partners, the
team returned to base with a clear vision of how the organisation should
move ahead in the region and also about the work of Dignity International
globally. “Some of the ideas we have in mind for East Africa can be
test-cases for Dignity International globally” said Thomas Nzumbi.

Following this field visit, there is a greater resolve within the team and
those visited to help develop a new generation of human rights movements,
which can connect seemingly distant ideals of human rights with local
realities and can really make a difference to people’s lives on the ground.
“It is important to capture the determination and energy of the local
communities to improve their lives and combine that with grassroots,
national and international campaign efforts to bring about lasting social
change”, said Aye Aye Win.

A range of recommendations have been made in the Field Report, a copy of
which can be obtained by sending a mail to dignity@netvisao.pt or it can be
accessed directly at http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/SAFARI_REPORT.doc

Work in East Africa will be coordinated by Thomas Nzumbi - regional
coordinator for East Africa, who can be contacted at tnzumbi@hotmail.com

*** Interaction Forum 2004 - The annual conference of Interaction was held
from 17-19, 2004 in Washington, D.C. It was a gathering of over 600 leaders
from US non-governmental organizations, donors, the US government, academia,
and civil society organizations from the South. The Forum theme of this year
is "Operating in an Age of Uncertainty: New Challenges in Humanitarian and
Development Work."

Dignity was invited to contribute to the session on “A Rights-based
Approach: Expanding the Practice of Development through a Human Rights
Lens". During a lively session facilitated by Kathryn Wolford, Lutheran
World Relief, Aye Aye Win of Dignity International joined Larry Cox of the
Ford Foundation and Lynn Freedman of Columbia University on the panel.
Dignity’s contribution focused on the findings of the recent field mission
to East Africa, to illustrate the inadequacies of existing development
strategies of ´service delivery´ and how human rights can help the agencies
to tackle the root causes of poverty and bring about social change. For
Dignity’s contribution to the panel, see
http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/speech_interaction.doc

Dr. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, was the
closing speaker of Forum 2004. His speech focused on a rights-based approach
to development, and the implications of such an approach for international
NGOs engaged in development.
See http://www.interaction.org/forum2004/sen.html

*** Dignity’s Advisory Council Member, Minar Pimple recently visited the
Dignity office in Portugal. Minar Pimple, founder and Director of Youth for
Unity and Voluntary Action in India, and a member of the recent Mumbai
Organising Committee for the World Social Forum which succeeded to bring
together the largest participation of social and grassroots movements to
date, and who is now moving to New York to assume the position of Executive
Director of the People’s Decade for Human Rights Education has had extensive
experience in building indigenous social movements and international
initiatives. During his two days in Portugal, Minar advised Dignity
International on the way ahead with the modalities around the membership
drive for the organisation and the concrete steps that need to be taken to
build a strong global human rights movement.

*** The Government of Portugal and the International Commission of Jurists
organized the European Roundtable on Economic Social and Cultural Rights,
from 24th to 25th of May at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
Over 60 participants from European governments, as well as from NGOs working
on economic, social and cultural rights and related issues attended the
roundtable. Simone Andrade, Learning Associate of Dignity International also
participated in the roundtable.

The roundtable discussed issues related to the proposed ´Optional Protocol´
and provided a forum for the exchange of experiences, learning and
strategies towards the further national, regional and international
protection and promotion of ESC rights. For further details and a copy of
the report, please e-mail to talvarenga@sg.mne.gov.pt

As the roundtable proved to be a very enriching exercise to raise awareness
about economic, social and cultural rights, it is our hope that similar
roundtables can be organised in other continents of the world.

OTHER NEWS

*** The G8 Summit underway ­ An Appeal by the Humanitarian Leaders - Leaders from the so-called Group of Eight industrialized democracies arrive today at Sea Island, Georgia for a three day annual G8 summit. President Bush will host his counterparts from Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Russia, Germany,
the United Kingdom, and the European Union. In terms of humanitarian issues,
U.S. officials say President Bush is expected to focus the discussion on
food security in Africa, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, such as
Polio.
However, representatives from the largest humanitarian alliances in each of
the nations recently urged their respective leaders to also place the
eradication of extreme poverty as a permanent agenda item at this and future
G8 meetings.
Humanitarian leaders are calling upon the G8 leaders to:
- Formally place the eradication of extreme poverty as a central agenda item
at all G8 meetings;
- Recommit governments, by specifying concrete strategies and plans, to the
achievement of all of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015;
- Bring to bear and tailor all the tools necessary for meeting the
Millennium Development Goals, including, but not limited to, development
assistance, trade policies, debt relief, technology transfer and private
investment.

