Month: August 2019

Opinion polls exude an aura of scientific truth. Those numbers and percentages are so reassuringly solid, especially when generated by one of the well-known names of the polling world, that for many people they represent hard evidence of the state of British public opinion.

So when The Daily Telegraph announces in a stark front page headline that “Public backs Johnson to shut down Parliament for Brexit”, majority public support for such a huge constitutional risk seems assured. And when this headline is reiterated by Newsnight’s Emma Barnett – who rarely lets anything remotely contentious slip by – without so much as a raised eyebrow, it receives an implicit nod of authority from the nation’s impartial public broadcaster.

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In fact, it is complete nonsense: at best, a misleading interpretation of a simplistic poll attempting to tap public feelings on a complex and controversial issue; at worst, a deliberate and malign distortion of a poorly designed poll, with a headline calculated to set the news agenda and serve the interests of Johnson and his strategy sidekick Dominic Cummings.

Let’s take the poll first. Anyone who understands questionnaire design will tell you that both question wording and question order can easily bias responses if not carefully drafted.

There was little sign of careful drafting. The headline was based on a question which invited respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Boris needs to deliver Brexit by any means, including suspending parliament if necessary, in order to prevent MPs from stopping it”.

It doesn’t take a research methods expert to understand that there are at least four problems here. First, there is 'Boris': not 'Mr Johnson' or 'the PM' but that nice uncle 'Boris' with whom we are all intimately familiar. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Second there is the double question, breaking all the usual rules of simplicity, which buries the suspension of Parliament inside a statement about delivering Brexit “by any means”. Third, there is what academics grandly call “acquiescence bias” which simply means we’re all more prone to agreeing with statements than disagreeing with them.

Fourth, and most egregious of all, there is the rider that this is all about preventing MPs from stopping Brexit rather than allowing MPs to prevent a no-deal Brexit (which would almost certainly command a higher level of support).

That rider is even more problematic given the order of questions, because it followed almost immediately after two bluntly anti Parliament agree/disagree statements. One read: “On Brexit, most MPs seem to ignore the wishes of voters and push their own agendas”, the other “Parliament is out of touch with the British public”.

In the art of questionnaire design, respondent-priming is a well-known phenomenon and generally avoided. By the time they got to the uncle Boris question, respondents would hardly be well disposed to MPs. Had the Parliament suspension question come first, unqualified by cuddly Boris or those dastardly MPs, the results would almost certainly have been very different.

Then there was the Telegraph reporting, which deliberately distorted weak data to produce the headline they desperately wanted in pursuit of their unadulterated pro-Johnson agenda.

That suspending Parliament has “the support of more than half of the public” is a straightforward lie, derived from ignoring the one in five “don’t knows”. In fact, 44% agreed with the dodgy statement, 37% disagreed, and 19% said they did not know. However much you try to slice up the statistical cake, 44% is not half the British public.

There has been at least one accuracy complaint to the puppet press “regulator” IPSO which, if past behaviour is any guide, will now take several months to determine that everything is absolutely fine; or that perhaps a tiny correction might be warranted sometime next decade at the bottom of page 17. By which time either Brexit or Boris (and quite possibly both) will be ancient history.

If this was a single lapse – either by polling company or by publisher – it might be less worrying. But our Brexit-loving press will be using every conceivable device over the next 10 weeks to persuade MPs that a PM with no democratic mandate of his own is reflecting the Will of the People in his determination to crash us out of the EU.

Not only will they be exploiting polling companies who really ought to know better. They will also be exploiting broadcasters who routinely feature the next day’s press headlines in their programmes, as if these come from trusted bi-partisan seekers after truth rather than propaganda machines for Johnson and his band of hardline Brexiteers.

With declining circulations, the Telegraph, Sun, Mail and Express should be less powerful than during their halcyon days of last century’s elections. But their ability to influence agendas in other news organisations, and to provide content for TV programmes that are cash-strapped and seemingly addicted to newspaper headlines whatever their circulations, remain as potent as ever.

It will therefore be down to the producers of those programmes on the BBC News Channel and Sky News, as well as Newsnight, Marr, Peston and all the other political programmes that still love to feature our daily papers, to treat every poll and every statement of “public opinion” with a huge dose of scepticism. They need to remember that there are newspaper journalists and editors who, whether deliberately or not, are spreading misleading information under the cloak of “objective” opinion research.

