ANONYMOUS - OUR VOICE

How your favorite jeans might be fueling a human rights crisis

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In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent.
The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan. More than 50 textile printing and dyeing companies stand in huge rows, facing out over the Cao’e River where it flows into Hangzhou Bay. Trucks stream north on the highway from the Zone carrying miles of dyed and printed fabrics, en route to becoming billions of dollars’ worth of shirts, dresses, shorts, and leggings.
I was there to research a book I was writing about clothing and textiles, and the Zone, in terms of its sheer scale, was unlike anything I had ever seen in the US. Yet it’s a landscape that a mammoth American consumer market — and the steady, supersize patronage of US clothing brands and retailers — has been critical in shaping.
The US has gobbled up far more Chinese garments and textiles than any other nation every year since 2006. Between 2002 and 2020, China was by far the largest source of <a href="https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Year/2018/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/50-63_TextCloth">garment imports into the US</a>. In 2020, Vietnam <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3096504/china-no-longer-top-clothes-exporter-us-vietnam-gains-market">outstripped China</a> as the biggest exporter of garments to the US market, but that fact obscures the reality that the cloth used to make those Vietnamese garments is frequently Chinese-made, and is often sewn in Chinese-owned factories.
Because of the deep reliance on this single source to meet insatiable clothing appetites, clothing companies — and consumers — now have a particularly big moral dilemma on their hands.
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<aside><q>The US has gobbled up far more Chinese garments and textiles than any other nation every year since 2006</q></aside>
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US officials and human rights organizations say the cotton fields and factories in the Xinjiang region of China are using forced labor, mainly that of the Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs imprisoned in the vast internment camp system that the Chinese government has built in the region in recent years.
In January, the Trump administration banned cotton from Xinjiang because of its connection to the alleged human rights violations, roiling a fashion industry heavily reliant on Chinese textiles. Reports of the detention camps began <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/11/cotton-china-uighur-labor-xinjiang-new-slavery/">circulating in 2019</a>, but by 2020, reports had surfaced that major international brands’ <a href="https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale">supply chains were marred</a> by forced labor. Soon, those brands were rushing to make public statements condemning China’s actions in Xinjiang, eagerly professing a zero-tolerance policy on forced labor. Some, like Adidas, <a href="https://www.glossy.co/fashion/lacoste-and-adidas-pledge-to-cut-forced-uighur-labor-from-supply-chain/">pledged</a> to cut Xinjiang-made materials from supply chains; others, such as Patagonia and the millennial “it” brand Reformation, have said they will <a href="https://fortune.com/2021/07/18/china-cotton-forced-labor-xinjiang/">stop using Chinese cotton</a> altogether. The problem, however, had been building for some time.
Though Beijing has <a href="https://apnews.com/article/forced-labor-race-and-ethnicity-global-trade-china-archive-eb8112a291398da559317dd1bff8c1df">vociferously denied</a> using forced labor, calling it “totally a lie fabricated by some organizations and personnel in the United States and the West,” US senators met in committee in March to hash out possible solutions to the problem and its presence in the supply chains of US companies.
One of the witnesses giving expert testimony that afternoon, Julia K. Hughes, president of the United States Fashion Industry Association, suggested that it was important to focus on “the real actions that will get to the perpetrators of the crime, which is not the US companies that are good corporate citizens.”
But just who is responsible is, by any account, a difficult question to untangle. China is both the world’s <a href="https://www.globaltrademag.com/global-cotton-yarn-market-slipped-back-slightly-to-77b/">largest producer</a> of cotton yarn and its largest yarn importer, buying up cotton thread from India, Pakistan, and Vietnam to supplement its domestic thread. This yarn is knit, woven, and dyed to make textiles that will become summer dresses for Zara, T-shirts for Gap, and socks, hats, and jeans for the Japanese retailer Muji, even the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/style/cotton-totes-climate-crisis.html">cotton tote bags</a> that have proliferated in recent years as a replacement for plastic. China is also one of the world’s biggest producers of raw cotton. And nowhere in China produces more cotton than Xinjiang.
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An autonomous region located in the country’s far northwest corner, bordering Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, Xinjiang has been under Chinese control since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. Uyghurs — the majority of whom follow the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of four schools of thought within Sunni Islam — are by far the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, although the region is also home to many Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Hui (Chinese Muslims). Their culture is distinct from that of Han Chinese — the majority ethnic group in China — in many ways: Their food is largely halal, based on mutton, wheat noodles, nan, and savory pastries.
Uyghur farmers in Xinjiang were formidable farmers, making virtuosic use of rain-fed agriculture to grow food. But a new agricultural regime would turn the land to another crop: cotton.
Xinjiang has long been strategically central to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project intended to link China globally via railroads, shipping lanes, and gas pipelines. The initiative’s central arteries <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/map-explains-china-crackdown-on-uighur-muslims-in-xinjiang-2019-2">crisscross the province</a>, which happens to also hold huge reserves of natural gas. As the Chinese government has moved to assert tighter control over the region, cotton has operated as both an end and a means. In the 1990s, it was used as a way to encourage Han migration into the region. Today, it feeds the Chinese textile industry.
Beijing’s effort to move cotton and cloth production west to Xinjiang unfolded in several phases. The Eighth Five-Year Plan (1991-1995) highlighted the region’s huge potential for cotton, and the subsequent plan specified that Xinjiang be turned into a national cotton-producing base. Meanwhile, planners also transferred textile production west, from its traditional base on the east coast. Central planners felt that China’s textile industry could become more competitively priced by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/09/15/china-go-west-young-han/1d7e55a0-ab67-44a6-b6db-631b1c328281/">being closer to the cotton fields</a> and employing a cheaper rural workforce.
Twenty years later, Xinjiang has a cheaper workforce than planners in the ’90s could have dreamed, and the reason is disturbing. From softer, coercive policies — like giving cotton quotas to Uyghur farmers that they had to meet, even if it wasn’t profitable — Beijing has turned to a policy of forcefully interning Uyghurs in massive, heavily guarded camps, subjecting them to what it has described as “reeducation” but is believed to include sterilization and forced labor. They are actions that, when taken together, constitute what the US State Department has termed a genocide. They are actions that have also been a boon to industry.
