Poverty, Assault and Institutionalized Discontent
To solve a jigsaw puzzle people usually start by connecting the pieces with straight edges to form the frame. This creates a visual boundary for focusing their attention. In the 19th and 20th century, the progressive outlook was framed by the economic problem delineated along the plumbed lines of poverty, hunger, dilapidated housing and disease. By the 21st century the frame for this problem has lost its edge in the advanced industrialized world. In Western Europe, 50 percent and then 60 percent of the median income once defined the straight edge of poverty.
The work of the European Union Social Protection Indicators Committee and publications by the OECD now argue that the measure of 21st century poverty in the advanced industrial countries is more complicated than the lack of income for the fundamental needs of modern life.
It is not unusual for academics studying social issues such as poverty, hunger and abuse to broaden the conceptual boundaries as the depth of the problem declines. This is evident in the way that advocacy researchers continue to address the issue of rape on college campuses. More than twenty years ago, for example, a widely-cited study claimed that 27 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape; critical analyses revealed this figure to be an immense exaggeration. Since then, the rate of forcible rape documented in the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting System declined by 30 percent; similarly, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual National Crime Victimization Survey reveals that the rate of rape and sexual assault on college campuses fell by more than 50 percent from 9.2 per thousand in 1997 to 4.4 per thousand in 2013; because these data are collected the same way every year, it is reasonable to assume that their biases are constant and the findings provide a reliable guide to trends in the rate of rape, even if they might underestimate the magnitude.
As the rate of the problem diminished, the conceptual boundaries of sexual violence on campus were reframed under the heading of “sexual assault,” the precinct of which extends far beyond the legal borders of rape. Applying this broader formulation, a highly-publicized 2015 study reports that 25 percent of college women have experienced a sexual assault, the definition of which includes forced oral, anal and vaginal sex as well as unwanted kissing, grabbing and rubbing up against a person in a sexual way, even if it is over one’s clothes. This study involved a web-based survey with a response rate of only 19.3 percent. The vast majority of respondents indicated that they never reported the incident of “sexual assault” because they ‘did not think it was serious enough.” Curiously when asked: “How likely do you think it is that you will experience sexual assault or sexual misconduct on campus?” only 8 percent of the women thought that it was “very” or “extremely” likely – even though according to the survey 25 percent already had been victims. Despite these incongruities and the unrepresentative sample, the media rushed to headline the sensational findings. Mingling an unwanted kiss or dancing too closely with forcible rape inflates the numbers as it trivializes sexual violence. More gravely, it distorts social policy by shifting public resources to middle- class college students and away from those who are in greater need of assistance.
Hunger in the United States is another problem where defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory. In 1995, federal agencies launched an annual “Food Security Survey,” which was just around the time that Rebecca Blank, then a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic advisers, observed that severe health problems related to malnutrition had virtually disappeared in the United States. Yet by 2013, the federal survey found 14.3 percent of households suffering from food insecurity. As Douglas Besharov explained, “many think that this is an artificial construct, as it is based on answers to eighteen different questions that express some uncertainty about having sufficient financial resources to obtain enough food to meet the needs of all household members even once in the past year.”
This propensity to stretch the boundaries to encompass milder forms of social distress is inspired by layers of motivation -- a curious blend of opportunism and idealism. Public funding to examine and alleviate social problems has created a large class of professional researchers and service providers that has a vested interest in keeping the numbers high and on the rise. “It is a question,” as Irving Kristol observed, “of jobs and status and power.” To say the problem is diminishing, but we need more funding for research and service is a hard sell. The media are inclined to report on problems that are growing and affect large numbers of people, while ignoring the exact definitions and measurements on which the numbers are based. This encourages broad definitions that embody as many cases as possible, since proposals to study and remedy the problem of poverty, for example, compete for public attention and financial support with other social problems such as sexual assault, bullying, micro-aggression, discrimination, child abuse, mental health and physical illness – the definitions of which are also being extended. Under these circumstances professional ambitions and competition for public funding spawn a market of institutionalized discontent.
