The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes practicable international public policy responses to those problems.
Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), chapters examine topics such as education, violence, discrimination, substance abuse, public health, and environment. The volume provides recommendations for action by governing officials, policy makers, and the public around key issues of social justice.
The book will be of interest to scholars, practitioners, advocates, journalists, and students interested in public sociology, the study of social problems, and the pursuit of social justice.
constitutional principles, including equality and dignity, in Chapter 3. The chapter concludes with a short comment bringing together material focused on campaigns to enhance aspects of the ‘right to a nationality’ via constitutional amendments (and thus to eliminate statelessness), drawing on issues discussed in previous sections. This concluding section also highlights, by way of comparison, another field of campaigning, in the area of gender equality. In some cases, the two sets of campaigns merge together, as in the case of efforts to ensure that mothers and fathers
School segregation—the uneven distribution of students across schools, based on their socioeconomic status (SES), sex, race/ethnicity, or other ascribed characteristics—has important implications for educational inequality, social cohesion, and intergenerational mobility (Bonal and Bellei, 2019). While this topic has drawn special attention in the US, due, in part, to the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court case, between-school segregation is a concern to policymakers and researchers worldwide. School segregation by race dominates much of the research on this topic in the US, but studies of school segregation by SES predominate internationally. This chapter summarizes what we know about betweenschool segregation by SES, describing the strongest international evidence we have, drawing attention to the consequences of segregation and the benefits of integration, and concluding with a discussion of solutions. Residential segregation, migration movements, economic inequalities, and even education policies themselves have shaped a growing process of school segregation between the world’s most disadvantaged students and the wealthiest. School composition matters, and it impacts students’ short- and long-term academic and social-emotional outcomes. Student performance is more strongly related to SES than to other school compositional characteristics, such as gender, immigrant status, or race/ethnicity. Indeed, research indicates that disadvantaged students who attend schools with more affluent peers see a range of positive effects, including increased achievement, motivation, and resiliency (Van Ewijk and Sleegers, 2010; Agasisti et al, 2021). A school’s average SES is highly predictive of its academic climate and instructional quality, both factors associated with educational outcomes.
The global fight against the victimization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth has led to a prolific backlash. The LGBTQ+ “safe schools” movement has gotten violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity recognized as a problem by the United Nations (UN). However, this victory has resulted in the greater availability of anti-LGBTQ+ tropes for use as political fodder by bad-faith actors seeking to undermine progress toward the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, in particular, and democratic values, more generally. We are specifically concerned in this chapter with how opportunistic anti-LGBTQ+ state regimes clash with the UN vision for LGBTQ+-inclusive sustainable development, with resulting harm to LGBTQ+ youth. In this first section, we describe the safe schools movement, explain its connection to the UN’s commitment to education justice, and point to how countermovements around the globe endeavor to quash the hard-won achievements of LGBTQ+ rights movements by targeting sexual and gender minority youth. Following the lead of sexual and gender minority youth who have begun to demand safety and dignity around the world, the global safe schools movement is an informal network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active on nearly every continent. It is concerned with the prevalence and effects of bias-based violence and discrimination against primary and secondary school students who do not conform to socially dominant or expected sexuality and gender norms. The transnational movement is united by two shared goals: to document LGBTQ+ youth experiences through research; and to promote affirming school climates through advocacy.
Until the 1970s, violence against women (VAW) was framed as a private issue and remained conspicuously absent from the public sphere and policy debates. Today, owing to decades of protest by women’s movements in different parts of the world, VAW—and gender-based violence (GBV) directed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other non-heteronormative (LGBTQI+) individuals—is widely recognized as a serious human rights violation and a health problem that disproportionately affects women.
Patriarchy, which subjects women and girls to violence because of their sex, is the root cause of VAW and GBV. As the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) put it: [VAW] is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women … [VAW] is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.
Feminists have always challenged the private–public dichotomy, which serves to depoliticize the unequal power relations within the home, where VAW often takes place. The terms used, as discussed by Ertürk (2016), to refer to the problem are instructive of the shifts in how VAW has been framed. The First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 made reference to “unity of the family and prevention of intra-family conflicts.” Five years later, at the Copenhagen Conference, a resolution on “battered women and the family” was adopted, and the concluding document made reference to “domestic violence.”
Fatphobia—that is, the fear, hatred, and loathing of fat bodies—is pervasive worldwide. Studies show that fat people experience discrimination in employment, education, media, interpersonal relationships, politics, and especially healthcare. Fatphobia starts young and runs deep; fatphobic attitudes have been recorded in children as young as three and become more pronounced with age. Cross-cultural studies confirm that socialization to fatphobia is not limited to North American populations. Data from the Project Implicit study, including over 300,000 respondents from 71 nations, demonstrate consistent pro-thin, anti-fat biases. A recent examination of longitudinal trends in prejudicial attitudes toward a range of stigmatized groups found that between 2007 and 2016, both explicit fatphobic attitudes (for example, acknowledging a preference for thin people over fat people) and implicit fatphobic attitudes (for example, associating negative words and phrases with images of fat people) either remained stable or increased, while stigma toward many other oppressed groups showed a downward trajectory.