As for the pollsters, it is time they took responsibility for how their work is reported as well as conducted. The Market Research Society used to insist that its members take steps “to check and where necessary amend any client-prepared materials prior to publication”. But many (including ComRes who conducted the Telegraph poll) do not belong to the MRS, and therefore allow themselves to become accomplices to newspaper propaganda.

They, along with responsible broadcasters, academics, and ordinary members of the public, should be watching carefully and calling out bogus claims about public opinion.

All the available evidence suggests that the German government rejects lesbian asylum cases at a higher rate than those of gays after the first interview, and perhaps as many as 95% of asylum applications filed by lesbians racialized as Black. We cannot know for sure because the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) does not maintain a separate register for LGBTQI+ asylum cases. In contrast, the Germany-wide rejection rate for LGBTQI+ individuals seeking asylum is 50% and for heterosexual women 30%.

This enormous difference suggests that lesbians face specific challenges when seeking refugee protection in Germany. This particularly applies to one of the most vulnerable cohorts within the German asylum system – lesbian women racialised as Black.

Lesbians should not be finding this as difficult as they do. In line with EU Directive 2011/95/EU, Germany recognises human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity as grounds for seeking asylum. Germany also recognised that gender-based violence could meet the legal definition of persecution as understood by the 1951 Refugee Convention when it ratified the Istanbul Convention in 2011. This has been a boon primarily for heterosexual women asylum seekers. BAMF statistics show that while over 50% of women seeking asylum have successfully gained refugee status as victims of gender-specific persecution (i.e. forced marriage, FGM, honor killing, rape, domestic violence, or sex trafficking), lesbians still struggle to validate violence experienced on the basis of their sexuality as a reason for refugee protection.

Hope’s search for asylum

I met Hope, a lesbian from Uganda, at a networking event for non-binary, gender queer asylum seekers and refugees in Germany in 2018. She told me her story.

Hope was 15 years old when she had her first sexual encounter with a woman. Two years later her father married her off to a friend, an elderly man with multiple wives, to ‘correct’ her sexual orientation. He was an abusive man. According to Hope, the violence he meted out caused her to lose two pregnancies within the first year. Unable to tolerate the situation, Hope convinced her father to let her study at the university in Kampala and she left her husband behind.

At university she met and fell in love with someone who would stay her partner for the next ten years. Their relationship took place at a time of rapidly increasing anti-LGBT politics and violence in Uganda, culminating in the Anti-Homosexual Bill of 2014. For this reason, the couple was very cautious to keep their relationship secret.

Their apartment was raided by a mob in 2017 and her partner was heavily injured. The partner was ultimately brought to the hospital, however Hope ended up in police custody for almost a week. She refused to speak about her time in jail, but after the incident she fled from Uganda.

With the support of her mother, Hope arranged air travel to Italy through a local ‘travel agent’. The agent deceived her, Hope said, and after arriving in Italy she was forced into prostitution. After serving about five ‘clients’ a day over the course of a month, one of her regulars helped her make the journey to Germany where she registered as an asylum seeker in February 2018. Hope currently lives as a closeted lesbian in a refugee camp in a small Bavarian town together with other asylum seekers from mostly Sub-Saharan countries – the same people she fled from in the first place.

Hope denied

In August 2018, BAMF rejected her claim on the grounds that her account of her homosexuality, harm, and pain was not credible. The decision states that Hope does not fall under the protection of the 1951 Refugee Convention because “she has not successfully established a substantiated fear of being persecuted”. Hope’s assertion that she is a survivor of forced marriage, marital rape, domestic violence, and sex trafficking – violations directly connected to her sexual orientation – was entirely erased in the decision. These severe human rights violations were deemed either not directly related to her LGBT asylum claim or not credible.

The interviewer also questioned Hope’s identity homosexuality in general. Hope’s homosexuality was not explicit enough for her to receive asylum. The interviewer did not believe that Hope could be a lesbian if she did not sleep with women between high school and university, as the verbatim transcript of the asylum interview protocol shows. They doubted that Hope could secretly lead a relationship with a woman in Uganda for almost a decade. And they found it suspicious that Hope had not yet engaged in sexual relationships with women in Germany, now that she is free to do so. On these grounds, Hope’s application was denied.