View the full statement at
http://www.interaction.org/files.cgi/2918_StatementCoalitionFinalFinal.pdf
(Source: Interaction)

NetAid Speaks Out for Education for All on Eve of G8 - NetAid, the Global
Campaign for Education, CARE and the Basic Education Coalition joinned hands
in a campaign to present to the world wealthier leaders letters from
children around the world demanding Education for All. On the inaugural day
of the Summit, these leaders will be faced with the result of this year’s
Action Week - where people from 110 countries participated to ensure every
child's right to go to school. This is a clear call to the eight most
powerful nations to listen to these children's voices, and make Education
for All a priority.
http://www.netaid.org/groups/news/news_item.pt?article_id=1310&group_id=848
(Source: NetAid Network)

For more information on Oxfam position on the 2004 G8 summit where they ask
the leaders to address two key issues for developing nations - peacekeeping
and debt relief.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/press/releases/g8070604.htm

The official US Government site: http://g8usa.gov/home.html

*** Spanish NGOs join forces for the Shadow Report on ESC Rights ­ The
government of Spain submitted its periodic report to the 32nd session of the
UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which met in Geneva
from 26 April ­ 14 May. Spanish NGOs, coordinated by Observatorio DESC,
joined forces to pull together a shadow report to the Committee, which can
be accessed at
http://www.descweb.org/continguts/documents/informeparalelo/INFORME-PARALELO
.doc
Official concluding observations of the UN Committee on ESCR on Spain can be
found at
http://www.descweb.org/continguts/documents/informeparalelo/SpainCOFinal.doc

As a follow-up, on the 17th of May, Observatorio DESC organised an
information meeting with NGOs and government officials on the outcomes of
the UN Committee on ESC Rights. For further information on Observatorio DESC
and its activities see http://www.descweb.org

*** The World Social Forum update ­ The fifth edition of the World Social
Forum will be held again in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from the 16th to the 31st
of January 2005. The mobilisation for the 2005 WSF has already begun. While
maintaining the diversity, which is typical of the WSF, the organisers plan
to transform the WSF into a space that is increasingly capable of
facilitating interlinkages and common actions among different participants
who come together in the WSF. In order to achieve that, the organisers plan
to improve the process of finalising “large events” (Conferences, Panels,
Testimonies and Round Tables of Dialogue and Controversies) as well as the
registration of hundreds of Seminars and Workshops that can be proposed by
any organisation registered for the event. For further information on the
proposed new format for the 2005 WSF, see:
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/dinamic.asp?pagina=cartainicial_ing

*** Dam affected Pak Mun residents write to World Bank President - To mark
the 60th Anniversary of the World Bank, Villager Committee for the
Rehabilitation of Life and Communities of the Mun River Basin sent a letter
to the World Bank President calling the Bank to end its support of
dam-building projects which harm local communities. Speaking from the
14-year experience of the Pak Mun Dam, which caused previously
self-sufficient communities to impoverishment, the residents appealed to the
World Bank not to subject the same fate to other parts of the world. See
http://www.thai.to/munriver

*** Oxfam Coffee Shops ­ Progres´o´ in the Fair Trade Campaign - Oxfam is
continuing to invest effort and imagination to raise awareness and knowledge
about Fair Trade. This time, Oxfam is planning to open Fair Trade Coffee
Shops in partnership with coffee grower co-operatives. “This is a bona fide
commercial venture”- says Wyndham James, managing director of Progreso ­ the
name of Oxfam’s chain of fair trade coffee shops. How an NGO will survive
the fierce of competition? Like David facing Goliath?
See: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/press/releases/progreso130504.htm

For further information on the Progreso Coffee Shops, see
http://www.progreso.org.uk/
For press coverage of this latest venture see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3708585.stm

*** Play Fair at the Olympics accuses The International Olympics Committee
of infringing its responsibility by closing its eyes to the exploitation of
workers from the sportswear companies connected with the Athens Olympic
Games.

