Jana Asher is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She is also a Service-Learning Associate of the Office for Community-Engaged Learning at SRU, as well as outside of work, she is a member of the board of directors for the Pittsburgh Interfaith Evolutions Corporation (PIE), a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading interfaith understanding. Her research interests include questionnaire design, survey methods, record linkage, history of statistics, community-engaged education, and statistics education as well as her work with human rights and sexual violence. Within the ASA, she is currently a member of the Committee on International Relations and the Program Chair for the Section on Survey Research Methods.
Episode Description
When we talk about human rights we often focus on qualitative narratives; the tales of struggles faced by refugees, of rights denied to individuals during war, of the fight for clean food and water, but undergirding all those stories are statistics. Statistics that allow us to gain insight into the scope of a human rights issue, or the size of a population living through particular human rights abuses. The collection of those statistics is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories.
+Full Transcript
Pennington
When we talk about human rights we often focus on qualitative narratives, the tales of struggles faced by refugees of rights denied individuals during war of the fight for clean food and water. But underlying all those stories are statistics, statistics that allow us to gain insight into the scope of a human rights issue or the size of a population living through particular human rights abuses. The connection between stats and human rights is the focus of this episode of stats and stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me as always is regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami statistics department. Our guest today is Jana Asher. Asher is an assistant professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University outside of work. She's a member of the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh interfaith evolutions Corporation, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading interfaith understanding. Her research interests include questionnaire design, survey methods, record linkage, history of stats community engaged education, and statistics education as well as her work with human rights and sexual violence. Within the ESA. She is currently a member of the Committee on International Relations, and the Program Chair chair for the section on survey research methods. Jana, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jana Asher
Thank you for having me.
Pennington
I just I guess, wondered if we could start the conversation with you telling us how you got interested in human rights in the first place?
Asher
You know, so actually, there was this little event on September 11, I think it was 2001. And I had always been interested in trying to be helpful. Within my field. I did a lot of volunteer work through the American Statistical Association, before I started doing work on human rights. And when 911 happened 20 years ago over now. I wanted to know why. It was clear that there was something happening in the world that I didn't understand. And there was an anger towards the United States I didn't understand. At the same time, I had started being colleagues and friends with Fritz Shuren. My advisor was Steve Feinberg, and Steve Feinberg was just starting to talk to a gentleman named Dr. Patrick Ball, who was working at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And he specifically was specializing in this intersection of statistics and human rights. He needed some help with a project. And at that point, it was called Project X. In fact, I don't think it ever got called anything other than. But I ended up being connected to Patrick ball. And we started working on the data for the mysterious Project X. And through that work, he got to know me. And he asked me to participate in a different project, which was to prepare testimony for the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Oh, wow. Yeah, using data that was collected between February and April of 1999, after the splitting up of the former republic of Yugoslavia, so I worked with him on that project. And there were many, many sleepless nights during that. And it ended up resulting in a report that I was a co author of, and things just grew from there. And I got to find out why the rest of the world was not so happy at the point of September 11. And I got to see a lot of what's going on out there. So.
Bailer
So can you-- that's, that sounds like a great origin story, in terms of your engagement with this, this topic, can you help unpack a little bit the idea of what's, what's the scope of human rights study? And what is what, what's the data, and then the role of statistics within it? So you know, I'll start with a really simple question.
