Authorization occurs when the situation becomes so defined that the individual is released of the responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through routinization, the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions. Through dehumanization, the person’s attitude towards their target change, causing the person to take away their target’s human status and the target’s morality no longer exists.
To view the Iraqis as animals, or as sub-humans, makes it easier for the soldiers to dominate them, to break down their doors in the middle of the night, to imprison them without charges and without notifying their families, and to use torture in order to break their spirit as an aid to interrogation. In Iraq, the U.S. troops did their best to instill fear and a sense of hopelessness when the Iraqis did not conform to their orders. Humiliation and justification for their actions are key elements both parties are expected to play in this game of war. Through dehumanization, the troops learn to view the Iraqis as inferior, as not as “civilized” as the U.S. troops view themselves.
Question #1 – C) Compare and contrast the attitudes of police officers (“How Police Justify the Use of Deadly Force”) with the arguments made in the “Torture at Abu Ghraib” article. Are there similarities? Differences?
Answer:
Police attitudes on justifying the use of deadly force compared to the Abu Ghraib article do have similarities. At first thought, I did not see any similarities, but as I hashed through the materials, I started spotting similarities. Both articles are similar in that they are associated with the three social processes mentioned above; authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. Authorization serves to distance people from each other, and makes it easier for people to let go of the moral responsibility they would otherwise use (this is part of the reason that people were not encouraged to kill at will - they were only supposed to act on orders). Routinization takes the 'choice' part out of a situation where a moral choice should normally be made. By doing the same thing, over and over again, one is able to act without thinking. Habit and routine kick in, and one does not have to face a moral choice at every point. Dehumanization is a process of moving a person from outside of their “moral realm.” This distance causes a person to think of that outsider as being at a less-than-human-being level. This makes it easy, as well as justifiable for the person to kill the “thing.”
Both occupations have similar goals in common; conformity, truth and interrogation. Although the two differ in their methods of instituting conformity, they both want this as their final goal. In obtaining the truth, both groups use similar interrogation tactics. These sometimes include sleep and food deprivation, intimidation and threats, although war time interrogation tactics are much more extreme than police interrogation tactics.
Certain circumstances are more likely to encourage the expression of authority. These circumstances include being one of a group, being able to attribute responsibility to others or to lofty goals, being in an environment experienced as alien or dangerous, and being in an overall climate in which there is little or no accountability. All of these circumstances are present to a great degree among the occupying army in Iraq. Police officers also live in this type of dangerous environment, where anything can happen and little or no accountability for their actions exists.
It is known that absolute power corrupts. Therefore, those who create an environment in which occupying soldiers (Americans) have absolute power with virtually no limits and no accountability, bear the ultimate responsibility for the horrors that occurred at Abu Ghraib, and that will continue to occur on a daily basis throughout Iraq as long as the United States is occupying their land.
One obvious difference between the two is training. The article on Abu Ghraib stated several times that their soldiers were not trained in the areas they were responsible for running. In law enforcement, I think they are well trained in their profession. They have continual opportunities to participate in further training and are required to participate in some instances. They must “qualify” for the position they desire within a department, they are not simply placed there as in the military.
Question #2 – A) Explain in detail Turner & Edgley’s (“From Witchcraft to Drugcraft”) argument equating witchcraft explanations for deviant behavior to the diagnosis of mental illness. B) What parts of the argument are the strongest to you?
C) What parts of the argument are the weakest?
Answer:
This article compared psychiatrists to witch-hunters. Witchcraft was the legitimized and acceptable explanation for deviance, therapeutic welfare, and exploitation in the nineteenth century. This condition was hypothesized, tested, and determined to have a causal relationship. Witchcraft was believed to exist, however, the waves of witch hunts that occurred during this time were not due to deviant behavior. They were due to the increase in societal reactions. Society defined the source of their problems as the witches.
The condition or curse of the witch, used to explain deviant behavior, is no longer alive in the same way as it was in the nineteenth century. This belief has been replaced by the languages of medicine, psychiatry, and biochemistry. There has been an increase in medicalization, and the primary political implication of this shift has been to maintain the status quo of social conduct that we call “mental health.” We have done this by categorizing and curing deviance in its various forms by putting it under the rubric of “mental illness” (Deviance Supplemental Readings, pg. 97). Specialists, psychobiologists, medical doctors and psychiatrists dispensing antipsychotic drugs are all examples of how science has replaced the witch-hunter. In other words, drugcraft has replaced witchcraft.
Science has been able to replace other forms of explanation primarily by producing and claiming certain “facts” as its own. Just as witchcraft claimed to account for certain deviations in human conduct, drugcraft makes such claims today.