Despite these findings, fatphobia is rarely seen as an important social justice issue and global social problem. This is because, unlike other marginalized identities, we are taught to see being fat as a “choice,” specifically, a bad choice. In many countries, fat bodies are viewed exclusively through medical and public health discourses that label fat bodies as diseased and therefore in need of prevention, intervention, and cure, regardless of the risks involved. This creates an environment in which fat people are blamed for their own oppression and makes it socially acceptable to censure, intimidate, harass, and discriminate against fat people because of their weight.
Opium originated in lower Mesopotamia in 3,400 BC and was used in many regions of the world throughout history before making its way to the US. It was not until the 1860s that opium-based drugs, such as morphine, were used by Civil War doctors to treat the pain of wounded soldiers. The Bayer Company later introduced heroin as a cough suppressant and an alternative to morphine, with the US government placing restrictions in the 1910s–1920s that outlawed heroin and required a prescription for opioids. The Controlled Substance Act was passed in the 1970s, which created five different groupings, or schedules, for all substances based on their medical use, potential for abuse, and safety.
Opioids are a class of drugs used to treat pain and include both prescription medications (for example, OxyContin, hydrocodone, morphine, and fentanyl) and heroin. Misuse or abuse of opioids can lead to an addiction, which is clinically referred to as opioid use disorder. The opioid crisis began in the 1990s with the development and increased prescription of OxyContin to treat pain. US-based drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma assured that patients would not develop an opioid use disorder and pharmaceutical sales skyrocketed, with aggressive marketing strategies and plans to expand sales globally. That decade ended with a rising number of fatal overdoses directly related to the use of prescription opioids.
While efforts focused on the global seizure of pharmaceutical opioids, the unattended effect was rising global opium production, which resulted in an increase in heroin with low cost and high availability.
Globally, an estimated one in four people still lack access to safe drinking water and nearly half of the global population—about 3.6 billion people—lack access to safe sanitation services (WHO, 2019). These statistics have shifted drastically over the years, depending on how access and safety are defined. Back in 2015, when safe water and sanitation were synonymous with improved sources—meaning likely to be protected from outside contamination through construction or intervention—it was estimated that over 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to safe water and only 2.4 billion people lacked access to safe sanitation services (UNICEF and WHO, 2015). The discrepancies between these two sets of statistics underpin the significant challenges still faced in measuring and increasing access to safe drinking water and sanitation services around the world. The ever-changing definitions of what constitutes safe water and sanitation have made it difficult to collect consistent statistical data on the situation, with access either over- or underestimated, depending on the definition. Furthermore, due to a focus on technological efforts, negative shifts in access may well be indications of backsliding, for example, when infrastructure breaks or loses efficacy. In combination with a growing body of scholarly and gray literature highlighting the systemic nature of inequalities influencing water poverty (see UNICEF and WHO, 2015; Anand, 2017; DigDeep, 2019; TMI, 2019), there is a need for a more holistic and sustained shift in how safe water and sanitation are defined, in how data are collected, and toward policy- rather than technology-focused efforts.
In a global pandemic, a critical challenge is ensuring widespread access to vaccines to achieve needed levels of population immunity. With the first vaccine rollout in early 2021, 15 COVID-19 vaccines are currently in use worldwide, with Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech doses being the most prevalent. By August 2021, of the 5.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses administered globally, 80 per cent had gone to high- or upper-middle-income countries. Only 0.2 per cent had been delivered to low-income countries. In high-income nations, one in four people had been vaccinated, a ratio that plummets to one in 500 in poorer countries.
Despite international efforts to address vaccine access, most notably, through the creation of COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), a global vaccine-sharing program, low- and middle-income countries are struggling to procure vaccines in a market cornered by rich nations, who are willing to pay premiums to hoard vaccines while slow-walking financial pledges that COVAX needed to purchase vaccines from manufacturers.
Vaccine inequity is not only a moral problem, but also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating. It affects the entire global community, fueling the rise of new, vaccine-resistant variants and dragging down the economies of rich and poor nations—and vaccinated and unvaccinated populations—alike. Data from the US National Bureau of Economic Research show that due to the interconnectedness of the global economy, COVID-19 outcomes for the entire global economy are highly dependent on poorer countries’ populations getting vaccinated. Richer economies will still bear 49 per cent of the global costs of the pandemic, even if their own populations are entirely inoculated.
In many countries in the Global South, there is a profound deficit of medical professionals. For example, World Bank (2017) data for sub-Saharan Africa showed that this region faces one of the worst health worker shortages, with only 0.2 physicians per 1,000 population. In response to these critical shortages, the World Health Organization (WHO) has advocated for the use of community health workers (CHWs) and promoted their occupational development. CHWs are community members whose purpose is to serve as intermediaries between patients in local neighborhoods or villages and the formal health system. They are trained and then tasked with a range of medical and public health services, including peer education and counseling on topics like nutrition, family planning, and disease prevention, as well as basic clinical tasks, such as taking vital signs, filling out patient registries, and monitoring adherence to medications. However, CHWs are seldom recognized as full-time workers deserving of pay, benefits, and occupational safety protections. By replacing trained health professionals with semiskilled CHWs, global health organizations have introduced a temporary solution to address a far more complex problem of health worker scarcity in the Global South.
Both governments and global health organizations recognize the value of CHW programs in expanding access to care. Some countries, such as Brazil and South Africa, have large CHW programs as part of their primary healthcare systems, funded by both national governments and global health organizations. In addition, donors in the global health field heavily fund nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that rely on CHWs to provide services. CHWs have been especially important in responses to health crises.