The Chinese government dramatically scaled up its repressive policies against Xinjiang’s Uyghurs in late 2016, when Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-hard-edge-the-leader-of-beijings-muslim-crackdown-gains-influence-11554655886">hardliner</a> who has escalated invasive, tech-driven policing and monitoring tactics in China, assumed leadership of Xinjiang. Massive internment camps, which Beijing terms “vocational education centers” — though satellite imagery has revealed that these camps are encircled with barbed wire fencing and surveilled from watchtowers — have since been erected.
The policy of “reeducating” Uyghurs has dovetailed with a desire to keep garment production in China after labor costs there grew uncompetitive with those in places like Vietnam or Bangladesh. By 2018, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/99016849cddb4b99a048b863b52c28cb">evidence</a> began to emerge of a major pipeline between detention centers and factories producing garments for US brands when the Associated Press <a href="https://apnews.com/article/99016849cddb4b99a048b863b52c28cb">tracked shipments</a> from a factory inside a Xinjiang internment camp to Badger Sportswear in Statesville, North Carolina. Badger quickly moved to source its sportswear elsewhere.
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<aside><q>The policy of “reeducating” Uyghurs has dovetailed with a desire to keep garment production in China</q></aside>
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But garments stitched by imprisoned Uyghurs were quietly entering the American wardrobe through myriad avenues — much of it, it would soon be revealed, made from cotton harvested by enslaved people. In January 2021, a shipment of men’s cotton shirts from Uniqlo was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/20/business/economy-stock-market-news#uniqlo-forced-labor-china">blocked from entering</a> the Port of Los Angeles by US Customs agents who believed the goods were produced in part using forced labor in Xinjiang. In July, France’s antiterrorism prosecutor’s office opened an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/fashion/xinjiang-forced-labor-Zara-Uniqlo-Sketchers.html">investigation</a> into four brands that it has alleged profited from human rights crimes in Xinjiang: Zara, Uniqlo, Skechers, and SMCP (owner of Sandro and Maje). Even after the situation in Xinjiang had become unmistakable, it was clear that the effort to remove cotton harvested by forced labor from the market was squarely at odds with the imperative to produce ever-cheaper clothing.
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Journalists face <a href="https://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/why-its-so-difficult-journalists-report-xinjiang">extreme restrictions</a> in their attempts to enter Xinjiang, but I had procured a tourist visa for my December 2018 research trip to China and, following my time on the nation’s east coast, I had planned to head to Xinjiang in the guise of a sightseer, to gather whatever I could that way. My research focus was, at that time, on the ecological costs of cotton.
I had enrolled in a formal “Silk Road” tour as a way to avoid imperiling Uyghur interview subjects, who can be arrested for something as minor as speaking to an American. Days before I was scheduled to fly out, I got an email from the tour company with the subject line “URGENT.” “I regret to inform you that we have to cancel your tour,” the email said. “It is something beyond our control.”
Months passed before I again heard from the American employee of the Uyghur-owned tour company who had informed me of the cancellation. She was back in the US, she said, and wanted to explain what had happened now that she had access to a secure email account. Days before my tour, the family that ran the company had been rounded up and “sent to their home village” — a euphemistic way to say that they were sent to an internment camp.
At the time, the detention of Uyghurs by the Chinese government was just beginning to be widely reported. I felt sick. I had assumed that I was being kept out because the ruling Chinese Communist Party was becoming more careful about concealing its actions in Xinjiang and didn’t want to risk even the occasional nosy tourist. This, however, was more direct, more brutal, more blunt.
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Since that first inkling that something was awry in the region, Xinjiang has emerged as the center of an international crisis. In March 2020, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) <a href="https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/ranking/release/menendez-calls-on-commerce-department-to-stop-us-companies-from-buying-goods-made-by-uyghur-forced-laborers">called on the Commerce Department</a> to take steps to prevent goods produced by forced labor in Xinjiang from entering the US market. Even as the international outcry grew, Beijing worked to keep the region cloaked in secrecy. Journalists looking to document what is occurring in Xinjiang are forced to rely on satellite photos, sift through government budget reports, and collect footage of closed doors and high fences. In the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-cotton">startling glimpses that have emerged</a>, cotton was front and center.
In July 2020, more than 190 organizations — interfaith groups, labor unions, Uyghurs’ rights groups, environmental organizations, anti-slavery organizations — spanning 36 countries issued a <a href="https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/call-to-action/">call to action</a>, seeking formal commitments from clothing brands to completely disengage from any connection to Uyghur forced labor, either through sourcing, business relationships, or <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56250915">labor transfers</a>, which serve to pipe Uyghurs from internment camps in Xinjiang to factories in other regions of China. In December 2020, German anthropologist Adrian Zenz released an <a href="https://newlinesinstitute.org/china/coercive-labor-in-xinjiang-labor-transfer-and-the-mobilization-of-ethnic-minorities-to-pick-cotton/">intelligence briefing</a> directly linking the cotton harvest with forced labor.
When I learned about how cotton was being harvested in Xinjiang, I thought about the tour guide who had been scheduled to drive me around, talking about the silk of China’s past. I wondered if he had become one of the prisoners laboring in the fields, picking the cotton of China’s present.
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Corporations didn’t end up sourcing garments from Xinjiang internment camps by accident.
Apparel is a footloose industry, and forced labor is rampant. Brands actively seek out countries that don’t enforce their labor laws, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, “then put enormous price pressure on suppliers, guaranteeing that they’ll violate labor laws.” The companies’ public statements reveal a desire to project certainty: “Nike does not source products from the [Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region] and we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region,” reads an undated statement from Nike that also acknowledges that its supply chains are opaque, even to the company itself. “Nike does not directly source cotton, or other raw materials,” the statement continues, but “traceability at the raw materials level is an area of ongoing focus.” The company concluded by saying that it was working with suppliers and others to better “map material sources.”
Slave cotton is far from new. The use of forced labor by an authoritarian communist regime to grow cotton can — and ought to — inspire the ire of the democratic West. But “free market” cotton has generally entailed very little freedom for most of those involved in its production. There is no global cotton trade outside of brutal colonial or neocolonial relations of power. Cheap cotton has been morally compromised for several hundred years.
The history of European imperialism, industrialization, and cotton are so intertwined as to be nearly identical. Cotton textiles were among the main products for which Britain colonized India. This cotton fabric was in turn the main currency used to purchase enslaved people from Africa, who were forced to grow commodity crops in the New World. After the invention of the cotton gin, cotton became the plantation’s crop par excellence in the United States. In the post-Civil War South, cotton continued to be made by unfree labor, as systematic efforts deprived formerly enslaved people of both land and alternative means of subsistence, all to force them into cotton sharecropping arrangements. Whatever could not be accomplished by this means was accomplished by Black Codes that allowed local authorities to arrest freed people for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor.