Asher
That's easy. That's pretty easy. That's kind of simple. It's something I thought about a lot. I actually ended up taking coursework on international humanitarian and human rights law as part of my graduate program. Because I developed a strong interest in human rights. Through these projects I was doing with Patrick Ball, I was still a graduate student at the time. So we generally split human rights into two piles. There's political and civil human rights. And I think that's what most people think about when they think about human rights. They think about the right to assembly, the right to speech, the right to life, basic things. And that tends to be where people think human rights abuses happen. So When you're talking about a situation, let's say in the United States, as you know, the Black Lives Matter movement and some of the recent understanding, and about social justice, that falls under the category of civil and political human rights. So, data related to that could take many, many forms. You could end up doing a new data collection, or you could use data that already exists. So for example, there's concern in our country about police and the relationship between police in the African American community. Well, there is existing data that are collected by the police themselves, they have their police blotters in their reports, those data can be quantified and turned into records that can be studied through statistics. In the world, in general, if there's been a period where of crimes against humanity, if there have been mass human rights violations in an area such as Rwanda, or Sierra Leone, or East Timor, or South Africa, typically what the response from the international community is to help form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Now, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is charged typically, with finding out the story, what happened. And the goal is to uncover the truth so that healing can begin. People need to be heard when something bad has happened to you, when your rights have been violated. Part of regaining those rights for yourself in part of combing through that process and healing is the ability to tell your story. And so truth and reconciliation commissions will often do qualitative data collection processes where they invite people to come and tell their stories. And they typically try to be as broad as possible and collect that information. Many of the projects that Patrick Ball has worked on and I've worked on since with Patrick Ball and without Patrick Ball, have been taking those existing testimonies, quantifying them, quantifying the information, coding it, and then developing statistics to accompany the stories. So in that context, again, this is all under civil political rights. In my catchphrases, you need the forest and the trees. Yeah. So when you, when you look at a forest from above, like say you're in a helicopter, you can take a snapshot of the entire forest. And to me, that's what the statistics provide. It provides an understanding of the patterns of violence, the patterns of human rights violations that have happened over time, happened over space in a particular conflict or in a particular political situation. But you also need qualitative information, because that's where the heart of the story lies. So my statistics may say 1.5 million people were displaced. But a couple of stories of what that experience was for those people help explain the real human suffering that occurred. And I think that that piece is incredibly important. Statistics have a lot of suffering that can hide underneath them, and part of our job as statisticians is to make sure that that message isn't lost.
Pennington
So, Jana, I wonder, you mentioned, sort of working on on the crime, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, and I wonder if maybe you could take a minute to talk about what maybe some challenges are in looking to gather data in the past, right, cuz I know you've done some collection, some survey methods, but I wonder if, if there are certain challenges as a statistician, when you're looking to the past, to figure out, you know, what can data tell us about human rights abuses?
Asher
Sure. Well, one thing is, unless it's a very carefully designed data collection process, so a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, their primary job is to get at the truth. But typically, they do that in very qualitative open ended methods, tell us your story. Then comes the statistician reading that and there may be vital information missing for us to help understand the pattern of what happened over time, say, so if I don't have an exact day that situation occurred? If I don't know where it occurred? If I don't know the gender of the people involved, if I don't know, you know, there can be details that are missing, that when you're designing a questionnaire or a survey form, you put in specific questions about those pieces, because, you know, eventually you're going to need that demographic information in order to to get at the heart of how it all pieces together. So one issue is that a lot of data might be missing. And I've seen you know, basically the earlier the statisticians can be involved in the process, the less likely that will happen because we can help guide ways to collect the data that both allow the person to tell their story because that's incredibly important. You don't want to treat this as an okay name, you know, right gender what happened, you know, that there's a powerful story to be told and you Don't want to inhibit that in any way. But you may need to follow up to get a few details that allow the statistics to be created later. So that's one issue. A second issue, in some cases, can be accessing information at all. So a lot of the work I've done has been after something has happened, I also was on the ground in Iraq, in 2003, right after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, and we were going around trying to collect information at that point. And, you know, some of the records just weren't there, we were able to talk to some people and get some testimonies. But typically, people who are committing massive human rights abuses aren't keeping detailed records on what's happening. And not only that, they may confiscate records from other people that might have been keeping detailed information about what was happening. So that's another issue.
Bailer
So as you were mentioning that I was I was just trying to imagine just in a completely disrupted circumstance, I mean, you're describing this as where there are civil and political rights disruptions occurring, just just the availability of data in this context, or even trying to think about designing some systematic way of collecting information, where much may have been filtered, destroyed, or lost. And I just, it seems just such a huge, huge challenge.
