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Ethiopian immigrants in South Africa are increasingly occupying informal trading space in townships, rural areas and in select central business districts across the country. This article documents the experiences of Ethiopian migrants in the informal sector in South Africa. Theoretically, the article rests on the concept of everyday life. It draws on data from interviews, focus group discussions and observations carried out between October 2020 and September 2021. This signals a period in which everyone was challenged by COVID-19, especially migrants, which compounded the hierarchies of marginality in which Ethiopian migrants in South Africa are situated. Coupled with this, Ethiopian migrants face two broad levels of marginality: firstly, marginality from state policies and the communities in which they reside and work;and secondly, marginality from gendered and class-based inequalities within the Ethiopian community. The structural and hegemonic barriers range from lack of documentation to regularize residency status and business respectively, extortion by gangs in the name of "protection fee,” exploitation by local level state/community structures and women restricted to female roles. By the same token, we see the creativity and ingenuity of this community, that focuses on their personhood, to make sense of their lives and create conditions to live meaningful lives. This article explores some of the core contestations emerging out of these twin marginalities the ways in which Ethiopian migrants structure their lives and livelihoods in South Africa.
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Documented Risks Facing Migrants During Travel and at Border Detention Points Type of Risk Environmental Exposure Physical Injury during Transit due to Terrain Temperature Extremes Drowning Minimal or No Water for Consumption Starvation/Food Insecurity Insect Pests and Dangerous Animals or Plants Infection Parasitic Infection (example: infectious diarrhea) Endemic Diseases (example: Malaria, hepatitis) Skin and Tissue Infection (example: cellulitis) Disease due to Crowding (example: tuberculosis) Transport Accidents and Injury Traffic and Boating Accidents Heat and Cold Exposure in Unsafe Vehicles Economic Exploitation Robbery Extortion and Kidnapping Exploitation by Border Vendors/Employers Forced Drug and Contraband Trafficking Physical Harm Rape and Assault Placed into Human Trafficking Forced Prostitution Sport Murder Lack of Health Care Access An important factor in understanding and addressing current migration patterns is recognizing the push and pull factors that convince people and families to migrate. Environmental degradation of agricultural and habitat land, social violence for control of limited resources by gangs and cartels, corrupt governments, and cultural discrimination, as well as a rapidly changing world economy are inter-related push factors for migration.
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For decades, governments have sought to deter migration by investing in the development of migrant-sending communities, despite macroeconomic data that shows that development can increase emigration. However, emerging research suggests that well-designed aid can promote rootedness in home communities. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has increasingly attempted to use development to deter migration from the Northern Triangle states of Central America. Is this policy sound?This paper argues that development should not be instrumentalized to discourage people from migrating. It examines migration and development policies from the lens of Catholic social teaching, which recognizes the need for states to respect the agency of individuals. This is particularly important when it comes to complex and consequential decisions like whether to migrate. The Catholic Church recognizes both a right to migrate, when necessary, and the responsibility of states, particularly wealthy nations, to help people realize the right not to migrate;that is, to thrive in their home communities. The paper argues for US government assistance to alleviate poverty and invest in human capital in Central America, but independently of efforts to deter migration. Prioritizing aid to potential migrants risks reducing its effectiveness. The United States should instead pursue a whole-of-government strategy that emphasizes the right relationships with aid recipients, and that prioritizes and empowers the poor and marginalized. The paper is strongly influenced by the author's 15 years of work for Catholic agencies on migration and development, more than one-half of those with Catholic Relief Services.
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The impact of digital technology on the COVID pandemic, The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted an unavoidable flood in the utilization of advanced innovations because of the social removing standards and cross country lockdowns. Individuals and associations all around the world have needed to acclimate to better approaches for work and life. We investigate potential situations of the advanced flood and the exploration gives that emerge. An increment in digitalization is driving firms and instructive organizations to move to telecommute (WFH). Block chain innovation will become significant and will involve research on plan and guidelines. Gig laborers and the gig economy is probably going to increment in scale, bringing up issues of work portion, joint effort, inspiration, and parts of work over-burden and presenters. Working environment checking and techno-stress issues will become unmistakable with an increment in computerized presence. Online extortion is probably going to develop, alongside research on overseeing security. The guideline of the web, a distinct advantage, will be pivotal post-pandemic. Exploration might address the results and reasons for the advanced separation. Further, the issues of unhindered internet and zero-rating plans will justify investigation. A key examination issue will likewise be the effect and outcomes of web closures, as often as possible turned to by nations. Advanced cash, as well, accepts significance in emergency circumstances and examination will address their reception, outcomes, and mode. Parts of observation and protection gain significance with expanded computerized utilization.