Large Southern landowners, cotton traders, and merchants — the same actors who had benefited from the antebellum order — were so successful in their efforts to reestablish cotton growing in the American South by forcing formerly enslaved people and landless white tenants to grow cotton via a punishing system of perpetual debt, that their strategy, known as sharecropping, became a model the world over. Today, small cotton farmers in India, for example, face crushing debt.
Private companies may direct flows of garments, but they travel along routes drawn by imperial legacies and colonial armies. In the cotton field, the division between the state and the corporation often fades away entirely. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the Chinese state-owned entity that administers Xinjiang and directs the cultivation of most of its cotton, is both a corporation and an army.
As for the garment trade itself, that too has relied on the movements of big state actors, and not just a handful of errant entrepreneurs. The globalization of the US garment industry came about as the result of the US State Department’s Cold War policy. After World War II, the Allied powers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur occupied Japan and moved to re-industrialize it as swiftly as possible so it wouldn’t “fall” to communism. MacArthur’s first economic priority was the Japanese textile industry, which had been nearly wiped out by the war. Factories were rebuilt and modernized. The State Department even subsidized the shipment of raw American cotton to Japan.
To absorb the product of these new mills, the United States then opened up its hitherto heavily protected garment market, and Japanese cloth and clothing flowed in. The US textile and garment industries were made a sacrificial lamb, and over the next half-century, garment workers’ rights eroded, and Americans got used to spending less and less on clothing made by workers whose pay became worse and worse.
The pipeline of low-cost Asian-made clothing had been long established by the time China opened its economy and revved up as a garment producer. Workers’ rights had never been on the minds of the architects of these policies, and remained an afterthought.
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<aside><q>There is no global cotton trade outside of brutal colonial or neocolonial relations of power. Cheap cotton has been morally compromised for several hundred years.</q></aside>
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In March 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart, Director Yang Jiechi, for a conversation that quickly devolved into a war of words. Yang made a thinly veiled allusion to the history of slavery in the US and suggested that with a record like that, the US had no right to lecture China. “It’s important that we manage our respective affairs well instead of deflecting the blame on somebody else in this world,” he told Blinken. (This line of attack is frequently taken by Chinese <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/18/tech/china-uyghurs-internet-trolls-facebook-intl/index.html">troll armies</a>, networks <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-52657434">likened to Russian troll farms</a> mobilized online to attack anyone posting concerns about the Uyghurs.)
Wang’s throwdown was cynical and self-serving. But it highlighted the irony of the US position. The US had emerged as a global leader in the fight against China’s oppression of the Uyghurs: It is the first government to call it a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/19/mike-pompeo-china-uighur-genocide-sanctions-xinjiang">genocide</a>, the first to ban imports of Xinjiang cotton — steps that Canada, the UK, Australia, and the EU also appear to be on their way to taking. In taking a hard stand, however, on China’s actions as a genocidal power using slave labor to harvest cotton for a voracious global market, the United States was looking at itself in the not-so-distant past.
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Self-reflection (or lack of it) aside, there are enormous complexities involved in trying to force the global tentacles of Western multinationals out of a forced labor industry.
According to Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium, an estimated 1.5 billion garments made with Xinjiang cotton streamed into the US market each year before the ban took hold, and there are significant obstacles to knowing how much the ban has reduced that number. “Most consumers do not want to wear clothing made with forced labor,” Nova told me. “That’s a given. And if they knew that a particular product was made with forced labor, very few people would buy it. Of course, that’s where transparency comes in.”
Rights groups have expressed frustration recently that, although the US has placed restrictions on Xinjiang cotton, it is nearly impossible to see how they are being enforced. US Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency responsible, discloses the total number and dollar value of shipments detained quarterly, but that’s it. There are some exceptions — as when the news broke about blocked Uniqlo goods — but most such detentions never reach the press. The public has no way of knowing how many of them involve Xinjiang cotton, let alone which brands are implicated.
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Ana Hinojosa, the agency’s executive director for trade remedy law enforcement, acknowledges that in the reporting, Xinjiang cotton detentions and others “are all lumped in together, mainly because it would be very difficult for us to continually update these moving numbers.”
The federal agency “is not required to make that any of that public,” confirms Esmeralda López, legal and policy director of the International Labor Rights Forum, but, she adds, “we think that it’s necessary to ensure effective enforcement.”
It matters, said Nova, because corporations are “waiting to see whether there’s going to be aggressive enforcement before they decide whether to really exit the region.”
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<aside><q>“Most consumers do not want to wear clothing made with forced labor. That’s a given.”</q></aside>
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Garment supply chains are incredibly complex. So far, Eileen Fisher, ASOS, Marks and Spencer Group, OVS, Reformation, WE Fashion, and others have all publicly committed to follow the steps laid out in the call to action put forward by the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region. These steps demand that companies engage in intensive research into their own supply chains. Without this kind of work, watchdog groups say, it’s nearly impossible to suss out Xinjiang cotton from the rest.
Cotton picked in Xinjiang may be mixed with cotton from other regions as it is spun into yarn. That yarn may be knit or woven into fabric far from Xinjiang, cut and sewn into a garment still farther afield — likely in Vietnam or Bangladesh. Brands like to <a href="https://www.gap.com/sustainability/xinjiang">point out this complexity</a> to disavow knowledge of what occurs in their supply chains.
But rights groups argue that companies do have choices. “I don’t think that we need to accept those limits,” said Allison Gill, forced labor program director/senior cotton campaign coordinator at Global Labor Justice — International Labor Rights Forum. “A company can tell us that a product was produced in a facility that also processes sesame and nuts. They can tell us all kinds of things if they want to.” According to Gill, “Xinjiang is the central case that we will use for years to show what an absolute failure voluntary standards have been [in] the auditing approach to supply chain. I mean, all of these companies that were operating there, they were all audited, they all passed their audits.”