At the same time, the campaign welcomes the attitude of some sportswear
brands, which have agreed to discuss their labour practices. The campaign
also highlights the huge civil society support it has been receiving.
(Source: http://www.fairolympics.org)

*** The Children’s World Congress on Child Labour was held in Florence,
Italy, from the 10th to the 13th of May. The Global March Against Child
Labour brought together 500 children to participate in the first
international conference where children, themselves, were the main speakers,
decision-makers and beneficiaries. It was a congress about children’s
problems, directed to them and held by them. Most of the participants were
former child labourers and were there representing different countries,
regions or organizations. These child-delegates were democratically elected
through consultative processes at national or local levels. After 3 days of
discussion, they drafted a Declaration, promising to continue the fight
against child labour and recalling that, being them the future, they detain
the power to decide it. For the whole Declaration, see:
http://www.globalmarch.org/worldcongress/dec.php3

*** The Global Population Forum 2004 was held in Washington, on May 13th to
15th. A three-day event organized by The Population Institute and Population
2005 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the United Nations International
Conference on Population and Development ­ Cairo, 1994 (ICPD). The event
brought to the agenda the discussion of the ICPD Program of Action. It
called attention to the successes and failures of its implementation and
tried to formulate concrete recommendations on how to better continue this
implementation. The major topics of the Forum were: Population and
Development; Family Planning and Reproductive Health; HIV/AIDS and other
Sexually Transmitted Infections; International Migration and Ageing. At the
end, it was adopted the Washington Declaration, strengthening the commitment
of making the Cairo Agenda a reality during the following decade.

For the full report: http://www.population2005.org/
About the ICPD - Cairo, 1994: http://www.iisd.ca/cairo.html

*** FAO European Regional Conference was held from 5-7 May in Montpellier,
France - On the occasion of its upcoming European regional Conference the
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has published
a list of European states that will not meet the target of reducing the
number of hungry and malnourished persons by half by 2015. In Russia alone,
6,2 Million persons are malnourished, with no sign of substantial
improvement. The report also names two new EU members who are "not on
track" - Latvia and Poland.

FIAN, the international human rights organisation for the right to food has
asked EU governments to take initiatives within to guarantee the human right
to food in the new EU member states. FIAN has also urged European
governments and the EU to fulfil their obligations towards people who are
facing hunger in other parts of the world. This includes a halt to dumping
of agricultural products in developing countries.

More information on the country rating of the FAO can be found at:
ftp://ftp.fao.org/unfao/bodies/erc/erc24/J1959E.doc
Source FIAN - http://www.fian.org

PUBLICATIONS

*** Social Watch Report 2004: Fear and Want ­ obstacles to Human Security -
Fear and want still stand on the way of human security around the world and
are major obstacles to achieving the development goals agreed to by all
countries of the world, concludes the Social Watch Report 2004. This report
was officially presented this 19th of May at United Nations headquarters in
New York. The report shows the obstacles faced by different populations when
exercising any of their rights. The most common obstacles are usually
related to situations of violence and armed conflict. Nevertheless, the
Report exposes the different case of Latin America, where the main obstacles
come from failed economic policies that create conditions for insecurity.
Poverty is the source of citizen insecurity in Latin America. More at:
www.socwatch.org.

*** ”The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires” - An anthology of essays
on the theory and practice of the Forum written by women and men from all
around the world, which share many different points of view. This diversity
can make of the book a faithful picture of the WSF history. See
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/1557.html
(Source: Choike)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

*** The Shared Space of Human Rights and Religious Freedom ­ People´s Decade
for Human Rights Education is embarking on an exciting new project to create
a set of videos that will dramatize real situations accompanied by a manual
to be introduced in communities around the world to encourage dialogue on
the human rights to religion and belief. You are invited to send PDHRE a
true story that can be dramatised and videotaped and which will show the
impact of the lack of such human rights in people’s lives. Stories need to
be outlined in a few paragraphs and no longer than 2 pages. Please send
them to the following address, by 25 July 2004 - E-mail: pdhre@igc.org or
mail: People’s Movement for Human Rights Learning, 526 West 111th Street,
suite 4E, New York, NY 10025. For further information see also
http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/pdhre.doc

*** Call for Nominations - 1000 women for the Nobel Peace Prize ­ The search
is on for 1000 women from all over the world who will be nominated
collectively for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. The idea is to call
international attention to the vital role played by women from all walks of
life in challenging harmful established social/cultural boundaries,
institutions and ideologies and in creating and promoting peace in their
communities and in the whole world. The aim of the Prize is to call
attention to women’s worldwide fight and struggle for peace, which most of
the times remain totally out of sight. Given the Nobel Peace Prize to 1000
women is to give name and face to 1000 courageous but unknown women.
Nominations close 30 June 2004. For more information and for a nomination
form see:
http://www.1000peacewomen.org/eng/html/nomination/index.php

UPCOMING EVENTS

*** International Forum on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights - This international
forum organized by the Thai Working Group on Human Rights and HIV/AIDS will
be held on the occasion of the 15th International AIDS Conference from 10
and 15 July 2004, Bangkok. The Thai Working Group on Human Rights and
HIV/AIDS strongly felt the importance to bring the issue on Human Rights
Based Approach in relation to the HIV/AIDS for further discussion with the
expectation that the process might lead to a more comprehensive plan of
action, to the eradication of prejudice and to the enhancement of a better
treatment to the affected people.

