[SystemSafety] Risk .... again

[Fenn, Jane (UK)]

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Hi

What Phil said.....

I sometimes think that 'ladies of a certain age', of which I consider myself one, particularly those living in the North of England in the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, have been subconsciously taught risk management from a very young age.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be furious when judges make comments to reduce the 'blame' attributed to men for sexual violence against women because they claim it was the victims own fault for being in the wrong place/wearing the wrong clothes/drinking too much/forgetting to lock a door/being unconscious/being asleep.  Even in the last year or so there was a US judge who decided it was more important that a young man did not get a criminal record, which would damage his career prospects, over a tiny little rape of a woman at a party who the judge felt has not adequately protected herself or reduced her risk sufficiently low, according to his way of thinking.

So, yes, the world is still very heavily biased towards fixing the symptom and not the cause.  What you saw at SCSC, Les, was likely a lot of women totally despondent that men will ever understand......women have been expected to fix the symptom....insufficient people are trying to fix the cause!  

Being a safety engineer, I do both, but get might p**sed off at the limitations it places on my freedom, such as going out at night on my own.  We deserve to be angry about that.....

Jane

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety <systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de> On Behalf Of Phil Koopman
Sent: 29 September 2022 16:55
To: les at chambers.com.au; The System Safety List <systemsafety at techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>
Subject: Re: [SystemSafety] Risk .... again

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Les,

A confounding aspect is the tendency of some stakeholders to use risk management messaging to deflect attention away from fixing much more systemic issues that they do not want to deal with. This is a big discussion in traffic safety now, especially in the US.  It can result in backlash against risk management messaging just as you say.  Because sometimes it might indeed be an intentional strategy of victim blaming by some very powerful forces.  (I'm not weighing in on your specific incident; I'm being much more general here.) Railing against such techniques is a natural response.

As a simple example, telling pedestrians or bicyclists to wear bright clothing might well be a sensible risk management strategy. I bought the yellow raincoat instead of the black one for exactly this reason. But this can get converted into effectively blaming pedestrians for being killed because they were not wearing yellow clothing in ways both subtle and overt. That messaging is then used to distract attention away from the other factors that set up the conditions for the crash. So the other factors never get fixed, and each new tragic death is because of a personal choice of the victim not to practice risk management rather than the fact that there is an unreasonable risk to public safety that will inevitably continue to claim lives until addressed.

For those who have not heard of it, there is a well written book that makes the case for going deeper that blaming victims as a way to improve overall public safety:  Jessie Singer, "There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster―Who Profits and Who Pays the Price" 
Feb 2022.  It does not go so far as to suggest a dual prong approach.

As a society we need to do better at nuance and complexity in such policy discussions.

