QUESTION: What is Population Communication?
ANSWER: Before I define Population Communication, let me first of all define the words separately, thus Population and Communication.
Population as defined by the Cambridge International Dictionary of English is all the people living in a particular Country, Area or Place.
Again, in sociology and biology a population is the collection of people or organisms of a particular species living in a given geographic area or mortality, and migration. Though the field encompasses many dimensions of population change including the family (marriage & divorce), public health, work and the labour force, and family planning.
Communication on the other hand, is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other. There are many auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, or the writing.
Considering the above definitions we can simply say that population communication conveys messages about the collection of people or organisms of a particular species living in a given geographic area over a period of time.
But we cannot discuss population communication without talking about demography. This is because demography is the statistical study of all populations. It encompasses the study of the size, structure and distribution of populations, and how populations change over time due to births, deaths, migration, and ageing. Demographic analysis can relate to whole societies or to smaller groups defined by the criteria such as education, religion, or ethnicity.
Demography has been defined by several people over the years. Below are three definitions of demography taken from wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection.
Demography is the study of human populations in relation to the changes brought about by the interplay of births, deaths, and migration. Term is also used to refer to the actual phenomena observed, as in phrases such as the demography of tropical Africa.(Pressat 1985:54)
Demography is the statistical and mathematical study of the size, composition, and the spatial distribution of human populations, and of changes over time in these aspects through the operation of the five processes of fertility, mortality, marriage, migration, and social mobility. Although it maintains a continuous descriptive and comparative analysis of trends, in each of these processes and in their net result, its long-run goal is to develop a body of theory to explain the events that it charts and compares(Bogue 1969:1-2)
Hauser and Duncan(1959:2) also defined demography as the study of the size, territorial distribution, and the composition of population, changes therein, and the components of such changes, which may be identified as natality, mortality, territorial movement(migration), and social mobility(change of status) .
The study of human populations has its roots. Like sociology generally, in the societal changes that accompanied both the scientific and industrial revolutions. Some early mathematicians developed primitive forms of life tables, which are tables of life expectancies, for life insurance and actuarial purposes. Census, another demographic tool, was instituted for primarily political purposes:
As a basis for taxation
As a basis for political representation.
The development of demographic calculations started in the 18th century. Census taking, on the other hand, has a long history dating back close to 2,000 years among the Chinese and the Romans and even further back in history among groups in the Middle East. Most modern censuses began in the late 18th century. Demography relies on the large data sets that are primarily derived from censuses and the registration statistics (that is, birth, death, marriage registrations) large data sets over long periods of time (example the 2000 census in Ghana).
Population communication/demography plays various roles and functions in the society which goes a long way to enhance development. Some of the functions attributed to population communication/demography are as below:
Population communication supports immigration reforms. It helps check the number of people who enter and go out of the country. This sees to the number of people and the social amenities available before allowing immigrants into the country to avoid too much concentration on economic facilities.
Also Population Communication conveys messages to national leaders on the number of people living in their country, the birth rate, death rate, number of males and females in the country, the migration rate, and the people in the working age group. This helps national leaders to know which policies to formulate at any give time and also what social amenities to provide.
It again serves political purposes such as the basis of taxation based on the number of people in the working age group as well as serve as a basis for political representation.
Population Communication helps International Population Agencies like the Population Communication International (PCI), which is working worldwide, to develop entertainment-education programmes and social marking strategies that support targeted health and poverty alleviation initiatives. For more than twenty years PCI, has worked in over 27countries, producing more than 75 radio and television programmes, training hundreds of individual, and providing technical assistance to more than 100 international organizations.
Demographers are often multi-skilled, particularly if they gained first degrees in subjects such as geography, statistics or health, and have then studied demography at the graduate level. Training in demography will normally provide them with skills in computing and analysis as well as insights into population and health programmes and policies.
Students of demography thus find employment in a wide range of professional settings. In the public sector, demographers are employed in:
Government Statistical Offices, especially in the sections dealing with censuses, surveys, and the registration data.
National, State, and local planning bodies, especially in the educational and health planning, housing, and social policy.
Government research units in areas such as immigration and labour market analysis.
In development cooperation agencies such as AusAID and USAID.
Demographers can also be found in university research units and private consulting firms. Many international agencies, such as the United Nations Population Division and United Nations Fund for Population, and the non-government organizations also utilize the skills of demographers.
In the private sector demographic analysis is recognized as a vital part of market research and the investment planning.
In conclusion, one can say that the components affecting population change are measured by birth, death and migration rates that determine the numbers in the population, its age composition, and how fast it is growing or declining. Demographics are also concerned with the use of existing knowledge and techniques to identify and solve problems.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Censorship
Definition: forbiddance; ban
Antonyms: approval, compliment, encouragement, endorsement, praise, recommendation, sanction
Military History Companion: censorship
Censorship is strictly the review by an authority of any material before publication or dissemination, with the legal right to prevent, alter, or delay its appearance. The term is often loosely used to reflect voluntary arrangements between armed forces and the media, or in criticism of any system other than complete press freedom. Historically, censorship has been habitually practised by most governments, or other political and religious authorities. Censorship in the military sense has only become an issue in modern times, with the growth of liberal or democratic governments, and new methods of press communication. Its problems arise from a collision between traditional press freedoms and the needs of military security in wartime. The USA has occupied a special place in this story, through being the world's first literate democracy, and also through the constitutional position of the press. Much censorship has been by co-operation, and it has not been unusual for the media to ask for guidance or even direct censorship from the armed forces, rather than reveal wartime secrets.
The profession of war correspondent developed in the mid-19th century with the growth of the telegraph and widespread newspaper readership. The first wars on which reporting probably had a direct impact were the Crimean and the American civil wars. In the next fifty years vague censorship regulations were established in most western countries, but only supplementing more important informal arrangements. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war convinced the British in particular that a more formal system was needed.
At the start of WW I all belligerents had extensive censorship legislation and practices, although military attempts to exclude the press altogether from reporting the fighting fronts proved unsuccessful. This war also saw the extension of censorship to servicemen's letters home. Comments in letters analysed by censors became a tool for commanders in judging their own side's morale. WW II saw a revival of similar censorship practices, again with significant co-operation from the press. But this only applied chiefly to wars of national survival, and to the era of newspaper dominance. The last significant case of legally enforceable wartime censorship by the USA or Britain was the Korean war.
The rise of radio and television to supplant newspapers in the second half of the 20th century raised a number of new issues. Controversial but highly critical claims that the unrestricted reporting of American involvement in the Vietnam war had contributed to defeat produced concern on all sides. The result was the introduction by the USA and Britain of voluntary systems of press restraint, seen in the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Since then, developments in media communications technology have made censorship increasingly unfeasible.
US Supreme Court: Censorship
The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint-any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).
The Court first directly addressed the constitutionality of prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931). In question was a Minnesota law that allowed judges to eliminate as a public nuisance any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” newspaper or periodical (see Libel). A state court had declared a newspaper, the Saturday Press, to be a public nuisance after it had attacked public officials with allegations of corruption, laziness, and illicit contact with gangsters. Much of the material seemed anti‐Semitic. The state court issued an order forever prohibiting the editors “from producing, editing, publishing, circulating, having in their possession, selling or giving away any publication whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper” either under the title of the Saturday Press or any other title (p. 706). Violation of the order would constitute contempt of court.
By a margin of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court found the statute to be an unconstitutional form of censorship, because before a banned newspaper could publish again, the editors would have to satisfy a judge as to the new publication's good character. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the majority concluded that prior restraint would be constitutional only in extreme circumstances, for example, if a newspaper were about to publish the location of troops in wartime. Speaking for dissenters, Justice Pierce Butler protested that the Minnesota law did not constitute a classic form of censorship because the newspaper had published nine issues before being suppressed. He noted that the law “does not authorize administrative control in advance such as was formerly exercised by the licensers and censors” (p. 735).
In subsequent cases, the Court disapproved of administrative licensing of speech where the licenser can make decisions based on the context of the would‐be speaker's expression. For example, in Lovell v. Griffin (1938) the Court held unconstitutional an ordinance banning distribution of literature without permission of the city manager, where the manager had carte blanche to grant or deny permits. Likewise, the Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1951) found unconstitutional a New York scheme under which exhibition licenses could be denied to motion pictures found to be “sacrilegious.” Nor would the Court allow the postmaster general to revoke Esquire magazine's second‐class mailing privileges on grounds that the publication was not contributing sufficiently to the public good and welfare (Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 1946). The Court struck down injunctions prohibiting newspapers from publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that had been leaked to the press (New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971). And it held that judges could not prohibit journalists from publishing material potentially prejudicial to a criminal defendant when such material was obtained in open court (Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 1976).
On the other hand, the Court is likely to allow licensing systems that minimize administrative discretion, regulate the time, place, and manner of expression without regard to its content, and are guided by clear and specific standards (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 1953). The Court has allowed government censorship of obscene movies, but only if stringent procedures are followed, including prompt judicial review (Freedman v. Maryland, 1965). The Court has also granted public elementary and secondary schools broad power to censor student publications (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). It has also concluded that the federal government has broad power to require many government employees to submit to censorship of their speech and writing even after they leave government employment and even when unclassified material is involved (Snepp v. United States, 1980). Further, the Court has held that people who disobey court orders restraining expression may be punished for contempt even if the restriction is likely to be found unconstitutional (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967).
The Near decision itself has been invoked to justify prior restraint, which has led critics to complain that the Court has provided no clear theory or standards for determining when prior restraint is permissible. In the Pentagon Papers Case, justices on both sides of the decision used Near to support their positions-some for the proposition that prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional, but others for the proposition that exceptional circumstances can justify prior restraint. And when, in 1979, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting The Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to explain how to build a hydrogen bomb, the judge concluded that the article was analogous to the types of exceptional circumstances listed in Near (United States v. The Progressive). (The injunction was lifted after similar material was published elsewhere and the government dropped the case.)
In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.
The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: censorship
Act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good. In the past, most governments believed it their duty to regulate the morals of their people; only with the rise in the status of the individual and individual rights did censorship come to seem objectionable. Censorship may be preemptive (preventing the publication or broadcast of undesirable information) or punitive (punishing those who publish or broadcast offending material). In Europe, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches practiced censorship, as did the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Authoritarian governments such as those in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union have employed pervasive censorship, which is generally opposed by underground movements engaged in the circulation of samizdat literature. In the U.S. in the 20th century, censorship focused largely on works of fiction deemed guilty of obscenity (e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover), though periodic acts of political censorship also occurred (e.g., the effort to purge school textbooks of possible left-wing content in the 1950s). In the late 20th century, some called for censorship of so-called hate speech, language deemed threatening (or sometimes merely offensive) to various subsections of the population. Censorship in the U.S. is usually opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Germany after World War II it became a crime to deny the Holocaust or to publish pro-Nazi publications. See also Pentagon Papers.
Russian History Encyclopedia: Censorship
Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm's first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) expanded his government's monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia's first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newlycreated Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741 - 1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.
When Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing "free publishing" banned published words against "the laws of God and the state" or of a "clearly-seditious" nature. The police would henceforth supervise "free" presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine's reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.
Sharing Catherine II's early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801 - 1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia's first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon's invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.
At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825 - 1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.
Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to "direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government." No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).
Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of "Literature, Science, and Art" (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod's right - through censors chosen from ecclesiastical academies - to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.
Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter clandestine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything "inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects." One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas - so-called "Official Nationality" - to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.
With respect to the state's granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.
Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors' approval under Nicholas I.
Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881) blamed that debacle on Russia's backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.
On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give "relief and convenience to the national press." Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a "dangerous orientation." Freed from censorship - but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow - were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute's subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.
In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would "take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions." During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.
That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881 - 1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just "dangerous" periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889 - a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen's Deputies ordered members of the Printers' Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.
Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted "one of the fundamental freedoms." Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.
Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.
War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: "Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia." Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in 1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
Enforcing limits on the printed word - and all cultural and artistic expression - was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956 - 1964) as first secretary, and his effort to "de-Stalinize" the USSR brought his famous but short-lived "thaw" in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost.
Columbia Encyclopedia: censorship,
official prohibition or restriction of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order. It may be imposed by governmental authority, local or national, by a religious body, or occasionally by a powerful private group. It may be applied to the mails, speech, the press, the theater, dance, art, literature, photography, the cinema, radio, television, or computer networks. Censorship may be either preventive or punitive, according to whether it is exercised before or after the expression has been made public. In use since antiquity, the practice has been particularly thoroughgoing under autocratic and heavily centralized governments, from the Roman Empire to the totalitarian states of the 20th cent.
In the United States
Censorship has existed in the United States since colonial times; its emphasis has gradually shifted from the political to the sexual.
Political Censorship
Attempts to suppress political freedom of the press in the American colonies were recurrent; one victory against censorship was the trial of John Peter Zenger. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, speech, and religion. Nevertheless, there have been examples of official political censorship, notably in the actions taken under the Sedition Act of 1798 (see Alien and Sedition Acts), suppression of abolitionist literature in the antebellum South, and local attempts in the 19th and 20th cent. to repress publications considered radical. During the cold war many Americans worked to keep textbooks and teaching that they considered deleterious to “the American form of government” out of schools and colleges; many others opposed this effort (see academic freedom).
The issue of government secrecy was dealt with in the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which stated that, with some exceptions, people have the right of access to government records. The issue was challenged in 1971, when a secret government study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers was published by major newspapers. The government sued to stop publication, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers (see press, freedom of the).
Cultural Censorship
Long before World War I there were vigilante attacks, such as those by Anthony Comstock, on what was reckoned obscene literature, and the U.S. Post Office expanded (1873) its ban on the shipment of obscene literature and art, but it was after World War I that public controversy over censorship raged most fiercely. Until the Tariff Act was amended in 1930, many literary classics were not allowed entry into the United States on grounds of obscenity. Even after the act's amendment censorship attempts persisted, and James Joyce's Ulysses was not allowed into the country until 1933, after a court fight. Noted works of literature involved in obscenity cases included Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1957, a series of Supreme Court decisions relaxed restrictions on so-called obscene materials, although not all obscenity prosecutions during this time were dismissed; in a famous case in the 1960s publisher Ralph Ginzburg was convicted of advertising in an obscene manner.
As Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statutes, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting the sale of obscene materials to minors, and these were upheld (1968) by the Supreme Court. In decisions handed down in 1973 and 1987, the Court ruled that local governments could restrict works if they were without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and were at the same time seen, by local standards, to appeal to prurient interest. From the 1960s, the issue of sex education in schools was highly controversial; more recently, the question of AIDS education has stirred debate. In the 1980s, some feminists attempted to ban pornography as injurious to women. Other activists, concerned with racism and other forms of bigotry, lobbied for the suppression of what came to be called hate speech.
The producers of motion pictures, dependent for success on widespread public approval, somewhat reluctantly adopted a self-regulatory code of morals in the 1920s (see Hays, Will H.). This was replaced after 1966 by a voluntary rating system under the supervision of the Motion Picture Producers Association; the need to tailor a movie to fit a ratings category has acted as a form of censorship.
Since 1934, local radio (and later, television) stations have operated under licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission, which is expressly forbidden to exercise censorship. However, the required periodical review of a station's license invites indirect censorship. The Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that indecent material could be banned from commercial cable-television stations but not from public-access cable stations.
The rapid growth of the Internet presents another set of issues. The Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton, was overturned by the Supreme Court for the restrictions it placed on adult access to and use of constitutionally protected material and communication on the Internet. The Children's Internet Protection Act (2001), which requires libraries and schools to install antipornography filters on computers with federally financed Internet access, was upheld, however, because it was only a condition attached to the acceptance of federal funding and not a general prohibition on access.
In Other Countries
In other countries, censorship is accepted as inevitable in times of war, and it has been imposed to varying degrees even in peacetime. In the Middle Ages, attempts to silence heresy through intimidation, particularly through the establishment of the Inquisition, were examples of censorship, as are modern instances of book banning. The absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cent. imposed strict controls, and because the Reformation had resulted in a reshuffling of the relations between church and state, these controls were used to persecute opponents of the established religion of a particular state, Roman Catholic or Protestant. A form of book-banning was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the Index, a list of publications that the faithful were forbidden to read. The last edition of the Index was published in 1948; in 1966 Pope Paul VI decreed that it would be discontinued. Paradoxically, in the lands under Calvinist domination (such as Geneva, Scotland, and England of the Puritan period) where the ideals of liberty and freedom first blossomed, regulation of private conduct and individual opinion was rigorous, and censorship was strong.
Strict censorship of all forms of public expression characterized the Soviet Union throughout most of its 74-year history. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, was not permitted publication there, and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, considered by many to be masterpieces, were banned in 1966. Soviet censorship ended in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness).
In Britain during the 19th and 20th cent., the object of censorship has most often been literature regarded as obscene. With the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, there followed many criminal prosecutions and seizures of books. This law remained in effect until 1959, when a new law provided that the opinion of artistic or literary experts could be submitted as evidence in deciding obscenity cases and that work alleged to be obscene had to be judged as a whole rather than in part. However, when the editors of an underground periodical, Oz, were convicted in 1971 for violating postal laws, an appeal court held that a periodical need not be judged as a whole, an apparent reversal of the 1959 act.
Psychoanalysis: Censorship
The term censorship in everyday language connotes ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: "we are very often astonished," he writes, "to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (1895b, p. 281-282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he compares this psychic work to the censorship that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time: "Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).
Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain. Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).
The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the "antechamber") and on to the conscious (the "drawing-room") (1915e).
Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from repression: whereas repression rejects a representation and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example: "We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed" (1916-17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under the superego-the merciless supervisor (1923b).
Although the notion of censorship continues to be fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.
History 1450-1789: Censorship
Censorship began in the sixteenth century as the effort to prohibit religious ideas that were deemed heretical. From the beginning religious censorship was only possible when civil governments agreed that it was needed and provided the police authority for enforcement. In the following two centuries the state gradually took complete control, with little or no participation by clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed and waned according to the perceived threat of alleged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest during the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant states sought to enforce religious uniformity, and weakest during the antireligious and politically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech, and theater never completely disappeared because almost all state and church authorities felt that it was a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the populace from destructive ideas.
The Protestant Reformation
Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not permit overt political criticism within the state, but they could do little about denunciations from beyond their borders. Because there was widespread agreement about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, little censorship of religious and philosophical ideas existed.
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation stimulated the beginning of religious censorship. Since Protestants promulgated their views through the printing press, and Catholics replied via the same medium, it was inevitable that both sides would try to control the press. But they waited until all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the sixteenth century before establishing censorship machinery. Then both sides developed similar policies.
Press censorship needed three components to be effective. First, an individual or a group had to determine which books, authors, and ideas were dangerous-a commission of experts had to prepare a list of objectionable previously published books. Second, prepublication censorship was needed to ensure that new books propagating heretical, seditious, or immoral ideas would not be published. Governments had to establish committees of readers, composed of clergymen and civil officials, to review manuscripts before issuing permissions to print. Prepublication censorship would become the most widespread and effective kind of censorship. Third, the civil authority used its police powers to keep banned books from entering the state and, if possible, to remove them from bookstores and libraries. This part of censorship was never very effective.
The papacy fulfilled the first requirement by promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books, the most important of which were the Tridentine Index of 1564, so called because the Council of Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clementine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clement VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide those carrying out prepublication censorship and expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and church authorities cooperated relatively effectively in censorship actions despite numerous disagreements and jurisdictional conflicts. For example, France never accepted the papal indexes but still banned Protestant books and ideas.
Protestant censorship followed the same paths except that no supranational Protestant church existed to direct and coordinate censorship. Since Protestant religious leaders invested the state with substantial authority over the church, the state assumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protestant state had to decide which books to ban and how to censor. Protestant states banned the publication, importation, and ownership of Catholic works, and sometimes the works of other Protestants. They also condemned books considered immoral and critical of the government. Although Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Geneva had the most effective Protestant censorship in the sixteenth century.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches and states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and taught in universities. Prepublication censors sometimes dictated that scholars accept unwelcome changes in their works. Authors exercised some degree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Catholic and Protestant worlds lost university positions, or suffered worse, because of their religious views. Political censorship also intensified in the late sixteenth century as governments attempted to stem a flood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially in France.
State Censorship
Although censorship began as a result of the religious division of Europe, civil governments quickly took complete control of censorship of books and theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the 1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors existed. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to read manuscripts intended for publication and to grant the publisher the right to print the book, called a privilège. By the eighteenth century the number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200. The college exercised prepublication censorship and awarded exclusive publication rights to one publisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.
English censorship of printed works began when Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547) sought to protect the national church from other doctrines and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding monarchs used censorship to enforce different religious establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553) allowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled 1553-1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) passed numerous laws censoring the press and the theater to ensure that they respected her version of the English Church, did not publish Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy. In 1557 the crown created the Stationers' Company to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every book had to be licensed helped control the press. English monarchs continued a policy of state censorship over the next two centuries, although the purpose of censorship increasingly became that of shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Nevertheless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism produced considerable variation from regime to regime in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and blasphemous matter simply published without permission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-publication censorship of written materials. The practice of locating and destroying books and prosecuting publishers had always been difficult, and that also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.
Every other large and small political unit had similar censorship systems, sometimes including representatives of the local church. But the local nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and printers wishing to publish political or religious criticism only needed to go to the next state to publish their works. Then the international commercial network of the book trade, including book fairs at Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late seventeenth century created a new publication that was difficult to censor. Because newspapers were local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick and local. The censorship machinery of the sixteenth century was organized to censor learned works of religion, philosophy, and politics and could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broadsides and other ephemeral matter, which were printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the names of author and printer, and were quickly distributed.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, especially in the years from 1750 to 1789, significantly weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially religious censorship, partly because they wrote many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786), Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740-1780) and Joseph II (Holy Roman emperor, 1765-1790; king of Austria, 1780-1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762-1796), and King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759-1788), who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more religious and literary freedom of expression. However, when writers began to publish works criticizing absolutist government and demanding expanded political rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened censorship. But they did not, and could not, return censorship to its earlier state.