In Xinjiang, there are known unknowns. “If you have clear due diligence policies, and if you’re saying, ‘We don’t use forced labor goods,’ and you can’t have factory auditors go in and actually check factories,” said Peter Irwin, senior program officer for advocacy and communications at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, “then you need to leave.”
The Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region is calling on brands to make public commitments to disengage from the region, but many brands have said they’d rather exit quietly because they fear losing Chinese market share if they pull out of Xinjiang openly. They’re afraid the Chinese government and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/business/xinjiang-china-cotton-brands.html">nationalist consumers</a> there will interpret any criticism of its conduct in Xinjiang as an open threat and retaliate.
That’s not an unrealistic fear. Days after Sweden joined in the coordinated sanctions on senior officials involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Youth League launched an <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-xinjiang-cotton/old-hm-comment-on-forced-labour-in-chinas-xinjiang-raises-online-storm-idUSKBN2BG1G4">online attack</a> on the Swedish retailer H&M, zeroing in on a year-old statement on H&M’s website expressing concern over human rights violations in the Uyghur region. The next day, H&M <a href="https://apnews.com/article/china-erase-h-and-m-shopping-xinjiang-442a71a395d5aac39c3c475a20054a34">vanished from the Chinese internet</a>. Major e-commerce platforms including Alibaba’s Taobao dropped its goods, and one ride-hailing app, Didi Chuxing, did not recognize its stores as locations. The party newspaper also leveled criticisms at Burberry, Adidas, Nike, New Balance, and Zara for past statements on Xinjiang, some from as long ago as two years. Celebrities including pop singer Wang Yibo announced they were breaking endorsement contracts.
“Normally in our work, it’s easier to get the brands to say they’re doing the right thing than it is to get them to do it. That has flipped to a degree on this issue,” said Nova. “If their position is that their level of access to China’s consumer market is more important to them than not being directly complicit in the worst human rights crimes that are taking place in the world today, their consumers have a right to know that.”
Then there are those, he argues, that have simply done nothing. “We’ve seen nothing whatsoever from Target, nothing whatsoever from Walmart. Nothing except rhetoric from Amazon, among many others,” Nova says. (Neither Target nor Walmart replied to Vox’s requests for comment; Amazon issued a statement that read, in part, “Amazon expects all products sold in the Amazon Stores to be manufactured and produced in accordance with our Supply Chain Standards. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action and remove the violating product and may suspend privileges to sell.”)
One promising new tool in supply chain transparency is technology developed by a company called Oritain, which can analyze a cotton fiber and determine its point of origin. Cotton from different locations bears different molecular blueprints: Distance from the sea will affect its sulfur content, for instance, while altitude will impact its hydrogen. However, Grant Cochrane, Oritain’s CEO, cautioned, “We’re not a standalone service. We work with other systems: really solid traceability systems.”
Even if the US cotton ban is made airtight, to work optimally, “It’s very important that a cotton ban … be a global effort,” said Johnson Yeung, urgent appeal coordinator and campaigner at the Clean Clothes Campaign. Yeung points to Muji, the Japanese retailer, which has said it <a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-cotton-02122021141610.html">has stopped</a> sending Xinjiang cotton products to the US but will continue to sell them in countries without the ban. In Hong Kong, where Yeung is based, Muji actively advertises the presence of Xinjiang cotton in its products — a practice it jettisoned in Western markets after an uproar in the human rights community — attempting to brand “Xinjiang” as an upscale, luxury marker.
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In the meantime, for Uyghurs in the diaspora, an act as simple as clothes shopping has become fraught. Zumretay Arkin is the program and advocacy manager at the World Uyghur Congress, part of the coalition asking brands to leave the Uyghur region. “I’m not an angel,” said Arkin. “I used to shop fast fashion.” Now, though, when Arkin sees cotton clothes in stores, “I just freeze there, thinking, ‘Maybe one of my relatives made this piece.’”
Arkin’s grandmother was a retired seamstress who used to sew clothing for Arkin using colorful printed cloth, sometimes cutting up her old dresses and veils to use as materials. Arkin brought these handmade garments along as a treasured memory when she immigrated to Canada at age 10. When Arkin’s grandmother passed away in 2017, Arkin could not go back for the funeral. The risk of detention was too great. Today, long dresses like the ones Arkin’s grandmother both wore and repurposed for Arkin’s wardrobe have been criminalized in Xinjiang. Uyghur women are <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/17/chinese-authorities-accused-cutting-uighur-dresses-latest-crackdown/">stopped on the street</a> to have long dresses shortened with scissors on the spot.
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<aside><q>“I used to shop fast fashion. [Now] I just freeze there, thinking, ‘Maybe one of my relatives made this piece.’”</q></aside>
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Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs, also finds it fraught to shop for clothes these days. In retaliation for Abbas’s activist work in the US, she alleges, authorities in Xinjiang detained her sister, a retired medical doctor, in September 2018. (Radio Free Asia <a href="https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/15/uighur-muslims-china-human-rights">has confirmed her detention</a>.) “I’m afraid of going out and buying some of the things in the store now. Because I don’t know where my sister is,” or whether she is being forced to make products, Abbas said. Although China’s government has framed its labor transfers with the dystopian euphemism of “job training” programs, Abbas notes that “Uyghurs being held and sent to those factories to work, they are professors, writers, doctors, successful business people, elites — they’re professionals in the different fields.”
Abbas lives with her husband, who is also Uyghur, in Herndon, Virginia. His parents, both over 70, have been missing since 2017. So have four siblings and their spouses, along with 14 nieces and nephews. The Abbas family is far from exceptional in this, she said. “Me and my husband are the example of every single Uyghur in the diaspora.”
The United States’ link to the Uyghur internment camps isn’t just a matter of parallel histories.
US corporations have played a central role in creating the situation in Xinjiang today, and consumers have been their unwitting accomplices. “When you pour money into a region where there’s rampant forced labor, you’re both supporting and profiting from forced labor,” said Nova.
“Forced labor is a spectrum,” Gill said. “People in forced labor very often have agency, they are often making very hard choices. But genocide — genocide is different.”
“We hear a lot of different arguments for basically ignoring these atrocities, one being, well, the US needs to clean up their own act first,” said Julie Millsap, director of public affairs and advocacy at the Campaign for Uyghurs. “It’s not that simple. This is also our issue. We don’t get to say that while we’re improving things ... in the States that we’re going to outsource human rights abuses.”
Sofi Thanhauser is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books on January 25, 2022. She teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22632448/xinjiang-cotton-ban-china-uyghurs-fast-fashion">https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22632448/xinjiang-cotton-ban-china-uyghurs-fast-fashion</a>

