Social Problems

A Human Rights Perspective

Eric Bonds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351689205
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Menschenrechte

Social Problems: A Human Rights Perspective, Second Edition evaluates U.S. society through an international human rights framework. The book provides a critical discussion about what rights mean, along with a sociological exploration of power and inequality to explain why human rights are so often violated or left ignored and unfulfilled in the United States.

In each chapter, the book offers numerous policy alternatives that could provide a pathway toward the increased fulfillment of rights, while also stressing the important role that nonviolent social movements have had, and must have in the future, in achieving greater justice, dignity, wellbeing, and environmental protection in our society. This edition includes several new chapters on topics of major interest to students, including:

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• the human right to health

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• climate change and human rights

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• immigration and human rights violations in U.S. society

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• a new discussion of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Social Problems gives social science students a new way to understand pressing social issues that exist in their own communities.

1Introduction to the Human Rights Perspective

These are strange and difficult times. As I write this, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, there is so much upheaval, loss, and uncertainty in the United States. An estimated 220,000 people have died so far because of the virus, while countless more have suffered due to the disease. The pandemic has sent the economy into a nosedive, with millions left unemployed or with reduced hours and pay, and now at risk of being evicted from apartments or losing their homes. On top of all this, many of our nation’s political leaders have proved ineffective at dealing with the crisis, and often seem more interested in fighting and hurling insults at one another than in helping the American people. But we Americans are, of course, deeply divided ourselves. The pandemic has made the fissures between us brutally evident.

But there are good things happening now too. Some restaurants and multitudes of volunteers have kicked into high gear in order to help get food to people in need. As a people, we have rallied to make contributions to food banks and other social support organizations. We have come to better appreciate the invaluable work done by janitors, grocery store employees, farm laborers, and delivery drivers, now calling them “essential workers” when, in the past, it was easy to overlook their contributions to society. And we have celebrated and cheered on our healthcare workers as they put in long hours and as they constantly take personal risks to care for us and our community.

All these positive happenings remind us that, despite everything that divides us as Americans, we share some basic values. I would wager that almost every American believes all people should be treated with dignity and should be allowed some basic material conditions for living. Practically all Americans agree that racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination that give some individuals special advantages over others should be prohibited. And, as a nation, we mostly agree that children and young people are special and deserve support, protection, and educational opportunities from their communities. Finally, as Americans, we typically believe that all people should be given an opportunity to express themselves, to form their own beliefs, and to develop their own capacities to think.

These principles that we share are, in fact, a starting place for “human rights.” When it comes down to it, human rights are nothing more than shared standards and ideals about the moral treatment of persons in our contemporary world. While some of these ideals have been under attack in recent years, both in the United States and around the globe, they still provide a beacon guiding us toward a more peaceful, free, equitable, and prosperous world.

Of course, when you typically hear about human rights, it’s frequently about terrible events happening in some other land—perhaps when a government somewhere in Asia, Africa, or Latin America has arrested critics, shut down newspapers, or even killed unarmed citizens. These are certainly human rights abuses, but this is far from the only way to think about human rights. As I’ll demonstrate over the course of this book, human rights also apply right here in the United States, giving us a powerful tool that we can use to better understand our society and a guide to improving life for more people in our nation.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady and wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–45) and one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, once asked, “Where do human rights begin?” The answer, she said, is “in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person.” Human rights begin when people across the world and in our own nation expect to live with justice and dignity. They begin when families insist upon safety and access to adequate resources to care for themselves and others. Human rights begin when we demand the opportunity to develop and grow as individuals.

In this sense, human rights are one way to measure progress in contemporary societies, something that is as true in the U.S. context as in any other country. Human rights are a way of knowing when things are going as we might hope. They are fulfilled when, for instance, an unemployed parent receives temporary government support in the form of checks that can help pay the mortgage on their family’s house until they are able to find a new job. Human rights are also achieved when a government treats all its citizens fairly, whatever their race, gender, religion, or sexuality. Our society also meets its human rights obligations when a graduating high school senior who shows great academic promise receives the support they need to attend college.

