“If you don’t like what they’re asking you don’t accept the premise of the question.”

– Annabeth Schott, The West Wing

‘Boring’ is not a demonstrable intrinsic quality of anything. It’s not that it is boring, it’s that you are bored.

– Pavlov’s Cat

In thinking about the SlutWalks and what they mean, these two quotes keep coming back to me, as getting to the heart of what, for me, is their main point. The SlutWalk is not an argument that calling someone a slut is OK. It’s about demonstrating that the word slut is a meaningless concept, which refers to nothing more than behaviour that the accuser disapproves of. As Clementine Ford argued, the difference between expecting women to wear the burqua and expecting them to go around in “mom jeans” is one of degree, not kind.

Germaine Greer attacked the concept from a different angle, pointing to the word’s origins as referring to a woman who was dirty, unclean:

In mixed digs in our tolerant universities, it’s the women who are forever cleaning the shared facilities, because the men won’t. The con is a simple one. If you don’t mind that the toilet’s disgusting, then don’t clean it; if you do, then do. Girls don’t have the option of not minding. Dirty house equals dirty woman equals tramp.

It’s about the fact that a man can be dirty or sexually promiscuous and generally society gives it no extra significance. He is still assumed capable of being good at his job, fun to have a beer with, and he is always assumed to retain the right not to be assaulted. SlutWalk seeks to address the idea that a woman’s behaviour in one sphere of life should have no bearing on how she is judged in other spheres. She can be a “slut” and manage a business, and she can be a slut without giving up her legal rights.

Of course the concept is messy, hard to pin down, because it is one that is deeply embedded in our culture. But at its most basic, the SlutWalk is where people march in short skirts, business attire, or exercise gear; the word slut is hurled at women in all of those outfits, because it is never really about the clothes.

This is what a slut looks like.

I hesitated in writing this post, because the concept of “slut” is so broad that it is open to many interpretations, not just from the people who would use it to insult a woman, but also by the women who choose to either reclaim or demolish the word. When I saw that the Perth SlutWalk was going to be sponsored by Sexpo, I was troubled, because it felt like missing the point, but I also understand that because the concept is so huge and so subjective that it’s OK that I don’t identify with everything that progressive/feminist activists do (and also because I am not doing the work, and my attitude is that if you’re not helping you should think very carefully before jumping in to criticise those who are).

But now they have announced “HOVEMBER – a month dedicated to promoting the true aims of SlutWalk” and I now I want to say no. I am not interested in critiques of SlutWalk that say we shouldn’t use the word slut because it is divisive and off-putting to “non-sluts”. I recognise that the attitude that a slutty woman brings rape upon herself is the same attitude that causes governments to ignore centuries-old principles of the rule of law in order to punish those who do not conform. I strongly agree that part of the aims of SlutWalks should be to oppose taking away the legal rights of prostitutes in the same way as it is about using sexual “morals” to take away the rights of any woman who is not sufficiently chaste. It is the same fight.

But a month of burlesque and pole-dancing to protest slut-shaming is accepting the premise. Yes, part of the aim is to make it clear that women should be free to do any of those things. But it also needs to be about breaking down the us-and-them dichotomy. The idea of women being free to have sex “like a man” should not be about replacing one stereotype with another. Women should be free to have sex like men in the sense that a man’s sexuality is seen, accurately, as just one facet of his character. The response to those who want to force women into one specific role is not to spend a month focussing on another specific one.

Some analysis I’ve found interesting and revealing in various measures comes from Stafford Scott, Nina Power and Mary Riddell.

Of particular interest is the way in which subcultural and behavioural patterns are shaped by exclusion from access to social and economic rewards (through work and education), and a consequent refusal of the institutional structures which are designed to provide such access.

This is not a new or an unexpected dynamic: it’s a dynamic which produces social ordering (gangs, territorial fights, deviant status hierarchies, violent masculinities) but a form of social ordering which is dissonant with dominant cultural norms.

Nevertheless, such social deviance adopts other cultural signals from the dominant order. Stafford Scott’s piece is acute on this:

First, looting comes from the belief that if you cannot get equality and cannot expect justice, then you better make sure that you “get paid”. “It’s all about the money!” is the motto of too many young black men, who have given up all hope of attainment in a white man’s world. This is an absolute belief for those looting at the weekend – borne not only out of their experiences but their parents’, too. They want to follow the rappers and athletes who live ghetto-fabulous lifestyles based on natural talents, as opposed to learned skills. They can’t see that coming through education: those who live on estates generally survive from one wage packet to the next. Sadly this mindset also makes it easier to legitimise the selling of drugs, as that too “brings in the money”.

