14% rise in sex crime reporting after MeToo movement: Study

Agencies
December 15, 2019

New Delhi, Dec 15: The MeToo movement that took the world by storm has led to a 14 per cent rise in reporting of sexual crimes during its first three months across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

The MeToo movement started on October 15, 2017, after sexual misconduct allegations against former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein became public following a tweet by actress Alyssa Milano who encouraged people who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to write "Me too" on social media.

The MeToo movement was exceptionally effective in rapidly increasing awareness around sexual misconduct in many countries including India.

However, despite the increase in crimes reported, the movement did not increase the number of sexual crimes cleared by the police, said the study published on SSRN, formerly known as the Social Science Research Network.

For the study, Roee Levy and Martin Mattsson from Yale University in the US constructed a new data set of sexual and non-sexual crimes in 24 OECD countries, covering 81 per cent of the OECD population.

"Our results suggest that social movements can rapidly change high stakes personal decisions," the study said.

The researchers estimated that in the first three months of the movement, 11,598 additional sexual crimes were reported in the 13 OECD countries with "strong" MeToo movements.

"This study showed that the MeToo movement had a substantial, persistent effect on the propensity to report sexual crimes. This result is consistent across multiple samples and is robust across multiple estimation techniques," the study concluded.

The MeToo movement focused on female victims, and often on cases that occurred several months or years before they were discussed in the media.

The researchers said that focusing on the US allowed them to understand better who was affected by the movement.

"The effect is strong and statistically significant for both sexual harassment and sexual assault," said the study.

"Furthermore, we do not find evidence that the movement disproportionately affected neighbourhoods with higher incomes or more education. Overall, we can reject the argument that the MeToo movement had an effect mostly among whites or those with high socioeconomic status," it added.

The findings suggest that social movements can have large, long-lasting effects on social norms and, as a result, individuals make meaningful changes in their personal decisions. The action individuals take is costly and the effect occurs almost immediately. This suggests that awareness-raising campaigns can be effective in changing personal behaviour.

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Agencies
January 20,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 20: An American bride asked for money from her invitees so that they can be on the 'exclusive guest list'.

Weddings can be surely expensive. But is it feasible for one to charge the guests to make up for the expenses?

According to Fox News, that is exactly what happened in a recent American wedding. A 19-year-old shared on Reddit that her cousin was getting married on Sunday and announced that she would charge 50 dollars to those who wanted to attend her wedding.

"She said that they can Venmo her money so there won't be no [sic] problems and everyone who paid will be added onto the 'exclusive guest list' which basically means you won't have to wait in line while other guests pay," wrote the user named DaintySheep.

While she refused to pay for entry into her cousin's wedding the bride-to-be contacted the elders in the family which ended up in an embarrassing situation.

"She wanted to get the money she spent on her special day back. I told her I wouldn't be able to come because this was outrageous and that I wish her well on her special day. She contacted my aunt and my aunt called me cheap and rude. My parents offered to pay for my entry, but I refused," continued the disheartened girl.

While in almost every nook and cranny of the world gifting the bride-groom with money is a tradition, asking for money from friends and family to replenish the money spent on a wedding is can be said to be a rare scenario.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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Agencies
February 17,2020

Google on Monday announced it is gradually winding down its free public Wi-Fi Station programme currently available at over 400 railway stations in India, and will work with the Indian Railways and Railtel Corporation to help them with existing sites so they can remain useful resources for people.

Google launched its Station initiative in India in 2015 to bring fast, free public Wi-Fi to over 400 of the busiest railway stations in the country by mid-2020.

"We crossed that number by June 2018 and implemented Station in thousands of other locations around the country in partnership with telecommunications companies, ISPs and local authorities," Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Payments and Next Billion Users, Google, said in a statement.

"Over time, partners in other countries asked for Station too and we responded accordingly. We're grateful for these partnerships, especially with the Indian Railways and the Government of India, that helped us serve millions of users over the last few years," he added.

According to Google, the decision to shut Station has been taken keeping the affordable mobile data plans and mobile connectivity in mind that is improving globally including in India.

"India, specifically now has among the cheapest mobile data per GB in the world, with mobile data prices having reduced by 95 per cent in the last 5 years, as per TRAI in 2019," said Sengupta.

The Indian users consume close to 10GB of data, each month, on average, according to reports.

"Our commitment to supporting the next billion users remains stronger than ever, from continuing our efforts to make the internet work for more people and building more relevant and helpful apps and services," Sengupta noted.

Global networking giant Cisco last year teamed up with Google to roll out free, high-speed public Wi-Fi access globally, starting with India.

The first pilot under the partnership was rolled out at 35 locations in Bengaluru.

Sengupta said that in addition to the changed context, the challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among our partners across countries has also made it difficult for Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners.

"And when we evaluate where we can truly make an impact in the future, we see greater need and bigger opportunities in building products and features tailored to work better for the next billion user markets," he said.

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