Objectives:
1) To explore the best way to promote the human rights and human dignity of
the People living with HIV/AIDS;
2) To exchange idea, information and experiences in raising public awareness
on the human rights for the marginalized groups, such as the ethnic groups,
minorities, and the PLWHA;
3) To identify the key obstacles and the challenges for the promotion and
protection of human rights on HIV/AIDS;
4) To work out a systematic and comprehensive approach and the practical
plan of action to promote the ‘All Human Rights for All’ especially for the
people living with HIV/AIDS.

Contact Boonthan Verawongse at Dignity International ­ Asia
e-mail dignity@inet.co.th

CALENDAR OF ACTIVITIES

For the updated Calendar of Activities for 2004, please see:

April - June
http://www.dignityinternational.org/2004monthly_planner2.html

July ­ September
http://www.dignityinternational.org/2004monthly_planner3.html

THIS NEWSBULLETIN CAN BE ACCESSED DIRECTLY FROM THE WEB AT
http://dignity.3pontos.net/doc/news_2004june.doc or selected items can be
see from the Dignity International website at
http://www.dignityinternational.org/News_june2004.html

=============================================
This is a monthly electronic news bulletin of “Dignity International: All
Human Rights for All”. Dignity International does not accredit, validate or
substantiate any information posted by members to this news bulletin. The
validity and accuracy of any information is the responsibility of the
originator.

If you are working in the area of human rights with a special attention to
different aspects of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR), we would
love to hear from you. To contribute, email us at dignity@netvisao.pt

To subscribe send an e-mail to dignity@netvisao.pt If you do not wish to
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Dear All

Avishai Margalit wrote that we need a decent society, meaning a society that does not entail humiliating institutions. I believe we need a decent global village; the national level has become too narrow.

Yet, what does this mean in detail and how do we get there?

I am at present working on a text where I reflect on the relational skills we need and how we could draw together elements from different cultural knowledge bases. I am currently trying to get a feel for Japanese culture, and I detect, for example, that it offers a lot of good "lessons" that resemble what I learned when I lived in Egypt.

However, when caring for a cancer patient, it is not enough to smile kindly upon her and apply good communication skills. While it is extremely important to keep up hope and passion for life in the patient, this does not mean that the financial means and surgical skills to treat the patient should be forgotten.

I just read Monbiot's book The Age of Consent and would very much like to have your views on this book.

Most warmly!
Evelin

Monbiot, George (2003). The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order. Hammersmith, UK: Flamingo.

Some quotes:

Globalization is not the problem. The problem is in fact the release from globalization which both economic agents and nations states have been able to negotiate. They have been able to operate so freely because the people of the world have no global means of restraining them. Our task is surely not to overthrow globalizing, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution (Monbiot, 2003, p. 23, italics in original).

...

There are hundreds of ... networks operating already within the global justice movement.
If such campaigns are to succeed, they need to call not only upon existing activist, but also upon many people who are not yet engaged in transformative politics. In most democratic nations, citizens are withdrawing from the political process. Mainstream politics has become, especially for young people, boring and alienating, as many correctly perceive that it has been reduced to a matter of management, that the competing parties in most nations have been captured by a class of people permitted by corporations and the financial markets to govern, whose aims and outlook are almost identical. There is no outlet, in most national systems, for passion. Globalization has increased the complexity of political issues and, by removing their resolution to levels at which there is no democratic control, exacerbated people’s sense of helplessness.

The global justice movement has become, for many of those alienated from national politics, an enfranchisement movement. By lifting their sights from the national sphere to the global or international sphere, they have discovered that the potential for political engagement has not disappeared, but merely shifted to another realm. Older activists have rediscovered, in the extraordinary numbers these global campaigns have mustered, some of the hopes which have lain dormant for the past twenty years. By demonstrating that we have the means of both democratizing and transforming global politics, we can turn this movement which id already the biggest global federation ever convened into a force so numerous and so effective that is becomes irresistible (Monbiot, 2003, pp. 258-259).

Dear All
I often rely on Varda in order to get a better grounding for our group's work (please meet Varda on our Advisory Board). Our aim is not to become a political group that engages in day-to-day campaigning. We would like to make an effort to work long-term and above fault lines.
Varda helps us keep the compass in the right direction. Clearly, one has to expect some zig-zag course, it is always a delicate balance, so, the main direction is important.
Warmly!
Evelin

Varda writes:
The Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies was established to investigate and understand a despicable phenomenon such as humiliation and maybe come up with theories to minimize that aspect of human interaction and study ways to reinforce alternative aspects, mainly dignity.

