Survey ranking of world cities – from Thomson Reuters survey site

What happens when you conduct an economic survey of rising price index and select only lower income group, people, to opine? Will you get a correct indication of the economy? Or What happens when you ask strict vegetarians about the pros and cons of eating non-veg? Will you ever get a correct comparison?

In 2011 Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) has conducted a opinion based survey to find out world’s most dangerous nations and megacities. They published the result for megacities in 2017 and in 2018 they published the list of world’s most dangerous nations.

Survey on World’s Most Dangerous Countries

Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) asked the selected women’s rights activists of each countries questions on Healthcare, Cultural Traditions, Sexual Violence, Non-sexual violence and Human Trafficking.

These results were published in 2018, one year after they published the results for the dangerous cities. Since we exposed their previous survey, in this survey for the countries, they had added elaborate questions. Problem is if they had conducted the survey in 2011, and for the previous survey on cities they published a different set of questions, it is highly unlikely that they would have asked different questions when they did a survey for the countries. But let’s keep that aside and focus on the questions asked.

Healthcare

On Healthcare they asked – ”

In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of health? This includes general health access to optometrists, dentists, general doctors and specialist doctors who have expertise knowledge in disabilities, diseases or dealing with trauma. When we talk about health, we are also referring to the lack of healthcare, maternal mortality, awareness and prevention of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases and reproductive health including family planning, contraception and other general female health care.

Question is these NGO workers who work in a specific country, how do they know about other countries, and how can they rank countries in any order unless they have complete information? So, it is completely a bogus approach to find anything.

Discrimination

For discrimination, they asked –

In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of the lack of access to economic resources/discrimination? This includes job discrimination; an inability to make a livelihood; discriminatory land, property or inheritance rights; a lack of access to education and a lack of access to adequate nutrition.

In this category India was ranked below countries like Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan etc. and you know in all the above categories this is surely not true. The question again, how do the unknown NGO workers working in one country know details about other countries? How could they take any informed decision?

Cultural Traditions

The question asked was – In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of cultural, tribal and religious traditions or customary practices? This includes acid attacks, female genital mutilation, child marriage; forced marriage, stoning, physical abuse or mutilation as a form of punishment/retribution and female infanticide.

India came out to be worst in this category. I am still wondering when did we hear about Mutilation as a punishment to women? or stoning to death for women? Definitely, the NGOs that took part in the survey were not at all informed about the situation or had different intentions.

Sexual Violence

The question asked was –

In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of sexual violence? This includes rape as a weapon of war, domestic rape, rape by a stranger, the lack of access to justice in rape cases, sexual harassment and coercion into sex as a form of corruption.

India performed as the worst country in this category as well and we know the reality why Indian rape stories become worldwide news and why world media wants to talk about it -Details here

Non-Sexual Violence

In terms of non-sexual violence, the survey asked this question –

In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of non-sexual violence? This includes conflict-related violence, domestic, physical and mental abuse.

India featured after Afganistan and Syria. Much worse than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Yemen and I am sure we don’t need to elaborate anything else on this as the criminal intention of Thomson Reuters is clear from this.

Human Trafficking

Question asked was –

In your view, what is the most dangerous country in the world for women in terms of human trafficking? This includes domestic servitude, forced labour; bonded labour, forced marriage and sexual slavery.

I am sure that in this category too, India came as the worst country worst than Phillippines, Thailand and Afganistan, I am sure I don’t need to tell you more about the intention of the survey. Which is of course clear.

Story of India

The survey site also gives us a story from India and claims that from maids to managers all face sexual abuse. It gives an example of a random woman who termed Delhi as the rape capital of India. A claim which can be easily refuted if you read – This.

It tells some unverified stories and says that “at least 20 million women have left workforce since 2005 – partly due to poor treatment”. Now poor treatment doesn’t necessarily mean sexual harassment as the report tries to prove. This, however, shows the poor standard or the survey. This also tries to show some half-baked rape statistics that is already debunked in a previous article linked here.

In this story of India, if you notice, it was written by Annie Banerji and an Islamabad based journalist Zofeen Ibrahim. You will understand why we find these extremely hateful stories.

World’s Dangerous Megacities

Earlier Thomson Reuters also conducted a survey to find out world’s most dangerous megacities. They ranked top 19 most dangerous megacities of the world and selected 20 ‘experts’ in women’s issues from each city to opine.

This survey conducted on four different parameters of public life, i.e. i) Sexual Violence, ii) Access to Healthcare, iii). Cultural Practices and iv). Economic Opportunities and asked one question in each area that needed to rank their city based on their perception.