Asher
It is actually the basis of my dissertation. So this is a funny story, which I don't think I've ever told anyone before, which was that I was starting to work on my dissertation work with Steve Feinberg. And I asked to take a year off because I wanted to get my son settled into a, I was just getting married. I was a single mom in graduate school, which is a whole nother strike. And he and I had a son with disabilities. And I wanted to get him settled into a new area. I was getting married and moving. And I asked for your time off from school. And I got him settled. But then this project came up where I had to go to Sierra Leone, and it was supposed to be like six weeks to start. I ended up staying there many, many months. But it was supposed to be a six week project, right? And it was to run this national survey to ascertain human rights violations that had occurred during Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone armed internal conflict. So I went off to do that. And my dissertation advisor was laughing a little bit because he's like, I thought you were going to take care of what is going on? So, um, the project started in January 2004. And I encountered the very issues you're talking about here, I had a traumatized multicultural, multi language, time illiterate, illiterate population. And what I mean by time literate is that, you know, we have a very structured sense of time. Yeah, in our society. We have our watches, and we have things on Tuesdays. And we have, you know, we have particular holidays. And so I was going to be asking a group of people about a 10 year conflict that worked. There was a rainy season there, and a dry season. How was I going to get to the heart of what it happened, when it happened, where it had happened? And do that in a way that was ethical, because I didn't want to be traumatized. Right. Right. Right. So I had a huge job. And basically, I was given a budget and carte blanche, and, wow, I just reinvented things I said, we're going to send counselors into the field because I don't want to be responsible for traumatizing people. We are going to do cognitive interviewing in seven different languages. Because I want to make sure I understand how this works. We are going to collect information about you know, what happens with male versus female interviewers, we're going to you know, and I just kept, we're going to use anchor events in order to figure out time, so there were certain events that happened in the war. Everybody knew when it happened, like words, you know, when there was the invasion of free time, everybody knew about the invasion of free time when it happened, that sort of thing. And so we use those as anchor events to try to narrow down time periods when things happen. So I had to come up with all these ideas on the fly. And we did, I had this team of incredibly intelligent, bright people that were Sierra Leonean. And we specifically went and got people from different cultures and who had different language skills. And we sat down, we completely designed a survey from the ground up. Anyway, I said, Well, what I'm doing off to my dissertation advisor, and he says, You know what, this is a dissertation. Great when I was done, I came back, I wrote it up, and it was a dissertation. It took me a little longer than that, because the third piece I didn't get done until much later, which was to compare the results of the survey that I did to another estimation technique called multiple systems estimation that's often used in this context. But um, so a bunch like I'd say about two thirds of my dissertation had to do with it. You know, how do you pinpoint the timing of events in these situations? How do you work ethically with traumatized populations? How do you deal with it being a multicultural, multi language situation? And how do you make sure you're asking the same question? You know, in all these different languages, and so on. So yeah, it's hard. It's very hard.
Pennington
You're listening to stats and stories. And today, we're talking to Jana Asher about human rights and statistics. Jana, I know that you have done work around sexual violence. And as you're talking about this approach you took in Sierra Leone and how you were wanting to make sure you weren't really traumatizing people. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you approach doing work around sexual violence, which again, also has that possibility of as people talk about their experiences, triggering them or re traumatizing them and sort of maybe what your approach has been and what we can take as maybe best practices from that?
Asher
That's a great question. And I actually started with some articles by Shana Swiss and Peggy Jennings. They were two researchers that started working with communities attempting to learn about sexual violence that it had heard that had occurred. And I really liked their approach, because it was so respectful of those local communities. Basically, they took women in as partners, and worked with them to understand culturally, what was the best way to approach should I start over? They? Sorry, about the beat. Right? So Seamus was and Peggy Jennings worked with women in these cultures to understand what was the culturally appropriate way to talk about these issues. And because they had the bias of the local community, women did speak up and talk about what had happened. And I felt like this made a lot of sense to me. And so when we went to work on asking about sexual violence in Sierra Leone, that was one of the first places that I started looking at sexual violence. One of the things we did is we made no assumptions about the gender of the people that experienced the violence, or that were perpetrators of the violence. And people thought we were a little crazy. Because we started getting back data that there had been female perpetrators and male victims. And when those data first started coming back, and I don't want to take Patrick Paul's name in vain at all, yes, he's an amazing researcher. But he was a little disbelieving at the time, I think he would even agree. And so I went back to my interviewers, I was still in Sierra Leone. And I said, Did this really happen? And they they verified that, yes, they had talked to men that had experienced