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Ransomware constitutes a prevalent global cybersecurity threat since several years ago, but it is almost pandemic at present. To a larger extent, the growth of this criminal practice is due to its high economic efficiency and high degree of impunity. Efficiency in general is mainly a consequence of its high and sophisticated technical development more varieties, more devices to use it on and more functional complexity, while impunity is mostly the result of shortcomings and gaps in legal regulation. However, both of the aspects are closely related, as combating ransomware requires adopting and integrating technical solutions and legal sanctions with an interdisciplinary approach. Regretfully, the analyze of the ransomware’s background, theoretical framework and practice shows a vast majority of technical proposals and a lack of either interdisciplinary or legal studies. The technical as well as the legal dimensions of ransomware need to be addressed to properly understand the scope and nature of the problem and its potential solutions. Following this approach, some basic guidelines about defense, mitigation and sanction methods are proposed in order to reach a feasible response to the challenge of defeating ransomware. These include the definition of ransomware as an autonomous offence. After setting out the main results of the doctrine, the conclusion section specifies the solutions drawn from such an interdisciplinary technical-legal approach.
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Context: Food safety is essential for every human. It determines public health, nutrition, elimination of hunger, and the promotion of sustainable agriculture. It is crucial for sustainable production, consumption, and international food trade. Ensuring food safety is the fundamental challenge of the 21st century. Food safety is often related to food defense and includes protection against intentional contamination with various chemical, biological, or other harmful substances. By introducing food protection tools and methods, any company reduces risk and creates an opportunity to generate more significant and reliable profits and improved production for society. One such method could be the CARVER+Shock. The method is an offensive targeting prioritization tool that has been adapted for use in the food sector. Objective: The article aims to present the experience of the first implementation of CARVER+Shock in a Polish primary production company, to improve the approach to food safety and food defense. Methods: The article is a case study. Descriptive analysis was performed to analyze legal acts and safety management standards in food defense. The authors used the CARVER+Shock expert method to estimate companies’ vulnerability. CARVER is an acronym for Criticality, Accessibility, Recoverability, Vulnerability, Effect, Recognizability. The visualization and risk analysis were made using business process management and business process modeling (VACD diagram) Results and conclusions: Primary production enterprise dealing with the cultivation and confectioning of the pre-treatment and sale of peeled onions for further processing purposes was examined. Five essential stages of the production process were assessed, and risks were assigned. Recognizability and criticality turned out to be the most crucial attribute of CARVER+Shock. Overall, the study showed that the company was not fully prepared for the threat posed by food terrorism. The organization did not have any procedures describing how to proceed during deliberate attacks. In addition, workers had low awareness of food defense throughout the food chain. Based on these conclusions, several detailed improvement actions were formulated. The results obtained from the pioneering application of the CARVER+Shock method for a Polish primary production company may constitute a benchmark for other sectors of the food industry, both domestically and abroad. Significance: The article describes the results of the first Polish attempts to use CARVER+Shock and business process management to improve the approach to food safety in a primary production enterprise.
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Sexting is a common practice among young adults that consists of sending material with sexual content to other people. During the COVID-19 pandemic containment situation, the main means of exploring sexuality have been through digital devices. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the practice of sexting before and during confinement due to COVID-19 amongst Spanish university students. A longitudinal design was adopted from the application of an online survey based on three standardized and internationally used instruments on a sample of university students (n = 499) before and during confinement. The results indicated that the practice of sexting was slightly higher during confinement. At the same time, the use of dating applications was a conditioning factor in sexting. Furthermore, it was noted that sexting had a significant influence on college students' levels of self-control, depression, anxiety, and stress during confinement. Finally, the main conclusions of this study are discussed where the situation of confinement has had an impact on the lives of students and their habits of digital consumption and expression of sexuality.
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Originating and striking from anywhere, cyber-attacks have become ever more sophisticated in our modern society and users are forced to adopt increasingly good and vigilant practices to protect from them. Among these, ransomware remains a major cyber-attack whose major threat to end users (disrupted operations, restricted files, scrambled sensitive data, financial demands, etc.) does not particularly lie in number but in severity. In this study we explore the possibility of real-time detection of ransomware source through a linguistic analysis that examines machine translation relative to the Levenshtein Distance and may thereby provide important indications as to attacker’s language of origin. Specifically, the aim of our research is to advance a metric to assist in determining whether an external ransom text is an indicator of either a human- or a machine-generated cyber-attack. Our proposed method works its argument on a set of Eastern European languages but is applicable to a large(r) range of languages and/or probabilistic patterns, being characterized by usage of limited resources and scalability properties.
