Having found myself broadly agreeing with something written by Polly Pot the other day I now find myself faced with a saluatory reminder that as vapid and ill-conceived as many of her columns are there is one thing going her favour as journalist.

She isn’t Melanie Phillips.

There isn’t that much I can add to Melanie’s prescription for tackling the failings of the Child Support Agency other than to point you to article itself - which is here - chuck in a couple of quotes to give an idea what to expect if you follow the link:

If an unmarried woman chooses to give up work when she has a baby, this is presented by feminists as an unarguable case for mandatory payments by the father. But why? There is already a perfectly good social arrangement to give mothers precisely such support. It is called marriage. The problem is that the woman may not want marriage to the man, but she does still want his money. What kind of equality is this?

And.

Yes, some men are grossly irresponsible and are either unfaithful, desert their wives or father many children by different women. But many men feel licensed to behave in such a manner because of those women who declare them redundant.

And.

It is women above all who should be made to take responsibility for their behaviour. If they choose to tear up a marriage contract or to have children without committing themselves to the father, they should bear the financial burden. Instead of being propped up with benefits or money extorted from rejected men, they should be expected to support themselves through work.

And note that about the only things she isn’t complaining about here is the chronic shortage of orphanages to take on children while the unmarried mothers go into service, but give her time - I’m sure it won’t be too long before she’s demanding the return of the workhouse, gruel and stuffing little boys up chimneys as a meaning of supplementing your meagre income.

In the meantime, next week Melanie will be discussing the use of wooden clubs in courtship and why the Prince Regent is not such a bad fellow after all once you get to know him.

As Melanie doesn’t have a comments system, please feel free to use the comments here to vent as much as you like.

Via Recess Monkey comes this prime example of statistical hyperbole from the PM no less.

Written answers
Monday, 21 November 2005

Prime Minister
Terrorism Legislation

Grant Shapps (Welwyn Hatfield, Con)

“To ask the Prime Minister pursuant to his oral answer of 9 November 2005, Official Report, column 298W, to the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), what means he used to calculate the conversion between gigabytes and feet”.

Tony Blair

“The method of calculation was taken from the ‘New Perspectives Series’ published by Thomson Leaning entitled ‘Computer Concepts, Fourth Edition, Enhanced’ (June Parsons and Dan Oja, Chapter 4, Section D), which calculates that a computer hard drive of 20.4 gigabytes would equate to 5.4 million sheets of single spaced normal text, which would in turn produce a stack of paper around 1,800 feet high. The computer hard drive in question equalled 750 gigabytes which would, therefore, have produced the equivalent of 198 million sheets of paper standing at 66,176 feet high”.

There are several obvious problems with Blair’s gigabyte to feet conversion.

First, and just to be picky, the biggest HD I can find in retail channels is current 500Gb, so ‘the hard drive’ singular is rather a misnomer.

However, and much more to the point, who the fuck has a 750Gb hard drive full of fucking text anyway? What the fuck is Blair suggesting the police are trying to do, print and read a terrorist suspect’s collection of MP3 music files?

“Well sir, this one files starts of with ‘aDFsrgt!”$%fsgWyDgQE5Y adhgafSDGahySGqw’ which means its either encrypted instructions from Osama bin Laden or we’re trying read the new Crazy Frog single”

What Blair actually said during PMQ’s on 9 November was this:

For example, just this last weekend, we arrested people on a terrorist operation. There were 750 gigabytes of data—that is 66,000 ft-worth of data—that would be printed out and have to be investigated.

Which is, of course, a complete load of bollocks.

Yeah, sure Tony, the police really are going to print out every file on the hard drive(s) they’ve seized and spend weeks pouring over print outs of assorted bits of Microsoft Windows in order to spot the secret messages that Al-Qaeda have been embedding in the operating system where only their operatives will find them.

Using text analysis software it would take the police a matter of a few hours to scan even 750Gb of data for files which might contain useful information or evidence, unless, of course the drives are encrypted in which case it could take anything from a matter of minutes to several hundred years to unlock the information depending on how security savvy the people using the computers were.

In general terms, then, the police are either going to turn up useful evidence in a matter of a few days or they’ll get nothing at all - but the one thing that is certain is that they won’t be running off 66,000 feet of print outs in the process.

