Pod Academy

Mladen Ostojic explores the impact of international justice on post-conflict states that are undergoing a political transition. He asks whether international tribunals are a threat to stability in targeted countries - do justice and truth, or justice and peace, always go hand-in-hand?

In the last ten years the humanities has become obsessed with stuff – things, ephemera, paraphernalia and possessions. Writer and critic Brian Dillon speaks to Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London, about the curious magic of everyday things.

Noam Chomsky is a world renowned linguist and one of America's foremost social critics. He is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at M.I.T. He is the author of numerous books for Pluto Press, including Pirates and Emperors Old and New, Fateful Triangle, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo and Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. In October 2011 Professor Chomsky visited King’s College London in order to promote the launch of International State Crime Initiative’s new journal, State Crime.  State Crime is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to state crime scholarship.

Anupama Srinivasan argues that what we know about gender violence in South Asia - dowry harassment, domestic violence, acid attacks -  is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Anupama is Programme Director at the Gender Violence Research and Information Taskforce (GRIT) at Prajnya. Based in Chennai, India, she has spent the last year carrying out research in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh into gender violence, looking at it through the lens of security.

Rachael Jolley:  Could you talk me through the motivation for doing this research?

Anupama Srinivasan: The starting point was that gender and sexual violence remains an under researched area.  It tends to fall into many different categories - you see some work on it under the label of human rights, and some under the label of women’s issues.  As a result, different people take, or abdicate, responsibility for it.  It is everyone’s problem and no one’s.

So the starting point was, what is the big picture?   And also, what is the evidence we have to back up the statement that ‘gender  and sexual violence is highly prevalent in South Asia?’   We say this all the time, and we say it with a fair amount of confidence, but what are the numbers behind it?  How do they correlate with the anecdotal evidence that is more publicly visible through newspaper reports or documentary  films.  And who are the different players on this scene?  What are their roles, their responsibilities and their motivations?

I happened to see a call for proposals, from the Global Consortium on Security Transformation, and  they were interested in looking at different security issues.  Human security issues.   And it was important for me to be able to place the issue of gender and sexual violence within the idea of security.  Traditionally you tend to look at security as military security, national security.  But there is also the idea of looking at it as human security, health security.

RJ What were the sources of material you looked at?

AS There were two kinds of sources.  One was the existing literature – both country specific and specific to certain forms of violence.  Gender violence is a very broad label and you can and must break it up to look at very specific forms of violence, whether defined by where it takes place or defined by the degree of violence itself.  So the literature was one, main starting point.

The other was conducting in depth qualitative interviews with a range of people who have many years of experience working on this issue.  I also travelled to Sri Lanka to do interviews there.  Unfortunately there was no real budget provision to travel to the other South Asian countries. Obviously that would have been ideal.   So one of the challenges was identifying the right people to speak to.   The other was getting access to them.  We make assumptions about the levels of internet access sometimes, and I did find that particularly challenging with Nepal and Bangladesh.  I think those two countries remain gaps in this research to a certain extent.

RJ  You say in your report, that gender violence remains invisible and shrouded in silence – what are the factors that make that true?

AS What has always been true is that someone who experiences violence is either too scared, ashamed or embarrassed (or a combination of all these things) to talk about it.  That goes with the fact that as a society we don’t really encourage or create public platforms or spaces that enable this kind of conversation – even one on one (e.g. accessing a mental health professional).  That is a big stumbling block.

One of the things we say when we work on this issue is that what we know is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg.  That has pretty much become an assumption.   But we know more now because we have more legislation.  Many countries have been trying to work with police forces to sensitise them a little more on how to respond –...

Stephan Wolf and Dino McMahon use radar to track bee behaviour. By doing so, they hope to find out why bee populations have, in some parts of the world, gone into such rapid decline.

The invention and reception of change ringing in seventeenth-century England

The challenges of identifying disease genes using exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing.

Speakers explore the merits, practicality and value of maintaining a multiplicity of languages at the University of Reading.

The Researchers' Night is a Europe-wide event bringing together the public and academic researchers. The aim is to showcase university research, exploring its relevance and importance for all of us.

1 in 10 children in the UK suffers from a diagnosable mental health problem. What can be done to prevent depression, stress and anxiety amongst children?