In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously weakened the privilège system, as censors permitted the publication of ideas that had previously been banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just beyond the borders of France published many works without privilèges, then sent them into France. The loosening of censorship permitted an avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the monarchy and the church, which helped bring on the French Revolution.
Antonyms: approval, compliment, encouragement, endorsement, praise, recommendation, sanction
Military History Companion: censorship
Censorship is strictly the review by an authority of any material before publication or dissemination, with the legal right to prevent, alter, or delay its appearance. The term is often loosely used to reflect voluntary arrangements between armed forces and the media, or in criticism of any system other than complete press freedom. Historically, censorship has been habitually practised by most governments, or other political and religious authorities. Censorship in the military sense has only become an issue in modern times, with the growth of liberal or democratic governments, and new methods of press communication. Its problems arise from a collision between traditional press freedoms and the needs of military security in wartime. The USA has occupied a special place in this story, through being the world's first literate democracy, and also through the constitutional position of the press. Much censorship has been by co-operation, and it has not been unusual for the media to ask for guidance or even direct censorship from the armed forces, rather than reveal wartime secrets.
The profession of war correspondent developed in the mid-19th century with the growth of the telegraph and widespread newspaper readership. The first wars on which reporting probably had a direct impact were the Crimean and the American civil wars. In the next fifty years vague censorship regulations were established in most western countries, but only supplementing more important informal arrangements. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war convinced the British in particular that a more formal system was needed.
At the start of WW I all belligerents had extensive censorship legislation and practices, although military attempts to exclude the press altogether from reporting the fighting fronts proved unsuccessful. This war also saw the extension of censorship to servicemen's letters home. Comments in letters analysed by censors became a tool for commanders in judging their own side's morale. WW II saw a revival of similar censorship practices, again with significant co-operation from the press. But this only applied chiefly to wars of national survival, and to the era of newspaper dominance. The last significant case of legally enforceable wartime censorship by the USA or Britain was the Korean war.
The rise of radio and television to supplant newspapers in the second half of the 20th century raised a number of new issues. Controversial but highly critical claims that the unrestricted reporting of American involvement in the Vietnam war had contributed to defeat produced concern on all sides. The result was the introduction by the USA and Britain of voluntary systems of press restraint, seen in the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Since then, developments in media communications technology have made censorship increasingly unfeasible.
US Supreme Court: Censorship
The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint-any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).
The Court first directly addressed the constitutionality of prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931). In question was a Minnesota law that allowed judges to eliminate as a public nuisance any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” newspaper or periodical (see Libel). A state court had declared a newspaper, the Saturday Press, to be a public nuisance after it had attacked public officials with allegations of corruption, laziness, and illicit contact with gangsters. Much of the material seemed anti‐Semitic. The state court issued an order forever prohibiting the editors “from producing, editing, publishing, circulating, having in their possession, selling or giving away any publication whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper” either under the title of the Saturday Press or any other title (p. 706). Violation of the order would constitute contempt of court.
By a margin of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court found the statute to be an unconstitutional form of censorship, because before a banned newspaper could publish again, the editors would have to satisfy a judge as to the new publication's good character. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the majority concluded that prior restraint would be constitutional only in extreme circumstances, for example, if a newspaper were about to publish the location of troops in wartime. Speaking for dissenters, Justice Pierce Butler protested that the Minnesota law did not constitute a classic form of censorship because the newspaper had published nine issues before being suppressed. He noted that the law “does not authorize administrative control in advance such as was formerly exercised by the licensers and censors” (p. 735).
In subsequent cases, the Court disapproved of administrative licensing of speech where the licenser can make decisions based on the context of the would‐be speaker's expression. For example, in Lovell v. Griffin (1938) the Court held unconstitutional an ordinance banning distribution of literature without permission of the city manager, where the manager had carte blanche to grant or deny permits. Likewise, the Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1951) found unconstitutional a New York scheme under which exhibition licenses could be denied to motion pictures found to be “sacrilegious.” Nor would the Court allow the postmaster general to revoke Esquire magazine's second‐class mailing privileges on grounds that the publication was not contributing sufficiently to the public good and welfare (Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 1946). The Court struck down injunctions prohibiting newspapers from publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that had been leaked to the press (New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971). And it held that judges could not prohibit journalists from publishing material potentially prejudicial to a criminal defendant when such material was obtained in open court (Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 1976).
On the other hand, the Court is likely to allow licensing systems that minimize administrative discretion, regulate the time, place, and manner of expression without regard to its content, and are guided by clear and specific standards (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 1953). The Court has allowed government censorship of obscene movies, but only if stringent procedures are followed, including prompt judicial review (Freedman v. Maryland, 1965). The Court has also granted public elementary and secondary schools broad power to censor student publications (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). It has also concluded that the federal government has broad power to require many government employees to submit to censorship of their speech and writing even after they leave government employment and even when unclassified material is involved (Snepp v. United States, 1980). Further, the Court has held that people who disobey court orders restraining expression may be punished for contempt even if the restriction is likely to be found unconstitutional (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967).
The Near decision itself has been invoked to justify prior restraint, which has led critics to complain that the Court has provided no clear theory or standards for determining when prior restraint is permissible. In the Pentagon Papers Case, justices on both sides of the decision used Near to support their positions-some for the proposition that prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional, but others for the proposition that exceptional circumstances can justify prior restraint. And when, in 1979, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting The Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to explain how to build a hydrogen bomb, the judge concluded that the article was analogous to the types of exceptional circumstances listed in Near (United States v. The Progressive). (The injunction was lifted after similar material was published elsewhere and the government dropped the case.)
In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.
The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: censorship
Act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good. In the past, most governments believed it their duty to regulate the morals of their people; only with the rise in the status of the individual and individual rights did censorship come to seem objectionable. Censorship may be preemptive (preventing the publication or broadcast of undesirable information) or punitive (punishing those who publish or broadcast offending material). In Europe, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches practiced censorship, as did the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Authoritarian governments such as those in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union have employed pervasive censorship, which is generally opposed by underground movements engaged in the circulation of samizdat literature. In the U.S. in the 20th century, censorship focused largely on works of fiction deemed guilty of obscenity (e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover), though periodic acts of political censorship also occurred (e.g., the effort to purge school textbooks of possible left-wing content in the 1950s). In the late 20th century, some called for censorship of so-called hate speech, language deemed threatening (or sometimes merely offensive) to various subsections of the population. Censorship in the U.S. is usually opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Germany after World War II it became a crime to deny the Holocaust or to publish pro-Nazi publications. See also Pentagon Papers.
Russian History Encyclopedia: Censorship
Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm's first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) expanded his government's monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia's first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newlycreated Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741 - 1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.
When Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing "free publishing" banned published words against "the laws of God and the state" or of a "clearly-seditious" nature. The police would henceforth supervise "free" presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine's reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.
Sharing Catherine II's early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801 - 1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia's first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon's invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.
At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825 - 1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.
Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to "direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government." No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).
Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of "Literature, Science, and Art" (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod's right - through censors chosen from ecclesiastical academies - to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.
Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter clandestine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything "inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects." One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas - so-called "Official Nationality" - to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.
With respect to the state's granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.
Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors' approval under Nicholas I.
Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881) blamed that debacle on Russia's backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.
On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give "relief and convenience to the national press." Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a "dangerous orientation." Freed from censorship - but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow - were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute's subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.
In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would "take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions." During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.
That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881 - 1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just "dangerous" periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889 - a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen's Deputies ordered members of the Printers' Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.
Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted "one of the fundamental freedoms." Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.
Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.
War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: "Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia." Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in 1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
Enforcing limits on the printed word - and all cultural and artistic expression - was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956 - 1964) as first secretary, and his effort to "de-Stalinize" the USSR brought his famous but short-lived "thaw" in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost.
Columbia Encyclopedia: censorship,
official prohibition or restriction of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order. It may be imposed by governmental authority, local or national, by a religious body, or occasionally by a powerful private group. It may be applied to the mails, speech, the press, the theater, dance, art, literature, photography, the cinema, radio, television, or computer networks. Censorship may be either preventive or punitive, according to whether it is exercised before or after the expression has been made public. In use since antiquity, the practice has been particularly thoroughgoing under autocratic and heavily centralized governments, from the Roman Empire to the totalitarian states of the 20th cent.
In the United States
Censorship has existed in the United States since colonial times; its emphasis has gradually shifted from the political to the sexual.
Political Censorship
Attempts to suppress political freedom of the press in the American colonies were recurrent; one victory against censorship was the trial of John Peter Zenger. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, speech, and religion. Nevertheless, there have been examples of official political censorship, notably in the actions taken under the Sedition Act of 1798 (see Alien and Sedition Acts), suppression of abolitionist literature in the antebellum South, and local attempts in the 19th and 20th cent. to repress publications considered radical. During the cold war many Americans worked to keep textbooks and teaching that they considered deleterious to “the American form of government” out of schools and colleges; many others opposed this effort (see academic freedom).
The issue of government secrecy was dealt with in the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which stated that, with some exceptions, people have the right of access to government records. The issue was challenged in 1971, when a secret government study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers was published by major newspapers. The government sued to stop publication, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers (see press, freedom of the).
Cultural Censorship
Long before World War I there were vigilante attacks, such as those by Anthony Comstock, on what was reckoned obscene literature, and the U.S. Post Office expanded (1873) its ban on the shipment of obscene literature and art, but it was after World War I that public controversy over censorship raged most fiercely. Until the Tariff Act was amended in 1930, many literary classics were not allowed entry into the United States on grounds of obscenity. Even after the act's amendment censorship attempts persisted, and James Joyce's Ulysses was not allowed into the country until 1933, after a court fight. Noted works of literature involved in obscenity cases included Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1957, a series of Supreme Court decisions relaxed restrictions on so-called obscene materials, although not all obscenity prosecutions during this time were dismissed; in a famous case in the 1960s publisher Ralph Ginzburg was convicted of advertising in an obscene manner.
As Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statutes, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting the sale of obscene materials to minors, and these were upheld (1968) by the Supreme Court. In decisions handed down in 1973 and 1987, the Court ruled that local governments could restrict works if they were without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and were at the same time seen, by local standards, to appeal to prurient interest. From the 1960s, the issue of sex education in schools was highly controversial; more recently, the question of AIDS education has stirred debate. In the 1980s, some feminists attempted to ban pornography as injurious to women. Other activists, concerned with racism and other forms of bigotry, lobbied for the suppression of what came to be called hate speech.
The producers of motion pictures, dependent for success on widespread public approval, somewhat reluctantly adopted a self-regulatory code of morals in the 1920s (see Hays, Will H.). This was replaced after 1966 by a voluntary rating system under the supervision of the Motion Picture Producers Association; the need to tailor a movie to fit a ratings category has acted as a form of censorship.
