Elena's toolbox for Human Rights Education by E lena

The killing of Amadou Diallo

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 14:13:08 UTC

In February 1999, a policeman was told that a twenty-year-old Black man raped a woman in the Bronx neighborhood. The physiognomy of Amdou - an unarmed African immigrant with no criminal record - corresponds to the wanted person; he is told to stop, but Amadou doesn't understand English well and puts his hands in his pockets to take out his documents (he thought this was what he was being asked). The policemen, thinking he was taking out a gun, fired 41 shoots and brutally killed him. The case becomes a scandal.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/05/nyregion/officers-in-bronx-fire-41-shots-and-an-unarmed-man-is-killed.html

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 14:19:07 UTC

Did the policemen use Amadou's skin color as a fundamental criterion in their choice to shoot?
Wasn't their rash decision a defense behavior against what society teaches us to perceive as dangerous, rather than a generalized defense behavior?

Racial inequality has always been a human rights issue. Its urgency is of the utmost significance, as it has costed and keeps costing millions of human lives.

Police shooting deaths of unarmed Blacks and African Americans led to psychological research on the influence of racial stereotypes on decisions to shoot, an effect called shooter bias.

1) SHOOTER TASK

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 14:21:36 UTC

This led to the development of a first-person-shooter videogame, which presents a series of images of young men, some armed, some unarmed, set against realistic backgrounds like parks or city streets. The player's goal is to shoot the armed targets, but not to shoot unarmed targets. Half of the targets are Black, and half are White. This five-minute-long game is used to investigate whether decisions to "shoot" a potentially hostile target can be influenced by that target's race.
http://psych.colorado.edu/~jclab/FPST/demo/canvas/testPrograms/st_v.1.html

2) IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 14:49:18 UTC

The implicit association test (IAT) is a tool created to study the strength of the implicit associations between objects and attitudes or between different objects. The procedure consists of five categorization tasks.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
These are the instructions for the tests, which only take 10 minutes: https://psych.hanover.edu/javatest/cle/cognition/cognition/IAT_instructions.html

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 15:17:01 UTC

Applying this tool to social objects may result in (not so) surprising findings!
IATs allow to measure implicit attitudes, fighting the tendency to give socially desirable answers (within the few milliseconds in which it's necessary to respond, it's practically impossible to control them!) and to discover a possible ambivalence towards an object.
You can take a test about:

ethnicities
gender/career
gender/science
religions
disability

3) CARBON FOOTPRINT CALCULATOR

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 15:33:03 UTC

With this test it's possible to gain a realistic idea of how much your lifestyle impacts the Earth, depending on the amount and the kind of resources you use every day.

The Inuits' testimony

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 21:07:04 UTC

The Arctic is experiencing some of the most rapid and severe climate change on Earth.
After filing a petition in December 2005, in January 2007 Inuit people from Artic Canada asked the Inter-American Human Rights Commission to hear their claim that the unchecked effects of climate change were violating their human rights.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6408441.stm

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-16 21:15:08 UTC

Sheila Watt-Cloutier's fundamental rights to life, health, water, food, housing and an adequate standard of living are being threatened by the impact of climate change: <<Our region is the global climate change barometer. If you want to protect the planet, look to the Arctic and listen to what Inuit are saying>>.
http://www.ciel.org/Publications/IACHR_WC_Mar07.pdf

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 09:05:04 UTC

Why is the number of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 list so low (33 last year, which is also the highest)?
https://fortune.com/2019/05/16/fortune-500-female-ceos/

Even if women are almost half of the world population, they lag substantially behind men in terms of representation in leadership positions because they have to face a lot of subtle obstacles that make up gender barriers in the workplace. The beliefs that hinder women's full participation in work and determine a violation of their right not to be discriminated against because of their sex are very common.

4) LGBTI SURVEY

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 14:26:14 UTC

The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) carried out the world’s biggest ever survey of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people’s life experiences, involving a total of 139,799 people aged 15 years or older.

The survey covered a wide range of issues, such as:

experiences with discrimination, harassment or violence
openness about being LGBTI
positive and negative experiences at work and in education
socio-economic and living conditions

It's possible to use the data explorer on this website to grasp the big picture of what it means to be part of the LGBTI community as a European citizen.

Guilt of existing

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 15:07:18 UTC

The map below shows the countries across the world where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are criminalised: so many of their human rights are being violated.
In 2020 there are still 11 countries in which LGBT people risk a death penalty for simply existing.

5) A GUIDE TO SHOP ETHICALLY

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 15:58:21 UTC

The Shop Ethical! guide is a database that shares information on the environmental and social track record of the companies behind common brands.

There's no such thing as "ethical" or "unethical’".
Companies have praises or criticisms in particular areas, which makes them more ethical or less ethical depending on the criterion.
It's important to know better in order to be able to make better choices.

Italian "caporalato"

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 16:08:44 UTC

Caporalato is is an illegal form of recruiting and organizing the workforce through unauthorized intermediaries called caporali.
The recruitment process mainly takes place in the agricultural sector and mostly involves immigrant workers.
The caporali hire the workers in account of agricultural entrepreneurs, obtaining money from them and not distributing it fairly.

This phenomenon is very common in Southern Italy, for example in the tomato industry:

430000 illegal contracts
2€ per hour
10 hours of work per day
violation of labor standards and fundamental human rights (in the picture there's Borgo Mezzanone, Italy, where many of these workers have to live)

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 19:42:19 UTC

When we choose - for example - the tomato sauce we want to buy on a supermarket shelf, we have to keep in mind that our consumption may have costed someone's life. We need to understand the value of food, especially when it's covered in blood. The blood of Lhassan Goultaine (Morocco, 39 years-old), Anane Kwase (Ghana, 34 years-old), Mousse Toure (Mali, 21 years-old), Lahcen Haddouch (Morocco, 41 years-old), Awuku Joseph (Ghana, 24 years-old), Ebere Ujunwa (Nigeria, 21 years-old), Bafoudi Camarra (Guinea, 22 years-old), Alagie Ceesay (Gambia, 24 years-old), Alasanna Darboe (Gambia, 28 years-old), Eric Kwarteng (Ghana, 32 years-old), Romanus Mbeke (Nigeria, 28 years-old) and Djoumana Djire (Mali, 36 years-old), among many.

So... WHAT'S YOUR ROLE?

elenamedda1999 — 2020-05-17 20:22:47 UTC

Living as humans means exercising our rights in a place that supports us as we do it. But does this world actually support the enjoyment of human rights for ALL PEOPLE?
These stories, facts and tools are being shared on this Padlet so that - just by taking a look at what's really happening in the world - we can understand more easily and more directly how many human rights are being violated and how many lives (just as unique, irreplaceable and precious as our own) are being obstructed, oppressed or put at risk by the social beliefs and economic norms that have been dominating the order of our human world up until now.
We may have unconsciously contributed to them with our lifestyle or just with our (willful) ignorance. But knowledge is power, and we can make a difference. What's our role? We can find that out as soon as we acknowledge the urgency of human rights issues and how important human rights are.

Let's start with learning...
https://academy.amnesty.org/learn