vox How your favorite jeans might be fueling a human rights crisis

In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. T...

The evidence for violence interrupters doesn’t support the hype

As progressives search for alternatives to traditional policing in the wake of the protests over George Floyd’s murder, one solution has gained prominence: violence interrupters.
For this approach, Groups like Cure Violence and Advance Peace recruit members of local communities, particularly people who have a history with gangs or violence, to act as mediators who can deescalate interpersonal conflicts before they turn violent.
In the short term, the goal is to stop shootings and murders. In the long term, it’s to foster stronger norms of peace within communities — an idea that, if it succeeds, could lead to a drop in violent crime broadly, without the need for armed officers capable of their own violence.
Interrupters were the subject of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interrupters">splashy documentary</a> in 2011. Since last year, they’ve gained more prominence as a solution, touted by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/george-floyd-police-funding.html">progressives</a> and cited by <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/police-brutality-cop-free-world-protest-199465/">news</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/nyregion/Coronavirus-social-distancing-violence-interrupters.html">outlets</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/6/24/21296881/unbundle-defund-the-police-george-floyd-rayshard-brooks-violence-european-policing">including Vox</a>, as a path forward in a world with fewer or no police officers. More recently, the concept has even gained federal support — with President Joe Biden’s administration <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/biden-wants-give-anti-violence-groups-5-billion-here-s-n1263990">aiming to direct</a> new funds and other resources to interrupters, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/07/fact-sheet-more-details-on-the-biden-harris-administrations-investments-in-community-violence-interventions/">describing</a> the approach as an “evidence-based model.”
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<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1630676397_9558_81643" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22823252,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vo0_xvl1xhmOLO1bg8lbQ51IBDQ=/0x0:256x389/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/I3IQZ3X37f6NUNlpTinSZh5M4y4=/0x0:256x389/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HlZysA2jM0WgAU_bQX6K6J5ABVY=/0x0:256x389/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eWC2laIEc9AHVgWs1dOyE1E63PM=/0x0:256x389/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cVrMaw53mHJ9lag1Tfue1XilCkc=/0x0:256x389/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/11j8gdBnAm393mghSfLEAL3rh1w=/0x0:256x389/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eH3CScRnWEcgxEcU4S4uUPKqF0Y=/0x0:256x389/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/y7draN5Vm8hftxbR9kYYGYqDsdo=/0x0:256x389/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yjFBQJGxX38TS9mr9IGa62tY9TI=/0x0:256x389/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="256" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/v_R2yycjUbL3DWXt8h7gdLPCZlk=/0x0:256x389/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MK78OgtaH19L_T1hr5D8EfWDwPs=/0x0:256x389/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zpVYPgq5HD9QKV916bKiD_P9gb8=/0x0:256x389/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6ubdRNKrsiC06ar8CqGK7K3rgjo=/0x0:256x389/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/J3A7jaLDzOWsYIAxgAWJu0tTKPw=/0x0:256x389/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Do_E78McdKCcCiit7IPHOIdHuBk=/0x0:256x389/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9s24RV_3-gJGa_wPg7HjjYhIFPw=/0x0:256x389/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/m53XN1Ix7EcMpK47SxbG6ZNZKgE=/0x0:256x389/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CgBvkJgEwmzqPAS2NhWd0H_LDaI=/0x0:256x389/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LWw6M3ZWQltG5l5VTM_crsbyDyQ=/0x0:256x389/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:256x389):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22823252/The_Interrupters_FilmPoster.jpeg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>The Interrupters is a 2011 documentary film that tells the story of three violence interrupters in Chicago.</figcaption>
<cite><a class="ql-link" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interrupters" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></cite></figure>
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One hope with interrupters is they might have a short-term effect on crime and violence — unlike other proposed alternatives to police, which tend to address root causes to disorder that can take years or generations to mend. For policymakers looking to address crime and violence now, that’s promising.
But studies on interrupters have been largely disappointing. Reviews of the evidence have found that the approach often produces no significant effect on shootings and murders, and some programs were even associated with more violence. While some studies have found positive effects, they are few and far between and suffer from methodological flaws. Taken together, the research is decidedly mixed — and offers little proof that the programs live up to their promise.
The research on interrupters “is mixed, incomplete, and very difficult to do,” Jeffrey Butts, a researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied violence interrupters, told me.
There’s nothing wrong with trying new ideas, and spending more time and money on the concept of interrupters could eventually bear fruit. But the focus on interrupters could lead policymakers astray as they deal with a new sense of urgency to do something about crime and violence in the US.
Over the past year and a half, America has seen a <a href="https://www.vox.com/22578430/murder-crime-2020-2021-covid-19-pandemic">spike in shootings and murders</a>. Murders likely rose by about 25 percent in 2020 and, though data remains limited to large cities, by 11 percent so far in 2021, based on <a href="https://datastudio.google.com/embed/u/0/reporting/133bc335-b4e9-41f4-890d-3adb7de5a141/page/QX9NC">crime analyst Jeff Asher’s tracker</a>.
This is a crisis that policymakers are dealing with now, with political pressure mounting to do something quickly. So far, President Biden has embraced a “both and” approach that combines policing and alternatives like interrupters. But most crime-fighting policy is made at the state and local levels. If progressives manage to persuade local and state lawmakers to embrace interrupters over more proven approaches, it would be a roll of the dice — embracing a strategy with scant evidence, with lives at stake.
Violence interruption was conceived by Gary Slutkin, head of Cure Violence, in Chicago in the 1990s as a public health response to shootings. The idea is that violence spreads like a disease — as, say, retaliatory shootings beget more retaliatory shootings — but interrupters can cut that cycle of violence short. With each of these interactions, interrupters hope to instill norms in a community against continued violence, showing a better path forward.