Another sign was when they allowed themselves to be referred to by the n-word. They weren’t simply seeking to reclaim a word. They were telling the world that they were the offspring of the “field negro”, not the trained “house negro” from slavery days. The field negro’s sole intent was to escape, and maybe even to cause a little damage to the master and his property.

I think it’s a mistake to see this civil disorder as too closely linked to current political and economic conditions. It has a proximate cause which is related to race, but it’s a tinderbox which could be set on fire at almost any moment.

It’s more about the failure of forms of social discipline (“address social exclusion through providing positive and negative incentives to study and work”) which are massively inadequate to the underlying causes. Tariq Ali is absolutely right that it has happened before and will happen again, and for the same basic reasons.

It would also be a mistake to see these events as an “organic crisis of capitalism”. The sense-making that people affected (and however many bricks or petrol bombs are thrown through the windows of Louis Vuitton shops, the people most immediately affected are those living in the areas of deprivation where disorder erupts) engage in is unrelated to immediate or long term political or economic demands. That’s precisely why these sort of events recur.

And, at the level of the state, the events are very quickly re-inscribed in a narrative of crime and senselessness, or turned into another political talking point. And so it goes, until next time.

So I’m not sure that Nina Power is right that ‘austerity measures’ are directly to blame, though to be fair, that’s perhaps more implicit in her claim that they provide context for the events than directly asserted. Many of those engaging in the forms of violent behaviour we are witnessing are usually outside the structure of the welfare economy, something that is also very rarely addressed by the mainstream policy discourse on social exclusion.

Nevertheless, she is absolutely right that underlying all this is deep inequality, which is causal insofar as it creates the subcultures where setting the town alight can be perceived as a rational action. The thing is that addressing those causes would require a vision of a different form of society altogether, and a political force which would take people there.

Update: Penny Red.

Update: Further to the question of whether this constitutes a legitimacy crisis, I’ll summarise some of what I’ve said in comments on this thread and on Facebook.

First, I think the “cuts=riots” equation is wrong. However, there is likely to be a meaningful relationship (if not a direct causal one) in that the forms of social discipline (miminal welfare, workfare, ‘youth centres’ and so on) becoming more stick and less carrot may incline some of those more attached to the logic of the system to become less so. It’s still important to remember that often those who are central to subcultural hierarchies are more often part of the informal economy than the social discipline of the official welfare economy.

Secondly, the question of ‘orchestration’ as opposed to ‘random’ is a false, and ultimately, meaningless dichotomy. As I read the reports, what is going on is the extensability of existing gang and community networks being fostered through demonstration effects, and through word of mouth and mobile devices. In some instances, this appears to be leading to inter and intra-communal violence, along existing cleavages, without the police being involved. We also have to recall that the police, as an ‘armed band’, also produce a reaction in force simply through being deployed en masse.

These situations reach a point where their momentum begins to outweigh their initial causes, and they are intensely frightening for people to live through. It’s at the point when violence becomes generalised that it becomes more (not entirely) ‘random’, and it’s at that point when a clash of orders starts to resemble real disorder. Here, we are a long way from politics, and we also should be a long way from celebrating ‘resistance’. Politics, after all, may be about the intensification of conflict, but it’s also about its containment.

Thirdly, I do think that there are points when social strain intensifies, and what will perhaps become most important is the short and medium term response of the state. There is only so much strain a system can bear before it breaks, or before its reconfiguration alters some of its characteristics, perhaps fundamentally. To what degree will this be capable of being inscribed in a ‘law and order’ narrative of ‘senselessness’ and how far can a repressive social order be pushed? Certainly, I would agree that those elites with most stake in the continuance of current arrangements would not want this to go on much longer, but, conversely, the force of the response itself may upend some of its legitimacy.

But we still need to place these events in a historical perspective. A lot of the sensemaking that goes on – not least among those immediately affected – reinforces or draws on the dominant cultural register. If this is a major legitimacy crisis, was Brixton in the early 80s also one, and how was it resolved?

Lastly, there’s always been a distinction between large scale civil disorder and political shifts. For the latter to accompany the former, a lot of the groundwork has to have been laid by changes in attitudes among some of the elite and political class (the French revolution is the best example) *as well as* a political force capable of channelling civil disorder.

