Problems In Todays Society Part 1

Problems In Todays Society Problems In Today’s Society There are many problems right now in the society Some of these problems can be easily solved, or can be impossible to solve depending how bad it.

Problems In Todays Society

Problems In Today’s Society There are many problems right now in the society Some of these problems can be easily solved, or can be impossible to solve depending how bad it is Many people think these problems should be solved by the governments, since they are in charge But we can also solve these problems if we get together Not all the problems, but some that can be solved

I think the three major problems in the society today are: unemployment, violence, and pollution The first problem in the society right now is unemployment Many people today are either unemployed or underemployed Some of these people just stay home and collect their welfare cheque every month, when they should go out and at least try to get a job If there are more people like this, the country would be poor and therefore the government would have to collect more taxes Also the standard of living would decrease because of their income that is way below the average income Right now, there is also a big gap

between the low income people and the high income people and this is becoming a

problem Low income people are starting to get lower wages and higher income people a restarting to get higher wages Another problem in the society is violence Today, there are many violence in the streets, some schools, and also in the media These violence in the streets can cause the neighbourhood to become a bad place to live This will cause people not to go there or move in there because of these violence

There are also many violence and gangs in some school, causing some of the school to be very unsafe to go With these violence and gangs, students will probably be afraid of these people In addition, the media can contain violence too These violence, can cause kids to do what ever is on TV For example, my little brother likes to watch wrestling and he sometimes does wrestling moves one for no reason and thinking it’s fun Even though it doesn’t hurt me becauseI’m bigger than him, he might hurt someone smaller in school or something The third problem in the society today is pollution Many things these days cause pollution such

as cars, air conditioners, refrigerators, factories, CFC cans, etc… All these things together can cause a pollution problem in the society today The CFC cans used to be a serious problem to the ozone layer, but luckily it was taken off the market Refrigerators and air conditioners are also a problem to the zone because of the liquid called freon These machines use this liquid that makes it cold, but when these liquids are released from damaging the machine, it releases a gas that breaks down the zone layers In addition, cars also can cause a lot of pollution because of the carbon monoxide it produces This would cause the air to be bad, cause global warming, which would cause the earth to have longer summers or vice versa, longer winters, and would also cause acid rain In conclusion, unemployment, violence, and pollution would consider to be the three major problems in the society today People and the government should get together and try to solve these problems in order to make this planet a safe and good place to live If these problems are not solved, there might not even

be an Earth in the future to live on

Existing problems in today's society

1 The Problem of Domestic Violence

As a global public health and human rights concern, domestic violence affects the lives of millions of individuals throughout the entire world Most frequently, the abuser violates the rights of the other family member due to low self-esteem, extreme jealousy, as well

as difficulties in regulating anger and other strong emotions Even though it is still

difficult to determine specific contributors to the development of domestic violence in relationships, the majority of researchers highlight that abuse is dependent on gender, race, class, and sexuality

Despite the fact that any individual can become the victim of domestic violence, women are most likely to suffer from this problem In fact, poverty and economic needs force women to remain in abusive marriages where their well-being is threatened when they try to leave (Anderson, 2010) As a result, women end up in a dilemma relying on their abusive partners to survive while experiencing threats to their emotional and physical well-being Whether a partner’s domination takes the form of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, the other person is predicted to face additional issues, such as depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicide (Lawson, 2012) Consequently, gender can be considered the central aspect of partner violence

Although women are the most affected as a result of violence, other parties are also directly or indirectly impacted For instance, their children get traumatized from

observing their abused mothers and in some instances get similar abuses like their mothers In order to avoid it, it is essential to take into consideration therapies offered by psychologists Nowadays, the majority of these theories are associated with numerous limitations but the home visitation program has proved to demonstrate positive results (Jouriles et al., 2008) According to this program, the child raised in a family where any type of violence takes place should be visited by a professional for a period of several months or years During these sessions, psychologists take appropriate measures to detect whether the child experiences emotional and psychological issues Finally, they use talking sessions as a tool to improve the self-esteem of the family member

When it comes to race and social status, these factors significantly affect the chances for the development of domestic violence On one hand, people of color are more likely to experience abuse in relationships than white individuals (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005) On the other hand, they are less likely to report it than other population groups Increased rates of domestic violence among racial minorities can be explained by economic

insecurity, combined with isolation, racism, and discrimination Hence, race and social status of the victim of abuse are interrelated terms in this case In turn, same-sex

relationships suffer higher levels of domestic violence, which can be explained by both external and internal factors For example, these couples are more likely to face

discrimination and internalized negative attitudes about homosexuality from the

perspective of society than heterosexual couples

Thus, domestic violence can be characterized by an imbalance of power and control in relationships This pattern of abusive behavior is usually expressed by manipulations, physical threats, humiliation, and constant criticism Today, gender, race, social status, and sexual orientation significantly affect the number of domestic violence victims In fact, females, people of color, poor individuals, and gays are more likely to struggle with this problem These population groups are less stable and powerful, which is the reason why they are likely to face domestic violence in real life