The concept picked up mainstream traction over the past year, particularly as the “defund the police” movement took off and policymakers sought alternatives to traditional policing.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Cure Violence Global and UNICEF save hundreds of lives! Thank you to Violence Interrupters and Outreach Workers! To hear more about their work, check out the link in our bio. <a href="https://t.co/vgeMwK6B5t">pic.twitter.com/vgeMwK6B5t</a>
— CureViolence (@CureViolence) <a href="https://twitter.com/CureViolence/status/1411038226580709383?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 2, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
But the evidence for the approach is mixed.
A 2015 <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031914-122509">review of the research</a>, published in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, analyzed the results of interrupter programs across several American cities. None of the five studies included produced fully positive results, such as reductions in gun violence or murders. One program in Pittsburgh fared so poorly that it was linked to “an increase in rates of monthly aggravated assaults and gun assaults” in some neighborhoods.
The most famous of these studies, from 2009, looked at Chicago’s interrupter program. Comparing the sites of interrupter programs to similar areas, the study found positive effects for shootings in four of seven evaluation sites. Supporters would hope to see interrupter sites consistently perform better than comparable areas without the intervention; instead, they performed barely better than a coin flip.
The researchers also conducted social network analyses in these areas to see if they could pick up deeper changes in homicides and violence. They again found the outcomes varied widely.
“The evidence is mixed,” Butts, who led the 2015 review and subsequent research on interrupters, said. “We need to do more studies.”
A 2020 <a href="https://johnjayrec.nyc/2020/11/09/av2020/">review</a> from John Jay College, which examined various alternatives to police, concluded the evidence base for interrupters was “promising but mixed.”
Some of the studies produced positive effects. The most promising — a program in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago — “was associated with significant reductions in overall violent crime (–45%) and shooting injuries (–39%).” A survey in New York gauged propensity for interpersonal violence among men ages 18 to 30, finding it dropped across areas both with and without interrupter programs but that “the decrease was steeper in Cure Violence areas (33% vs. 12%).”
But a bulk of the studies reviewed were mixed or disappointing. An interrupter program in Richmond, California, “may have been associated with statistically significant reductions in firearm violence, but researchers noted small increases in other types of violence.” Another in Baltimore had results that “were inconsistent across several sites.”
The research also consists of largely correlational work, with no randomized controlled trials — the gold standard for evidence — on interrupters to date. So instead of randomly selecting some neighborhoods, exclusively deploying interrupters there, and seeing how those places compare to similar areas, the studies typically looked at correlations between places where interrupters were believed to be active and places where interrupters by and large weren’t.
Given that less rigorous studies <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1051">tend to be more likely</a> to produce positive results for a studied intervention in crime and justice, it’s all the more worrying the weak studies for interrupters have found mixed to negative effects.
“It’s concerning,” Anna Harvey, a public safety expert at New York University who worked on the John Jay report, told me. “It really is an example of weak evidence.”
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<aside><q>The research on interrupters “is mixed, incomplete, and very difficult to do” —Jeffrey Butts</q></aside>
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Advocates of the approach <a href="https://cvg.org/impact/">emphasize</a> the more positive findings in the studies, including reductions in shootings in specific areas or neighborhoods. But the same studies also often found negative or null findings.
For example, the <a href="https://cvg.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CVG-Evidence-Summary-2021.08.06.pdf">evidence summary</a> from the interrupter program Cure Violence cited the 2009 Chicago evaluation to claim a “41% to 73% reduction in shootings.” But the bulk of this reduction wasn’t statistically significant; it didn’t differ from results in control groups, which is why the researchers could only link the intervention to drops in shootings in four of seven study sites — again, barely better than a coin flip.
When they acknowledge the mixed findings in the research, advocates of interrupters point to a range of problems. At the top, interrupter programs face inconsistent funding and support, particularly as changes in leadership and politics prompt the people in charge to divert resources elsewhere. That makes it difficult to implement these programs in the way they’re supposed to be implemented — and could explain some of the poor findings in the research.
“Not having a result in every community on every measure, to me, is way too high a bar with half funding, irregular funding,” Slutkin told me. “It has to be done right all the time — and that requires a consistent amount of training and technical assistance on the spot.”
They also argue that the approach is particularly difficult to research. As John Jay’s report noted, interrupter programs involve working with “individuals who are disconnected from traditional institutions and systems of support and are already involved in illegal activities.” Many of these people are going to be hard to follow in a scientific way, if they agree to participate in a study at all. That might lead to an absence of evidence without necessarily meaning the approach is ineffective.
Still, this is the evidence we have to work with. And based on that, the interrupter approach is at best mixed.
For some activists, the goal of these programs isn’t just to complement the jobs of police, but to replace them partially or entirely, using both interrupters and other approaches. Advocates, like <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/">#8toAbolition</a> (a reference to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html">abolishing the police</a>) and <a href="http://defundpolice.org/">DefundPolice.org</a>, have <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/community-models">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://defundpolice.org/trainings/practical-abolition-violence-interrupters/">cited</a> interrupter programs as an alternative to the police. The media has played a role, too: <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/police-brutality-cop-free-world-protest-199465/">One article</a> in Rolling Stone presented interrupters as one idea for a “Cop-Free World.” <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/6/24/21296881/unbundle-defund-the-police-george-floyd-rayshard-brooks-violence-european-policing">Another</a> in Vox posed the idea of interrupters to help “replace traditional police officers.”