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There is a large body of international literature on most aspects of workplace bullying, yet there are only a few research articles dealing with bullying of bosses, managers, and leaders by their subordinates and staff members. Over time the term “upwards bullying” has been accepted as the generic term to describe this phenomenon but using these search terms does not provide a comprehensive indication of relevant publications. This literature review identifies and collates English language research on upwards bullying to document its research status, its lack of visibility in the workplace, and to connect upwards bullying with related research on aggression against supervisors and managers. Included is research that specifically labels the phenomena as upwards or upward bullying, along with related terms of subordinate-initiated bullying, supervisor-targeted bullying, bottom-up bullying, bullying the manager, and bullying the boss. Nonacademic publications are not included, nor is research on related workplace misbehavior such as cyberbullying, legal action resulting from upwards bullying or whistle blowers, and extortion or blackmail. Areas for further exploration in the field are identified with indicators of how this type of workplace bullying differs from lateral and downward bullying. Coverage up to the year 2020 is provided with the expectation that the trend of working from home driven by safety considerations during the COVID-19 epidemic could change employee responses and reactions to their workplace leaders and management.
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The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic and the Nigerian state’s attempt to enforce lockdown to prevent further spread of the virus using the security agents exposed citizens to brutalisation. This study was conducted to determine the lawfulness, necessity and proportionality of the security agents’ intervention in the enforcement of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in southeastern Nigeria. The main objective of the study was to determine the human rights violations and health problems experienced by citizens at the hands of security agents. The study utilised a descriptive cross-sectional online survey poll. Data were collected using a structured interview–questionnaire and analysed with the aid of STATA 12.1 software. The analysis utilised descriptive and inferential statistics with a level of significance of 5%. The results of the study showed that a total of 600 respondents participated in the survey with a mean age of 32.3±4.6 years with 408(68%) being males. Further results indicated that, on lawfulness and necessity of security agents’ involvement in the enforcement of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic containment, 482(94.5%) reported that it was lawful and necessary. On proportionality of the use of force, 449(74.8%) reported not proportional. Reported human rights violations by security agents included unjustifiable arrest and detention 275(53.9%), seizure/confiscation of properties 464(77.4%), briberies and extortion 470 (78.4%), sexual molestation 217(36.2%) and tear-gassing of human gatherings 194(32.4%). There was an association between security agents’ arbitrary detention and health challenges of victims. Reported health challenges were: paralysis (94.6%), arthritis (85.7%) and mental health challenges (86.2%). Significant associations were established in in-the-cell fight with injury (p<0.01) and paralysis (p<0.04). Similar significant associations were established between the use of tear-gas and chest-tightness (p<0.02) and choking sensation/shortness of breath (p<0.04). The use of pernicious force by the security agents in the COVID-19 lockdown control was excessive. The paper recommended that efforts should be made by the government of Nigeria and stakeholders to apply least intrusive means of public health management such as social marketing, education and facilitation engagement.
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How do changes in mobility impact crime? Using police precinct-level daily crime statistics and shootings data from the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we estimate that extortion, theft, and robberies decrease by at least 41.6 percent following COVID-19 mandated stay-at-home orders and changes in mobility in March 2020. Conversely, we find no change in violent crimes, despite fewer people being on the streets. To address the relationship between crime and mobility, we use cellphone data and split the precincts into subgroups by pre-Covid-19-related restrictions mobility quintiles. We estimate a similar average decrease in extortion regardless of a precinct’s previous activity level, but find that the decrease in theft and robberies is substantially higher for the more mobile precincts while it disappears for the least mobile precincts. Using daily cellphone mobility data aggregated at the police precinct level, we find that changes in mobility while the stay-at-home order is in place only have a meaningful effect on robberies, which increase in likelihood when a precinct’s mobility ranking is higher than the previous day. Together, these results suggest that the stay-at-home order and associated decline in mobility strongly affected extortion and property crimes while not interfering with the dynamics of violent crime. These findings support the hypothesis that violent and property crime follow different dynamics, particularly where there is a bigger impact of organized criminal groups.