2 The problem of school violence around the world

Click to expand Image

Since Lebanon opened classes for Syrian refugee students, the number of children in public schools has more than doubled But teachers need training in positive discipline Syrian children said they were insulted and often banned from going to the bathroom at school ©

2019 Dadu Shin for Human Rights Watch

(London) – Governments around the world should urgently step up efforts to ensure

students’ safety at school and in online spaces, Human Rights Watch said today on the first

International Day against Violence and Bullying at School Including Cyberbullying Many governments have not yet banned corporal punishment, and many lag behind on protecting students from school-related sexual violence, bullying, and online violence

Students in most countries suffer violence, bullying, and discrimination According to United Nations agencies, more than 246 million children suffer gender-based violence in or around schools every year, and one in three students experiences bullying and physical violence Half of the world’s adolescents report violence from peers at school

“It’s outrageous that students in many countries suffer terrible violence in school that can affect them for the rest of their lives,” said Elin Martinez, senior children’s rights researcher

at Human Rights Watch “Grave abuses like sexual and physical violence seriously affect students’ dignity, their bodily autonomy, and their ability to learn and to feel safe at school.” Human Rights Watch research on barriers to education in over 15 countries found that children and young people experience many forms of school-related gender-based violence Students often report corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment,

physical violence, and bullying Teachers and school officials as well as other students are commonly responsible for these abuses

Girls, children with disabilities, refugee children, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students frequently experience high levels of violence and bullying Violence against these children often receives little attention because of prevailing discriminatory and

harmful attitudes that perpetuate silence and impunity

Despite important progress, corporal punishment in schools remains lawful in at least 67 countries, and many teachers still use corporal punishment to control classrooms and to exert their authority In Lebanon, children are frequently beaten, slapped, and humiliated In

South Africa, some children with disabilities, particularly sensory and intellectual disabilities, and children with autism, are exposed to physical violence, verbal abuse, and neglect by teachers and assistants in mainstream and special schools

Sexual violence in schools, which includes rape, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation, remains under-reported in many countries In Senegal and Tanzania, teachers and school officials frequently sexually exploit girls in exchange for money for school fees, grades, and basic items like menstrual pads Many girls told Human Rights Watch they did not report sexual violence because school officials do not believe them, especially when those

responsible were teachers

LGBT students face bullying, discrimination, and violence in many countries, but are often excluded from anti-bullying policies or measures taken to curb violence in schools In Japan

and Vietnam, a lack of teacher training and accountability means that teachers both allow and contribute to bullying of LGBT students

Online gender-based violence linked to their school experience increasingly affects many children It has increasingly become a concern as a result of the increase in time students spend online as a result of school closures tied to the Covid-19 pandemic Cyberbullying also affects LGBT youth, with abuses moving from classrooms to online spaces In the Philippines

and the United States, LGBT students described anti-LGBT comments and slurs as well as rapidly spreading rumors facilitated by social media This public exposure and ridicule has negative consequences for children’s mental health and academic achievement, Human Rights Watch has found

Countries that lack clear and binding policies for schools to address all forms of violence and bullying, including online, often perpetuate similar bad practices, Human Rights Watch said Many schools lack policies to safeguard children as well as targeted protection measures to ensure the safety of the most at-risk children

In many countries, children do not receive age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality

education This essential subject provides an entry point for children and teachers to discuss gender-based violence, enables teachers to approach sensitive or difficult conversations in non-stigmatizing ways, and empowers children to report abuses or harmful behaviors

Schools also often lack counselors and teachers adequately trained in child protection In the worst cases, school officials fail to protect children’s privacy or to respect confidentiality, which exposes children to stigma, humiliation, and retaliation Even when children report abuses, school officials do not always take the allegations seriously, initiate investigations, or refer cases to the appropriate authorities

Governments should urgently adopt binding national policies that guarantee students protection in schools and online spaces Those that already have policies in place should ensure that they include protections for children particularly likely to face abuse, including girls, LGBT students, and children with disabilities Schools should have accessible,

confidential reporting systems and counsellors, teachers, or school officials who act as child protection focal points and are available to provide immediate support for students who are threatened or have experienced abuse

Schools should link up with local child protection and health centers to ensure that children who have experienced abuse are adequately heard, and referred to appropriate health and sexual and reproductive health services, including emergency contraception and abortion where needed They should provide students with access to adequate psychosocial – mental health –services, including therapy Governments should also ensure that schools provide compulsory, scientifically accurate, and age-appropriate sexuality education

“Children have a right to learn in a safe physical or online environment and should be able to trust adults who have a legal and moral duty to protect them,” Martinez said “This key principle should guide every government’s efforts to address and ultimately eradicate the scourge of violence and bullying in schools and online spaces."

