Responses

Thanks Elena,

– You do a nice job of recognizing how individual dignity is profoundly violated by rape, and also by other forms of physical and sexual abuse, from physical to psychological, to verbal. And in your reference to poverty as a socio-economic reality for a segment of society you recognize the condition of poverty as also an assault on human dignity, and this is not so much a situation of individual injustice as a case of social and economic injustice. Clearly there would be no simpe line between the violation of individual dignity and the more general observation that whole segments of society suffer from the socio-economic indignities of poverty, and both present widesperead social problems that need to be addressed. The rates of violence against women are especially troubling globally, but also here in the United States – and that would certainly constitute a global issue well worth studying in a class like this. Perhaps I should revise this Unit on human rights and social justice to focus on the global disempowerment of women and violence against women, including the violence of poverty given tht womean are disproportionate sufferers of poverty, especially since the care and raising of children is often left up to them.

– Do you think that our legal system manages to treat all equally before the law? Another interesting study would be who gets incarcerated, and for what crimes, how long are they incarcerated fore certain crimes, how does this compare across different populations, and what are the demographicas of prison populations? Lots of questions seem relelvant to the question of equal treatment before the law.

– If you were to have to be specific about ways in which poverty violates a person’s dignity, what would be some things that you’d list?