Response to Chris Holt
As a matter of fact, it is true that there are disparities in the way crime is reported across different countries due to socio-political and economic factors. This difference may also be imputed to the variations in resources and social perceptions of crimes and crime reporting. According to Goudriaan, country characteristics or the context in which crime victims live also affect the cross-national comparison of crime reporting based on the International Crime Victims Survey (29). The victimization survey statistics also suffer from several limitations that affect the way they reflect the rate and incidences of crime in various countries.
However, this may not always be the case and therefore people travelling to these countries as tourists, for instance, do not have to necessarily understand these countries before making such a decision. This is because, with the current globalization and emergence of social media, it is rarely the case that a crime will take place in any part of the world without being reported and people becoming aware of it. Thus, these disparities that exist in the social classes of various countries in terms of crime reporting statistics should not in themselves how crime is perceived and a people in a country construed. Moreover, as Greenberg and Ruback argue, there are other factors that affect crime reporting and perception including presence of gun possession laws, the seriousness of the crime and the degree of injury to victims (115).
Response to Maria Saavedra
While it is true that the use of the law s that protect women by the Chinese authorities and China’s political systems are primarily responsible for the long it has taken for women to gain legal protection, this may not be necessarily so. There are certainly other factors that have played a significant role in delaying the ability of Chinese women to obtain legal protection. Firstly, cultural practices in China may be argued to have significantly delayed women’s empowerment and emancipation. This is because, due to the decade long cultural belief that women are inferior to men, women have consistently been trodden upon in the Chinese society. This cultural attitude that condones the perception of women as being second class citizens has thus delayed their ability to gain legal recognition and protection.
Further to this, the lack of gender protection laws in China for a very long period of time may also be another reason why it has taken so long for Chinese women to gain legal protection. Moreover, most of the existing laws at least up to the end of the last century were drafted without women input thus reflected the Confucius and patriarchal cultural heritage that did not value women. Nevertheless, this proposition may not easily be maintained currently given the strides that China has made towards the legal protection of women’s rights and interests though equality with men is still a pipe dream (Al-China Women’s Federation 36).
Works Cited
All-China Women's Federation. Women of China. Guanzhou: China Intercontinental Press, 2004. Print.
Goudriaan, Heike. Reporting crime: Effects of social context on the decision of victims to notify the police. Lausanne: Universal Press, 2006. Print.
Greenberg, Martin S and R Barry Ruback. After the crime: Victim decision making. New York: Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2012. Print.