Since 1934, local radio (and later, television) stations have operated under licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission, which is expressly forbidden to exercise censorship. However, the required periodical review of a station's license invites indirect censorship. The Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that indecent material could be banned from commercial cable-television stations but not from public-access cable stations.
The rapid growth of the Internet presents another set of issues. The Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton, was overturned by the Supreme Court for the restrictions it placed on adult access to and use of constitutionally protected material and communication on the Internet. The Children's Internet Protection Act (2001), which requires libraries and schools to install antipornography filters on computers with federally financed Internet access, was upheld, however, because it was only a condition attached to the acceptance of federal funding and not a general prohibition on access.
In Other Countries
In other countries, censorship is accepted as inevitable in times of war, and it has been imposed to varying degrees even in peacetime. In the Middle Ages, attempts to silence heresy through intimidation, particularly through the establishment of the Inquisition, were examples of censorship, as are modern instances of book banning. The absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cent. imposed strict controls, and because the Reformation had resulted in a reshuffling of the relations between church and state, these controls were used to persecute opponents of the established religion of a particular state, Roman Catholic or Protestant. A form of book-banning was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the Index, a list of publications that the faithful were forbidden to read. The last edition of the Index was published in 1948; in 1966 Pope Paul VI decreed that it would be discontinued. Paradoxically, in the lands under Calvinist domination (such as Geneva, Scotland, and England of the Puritan period) where the ideals of liberty and freedom first blossomed, regulation of private conduct and individual opinion was rigorous, and censorship was strong.
Strict censorship of all forms of public expression characterized the Soviet Union throughout most of its 74-year history. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, was not permitted publication there, and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, considered by many to be masterpieces, were banned in 1966. Soviet censorship ended in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness).
In Britain during the 19th and 20th cent., the object of censorship has most often been literature regarded as obscene. With the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, there followed many criminal prosecutions and seizures of books. This law remained in effect until 1959, when a new law provided that the opinion of artistic or literary experts could be submitted as evidence in deciding obscenity cases and that work alleged to be obscene had to be judged as a whole rather than in part. However, when the editors of an underground periodical, Oz, were convicted in 1971 for violating postal laws, an appeal court held that a periodical need not be judged as a whole, an apparent reversal of the 1959 act.
Psychoanalysis: Censorship
The term censorship in everyday language connotes ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: "we are very often astonished," he writes, "to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (1895b, p. 281-282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he compares this psychic work to the censorship that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time: "Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).
Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain. Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).
The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the "antechamber") and on to the conscious (the "drawing-room") (1915e).
Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from repression: whereas repression rejects a representation and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example: "We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed" (1916-17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under the superego-the merciless supervisor (1923b).
Although the notion of censorship continues to be fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.
History 1450-1789: Censorship
Censorship began in the sixteenth century as the effort to prohibit religious ideas that were deemed heretical. From the beginning religious censorship was only possible when civil governments agreed that it was needed and provided the police authority for enforcement. In the following two centuries the state gradually took complete control, with little or no participation by clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed and waned according to the perceived threat of alleged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest during the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant states sought to enforce religious uniformity, and weakest during the antireligious and politically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech, and theater never completely disappeared because almost all state and church authorities felt that it was a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the populace from destructive ideas.
The Protestant Reformation
Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not permit overt political criticism within the state, but they could do little about denunciations from beyond their borders. Because there was widespread agreement about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, little censorship of religious and philosophical ideas existed.
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation stimulated the beginning of religious censorship. Since Protestants promulgated their views through the printing press, and Catholics replied via the same medium, it was inevitable that both sides would try to control the press. But they waited until all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the sixteenth century before establishing censorship machinery. Then both sides developed similar policies.
Press censorship needed three components to be effective. First, an individual or a group had to determine which books, authors, and ideas were dangerous-a commission of experts had to prepare a list of objectionable previously published books. Second, prepublication censorship was needed to ensure that new books propagating heretical, seditious, or immoral ideas would not be published. Governments had to establish committees of readers, composed of clergymen and civil officials, to review manuscripts before issuing permissions to print. Prepublication censorship would become the most widespread and effective kind of censorship. Third, the civil authority used its police powers to keep banned books from entering the state and, if possible, to remove them from bookstores and libraries. This part of censorship was never very effective.
The papacy fulfilled the first requirement by promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books, the most important of which were the Tridentine Index of 1564, so called because the Council of Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clementine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clement VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide those carrying out prepublication censorship and expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and church authorities cooperated relatively effectively in censorship actions despite numerous disagreements and jurisdictional conflicts. For example, France never accepted the papal indexes but still banned Protestant books and ideas.
Protestant censorship followed the same paths except that no supranational Protestant church existed to direct and coordinate censorship. Since Protestant religious leaders invested the state with substantial authority over the church, the state assumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protestant state had to decide which books to ban and how to censor. Protestant states banned the publication, importation, and ownership of Catholic works, and sometimes the works of other Protestants. They also condemned books considered immoral and critical of the government. Although Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Geneva had the most effective Protestant censorship in the sixteenth century.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches and states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and taught in universities. Prepublication censors sometimes dictated that scholars accept unwelcome changes in their works. Authors exercised some degree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Catholic and Protestant worlds lost university positions, or suffered worse, because of their religious views. Political censorship also intensified in the late sixteenth century as governments attempted to stem a flood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially in France.
State Censorship
Although censorship began as a result of the religious division of Europe, civil governments quickly took complete control of censorship of books and theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the 1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors existed. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to read manuscripts intended for publication and to grant the publisher the right to print the book, called a privilège. By the eighteenth century the number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200. The college exercised prepublication censorship and awarded exclusive publication rights to one publisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.
English censorship of printed works began when Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547) sought to protect the national church from other doctrines and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding monarchs used censorship to enforce different religious establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553) allowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled 1553-1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) passed numerous laws censoring the press and the theater to ensure that they respected her version of the English Church, did not publish Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy. In 1557 the crown created the Stationers' Company to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every book had to be licensed helped control the press. English monarchs continued a policy of state censorship over the next two centuries, although the purpose of censorship increasingly became that of shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Nevertheless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism produced considerable variation from regime to regime in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and blasphemous matter simply published without permission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-publication censorship of written materials. The practice of locating and destroying books and prosecuting publishers had always been difficult, and that also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.
Every other large and small political unit had similar censorship systems, sometimes including representatives of the local church. But the local nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and printers wishing to publish political or religious criticism only needed to go to the next state to publish their works. Then the international commercial network of the book trade, including book fairs at Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late seventeenth century created a new publication that was difficult to censor. Because newspapers were local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick and local. The censorship machinery of the sixteenth century was organized to censor learned works of religion, philosophy, and politics and could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broadsides and other ephemeral matter, which were printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the names of author and printer, and were quickly distributed.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, especially in the years from 1750 to 1789, significantly weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially religious censorship, partly because they wrote many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786), Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740-1780) and Joseph II (Holy Roman emperor, 1765-1790; king of Austria, 1780-1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762-1796), and King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759-1788), who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more religious and literary freedom of expression. However, when writers began to publish works criticizing absolutist government and demanding expanded political rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened censorship. But they did not, and could not, return censorship to its earlier state.
In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously weakened the privilège system, as censors permitted the publication of ideas that had previously been banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just beyond the borders of France published many works without privilèges, then sent them into France. The loosening of censorship permitted an avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the monarchy and the church, which helped bring on the French Revolution.
Internal communications
This Research Work is on Internal Communications. The Research is going to take a look at what Internal Communications is, some benefits of Internal Communication as well as features of Internal Communications. The research will also look at Managerial Communication Approaches, Case Study, Employee Engagement and some Influences of Internal Communications.
Internal communications
Internal communications, also known as employee relations, includes all communication within an organisation.
Internal communications may be oral or written, face to face or virtual, one-on-one or in a small group.
Effective internal communication - which can be said to be "downward, upward, and horizontal" - is a vital means of addressing organisational concerns. Good internal communication helps to establish formal roles and responsibilities for employees.
Definition
Communication is often defined as an exchange of information. True communication requires a two-way process (a dialogue, not a monologue). "Information" can be presented orally, through writing, face-to-face, virtually, one-on-one, or in small groups. Listening to employees (an integral part of two-way communication) enables management to identify strengths and weaknesses, which helps in the process of decision making, and fosters esprit du corps.
Personal conversations between other colleagues
Internal communication in practice
Internal communications departments have broken away from HR since the 80's and 90's and now report directly to senior management in most organisations. In some organisations where internal communication has not been established as a separate communications function; it may be coordinated by Human Resources, Marketing and PR departments.
Benefits of Internal Communication
Internal communications helps employees to understand the organisation's vision, values, and culture. It may involve staff members in issues that affect working life and keeps staff informed on important decisions taken by management. Furthermore, internal communication, when implemented effectively, can be crucial in a time of crisis, providing employees with not only a strategy to handle a crisis, but the facts surrounding such an event. As arguably some of the most invested individuals in an organisation, trusted and valued employees can prove to be excellent partners when addressing a crisis. By maintaining open lines of communication between management and employees, effective internal communications can enhance stronger relationships throughout all levels of the organisation and forge a sense of community.
Excellent internal communications cannot simply be implemented and left alone; the process must be ever-changing and adaptable for success. While more and more organisations begin to spend more time identifying special interest groups within their own walls, internal communications methods are becoming increasingly diverse to match the varying needs of each organisations' internal staff and stakeholders.
The way messages are presented can have a negative or positive impact upon the reader, regardless of the core content of the message. While this could be condemned as spin, organisations who strive to practice excellent public relations will avoid manipulative and ambiguous messages as they destroy trust in the organisation. The most effective way is to find a balance between being "his Master's voice" and representing employees' interests.
Features of good internal communications
Internal communication should be:
· transparent and timely (when details have been confirmed and approved, messages should be presented to employees before any external public);
· clear;
· concise;
· informative; and
· Independent.
Internal communications practitioners should adhere to certain values such as:
· openness;
· honesty; and
· Two-way communication.
An internal communications department can become a moderator of interaction between official organisational representatives and employees.
The internal communications department should be responsible for developing and maintaining a number of channels that allow effective communication to take place. These channels include:
· intranet website;
· a regular Town Hall (an informal session where employees can listen to and talk with the organizational representative such as a Managing Director);
· conference calls;
· internal newsletters;
· email;
· message boards;
· print materials; and
· virtual meetings (which can be housed and facilitated through online MMORPGs, like Second Life)
Managerial Communication Approaches
Clampitt (2005) lists three approaches managers use to communicate with their employees.
Arrow approach - Communications are carefully constructed and aimed at a target audience. It assumes the more accurate the message, the clearer the understanding of the recipient. Problems arise when it is taken for granted that information is mostly transmitted by words and that recipients are passive receptors.
Circuit approach - Communications is achieved with positive relationships and job satisfaction of employees through understanding and discussion. It assumes that communicating is grounded in mutual understanding. Problems arise because of the myopic view that understanding will lead to agreement and that this understanding should be the sole goal of communications.