Both those are absent, and the rise of racist movements is also another argument against there being any real ‘organic crisis’ going on here, in the sense that racial division reinforces rather than erodes the dominant system logic.

Having said all that, I’d close by repeating that there’s always the question of how much strain a system can bear. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s terms, we may be at a point of bifurcation. How it all plays out is as yet unknowable.

Update: New post here.

Their key claim – Victorians are living in fear of rising violent crime:

Labor’s 11 years of failure and the Liberals plan to change Victoria for the better. Under John Brumby, violent crime has reached record highs and assaults are up, but police are spending less time on the streets protecting Victorians and more time behind a desk doing paperwork. Many Victorian families are living in real fear and face rising levels of violent crime and too few police on the frontline to protect them. Labor spends the least per person on policing of any state. Since Labor came to power, assaults have increased from 19,000 incidents in 1999/2000 to 34,981 incidents last year.

Their response? The usual. 1600, wait, there’s more, 2640 additional police and protective services offices – and to abolish suspended sentencing. Labor, is offering, amongst other things 2100 new cops and that mother of all placebos, CCTV cameras (which don’t reduce violent crime – but don’t tell either of the major parties that).

But let’s stop a minute. Is violent crime actually rising, and if so, how much?

The source for the Liberal Party’s numbers are Victoria Police’s crime statistics, and the raw numbers on the assaults appear to be accurate. However, there’s at least two reasons to be skeptical that quoting assault numbers is indicative of huge rises in violent crime.

The first is that Victoria’s population has risen substantially since 1999/2000, which accounts for some, but not all of the rise.

However, there’s also the question of family violence, the reported levels of which have increased a lot over the past few years. However, I’d bet considerable amounts of money that the family violence isn’t new – what’s new is the willingness of the victims to report it.

Unfortunately, the police don’t provide a detailed breakdown of those statistics, but they do claim the following in their most recent statistics summary:

In terms of a rate per 100,000 population, crime against the person has increased by 0.7%. In 2009/2010 there were 45,385 offences of crime against the person recorded. This is an increase of 2.9% compared
with 2008/2009. In 2009/2010, total crime against the person offences not arising from family incidents as a rate per 100,000 population decreased by 1.0% compared to 2008/2009 and have decreased by 0.6% since 2000/2001.

While there are any number of complexities not dealt with in the available statistics (for instance, the possibility that assaults may be resulting in more serious injuries) if we have a real increase in violent crime, it seems a major part of it is taking place inside our homes, not on our streets.

Accordingly, I wait with anticipation for the Coalition to announce their policies to use those extra police to enforce AVOs, their funding of extra women’s shelters, and so on. Anybody want to give odds on that happening?

The above, which translates as “not twice for the same”, is one of the fundamental principles of modern law. Once you’ve been tried for something, and that trial has reached a final verdict (either to convict or acquit), you can’t be tried for it again. And if convicted and sentenced, you can’t then have additional punishments heaped on you for the same offence.

The government of New South Wales has just announced its intention to abandon that principle, with plans to subject violent criminals to indefinite detention when their sentences are complete. So, despite being handed a finite sentence by judges, these prisoners will now be given an effective life sentence by political fiat.

This unquestionably violates the rights against retroactive penalties, double jeopardy, and arbitrary detention affirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (and as a party to the ICCPR and First Optional Protocol, Australia will no doubt become the subject of complaints to the UN Human Rights Committee as a result) . But it also violates the rule of law. It arbitrarily changes the rules after the fact, with retroactive effects. The result is not only arbitrary decisions – criminal sentences determined by the whether a politician can gain votes by squicking someone rather than the severity of the offence – but also that no one can rely on the law as a guide to their behaviour. When sentences are arbitrary, there is no deterrence. And when they are arbitrarily large, there is no incentive to accept them (which could be unpleasant for witnesses, or those tasked with enforcement. Sadly, such injustices never seem to come back on the politicians…)

This is simply a monstrous move, but Australia has no formal human rights mechanisms which would prevent it (New Zealand has the BORA, which would at least force the politicians to admit what they were doing – not that that seems to help). And so it gets chalked up as yet another example of why Australia needs a Bill of Rights…

“I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”

Australians are rightfully proud of the good thing we’ve got going on here. We know that we live in god’s own country and most of us wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact I couldn’t agree with it more. However, one area in which we’re certainly not world leaders is self reflection. Most of us are pretty happy with our lot in life and don’t feel the need to risk it by asking too many questions of ourselves. As a result, we’ve made avoiding direct public discussions about the (relatively minor) imperfections in the Australian way of life an art form. It’s trite, but it’s the Australian way to dodge any issues that have the potential to make us uncomfortable with a dismissive ‘She’ll be right’ or ‘No worries’.

