discrimination - ReviseSociology

Ageism

Ageism is discrimination against older people on the basis of their age. It involves making narrow judgements about the elderly based on stereotypes and treating them differently based on nothing other than their biological age, which can occur at both individual and institutional levels.

Two example of ageism include:

judging older people based on stereotypical assumptions about age, by assuming they are less physically or mentally capable just because of their biological age.

Blocking older people from opportunities to work or take part in society in other ways on the basis of their age.

According to Loraine Green (1) Ageism can take one of three forms

Subtle ageism: acting towards older people as if they were a homogenous group, without taking into account the wide variety of experiences and abilities among older people.

Compassionate ageism: trying to protect older people from harm which may be well intentioned but can end up restricting their opportunities and doing more harm than good.
Direct discrimination: where policies overtly block older people from doing certain things or people are overtly hostile towards older people.

While it is true that generally older people do suffer from deteriorating physical and mental capacities over time which can make participating in society and just life in general more challenging, the existence of ageism in society adds further barriers which makes the experience of ageing even more difficult!

Individual Ageism

One of the worst forms of individual ageism involves abuse of the elderly and there are several types.

The World Health Organisation (2) defines Abuse of the elderly (aka elder abuse) as any action or lack of action which takes place within a relationship of trust which causes harm or distress to an older person in that relationship.

A 2017 review of 52 studies from 28 countries found that as many as one in six people aged 60 or over have experienced some form of abuse.

Examples of elder abuse

psychological abuse: involves intimidation or harassment of older people with the intention to make them afraid, and/ or failing to meet their cultural/ religious needs within institutional settins
physical abuse: involves both direct harm to older people or anything than deliberately causes them to become unwell such as manipulating food intake or withholding medication
financial abuse: involves either stealing from or preventing an older person gaining access to their finances.

Neglect: involves the lack of sufficient care for older people.

Institutional ageism

Institutional ageism is systematic discrimination against the elderly by institutions. These may either be organisations specifically dedicated to elderly care or social institutions more generally such as workplaces.

Prior to 2011 in the UK employment law allowed for forced retirement at the age of 65, so it was legal for companies to overtly discriminate against people when they reached 65 by ‘retiring’ them, meaning anyone aged 65 or over was blocked from working if companies wished it.

A more indirect form ageist social policy occurs when state pensions are so low that those without sufficient private pensions are forced into claiming state benefits on top of their pensions, which effectively locks older people in to having to maintain their benefits claims. Some older people don’t claim out of either shame or because of the complexity of the process, meaning older people are more likely to live in poverty.

If older people are dependent on benefits it reinforces the stereotype that older people are in need of help, when in reality this is only the case because of state policies underfunding pensions.

Recent policy changes in the UK have reduced these kinds of institutional ageism: since 2011 people over the age of 65 now have the right to carry on working, they can’t just be sacked at the age of 65, and the treble lock to the pension means the value of the pension has increased significantly relative to earnings meaning that today older people are less likely on average to be in the bottom quintile for income than those aged under 65.

The relative underfunding of health and social care through four decades of neoliberal Tory policy could also be regarded as a form of ageism. Most older people don’t require treatment in hospital for most of their lives, for those that need extra support home visits are usually sufficient, but it is precisely this aspect of the public sector which has been underfunded.

Another form of institutional ageism is media stereotypes of the elderly, who are typically overrepresented as dependent, helpless, as objects of fun or pity, or in the case of older women, subject to symbolic annihilation given that there are relatively few positive representations of older women in the media.

Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to the culture and identity option, usually taught as part of A-level sociology in the first year of study.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

(1) Lorraine Green (2016) Understanding the Life Course: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives.

(2) The World Health Organisation Abuse of Older People.

(3) Hourglass.org –

PREVENT: Discriminating Against Muslims?

PREVENT discriminates against Muslims

PREVENT requires schools to monitor pupils for their potential to become radicalised into extremist views and become terrorist.

While PREVENT doesn’t specify that schools should focus mainly on preventing Muslims from becoming extremist, an increasing body of research suggests this is what happens and as a result PREVENT as a policy is discriminatory.

What is Prevent?

PREVENT was introduced in 2015 and today forms part of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism strategy. Schools are among those institutions which are required to prevent young people from being drawn into terrorism.

The government notes that terrorism is often driven by extremist beliefs and for the sake of prevent defines extremism as:

“vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.” (1)

PREVENT requires Local Education Authorities to use terrorist risk profiles to assess the risk of certain students being drawn into terrorism, and where necessary take appropriate action, which might mean sharing information with other agencies such as the police themselves.

However for the most part PREVENT requires that schools teach British Values and the importance of community cohesion.

Problems with PREVENT

In 2015 the Muslim Council of Great Britain raised a number of concerns (2) that the way PREVENT was being deployed in schools was both discriminatory against Muslims and having a harmful effect on mainly Muslim children.

They noted that 60% of referrals under PREVENT had been against Muslim children, even though they only made up 5% of the population, while only 10% of referrals were for white extremists, despite the growth in far right views in Britain.

They cite a number of case studies such as:

A two year old with learning difficulties being referred to social services after singing an Islamic song and then saying “Allahu Akbar” spontaneously afterwards.
Two students were referred to Senior Leadership Team at one school for making way for a female student and lowering their gaze as she went past.

In one school a physics teacher referred a Muslim student to the PREVENT team because he asked how to make a bomb, he hadn’t made a similar referral for a white student who had asked the same previously.

Human Rights Watch (3) argues that the implementation of PREVENT has violated students’ right to education and freedom of expression, making many Muslim students feel as if they cannot freely discuss religious and political issues for fear of being referred to the police.