Dance approach - Communications are achieved through an intricate combination of the practice, understanding, and intuition. It believes that the communication involves the coordination of meanings, the understanding of common rules, and the recognition of patterns between two or more people.
Employee Engagement
Good internal communications bring about employee engagement. Employee engagement is a concept that is generally viewed as managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work. In a book titled Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, author Tim Rutledge explains that truly engaged employees are attracted to, and inspired by, their work ("I want to do this"), committed ("I am dedicated to the success of what I am doing"), and fascinated ("I love what I am doing")
Studies have shown that Engaged employees care about the future of the company and are willing to invest the discretionary effort. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. (Robinson)
Emotional attachment
Only 29% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. These employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. People that are actively engaged help move the organization forward. 84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization's products, compared with only 31% of the disengaged. 72% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service, versus 27% of the disengaged. 68% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact costs in their job or unit, compared with just 19% of the disengaged. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. This is associated with people demonstrating willingness to recommend the organization to others and commit time and effort to help the organization succeed. It suggests that people are motivated by intrinsic factors (e.g. personal growth, working to a common purpose, being part of a larger process) rather than simply focusing on extrinsic factors (e.g., pay/reward)
Involvement
Eileen Appelbaum and her colleagues (2000) studied 15 steel mills, 17 apparel manufacturers, and 10 electronic instrument and imaging equipment producers. Their purpose was to compare traditional production systems with flexible high-performance production systems involving teams, training, and incentive pay systems. In all three industries, the plants utilizing high-involvement practices showed superior performance. In addition, workers in the high-involvement plants showed more positive attitudes, including trust, organizational commitment and intrinsic enjoyment of the work. The concept has gained popularity as various studies have demonstrated links with productivity. It is often linked to the notion of employee voice and empowerment.
Commitment
In 1999, The Gallup Organization published research that showed that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and less likely to leave their employer. The review stated that "engagement with employees within a firm has shown to motivate the employee to work beyond personal factors and work more for the success of the firm.
Employees with the highest level of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave the organization, which indicates that engagement is linked to organizational performance. For example, at the beverage company of MoisonCoors, it was found that engaged employees were five times less likely than non-engaged employees to have a safety incident and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident. In fact, the average cost of a safety incident for an engaged employee was $63, compared with an average of $392 for a non-engaged employee. Consequently, through strengthening employee engagement, the company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs in 2002. In addition, savings were found in sales performance teams through engagement. In 2005, for example, low-engagement teams were seen falling behind engaged teams, with a difference in performance-related costs of low- versus high-engagement teams totalling $2,104,823.3 (Lockwood).
CASE STUDY
Life insurance industry
Two studies of employees in the life insurance industry examined the impact of employee perceptions that they had the power to make decisions, sufficient knowledge and information to do the job effectively, and rewards for high performance. Both studies included large samples of employees (3,570 employees in 49 organizations and 4,828 employees in 92 organizations). In both studies, high-involvement management practices were positively associated with employee morale, employee retention, and firm financial performance. Watson Wyatt found that high-commitment organizations (one with loyal and dedicated employees) out-performed those with low commitment by 47% in the 2000 study and by 200% in the 2002 study.
Productivity
In a study of professional service firms, the Hay Group found that offices with engaged employees were up to 43% more productive.
The most striking finding is the almost 52% gaps in operating incomes between companies with highly engaged employees and companies whose employees have low-engagement scores. High-engagement companies improved 19.2% while low-engagement companies declined 32.7% in operating income during the study period. For example, New Century Financial Corporation, a U.S. specialty mortgage banking company, found that account executives in the wholesale division who were actively disengaged produced 28% less revenue than their colleagues who were engaged. Furthermore, those not engaged generated 23% less revenue than their engaged counterparts. Engaged employees also outperformed the not engaged and actively disengaged employees in other divisions.
Influences
· Employee perceptions of job importance. According to a 2006 study by Gerard Seijts and Dan Crim, "...an employee’s attitude toward the job's importance and the company had the greatest impact on loyalty and customer service then all other employee factors combined.
· Employee clarity of job expectations. "If expectations are not clear and basic materials and equipment not provided, negative emotions such as boredom or resentment may result, and the employee may then become focused on surviving more than thinking about how he can help the organization succeed.
· Career advancement/improvement opportunities. "Plant supervisors and managers indicated that many plant improvements were being made outside the suggestion system, where employees initiated changes in order to reap the bonuses generated by the subsequent cost savings.
· Regular feedback and dialogue with superiors. "Feedback is the key to giving employees a sense of where they’re going, but many organizations are remarkably bad at giving it. What I really wanted to hear was 'Thanks. You did a good job.' But all my boss did was hand me a check.
· Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates. "...if employees' relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss.
· Perceptions of the ethos and values of the organization. "'Inspiration and values' is the most important of the six drivers in our Engaged Performance model. Inspirational leadership is the ultimate perk. In its absence, is unlikely to engage employees.
· Effective Internal Employee Communications - which convey a clear description of "what's going on". "'If you accept that employees want to be involved in what they are doing then this trend is clear (from small businesses to large global organizations). The effect of poor internal communications is seen as its most destructive in global organizations which suffer from employee annexation - where the head office in one country is buoyant (since they are closest to the action, know what is going on, and are heavily engaged) but its annexes (who are furthest away from the action and know little about what is happening) are dis-engaged. In the worst case, employee annexation can be very destructive when the head office attributes the annex's low engagement to its poor performance... when its poor performance is really due to its poor communications.
Internal communications
Internal communications, also known as employee relations, includes all communication within an organisation.
Internal communications may be oral or written, face to face or virtual, one-on-one or in a small group.
Effective internal communication - which can be said to be "downward, upward, and horizontal" - is a vital means of addressing organisational concerns. Good internal communication helps to establish formal roles and responsibilities for employees.
Definition
Communication is often defined as an exchange of information. True communication requires a two-way process (a dialogue, not a monologue). "Information" can be presented orally, through writing, face-to-face, virtually, one-on-one, or in small groups. Listening to employees (an integral part of two-way communication) enables management to identify strengths and weaknesses, which helps in the process of decision making, and fosters esprit du corps.
Personal conversations between other colleagues
Internal communication in practice
Internal communications departments have broken away from HR since the 80's and 90's and now report directly to senior management in most organisations. In some organisations where internal communication has not been established as a separate communications function; it may be coordinated by Human Resources, Marketing and PR departments.
Benefits of Internal Communication
Internal communications helps employees to understand the organisation's vision, values, and culture. It may involve staff members in issues that affect working life and keeps staff informed on important decisions taken by management. Furthermore, internal communication, when implemented effectively, can be crucial in a time of crisis, providing employees with not only a strategy to handle a crisis, but the facts surrounding such an event. As arguably some of the most invested individuals in an organisation, trusted and valued employees can prove to be excellent partners when addressing a crisis. By maintaining open lines of communication between management and employees, effective internal communications can enhance stronger relationships throughout all levels of the organisation and forge a sense of community.
Excellent internal communications cannot simply be implemented and left alone; the process must be ever-changing and adaptable for success. While more and more organisations begin to spend more time identifying special interest groups within their own walls, internal communications methods are becoming increasingly diverse to match the varying needs of each organisations' internal staff and stakeholders.
The way messages are presented can have a negative or positive impact upon the reader, regardless of the core content of the message. While this could be condemned as spin, organisations who strive to practice excellent public relations will avoid manipulative and ambiguous messages as they destroy trust in the organisation. The most effective way is to find a balance between being "his Master's voice" and representing employees' interests.
Features of good internal communications
Internal communication should be:
· transparent and timely (when details have been confirmed and approved, messages should be presented to employees before any external public);
· clear;
· concise;
· informative; and
· Independent.
Internal communications practitioners should adhere to certain values such as:
· openness;
· honesty; and
· Two-way communication.
An internal communications department can become a moderator of interaction between official organisational representatives and employees.
The internal communications department should be responsible for developing and maintaining a number of channels that allow effective communication to take place. These channels include:
· intranet website;
· a regular Town Hall (an informal session where employees can listen to and talk with the organizational representative such as a Managing Director);
· conference calls;
· internal newsletters;
· email;
· message boards;
· print materials; and
· virtual meetings (which can be housed and facilitated through online MMORPGs, like Second Life)
Managerial Communication Approaches
Clampitt (2005) lists three approaches managers use to communicate with their employees.
Arrow approach - Communications are carefully constructed and aimed at a target audience. It assumes the more accurate the message, the clearer the understanding of the recipient. Problems arise when it is taken for granted that information is mostly transmitted by words and that recipients are passive receptors.
Circuit approach - Communications is achieved with positive relationships and job satisfaction of employees through understanding and discussion. It assumes that communicating is grounded in mutual understanding. Problems arise because of the myopic view that understanding will lead to agreement and that this understanding should be the sole goal of communications.
Dance approach - Communications are achieved through an intricate combination of the practice, understanding, and intuition. It believes that the communication involves the coordination of meanings, the understanding of common rules, and the recognition of patterns between two or more people.
Employee Engagement
Good internal communications bring about employee engagement. Employee engagement is a concept that is generally viewed as managing discretionary effort, that is, when employees have choices, they will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests. An engaged employee is a person who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work. In a book titled Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, author Tim Rutledge explains that truly engaged employees are attracted to, and inspired by, their work ("I want to do this"), committed ("I am dedicated to the success of what I am doing"), and fascinated ("I love what I am doing")
Studies have shown that Engaged employees care about the future of the company and are willing to invest the discretionary effort. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. (Robinson)
Emotional attachment
Only 29% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs. These employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. People that are actively engaged help move the organization forward. 84% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact the quality of their organization's products, compared with only 31% of the disengaged. 72% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively affect customer service, versus 27% of the disengaged. 68% of highly engaged employees believe they can positively impact costs in their job or unit, compared with just 19% of the disengaged. Engaged employees feel a strong emotional bond to the organization that employs them. This is associated with people demonstrating willingness to recommend the organization to others and commit time and effort to help the organization succeed. It suggests that people are motivated by intrinsic factors (e.g. personal growth, working to a common purpose, being part of a larger process) rather than simply focusing on extrinsic factors (e.g., pay/reward)
Involvement
Eileen Appelbaum and her colleagues (2000) studied 15 steel mills, 17 apparel manufacturers, and 10 electronic instrument and imaging equipment producers. Their purpose was to compare traditional production systems with flexible high-performance production systems involving teams, training, and incentive pay systems. In all three industries, the plants utilizing high-involvement practices showed superior performance. In addition, workers in the high-involvement plants showed more positive attitudes, including trust, organizational commitment and intrinsic enjoyment of the work. The concept has gained popularity as various studies have demonstrated links with productivity. It is often linked to the notion of employee voice and empowerment.
Commitment
In 1999, The Gallup Organization published research that showed that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and less likely to leave their employer. The review stated that "engagement with employees within a firm has shown to motivate the employee to work beyond personal factors and work more for the success of the firm.
