Posts tagged violence

What does your neighborhood beauty salon make possible? What new forms of culture are created in response?

re: community, crime, horizons of the possible, neighborhoods, scope, violence, women

Nate:

The police have tried doing outreach to victims by, among other things, setting up domestic violence education tables at community events, only to find that no one wants to be seen near them. But the atmosphere is different in the safety of a beauty salon.

“The salon may be one of the few places women might be without their abuser around,” said Laurie Magid, a former state prosecutor who is acting United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “This program really addresses a need. You don’t have a case unless you have a crime reported in the first place and that is the difficult area of domestic violence.”

While Cut it Out trains stylists offsite, the Washington Heights workshops, conducted in Spanish, take place inside beauty parlors during the hours that clients are served, which not only makes it easier for people to participate, but also enhances the comfort factor.

“The salon is a place where everyone already feels at home,” said Sharon Kagawa of the Administration for Children’s Services, the agency that recruits salons for the program. “So they can be more honest.”

A story that ran a couple of weeks ago, nearer the high-point of Zimbabwe's government-sponsored pre- and post-presidential-runoff violence, one that still stops me short with its eerie echoing to the concept that culture-making (and -breaking) is done less by individuals than by small groups of committed people. I'm still a little baffled as to why the Post's report wasn't picked up by other outlets—is it just that it doesn't fit into the easy, dominant story-arc for describing Zimbabwe's woes (roughly, "evil strongman issues 500-billion dollar bill")?

re: 3 12 120, africa, community, horizons of the possible, journalism, power, violence

Nate:

President Robert Mugabe summoned his top security officials to a government training center near his rural home in central Zimbabwe on the afternoon of March 30. In a voice barely audible at first, he informed the leaders of the state security apparatus that had enforced his rule for 28 years that he had lost the presidential vote held the previous day.

Then Mugabe told the gathering he planned to give up power in a televised speech to the nation the next day, according to the written notes of one participant that were corroborated by two other people with direct knowledge of the meeting.

But Zimbabwe’s military chief, Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, responded that the choice was not Mugabe’s alone to make. According to two firsthand accounts of the meeting, Chiwenga told Mugabe his military would take control of the country to keep him in office or the president could contest a runoff election, directed in the field by senior army officers supervising a military-style campaign against the opposition.