Biochemical theories of deviance do and must by necessity rely on social judgments in the determination of mental illness. Distinguishing the mentally healthy for the mentally ill is part of a social process of defining who is deviant and who is normal. The decision to identify a person as mentally ill is obviously not based on chemical or blood analysis.
Drugcraft is an attempt, like many before it, to provide objective, value-free standards for assessing social conduct. We also apply “vocabularies of motive” to explain and understand why people do the things they do. A vocabulary of motive is a communicated rationale, excuse, or justification for a behavior in question. Each of these explanations gives people a sense that the behavior of another can be placed within a context of meaning. In other words, the witch hunts are still going on today, but instead of witches, we now blame deviant behavior on mental illness. This believe in mental illness avoids responsibility. Our society produces people like this and we should take responsibility for it.
The strength of this argument lies in the assertion that proponents of drug therapy use correlation to infer causation. This means that the doctors see how patients react to a drug, then say that if the patients’ behaviors change after they take the drug, that the drug caused the change. However, I still believe the proof is in the pudding. It is more important to find out if the people who take the drugs are doing better than they were when they did not take the drugs? Another strong point of this article that I agree with is that we have medicalized deviance in that our society has redefined deviant behaviors as illnesses. I believe this has gone too far, especially in diagnosing children.
As a para-pro in the school district, I see the stigmatizing labels professionals place on children who take “meds.” These kids are stripped of their former identities and replaced with stigmatizing labels. As a mother, I would not allow my child to take medications (if necessary) at school simply because of the stigma that is placed on those who need to take a trip to the nurse’s office after lunch every day.
The weakest part of this argument is that Turner and Edgley don’t look at the point that doctors who specialize in treating people, have an interest in maximizing their clients’ manageability. In short, people who work on people want those people as docile as possible and will be tempted to use whatever means they can to tame these people. I think drugs are too often used to help the people who administer the drugs rather than the people who receive the drugs.
Question #3 – A) Explain Simon’s argument about perversion in “Deviance as History, the Future of Perversion.” B) How does the emphasis on pedophilia make it more plausible? C) What other factors make it more plausible?
Answer:
According to this article, sexual deviance and perversion ask two major questions. First of all, they say how we define deviance, how it changes over time. This includes how we feel about perversion. This article also introduces the idea of a sexual script. These are uniformities in sexual practice. That means that they are saying that every culture has sexual scripts, the correct or the normal way to have sex.
This article makes a distinction between what is sexual deviance and what is sexual perversion. Sexual deviance is inappropriate behavior associated with normal sexual practices; an example of this might be rape. A heterosexual male who rapes a female, is what we tend to think of as deviance. Oral sex was considered sexual deviance at one time. It was considered a perverted thing to do. As it changes over time, so do the boundaries by the definition of deviance. Oral sex changed into conventional sexual scenarios. People were talking about it more, and it became more acceptable, it becomes less deviant.
Sexual perversion is defined as violation of the sexual practices of that time and place and common practices. These are the things we consider not plausible, these violate those things that we see as plausible, like pedophilia and necrophilia.
Pedophilia violates age norms of sexuality. During the 18th century, the act of masturbation was associated with a lot of guilt and shame. Meaning, if you engaged in it, then you would feel guilty. This prevailed for two centuries. People viewed masturbation as involving consumption. It took over a person’s ability to remain inside their own body. Homosexuality was seen as perversion until the 20th century. Simon argues that it became more plausible and more acceptable. It lost its status as significant perversion.
Society creates deviance, we construct it. This does involve pedophilia. Our society decided what constitutes sexual deviance. But we have read about some cultures, such as the right of passage in Zambia. In some cultures, this is alright. In our culture, we think there is something wrong with this. This article talked about how things are changing. The plausibility increases as sexual deviant issues are talked about.
Other evolving practices strengthen the plausibility of sexual deviance. Some of them mentioned in the article include: age appears vulnerable to deconstructive criticisms. “The resulting uncertainty is reflected in the increasing ambiguity surrounding what is considered age-appropriate costuming, postures, and behaviors. As age loses a substantial portion of its ability to independently organize the narrative of the self is correspondingly diminished. The uses of childhood in the narration of the self are exemplified in the ability to conceptualize most human experience being framed by the repetitions of the experiences and meanings of childhood.
The enlarged and empowered domain of psychic reality makes behavior the servant of sexuality, as it makes sexuality the servant of the narrative of the self. The narration of the self becomes less a continuous chronicle than a series of vivid episodes, episodes that often occur within settings that are rarely predictable. Also, a person can become the object of its own desires by appropriating the experience of the other. For some people, being in a parental role is the only acceptable route to the reconstruction of the fantasized desires of the child” (Deviance as History, pg. 156).