As the above examples indicate, we can use a human rights framework to assess our society in terms of our shared values. This applies not only when things are going well, but also when our society fails to live up to our collective expectations. When justice is lacking, dignity is denied, and when the futures of young people are being deflated rather than being filled with hope and opportunity, then we can say that human rights are not being fulfilled. In this way, I will employ the notion of human rights as a means of indicating that there is a social problem. Though this topic is frequently studied by sociologists, it is rarely defined.

The Social Construction of Social Problems

Politicians, news-media figures, celebrities, social-media influencers, corporate advertisers, activists, and campaigners are all competing for our attention. Taken together, that’s a whole lot of noise, and frequently this noise is highly discordant—even contradictory. Some of these folks might tell us about a dire “problem” they see in the world that should be addressed immediately, while others would like us to think that the very same thing is no big deal and that, perhaps, we should pay attention to some other terrible thing they’re worried about instead. Some might tell us, for instance, that climate change is a serious threat, while some politicians and media personalities would have us believe—contrary to the scientific consensus—that concerns about the climate are overblown. Others might call attention to immigration to the United States as a major social problem, while others focus instead on the mistreatment of immigrants as the important issue that should hold our attention. Add into this mix America’s partisan divide, in which people decide what is or what isn’t a social problem based upon their Democratic or Republican party identification, and we’ve got a serious challenge on our hands. How can we possibly know what is or isn’t a social problem?

Some sociologists say that the best way to deal with this dilemma is not to weigh into these debates at all and to avoid taking a side one way or the other, but to instead study the process by which something gets defined as a problem and how that definition then influences behavior (Best 2013; Spector and Kitsuse 1977). To call something a problem, these theorists point out, necessarily means relying upon the group values and norms of the community to which one belongs. Think, for example, of the “social problem” of witchcraft. If we were alive in New England during America’s early colonial period, we might very well take it as a serious condition plaguing our community, which requires our attention and serious action. Of course, from today’s perspective, the “problem” of witchcraft sounds absurd. But the point is that we all view the world, and consider what is and what isn’t problematic, from within it. We can’t help but to view “problems” from the standpoint of our own community. Just as we might find the problem of witchcraft laughable today, others—maybe living hundreds of years in the future—might find some of our own contemporary preoccupations and concerns equally ridiculous.

This approach to social problems, called social constructionism, draws from a long intellectual tradition asserting that people do not act based upon the world itself, but rather upon interpretations or definitions of that world. Early American sociologist W. I. Thomas summed up the social constructionist position best when he said, “if men (or people) define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (quoted in Merton 1995). This is a fundamental principle of sociology, which can be applied in innumerable ways, but I’ll provide a couple of examples that might help you think the idea through.

For the first example, I’d like to ask whether you are someone who loves hot and spicy food? Or maybe you prefer your food without the burn. Where I teach in Virginia, the mix of my students’ spice preference is about even. What explains this difference? Why do half of my students enjoy the heat provided by chili peppers, but the other half like their food calmer? Looking at the student characteristics between the two groups in class, which are roughly even, it’s clear that the difference in taste is not based on genetics. And while I personally love chili peppers, the consistently large number of students who don’t want to go anywhere near them shows that there is nothing inherently delicious about the flavoring. In fact, one of the reasons these plants developed capsicum, which is the chemical inside chili peppers that make them spicy, was to keep mammals like us away (Walton 2018).

From a social constructionist perspective, the explanation behind the question of why some people enjoy spicy foods while others don’t is simply that some of us come from family or friendship circles in which eating spicy food is defined as enjoyable, and members of these groups are taught to cultivate—despite the experience of some pain—an appreciation for it. Here we see the Thomas Theorem in action. In this case, it’s not the taste of spice itself that people act on, but their community’s interpretation of it. Those interpretations—whether fiery hot food is good or not—influence how people act.