Why did this happen? How could BAMF categorically reject both Hope’s identity as a homosexual and the link between that sexuality and the violence she has endured – violence that is grounds for asylum according to the Istanbul Convention of 2011?

“Lesbian asylum seekers face a double discrimination within Germany’s asylum system because they are women and lesbians”, said a counsellor at a lesbian counselling centre in Bavaria. According to centre, lesbian asylum seekers in Germany are primarily rejected for three reasons: first, they are reluctant to immediately out themselves during the hearing (for many women to even utter the words “I am a lesbian” is extremely difficult); second, evidence of a non-stereotypical gay lifestyle, including previous or existing marriages and children; and third, their inability to offer a narrative of pain and suffering that is rich in details due to trauma.

In short, if a lesbian asylum seeker fails to depict her sexual orientation as “fateful and irreversible” (so the wording of the German LGBT asylum law), if she fails to conform to stereotypes held by the interviewer or the judge about homosexual life, and if she fails to narrate episodes of violence with great accuracy – including exact dates and places – she risks her status as a protection-worthy subject as stipulated under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Sometimes even that is not enough. As the counsellor noted, some judges and asylum interviewers simply don’t believe a Black lesbian could exist in the first place.

Black lesbians seeking asylum in Germany grapple with a system that privileges heterosexual women who embody heteronormative norms of motherhood and female vulnerability, on the one hand, and LGBTQI+ individuals whose queer asylum story of pain and suffering neatly fits Western expectations of visible intimacy and love, on the other. Since the sexual asylum stories of lesbians from sub-Saharan Africa tend to fit neither of these victimhood tropes, they risk being excluded from the humanitarian framework of refugee protection within the European Common Asylum System.

To better protect Hope we have given her a pseudonym and altered her location in Germany.

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While Colombia is known for its vast coca fields, the hillsides of its Cauca region are covered in another illicit crop: highly potent marijuana.

These lucrative strains of cannabis — known collectively as “cripa,” “cripy,” or “creepy” — are being grown in vast quantities by farmers, sold by local gangs, and trafficked by powerful criminal groups that have come to control its cultivation and transport to neighboring countries.

What distinguishes creepy marijuana is its high levels of the psychoactive drug THC. Whereas normal marijuana’s THC concentrations hover in the single digits, creepy contains between 15 and 25 percent, said Juan Daniel Gómez, a professor of neuroscience at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. And it produces a different effect: “The high is much higher but also shorter,” Gómez said.

While it’s still unclear whether such powerful strains of marijuana are harmful, it is well known that THC has the potential to aggravate psychiatric conditions. Gómez said that use of creepy has skyrocketed locally, with addiction clinics in Colombia seeing more patients abusing the drug.

“What surprises me is that you practically can’t get regular marijuana now,” Gómez said.Colombia’s marijuana boom is largely centered in Cauca, a department that touches the Pacific Ocean and contains the colonial city of Popayán.

Desolate mountain towns in its northern reaches provide fertile ground for the crop. Cauca accounted for 233 hectares of marijuana in 2016, according to the Colombian Drug Observatory(Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia – ODC).

The number, however, is likely higher, given that no survey method has been developed in Colombia for marijuana crops, the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)’s Illicit Cultivations Monitoring System (Sistema Integrado de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilícitos – SIMCI) said in its 2016 report.

More than 6,000 farmers grow marijuana in northern Cauca. These farms can range from family-tended plots of a few hundred plants to four or five hectares controlled by drug trafficking groups, an agricultural engineer who works in marijuana cultivation told InSight Crime.

The average plot has about 2,000 plants, and a pound of marijuana costs anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000 Colombian pesos ($9 to $45), depending on crop yields, he said.

Local indigenous groups were the first to cultivate cannabis in the region, and are permitted to do so under tribal law. The potent strains of what became known as creepy began arriving in the early 1980s from Europe, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that their cultivation really took off, thanks to investment from trafficking groups. “It got out of hand,” the agricultural engineer said.