All that Blair’s doing here is making an exaggerated claim to cover up the fact that his arguments don’t hold water - I wonder where I’ve heard him do that before?

Lots of ground to cover here so I’ll straight down to business.

First up Tim Worstall notes an interesting statistical claim from Julie Bindel in today’s Grauniad, which he files under the category ‘idiotarians’:

Violence against women is the cause of more deaths and disability around the world in 15- to 44-year-olds than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war.

Tim would like to know where the evidence is the for this, which as good question as figures from the World Health Organisation put deaths from cancer at 7 miiion a year (12.5% of all deaths) and malaria at around 1 million and year while traffic accidents rack up 1.2 million deaths and anything from 20-50 million injuries/disabilities each year.

Given the scale of the problem that Bindel claims exists, you might expect this to be mentioned by the WHO in their new ‘landmark’ study on domestic violence around the world - yet neither the summary report nor the full report makes any such claims - in fact the WHO report, in calling for more research, explicitly notes that:

In some places few [sic] data on violence against women are available. More research on the magnitude and nature of the problem of violence against women, and its costs, in given countries or settings is therefore urgently needed to provide a stronger basis for advocacy and action.

Which seems to confirm that Bindel’s figure derive from that time-honoured journalistic tradition more commonly refered to as ‘pulling numbers out of your ass’.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International’s survey on attitudes toward rapes, reported here by the Times, has been rattling around the blogosphere and spawning much interesting commentary.

As things go, Andrew at Non-trivial Solutions, with a bit of an assist from Jarndyce in the comments, has pretty much the right kind of take on things in noting that ‘blame’ and ‘responsibility’ are very different things and that there seems to be a fair bit of public confusion between notions of responsibility and risk within the survey answers which is reflected in some of the commentary on this study.

I think the sensible thing for Amnesty to do is commission a follow-up study to unpick this whole blame-responsibility-risk issue and provide a more nuanced assessment of public attitudes.

My main practical criticism of this study, however, is reserved for its seeking to draw conclusions about the public’s understanding of rape and the issues it raises - which is ’sold’ as ‘public ignorance’ - from their apparent lack of awareness of current crime statistics and conviction rates. Andrew rightly points out that aspects of the survey’s design will tend to introduce a degree of cognitive bias into the results.

What the survey and many of those commenting on it fail to address, however, is the question of why its assumed that the public should possess an encyclopedic knowledge of crime statistics and conviction rates for rape, or any other offence for that matter, in the first place?

I think it a near certainty that the same kind of survey questions, if applied to other types of criminal offence, would turn up much the same the results - i.e. that the public don’t really know but about half of them are willing to take a guess based on the multiple-choice options put in front of them.

As it happens, had I been one of those surveys, I would have got the questions on rape statistics and conviction rates pretty much right - but only because I’ve had cause - for professional reasons - to look these things up and have, in any case, read something in a newspaper on just this subject fairly recently.

Ask me the same questions about fraud, street robbery or pretty much any other crime and I really couldn’t tell you what the figures are, not because I’m ignorant but simply because I’ve had no particular reason to look them up. If I should find myself needing to know the numbers, well the I do know where to look for them and can track them down pretty quickly if and when I need them.

All of which makes me wonder whether, if I rang a few journalists and asked them to tell me, off the top of their heads and without looking it up, the gross domestic product of Lesotho and the countries per capita expenditure on toilet paper and then stuck out a press release claiming that journalists know nothing about Africa, would that get me an op-ed piece in the Grauniad?

Still, this is an issue which looks set to rumble on for a bit, not least courtesy of the High Court judge who ruled that consent given when pissed is still consent, at the conclusion of a rape trial which ended with the judge instructing the jury to render an acquittal.

This has sparked something of a controversy as the alleged victim claims to have been unconscious at the time the rape took place, making it appear that the judge has overturned both part of the recent Sexual Offences Act 2003 and a hundred year-old principle in common law that consent cannot be given - quite obviously - when unconscious, even though the law professor drafted in by the times to comment on this ruling notes that:

“If a woman has sex with a man just because she is drunk, and with whom she would not have had sex otherwise, then she cannot say she did not really consent because she was under the influence of drink.â€?