How about a more serious application of the idea? In the United States, there has been a decades-old idea that boys are innately better at math than girls, despite considerable evidence to the contrary (Kersey, Csumitta, and Cantlon 2019). Still, for years and years, this mistaken idea persisted and became real in its consequences. It’s easy to understand why: if teachers think boys have a greater aptitude for math, they’ll likely give them a little more attention in class, or apply additional pressure to a boy who “doesn’t get it,” while being more likely to let a girl’s lack of comprehension slide. Parents sharing this mistaken idea are going to amplify this effect, investing in their sons’ mathematical development while neglecting that of their daughters. This effect is only heightened if kids themselves succumb to the myth, which may convince girls and young women that it’s okay if “math isn’t their thing.” To bring in the Thomas Theorem, it’s again not young people’s mathematical aptitude that makes the difference, because in this case the aptitude is equivalent. Instead, it’s people’s definition of it that matters because definitions create their own reality, even if based on mistaken assumptions. Even today, boys are much more likely to join “math clubs” (Cain-Miller and Queally 2018) and mathematics and math-driven professions remain heavily dominated by men (Price-Mitchell 2019).

Applying this line of thinking to social constructionists studying social problems, nothing in the world is inherently problematic. Some things simply get defined that way while others don’t (Spector and Kitsuse 1977). Yet these definitions become consequential because they provide motivations for human action. For this reason, social constructionists encourage us to study the careers of social problems, through which certain aspects of the world are defined as problematic, and how those changed definitions influence people’s behavior (Best 2013).

This process typically begins with claims-making by such people as writers, experts, celebrities, influencers, or activists, who first define something as problematic and seek to convince others to share their concern (Best 2013; Spector and Kitsuse 1977). News organizations then pick up these claims. Hopefully, these organizations will do serious reporting on the issue, vetting claims and discerning for the public what’s true. But with little money to pay for in-depth investigative reporting while still trying to attract and maintain a readership, some news organizations might instead rush to sensationalize the newly developing “problem,” sometimes overgeneralizing from a few isolated incidents and exaggerating consequences. These claims might then be picked up by members of the public as appropriate definitions of reality, and politicians looking to score points with constituents may act to craft policies in order to address this perceived malady (see Best 2013 for one elaboration of this process). As a consequence, problems—whether well founded or not—become socially constructed and come to influence the behavior of individuals, communities, and institutions.

A social constructionist perspective is invaluable to the study of social problems for at least a couple of reasons. First, the perspective teaches that a problem doesn’t just exist in the world, no matter how harmful it might be. It must first be defined as such before people act on it. One example is smoking. For decades in American society, smoking cigarettes wasn’t defined as a social problem despite credible scientific evidence of its harm. A growing chorus of claims-makers ultimately changed Americans’ minds about it, thereby also changing behaviors and ushering in countless new restrictions.

Second, the social constructionist perspective reminds us that some conditions may not be harmful at all, even if they are collectively defined as problematic. For instance, during the time I’m writing this book, the nightly news, talk shows, and social media have carried alarming warnings about a so called “murder hornet.” Headlines allege that these wasps, which were unintentionally brought to the United States from Asia, “have a sting that can kill” (Geranios 2020) and that the new predator may “decimate honeybee populations” (Cohen 2020). Despite all the media hype, experts are also trying to weigh in by assuring us that while Asian giant hornets—the real name for these insects—have a painful sting, they are no more deadly than the native bees or wasps that can also cause anaphylactic shock in individuals who are allergic to them (Kawahara 2020). It also seems as if honeybees have natural defenses against Asian giant hornets, which they developed to protect themselves from other predators (Kawahara 2020). Of course, the introduction of a non-native species to an ecosystem is never a good thing, but the fear caused by all this panicked news coverage is not consistent with the threat this hornet poses to humans.

It does, however, match a familiar pattern of social problem construction in the United States. News reporting of “social problems” frequently has as much to do with the social organization of major media outlets in America as with the issues being reported on themselves. Today in the United States, most news media organizations are businesses that ensure their profitability by doing two main things: pushing costs down and attracting viewers’ attention to keep advertising revenue up. By giving us sensational stories about an invasion of “murder hornets” from Asia, and by reporting on other scary-sounding things across the nation, news organizations can accomplish both goals: they give us an eye-catching story that costs practically nothing to produce.

Rather than jumping on the bandwagon and declaring these things to be “real” problems ourselves, the perspective of social constructionism helps us develop our critical thinking abilities and encourages us to examine claims carefully before we also get riled up about something that maybe isn’t such a major threat after all. Powerful insights from social constructionism can be combined with ideas from the sociology of human rights in order to create a comprehensive and productive s...