The creepy bonanza has drawn criminal actors of all stripes. Small local gangs traffic marijuana to Colombian cities, while illegal armed groups such as the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), and dissidents from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC) demand “vacunas,” or taxes, on the transport, sale and movement of the drug. According to Semana Rural, one ex-FARC mafia cell in northern Cauca counts some 200 men.

Large-scale traffickers fill trucks with up to 3,000 pounds of marijuana, the source said. “The narcotraffickers have almost everything bought up.”

The criminal groups have also brought with them renewed violence to the region as they battle it out for control of illicit crops, which also include coca and poppy. In 2019, more than 30 indigenous leaders have been gunned down in northern Cauca, and pamphlets — under various names — have disseminated threats against them.

“All of this robbed us of our peace,” an indigenous leader told Semana. “Crime, robbery, killings all shot up.”

Marijuana Movement

In June, authorities in Colombia seized more than 500 kilograms of creepy marijuana, with several seizures occurring in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla. Shipped by courier, the drug was hidden in cargo consisting of shoes, clothes, and produce. Smugglers also concealed 75 kilograms of the drug within metal doorframes. The frames were stuffed with mayonnaise, ketchup and coffee to mask the marijuana’s odor, though a drug dog sniffed out the ruse.

The marijuana was largely destined for a gang known as “Los Costeños” that runs drug trafficking points in and around the city, El Heraldo reported. Similarly, in Medellín, local mafias under the criminal federation known as the Oficina de Envigado are behind the sale and distribution of creepy marijuana, according to El Colombiano.

Massive quantities of the drug have also begun to be smuggled. In April of 2018, more than 3,500 kilograms were discovered in a tanker truck at a checkpoint just north of Cauca. The department recently saw a seizure of about 1.5 tons of the marijuana, wrapped in brown tape and stamped with the faces of Osama Bin Laden and Pablo Escobar.

The large shipments travel along established cocaine routes to other countries, including those dominated by drug trafficking groups in the Santa Marta region, on the Caribbean Coast. From there the marijuana is sent by boat to Trinidad and Tobago and Central America, where it sells for up to $4,000 a kilogram.

Traffickers have even smuggled the drug with cocaine. In Bolivia, authorities discovered nearly 200 kilograms of creepy marijuana alongside some 120 kilograms of cocaine paste after tracking a helicopter to a hidden airstrip.

Up to a ton of Colombian creepy marijuana crosses into Venezuela each month, according to authorities. Often concealed in sacks of sugar or within machinery, it is smuggled aboard cargo trucks that reach Venezuela’s northern coastline, where it is loaded onto small boats heading to other points in the Caribbean.

Marijuana destined for Brazil from Cauca moves east through the Amazon region. In July, authorities dismantled a criminal group, Los Puntilleros, that smuggled three tons of the drug each month by truck along this route, ultimately passing it along to the powerful Brazilian gang, Family of the North (Familia do Norte – FDN).

And creepy marijuana from Colombia has made it as far south as Chile, passing through both Ecuador and Peru, according to the State Department’s 2019 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. There it sells for as much as $5,000 per kilogram.

Farming Towns

In northern Cauca, a line of four towns, about 80 kilometers apart, run along the hillsides of marijuana plantations. Together, Miranda, Corinto, Toribío and Jambaló have a population of about 100,000 people, with nearly half living in rural parts.The agricultural engineer who spoke to InSight Crime said that in these villages, up to 70 percent of rural and indigenous families are living off marijuana cultivation.

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Growing this highly potent cannabis is not simple — but over time the Cauca farmers have become “specialists in its cultivation,” the engineer said. The rigging of night time grow lights, which increase crop yield, is now so common that when it gets dark, the hills appear to be dotted with “Christmas créches,” he said.

To stop the growth in illegal cannabis, Colombia officials have ordered the region’s electricity to be cut off at night. Late last month, however, angry residents in Corinto and Miranda protested the blackouts, blocking roads and service workers from reaching energy substations. They even confronted local police.

The engineer said he would prefer the government find a way to work with the farmers, either through the growing of marijuana for legal uses or through crop substitution programs.

Turning off the lights will do little, he said.

“The marijuana,” he said, “is everywhere.”

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This article was previously published by InSight Crime. Read the original here