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The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking
We live in a world where seemingly everything can be measured. We rely on indicators to translate social phenomena into simple, quantified terms, which in turn can be used to guide individuals, organizations, and governments in establishing policy. Yet counting things requires finding a way to make them comparable. And in the process of translating the confusion of social life into neat categories, we inevitably strip it of context and meaning—and risk hiding or distorting as much as we reveal.
With The Seductions of Quantification, leading legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed in the production of global indicators on human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Although such numbers convey an aura of objective truth and scientific validity, Merry argues persuasively that measurement systems constitute a form of power by incorporating theories about social change in their design but rarely explicitly acknowledging them. For instance, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries in terms of their compliance with antitrafficking activities, assumes that prosecuting traffickers as criminals is an effective corrective strategy—overlooking cultures where women and children are frequently sold by their own families. As Merry shows, indicators are indeed seductive in their promise of providing concrete knowledge about how the world works, but they are implemented most successfully when paired with context-rich qualitative accounts grounded in local knowledge.
With The Seductions of Quantification, leading legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry investigates the techniques by which information is gathered and analyzed in the production of global indicators on human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. Although such numbers convey an aura of objective truth and scientific validity, Merry argues persuasively that measurement systems constitute a form of power by incorporating theories about social change in their design but rarely explicitly acknowledging them. For instance, the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, which ranks countries in terms of their compliance with antitrafficking activities, assumes that prosecuting traffickers as criminals is an effective corrective strategy—overlooking cultures where women and children are frequently sold by their own families. As Merry shows, indicators are indeed seductive in their promise of providing concrete knowledge about how the world works, but they are implemented most successfully when paired with context-rich qualitative accounts grounded in local knowledge.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 22, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 11, 2017
3.5 stars rounded up
A truly engrossing and rare for me non-fiction read.
The book talks in-depth about the dangers of making inequality, discrimination, abuse, etc. quantifiable or measurable concepts. By making them so, you essentially strip them of their essence. The author states- and I tend to agree- that it's already an act of asserting power when you turn a rape, an abduction, an act of racism, a gender pay gap or anything that abuses a position, a statistic. A number is already giving an act a detached approach to it. By talking about say a percentage instead of a person with a name and age you dehumanise the acts that percentage represents.
The problem is how to talk about it then. And this is why I won't rate the book higher. Because I was left with the feeling that nobody-including me- has come up with an alternative approach. I'm as dissatisfied with the current way of speaking about violent acts on a large scale as the author is. But I don't know how to do it differently.
A truly engrossing and rare for me non-fiction read.
The book talks in-depth about the dangers of making inequality, discrimination, abuse, etc. quantifiable or measurable concepts. By making them so, you essentially strip them of their essence. The author states- and I tend to agree- that it's already an act of asserting power when you turn a rape, an abduction, an act of racism, a gender pay gap or anything that abuses a position, a statistic. A number is already giving an act a detached approach to it. By talking about say a percentage instead of a person with a name and age you dehumanise the acts that percentage represents.
The problem is how to talk about it then. And this is why I won't rate the book higher. Because I was left with the feeling that nobody-including me- has come up with an alternative approach. I'm as dissatisfied with the current way of speaking about violent acts on a large scale as the author is. But I don't know how to do it differently.
February 11, 2023
A bit over a year ago I reviewed a book called The Scout Mindset. I didn’t really think much of the book and said so in the review. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be much more to the story than that. Man, was I wrong. First of all a few nasty new rationalists decided it was time to give me a kicking. Then some less nasty new rationalists decided to put me straight. A deeply strange experience. I kept trying to refer them to books that would explain the points I was making better than I could – but people don’t read books on a site like this, I guess, especially new rationalists who, I assume, are terribly busy reading whatever it is new rationalists need to read to remain rational.
This book would be yet another book I would pointlessly recommend to such people. The point of this book is to show how attractive objective measures appear to be. How incredibly rational and reasonable and worthwhile they appear. But then, as soon as you start trying to see how they operate in the real world, what it is that gets counted and how it is counted and what counting certain things in ways that are decided by certain people in power – well, things become far less certain and endlessly more interesting. This book talks about how three categories of measurement end up getting measured: violence against women, sex trafficking and human rights. It is fascinating.
Part of this made me think of the wonderful clip by Laurie Anderson called “Women and Money” (I would like to link it, but I’m not allowed, but if you go into YouTube and search you will not be disappointed). The point being that you certainly can raid brothels, but if you think you are ‘liberating’ all of the women working there, well, that might not be the case. Sexual exploitation might just pay more and be a better deal than capitalist exploitation (as much as the two can be differentiated at all). As such, you might, in fact, be liberating these women to starvation. What is also made clear in this book is that we don’t just set about to liberate people who are the victims of sexual violence, but we also measure and track this violence. It is just that we don’t then go on to seek to understand the differences that exist for women in different cultures. I’m not saying that a woman being raped in one culture is somehow acceptable, but rather that some forms of violence against women are much more prevalent in some cultures than in others – and too often those defining what is violence and what will be measured come from rich, western nations.