I had cause to reflect on this recently when I posted a bit of a spray about the inadequacy of the police response to the recent attacks on Indians in Melbourne on my Facebook profile. This deliberately direct comment provoked some very odd responses (both public and private) from ordinarily sensible people. While the content of these responses was extremely varied, they had one fairly consistent theme – a desperate avoidance of confronting the role that racism (subjective or structural) has played in these attacks.

I knew that Mark shared my frustration at people’s reluctance to confront the issue head on, so to try and keep up the momentum for addressing the core of this problem I offered to set out a factual basis for discussion and respond to some of the more common dodges that I’ve seen employed to avoid these facts.

Factual Basis for Discussion:

1. Media coverage of violence in which racial minorities are the victim has increased substantially over the last 18 months or so. I don’t have data for this, but I don’t think anyone’s really disputing it.
2. Assaults and robberies of people of Indian appearance increased by 5.4% in 2008-09 (a total of 1525 incidents).
3. People of Indian appearance are 2 ½ times as likely to be the victim of an assault as non-Indians (an assault rate of 1700 assaults per 100,000 people compared to 700 assaults per 100,000 people). It could even be worse than this; a number of Indians who have contacted me privately has suggested that there is chronic under-reporting of attacks to the police driven by a fear of losing visas and a belief the police are apathetic.
4. Representatives of the Australian-Indian community and the Indian Government have publicly stated their belief that these attacks are racially motivated.
5. The public response from the Police to this situation has been inconsistent. Public responses to incidents are provided on a case by case basis without reference to broader trends. On some occasions the Police have conceded a racial motivation for attacks while in others Police have publicly rejected race as a causal factor despite evidence to the contrary.

On the basis of the response I received to my original post, I’m sure people are already starting to object that nothing in the above necessarily equates to a problem of racism. So let’s examine the most common responses that have been prevalent online in the past few days:

Disavowal: “You Can’t Prove That These Incidents Were Motivated By Race”

By far the most common response to claims of racist violence basically boils down to a correlation v causation argument. Anyone with a little knowledge of statistics knows that correlation does not imply causation. In layman’s terms, the mere fact that Indians are two and a half times as likely to be victims of violent crime doesn’t mean that they are victims of violent crime BECAUSE they are Indian. There could well be another cause that isn’t a function of their race – the frequently cited alternative causes are Indians over-representation in poorer areas, more dangerous jobs and shift-work (Mark’s already covered the structural racism angle here so I won’t go over old ground here).

This is an argument that’s not limited to the online debate – variants of this argument have been advanced by people as senior as Australia’s High Commissioner to India, Peter Varghese, who recently complained that:

There is an unfortunate tendency in the tabloid media to equate anything bad happening to a person of Indian origin to racism. Then they focus on why you won’t admit it is racism, because they take it as a given that any attack has to be a racist attack.’

Unfortunately, this argument is one of those examples of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. As XKCD has put it, while correlation doesn’t imply causation “It does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.” Unfortunately, in Australia, when correlation points to racism, we don’t ‘look over there’ – we resolutely look the other way. The avoidance instinct kicks in and we latch onto another causal explanation, any causal explanation to avoid having to confront the presence racism.

This instinct to look the other way that leads to extraordinary logical contortions like the following chain of reasoning from a Victorian Police spokesman:

I think there was a mention where there was a comment similar to `why don’t you go home?’ but there was nothing more… They appear to take some delight in the actual assault. It’s very disturbing and their propensity for violence is quite shocking… I think the motivation would have been robbery.

Well, obviously.

I’d be happy if the Victorian Police were able to make the case publicly that racially motivated violence isn’t a problem. It would be great if someone could publicly show that that the correlation between Indian and being a victim of violent assaults is not the result of a causal relationship. Show me some data that shows that taxi drivers, night shift store clerks or people in other at risk occupations are equally likely to be victims of assault as Indians (in fact, before you do that you’d better show me that Indians actually are over-represented in these professions).

