CRE3: Justice in Society; Present situation

Definition of Justice

Justice is what we as a society regard as “right” based on our moral concepts of ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity and fairness. Justice needs to be in the light of the democratic principle of the ‘rule of law’.

It is the fairness in protection of rights and punishment of wrongs.

Injustices in society today

1. Racism: The idea that people are treated unequally because of the color of their skin is a social injustice. There have been many studies done by many smart people at smart universities that prove this.
   “As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts ‘Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,’ a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.”
2. Classism – The idea that people are treated worse based on their real or perceived socio-economic status (money and social standing) is a social injustice. Seriously ask any homeless person how they are treated, or think about how society treats homeless people. As your status/wealth increases you get treated better in our society. I really don’t need stats on this one, as it’s pretty obvious and has been this way in every country and every time period.
3. Sexism/ Gender discrimination – The idea that women are considered the “weaker sex” or inferior to men solely because of their gender/body parts. Although this tends to play out in the workplace Most, If not all major leaders of countries, painters, writers, scientists, business leaders, etc. have been men. This to me is not evidence that women are incompetent, it is evidence that there is a system in place to keep women from entering these fields or succeeding in these fields. Especially because once women were granted rights (like voting) then women began entering these fields. Again this is the only logical conclusion based on the evidence.
4. Religious discrimination occurs if an a person makes decision/comment based on your religion, creed, or sincere belief, rather than your performance or qualifications or personality. For example, if you receive excellent job evaluations until your supervisor finds out you are Muslim, and then you are terminated, this is religious discrimination. Similarly, it would be religious discrimination if you applied for a job, but after telling you that you are the most qualified candidate, the interviewer made negative remarks about Jehovah’s Witnesses while knowing that you belong to that religion, and you do not get the job.
5. Urban poverty is, in a sense, an overflow of rural poverty. Because rural people in the low-income group find themselves ‘unemployable’ in the urban environment as a result of their deficient education and training, they continue to be poor. According to the Urban Management Programme of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), urban poverty encompasses three main issues: lack of adequate employment, lack of appropriate urban services and insufficient social integration.
6. Slavery is also the looting of the wealth and resources of the victim countries and, when such exploitation went on for centuries, it is undeniable that the harm caused is huge and difficult, if not impossible, to quantify even if its reality is undoubted despite the time that has elapsed.
7. Active repression of human rights (including the right to work, education, social security, health, national self-determination, individual liberty, freedom of thought, expression, movement, privacy, religion, and ideology) or passive refusal to ensure human rights, usually on the part of governments, but also on the part of groups and individuals, occurs regardless of constitutions, legal provisions and bona fide statements. Human societies are so organized that in practice they tend to deny at least some of man’s inalienable rights to some of its members on the grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. The widespread violations of human rights over the globe relate to the insecurity of governments that do not have a broad popular support; to the need to maintain national security in times of real or perceived external threat; to the imposition of a form of organization of society on the minority or majority that do not accept it; to the maintenance of political stability seen as a sine qua non for economic and social progress; to, sometimes, the personal idiosyncracies or perversity of dictators; and, perhaps, to the conception of power seen and lived as limitless, by conviction or tactic.
8. Forced labour covers a wide range of practices, from slavery to compulsory national service of a military or civil kind. Its effect varies from the total subjugation of prisoners, particularly political prisoners or prisoners-of-war, and of slaves, to the hardships endured by people recruited for national service. It may have severe adverse physical effects especially in the case of the two former. Forced labour associated with malnutrition and crippling diseases has led to the death of millions.

Injustices Against women today

Injustices against children today

Children experience social justice in their homes and community. In the institutions that provide health and education. In the playground and streets of their community. In the neighbourhoods they live in. They are also actors and partners in promoting social justice through their concern and desire to uphold the rights of the most vulnerable children.

This discrimination affects both their health and the quality and delivery of child health services.

Discrimination can be direct or indirect. Indirect discrimination is the inequitable treatment of one group disadvantaging another, as opposed to direct discrimination in which the focus of discriminatory attitudes, actions, and policies is the group itself. Discrimination can act at the level of the individual, but can also be institutional. Institutional discrimination occurs when the structures or operating policies of organisations result in certain sections of the community being disadvantaged. This concept is most familiar as institutional racism, but can apply to any group disadvantaged by stigma and discrimination, including children.

Direct discrimination

This can be manifest in the following ways.

Overt discrimination

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the beginnings of the exclusion of children from adult spaces, not for their safety or wellbeing but for the convenience of adults. This separateness of the child’s world is now seen as natural. The resulting discrimination is so much a norm that it is both ubiquitous and unrecognised, with hotels in the UK routinely refusing access to children (and dogs).

Marginalisation

Marginalisation is when a group experiencing discrimination is not seen as part of the core business or service.

Children are similarly under-represented in funding for research and development, resulting in an inadequate evidence base for much paediatric practice, particularly evident in the development of new therapeutic drugs. Over two thirds (67%) of 624 children admitted to wards in five European hospitals received drugs prescribed in an unlicensed or off label manner.Although the problem is complicated by the ethical problems encountered around consent for child participation in trials, it is largely profit driven. Drugs are not tested in children and thus not licensed for paediatric use. Even licensed drugs are prescribed off label “resulting in children becoming therapeutic orphans sometimes with tragic consequences”.

Age blindness

This is equivalent to colour blindness in racial parlance—treating everyone in the same manner, so ignoring or denying different needs. Such an approach can exclude children: for example, marina developments with inadequate barriers between toddlers and deep water.