sexual violence, and that there were women committing violent sexual violence. So that was an unusual situation, right. But it kind of indicates the success of this kind of working in partnership with local community and local local cultural mores. And of course, we had very, very strict confidentiality protocols as well. We did not want our data collection to, you know, lead to anybody being killed or anybody being harmed in any way. And so we had a very, very strict the, the team leaders for my teams had locked boxes, all the surveys were kept under lock and key. That, you know, there were protocols that we followed to try to keep the data as safe as possible. And I think people knew that as well. But in later work, I started working with a researcher named Lynn Lowry. Now, I'm sorry, it was an AMA watts at the time. She ended up getting remarried and became Lynn Lowry later. But she actually reached out to me to ask if I would go to Iraq. So I got this actually prior to Sierra Leone. Okay, I first started working, looking at systematic abuses in Iraq with Lynn Lowry, once known as Lynn amulets, then I ended up going to Sierra Leone. And then I ended up working with her again after that on specifically gender based violence studies in different parts of Africa. And when I started working with her, and at that point, I had been with her long enough that I could get involved in the questionnaire design process, I said, we need to not assume anything about the gender of the people involved in these situations of sexual violence. And she agreed to that. And that led to a study in Liberia, where the main message was that men were experiencing this gender based, gender based violence specifically in conflict situations, that that was a technique of war, and that women were involved as perpetrators. And that was also a technique of war. We were the first people to come out and, you know, do that study and kind of break that myth and that stereotype and we were incredibly proud we looked at it in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We looked at it in Liberia. And we were both incredibly proud when the Human Development Report finally, after I forget if it was after the first study, or after the two studies, said that money needed to be put aside for rehabilitation for men that experienced gender based violence and war. So yeah, I mean, we've dealt with some very serious, traumatic issues in the field. And, again, you know, in terms of ethically, you need to have counselors with you, especially in developing countries where you can't just give somebody a list of names of counselors to go see, you need to be incredibly careful with the data. And you need to be incredibly protective of your interviewers, because they're also in dangerous situations when they're doing these interviews in a lot of cases. So I don't know if that answers all of your questions, but that's kind of my take on it.
Bailer
No, that's, that's, that's great. Insight, as I looked at some of the design and the stuff that you were reporting, I was I was really struck with with just how responsive the people the the response rates that you had that to the work that you were doing, and you know, you're you're you were investigating major depressive disorders and post traumatic stress among these communities, along with some of the other outcomes that you described. You know, can you talk a little bit about why you think there was such engagement with the researchers? I mean, I, I really think it's laudable that this kind of proactive way that you were thinking about sending counselors and engaging in that way, and also the sensitivity to language and, and kind of meeting people where they are in terms of their ability to respond and their needs. But it just, I was just really struck by just how responsive everyone was. Yeah.
Asher
Well, well, in Sierra Leone, we actually had an advanced team. So when I had this group of incredibly intelligent young people that I was working with, and they explained the political structure of Sierra Leone, to me, it's a chief based structure. So we went and got the permissions from the head sheeps before we went out to local communities. And then we asked the chief themselves, you know, was it okay to interview. And I think that is a step that I hope humanitarian organizations are getting better about. But you really need to, the only way I can be of help to somebody is if I have something to offer them. And they have a need, where they'd like my help. It's not to be a mutual respect and a partnership, or it doesn’t, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for me to come in and say, oh, I want to do the survey, and it's really going to help you. That doesn't make sense at all. And so when I sat down, I said, Okay, what do you think you guys need to collect data wise? Who do we need to talk to in order to be able to get buy-in from local communities and so on, and they told me, and that's what we did. So that's one piece of it is just I think, if you approach things with some humility, and some respect for whom you're talking with, then hopefully, they'll be respectful of what you're trying to accomplish, and you can accomplish the things together. So that's one piece. The other piece is that I think there are amongst groups that have experienced massive human rights violations, they want the truth to come out. Because a lot of times, there's disinformation by governments about what's really going on in the country. And it's incredibly disempowering to have, you know, say this is happening and to have somebody in authority say, No, it's not. Right. No, that's not really what's happening. And so I mean, that's the power of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, right, is to get the truth on record. And I think for a lot of these surveys, it's about getting the truth on record, you know, this is happening.
Pennington
So, Jana, what advice would you have for journalists who are covering these stories? Because we do. And, and, you know, I think we want to do so with care for the people we're reporting on. But I'm sure given your experiences in the field, you have some thoughts for things that journalists could probably be doing better when it comes to covering these stories?