When Minneapolis officials last year moved to disband the city’s police department and replace it with a new public safety agency, they <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/activists-push-disband-minneapolis-police-upcoming-vote/">looked to interrupters</a> as one of several possible replacements for traditional policing.
In the context of the current murder increase, relying on interrupters as an alternative to police, and framing it as such, when it lacks evidence is risky. Policymakers saw that in Minneapolis, where interrupters were <a href="https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2020/11/06/minneapolis-violence-interrupters-sidelined-ask-for-more-police-presence/">reportedly sidelined</a> as demands for more police patrols rose along with violence. Some Minneapolis officials have since <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/1000298293/a-year-after-george-floyds-death-plans-for-minneapolis-police-reform-have-soften">walked back</a> their support for disbanding the police department.
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<figcaption>A protester hold a sign reading “Defund the Police” outside Hennepin County Government Plaza in Minneapolis during a demonstration against police brutality and racism on August 24, 2020.</figcaption>
<cite>Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images</cite></figure>
There’s no reason interrupters have to be replacements to the police. There’s even less evidence for that than interrupters in general: The studies on interrupters were all done in places where police still exist, so even the most positive empirical findings assume cops are still around.
Nor is the alternative to interrupters simply accepting the status quo with police. It’s still possible to pursue reforms that tackle abuses, and adopt new practices that follow a less punitive, draconian model to policing. Some changes could explicitly embrace a public health approach — for example, <a href="https://khn.org/news/article/in-mental-health-crises-a-911-call-now-brings-a-mixed-team-of-helpers-and-maybe-no-cops/">deploying special teams</a>, instead of police alone, for 911 calls regarding mental health crises.
Interrupters and police can work side by side, addressing different needs in different spaces — and they do in some cities. “They have different roles,” Slutkin said, although he envisions a world where interrupters are central to crime-fighting policy.
<a href="https://www.vox.com/e/22344751">Other research</a> finds strong indications that police do have an effect on crime and violence. A <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202">recent study</a> published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that more police officers reduce homicides, particularly in Black communities. Reviews of the evidence, including randomized controlled trials, have found strong evidence that specific strategies, like <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-019-09372-3">hot spot policing</a> and <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cl2.1089">problem-oriented policing</a>, reduce crime and disorder.
These approaches still represent a break from the policing status quo in many places. They aren’t necessarily punitive; some hot spot policing approaches, for example, require cops to stand in high-crime blocks and take limited, if any, action — instead acting as largely armed surveillance, deterring wrongdoers.
“It doesn’t mean police are a panacea for these things,” Morgan Williams, an economist at Barnard College who studies crime and the criminal justice system, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22578430/murder-crime-2020-2021-covid-19-pandemic">previously told me</a>. “But it does mean we should be very careful about throwing around interventions that we don’t necessarily know come with any important benefits or costs.”
Now, the quantity of the research is skewed toward the policing approaches — making it difficult to say if policing has better evidence than the alternatives or if it’s simply received more attention.
Policing also likely has more costs than interrupters. If a policing approach goes wrong, the unintended consequences can be catastrophic — unnecessary arrests, harassment of neighborhoods, racial discrimination, and police shootings or killings. The downside of an interrupter approach gone wrong is more an opportunity cost: The time and resources dedicated to the program could have gone to something else, but there aren’t big, negative outcomes.
In short: Policing can be effective and doesn’t have to be punitive, but it can lead to bad, unintended consequences. Meanwhile, it’s not clear if interrupters can be effective, even if they don’t appear to lead to negative outcomes.
Of course, interrupters aren’t the only alternative to police for reducing crime and violence. There’s stronger evidence for other approaches, including <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w28373">offering summer jobs programs</a>, <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20140323">raising the age to drop out of school</a>, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/12/2946.full.pdf">greening vacant lots</a>, <a href="https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/projects/crime-lights-study">installing more streetlights</a>, <a href="https://johnjayrec.nyc/2020/11/09/av2020/">providing more drug addiction treatment</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-control-laws-licenses">having better gun control laws</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/13/18130843/alcohol-taxes">raising the alcohol tax</a>.
But these other alternatives tend to work over the longer term, since it takes time to, say, revitalize a community by providing more jobs and safe spaces to address root causes of crime.
The evidence on policing suggests a far quicker effect — since officers can reduce crime in an area the minute they’re deployed there, just by deterring through surveillance.
Interrupters are in some ways supposed to provide the same short-term benefit by stopping conflicts from escalating as soon as they’re deployed. That’s one reason that they’ve gotten so much attention compared to the other alternatives: For policymakers and a public looking for quicker solutions to crime and murder, whether benefits come in the short or long term is a crucial distinction.
But given the disappointing evidence for interrupters, it’s still not clear they can provide the short-term benefits that policing does. And with murders going up, American policymakers need evidence-based solutions to prevent potentially thousands more unnecessary deaths, hopefully right now.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22622363/police-violence-interrupters-cure-violence-research-study">https://www.vox.com/22622363/police-violence-interrupters-cure-violence-research-study</a>