But people don’t do this. Instead the default position of the Police seems to be to rule out a causal relationship, despite the overwhelming correlation and without any data of their own. Any honest evaluation of the statistical context of these crimes would lead someone to ask how the Police could possibly be justified in confidently ruling out racial prejudice as a causal factor in time for the next morning’s news.

It’s this automatic dismissal of a racial element to these crimes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that’s causing so much resentment among Australian-Indians and the Indian Government. Neville Roach AO, the Chairman Emeritus of the Australia India Business Council hit the nail on the head when he said that:

Unfortunately, the seeming instant dismissal by local authorities of the possibility of racism being involved has created an impression of a nation in denial. This has seriously damaged Australia’s credibility and helped inflame public opinion in India and within the Indian community in Australia, who see the official line as indicative of an unwillingness to take complaints of racism seriously.

It is difficult to understand how the police are able to rule out racism completely and with such certainty. While a premature conclusion of racism would also be inappropriate, the apparent disproportionate number of attacks on Indians relative to other overseas students does suggest racism is a factor.

Quite. It’s not the people who are suggesting that racism is relevant here that have something to prove. It’s those who are denying it.

Other Countries Are Worse!

“Australians on the whole are no more racist than anyone else, and possibly less so than quite a few places”. This one is often accompanied by gratuitous assertions that because of this fact, if you criticise anyone in Australia for being racist you are an anti-Australian, latte sipping, left wing basket weaver (those who know me will know how deeply insulting I find that).

The rejoinder this is short an obvious: Yes, so what?

I have no doubt that Asian, American and particularly European countries are far more racist than Australia (anyone who disagrees with that is either ignorant of the OS experience or into pointless self-flagellation). There probably is no other country in the world that I would rather live in if I was of another race (or more pertinently, that I would rather my child to live in).

But so what? Racism isn’t a relative concept. It’s not less bad because others are worse. To put it another way, we wouldn’t stop trying to stamp out paedophilia in Australia just because we discovered it was more common in another country.

Further, putting false relativism to one side, Australia’s uniquely exposed to negative economic consequences of being perceived as racist (to wit see projections of declining Asian student numbers). We’ve got good reason to hold ourselves to a higher standard than everyone else.

All Violence is Wrong – We Shouldn’t Focus on the Racial Element

Violence is violence is violence. It’s repulsive in any form and there are strong laws against it in all forms so we shouldn’t fixate on the racial element.

A week ago I probably would have agreed with this. I was against hate crime legislation because I thought that was already adequately covered by existing criminal laws and anything beyond that was getting close to criminalising thought.

However, upon reflection in light of the incident that I experienced, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think violence with a racial element IS in fact different to other violence because it has a differential impact. Violence with a racial element has an additional, targeted intimidation impact on minority communities that general violence doesn’t have. I hadn’t really thought about this before, but sitting on that train the news reports of racially violent incidents came immediately to mind in a way that I think general reports of violence wouldn’t have in that situation. In this way, the broader intimidation impact of violence is greater when it’s targeted towards an identifiable sub-group.

Further, generalising the problem in this way can blind policy makers to presence of important causal factors specific to the racial subgroup. It’s a bit like saying to an Aboriginal that alcoholism is bad wherever it manifests itself, therefore we shouldn’t focus on alcoholism in remote communities, rather simply on the general, Australia wide problem.

Don’t Talk About It – It’ll Only Make It Worse

The common objection to confronting the racial element of these incidents is that even if it does exist, if you talk about it in public, one of the following things will happen:

* You’ll ‘fuel’ the problem by given racist louts the publicity they crave;
* You’ll provoke a ‘law and order’ bidding war between Labor and the Liberals; and
* You’ll undermine the operational independence of the Police.

And on top of that, it won’t change the behaviour of people who are already flagrantly disregarding the norms of society.

I have to say, this is the response that irritates me the most. It amounts to little more than the advocacy of sweeping the issue under the carpet.

I simply can’t accept this – Words matter.

Words matter even more when they are being delivered by the Police – the bearers of the Government’s monopoly on the use of force. The Police enforce our society’s laws and as such are standard bearers for our values. Their public statements and behaviour carry special force. You could probably run off half a dozen slogans of police road safety campaigns. When the Police speak, they speak with authority.