Asher
Well, if you're talking about just working in transitional countries and Warzones, in general, I think what I would say is keep an open mind and be respectful of local culture. And I'm going to give you an example. When and I know I'm going back to Sierra Leone a lot because that was the one place I lived. I've worked on other surveys and other places, but I lived in Sierra Leone for months. And I actually did not get along with most of the expats very well. Expat stands for expatriate stands for somebody that's coming into the country from a different place. And the expats in many developing countries will form their own society. And the problem with that is that they're interacting with each other and then they're making assumptions about the culture of the local community that may not be accurate. or true. So the example I'll give is that it is pretty, at least at that point, it was pretty traditional in Sierra Leone, for a boss to extend loans of money to an employee if it was needed, because there is no insurance. Or at least at that point, there was very little you could do in terms of getting medical insurance for people, school costs money, medicine costs, money, doctors cost money. And so if you had somebody working for you, there was a very good chance that at some point, they were going to have a desperate need for more money than you usually pay them. And so it's just kind of understood it was more like, like a medieval feudal system, then then employment in the United States, if that makes sense. And I picked up on that pretty quickly. And so with my employees, they understood that I would cover the medical costs, for instance, if they had a family member that got sick, and I sure as heck would cover the medical costs, if anything happened to them in the field. The expat community did not feel like I did. They would complain about employees, asking them for loans, and how dare they ask us for loans. And, you know, and just not understand what was happening in terms of a mismatch of culture. And so I think for reporters, specifically, when you're looking at you can, when you're looking at what's going on, you can hear one story from people that are from your culture. And if you're not careful, it's going to look just like they say, Yeah, but if you actually stay in the culture long enough to understand kind of the norms of that culture, you may discover that it's a completely different story than you thought.
Bailer
You know, I was thinking, Rosemary, when Jana was talking earlier, as she described this idea of the statistics of suffering that lie underneath them. So Jaden, yeah, that that statement, and the idea of, of kind of the the story that might be the stories that might help, you know, flesh out, one would, as you said, one and a half million people that are displaced, that that kind of magnitude doesn't resonate, but perhaps the the story of the individual cases that you were saying in the qualitative representations, I thought was really nice.
Asher
I think the reporters are incredibly important for that sometimes you're the first folks on the scene, to say, This is what's really going on. And I have read, you know, I, I'm a member of Amnesty International, I get the reports, and there have been plenty of reporters that have gotten into some very serious situations out there. It takes some bravery to be a reporter in this kind of situation. So I can only applaud them for their work.
Bailer
You know, so one of the things that we sometimes ask our our guests or visitors to the podcast is, if people would like to get involved in this kind of work, you know, if you have if you have journalists, or statisticians or anyone that's, that's interested in engaging and human rights, and in particular, the analysis of data associated with it, what kind of advice or recommendations might you give?
Asher
Oh, you know, I, I've actually had many people over the years who have approached me about this question. And my first advice is, don't just jump in, learn a little bit more about what you're getting yourself into. I made a lot of mistakes. When I first started doing this type of work. I made cultural faux pas, I made assumptions I shouldn't have, I mean, some of these lessons I'm talking about, were lessons learned over time, with experience. So have somebody that mentors you in this process. So that's piece one. So for instance, right now, there's a group called statistics without borders. They're a volunteer group, and within the American Statistical Association, they're an outreach group. And there are people there that have been doing this work for a while and can help mentor you to talk about what the challenges are, what you need to think about in terms of multicultural communication, and so on. So that's, that's thing, one. I don't want to give Patrick Ball's organization away, because, you know, they're a very serious research organization, I don't think they could take on tons of volunteers. And that's why I'm recommending a group like Statistics Without Borders first. So that's piece one. Piece two is make sure to do a mental health check on yourself and make sure you're healthy to do this, and that you're doing it for the right reasons. I actually experienced some secondary trauma in the work I've done. And for people who don't know what secondary trauma is. This is a concept that's very common for people in social work, that when you're surrounded by stories that are hard, hard, traumatic stories, you can start gaining or basically experiencing some of the same post traumatic stress disorder symptoms as the people that experienced these bad stories in the first place. And so I actually was caught unaware of that happening. And for two years was having those symptoms before I finally found out what was going on. So make sure that you're mentally healthy, that you're ready for this, but also that, you know, this is hard stuff. And if you're going to, you know, get the help if you need it, you know, if you start having nightmares, if you start having panic attacks, that can happen. And don't be ashamed of that, because this is a common phenomenon in this kind of work.
Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Jana, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been really wonderful to hear you talk about your work. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.