vox The evidence for violence interrupters doesn’t support the hype

As progressives search for alternatives to traditional policing in the wake of the protests over George Floyd’s murder, one solution has gai...

Poland VS Belarus: The Forcing Of Migrants Into The Polish Border And The Revival Of Old Hatreds

armageddon Poland VS Belarus: The Forcing Of Migrants Into The Polish Border And The Revival Of Old Hatreds

My thoughts on the current tensions occurring between Poland and Belarus: [embedded content] source https://shoebat.com/2021/09/03/pola...

UAE Sends Plane Carrying "Medical And Food Aid" To Afghanistan: Report

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UAE has been instrumental staging posts for evacuation flights for foreigners and Afghans (File)
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Abu Dhabi:
The United Arab Emirates sent a plane carrying "urgent medical and food aid" to Afghanistan on Friday, the official WAM news agency said, nearly three weeks after the Taliban's takeover.
The "assistance comes within the framework of the humanitarian role being played by the UAE to provide full support to brotherly Afghan people in such current circumstances," WAM said.
The UAE foreign ministry confirmed to AFP that "this is the first (Emirati) aid flight since the recent events in Afghanistan".
Taliban celebrated with gunfire on Tuesday, hours after the last US forces abandoned Kabul, closing a frenzied airlift operation that saw more than 123,000 foreign nationals and Afghans flee.
The United States invaded Afghanistan and toppled its Taliban government in 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda, which had sought sanctuary in the country.
Western capitals fear Afghanistan could again become a haven for extremists bent on attacking them.
The UAE is one of a number of Gulf states that have been instrumental staging posts for evacuation flights for foreigners and Afghans, along with Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/united-arab-emirates-sends-plane-carrying-medical-and-food-aid-to-afghanistan-report-2528657">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/united-arab-emirates-sends-plane-carrying-medical-and-food-aid-to-afghanistan-report-2528657</a>

news world UAE Sends Plane Carrying "Medical And Food Aid" To Afghanistan: Report

UAE has been instrumental staging posts for evacuation flights for foreigners and Afghans (File) Abu Dhabi: The United Arab Emirates se...

Britain Says Wants To Engage With Taliban

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Britain Says Wants To Engage With Taliban" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-08/p95ekl4_uk-foreign-secretary-dominic-raab_625x300_17_August_21.jpg" title="Britain Says Wants To Engage With Taliban" /></div>
"We do see the importance of being able to engage," UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. (File)
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Islamabad:
Britain will not recognise the Taliban as the new government in Kabul but must deal with the new realities in Afghanistan and does not want to see the social and economic fabric of the country broken, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Friday.
Speaking during a visit to Pakistan he said it would not have been possible to evacuate some 15,000 people from Kabul without some degree of cooperation with the Taliban, who seized Kabul on Aug. 15.
"We do see the importance of being able to engage and having a direct line of communication," he said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/britain-says-wants-to-engage-with-taliban-2528584">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/britain-says-wants-to-engage-with-taliban-2528584</a>

news world Britain Says Wants To Engage With Taliban

"We do see the importance of being able to engage," UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. (File) Islamabad: Britain will no...

Taliban Says "China Our Most Important Partner, Ready To Invest": Report

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Taliban Says 'China Our Most Important Partner, Ready To Invest': Report" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-09/9pc1clc4_zabihullah-mujahid-1-650_625x300_03_September_21.jpg" title="Taliban Says 'China Our Most Important Partner, Ready To Invest': Report" /></div>
China has been making some positive statements towards the Taliban (File)
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Peshawar:
Describing China as its "most important partner", the Afghan Taliban has said it looks to Beijing to rebuild Afghanistan and exploit its rich copper deposits as the war-ravaged country faces widespread hunger and fears of an economic collapse.
Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the group supports China's One Belt, One Road initiative that seeks to link China with Africa, Asia and Europe through an enormous network of ports, railways, roads and industrial parks.
"China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country," Geo News quoted Mujahid as saying in an interview to an Italian newspaper on Thursday.
There are "rich copper mines in the country, which, thanks to the Chinese, can be put back into operation and modernised. In addition, China is our pass to markets all over the world," said Zabihullah Mujahid.
China has been making some positive statements towards the Taliban and has expressed the hope that its dreaded cadre will follow moderate and prudent domestic and foreign policies, combat all forms of terrorist forces, live in harmony with other countries, and live up to the aspiration of its own people and the international community.
Stating that China respects Afghanistan's sovereignty and will not interfere and follow the friendship with "entire Afghan people", Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday that, "facts show that in realising economic development we need an open inclusive political structure, implementation of moderate foreign and domestic policies and clean break from terrorist groups in all forms".
The Taliban also view Russia as an important partner in the region and will maintain good relations with Moscow, Zabihullah Mujahid said.
The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on August 15. The last of the foreign troops left the country on August 31, bringing an end to 20 years of war amid fears of an economic collapse and widespread hunger.
Following the chaotic departure, Western states have severely restricted their aid payments to Afghanistan.
Earlier this week, United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warned of a looming "humanitarian catastrophe" in Afghanistan and urged countries to provide emergency funding as severe drought and war have forced thousands of families to flee their homes.
Mr Guterres expressed his "grave concern at the deepening humanitarian and economic crisis in the country", adding that basic services threatened to collapse "completely".
Amid fears of an economic collapse and widespread hunger, the Taliban have indicated a formal government structure was on the horizon.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-is-our-most-important-partner-says-taliban-2528576">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-is-our-most-important-partner-says-taliban-2528576</a>

news world Taliban Says "China Our Most Important Partner, Ready To Invest": Report

China has been making some positive statements towards the Taliban (File) Peshawar: Describing China as its "most important partne...