3 The problem of orphans without foster parents' care

BYVIRGINIA HUGHES

PUBLISHED JULY 31, 2013

• 5 MIN READ

Last November I went to Bucharest to shadow an American neuroscientist, Charles Nelson, whose team has studied the same group of 136 Romanian

orphans for the past 14 years My (loooong) story about this project came

out this week in Aeon Magazine Here’s a snippet:

In 1999, [Nelson] and several other American scientists launched the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a now-famous study of Romanian children who were mostly ‘social orphans’, meaning that their biological parents had given them over to the state’s care At the time, despite an international outcry over Romania’s orphan problem, many Romanian officials staunchly believed that the behavioural problems of

institutionalised children were innate — the reason their parents had left them there, rather than the result of institutional life And because of these inherent deficiencies, the children would fare better in orphanages than families

The scientists pitched their study as a way to find out for sure They

enrolled 136 institutionalised children, placed half of them in foster care, and tracked the physical, psychological, and neurological development of both groups for many years They found, predictably, that kids are much better off in foster care than in orphanages

Perhaps the strangest part of this project was that the fundamental

scientific question it posed — Are orphanages bad for kids? — had already

been answered Definitively Studies going back many decades had shown that orphanages are awful

Research with human subjects is normally considered unethical if it

doesn’t tackle novel questions In this case, though, Nelson’s project was ethically justified because Romanian officials had not paid any attention to those previous studies Quite the opposite: They had a strong cultural belief that state-run orphanages would protect orphans far better than unstable and untrustworthy foster parents So the study went ahead, and exactly how it did so is the crux of my story

During my reporting, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the Romanian cultural preference for institutions I chalked it up to the lasting shadow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator who, for decades before his assassination in 1989, had deliberately cultivated the

population of institutionalized orphans to ensure loyalty to the state

But this week I learned from fellow science writer Maia Szalavitz that the pro-orphanage idea still persists to a surprising degree

In 2010, Szalavitz wrote a Forbes post outlining all the ways in which orphanages are damaging In one part of the post, she describes a

fascinating early study:

Research on the dangers of institutional care for young children dates back to the 1940s For as long as they have existed, orphanages have always had alarmingly high death rates From the early 20th century onwards, this was blamed on contagious disease–and so, attempts were

made to keep orphanages sterile, to isolate children from each other by doing things like hanging sterilized sheets between their cribs

But Austrian psychoanalyst and physician Rene Spitz proposed an

alternate theory He thought that infants in institutions suffered from lack

of love–that they were missing important parental relationships, which in turn was hurting or even killing them

To test his theory, he compared a group of infants raised in isolated

hospital cribs with those raised in a prison by their own incarcerated

mothers If the germs from being locked up with lots of people were the problem, both groups of infants should have done equally poorly In fact, the hospitalized kids should have done better, given the attempts made at imposing sterile conditions If love mattered, however, the prisoners’ kids should prevail

Love won: 37% of the infants kept in the bleak hospital ward died, but there were no deaths at all amongst the infants raised in the prison The incarcerated babies grew more quickly, were larger and did better in every way Spitz could measure The orphans who managed to survive the

hospital, in contrast, were more likely to contract all types of illnesses They were scrawny and showed obvious psychological, cognitive and behavioral problems

Now here’s the surprising part Szalavitz told me that she got tons of

comments on that post from people who still believe that institutions are

OK for infants There were so many apologists, in fact, that she wrote a

follow-up post a few days later calling them out In that, she pointed to a

story in the New York Times with a dreadful headline: Study Suggests Orphanages Are Not So Bad The study in question, published in 2009, indeed found no differences in cognitive development or emotional well-being between kids in Africa and Asia who lived in orphanages versus family homes But the study had one big caveat that was ignored in the

Times article: The kids were all between the ages of 6 and 12 For children

younger than that, orphanages are so bad.

Why is this idea so difficult to accept? Szalavitz says it’s not about cost, as foster care is far less expensive than keeping an orphanage open She

suspects it does come down to money, though, in that government and

non-profit funding is more easily granted to institutions than individuals That agrees with what I heard in Romania Elizabeth Furtado, one of the researchers working on the Romanian orphans project, put it like this: The last two years on the project have been somewhat defeating, Furtado says, because the adolescents’ behaviors are becoming more difficult to manage, and the foster-care parents are getting less and less support — financial, educational, emotional — from the government ‘On the one hand, I know that we are doing a lot of good for a lot of these kids,’ she

says ‘But it makes me sad that legislation isn’t keeping up with enough of what we’re finding.’