I am saying that because there is an imminent risk that daily dealings with the Palestenian/Israeli conflict can very easily outstrip any other issue and take over the front stage. And I guess that it won't be the first time that the emotionality involved in that conflict managed to do that. I think that everybody should be reminded that humilation is almost an intergral part of many relations, starting from kindergarten and onward. I see it happening among young children and grown adults. I see it in arenas as diffferent as the workplace and in the home among parents and children and among men and women.

Humiliation is also part of acute conflicts and particularly in wars. Still, as far as the horrendous bloodshed that happens in war zones - I think it is worse than humiliation. As a cognitive psychologist I can assure you that when someone humiliates you, you do not automatically become humiliated - there are buffers - and I'll write about it. However, when you are dead - that is it !!

In addition, a great part of the conflict is now happening in the media. It almost has a life of its own ....

Varda Mühlbauer

Correspondents Report - Images of Palestine
ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] Online
-----
To listen to this interview click on one of the links below depending on which player is installed on your PC:
RealOne Player Presentation: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200405/r22005_54006.ram
Windows Media Audio http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200405/r22005_54005.asx
-----

Correspondents Report - Images of Palestine
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2004/s1118768.htm]

Correspondents Report - Sunday, 30 May , 2004
Reporter: Jane Hutcheon

EDMOND ROY: Last week as Israel's military offensive in southern Gaza wound up, Correspondents Report looked at how Israel handled its public image. The Jewish state attracted international condemnation for its actions, which resulted in the loss of more than 50 Palestinian lives, including at least ten civilians.

This week, a view from the other side.

Middle East Correspondent Jane Hutcheon went to Ramallah to speak with Ohio-born Palestinian businessman and activist, Sam Bahour. She began by asking him whether Palestinians have been successful at articulating their cause in the international media.

SAM BAHOUR: Personally, I think it's our own fault, as Palestinians. This is not something we can blame on the Israelis.
To be able to put together a proper, public relations/media/campaign, requires an internal commitment to do so, commitment and more than just words. It requires funds, it requires equipment, it requires professional staff, professional training. And it also requires tapping the Palestinian diaspora.
Unfortunately, the investment going from the Palestinian side into properly articulating their case, is an investment that's more oriented towards the 1970s and not the year 2000.

JANE HUTCHEON: Sam Bahour came to Ramallah in 1995 to set up a telecommunications firm. Since then he's been responsible for constructing the West Bank's first mall, which opened last year.

Now, this MBA graduate runs an information consultancy. He's a passionate advocate of how Palestinians could better express themselves, and the goal of the current Intifada or uprising – freedom from occupation.

I asked him whether he thought the Palestinian cause was largely understood by the world.

SAM BAHOUR: I think more so than 20 years ago. Things are improving, especially with a new generation of Palestinians coming to the scene, people such as myself, second generation Palestinians who have seen the tools of the media abroad, have been brought up in different communities, were bringing, I think, a resource to our community here in Palestine that maybe wasn't here before.
Having said that, I do think people are fully aware, with this Intifada, that the Israeli military occupation has to come to an end and I think that realization in itself is a major achievement.

JANE HUTCHEON: When you see scenes of checkpoints and occupation, and you contrast that with something like a suicide bombing on an Israeli bus, the two in a sense don't compare.

Do you feel that that does the Palestinian cause some damage?

SAM BAHOUR: It does a lot of damage. I think it's the result of not only the oppression that the occupation puts upon our people and turns youth to view life under occupation as death.
But I think equally it is the lack of a pro-active Palestinian leadership to give everyone a role in the resistance, a lack of that proper leadership, has had a lot of people turning to fundamentalism, a lot of people turning to suicide bombings.

JANE HUTCHEON: I asked Mr Bahour whether either side, Israeli or Palestinian, could win the image war in the current conflict.

SAM BAHOUR: From the Palestinian point of view at least, we need to view our articulating the public relations issues in a way not to win this battle of this week's conflict, but rather to put our efforts into a strategic path that will bring decision makers, whoever they may be, whether it's the President of the United States, the United Nations, the quartet, or our own leadership, to bring those decision makers into a path that will lead them to ending the occupation.
So I can't really care less if I won this week's image building with Israel or not, but I care a lot if I move the world one step closer to bringing about the end of occupation.

JANE HUTCHEON: Businessman and activist, Sam Bahour.
And this is Jane Hutcheon in Ramallah, for Correspondents Report.
© 2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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