She added than any case where a woman was proved to be unconscious would be a long way down the line from that.

All of which explains why the judge directed the jury as he did when you not the operative phrase “any case where a woman was proved to be unconscious” - and its also worth noting that he made his comments in response to a request from Huw Rees, the prosecution barrister, that the case be abandoned “in light of the evidence revealed in cross-examinationâ€?.

Essentially what happened here is that the prosecution were unable to establish with corroborating evidence and beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged victim was actually unconscious and, therefore, incapable of giving consent, which - whether you like it not - means an acquittal.

So, the reality here is that the judge isn’t overturning either the Sexual Offences Act 2003 or common law after all as without proof that the ‘victim’ was unconscious, the question of consent become entirely moot.

All of whcih bring me to the last post I want to reference, which is this one from Gendergeek, and specifically this from Emmy’s actual post:

Amnesty’s Kate Allen believes that the government must take action to combat this ‘blame culture’ and publicise the true prevalence of rape and its appalling conviction rate in the UK. The results of this opinion poll indicate that current policy approaches are not working.

And this comment from Emma in the comments:

Your confidence in the British public is not borne out by the attrition rate for rape complaints. Only 4% are converted into convictions in Scotland.

Yes, it certainly is true that headline conviction rates are appalling low in rape cases - 5.6% overall being the figure most often quoted of late.

Except that this has very little to do with public attitudes to rape or ‘ignorance’ of crime statistics, as this recent Home Office report ‘A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases‘ clearly demonstrates.

The 5.6% conviction rate that is widely reported is the headline rate for all reported rape cases. By way of contrast the actual conviction rate in cases which make it to the courtroom is actually 60% - 24% due to the defendant entering a plea of guilty and another 36% where a trial leads to a conviction on a guilty verdict - which amounts to 48% of all cases where a full jury trial takes place leading to convictions.

The real problem here lies in getting cases to court - only 14% of reported rapes result in trial proceedings but:

9% of reported rapes are designated false during investigations; the majority of which comprise reports from women in the 16-25 age group.

A full third of all reported rapes fail to proceed past the investigation stage due to ‘evidence issues’ – in many cases the issue here is one of ‘victim credibility’.

Another third are lost when the victim withdraws from the case, either for fear of being disbelieved or of the criminal justice system and court process.

So you tell me, where’s the problem here?

You can’t really blame ‘public attitudes’ when so few cases go to court in the first place, a jury trial being the only situation where such attitudes - as opposed to the victim’s own perception of what public attitudes may be or the attitudes their encounter from the police and CPS - are really put the the test.

All things being equal, a 48% conviction rate in trials is still pretty much on the low side compared to most other offences but even then, without studying and evaluating what goes in jury room in cases which result in an acquittal its still impossible to say how much of factor public attitudes are as opposed to the quality of evidence, despite the fact that the evidence from the US, where for example Alameda County, California (which includes Berkely and Oakland) has a conviction rate at trial of 90%, shows that the use of specialist rape investigation and prosecution teams increase the conviction rate in rape cases at trial to around 85%.

This all brings us back to a particular pernicious and disreputable subtext to the current law and order debate, one which masquerades as concern for ‘victim’s right’ but which is actually a coded argument in favour of articificially inflating conviction rates by the quick-fix method of denuding the fundamental principles of justice, the presumption of innocence and the requirement for ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’.

Put simply, what the evidence says is that the way to improve conviction rates in rape and many other offences is through the use of highly-skilled specialist teams who can generate quality evidence - this is certainly true in the US in rape cases and equally true in the UK where the introduction of a specialist unit to tackle serious and complex fraud cases has successfully upped the conviction rate from around 63£ to 85%, albeit that this unit has also had the odd spectaclur and extremely expensive failure.

The trouble with this approach as that, politically-speaking, it requires both a significant cash investment to put such units together and takes time to deliver concrete results - if government were to make such an investement today it could take anything from three to five years for such units to start to make a significant dent in conviction rates - allowing both for the time it takes to get units set up, trained and resoourced and the time it takes to investigate cases, get them to trial and see their outcomes reflected in official statistics.

As is the case with many things, doing the job properly can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition, even if that’s the right way to go.

