7.6.2: The Industrializing Nations The Industrializing Nations include most of the nations of the former Soviet Union and its former satellites in eastern Europe. As you saw in Table 7.2, these nations account for 20 percent of the Earth’s land and 16 percent of its people. The dividing points between the three “worlds” are soft, making it difficult to know how to classify some nations. This is especially the case with the Industrializing Nations. Exactly how much industrialization must a nation have to be in this category? Although soft, these categories do pinpoint essential differences among nations. Most people who live in the Industrializing Nations have much lower incomes and standards of living than do those who live in the Most Industrialized Nations. The majority, however, are better off than those who live in the Least Industrialized Nations. For example, on such measures as access to electricity, indoor plumbing, automobiles, telephones, and even food, most citizens of the Industrializing Nations rank lower than those in the Most Industrialized Nations but higher than those in the Least Industrialized Nations. As you saw in this chapter’s opening vignette, stratification affects even life expectancy. The benefits of industrialization are uneven. Large numbers of people in the Industrializing Nations remain illiterate and desperately poor. Conditions can be gruesome, as we explore in the following Thinking Critically about Social Life.
Thinking Critically about Social Life
Open Season: Children as Prey
What is childhood like in the Industrializing Nations?
The answer depends on who your parents are.
If you are the son or daughter of rich parents, childhood can be pleasant—a world filled with luxuries and servants.
If you are born into poverty but live in a rural area where there is plenty to eat, life can still be good—although there may be no books, television, and little education.
If you live in a slum, however, life can be horrible—worse even than in the slums of the Most Industrialized Nations (Mutsaers 2019). Let’s take a glance at a notorious slum in Brazil. Not enough food—this you can take for granted—along with wife abuse, broken homes, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a lot of crime: From your knowledge of slums in the Most Industrialized Nations, you would expect these things.
What you may not expect, however, are the brutal conditions in which Brazilian slum (favela) children live.
Sociologist Martha Huggins (Huggins et al. 2002) reports that poverty is so deep that children and adults swarm through garbage dumps to try to find enough decaying food to keep them alive.
You might also be surprised to discover that the owners of some of these dumps hire armed guards to keep the poor out—so that they can sell the garbage for pig food.
And you might be shocked to learn that some shop owners hire hit men, auctioning designated victims to the lowest bidder!
A woman and her two daughters in a favela in Brasilia, Brazil.
Credit: Florian Kopp imageBROKER/Newscom Life is cheap in the poor nations—but death squads for children?
To understand this, we must first note that Brazil has a long history of violence. Brazil also has a high rate of poverty, has only a tiny middle class, and is controlled by a small group of families who, under a veneer of democracy, make the country’s major decisions.
Hordes of homeless children, with no schools or jobs, roam the streets.
To survive, they wash windshields, shine shoes, beg, and steal (Gatehouse 2019).
The “respectable” classes see these children as nothing but trouble.
They hurt business: Customers feel intimidated when they see begging children—especially teenaged boys—clustered in front of stores.
Some shoplift.
Others break into stores.
With no effective social institutions to care for these children, one solution is to kill them.
As Huggins notes, murder sends a clear message—especially if it is accompanied by ritual torture: gouging out the eyes, ripping open the chest, cutting off the genitals, raping the girls, and burning the victim’s body.
Not all life is bad in the Industrializing Nations, but this is about as bad as it gets.
For Your Consideration → Directed by the police, death squads in Brazil also assassinate criminals, while in the Philippine slums they kill rapists and drug dealers (Mogato and Baldwin 2017). What do you think about this?
No comments:
Post a Comment