Employees with the highest level of commitment perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave the organization, which indicates that engagement is linked to organizational performance. For example, at the beverage company of MoisonCoors, it was found that engaged employees were five times less likely than non-engaged employees to have a safety incident and seven times less likely to have a lost-time safety incident. In fact, the average cost of a safety incident for an engaged employee was $63, compared with an average of $392 for a non-engaged employee. Consequently, through strengthening employee engagement, the company saved $1,721,760 in safety costs in 2002. In addition, savings were found in sales performance teams through engagement. In 2005, for example, low-engagement teams were seen falling behind engaged teams, with a difference in performance-related costs of low- versus high-engagement teams totalling $2,104,823.3 (Lockwood).
CASE STUDY
Life insurance industry
Two studies of employees in the life insurance industry examined the impact of employee perceptions that they had the power to make decisions, sufficient knowledge and information to do the job effectively, and rewards for high performance. Both studies included large samples of employees (3,570 employees in 49 organizations and 4,828 employees in 92 organizations). In both studies, high-involvement management practices were positively associated with employee morale, employee retention, and firm financial performance. Watson Wyatt found that high-commitment organizations (one with loyal and dedicated employees) out-performed those with low commitment by 47% in the 2000 study and by 200% in the 2002 study.
Productivity
In a study of professional service firms, the Hay Group found that offices with engaged employees were up to 43% more productive.
The most striking finding is the almost 52% gaps in operating incomes between companies with highly engaged employees and companies whose employees have low-engagement scores. High-engagement companies improved 19.2% while low-engagement companies declined 32.7% in operating income during the study period. For example, New Century Financial Corporation, a U.S. specialty mortgage banking company, found that account executives in the wholesale division who were actively disengaged produced 28% less revenue than their colleagues who were engaged. Furthermore, those not engaged generated 23% less revenue than their engaged counterparts. Engaged employees also outperformed the not engaged and actively disengaged employees in other divisions.
Influences
· Employee perceptions of job importance. According to a 2006 study by Gerard Seijts and Dan Crim, "...an employee’s attitude toward the job's importance and the company had the greatest impact on loyalty and customer service then all other employee factors combined.
· Employee clarity of job expectations. "If expectations are not clear and basic materials and equipment not provided, negative emotions such as boredom or resentment may result, and the employee may then become focused on surviving more than thinking about how he can help the organization succeed.
· Career advancement/improvement opportunities. "Plant supervisors and managers indicated that many plant improvements were being made outside the suggestion system, where employees initiated changes in order to reap the bonuses generated by the subsequent cost savings.
· Regular feedback and dialogue with superiors. "Feedback is the key to giving employees a sense of where they’re going, but many organizations are remarkably bad at giving it. What I really wanted to hear was 'Thanks. You did a good job.' But all my boss did was hand me a check.
· Quality of working relationships with peers, superiors, and subordinates. "...if employees' relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss.
· Perceptions of the ethos and values of the organization. "'Inspiration and values' is the most important of the six drivers in our Engaged Performance model. Inspirational leadership is the ultimate perk. In its absence, is unlikely to engage employees.
· Effective Internal Employee Communications - which convey a clear description of "what's going on". "'If you accept that employees want to be involved in what they are doing then this trend is clear (from small businesses to large global organizations). The effect of poor internal communications is seen as its most destructive in global organizations which suffer from employee annexation - where the head office in one country is buoyant (since they are closest to the action, know what is going on, and are heavily engaged) but its annexes (who are furthest away from the action and know little about what is happening) are dis-engaged. In the worst case, employee annexation can be very destructive when the head office attributes the annex's low engagement to its poor performance... when its poor performance is really due to its poor communications.
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!
We were created by an all powerful, all mighty, all possible God who is perfect in all his ways. He created us in his own image as we all know. After molding man, God saw that the body he had made in his likeness could not move. So God breathed into man his spirit. This means each and every person on earth has the Spirit of the highest God in him. So why fret over an obstacle you face? Why be discouraged to try and acquire the job you desire? Why listen to what people say about not being able to achieve anything in life.
Brethren, God made you. In the book of Genesis we learn that the world was created with everything in it before God created man. Why? Take this scenario, a husbands finds out his wife is about to give birth. What does the husband do? He makes sure the wife relaxes, gives her everything she needs and will need, and even go to the extent of surprising her may be he would by a car for her. God did the same. He created the earth with everything in it just for YOU! (Genesis 1: 26).
After man was created, the devil, popularly known as Lucifer or Satan tempted man and man fell. After the fall of man, it became very hard for man to please God but the Bible tells us that God loves this world that included you and me so much that he sent his only begotten son to come and die for our sins. If you had a son and loved him so much would you give him up for a sacrifice? God’s love is the only thing that binds us to him. Though we have sinned against Him, he sent his son to die for us. So why still grieve over something that has already been taken away. Why bother so much about the sin you committed just the other night? Why give in to troubles when the Bible makes us understand in Romans 8:1, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who have been crucified with Christ who walk not after the flesh but the Spirit. Again 1Corinthians 6:20 says, for we have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your Spirit, which are God’s. Also, 1Peter 1:18-19 says, forasmuch as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver or gold, from your vain conversation from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ. Beloved brethren wipe your tears and wear a smile forever before it is too late. For there are people in hell who never knew their sins were bought till they got to hell to realize it. Ah! Had I known on earth I would have lived right. This is what you may end up saying. The time is near. This is a time for all Christians including the ones who backslid to get to your feet and stand for God.
Lastly, 1Peter 2:9 says for we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation and a peculiar people who have been brought out of darkness into the marvelous light to show forth praises to Him who brought us out of darkness. Wherever you go, whatever you do or say let people know that yes! You are truly a son or daughter of God. Don’t fret! If people listen to worldly music and ask of your opinion of a certain song, be bold and say my friend what you are listening to isn’t right. It does not please God! Don’t listen to it! And friend as the word makes me understand that we should set our affections to things above for that is whence the pleasures come from. NO! Friend NO! Remember we walk not after the flesh (world) but after the Spirit through which we gain SALVATION and a righteous living.
Friend, if you are a child of God that means you are HOT for God and not cold. Revelation 3:16 says, so then because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I the Lord will spit you out of my mouth! Friend please change your ways. If don’t believe me just taste and you shall see that the LORD is good! (Psalm 34:8)
Brethren, God made you. In the book of Genesis we learn that the world was created with everything in it before God created man. Why? Take this scenario, a husbands finds out his wife is about to give birth. What does the husband do? He makes sure the wife relaxes, gives her everything she needs and will need, and even go to the extent of surprising her may be he would by a car for her. God did the same. He created the earth with everything in it just for YOU! (Genesis 1: 26).
After man was created, the devil, popularly known as Lucifer or Satan tempted man and man fell. After the fall of man, it became very hard for man to please God but the Bible tells us that God loves this world that included you and me so much that he sent his only begotten son to come and die for our sins. If you had a son and loved him so much would you give him up for a sacrifice? God’s love is the only thing that binds us to him. Though we have sinned against Him, he sent his son to die for us. So why still grieve over something that has already been taken away. Why bother so much about the sin you committed just the other night? Why give in to troubles when the Bible makes us understand in Romans 8:1, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who have been crucified with Christ who walk not after the flesh but the Spirit. Again 1Corinthians 6:20 says, for we have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your Spirit, which are God’s. Also, 1Peter 1:18-19 says, forasmuch as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver or gold, from your vain conversation from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ. Beloved brethren wipe your tears and wear a smile forever before it is too late. For there are people in hell who never knew their sins were bought till they got to hell to realize it. Ah! Had I known on earth I would have lived right. This is what you may end up saying. The time is near. This is a time for all Christians including the ones who backslid to get to your feet and stand for God.
Lastly, 1Peter 2:9 says for we are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation and a peculiar people who have been brought out of darkness into the marvelous light to show forth praises to Him who brought us out of darkness. Wherever you go, whatever you do or say let people know that yes! You are truly a son or daughter of God. Don’t fret! If people listen to worldly music and ask of your opinion of a certain song, be bold and say my friend what you are listening to isn’t right. It does not please God! Don’t listen to it! And friend as the word makes me understand that we should set our affections to things above for that is whence the pleasures come from. NO! Friend NO! Remember we walk not after the flesh (world) but after the Spirit through which we gain SALVATION and a righteous living.
Friend, if you are a child of God that means you are HOT for God and not cold. Revelation 3:16 says, so then because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I the Lord will spit you out of my mouth! Friend please change your ways. If don’t believe me just taste and you shall see that the LORD is good! (Psalm 34:8)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Widows in Ghana are still going through inhuman and degrading treatments making their future bleak especially for young widows.
A Ghanaian woman who looses her husband to death is expected to go through certain rites and rituals to prove her innocence or otherwise of the husbands death. These rites are what we call the widowhood rites.
These rites and rituals are often inhuman in nature and very degrading and trample upon the fundamental human rights that every human being is entitled to enjoy. Article 12 of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution talks about the basic fundamental human rights, and therefore no body should deprive a fellow human being from enjoying his or her rights.
Although, there are many legislations and human rights conventions both local and international such as the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment(CAT) and the Convention of the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women(CEDAW) which were adopted by a United Nations resolutions 39/46 10 December 1984 and 34/180,18 December 1979 and which were entered into force on 26 June 1987 and 3 September 1981 respectively, are all but a few of the conventions yet the situation facing widows in Ghana is grave and needs immediate attention.
When a Ghanaian woman looses her husband or is widowed, especially in the northern part of Ghana, she looses the rights and security she gained and enjoyed in her marriage. For example, life becomes very difficult and unbearable for women in Upper East Region, immediately after they are widowed, they are subjected to inhuman and degrading rituals such as being stripped of their clothes and forced to wear leaves over their private parts. These women are forced to remain in this state until the funeral is over, during which the widows are also forced to do other things to determine their state, thus whether they have been faithful or not. These other rituals include sitting on a mat all night wearing only leaves, and surrounded by black ants. If they are bitten by the ants, they are deemed to have been unfaithful. Furthermore, the widows are made to stand while two other women throw water at them. One of the women will throw boiling water and the other cold, and if the widow is scalded, then it is also an indication that the widow had been unfaithful. It is unbelievable to hear of such practices because one wonders how an individual can sit in the midst of ants and expects the ant not to bite her. It is equally astonishing to expect ones body not to burn when hot water is thrown at her.
Even though these practices contravene section 278A of the criminal code of 1960 which state: ‘Whoever compels a bereaved spouse or a relative of such spouse to undergo any custom or practice that is immoral or grossly indecent in nature shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.’ Yet perpetrators of such acts always go unpunished.
Perpetrators of these acts argue that it is their custom, tradition and culture and must therefore obey them to avert the wrath of the gods and its accompanying catastrophic consequences on their families and descendants yet unborn. But what these people are failing to acknowledge is that culture is dynamic and keeps changing, therefore, the way we used to do things some decades ago is not the same today. Hence the need to vary and embrace modernity in our cultural practices.
