Creating and Developing Awareness

 

It is easy to focus attention on numbers. These are the cause and effect that point to a lack of social justice, but the real stories lie in the individuals who are impacted. Entangled in the numbers and numerous reports, there are real people. Men, women and children whose lives are lessened, whose futures are dimmed and potential diminished. While we will supply the numbers, causes and effect, we will also provide you stories to help you learn to look with your heart.

Global Awareness

The issue of social justice is a worldwide issue. Countries around the world are at different stages in ensuring all its citizens are afforded the same level of justice in their societies. Some are much further along than America and other much further behind.

The SGI (Sustainable Governance Indicators) organization looks at social policies as a way to determine whether a country provides a fair and equal society. The major categories are:

Education: assesses the extent to which a government’s education policy facilitates high-quality learning for everyone with the most efficient allocation of resources between the different education systems (pre-school, schools, universities etc.

Social Inclusion: the prevention of poverty and the provision of enabling conditions for equal opportunity in society are essential elements of such a policy

Health: public health care policies should aim at providing high-quality health care for the largest possible share of the population and at the lowest possible costs.

Families: based on the assumption that an optimal system of family support should enable women to decide freely whether and when they want to take up or proceed with full- or part time employment.

Pensions: An optimal pension system should prevent poverty among the elderly due to retirement and should be based on distributional principles that do not erode the system’s fiscal stability. It should ensure equity among pensioners, the active labor force and the adolescent generation

Integration: policies fostering the integration of migrants will ensure migrants’ equal access to the labor market and education, opportunities for family reunion and political participation, the right of long-term residence, effective pathways to nationality as well as protection from discrimination and equality policies.

Safe Living: the assumption that the aims of protecting citizens against security risks like crime, terrorism and similar threats that are more and more internationally organized can be achieved by many different ways and combinations of internal security policies

Global Inequalities: the extent to which the government actively and coherently engages in international efforts to promote equal socioeconomic opportunities in developing countries by demonstrating initiative and assuming responsibility or acting as an agenda-setter within international frameworks.

The explanation of each category is taken directly from SGI’s report. All were shorten for this handbook.

Each category has sub-categories which explains them further on their website.

The SGI is a platform built on a cross-national survey of governance that identifies reform needs in 41 European Union (EU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Part of SGI’s mission statement reads: In our globalizing world, increasingly complex challenges – from shifting economic power and social inequalities to aging societies and depleting resources – are placing governments under intensifying pressure. Now more than ever, governments must rapidly adapt and deploy policies to meet these challenges.

When confronting these challenges, most OECD and EU governments continue to struggle with implementing sustainable policies. All too often, ad-hoc measures rule the day. Mounting debts shift unfair burdens to future generations. The lack of equal opportunities in labor markets, education and health care put the future viability of entire societies at risk. And most countries fail to prioritize the efficient use of natural resources for long-term sustainability.

The organization provides regular rankings for countries and their social policy performance in the listed categories. The scores and ranking are below. For more details on the rankings as well as interactive charts, visit their website. Below are the rankings from the 2016 report.

In order to understand the numbers and how they relate to the lives of people in the various countries, we will explore several examples.

We took the above chart and reformatted the countries into quartiles using the social policy number to group them. The higher the number, the more likely the citizens of that country, as a whole, will experience a higher level of social justice according to the various categories. (SGI)

 Countries in the highest quartile have the following things in common:

• A focus on funding of public education that provides high graduation rates, vocational training opportunities and equal access: countries in 1^st quartile average a score of 6.7 out of 10, while countries in the 4^th quartile averaged 4.4
• A high level of social inclusion: countries in the 1^st quartile averaged a score of 7.2 out of 10, while countries in the 4^th quartile averaged 4.0
• A high commitment to the overall health of its citizens, families, pensions, integration, safe living and global inequalities.

While some countries score high, the dedication to social justice to all starts to become thin when migrants from places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan start to enter the country. On Sweden government site, they go to great lengths to point out the facts relating to immigrants and crime which they state there is no link. Never-the-less, people outside the country and within think crime has increased which has led some people in the society to challenge allowing more immigrants into the country.

Prejudices and negative attitudes towards Muslims exist in many areas of society. A report published by the Equality Ombudsman in 2015 shows that Islamophobia is manifested in threats, violence, verbal abuse, media attacks, harassment in schools, unfavourable opportunities for finding a job, and in other ways (www.government.se/articles/2017/02/facts-about-migration-and-crime-in-sweden)

Switzerland government was surprised when its citizens voted, narrowly, for a referendum championed by the anti-immigration party Swiss People’s Party in 2014 which calls for quotas on immigration from the EU. There were already quotas in place for immigration outside of the EU.

Does the change in a country’s population or religious mix create a climate of fear that leads to the restriction of social justice?

This report is incomplete when it comes to looking at the entire world because it only includes those countries within the EU and OCED, these represent only about 17% percent of the world’s population.

Let’s pull the lens back further to examine factors that have a bearing on the available of justice in any society in the world and why.

Some of those factors are:

• Poverty
• Health
• Social Inclusion
• Safe Living
• Food Security
• Water and Sanitation Rights
• Climate Justice
• Gender Equality
• Indigenous Rights
• Education
• Religious Rights
• Immigration
• Refugees
• Racial Equality

We will explore each category in detail in the following pages.