Unfortunately, politicians have a second option; tinkering around the edges of the law to create the impression that they’re doing something, which comes considerably cheaper and is more ‘immediate’ in political terms as it appears to generate results - new and amended laws - the actual effectiveness of which can be nigh on impossible to evaluate for several years.

For politicians this can all too easily appear a win-win strategy. you tweak the law so that, in theory, it should make getting a conviction bit easier and dish out stiffer and more punitive sentences - all of which plays well with the likes of the Sun, Mail and Express - and then a few years down the line when it turns out to have made little or no difference at all you’ll either be out of office and out of the firing line or you can just pass the buck and blame judges for not interprting the law the way you wanted them to, tell everyone that ‘public opinion’ supports more changes to the law and start the whole dumb process all over again.

This is where the supporter of this current campaign to tackle violence against women, and women’s groups in particular, need just to be a touch careful and not lose sight of the nuances of the debate.

What we should all be demanding is that government tackle the difficult things here, the things that require long-term and sustained investment in education - to try and change attitudes, particularly amongst men - in better policing and specialist investigation teams and prosecutors and in the co-ordinated provision of support and after-care services for women who are victims of rape, domestic violence and violent attacks in general.

What needs to be avioded, though, is falling into the trap laid by the notional idea of ‘victim’s rights’ and that, somehow, changing the law in ways which, so the government claims, rebalances the system towards the victim but which, in reality, eat away at the fundamental principles of Britis justice, which seems to promise much but invariably delivers very little.

We should avoid the easy option here, the one which takes away more and more of our precious rights and freedoms not just because its wrong in principle - although it is - but because if offers the least effective solution here adn if we genuinely want a first-class response from government on this issue we should make it clear from the outset that we’re not going to be suckered into taking second, third or fourth best just to cover their collective arses with a quick fix before the next election.

Update: It turns out the statistics that Bindel uses (badly) in her article are taken from 1993 World Development Report, which is produced by the World Bank and, as Jo Salmon has pointed out in comments, is in widespread use by both Oxfam and the US Congress.

None of which validates the manner in which these statistics are used in the article.

For one thing the statistics in question relate to morbidity not mortality, which is assessed in terms of an estimate of the years of healthy life (1 in 5) lost to women due to violence - which is not an assessment of cause at all but an indication of the extent to which such violence is a significant contributory factor in women’s health problems.

This notional idea of ‘healthy years lost’ due to the effects of violence would certainly include situations where there is a direct causal link, where the violence results in death or injury, but also many more indirect effects, for example those arising from drug or alcohol dependancy which can certainly be linked to violence but cannot definitively be said to be caused by violence as there are a wide range of other factors which must be taken into account.

In addition, the actual WDR estimates being cited place healthy years lost due to violence above those lost to either breast cancer or cervical cancer but make no claim at all in relation to all cancers - in fact breast and cervical cancers combined make up about a third of all cancers in women in this particular age group.

In essence there’s nothing particularly wrong with the statistics themselves but the manner in which they’re being used here is problematic and their significance is overplayed - as is all too often the case when sucvh things turn up in newspaper articles.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about my former employer, Sandwell Council of Voluntary Organisation, however a call I received tonight suggests things are getting too entertaining at the moment not to give them a mention.

It seems that open hostilities have broken out between SCVO and another local organisation, Murray Hall Community Trust, over some pretty robust - and entirely justified criticism that Murray Hall’s manager has made of SCVO and his management of late, particular regarding SCVO’s Deputy Chief Executive, Michael Anderson.

This has now culminated in SCVO issuing a letter to Murray Hall - as soon as I see a copy I’ll let you know exactly what it says - demanding an apology and, presumably, the retraction of a number of critical comments on threat of legal action against the trust - to which the Trust has responded simply ‘bring it on’.

This all seems to have started a couple of month ago after SCVO were asked by Sandwell Children’s Trust to prepare a paper outlining the kind of support that local voluntary organisations working with children would need in order to meet the statndards required by the government’s ‘Every Child Matters’.