Additionally, Article 26 of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution also prohibits the performance of customary practices that dehumanise or are injurious to the mental and physical well-being of humans. Of great concern, especially in the context of communicable diseases, are the harmful, degrading and life-threatening traditional practices as part of burial rites.
It is also an undeniable fact that, widows are forced to drink the water that their husbands’ corpses have been washed in, in some communities in Ghana. Yet Ghana is one of the few countries in Africa that has enacted specific legislations in this area, in the 1989 Amendment to the Ghana Criminal Code, yet there is no record of any prosecutions and the amendment is not well known or understood. What really beats my imagination is that the men are never subjected to these same or similar degrading rituals when they become widowers. Is it because men are supernatural human beings? The puzzle behind this mystery is yet to be unraveled.
Quite recently, there was a report in the Women’s World Page of the Daily Graphic dated April 5, 2008, which has caused much concern to human rights organizations. The report was on the three elderly widows being locked up for nine years in the Kintampo North District of the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana. These widows were all married to the late Nana Kwaku Dimpo II, chief of New Longolo in Kintampo North.
According to their custom, the widows had to be kept indoors or locked up until the final funeral rites of their late husband were performed, which could only occur once a new chief was enstooled. However, there is a dispute among the family members of the late chief, and a new one has not been installed. That means… Hmmm your guess is as good as mine.
These poor widows, aged 70, 80 and 90 respectively are kept under poor conditions, and are not allowed to leave their house for any reason. Their right to freedom of movement is trampled upon with impunity as they must be in their small, single room by 6pm and in which they share a mat, yet are not allowed to communicate.
However mother luck has decided to smile on these three unfortunate widows as they have once again gained their freedom after nine years of imprisonment without committing any offence.
Widowhood rites make widows vulnerable to serious sexual abuse, as was revealed in Ghana’s Country Report in the document: Empowering Widows in Development: 10 Country Report. A 23 year-old widow from the Volta Region of Ghana recalls: ‘I was raped by two or three men who were sent by my brother-in-law to get me to leave the house. My husband’s brother had already taken my son, but my little daughter was only 4 years old and she witnessed this terrible thing that happened to me. No one wanted to help me. Later, when I lay bleeding on the floor, my brother-in-law came and shouted through the door that it would be worse for me if I reported what had happened.’
Another widow also narrated how her daughters aged 12 and 13, were raped in turns by two brothers. ‘How will they be married now?’ she asked. Child marriage still occurs in rural Ghana, and when young wives are widowed, they face bleak future, as widows are seen as bad luck, and so they may have difficulty finding a new husband.
The luck of support for widows generally also leads to an increase in child marriages, since some destitute widows find themselves finding husbands for their young girls to enable them acquire bride price of cattle.
Despite these disturbing situations and the seemingly hopeless future for widows in Ghana, there is however some hope as Widows Rights International (WRI), a non-governmental organization working to improve the situation for widows in the northern part of Ghana, has recently reported two successful outcomes to its workshops.
The first is an agreement reached by the chief of Kongo and his elders not to strip widows naked during funerals and end the practice of making widows drink any concoctions. This was the result of a workshop held at Kongo, a village close to Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana. They also agreed that after the death of the husband, the widow and her children should use the husband’s property and when a widow’s daughter gets married, a portion of the bride wealth or the cows should be given to her mother.
The second positive result concerns a widow name BA, who was her husband’s second wife and a mother of three. Three years ago her husband died after a short illness. During his lifetime, BA’s husband built six rooms for himself and his two wives. Life became very difficult for BA after the demise of her husband and subsequently moved to town to look for a job to take care of her children.
BA’s life was given a face lift as the Widows and Orphans Ministry trained her in baking bread. One day she decided to visit her in-laws and clean her rooms. While she was sweeping, her husband’s brother came in and asked why she had come to the house. He beat her mercilessly that she had to go to the hospital. She later reported the incident to the ministry and her husband’s brother was arrested and imprisoned. Two months later he was given the option of paying a GH¢ 50 fine or spending a further six months in jail. This has served as a deterrent to lot of in-laws who are in the same practice.
Also worth mentioning is the ban on widowhood rites that human rights activists condemn as dehumanizing by the Paramount Chief of Bongo Traditional Area in the Upper East Region, Naba Baba Salifu Aleemeyaarum. These practices include forcing widows to strip naked in public during the funeral rites. Widows are encouraged to report such practices to the appropriate quarters for necessary actions. The government is also encouraged to make the laws bite since such practices are criminal and should be handled with the contempt that it deserves.
Although the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution bans discrimination on the grounds of sex, widows are still discriminated against in Ghana. There is the need for better protection for women immediately after bereavement, to ensure that they are not subjected to degrading practices that violate their human rights, and also enable them to benefit from their late husband’s property to cater for their children.
Widowhood rites are definitely gendered, and it is as if only women should grieve when their partners die. Why do we as a people consistently fail to implement the laws we pass to protect the vulnerable in our society? Hmmm… Some body out there should help me answer this all important question.
A Ghanaian woman who looses her husband to death is expected to go through certain rites and rituals to prove her innocence or otherwise of the husbands death. These rites are what we call the widowhood rites.
These rites and rituals are often inhuman in nature and very degrading and trample upon the fundamental human rights that every human being is entitled to enjoy. Article 12 of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution talks about the basic fundamental human rights, and therefore no body should deprive a fellow human being from enjoying his or her rights.
Although, there are many legislations and human rights conventions both local and international such as the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment(CAT) and the Convention of the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women(CEDAW) which were adopted by a United Nations resolutions 39/46 10 December 1984 and 34/180,18 December 1979 and which were entered into force on 26 June 1987 and 3 September 1981 respectively, are all but a few of the conventions yet the situation facing widows in Ghana is grave and needs immediate attention.
When a Ghanaian woman looses her husband or is widowed, especially in the northern part of Ghana, she looses the rights and security she gained and enjoyed in her marriage. For example, life becomes very difficult and unbearable for women in Upper East Region, immediately after they are widowed, they are subjected to inhuman and degrading rituals such as being stripped of their clothes and forced to wear leaves over their private parts. These women are forced to remain in this state until the funeral is over, during which the widows are also forced to do other things to determine their state, thus whether they have been faithful or not. These other rituals include sitting on a mat all night wearing only leaves, and surrounded by black ants. If they are bitten by the ants, they are deemed to have been unfaithful. Furthermore, the widows are made to stand while two other women throw water at them. One of the women will throw boiling water and the other cold, and if the widow is scalded, then it is also an indication that the widow had been unfaithful. It is unbelievable to hear of such practices because one wonders how an individual can sit in the midst of ants and expects the ant not to bite her. It is equally astonishing to expect ones body not to burn when hot water is thrown at her.
Even though these practices contravene section 278A of the criminal code of 1960 which state: ‘Whoever compels a bereaved spouse or a relative of such spouse to undergo any custom or practice that is immoral or grossly indecent in nature shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.’ Yet perpetrators of such acts always go unpunished.
Perpetrators of these acts argue that it is their custom, tradition and culture and must therefore obey them to avert the wrath of the gods and its accompanying catastrophic consequences on their families and descendants yet unborn. But what these people are failing to acknowledge is that culture is dynamic and keeps changing, therefore, the way we used to do things some decades ago is not the same today. Hence the need to vary and embrace modernity in our cultural practices.
Additionally, Article 26 of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution also prohibits the performance of customary practices that dehumanise or are injurious to the mental and physical well-being of humans. Of great concern, especially in the context of communicable diseases, are the harmful, degrading and life-threatening traditional practices as part of burial rites.
It is also an undeniable fact that, widows are forced to drink the water that their husbands’ corpses have been washed in, in some communities in Ghana. Yet Ghana is one of the few countries in Africa that has enacted specific legislations in this area, in the 1989 Amendment to the Ghana Criminal Code, yet there is no record of any prosecutions and the amendment is not well known or understood. What really beats my imagination is that the men are never subjected to these same or similar degrading rituals when they become widowers. Is it because men are supernatural human beings? The puzzle behind this mystery is yet to be unraveled.
Quite recently, there was a report in the Women’s World Page of the Daily Graphic dated April 5, 2008, which has caused much concern to human rights organizations. The report was on the three elderly widows being locked up for nine years in the Kintampo North District of the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana. These widows were all married to the late Nana Kwaku Dimpo II, chief of New Longolo in Kintampo North.
According to their custom, the widows had to be kept indoors or locked up until the final funeral rites of their late husband were performed, which could only occur once a new chief was enstooled. However, there is a dispute among the family members of the late chief, and a new one has not been installed. That means… Hmmm your guess is as good as mine.
These poor widows, aged 70, 80 and 90 respectively are kept under poor conditions, and are not allowed to leave their house for any reason. Their right to freedom of movement is trampled upon with impunity as they must be in their small, single room by 6pm and in which they share a mat, yet are not allowed to communicate.
However mother luck has decided to smile on these three unfortunate widows as they have once again gained their freedom after nine years of imprisonment without committing any offence.
Widowhood rites make widows vulnerable to serious sexual abuse, as was revealed in Ghana’s Country Report in the document: Empowering Widows in Development: 10 Country Report. A 23 year-old widow from the Volta Region of Ghana recalls: ‘I was raped by two or three men who were sent by my brother-in-law to get me to leave the house. My husband’s brother had already taken my son, but my little daughter was only 4 years old and she witnessed this terrible thing that happened to me. No one wanted to help me. Later, when I lay bleeding on the floor, my brother-in-law came and shouted through the door that it would be worse for me if I reported what had happened.’
Another widow also narrated how her daughters aged 12 and 13, were raped in turns by two brothers. ‘How will they be married now?’ she asked. Child marriage still occurs in rural Ghana, and when young wives are widowed, they face bleak future, as widows are seen as bad luck, and so they may have difficulty finding a new husband.
The luck of support for widows generally also leads to an increase in child marriages, since some destitute widows find themselves finding husbands for their young girls to enable them acquire bride price of cattle.
Despite these disturbing situations and the seemingly hopeless future for widows in Ghana, there is however some hope as Widows Rights International (WRI), a non-governmental organization working to improve the situation for widows in the northern part of Ghana, has recently reported two successful outcomes to its workshops.
The first is an agreement reached by the chief of Kongo and his elders not to strip widows naked during funerals and end the practice of making widows drink any concoctions. This was the result of a workshop held at Kongo, a village close to Bolgatanga in the Upper East Region of Ghana. They also agreed that after the death of the husband, the widow and her children should use the husband’s property and when a widow’s daughter gets married, a portion of the bride wealth or the cows should be given to her mother.
The second positive result concerns a widow name BA, who was her husband’s second wife and a mother of three. Three years ago her husband died after a short illness. During his lifetime, BA’s husband built six rooms for himself and his two wives. Life became very difficult for BA after the demise of her husband and subsequently moved to town to look for a job to take care of her children.