Although huge strides have been made within the health sector to respond to the accommodation needs of children—providing facilities for play, and ensuring parents can accompany their children—there are still examples of poor practice, with shared waiting rooms in primary and secondary care in which carers have to spend considerable time with very young children in surroundings that are unsuitable and stressful.

The deficit model of childhood

Children are seen as immature—that is, incapable or unfinished; simply on the road to adulthood rather than people in their own right.

Children as incapable

We continue, for the most part, to exclude children from decision making or, at best, fail to take their input seriously. Although there is a commitment within the NHS to children’s participation in decision making and no shortage of guidance, participation in health service development remains exceptional. For example, of 509 Trusts and health authorities in the UK, only 27 consulted children on services for chronically ill or disabled children, and only 11 of these went beyond consultation to meaningful participation in policy.Young people with serious illness have reported feeling marginalised in decision making.Although there are problems in achieving full and meaningful participation, not least the competing rights of children and parents, children can be effective partners in the management of their own treatment,and there is plenty of convincing evidence from the Child-to-Child programme showing how children can contribute effectively to health alliances and transform their lives and health.

Victim blaming

This term describes the phenomenon in which a vulnerable group are blamed when they experience disadvantage or harm.

Pedestrian injuries, a leading cause of childhood mortality, provide a good example. Children are blamed, with prevention strategies continuing to stress child behaviours, rather than addressing necessary and more effective changes in the structure of transport systems.

“The strength and pervasiveness of the ideology of victim blaming in child pedestrian injuries is explained by the special position that the road transport system holds in relation to dominant economic interests. Victim blaming ideology is a strategy that serves to maintain these interests at the expense and suffering of children”. Another example is the “Lolita” syndrome, in which children are blamed for their own sexual abuse. In 1993 a man found guilty of the rape of a girl, aged 9, was given two years’ probation. The presiding judge said: “I have been provided with information which leads me to believe that she was not entirely an angel herself”.Although Lord Taylor stated on appeal that this comment should not have been made, it is a view met elsewhere. On Alice Liddell, the girl with whom both John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll were infatuated, Prose writes: “what seems clear is that Alice was by no means a frail flower attracting these predatory bees; she pursued and actively encouraged their attentions”.

Stereotyping

Children can be viewed as poor witnesses, more likely to lie than adults. This has had serious consequences for vulnerable children in care:

There is also a pervasive stereotype of children, particularly poor children, as inherently naughty, with distress frequently mistaken for “badness”. Research evidence shows clear links between life course persistent delinquency and abuse, poor parenting, poverty, and socially disorganised communities.Many of these young people also have neurodevelopmental problems, of which the most common is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Growing up with abuse and violence can also lead to anxiety and attachment disorder, both of which may lead to children fulfilling criteria for ADHD.

Internalised discrimination

Discrimination can be internalised. A member of a group experiencing discrimination adopts and shares the views of a hostile society, thus seeing him/herself as inferior. A powerful example of internalised racism is provided by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography. He describes an incident during a period of exile in which he panics on noticing that the pilot of an aeroplane in which he is travelling is black—even Mandela had internalised the view that a black person could not be capable of such a task.

Children also take on society’s view of themselves—as someone adults can pass in a queue unchallenged, as people having nothing to say worth hearing, as lawful victims of physical assault.

Exploitation

As with any powerless group, children are vulnerable to exploitation by the powerful—that is, adults. This may be private and secret, for example, the sexual exploitation of children within families. It may be commercially driven, for example, child labour (including sexual exploitation), advertising aimed at, or using, children; or politically driven—consider the exploitation of athletic prodigies in former Eastern Europe, given anabolic steroids in adolescence with serious consequences for their health.

Child labour is traditionally seen as a problem of low and middle income countries, but Field argues that we see emerging another equally exploitive form of labour—a tests and outcomes dominated education system, an “insatiable schooling industry” with education as “endless labour”. Although Field is writing about Japan, her work makes for uncomfortable reading.

Indirect discrimination

As children are dependent and powerless they are particularly vulnerable to indirect discrimination, in which their carers are disadvantaged as result of gender discrimination, racial discrimination, or the disadvantage many marginalised groups experience because they are poor, ill, disabled, or stigmatised for other reasons. Table 1 provides examples of how indirect discrimination affects children.

For children, indirect discrimination always compounds direct discrimination, with some children experiencing multiple jeopardy. For example, a child may be disabled, belong to an ethnic minority community, be living in poverty, and have a parent with mental health problems. Such a child will be victim to layers of discrimination, all of which will affect his or her circumstances. The effects of such multiple disadvantage may not be simply additive, but act in synergy to paralyse services and leave children in danger.

Poverty

Children from communities which are either unemployed or in low paid work are more likely to attend poorly resourced inner city schools, be in the public care, and/or excluded from school. All these factors are linked with adverse health outcomes.

Access to information

Many parents  particularly mothers, do not have a working knowledge of English, and may not read. Without adequate provision of interpreters these parents are unable to access information crucial to their ability to make informed choices, to liaise with health, welfare, and education, and to advocate for their children when they are in need. Their situation is somewhat analogous to that of an illiterate mother in the developing world, a factor long known to be linked to high infant mortality.It would seem reasonable to hypothesise that the language status of unsupported migrant parents is likely to impact on the health of their children.

Access to health services

There are examples of institutional racism. For example, services are dependent on postal addresses, which disadvantages asylum seekers and travellers. Services are often planned using whole population data.  Populations are undermanned and under-resourced for children’s services, despite the increased needs of these communities as a result of poverty.Most choldren from low income generating communities do not receive proper medical care and attention.