On the sampling of respondents, the Thomson Reuters site states –

“Our list of experts was compiled from a database of women rights’ experts built by the Thomson Reuters Foundation team that runs the annual Trust Conference and from key groups in each city in the survey. The list also reflected Google searches of the most prominent women’s issues experts in each city.”

So, only prominent feminists were asked questions (and not general sociologists or public or normal women) to create a perception of women’s safety. It was like asking activists like Medha Patkar to talk about “how Indian dams are safe for the environment (damn it)”. Will people like her who was under ED scanner for getting money from abroad to agitate Indians against all development projects, ever say that dams are also needed?

But intellectuals in Thomson Reuters have ranked world’s cities based on such biased poll and also claimed that they involved ‘StarMine’ a Thomson Reuters company that ‘specializes’ in models in analytics. The analytics industry should now die a thousand times for obvious reasons.

Methodology

The survey methodology was simple, Thomson Reuters team asked one question each to each participant over phone or email and asked them to give scores to their city. What a cost-effective method of doing a global survey and also to publish the results on a website. Amazing!!

Questions asked in each area are listed below –

Sexual Violence

Women can live in this city without facing the risk of sexual violence including rape or sexual attacks or harassment

Access to Healthcare

Women have good access to healthcare including control over reproductive health and maternal mortality

Cultural Practices

Women are well protected from potentially harmful cultural practices including female genital mutilation, child, early or forced marriage, female infanticide

Economic Opportunities

Women have access to economic resources such as education, ownership of land or other forms of property, and financial services such as bank accounts

So, we find that the survey questions (or statements?) were vague in nature and were based on one’s perspective on the issue. For example, what did ‘Good Access’ to health care mean? Could this be quantified or standardized to get the same perspective from all the respondents? What did ‘well protected’ mean? How much protection is ‘well’ and how much is not. Did all respondents have the same perspective about these generic terms? Did they use same yardsticks to measure these perspectives? Since there are too many parameters affecting these areas, we don’t see any expertise in data modelling or analytics here, and see a school level project that our kids do in their secondary standard, is being termed as ‘expert’ analytics. No wonder when some random journalists try to do something for money, they produce some crap, and then publish that on a glossy website to show how great their study was. Soon other idiots will refer to this study and will create global campaigns.

Survey Findings

In this survey, Delhi is ranked as #1 city in terms of sexual violence on women, so let’s look at what the feminist respondents had to say about this city. These stories are available in the ‘Stories’ section of the survey website.

While the survey wanted to rank the current situation in these cities, the story starts with 2012 Delhi gang rape. Clearly, the 2012 incident played a major role in ranking, when the survey was for a recent time.

Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, head of U.N. Women in India who also worked in Brazil; said to Reuters that she was not surprised with poll results as the poll was based on perceptions and didn’t really mean the sex crimes in these cities are higher. She agreed that ‘there isn’t definitive data to suggest that rates are higher in Delhi or in Sao Paulo’.

Now, to understand what kind of NGOs were asked about their perception to rank these cities, we need to see the last part of the stories section on Sexual Violence, where Rishi Kant a Supreme Court advocate was quoted saying – “For too long, the perpetrators have acted with a sense of impunity. The certainty of punishment is the best deterrent.”

When we know that he is from the NGO Shakti Vahini, that used to instigate women to file false rape cases, we know exactly why Delhi is ranked #1 city in this otherwise baseless and aimless survey.

The article says Shakti Vahini is a Delhi-based charity that supports victims, whereas they used to instigate women to file false rape cases and get money from those victims as well as from the accused. We know their charity has a reason.

Read more on Shakti Vahini’s foreign funding – here

The first news item above says, that the NGO Shakti Vahini was involved in thousands of rape cases where they claimed to have rescued a woman and then filed rape cases in court. Since they had tutored this minor girl to testify against a businessman that he had raped her, we can imagine how many more such cases were filed by them against different other men, who could not open their mouth in fear of shame.

Conclusion

From this kind of survey, we understand two things –

How false rape cases filed by these NGOs become the basis of shaming Delhi and thus India (because Delhi is the capital, so shaming Delhi is attacking India) and How these NGO lawyers got into our Supreme Court and we understand exactly why justice is a far cry in the Supreme Court today.

Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any NGO worker from one country will have full details of all these scenarios of other countries. From the survey findings when we see that it is highly unlikely that these NGOs even know properly about their own country then the question becomes how can this become a yardstick to find anything?

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