what is trafficking?

In my college writing class, we're starting a big paper on a global issues. My group chose women trafficking, so for the next few blogs I'll be focusing more on that. Women trafficking is a global issue not many people are aware of. The definition of trafficking is the practice of people being tricked, lured, coerced, or otherwise removed from their home, and then compelled to work with low or no payment on terms which are highly exploitative. I hardly knew anything about this topic before we started, but i've learned so much. I thought this problem occured only in Europe, but we found out 50,000 women in the U.S. get trafficked every year. This was so shocking to me because I've never really heard about this before we started researching it. I also found out that overall, 4 million women are trafficked each year. I know there are some support groups trying to help this problem, but they need a lot more than that. Well this is all I have for now, but I'll be talking about this again when i get more information:)

What are effects of teenage stereotyping?

Whether you like it or not, if you're a teen your have an automatic negative stereotpye. Teens are stereotpyed to cause problems, and do illegal things. Yes, some teens are like this, but not all. Adults don't realize this, and they treat all teens different just because of their age. I can think of many times i've experienced this. Many times my friends and I have gone shopping and we've noticed a worker following us around making sure we weren't stealing anything. This is a very common thing for workers to do. At first i found that very offensive, now I'm just used to it. I understand that some teens do steal, but it's sad that we have that stereotype and all of us get treated like we do. Most people think teens have high rates of violence, pregnancy, and sex. I found a website that says in recent years all three of those rates have gone down. It also said the percentage of students graduating now has significantly gone up from ten years ago. I know this stereotype is a hard one to change, but stereotypes are only as true as we decide to make them.

What is A Class Divided?

A few weeks ago I recieved a comment about a study done about stereotypes. This study is called A Class Divided. In 1968, Jane Elliot, a third grade teacher in Iowa, came up with this experiment. One day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, she knew she had to do something, so she thought she would teach her third graders about discrimination. She started out dividing the class into two groups, one with blue eyes, and one with brown eyes.
The first day of the experiment she convinced the children everyone with blue eyes was superior. She told the class blue eyed people were better and smarter than brown eyes. She gave the blue eyes more time at recess and much more encouragement than the other students. She treated the brown eyes like they were stupid and nobody cared about them. The brown eyed children weren't allowed to use the drinking fountains or to play with the blue eyed children. Jane started noticing the changes of behavior in her students. The great, cooperative children started calling eachother names and fighting.
The second day she did the same thing except, she told the class that she had make a big mistake and really the brown eyes were better. So the children went through the day with opposite treatment as the day before.
Jane talked to her children after the experiment to see what they thought. Those students came into the classroom discriminating people because of color, but after this experiment, they were totally against discrimination. Jane had a reunion with those same students fourteen years later to show how much it affected them all. She went on giving those classes to all age groups.


I found a really good site with a video about the study.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

How do life experiences effect stereotyping?

Everything that happens in a persons life effects how they stereotype people and things. Life experiences can make both positive and negative stereotypes. This topic made me think about my grandpa. From his life experiences he thinks of a lot of things a lot different that I do. I realized how different we are just by the way we stereotype. An example is how he thinks of African Americans. Due to his life experiences he often assumes negative images of Afrian Americans rather than positive. My experiences are the complete opposite from his. I've had more positive life experiences with African Americans, so i don't have that stereotype against them at all. I find it interesting that our stereotypes are so different considering we've lived together for twelve years. Usually opinions rub off from your parents but this is all life experiences, so it's completely different.

How do peers influence stereotyping?

One way a person stereotypes others is by influence brought by their peers. This is especially true during the teenage years when everyone's just trying to fit in. Fitting in means everyone in a certain group shares some of the same qualities. The members of that group all consider themselves to be "normal". They think they are superior to people in other groups. In order to keep their feeling of superiority, the members of the group stereotype other groups. When students have peers around them they tend to do or say things they usually wouldn't in an effort to fit in. An example of this would be, a boy showing off in gym class because he sees girls watching him. Peers are a big influence on stereotpying because of the desire for teens to fit in.

How do parents affect childrens stereotypes?

I mentioned in my last blog that parents have an effect on their childrens' stereotyping. An example of this might be the parents saying to the children that anyone who drives a new or fancy car is rich. In this day of car loans, it should be obvious to anyone that a person doesn't have to be rich to have a new or fancy car. I read about a study done to see if and how children stereotyped people. The study was based on the person's appearance and the products they had with them. It showed children as young as five years old could stereotype. The older the children were, the more acurate their assumptions were that the stereotypes were true to their original impressions. There's no way children came up with those stereotypes on their own. Most of this comes from the parents. Even without thinking, parents stereotype a lot too. The children hear their parents opinions and learn to think the same thing. They agree with their parent's thinking without even having had a personal experience to form an opinion of their own. From then on, children's stereotypes keep growing.

What is a stereotype?

The dictionary definition of a stereotype is a “fixed, generalized image of a person or thing shared by many people.” In other words you look at someone and judge them by your ideas and your reaction to what they're wearing or who they're hanging out with, without even talking to the person. This all usually starts during childhood. Parents talk about their opinions and the children hear this and are basically taught to think the same things. When people make stereotypes it's usually based on one person or group of people they've known in their life. Say one of those parents knew somebody that was rich and they happened to be stuck up, so now they think anyone rich is stuck up.

Not only parents influence stereotypes, peers do also. Peers tend to think alike about a lot of things. An example of this would be the group of students at school known as "emo". This stereotype has been made about people that wear a lot of black and are upset a lot. Most kids at school don't really understand them, so they don't accept them.

Life experiences can also produce stereotypes. One experience in my life that I think produced a stereotype is being so close to my great grandma when I was young. That has caused a really poitive stereotype when I see old people, as I think of them as really sweet and caring.

Not all steroetypes are bad, but most tend to unfairly judge people.