blame the victim – Engaging Peace

Institutional Moral Engagement

Posted on April 10, 2014April 10, 2014 by kathiemm

Organizations are like people: they can frame their activities in the language of moral disengagement or engagement.

Some organizations (I bet you can come up with your own examples) do terrible things but cloak those terrible things in the language of “pseudo-moral” principles, or blame the victims of racism for hatred directed at them or use euphemistic language to describe their dirty deeds.

Other organizations operate on the principles of moral engagement.

With tax time upon us, our latest recognition of moral engagement at work goes to organizations promoting resistance to war taxes—for example, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)—which produced the brief video on “Where is the peace dividend?

The FCNL –a nonprofit associated with the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers)—provides many useful materials regarding the costs of war. One that you may want to read before tax time comes around again is “Where do your tax dollars go?” They report that in 2013 40 cents out of every tax dollar went for “defense”—and there’s a nice example of a euphemism–and only 2 cents out of every tax dollar went for diplomacy, development, and the prevention of war. What’s wrong with this picture?

Other anti-war, anti-war taxes morally-engaged organizations include:

*War Resistor’s League (WRL); see their predictions for where your 2015 tax dollars will go.

*Global Day of Action on Military Spending, co-founded in 2011 by the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS); check them out.

The road to militarization: Paved in video games?

Posted on November 25, 2013November 25, 2013 by kathiemm

With no universal conscription, how does the military-industrial complex entice young people into the military?

Young men playing at video arcade. — Photo by KoS, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

It certainly helps to keep a substantial portion of the population poor and to limit job opportunities for people of color. But to increase the enthusiasm of adolescents for a career involving weapons, violence, and death, what could be a better avenue than video games?

Don’t assume for one minute that the arms manufacturers and the video game industry are not in bed with each other.

For decades, Lockheed Martin weapons have appeared in extremely violent video games—e.g., Homefront and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter–in which Americans kill, kill, and kill various enemies threatening the country’s liberty.

Such games are case studies in moral disengagement:

Enemies are dehumanized
Pseudo-moral justifications are provided for “wasting” the bad guys
Responsibility for the violence is always attributed to the victims of the aggression

Lockheed Martin reciprocated, deliberately developing for one of their complex aircraft a training module that resembled a video game and “leveraged” video game technology for “tracking and interpreting real-time events during military operation(s).” Indeed, they bought their own video game maker, 3Dsolve, to develop training materials.

There is considerable evidence—although not undisputed—that exposure to violent video games can teach and increase violent behavior, violent thoughts, and violent emotions [links open in pdf].

The bad news is that this connection may serve the military well, convincing children that war is a game, that “wasting” others is fun, and that massive death and destruction are justifiable.

The good news is that prosocial video games appear to promote prosocial behavior [link opens in pdf].

What are your thoughts about how to promote prosocial videos in a culture of violence?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Weapons of war: rape

Posted on October 29, 2012October 29, 2012 by kathiemm

All weapons of war are weapons of destruction and pain. Previous posts have reminded readers of the pervasive lethal effects of, for example, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and landmines.

Another violent and devastating tactic recognized by the United Nations Security Council as a weapon of war is rape.

In its resolution calling for an end to sexual violence against women, the Security Council said, “Women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”

A recent report from the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights focused on the horrendously high rates of rape by warring groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and the Dafur region of Sudan.

Unfortunately, we must add to the list of wartime horrors the rape of U.S. servicewomen by U.S. servicemen. Watch the video above; you will not easily forget.

And for a horrifying example of moral disengagement in regard to the rape of women in the U.S. military, watch Liz Trotta of Fox News blame the victims.

If you watch these and other videos, you will want to do something. Stop Rape Now, the U.N. Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict agency, provides several suggestions, including the simple action of crossing your arms. Learn what you can do to stop this weapon of war.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology