INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FORCULTURAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
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Reposted from ArtSentry
Museums, art, and cultural institutions often hold a history heavy in Western and Euro-centric views. Additionally, these cultural centers haven’t always been equally accessible to everyone within the greater community.
To support diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) initiatives, museums and their counterparts must address the social and systemic exclusion many still feel in museum culture. Here are some ways for cultural institutions to create a more inclusive and equitable environment for their visitors.
A staff that’s representative of the diverse community around you can make the environment more welcoming and inclusive for visitors of diverse backgrounds. From volunteers and interns to leadership and board members, the more diversity within your team, the more diverse and inclusive your facility will be.
As a museum or art and cultural institution, you have the opportunity to curate inclusive events and exhibits that represent a multitude of perspectives. For the inclusive experience of your visitors, it’s important to involve multiple perspectives in the curation, development, and presentation of each event or exhibit. To do this, look for ways to involve new voices from the community or within your team to introduce different perspectives and create internal strategic goals to measure your progress.
To provide equitable access, museums and institutions need to first recognize and understand the different needs within their community, then find ways to meet them through programs, initiatives, or events. Eliminating these obstacles provides more equitable access for all visitors.
Equitable financial access might include free admission days or discounted entry through community partnerships. To provide equitable geographic access, your institution might organize transportation for groups to visit together or bring educational or cultural experiences to the community through after-school programs, online platforms, or community events.
To understand your community's unique and diverse needs, consider hosting community discussions or speaking with local community leaders. Make it a goal to collaborate and engage directly with the community you’re seeking to serve to provide more equitable and inclusive experiences for them.
Keep DEAI top-of-mind for all your staff to build a continuous, sustained effort towards equity and inclusion. With transparent policies and regular check-ins to see if you’re meeting your own DEAI goals, you and your team will naturally devise new ways and strategies to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for your museum or institution.
Beware of treating DEAI initiatives as one-time events or seasonal objectives. It requires a shift in your organization's internal culture for a true departure from the past. Change begins with awareness but is sustained by vigilance.
Creating a more inclusive and equitable environment is part of a sustained effort that will continually evolve and improve to meet the needs of today. Be aware and learn about the needs of your community, your current gaps in representation and diversity, and the systemic and structural history in which your institution exists. Look for opportunities to engage with your community and incorporate multiple perspectives into your work. Finally, be proactive and try new things, whether it's reaching out to your community first or creating internal benchmarks for equity and inclusion for your team. Committing to change is the first step to creating a more inclusive and equitable environment.
Reposted from iNews UK
Since Russia launched its full bloody invasion of Ukraine last February, innumerable acts of destruction have been wreaked on its towns, and atrocities against its people. But away from the front line, in the burnt-out shells of theatres and across the bullet-riddled busts of poets, another battle is being waged.
Ukraine’s culture itself has become a new front in the war. It has not been merely caught up in the crossfire. Russia has looted ancient treasures from Kherson’s museums; emptied libraries of Ukrainian books; repressed the Ukrainian language itself. The Ukrainian language has been repressed in occupied areas, with teachers and civil servants detained, threatened or worse for refusing to teach enforced Russian curricula in schools.
Writers and artists have been murdered. The conductor Yuri Kerpatenko was shot for refusing to participate in a concert in occupied Kherson. The children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko was kidnapped, killed and thrown into a mass grave.
This is not collateral damage but a cultural “genocide”, according to Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s Culture Minister. Libraries, museums, galleries, churches, memorials, statues, schools and universities have all been damaged or destroyed since February 2022. About 1,600 cases of possible damage have been documented, including 122 museums, 684 monuments and over 500 religious sites.
Unesco has verified 241 which should have been protected under the Hague Convention. This “deliberate destruction” of Ukraine’s culture, history and language is likely an attempt to erase its identity, the UN said last month.
Vladimir Putin has claimed repeatedly that Ukraine is not a country, but a sub-region of Russia, without culture, history or identity.
So any expression of that becomes a threat to the idea of a Russian empire comprising the former Soviet Union. Over its history, Ukraine has been subjected repeatedly to repression, or Russification, first under the tsars and then the Soviets.
The Ukrainian language has been banned hundreds of times. During Stalin’s Great Terror a generation of writers and artists – the “Executed Renaissance” – were persecuted and murdered. What Mr Putin is doing appears to be a continuation of this policy.
“A lot is at stake,” says Volodymyr Sheiko, director-general of the Ukrainian Institute in Kyiv, which promotes the country’s culture. “If we win this battle we can survive. If we lose this cultural battle, Ukraine will not survive eventually, even if it wins the war militarily, in the longer term.”
However, unluckily for Mr Putin, his efforts to stub out Ukrainian identity and culture have sparked a surge of interest around the world, with people discovering Ukrainian writers, fashion and filmmakers.
Books are now being translated in swathes. Ukrainian ballet companies and orchestras are touring the West. In May, Ukrainian music will be centre-stage once again at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool.
Ukrainian fashion designers are participating in London Fashion Week. The Kyiv designer Ivan Frolov recently dressed Beyoncé for her Dubai performance, as well as Sam Smith in the music video I’m Not Here to Make Friends.
Even Ukrainian borscht, a soup made with beetroot, was inscribed on Unesco’s list of intangible heritage in need or urgent safeguarding.
“The surge of interest has been incredible since February,” Mr Sheiko tells i. “All the doors that had been closed suddenly opened. It’s never been easier to get things staged – literary festivals, new publications of Ukrainian works, translations, poetry.
“We were approached to put together literary programmes for international book fairs etc. Similarly, we’ve seen an interest from film festivals, theatre festivals, publishing houses, mainstream media, museums, galleries, universities, who wanted to programme something about Ukraine.
Oksana Zabuzkho, author of Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex and one of the country’s foremost writers, has described how there used to be three “token” Ukrainian writers known to the rest of the world. “Nowadays,” she says, “you have an avalanche of names and you have ‘literature’… this has changed in the past year.”
Peter Doroshenko, director general of the Ukrainian Museum in New York, said visitor attendance had “skyrocketed” since the February invasion. “It’s a kind of turbocharger,” he says. “From month to month, [interest] accelerates at such a large level… that it’s almost hard to keep up.”.
Mr Sheiko adds: “Ukraine’s survival and sustainability and prosperity will depend on how effectively and efficiently we can protect and safeguard our culture and identity today.” However, he adds regretfully: “It took a war for so many people to understand that this is an interesting country worth looking at.”
Even Ukrainians themselves are rediscovering and celebrating their language and culture. A growing number of Russian-speakers now refuse to speak it. Last year a poll found that 76 per cent of Ukrainians considered Ukrainian their native tongue, up from 57 per cent in 2012. After Mr Putin gave a speech on 21 February 2021 that suggested he planned to invade, the phrase “this is my last tweet in Russian” trended on Twitter in Ukraine. After the invasion, posts on social media of Ukrainians announcing they would no longer speak the language went viral.
Professor Ogarkova said her students at university were now choosing to study Ukrainian subjects. “They are making their choices in favour of Ukrainian, culture and tradition. So, it has become something prestigious, interesting… this is a kind of trend,” she says.
Previously, Ukrainian culture was overlooked by many, she adds. “We had that image of Ukrainian culture as old-fashioned, boring, not interesting,” she said. Now, however, “we were discovering for ourselves that there are a lot of things that deserve our attention.”
Marina Pesenti, an independent researcher and board member of the Ukrainian Institute, points out that Ukrainians’ interest in their own history and culture has been rising since Russia illegally annexed Crimea and began the war in the Donbas. There has been a “cultural flourishing” since 2014,” she tells i. “It’s not something new that happened a year ago all of a sudden, because there has been quite a big transformation in the cultural sector in Ukraine .”
Yet “this massive rethinking of history and identity is happening,” now, she adds. A shift has taken place since February 2022, and people understand that something has changed. With each continued assault against their culture Ukrainian artists further interrogate and explore what it means to be Ukrainian.
This is now a “war of narratives”, declares Ms Zabuzkho. “This about-turn started when attacked with annihilation… … that Ukraine should not exist.”
For many artists, war is now their focus. Many are helping by joining the army. The well-known writer Andriy Lyubka is raising funds for vehicles for the front line. The novelist Victoria Amelina has stopped writing novels and retrained as a war crimes investigator. Many are volunteering in other ways to help the war effort. As the writer Oleksandr Mykhed, who has taken up a “virtual residency” at Oxford University, says: “You could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems.”
Others see their art as their most powerful weapons. Oleksiy Sai, an artist, said: “I envy those who fight with arms, but for now I am more effective as an artist.”
In January, one of his films was exhibited at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January. It depicts Russian war crimes, and features radio intercepts of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. In one recording the girlfriend of a soldier is heard encouraging him to rape Ukrainian women, but warning him to use a condom. The film was also shown at Nato’s headquarters and at the European Parliament.
“There’s no more illusion that art would live in a kind of separate reality from what we live through,” says Professor Ogarkova. “In Ukraine because everything is about politics.”
But for many artists, creating art in the midst of such horrors is impossible. “At the moment, what is happening is documenting war crimes,” says Ms Pesenti. “Of course, there are first reflections, radio programmes, articles, but not so much works of art because it takes time. Some are traumatised.”
Andrey Kurkov, another of Ukraine’s foremost writers, best known for the novel Death of a Penguin, said he was unable to keep writing novels after the war broke out, but turned instead to documenting its early days and writing newspaper columns for international audiences. Amelina has given up writing novels and turned to poetry. Nonetheless, in one poem, No Poetry, she claims: “This is no poetry too/ Poetry is in Kharkiv/ volunteering for the army.” Meanwhile, for Lyubka, “a writer who does not write has become a symbol of this war”.
“This is something that is common to many artists now,” says Ms Ogarkova. “War is something which goes beyond any kind of representation. The wounds are so fresh, the experience is so tragic that you have problems to fix it in artistic form. Representatives of Ukrainian culture who are unable to create.”
Furthermore, creating and exhibiting new art, literature or music has huge challenges during wartime. All public funding for cultural projects has been paused, many writers have fled abroad, and cultural institutions have been physically damaged. “The war has had a devastating impact on Ukrainian culture,” says Mr Sheiko.
However, Ms Pesenti expects a flowering of Ukrainian culture after the war. “There will be this rethinking of the war experience, of the trauma, which is going to take, I’m sure, many years,” she says. “If Ukraine is given a chance to speak in its voice it certainly will have lots of stories to tell.”
At the same time, as Ukrainians embrace their own culture, there has been a fierce reaction against Russian culture as part of a move to ‘de-Russify or “decolonise”. Mr Tkachenko has called for Western allies to boycott Tchaikovsky and other Russian artists until the war is over, pointing to the Kremlin’s use of culture as a “weapon of war”.
Many Ukrainians now refuse to play Russian music or read Russian literature. Shops are refusing to sell Russian books. There have been mass pulpings of Russian books, while Ukraine’s parliament adopted a law banning their import. Writers including Kurkov, who formerly wrote in Russian, have vowed to stop writing in the language until the war is over.
Streets named after Alexander Pushkin or Anton Chekhov are also being renamed after Ukrainian writers. Volodymyr Yermolenko, a philosopher and the editor in chief of UkraineWorld, has condemned streets’ Russian names as a legacy of the imperial past. “Every prominent Russian name was a way to exclude a Ukrainian one. Street names were a tool to erase local memory,” he has said.
Even Kyiv-born Russians are at risk of being dragged into the culture war. Recently Ukraine’s national writers’ union called for the Bulgakov Museum, where The Master and Margarita writer Mikhail Bulgakov was born, to be closed down, citing the author’s dislike of Ukrainian nationalism. Zabuzkho has described Bulgakov’s work as “propaganda literature”. However, the museum’s director, Lyudmila Gubianuri, defended Bulgakov as a “man of his time” whose “work is definitely part of Ukrainian cultural space”, and the culture minister has – for now – kept the museum open.
Mr Sheiko rejects such terms. “I don’t like the words boycotts, cancel, ban, sensor. It’s not about that. It’s about looking at all the imperialist and colonialist tropes, that are woven into Russian culture, both classical and contemporary, in film, in music, in literature,” he says. “Tchaikovsky might not be part of today’s contemporary Putin’s Russia, but it’s used very effectively as a tool of cultural expansion, of propaganda, of cultural domination by the Putinist regime… And that doesn’t allow other countries cultures to be visible in the world.
“We call the world to actually give that space to cultures that have traditionally been underrepresented internationally.”
Ukraine is now claiming figures formerly taken to be Russian, such as the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich was born in Ukraine and spent a considerable part of time in Ukraine. “I believe 30-40 per cent of Russian culture is built on Ukrainian culture, and which is never talked about rarely, rarely written,” claims Mr Doroshenko.
“Many artists in early 20th century who were all Ukrainian-born and raised, maybe moved to Petrograd or Moscow, and they’re all labelled Russian. I don’t know how that happened. Because last time I checked, Picasso was born and died a Spanish artist and not a Parisian.”
Even the Ukrainian Government has set up a website encouraging the public to upload their poetry, declaring “Every poem, every line, every word is part of Ukrainian history… wars end but poetry does not.”
As Volodomyr Zelensky said at the Venice Biennale last year, at the opening of the exhibition This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom: “There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art because they can see the power of art. Art can tell the world what cannot otherwise be shared.”
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Reposted from Sarasota Magazine
The Sarasota artist colony of painters and writers who flourished here in the ’50s and ’60s is long gone, and with it a remarkable group of men and women. These people set the tone of the town and did it so well that, today, the arts remain as central to Sarasota’s identity as its beaches. There may be one or two of these individuals left, but, as a group, they are fading into history.
Some ended up world famous. Syd Solomon’s paintings are in most major museums, John D. MacDonald is credited with creating modern crime fiction and MacKinlay Kantor’s story The Best Years of Our Lives is firmly embedded in our national psyche due to the classic movie based on it. Burl Ives, meanwhile, remains integral to the Christmas season thanks to his “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” And Julio De Diego, one of the more interesting of the painters, married Gypsy Rose Lee, the most famous stripper in the world, and spent the next several years managing her burlesque show.
And then there was Ben Stahl. In his heyday, he was one of the most famous Sarasota artists of all. One of the country’s top illustrators, he was so good he could almost cross the line into fine art. He had an entrepreneurial streak a mile wide and was always trying something new and potentially profitable. He set out to write a novel and it became a bestseller and then a Disney movie. He co-founded the Famous Artists School with his pal Norman Rockwell. He even opened his own museum, the Museum of the Cross, in which he exhibited a series of his own paintings depicting the stations of the cross—the final hours of Jesus’ life.
For three years in the late ’60s, the museum was one of the town’s major tourist attractions. Then, on April 16, 1969, it became something else—the scene of Sarasota’s most baffling mystery.
When Ben and Ella Stahl moved to Sarasota in 1953, the town had already acquired an arty reputation. The stage had been set early. Bertha Palmer had brought her favorite Monet down to hang over her fireplace at the Oaks and John Ringling’s art collection, both eccentric and eclectic, opened to the public in 1936.
Artists like Ben moved here for the simplest of reasons. It was a great place to work. The weather was beautiful, as were the colors of the Gulf and the tropical vegetation. Life here was also relatively cheap, there were many kindred spirits and there was even the circus to liven things up. People still talk about the social life back in those days, and some of the tales get quite racy. The alpha male artist or writer with an inflated ego and a drinking problem—we had our share.
Ben was not like that. I knew him during the last year of his life, and found him charming and great company, yet always a little reserved. Unlike most of the artists, he didn’t talk much about himself. He was the sort of person who, when he left the room, everybody started talking about him.
There was a lot to talk about. He had been one of the top illustrators in the country at a time when illustrators were in high demand. It was the golden age of magazines, and it was men (they were invariably men) like Ben who drew the illustrations that accompanied the articles and the ads. Ben illustrated more than 750 stories and covers for the Saturday Evening Post, the gold standard of 1950s mainstream media.
And it wasn’t just the Post. His work also appeared in Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s and more. He even drew Coca-Cola ads. He was the guy who got the plum assignments. Esquire hired him to do 12 portraits of beautiful young girls, each one typical of her European country.
He had his own style, or rather a style that pulled from the work of many famous artists—a little Renoir, a little Degas, a little Picasso and, when he was getting serious, a little El Greco. But he had a happy view of life. His favorite subject was a voluptuous nude, blissfully plump and smiling. I happen to know, because I own one. I won it from him in a poker game.
Of course, the Saturday Evening Post would only publish so many nudes, so he had other specialties. He had an affinity for religious paintings, very dramatic in color and composition, with figures posed to suggest the Old Masters. But he could please anybody. Even the Air Force, which hired him to do a series of paintings for their academy in Colorado Springs. His work even hangs in the Pentagon.
Ben became a leader in Sarasota’s artist colony, perhaps the most vocal. “He was a domineering presence in the community,” wrote Marcia Corbino, “a catalyst who was stimulated by obstacles.” He was always advocating for increased funding for the arts and getting into spats with politicians. He raised a terrible ruckus when members of the Florida Legislature refused to pay him for a portrait they commissioned of Gov. Claude Kirk.
His talent was not limited to painting. After an argument with John D. MacDonald about which was more difficult, writing or painting, he set out to write a novel. How hard could it be? The result was Blackbeard’s Ghost.
And, since he happened to have an appointment in California, he decided that while there he should talk to Walt Disney about his book, as yet unpublished. Walt was intrigued by this person from Florida who somehow managed to get his phone number and invited him to lunch at his studio. Three days later, Walt bought the movie rights and William Morrow called, looking to publish the novel. The book won prizes and the movie was a success. Everybody was pleased, except Ben, who told people, “The movie was horrible.”
The reason for Ben’s trip to Los Angeles was just as unlikely and just as thrilling. He was to paint a nude portrait of Ursula Andress—the original Bond girl—that would hang over the bar in a movie called 4 for Texas, also starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Anita Ekberg. Stahl’s work was often used for movie publicity. He did a series of paintings to promote Ben-Hur in 1959.
The Stahls had four children, whom many old timers around town remember from high school. The family was well known for their lavish home. It was designed by Sarasota School architect Victor Lundy and is credited with being the first of the Siesta Key showplaces. Ben did his best to adjust to modernism, but all those glass walls bothered him. There was nowhere to hang paintings. “It took us 10 years to rework it and make it livable,” he complained.
Ben had been somewhat of a child prodigy himself. His grandmother saw his talent early and took him to museums. But he had no formal education and never went to art school. At 16, he began working at a commercial art studio. That same year, he placed a watercolor in a prestigious exhibit.
To Ben, the role of the artist was not that of a tortured soul but rather an explainer, a guide. The artist was there to entertain, delight and inspire. It was this attitude that made him such a great teacher. Practically all the visual artists in the colony taught. Sarasota in the ’50s was clogged with art schools. There was Syd Solomon’s school, the Hartman school, Hilton Leech’s school, Jerry Farnsworth and Helen Sawyer’s school—they were everywhere.
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Reposted from BBC News
A cyber attack is stopping a museum from accessing its artefact database more than a year after the initial breach.
Benefit payments, planning applications and house sales were all delayed when Gloucester City Council was hit by hackers in 2021.
A council report has now revealed the Museum of Gloucester is still being affected by the cyber incident.
The museum's database had been used to create exhibitions at the venue.
Council officers first became aware their systems had been compromised on 20 December 2021.
Malware, which is software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage or gain unauthorised access to a computer, had made it onto their systems.
The harmful software was embedded in an email which had been sent to a council officer, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
Gloucester City Council has had to rebuild all of its servers as a result of the attack, which has been linked to Russian hackers.
The latest estimate suggests the bill to the taxpayer is approaching the £1m mark.
Council officers said the museum's access to the collection database was "rather fundamental".
Opposition leader Jeremy Hilton said: "It is very worrying that in a council report it was mentioned that the museum services had not had access to its collections database, hindering important investigation into the city's historic monuments.
"I hope this important information isn't lost forever or that officers will not have to spend their valuable time inputting data all over again."
Culture and leisure cabinet member Andy Lewis said he believed no records had been lost.
Reposted from Artnet News
Dutch police have identified the culprits behind a brazen heist at last year’s edition of the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, as members of the so-called Pink Panther Gang, a notorious criminal organization from the Balkans that has been active since 2001.
“Sources surrounding the investigation” have fingered the Panthers in the crime, the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reported, though the crime remains unresolved beyond the connection to the gang. The news is a vindication for the Dutch detective Arthur Brand, known for his work recovering stolen artworks and antiquities, who voiced his suspicions that the gang was involved in the weeks after the June 2022 heist.
The Pink Panthers are known for their bold daylight robberies, posing as well-dressed customers and then acting with precision to quickly make off with millions in stolen jewels. Other thefts have involved crashing cars into buildings.
The gang got their name after a 2003 robbery at London’s Graff Jewelers that the Daily Mail compared to the 1975 Inspector Clouseau film The Return of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers—echoing a scene from the movie, police found one of the stolen diamond rings hidden inside a jar of face cream.
The $33 million caper was, at the time, the largest diamond heist in British history, with the thieves making off with 47 pieces of jewelry. A decade ago, the Guardian estimated that the Panthers had made off with €330 million ($422.5 million) in stolen diamonds and jewels over the course of some 341 thefts. The size of the gang has been estimated at 200 to 300 operatives, overseen by a core group of 30-or-so thieves.
Reposted from Art Review
On 24 February, museum employees at the Schwules Museum in Berlin discovered evidence of an attack on the institution’s building. Two window panes, the illuminated sign with the museum’s name, and a work of art hanging in front of the entrance door were damaged by gunfire. The attack appears to have happened overnight. The Berlin police department have investigated the scene and collected evidence, though the full extent and cost of the damage is yet to be determined.
Now one of the largest LGBTQ museums in the world, the Schwules Museum was founded in 1984 to support the queer community as well as research on queer history, art and activism. This, however, is not the first time the museum has been targeted: in 2020, one of the museum’s window panes was severely damaged by rocks, and in 2016, the window at the reception area was shot in six places with firearms.
‘I think it’s important to state that we don’t know who did this or why’, Ben Miller, historian and board member of the museum, told Dazed Magazine. ‘However, I’m not sure it’s possible to think about this incident without considering the right-wing, anti-queer mobilisation that we’re seeing around the world. And I think it’s fair to say that we are certainly the target of that kind of mobilisation in general.’ Physical attacks aside, the museum has also experienced Neo-Nazi demonstrations as well as regular threats from phone calls and on social media.
According to a statement issued by the museum, the damaged piece of artwork is a part of Elizabeth Sweeney’s the Unrelenting (2022), created for the ongoing exhibition Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, on view through 29 May. The black triangular piece hanging outside the museum references the badges used by the Nazis to label and stigmatise a diverse range of people.
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
When it released its annual report on hate crime statistics late last year, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation faced criticism that a change in the reporting system used vastly underreported data thereby masking a growing problem. The FBI released an update yesterday with more complete data, and it showed the number of hate crime incidents had increased by 11.6 percent.
The report covers crime statistics from 2021. The original report was the first that required the nation’s local law enforcement agencies to report crime statistics using NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System), and many localities were not able to meet the new reporting requirements. As a result, the December 2022 release covered reports from localities representing 65 percent of the U.S. population.
The supplemental report backfills the data by combining the NIBRS data with the previous system of reporting, meaning the supplement covers 91 percent of the U.S. population. As a result, the FBI’s official number of hate crime incidents reported in 2021 jumped from 7,262 in the December report to 10,840 in the revised supplemental information. There were a total of 12,822 victims of hate crime incidents in 2021. (Note: To access the full supplemental report, users must access the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer and access the “Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021” link.)
“Preventing, investigating, and prosecuting hate crimes are top priorities for the Justice Department,” Associate U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a release, “and reporting is key to each of those priorities. The FBI’s supplemental report demonstrates our unwavering commitment to work with our state and local partners to increase reporting and provide a more complete picture of hate crimes nationwide.”
The 10,840 incidents broken down by type of bias:
In addition, 310 incidents involved multiple types of bias.
The FBI classified a total of 8,327 incidents as hate crime offenses that involved crimes against people. These incidents broken down by type of offense:
In addition, the FBI classified 19 rapes as hate crimes, as well as 18 murders and 70 additional crimes that fell under an “other” category.
Reposted from Victoria Buzz
An activist advocating for action against the climate crisis has thrown pink paint on the Royal BC Museum’s (RBCM) mammoth exhibit to publicly ‘kickstart’ a new protest campaign.
A video was posted to Twitter by On2Ottawa which is the official account for the new campaign wishing to call all Canadians to rally and march on Ottawa to remind political leaders of the ongoing climate crisis if action is not taken.
“If the government does not enact the citizen’s assembly to tackle the climate and ecological crisis in the next one to two years, then we will be travelling to Ottawa to demand one,” said the woman identified as ‘Laura,’ who spread paint on the mammoth.
“At 11 a.m. today an incident took place in which Woolly, the iconic and beloved Royal BC Museum mammoth, was defaced by activists and pink paint was applied to his tusks,” RBCM spokesperson Samantha Rich said in a media statement to Victoria Buzz
“Museum security staff safely reprimanded those involved, and called Victoria Police Department who quickly arrived on the scene and took the activists into custody.”
“Museum staff members from the exhibitions and conservation teams successfully cleaned off the water-soluble paint from the entire diorama.”
“There was no permanent damage to Woolly, who has been a favourite for visitors of the museum for over 40 years, and the exhibition was reopened within 90 minutes.”
“Thanks to a bit of elbow grease, he’s back to his old self. It was helpful that the paint was mainly just on his tusks,” added Rich.
VicPD say they’ve arrested three suspects in connection with the vandalism of the iconic wooly mammoth. Their investigation is ongoing.
Prior to this video, Laura has been featured in another On2Ottawa video explaining why she believes that climate action must be taken by federal government entities.
On2Ottawa is concerned that with rising temperatures, food will become increasingly more difficult to produce as populations grow, frequency of natural disasters will increase and eventually mass migrations will have to take place because more regions will become uninhabitable.
“All this pressure will result in societal collapse and we will not know life as we know it right now,” said Laura in the previous video. “We need drastic change as soon as possible.”
Laura and On2Ottawa say they believe that society as a whole has one to two years to sort this out before our collapse.
The On2Ottawa movement hopes to unite all climate action causes and endeavours to demand a people’s assembly in lieu of our current government.
Rather than democratically voting in politicians, a people’s assembly in On2Ottawa’s vision would see random citizens from across Canada selected and educated on what are the most pressing issues to society as we know it. They would replace our current administration.
Some stories hit harder than others. Whether it’s the news that a grandfather was scammed out of his retirement fund, or a child was the victim of a crime, or civil unrest is displacing thousands of people and putting them at risk of starvation, security professionals and investigators are often confronted by heart-wrenching scenarios. While many security practitioners and analysts can maintain objectivity and a professional distance from these tales of woe, it only takes one incident that resonates to tip even the most practiced professionals into a state of stress and, potentially, trauma.
This is because trauma—including indirect trauma, where the victim is exposed to others’ traumatic incidents and stories—is cumulative, and repeated exposure to troubling situations and news can wear down a person’s natural emotional resilience, says Diana Concannon, PCI, a forensic psychologist and dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University.
Indirect trauma changes a person’s inner worldview as a result of bonding with a victim (even one you have never met) over his or her traumatic experience, Concannon says. This could negatively distort a person’s worldview, convincing them to believe that people will all behave badly, or criminal activity is a default, or significant violent incidents are inevitable. It could be a result of secondary trauma—where the effect is immediate in response to a single event—or vicarious trauma, which builds up gradually. The path to indirect trauma is rarely linear, she notes, but sometimes a particular incident strikes a chord that makes it easier to empathize and relate with a victim (such as if the victim looks like your grandma or if a child the same age as yours is injured), potentially causing a spontaneous reaction.
According to the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), a division of the U.S. Department of Justice, “Vicarious trauma is an occupational challenge for people working and volunteering in the fields of victim services, law enforcement, emergency medical services, fire services, and other allied professions, due to their continuous exposure to victims of trauma and violence. This work-related trauma exposure can occur from such experiences as listening to individual clients recount their victimization; looking at videos of exploited children; reviewing case files; hearing about or responding to the aftermath of violence and other traumatic events day after day; and responding to mass violence incidents that have resulted in numerous injuries and deaths.”
People can experience vicarious trauma in a number of ways, from negative reactions (psychosocial symptoms, including critical incident stress or compassion fatigue) to neutral ways (a sign that an individual is managing traumatic material effectively, not that it has no effect) to positive reactions. This latter response is also called vicarious resilience, a state in which the individual “may draw inspiration from a victim’s resilience that strengthens their own mental and emotional fortitude,” the OVC said.
People who work with survivors of trauma or violence are at risk of being negatively impacted by vicarious trauma, and some factors make people more susceptible, including prior traumatic experiences, social isolation, a tendency to avoid feelings, lack of preparation or supervision at work, being newer or less experienced at the job, constant and intense exposure to trauma with little or no variation in work tasks, and a lack of effective and supportive processes for discussing traumatic content. The Vicarious Trauma Toolkit from the OVC noted that people in professions that help others—such as first responders, doctors, social workers, therapists, and victim services professionals—are at high risk of vicarious trauma.
According to compassion fatigue expert Francoise Mathieu’s 2011 book, The Compassion Fatigue Workbook, between 40 and 85 percent of “helping professionals” develop vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, or high rates of traumatic symptoms, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“It’s really helpful for any managers in the security space to know that when we are dealing with someone who may be diagnosed with PTSD, it’s often not what the Hollywood script looks like,” says Marisa Randazzo, executive director of threat management at Ontic and former chief research psychologist for the U.S. Secret Service. “In a few cases, we see someone who is startled, who is having flashbacks or feels they are living under constant threat, but oftentimes what we see instead is something that is lower level but a lot more chronic.”
In cases that Randazzo has worked throughout her career, security professionals operating with PTSD exhibited symptoms that are not the stereotypical image of traumatization but were more subtle: a lot of sick leave, increased physical ailments, or sleep disruption. “People would wrestle with these symptoms for years,” she says.
While some of the behaviors and symptoms may be similar, vicarious trauma and resulting compassion fatigue is different from burnout. Burnout is the result of broader, unrelenting stressors over a long period of time—such as an unsupportive workplace, long stretches of stress with few breaks, or an unfair culture—that affects energy levels, engagement with work, and personal fulfillment. In comparison, vicarious trauma is emotionally driven and brought about specifically by the subject matter the person is exposed to, and it brings out out feelings of fear and anxiety that can eventually wear security professionals down and compromise their ability to function well.
Randazzo notes that this has impacted colleagues in the national security space, as well as analysts and investigators. “The pressure to be on the lookout for national security threats can feel overwhelming. And it has a cumulative response, so you may have worked in the field for 10 years with no problem, but all of a sudden feel like you can’t handle the work anymore,” she says.
Security analysts and forensic investigators are at risk here, especially because of the nature of aberrant, extreme, or disturbing material they are exposed to as they search for evidence or data to work with. This can often be the case for analysts digging into extremist content online or for people investigating child abuse, exploitation, or trafficking.
“This—appropriately—is traumatizing to a normal psyche,” Concannon explains. “It is disturbing, and it’s very insidious as to its effect on the psyche. We often think that we can compartmentalize our ability to work with such material, and to a certain extent that is true—we can intellectualize it, we can look at it objectively, and that’s what we have to do. But to think that we are in some way immune or that we can separate ourselves from our emotional body as we’re doing that process is a distortion. We’re still a whole human as we’re looking at this material. Over time, we start to have a distorted worldview, because what we’re exposed to becomes our reality. And if we are constantly exposed to material that is slanted in a particular way, that is showing a side of humanity that is not the most favorable, that is looking at people behaving badly, our perception of the world can start to tilt in such a way so that our expectation is that people generally are going to behave that way. And depending on information we’re sorting through, we can expect people to behave in an especially heinous way.”
While many people may have a high level of resilience against this distortion, it is not invincible, she notes. The rate at which resilience is depleted from vicarious trauma is on a continuum—it’s not a straight line, and it varies by individual. A person’s ability to cope with vicarious trauma and repeated exposure to traumatic material depends on many factors, including personality, background, and the availability (or lack) of supportive social and professional resources.
“None of us are immune to it,” Concannon says. “And also, none of us are doomed by it. We all have the same continuum of resilience and depletion, but how we are calibrated on those continuums are different. That depends on our past experiences, our support systems, and—this is the good news—how we manage our exposure to traumatic intelligence. We have the opportunity to consistently build up our resilience and proactively get in front of any vicarious trauma response.”
Vicarious trauma can affect people on personal and professional levels, according to the OVC, with physical, emotional, behavioral, spiritual, cognitive, and relational ramifications, as well as detrimental effects on job performance, morale, workplace relationships, and behavior. Each individual may experience vicarious trauma differently, so it’s important to evaluate behavior based on deviations from that individual’s baseline personality and actions.
A person facing vicarious trauma might feel more suspicious or have a sense that their ability to control their life is being challenged in some way. They might take more risks, or instead they might behave in an overly controlled way, exhibiting agitation if their control or plans are disrupted, Concannon says.
Vicarious trauma challenges a person’s sense of safety, trust, and control, and it also attacks a person’s self-esteem and sense of intimacy—the desire to get close to other people, she says.
Being knocked off balance in this way can result in hypervigilance, and because security professionals are already prone to high levels of vigilance, Concannon says, managers will need to gauge what is out of the ordinary based on the individual. In addition, symptoms of vicarious trauma can include heightened states of emotional arousal, increased suspicion, increased self-doubt, or isolation.
Over time, these heightened states can result in more disruptions at work—potentially leading to a degraded work culture or even workplace violence. In her work with the U.S. Secret Service, Randazzo found that time and again, when security professionals exhibited concerning behavior, from angry outbursts to concerns over behavior such as threatening language or stalking, “it often had some root in trauma.”
“Much like building a house, an organizational response to vicarious trauma requires vision, commitment, and a methodical approach that starts with laying a foundation and then builds up from there,” according to the Vicarious Trauma Toolkit.
The toolkit offers a blueprint for building a trauma-informed organization (including a handy readiness guide assessment tool), and this can be a good place to start for many organizations. The system enables users to determine areas for improvement and designate stakeholders and champions who can push the organization forward into being more supportive of mental wellness.
What does this look like for security departments and managers on a day-to-day basis? It starts with culture—frequently and frankly discussing mental health challenges, the emotional effect of reviewing challenging material, and resources available to employees, Concannon says.
Because each person’s resilience level is different, managers will need to closely observe their baseline behavior and note any deviations from it. Because security personnel and law enforcement have a tendency for self-reliance, it can be challenging to detect changes in behavior early, so Concannon recommends more group debriefings and investing time and resources in building up camaraderie within teams to preempt isolation and to expand the number of people who could notice signs of trouble.
She also recommends building multidisciplinary teams to help tackle difficult or traumatic cases—having multiple people review the material builds a natural group of confidantes who can discuss the cases together and support each other.
These connected groups of comrades give employees more leeway to speak up if they recognize a team member is having trouble coping with the material or the job, giving management an opportunity to share additional resources and offer support, Concannon adds.
“For syndromes such as vicarious trauma, those who are most likely to see us struggling are those with whom we work,” she says. “Our families expect us to be cranky when we’re cranky, so they don’t see it, but coworkers tend to recognize signs in us a little differently. And if we are already part of a team, there’s more permission to come forward and say something. If we’re not part of a team, there tends to be a resistance to coming forward and saying something because there’s a fear of those statements being misunderstood as criticism.”
Overall, she notes, teams offer a built-in support system that augments what a manager provides directly.
Beyond organizational structures, there are many other actions individual managers can take to be more trauma-minded in the workplace. This starts with the self, Randazzo says.
“First of all, I would encourage every manager in the security space to take a hard look at their own level of functioning, because one of the things we’re seeing is an impaired level of management,” she says. “In the work I did in supporting a number of federal agencies after 9/11, we saw impaired managers in the security space and in companies that had lost physical offices or colleagues… Not necessarily in the immediate aftermath, but in the weeks and months after, we saw increasing levels of impaired management, or managers didn’t realize they weren’t functioning—they wanted to be there for their people, but they weren’t getting things done, weren’t doing the things they said they were going to do, started self-medicating on the job.”
Randazzo recommends working with an executive coach or a mentor in the security field to determine your current capacity as a manager and how to improve individual resilience, or to simply have a decompression session where you discuss current challenges.
“The other piece is for managers to really model self-care,” she adds. There is a false duality in many workspaces where managers espouse the value of self-care but then they never take any time off, which undercuts their message and silently discourages employees from stepping away.
The call for self-care extends to ensuring employees (and managers) are getting adequate sleep, nutrition, socialization, and exercise, Concannon says. In addition, they need to maintain a level of awareness of their saturation points—the quantity and depth of traumatic intelligence they are reviewing—and understand when they need to step away and regroup.
She adds that managers should frequently check in with employees—especially those who are regularly confronted with traumatizing material or victims’ stories—and ensure they are taking those breaks.
“It sounds like such a simple thing, but we’ve found from research on firefighters and emergency workers that just checking in and encouraging breaks, walking out for coffee—those little breaks make a big difference and add up,” Concannon says.
Managers and organizational leaders (including HR directors and others) can also invest in employee assistance programs (EAPs) and let people know about those resources early and often. Additional self-care programs or community resources such as fitness centers or running clubs could also be shared, depending on how they fit into the culture of the team, Concannon says.
Another valuable action managers can take is to continuously contextualize what security professionals and analysts are doing. “The work that most security professionals are doing, especially right now in this time in history, is so important,” Concannon adds. “Keeping that work linked to mission and purpose—the value of it—will help maintain a sense of value, honor, and purpose that is fortifying. It’s a counternarrative to the negativity to some of the material.”
“You are proactively creating the scaffolding for resilience,” she says. “If something acute does develop, then something is in place you can lean on to refortify that resilience. Vicarious trauma is not something that is terminal—it is a depletion beyond one’s resilience. Healing happens when resilience is replenished.”
Reposted from WTHR
Federal authorities say dozens of artifacts stolen in the 1970s from museums in several states and dating back as far as the French and Indian War have been returned to the institutions.
The FBI announced Monday at a ceremony at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia that 50 items had been repatriated to 17 institutions in five states.
The artifacts returned Monday included an 1847 Mississippi rifle stolen from a Mississippi museum, a World War II battlefield pickup pistol belonging to General Omar Bradley — stolen from the U.S. Army War College Museum — and 19th century Pennsylvania rifles stolen from Pennsylvania museums, officials said.
Authorities said Michael Corbett of Newark, Delaware, was indicted in December 2021 for possession of items stolen from museums in the 1970s. In August, he pleaded guilty to possession of stolen items transported interstate and turned over additional stolen items, authorities said.
Officials said the items recovered and now returned to their proper owners included:
Jacqueline Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the Philadelphia office, called it “a rare privilege” to be part of the ceremony returning the stolen items.
“These are artifacts that helped write our national story, with some even predating the country’s birth, and their long absence from public view — hidden away where no one could see or learn from them — was a loss both to society and the historic record,” Maguire said.
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