Question #7 – Using Heitzeg’s analysis of sports, explain the Valvano case study by: A) Giving examples of a suspension of informal norms; B) Giving examples of suspension of formal rules; C) Giving examples of suspension of medical norms.
Answer:
Sports are seen not only as a way of instilling conformity, but also as a method of thwarting deviance. Ideally, sports are widely believed to provide conforming values and role models, aid in socialization, and discourage deviance.
However, the reality of sports is not quite so perfect. Sports have moved from being games for children to profitable sports played by and primarily promoted for adults. Professional sports constitute a separate social world with different norms, agents of social control, and sanctions. What is accepted in sport may be deviant in other spheres of society. Athletes are allowed and even sometimes encouraged to behave in ways that are prohibited or defined as a criminal in other settings. For example, the behavior of athletes in contact sports would be classified as felony assault if it occurred on the streets (suspension of formal rules). Racecar drivers would be ticketed for speeding and careless driving (suspension of formal rules). On the other hand, male teammates may embrace one another, touch each other supportively, hold hands, and cry with each other in sports, while some behaviors in other settings would violate widely accepted norms about masculinity (suspension of informal norms).
Norms do exist in sports but, when athletes and others push normative limits, responses are often different than they would be in other settings. Engaging in extreme behaviors that risk health and well-being and inflict pain and injury on others are not as quickly condemned in sports as they are in other activities.
In the case of athletes, sports involve a combination of exciting experiences and powerful social processes, which encourage extreme behaviors. In fact, this may even lead some athletes to define themselves as morally upstanding, and even righteous, as they push limits. Many elite athletes prepare so intensely for their sports that the needs for family members are ignored, some of them follow training methods to such extend that their family relationships, work responsibilities, and physical health are affected negatively. Other forms of suspension of medical norms include self-injurious overtraining (distance runners), unhealthy eating behaviors and weight-control strategies (gymnastics, wrestling), extremely rigid and exclusive dedication to training and competition among ultra marathon bicyclists and trial athletes, and uncritical commitment to playing sports with pain and injury.
The suspension of informal norms is apparent in professional and advanced amateur sports. These sports exist in a realm where normative expectations regarding stratification, situations, and style are lifted, or, at least, significantly blurred. There is a blur between two sets of situational norms; those that separate work and school from leisure. These situational norms directly relate to the suspension of informal norms. Professional sports, is pleasure as business, and we have all been warned, “Not to mix business with pleasure.” An example of a suspension of informal norms discussed in the Heitzeg book involves collegiate sports and the student athlete. Education is to taken as seriously as a job; also, much secondary education is actually career training and preparation for one’s chosen occupation. The student’s role is circumscribed by norms requiring hard work, diligence, responsibility, and the denial of leisure for study. There is a definite conflict with the role of the collegiate athlete who is supposed to spend many hours practicing for the game. The competing expectations of school and sports cannot be fully met at the same time. Usually, it is the norms of sports that come first. This results in low graduation rates for college athletes, as well as the high illiteracy rates. In this case, sports allows for the rules of age, work, and school to be suspended so that something usually seen as deviant is allowed. This is how the sports industry grows.
Sports create a social context in which the usual rules of style are held at a different standard. Both athletes and fans are permitted to engage in behavior that would often be defined as rude. Some examples of informal norms that get broken regularly in sports include: tobacco chewing, spitting, swearing, shoving, screaming and heckling. These are all acceptable occurrences on the playing field or in the grandstands, but would be a definite violation of informal norms anywhere else.
Athletes see the suspension of informal norms as an element reaffirming their identities as athletes and their membership in select sport groups. That those most likely are involved in such attitude are athletes eager to be accepted by their peers in sport and those who see achievement in sport as their only way to get ahead, make themselves a name, and become important in the world. This may be why certain coaches create environments that keep sportsmen in a perpetual state of adolescence. This leads athletes to strive continually to conform their identities and eliminate self-doubts by engaging in behaviors that please their coaches and teammate. It could lead in situation separating athletes from the rest of the community.
Deviance off-the field and away sports receives widespread media attention. When athletes are arrested, linked to criminal activity or have a car accident, they make headlines and become lead stories on the evening news. These are formal rules that are occasionally violated by athletes and highly publicized.
It is generally misleading to make generalizations about how sport participation affects behaviors. At present it seems to say that sport participation turns young people neither into models of virtue nor into delinquents in any systematic way. We often hear that sports keep kids of the streets and out of trouble, and build character in the process and then we hear about athletes who get into trouble and prove that years of playing sports have not kept them from being deviant. But in general, we can conclude that being involved in sport activities leads to fewer delinquent tendencies, less anxiety and aggression, improves self-esteem and social skills, and more awareness of commonly held and shared values.