However, when the Police simply ignore the overwhelming correlation between being Indian and being a victim of violent crime, they send the message that it’s ok for the rest of the community to similarly look the other way when confronted with racial prejudice. By equivocating in the face of overwhelming evidence of racially motivated violent incidents, the Police send the message that the broader community is also equivocal in the face of racism. When this prejudice is unchecked in the public debate it creates the impression that there is room for this in our society. And they send a message to the Indian community that they are not taking the issue seriously.

Let’s Face Facts and Act

It was this feeling that the representatives of law and order in our society, the Police force, were letting down the Indian community by not being honest about the issue that prompted my extremely minor contribution to remedying the problem. It was as much an act of absolution of guilt as community service (though there are international precedents and a strong public policy argument in favour of such an approach). I decided to start mapping incidents of racial violence and any consequent law enforcement response because I wanted to try to face the facts and see the scale of the problem for myself. I haven’t gotten far and I’m shocked that it has received the attention that it did, but I’ve already learnt more from people’s response to the idea than I probably expected to learn from the exercise itself. It hasn’t changed my view that Australians in general aren’t racist. But it’s made me realise that we’re more ‘actively complacent’ about it than I ever expected.

Elsewhere: Hoyden About Town.

There has been a certain feeling in the air of deja vu over the past fortnight in Queensland. The jailing of a former Minister, allegations that government was far too close to business, a government sinking rapidly in the polls while making “tough decisions” and, the piece de resistance, the exposure of systemic misconduct in the elite Armed Robbery Squad of the Queensland Police.

The timing of this sequence of supposedly unlikely events was interesting. Much is being made of the 20th anniversary of the release of the Fitzgerald Report. The date falls this Thursday, and Tony Fitzgerald QC himself will be commemorating the occasion with a public lecture at Griffith University.

So is something again rotten in the state of Queensland?

Lurid stories of convicted criminals wining, dining and bonking on dodgy day release jaunts supposedly to gather intelligence for the coppers dominated local press coverage. This a week after revelations of the jailed Gordon Nuttall’s bizarre plans to make himself premier — shades of Russ Hinze perhaps.

The reality, though, is more prosaic.

Premier Anna Bligh claimed that Nuttall’s sentencing and the CMC report into police misconduct were proof that the system was working. A new Queensland would shed light on the malfeasance of a few. A number of voices were raised to accuse Bligh of dangerous complacency.

There’s merit in that claim.

In truth, as veteran civil libertarian lawyer Terry O’Gorman argued, echoed by a chorus of retired judges, the impetus behind the anti-corruption agenda had begun to dissipate long ago. Landmarks were the amalgamation of the Crime Commission and the CJC into the CMC, and the practice of outsourcing inquiries into misconduct back to the departments concerned. The CMC conducts few investigations, and a huge majority of complaints against police are referred back to the QPS’ Ethical Standards Command. The watchers are watching themselves.

The CJC, and it successor, the CMC, have never been popular with pollies. Signs that the Fitzgerald agenda was being watered down go back to the Goss era. The cavalier practice of using the corruption watchdog as a pawn in the political chess game hasn’t helped matters. Nor has, some would suggest, the secrecy surrounding the CMC itself.

Openness and transparency are key to an ethical political — and police — culture. The Bligh government has taken some steps in this direction, but much could still be done. Fitzgerald pointed to the faults of a supine media in his report. In the two decades since, Brisbane’s print landscape has narrowed to one paper, the Courier-Mail, whose tabloidisation is mirrored by the current affairs coverage on ABC Local Radio. The state based 7.30 Report has long gone, and there’s no new Quentin Dempster to put the pollies and coppers under the microscope. Brisbane media over the last fortnight has concentrated on the sensational aspects of the scandalous revelations at the expense of hard-headed analysis and investigative reporting.

That probably won’t change.

So it’s even more important that Bligh and her government ditch the soundbites which appear to come naturally to a government on the ropes and attend to the culture of complacency that has grown up. We don’t need another Fitzgerald Inquiry — things aren’t that bad. But we do need some serious thought and analysis about opening up the Queensland political and police cultures, and about reform of the CMC itself.

Just what is it with Victorians and their adoration of violent criminals, drug dealers and standover merchants? The same people who ring into talkback radio or post on news websites to froth about our crime epidemics and complain about too-soft sentences for drug addicts, dealers, burglars and “gang violence” (always “ethnic” gang violence), are all too happy to talk Desmond Moran up as a great guy who was just like one of us, really!.