The report cites the case of one eight year old who was subjected to an interrogation by authorities because a teacher mis-identified a name in Arabic on his T-shirt.

The main problem has been relying on teachers who are not well trained enough to identify the signs of radicalisation in children. Because of lack of training and mis-interpretation, some teachers end up alienating mainly Muslim students.

PREVENT and Islamophobia

Even though the 2021 update of PREVENT guidance doesn’t specify that school policy should be specifically focused on preventing Islamic extremism (NB the 2015 original version of PREVENT did), in practice PREVENT is usually interpreted through an Islamophobic lens.

In other words, schools mainly target Muslim students with PREVENT policies.

Jerome et al (4) cite survey research which found that over half of Black and Ethnic Minority students feel stigmatised by the PREVENT policy and feel as if the policy has made the creation of an ethnically inclusive school environment more difficult.

Signposting and Related Posts

This material is mainly relevant to the education topic within the sociology of education.

Sources

(1) Gov.UK (2021) Revised Prevent Duty Guidance for England and Wales.

(2) Muslim Council of Great Britain (2015) Concerns on Prevent.

(3) Human Rights Watch (2016) Preventing Education.

(4) Jerome et Al (2019) The Impact of the Prevent Duty on Schools: A Review of the Evidence.

Will Britain ever have a Black Prime minister?

Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister? aired on the BBC IN 2017, which looked at the relative average life chances of a Black British child progressing through life… NB Thank you kindly to whoever uploaded this to You Tube (it won’t be there forever, the BBC have unjustly removed this from iPlayer already)

In the summary below I focus on some of the educational disadvantages black children face highlighted by the programme…

Teachers mark black children’s test scores more harshly than other ethnic groups

For in-school test scores, the scores for black British students are consistently lower throughout schooling, until we get to the actual GCSE Results, when the scores of Black British students increase dramatically, with Black African students actually overtaking white British students.

The suggested explanation for this is that in school tests are marked by teachers who know their students and thus know their ethnicity, and that they have an unconscious bias against black students, and thus mark their test scores at a lower level, while GCSEs are marked independently – the markers do not know the students who sat them, and thus do not know their ethnicity: when the tests are marked in a neutral, unbiased way, the scores of black and white pupils are much closer together.

This is backed up by research conducted by Professor Simon Burgess which compared the results of test scores marked by teachers who knew the students sitting the tests (and hence their ethnicity) with the results of tests marked independently, where the markers did not know the ethnicity of the students who sat the tests: the results for some ethnic groups were lower when the teachers knew the ethnicity of the candidates, suggesting that there is an unconscious bias against certain ethnic groups.

A link to Professor Burgess’ (2009) research

This seems to be pretty damning evidence that teachers hold an unconscious bias against black students

Black students are less likely to get three As at A level than white students

Here we are told that….

Only 4% of black children get 3 As or more at A level, compared to…
10% of white pupils
28% of independent school pupils, who are disproportionately white.

In fact, the programme points out that you are more likely to be excluded from school if you are black than achieve 3 As at A-level

This seems to be less an example of evidence against black students, rather than evidence of the class-bias in A level results.

The Chances of being admitted to Oxford University are lower for black students compared to white students

The programme visits Oxford University, because every single Prime Minister (who has been to university) since 1937 has attended this bastion of privilege.

We are told that black applicants are less likely to be accepted into Oxford University than White students, even when they have the same 3 As as white students.

In an interview with Cameron Alexander, the then president of the African students union, he comes out and says that Oxford University is ‘institutionally racist’ and that structural factors explain the under-representation of black students – he points out the dominant culture of Oxford University is on of elite, white privilege, one in which staff identify more with independently schooled children, who have benefitted from the advantages of huge amounts of material and cultural capital; while they fail to identify with the hardships a black child from an inner city area may have faced – the result is that privileged white student has a higher change of being accepted into Oxford than a black student, even when they have the same grades as a the privileged white student.

As with the example of test scores above, at first glance this evidence seems damning, however, Oxford University has previously explained this by saying that black students have a higher rejection rate because they apply for harder courses on average than white students.

So what are the chances of a black person ever becoming Prime Minister…?

In short, a black person has a 17 million to 1 chance of becoming Prime Minister, compared to a 1 in 1.4 million chance for a white person…

Or in short… a black person is 12 times less likely to become Prime Minister in the U.K. compared to a white person…

Postscript…

Unfortunately this programme has already disappeared from iPlayer, despite the fact that anyone in Britain with a T.V. has already paid for it, which is just bang out of order.

Sociology in the News

This seems to be a clear-cut (and very unfortunate) example of overt discrimination on the basis of religion:

juhel-miah-discrimination — Juel Miah – A victim of U.S. discrimination

On 16th February, Juhel Miah, a respected British Muslim schoolteacher travelling as part of a school trip to New York was denied entry to the United States.

He was travelling from Wales with a group of children and other teachers and was removed from the plane while on a stop-over in Reykjavik, Iceland, despite having all the necessary documentation including a valid Visa for entry into the U.S.

The articles don’t state as much, but I’m assuming that all other non-Muslim adults on the plane weren’t escorted off.

Juhel has asked the American Embassy for an explanation of why he was refused entry to the U.S, but one week on and they haven’t responded.

This seems to be an unambiguous (but bleak), real-life example to illustrate what discrimination is – in this case differential treatment on the basis of someone’s religion. It could also be used to illustrate the extent to which Islamophobia is driving U.S. immigration policy.

Source – The Guardian, Monday 20th February.

You might also like The Independent’s version