What appears to have happened next is that Michael took it on himself to interpret this request for information as an invitation for SCVO to try to submit a bid for funding to the Children’s Trust, SCVO having unilaterally decided that what the voluntary sector needs is more people working for them without actually bothering to ask the sector what it thinks - of course, the fact that this bid includes management costs which would contribute towards paying Michael’s own salary had no influence whatsoever on this decision.

Murray Hall were, quite naturally, a little perturbed to find that SCVO had decide it was going to tell the Children’s Trust that what the children’s organisations in Sandwell needed was for the Trust to give SCVO money without even a by your leave to those organisations, not least because SCVO have no track record at all in children’s services while Murray Hall manage a local Surestart and their chairman is also chiar of the local Children’s Fund and, as a result, have made their feelings known on the subject of this bid, which Michael has been hawking around anyone who might possibly listen for the couple of months with no success whatsoever.

This all comes at a bit of tricky time for SCVO as they’ve only just discovered that a government-funded project they’ve been running for the last four years and getting shedloads of money for - 90 grand in management fees alone last years - has just been evaluated and found to be nowhere near being fit for purpose, the upshot of which is likely to be anything from 6-8 redundancies by March next year and a fair-sized hole in their finances which comes from relying on reaming that project for management fees to pay a quarter of the salaries of both its Chief and Deputy-Chief Executives.

Coming only just over 12 months after another project - Black Country Global Grants, was taken off them after only a year due to their inability to adequately manage the fund, this is naturally a pretty embarrassing situation for SCVO - not least as its managers were all given a 19.2% pay rise earlier this year. In fact the words ’shit’, ‘creek’ and ‘who lost the fucking paddle?’ come readily to mind.

In case you’re wondering, the staff who actually do the work there got 2.9% - corpulent felines or what!

So what’s actually going on here?

Well, something that Ian Hislop, of Private Eye and ‘Have I Got News for You’ fame would recognise straight away having been on the wrong end of the same treatment from good old Cap’n Bob - that’s Robert Maxwell if you’re too young to remember.

It’s called ‘threatening your critics with litigation in order to try to shut them up’.

Of course, SCVO being a charity, there is the little matter of their needing the permission of the Charity Commission (under S.33 of the Charities Act 1992) before using charitable funds to pursue litigation - and let’s be clear here on the back of what they’re moaning about their chances of getting permission to sue and somewhat less than fuck all.

But then why let a little matter like charity law get in the way of a good threat, even if the only reply you get is ’so sue me’.

I suspect that fact alone says more about this situation than anything else - if you have to resort to empty threats in order to try to silence your critics then it seems to me you’re on pretty shaky ground already, the kind of ground that doesn’t stand up to too close scrutiny.

After all, rub people up the wrong way like this as they may start asking a few awkward questions like:

How is it that between 2002 and early 2005, the African-Caribbean community in West Bromwich, which makes up about 4.3% of the town’s population were awarded 26% of the total grant funding, from two small grants programmes managed by SCVO, that went into the town - that’s just under £71,000 out of around £290,000 that went into West Bromwich in total.

It also happens to be 62% or thereabouts of the total amount of funding given the Black and Minority Ethnic groups in the town over the same period - the town’s Indian community which is twice the size, population-wise, got just less that half as much funding as the African Caribbean community and of that only around £8,500 went to local Sikh organisations despite their being, in terms of population, the largest local minority community.

Of course SCVO wouldn’t know any of this having recently responded to a request for this kind of breakdown of grant funding from these small grants programmes by telling the person who asked that such a breakdown can’t be done because they don’t monitor these grants fully by ethnicity only whether they go to BME organisation or not.

Thing is, the trouble with questions like that is that the answers you get spawn other questions like:

How is it that out of that £71,000 or so that went to African Caribbean organisations in West Bromwich, £49,000 went to organisations in which three of SCVO’s directors hold notifiable personal interests - in the case of one director nearly £30,000 has gone to organisations in which either they or an immediate family member have a direct interest as an employee or member of the management committee of the organisation receiving the funding.

Of course these interests were all declared when SCVO’s board met to approve the recommendations of the grants panel that made these awards - of which this same director is also a member, as are two other SCVO board members and the organisation’s Chief Executive.

Weren’t they?

Again this seems to something that SCVO don’t know because they don’t appear to monitor such things - even this is all information that can be pulled together with just a little effort and the information they have to hand.