By Professor Olinga Ta’eed
Director, Centre for Citizenship,
Enterprise and Governance
Intuition
tells us that these three subjects must be connected by sentiment if nothing
else. Words such as rage, oppression, freedom are emotive expressions which until recently could not be quantified
and thus only qualitatively connected. The latter makes for an interesting lecture,
but frankly it’s hardly ground breaking. This made last weeks inaugural lecture
by Dr Jarka Hrabetova, our newly appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance all the more fascinating in her unique
approach to these delicate subjects.
Her research
sample consisted of all imprisoned women who had perpetrated murder in one particular prison ie half of
all incarcerated women in the Czech Republic. The data detected the forms of
murderous behaviour of women, the typology of murder by motivation, mapping the
social situation of female convicts in prison, selected attitudes of homicide
offenders including the analysis of family murders. The results indicate that most
are intimate murders with the most common being partner homicide in conflict
situations, long-term domestic violence and excessive alcohol consumption for
both victim and perpetrator. The 100+ academic audience found comfort in her
robust methodology which supported her conclusions but the real surprise was
what she presented next.
Building on
the results of her sound but traditional research approach, Jarka has gone on
to use Sentiment Analysis, a methodology stemming from the burgeoning Semantic
Web 3.0, to analyse her data with a view to devise quantifiable metrics to
define, and thereby forecast,
catastrophic events based on emotion – like murder. This is the stuff of
the future and her work cannot be undervalued. My daughter, Tigris, has drawn
out the analogy to Tom Cruise’s 2002 film ‘Minority
Report’ where foreknowledge Is used to predict crime. This is powerful
stuff.
Going even further, Jarka’s has
extended her theory to applications in Domestic Violence, Honoured Based
Violence and Modern Slavery. Using the Social Earnings Ratio in the context of ‘Personal
Value’, she is defining trigger points to intimate murders, to DV and HBV in
the context of criminology. And even further still, the Modern Slavery Act 2015
which is obtained Queen’s Royal Ascent in March 2015 in the UK will be enacted
later this year. Companies with turnover of more than UK£36m will
have to disclose whether they are making efforts to eliminate slavery in supply
chains. Modern Slavery has principally two components – pay and oppression –
and Jarka is working to define the latter benchmark whilst her colleague, Rani
Kaur, works on the former. In this respect Jarka’s previous research work on
Human Trafficking and her 12 year background in the police force has provided
us with great insights. CCEG aims to provide the go-to metric behind the Modern
Slavery Act 2015, just as we have become the leading provider of measurement
under the Social Value Act 2012.
We are
living in a time when how we feel about things can be quantified and becomes
the new lexicon of intangible non-financial values. These modern tools such as
S/E allow Jarka to seamlessly draw from her Prague work on female perpetrators
of murder and apply it to the measurement of Ambition for the Arts Council in
Corby, a middle-England town which is the focus of her most recent work. Who
would have believed that would be possible?
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[The views and opinions expressed in this blogs by guests or members of the CCEG are those of the author, and not of the CCEG or the University of Northampton Business School]
