Oprah magazine: "Women as capable of torture as men"

Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2009-11-08 18:25

Occasionally, Hell freezes over. Looks to me like that just happened. Article here. Excerpt:

'The classic cruelty experiment was conducted at Yale in the early '60s by psychology professor Stanley Milgram, PhD. Each subject was assigned the role of teacher and asked to test a student, who sat on the opposite side of a thin wall. Whenever the student answered a question incorrectly, the subjects were instructed by a man in a lab coat to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks (in reality, the student was an actor who felt nothing). As the severity of the "shocks" increased, the student screamed and begged to be released, cried that he was in excessive pain, even that his heart was bothering him, and ultimately stopped responding. Still, 65 percent of the subjects continued to shock him to the maximum voltage.

Milgram performed 18 versions of the experiment on men. Surprisingly, the one time he used female subjects, they shocked at the same rate. But he never followed up. Fast-forward to the lab of Santa Clara University psychology professor Jerry Burger, PhD, who replicated Milgram's study (adjusting for ethical concerns) and published his findings this year. Burger's subjects—70 adults—included both men and women. He got nearly the same results as Milgram, and there was no difference between the sexes.
...

Of course it's one thing to be ordered to shock somebody, another to be the person giving the order. But even here women are perfectly capable, according to Darius Rejali, PhD, a Reed College political science professor who has studied torture for nearly 30 years. The reason women haven't done more tormenting throughout history, he maintains, is simply that they've been denied opportunities. "It's rare that women get to do the torturing," as he puts it. "Those jobs have mostly been taken by men." (Although it is not technically torture, women also don't seem to have a problem forcing others into sexual slavery. A recent United Nations report showed that more than 60 percent of those convicted of human trafficking in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are females.)'

May I suggest you send the link to this article to everyone you know.

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Comments

For a moment I thought I was in an alternate universe. In fact I imagined perhaps I had stumbled across Dr. Who's police call-box TARDIS and cluelessly went inside, then was spirited off via BBC special effects technicians to an alternate universe where an article like this would actually appear in "Oprah" magazine. At any moment, I surmised, I might be taken back to this universe at which time Dr. Who would use some kind of memory-erasing device captured from some evil space aliens he had outwitted in a prior episode and then returned to this universe, totally oblivious to what I had just seen.

But no, it continues. So aside from that possible scenario all I can think is that indeed, Hell has frozen over, solid ice from one side to the other, without so much as hint of moisture in the air.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2009-11-08 22:59

Admittedly I haven't read the article yet, but I remember there was a study done, I think in the 70's, where they did the same test with essentially the same results. But in this case, the people giving the shocks were psychology students at university. Remember, these are the people who go on to be psychotherapists, social workers, etc. (It was in psychlogy class in 1990 that I learned about the study - it was in the text, there was even a photo.)

-ax

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Submitted by axolotl on Sun, 2009-11-08 23:45

Take your pick:

1) The female torturers were under duress due to harrassment from the (male) study leader.
2) The study had a patriarchal structure.
3) The female torturers were really men with wigs on.

etc........

-ax

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Submitted by axolotl on Sun, 2009-11-08 23:49

No doubt this will be used to justify more programs and services for women who "torture." These women must be helped, or - - - gasp, they could wind up in some horrible place like prison, where men now make up 93% of that population.

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Submitted by MR on Mon, 2009-11-09 22:12