His mother had a terrible job getting him to come in for tea. Putting his little boot in he’d be, bless him. All the kids were like that then, they didn’t have their heads stuffed with all this Cartesian dualism.

The traders are mourning “Tupps” – a “good guy” one insisted, as she watched the boys from forensics sweep up the street, inch by inch, shoulder to shoulder, working their way to Ascot Pasta and Deli-Cafe, where Moran had gone for his regular coffee. He’d sit on the street there most days.
No, she doesn’t want her name in the paper. But she wants someone to write that he had lots of friends and plenty of respect in this neighbourhood. People knew who he was, what was said, but they took him as they saw him.
“He was always the first to one to put his hand out to anyone who needed a hand. He’s been in the area for years and years, a lot of people will be very upset.”
Whenever she saw him sitting having his usual at the cafe where he died, just down the road from her shop, she’d get a “g’day, love”.

Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.

As the police and others have pointed out, the media focus on the “gangland identity” angle has spawned a grotesque celebrity, epitomised by the “Gangland Matriarch” Judy Moran and the photos of her extensive wardrobe in the press. Life is imitating art. The men have been adopting Sopranos-like black suits and dark glasses at the many funerals that are a frequent event that world. Some of them, it seems, aren’t quite sure where Underbelly ends and their lives begin.

This is lapped up avidly by the same people who would be howling for the stocks to be brought back if they caught one of the poor wretches at the bottom of that food chain selling drugs to their schoolchildren. But then, the Morans and Williamses and Kanes are such lovely, old-fashioned folk at heart!

Mrs Simmel: Oh yes Kipling Road was a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other’s houses with each other’s property all day. They were a cheery lot.

I don’t know if this celebration of (white) criminality is more rife in Victoria than other states. Maybe it’s because when we think of (white) criminal gangs we think of the Kellys (Scenery! Horses! Interesting cyberpunk armour! Robin Hood!) rather than the Rum Corps. The younger ones have Chopper Read, who has his own website, book deals and stints on talk shows. And then we wonder why some of the Yoof see crime as a viable way of life.

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This July, women all around the world lined up to see the movie spin off of the Sex in The City television series that has been attributed to changing women’s views about sex, relationships and fashion. But while fashionistas flitted about in their uncomfortable toe splitting stilettos, I awaited the return of another female pop icon to the silver screen.

The Right Kind of Role Model

Scully on The X Files. Copyright 20th Century Fox

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She was strong, she was smart, she was cynical and she didn’t compromise her beliefs for a second, despite the all too convincing theories of an overly handsome man by the name of Fox Mulder. She wasn’t obsessed with the latest fashions and used her brains, not her boobs, to pursue her ambitious career objectives.

She was Special Agent Dana Scully and she was the heroine at the centre of the sci fi television drama, The X Files. While Mulder oozed sex appeal and crazy theories about the existence of extraterrestrials, Scully was the skeptical, forensic pathologist always there with a rational explanation for whatever paranormal phenomenon they were investigating that week. She stood side by side with Mulder as an intellectual equal. She was a sexy tomboy whose favourite book was Moby Dick and who wasn’t afraid of anything slimy, bloody or just down right gross. Scully stood strong as Mulder turned green and reached for a bucket.

I was twelve years old at the peak of the X Files phenomenon and I was obsessed with Agent Scully. I loved her and I wanted to be her. More than ten years and a degree in science later, I still have a soft spot for this sassy agent. As embarrassing as it is to admit to making career decisions based on a fictional television character, I take comfort in the fact that I am not alone.

The Next Generation

Science based crime solving programs are bigger than ever and so are enrolments in forensic science courses. Coincidence? I think not.

For the week of October 14 2008, four of the five most watched television shows in the US were crime-solving programs. CSI pulled 23 million viewers and was the most watched program in the country. NCIS came in at number three with 16.2 million, Criminal Minds at number 4 pulled 16.1 million and CSI: NY followed close behind with 15.8 million viewers. CSI: Miami, Cold Case and Bones were all in the top 20. Australia is no different. In the same week, City Homicide, CSI, NCIS, The Mentalist and Criminal Minds all appeared in the Top 20 programs. Reality based crime shows such as The Force and Border Security also rated well.

In an article for Science, forensic scientists Jason Linville and Ray Liu explain why shows such as CSI are so popular. “Hollywood focuses on the most interesting aspects of the forensic investigation. Science becomes a gimmick–a technological toy that the hero uses to find evidence the criminal surely hoped was undetectable.”