BA’s life was given a face lift as the Widows and Orphans Ministry trained her in baking bread. One day she decided to visit her in-laws and clean her rooms. While she was sweeping, her husband’s brother came in and asked why she had come to the house. He beat her mercilessly that she had to go to the hospital. She later reported the incident to the ministry and her husband’s brother was arrested and imprisoned. Two months later he was given the option of paying a GH¢ 50 fine or spending a further six months in jail. This has served as a deterrent to lot of in-laws who are in the same practice.
Also worth mentioning is the ban on widowhood rites that human rights activists condemn as dehumanizing by the Paramount Chief of Bongo Traditional Area in the Upper East Region, Naba Baba Salifu Aleemeyaarum. These practices include forcing widows to strip naked in public during the funeral rites. Widows are encouraged to report such practices to the appropriate quarters for necessary actions. The government is also encouraged to make the laws bite since such practices are criminal and should be handled with the contempt that it deserves.
Although the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution bans discrimination on the grounds of sex, widows are still discriminated against in Ghana. There is the need for better protection for women immediately after bereavement, to ensure that they are not subjected to degrading practices that violate their human rights, and also enable them to benefit from their late husband’s property to cater for their children.
Widowhood rites are definitely gendered, and it is as if only women should grieve when their partners die. Why do we as a people consistently fail to implement the laws we pass to protect the vulnerable in our society? Hmmm… Some body out there should help me answer this all important question.
THE CHALLENGES OF FEMALE AND JUVINILE PRISONERS IN GHANA. ACCRA, APRIL 25.
The deplorable state of the country’s prisons and detention centers are said to be affecting the quality of life of inmates, especially women and juveniles. Consequently, women are said to be using cement paper as “protective” pads during their menstrual periods.
This disclosure was made by Mr. Mohammed Kpakpo Addo, the research officer of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in Accra. Mr. Addo was reacting to a February 2008 “Ghanaian Times” publication about the inhuman conditions under which prisoners live in Ghana
.
He argued that, major challenges facing female and juvenile prisoners mostly centre on poor sanitation, poor ventilation, feeding and inadequate water supply. These conditions have had inmates to live undignified lives which sometimes affect their health and general well-being.
Explaining why CHRAJ cannot intervene on behalf of the inmates, Mr. Addo indicated that the commission is only a statutory body established by law to investigate cases and make appropriate recommendations to Parliament for the necessary action to be taken.
In line with its mandate, CHRAJ has been conducting annual mandatory inspection of selected detention centers country wide, and makes annual reports to Parliament. It is now the duty of the legislators to act on the commission’s recommendations.
Commenting on examples of recommendations made by the commission so far, Mr. Addo emphasized the need to introduce community service as a punishment for lesser crimes. He also recommended that there was the need to streamline the judicial system so that remand cases would not be dragged for years.
In reaction to the story, a source at the National Headquarters of the Ghana Prison Service confirmed that the plight of female and juvenile inmates in the country’s prisons worsening by the day. This, the source said, is due to the inadequate financial and logistic support given to the service to cater for the needs of prisoners.
The source indicated that, till date, prisoners are fed on a daily wage of forty pesewas per head, an amount which is seem to be woefully inadequate considering the current economic condition of the country. Hence the inability of the prison authorities to provide such basic necessities as protective pads for female inmates.
Commenting on the plight of juvenile, the source indicated that, the juvenile correction centers are under the care of the Department of Social Welfare.
However, the centers located at Accra, Agona Swedru and Pong Tamale lack the proper equipment and personnel to properly train and correct juveniles serving sentences in these
Centers, as required by the Juvenile Justice Act .The effect is that, most of these juveniles leave the centers hardened and mostly find their way back into crime.
Commenting on the situation of pregnant inmates at the Nsawam Prison, the source indicates that, a pregnancy test is always conducted on every female convict before she starts her sentence. Before pregnant female convicts do not get a different kind of treatment from the other female inmates, though was necessary but the service lacks the resources to implement this requirement.
The source then refuted allegations that some male prison guards impregnate female convicts saying it was a “wild allegation” which had no bases. The source also debunked claims that juveniles are sometimes mixed with adult prisoners but acknowledged that the act could be taking place in police cells since most stations do not have separate cells for juveniles and adult inmates.
In a related development, the coordinator of the Commonwealth Human Right Initiative (CHRI).Nana Oye Lithour has indicated that, the government, through the Ghana Prisons Service, has to put measures in place to ensure a proper reproductive healthcare for the country’s female prisoners.
She made the recommendation in an exclusive interview with the group in her office in Accra. She indicated that, by nature, women have a complex body stature as compared with their male counter parts. Therefore, women do not have to be given the same treatment as men in prison.
She explained further that, women are susceptible to various sicknesses such as breast cancer, menstrual disorders as well as vaginal infections, when exposed to inhuman living conditions.
The gender rights advocate therefore recommended the facilities within the female prison at Nsawam should be improved with emphasis on the primary healthcare of inmates. Regular medical check-ups should be conducted for inmates in order to identify infectious diseases before they become epidemics within the facility.
Adding to this, she explained that babies unit at the Nsawam Prison lacked most of the basic facilities, equipments and professional personnel capable of taking care of the babies. She said the Prisoners were only supplied with Paracetamol in case they were ill.
She also said further that, the female prison has come to be associated with stigmatization. This she explain to mean that where as male prisoners regularly receives visitors this was, however lacking in the female prisons. She said relatives of the female prisoners hardly make efforts to visit them, compelling prison guards to name the children born in the prisons in absence of their legitimate fathers.
That not withstanding she said efforts by the Prison Services and the Ministry of Interior to separate the babies from their mothers, was a gross violation of the right of the Children unless it was being done in the best interest of the child. Supporting her position and on this, she said in consonance with World Health Organizations recommendation, a baby should be fed exclusively on the mothers breast for six months from birth and should continue to receive breast milk as part of their diet for two years and beyond. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Breast Feeding Promotion Regulation, 2000(L1 1667) also emphasized the benefits and superiority of breast-feeding. Denying babies access to their mothers, she said is a criminal offence.
She stressed further that, non-compliance with the criminal procedure code was the genesis of all the issues that had been pointed to. She noted that, women who tested positive prior to conviction ought to have been given suspended sentence or a non-custodial sentence. But these provisions had for a long time never been adhered to.
She therefore urged government and civil societal organizations to come to the aid of in mates to help improve upon their lots. Apart from this, she said her outfit was doing everything possible to ensure that human rights related issues bothering on the shoulders of female inmates and juveniles were upheld.
This disclosure was made by Mr. Mohammed Kpakpo Addo, the research officer of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in Accra. Mr. Addo was reacting to a February 2008 “Ghanaian Times” publication about the inhuman conditions under which prisoners live in Ghana
.
He argued that, major challenges facing female and juvenile prisoners mostly centre on poor sanitation, poor ventilation, feeding and inadequate water supply. These conditions have had inmates to live undignified lives which sometimes affect their health and general well-being.
Explaining why CHRAJ cannot intervene on behalf of the inmates, Mr. Addo indicated that the commission is only a statutory body established by law to investigate cases and make appropriate recommendations to Parliament for the necessary action to be taken.
In line with its mandate, CHRAJ has been conducting annual mandatory inspection of selected detention centers country wide, and makes annual reports to Parliament. It is now the duty of the legislators to act on the commission’s recommendations.
Commenting on examples of recommendations made by the commission so far, Mr. Addo emphasized the need to introduce community service as a punishment for lesser crimes. He also recommended that there was the need to streamline the judicial system so that remand cases would not be dragged for years.
In reaction to the story, a source at the National Headquarters of the Ghana Prison Service confirmed that the plight of female and juvenile inmates in the country’s prisons worsening by the day. This, the source said, is due to the inadequate financial and logistic support given to the service to cater for the needs of prisoners.
The source indicated that, till date, prisoners are fed on a daily wage of forty pesewas per head, an amount which is seem to be woefully inadequate considering the current economic condition of the country. Hence the inability of the prison authorities to provide such basic necessities as protective pads for female inmates.
Commenting on the plight of juvenile, the source indicated that, the juvenile correction centers are under the care of the Department of Social Welfare.
However, the centers located at Accra, Agona Swedru and Pong Tamale lack the proper equipment and personnel to properly train and correct juveniles serving sentences in these
Centers, as required by the Juvenile Justice Act .The effect is that, most of these juveniles leave the centers hardened and mostly find their way back into crime.
Commenting on the situation of pregnant inmates at the Nsawam Prison, the source indicates that, a pregnancy test is always conducted on every female convict before she starts her sentence. Before pregnant female convicts do not get a different kind of treatment from the other female inmates, though was necessary but the service lacks the resources to implement this requirement.
The source then refuted allegations that some male prison guards impregnate female convicts saying it was a “wild allegation” which had no bases. The source also debunked claims that juveniles are sometimes mixed with adult prisoners but acknowledged that the act could be taking place in police cells since most stations do not have separate cells for juveniles and adult inmates.
In a related development, the coordinator of the Commonwealth Human Right Initiative (CHRI).Nana Oye Lithour has indicated that, the government, through the Ghana Prisons Service, has to put measures in place to ensure a proper reproductive healthcare for the country’s female prisoners.
She made the recommendation in an exclusive interview with the group in her office in Accra. She indicated that, by nature, women have a complex body stature as compared with their male counter parts. Therefore, women do not have to be given the same treatment as men in prison.
She explained further that, women are susceptible to various sicknesses such as breast cancer, menstrual disorders as well as vaginal infections, when exposed to inhuman living conditions.
The gender rights advocate therefore recommended the facilities within the female prison at Nsawam should be improved with emphasis on the primary healthcare of inmates. Regular medical check-ups should be conducted for inmates in order to identify infectious diseases before they become epidemics within the facility.
Adding to this, she explained that babies unit at the Nsawam Prison lacked most of the basic facilities, equipments and professional personnel capable of taking care of the babies. She said the Prisoners were only supplied with Paracetamol in case they were ill.
She also said further that, the female prison has come to be associated with stigmatization. This she explain to mean that where as male prisoners regularly receives visitors this was, however lacking in the female prisons. She said relatives of the female prisoners hardly make efforts to visit them, compelling prison guards to name the children born in the prisons in absence of their legitimate fathers.
That not withstanding she said efforts by the Prison Services and the Ministry of Interior to separate the babies from their mothers, was a gross violation of the right of the Children unless it was being done in the best interest of the child. Supporting her position and on this, she said in consonance with World Health Organizations recommendation, a baby should be fed exclusively on the mothers breast for six months from birth and should continue to receive breast milk as part of their diet for two years and beyond. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Breast Feeding Promotion Regulation, 2000(L1 1667) also emphasized the benefits and superiority of breast-feeding. Denying babies access to their mothers, she said is a criminal offence.
She stressed further that, non-compliance with the criminal procedure code was the genesis of all the issues that had been pointed to. She noted that, women who tested positive prior to conviction ought to have been given suspended sentence or a non-custodial sentence. But these provisions had for a long time never been adhered to.
She therefore urged government and civil societal organizations to come to the aid of in mates to help improve upon their lots. Apart from this, she said her outfit was doing everything possible to ensure that human rights related issues bothering on the shoulders of female inmates and juveniles were upheld.
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