4. The Global Financial Crisis: Causes and Political Response

Theme: The world financial crisis, the result of financial liberalisation and an excess of global

liquidity, has pushed the world to the verge of recession The crisis will also have major geopolitical ramifications

Summary: This ARI analyses the causes of the international financial crisis, evaluates the economic and political initiatives that governments have undertaken and explores its

geopolitical impact

Analysis ‘We have the tools to manage the crisis Now we need the leadership to use them’ (Paul Volker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve,

Wall Street Journal, 10/X/2007)

Introduction

No one questions any longer the fact that we are facing the greatest international financial crisis since the Great Depression Since September 2008, the world has seen unprecedented events that are re-shaping the international financial system and challenging liberal

economic orthodoxy, which had gone practically unquestioned since the 1990s under US leadership The sub-prime mortgage crisis that erupted in August 2007 has become a

systemic financial crisis whose epicentre is no longer just in the US, but rather has spread to Europe and Japan and is having a powerful impact on the growth of the emerging

economies

Investment banks have vanished, and governments have redefined the role of lender of last resort, launching rescue packages on both sides of the Atlantic, first for specific financial institutions and then for the banking system as a whole The G7 says it will use all means at its disposal to support financial institutions that need help, but the pledge lacks credibility because the group failed to present a coordinated plan The US Congress, in its second attempt, approved a bail-out plan, called the ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ (TARP), a US$700 billion package that in the end will earmark US$250 billion for injecting funds to recapitalise the banking industry –and partially nationalise it–, something many Republicans

do not approve of (the rest of the money will go towards buying up toxic assets) The UK, in

a rare display of leadership, has nationalised part of its banking system and will back up inter-bank loans The countries of the euro zone will follow the British model, although each country has set aside a different amount of money to buy preferential shares in

undercapitalised banks or help them with their short-term financing problems (the funds made available for tackling the crisis in Europe exceed €2.5 trillion)

Furthermore, central banks have opened up new channels for increasing liquidity In the US, the Federal Reserve has started making direct loans to the private sector by buying up commercial paper that is not guaranteed, which means the government is skirting bank

intermediaries In Europe, the European Central Bank has reduced auctions to zero, which means it will make available to the banking system all the liquidity that is necessary And the Bank of England has decided to guarantee short- and mid-term debt issued by banks

Indeed, banking authorities in advanced countries have made it abundantly clear they are willing to provide as much liquidity as necessary, both to guarantee deposits and rescue institutions in jeopardy and to restore confidence in the inter-bank market and get money ploughing into companies again, nationalising banks if it is necessary They will do this even

if it means taking risks that could lead to the undercapitalisation of their own central banks Finally, in an unprecedented action, on 9 October, the world’s main central bankers

(including the one from China) carried out a coordinated, half-a-percentage-point reduction

of their interest rates This was tantamount to saying only a global response can halt the crisis

Despite the battery of measures taken by governments and central banks –which have come late but shown that officials have learnt from earlier crises– for now the lack of liquidity and confidence remain Furthermore, the process of contagion has been made easier by the high degree of integration in the international financial system and by the feeling that there was

no clear leadership or transatlantic coordination One factor that has shaken confidence even more is that the IMF has raised its estimate of bank losses stemming from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis It now sees them at US$1.4 trillion (US$455 billion more than in April) What this means is that, so far, only half of the losses have been made public In other words, more banks might fail Furthermore, in its economic outlook for October, the IMF noted that the credit crunch has now hit the real economy, triggering recession in several developed countries and making it likely that there will be major increases in unemployment

in 2009 In fact, the IMF forecasts that the world economy will slow down considerably and grow at a rate of 3.9% in 2008 and 3.0% in 2009 (1.9% if measured at market exchange rates), its slowest pace since 2002 This lower growth will help moderate inflation to a great extent (especially prices of foodstuffs, raw materials and energy) But the current context of the crisis and the ‘liquidity trap’ that many advanced economies appear to find themselves

in indicates that over the mid-term deflation is a greater danger than inflation

What initially appeared to be a liquidity problem is also turning out to be a solvency problem that requires a hefty recapitalisation of the banking system in advanced countries And by definition this requires a government bailout (the question, mainly in the US, is to what extent the government should nationalise the banking industry) Also essential is a

coordinated fiscal stimulus package in which the emerging countries, mainly China, should play a role Raising spending and recapitalising banks will not avert recession, but they will reduce its duration and its impact on employment, so long as it is done in a coordinated fashion (unilateral solutions run the risk of being ineffective and serving only to increase the public debt of wealthy countries) Finally, it is necessary to improve regulation of the

financial sector, strengthening the supervision of the credit derivatives market and raising financial institutions’ capital requirements so as to avoid leveraging and risk levels as high as the current ones