Taking the Bait

University enrollments in natural and physical science courses have steadily increased in Australia over the past 10 years. From 2000 to 2004, enrollments increased by almost nine percent and only dropped off over the past few years due to the popularity of environmental studies courses. Last year enrollments increased by 3.1 percent and according to Dr Denise Donlon, a forensic anthropologist and lecturer at The University of Sydney, demand for forensic science courses has never been higher.

“There is much greater interest [due to television programs] and this has probably contributed to the growth of forensic science courses in universities,” she says. “I have had to introduce a quota on my course in forensic osteology.”

The story is the same in the US. Students in the US, especially female students, are citing the strong female role models on shows such as Bones and CSI as part of the reason they are entering what was previously an all boys club. (Told you it wasn’t just me.)

In a recent article in the Winston Salem Journal, West Virginia University professor Max Houck identified television as a reason for the increase in student enrollments: “I have to think that there’s got to be some relationship between the roles that are represented on TV and the way women see what’s possible for them as a career.”

Decisions Based On a Lie?

The internet is full of forums jam packed with questions such as “I love ‘insert TV show here’ and I want a job like that. What do I need to study?” But are students making life-changing decisions based on fiction?

Crime drama Bones has often been compared to The X Files. It’s a known formula: take a smart female scientist coupled with goofy FBI agent, add a bucket load of sexual chemistry, a list of weird cases and you have a ratings hit. Based on the life of Kathy Reichs, a best selling author and forensic anthropologist, Bones is now in its third successful season. Emily Deschanel stars as forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan who along with her team of ‘squints’ work with the FBI to solve bizarre homicides.

Donlon says Reichs’ experience has resulted in the show being rather accurate scientifically, but some aspects are highly dramatised for television. “Temperance Brennan has a team of people ready to do all kinds of analyses whereas forensic anthropologists usually work alone,” she explains.

And forget chasing after bad guys. “We don’t get involved in the investigation the way she does,” she says. “Often the last we hear about a case is when we hand in our report.”

But there’s always the fantastic gadgets right? “No one has a fabulous lab like she does,” Donlon laughs. “Usually we just have a small room with a table or trolley in it.”

Temperance Brennan’s Lab in Bones. Copyright 20th Century Fox

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So maybe real life is not a glamorous as it appears on TV, but when is it?

“I know that an actual crime lab has fluorescent lights and old equipment and cinderblock walls. But I also know people don’t want to look at that,” Naren Shankar, the executive producer of CSI told Expert Voices recently. With a PhD in applied physics from Cornell, Shankar says he is aware of taking creative licence for the visual aspects of the show but draws the line at fudging the science.

Professionals Convinced or Confused?

But it is not only students and potential forensic scientists who are influenced by these programs. Detective-inspector Bob Sitlington from Victoria Police’s Forensic Services told the The Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society that even police are fooled.

“Police officers watch these CSI shows like everyone else. Unfortunately, they think what they see on these shows is reality. We have had detectives at crime scenes ring forensics and say, ‘I have seen a certain forensic technique on television. Are you capable of doing it?’

Jokes aside, the writers of these programs take accuracy very seriously and this year for the first time, a television show was acknowledged by the US National Science Board for the promotion of science in the community. A crime solving show that features a mathematician at its core, Numb3rs was honoured “for innovative use of the entertainment medium to promote interest in mathematics education and mathematic applications in everyday life.”

The CSI Effect

An unexpected byproduct of the rise of forensic science has been its effect on the justice system. What has become known in US court rooms as ‘The CSI Effect’ is the impact of ‘whodunnit’ crime shows on the expectations of juries. In an article in the Yale Law Journal, Andrew Thomas says jury members have unrealistic expectations in the courtroom because of CSI.

“In real life, the false expectation of plentiful scientific evidence can create a bias in the jury if this issue is not properly addressed at trial,” writes Thomas.

Jeffrey Toobin’s piece in the New Yorker about the CSI Effect was the topic of a news story by Anderson Cooper on CNN.

Seriously?

The television industry is a fickle market. It is always evolving and changing and it is not uncommon for a show you once loved to disappear into pop culture history. Great television is rare, but when it happens it can change your world. So my advice is, enjoy your favorite shows, take from them what you will but don’t forget that the same people who bought you The X Files are also responsible for Sex in the City.