Phil

On 9/29/2022 11:29 AM, Les Chambers wrote:
> Bernard
> I feel your pain. I empathize but encourage you to crack on. You are a 
> good soldier for the cause.
> I’ve had my own problems explaining risk to none other than the sisterhood.
> A while ago a young woman - a SCEGGS girl - went to a party and got 
> legless drunk.
> SCEGGS is an exclusive girls high school based in Darlinghurst Sydney. 
> My mother was a SCEGGS girl in the 1920s.
> All the boys at the party were students at exclusive Sydney boys 
> schools. One of them decided to have sex with this unfortunate young 
> woman when she was not in a state to reject or except him. She may not even have been conscious.
> Another boy filmed the encounter and the video appeared on the web.
> I know. Jesus wept.
> Time passed and I could not walk past this story. My mother was a 
> SCEGGS girl for Christ sake and I have three daughters.
> So I composed a 4000 word email  on risk management to the 
> headmistress of SCEGGS.
> The skinny was as follows:
> 1.Young women have no control over the actions of male animals who 
> feel entitled to hurt them. They do not have the muscle mass to stop them.
> 2.They do have control over who they associate with, where they go, 
> how much they drink, how they dress, and so on. The issue is risk 
> assessment and risk reduction by having two wines and leaving the 
> party if you’re concerned about the rough trade leering at you.
> 3.Conclusion: young women should be taught risk management as a 
> subject at school.
> I was about to deliver a keynote at a Safety-Critical Systems Club 
> conference in Sydney so I volunteered to visit SCEGGS and meet with 
> the head mistress to further explain.
> The response was – crickets.
> At the conference I told the story and asked for volunteers to visit 
> SCEGGS should they change their minds as I am not a Sydney resident. 
> One lady volunteered. Nothing came of it.
> But there’s more.
> Proud of my attempt to protect young women I related the story to one 
> of my daughters. A few sentences into the narrative she stood up and 
> screamed at me for “victim blaming”. I’m still trying to recover my 
> relationship with that young woman. Since that horrible experience I 
> have noticed exactly the same response from many intelligent (but risk 
> illiterate) women who I have had the stupidity to engage in discussion 
> on women’s issues. The almost universal response from the ladies is 
> hand wringing. The narrative  is invariably: “A woman should be able 
> to go anywhere she likes, dress anyway she wants and drink as much as 
> she likes”. Followed by, “These misogynous pigs should be trained to 
> respect women”. If the lady hasn’t left the room and the screaming is 
> only moderate I try to express furious agreement with these sentiments 
> but with the caveat that lectures on how boys should be trained will not protect her daughter at the party she is attending this evening. Risk management will.
> I note that there was no such reaction from the many professional 
> women in the room at the Safety-Critical Systems Club conference. 
> Card-carrying risk managers all.
>
>  From all this I conclude that:
> 1.It takes significant training hours to produce a person who 
> understands and values risk and risk management techniques. Even more 
> to motivate them to actually use the techniques. It often takes blood. 
> Contrast the professional women at the conference with the ladies in the wild.
> 2.The standards wonks are  therefore wasting their time redefining 
> risk, it’s a simple concept but hard enough to explain as it is. Let 
> us leave its definition alone and concentrate the substantial 
> intellectual energy penned up in these working groups to designing 
> pathways to educate civilians on what it really means together with how to implement effective risk management.
>
> As for me, I refuse to give up. It does my head in to contemplate all 
> the young women who will be abused tonight for lack of a simple 
> element of education. If anyone on the list has ideas I’d love to hear 
> them. I have considered stealth. Get my 4000 words published under a 
> female Pseudonym. My working theory is that women just don’t want to hear suggestions from blokes.
> Hope I’m wrong.
>
> Back to your pain Bernard. In extremis there’s always the Rudyard 
> Kipling option.
>
> When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s planes And the women 
> come out to cut up what remains Jest roll to your rifle and blow out 
> your brains And go to your gawd like a soldier
>
> Cheers
> Les
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ISO and IEC have finally determined that there is an issue with 
>> figuring out
> what people mean when
>> they use the term "risk" technically. They have convened a "joint 
>> task
> force" to try to sort it out
>> https://www.iec.ch/ords/f?
> p=103:85:612946702359029::::FSP_ORG_ID,FSP_LANG_ID:28611,25. I am
>> sceptical they will come up with a good solution, because candidates 
>> for
> such WGs are self-selecting
>> (the actual members of the JTF nominated by the National Committees 
>> are not
> shown. More to the
>> point, I know some of them :-( ).
>>
>> They might improve the outcome if the JTF included by invitation at 
>> least
> some internationally
>> acknowledged experts with well-regarded publications on the subject.
>>
>> But, whatever. There are little things we plebs can do. Here's a 
>> picture
> caption from a piece in The
>> Guardian today: "Adults who took part in ‘regular’ weightlifting 
>> were
> found to have a 14% lower risk
>> of death."
>>
>> Source:
>> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/sep/27/exercise-with-weights
>> -
> linked-to-lower-risk-of-early-death-study-says
>> (no paywall)
>>
>> So, folks, go out and buy yourselves some weights and use them. It 
>> gives you
> a 16% chance of
>> immortality. But what I think is more significant is the crystal-ball
> technology the investigators
>> seem to be using to judge the immortality. I'd be keen to know more 
>> about
> that.
>> PBL
>>
>> Prof. i.R. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
>> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de
>
>
> --
>
> Les Chambers
>
> les at chambers.com.au
>
> +61 (0)412 648 992
>
>
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-- 
Prof. Phil Koopman   koopman at cmu.edu
(he/him)             https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/

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