The same thing goes for sex trafficking and human rights. Sex trafficking is particularly interesting, since, well, it is not as if it is exactly an open industry that publishes monthly figures. Tracking the traffickers involves a million ‘best guesses’ and assumptions. And again, what constitutes a trafficked person becomes insanely difficult to provide a single definition that does not smash up against endless cultural variations. Not only are not all women who end up being trafficked doing so against their will – some are escaping, if this is imaginable, even worse situations. But what this data also does not include are the young girls who are married off to strangers in return to their families of large doweries. That is, effectively still sex trafficking but where the fee for service is paid in one go and up-front.
The book documents the dilemmas faced in developing the types of indicators that will be used, and then in deciding what constitutes a human rights abuse or what can be counted and measured and reported upon. Ultimately, what is counted is a political decision. But also one that can hide as much as it reveals. Often the data generated is then colour-coded – and often coded by traffic-light colours – green is good, red is bad. Then whole nations get a single colour and are shamed into taking action. I’ve no problem so much with shaming nations into being more humane, but I do have a problem with western countries imposing ‘universal’ definitions of human rights, violence against women or sexual trafficking with no reference at all to the local contexts within which these measures will be applied. And not because I think violence against women isn’t as important in certain nations because they are under-developed – quite the opposite. It is more likely that the ‘universal’ measures will not detect at all instances that are the most likely forms of violence against women since the ‘universal’ measures are blind to the local situations in non-western nations.
Like I said at the beginning – if you are suffering under the new rationalist dogma, then this book could be for you. Otherwise, I guess you could read over The Scout Mindset one more time while congratulating yourself for being so much more objective than the rest of us.
This book would be yet another book I would pointlessly recommend to such people. The point of this book is to show how attractive objective measures appear to be. How incredibly rational and reasonable and worthwhile they appear. But then, as soon as you start trying to see how they operate in the real world, what it is that gets counted and how it is counted and what counting certain things in ways that are decided by certain people in power – well, things become far less certain and endlessly more interesting. This book talks about how three categories of measurement end up getting measured: violence against women, sex trafficking and human rights. It is fascinating.
Part of this made me think of the wonderful clip by Laurie Anderson called “Women and Money” (I would like to link it, but I’m not allowed, but if you go into YouTube and search you will not be disappointed). The point being that you certainly can raid brothels, but if you think you are ‘liberating’ all of the women working there, well, that might not be the case. Sexual exploitation might just pay more and be a better deal than capitalist exploitation (as much as the two can be differentiated at all). As such, you might, in fact, be liberating these women to starvation. What is also made clear in this book is that we don’t just set about to liberate people who are the victims of sexual violence, but we also measure and track this violence. It is just that we don’t then go on to seek to understand the differences that exist for women in different cultures. I’m not saying that a woman being raped in one culture is somehow acceptable, but rather that some forms of violence against women are much more prevalent in some cultures than in others – and too often those defining what is violence and what will be measured come from rich, western nations.
The same thing goes for sex trafficking and human rights. Sex trafficking is particularly interesting, since, well, it is not as if it is exactly an open industry that publishes monthly figures. Tracking the traffickers involves a million ‘best guesses’ and assumptions. And again, what constitutes a trafficked person becomes insanely difficult to provide a single definition that does not smash up against endless cultural variations. Not only are not all women who end up being trafficked doing so against their will – some are escaping, if this is imaginable, even worse situations. But what this data also does not include are the young girls who are married off to strangers in return to their families of large doweries. That is, effectively still sex trafficking but where the fee for service is paid in one go and up-front.
The book documents the dilemmas faced in developing the types of indicators that will be used, and then in deciding what constitutes a human rights abuse or what can be counted and measured and reported upon. Ultimately, what is counted is a political decision. But also one that can hide as much as it reveals. Often the data generated is then colour-coded – and often coded by traffic-light colours – green is good, red is bad. Then whole nations get a single colour and are shamed into taking action. I’ve no problem so much with shaming nations into being more humane, but I do have a problem with western countries imposing ‘universal’ definitions of human rights, violence against women or sexual trafficking with no reference at all to the local contexts within which these measures will be applied. And not because I think violence against women isn’t as important in certain nations because they are under-developed – quite the opposite. It is more likely that the ‘universal’ measures will not detect at all instances that are the most likely forms of violence against women since the ‘universal’ measures are blind to the local situations in non-western nations.
Like I said at the beginning – if you are suffering under the new rationalist dogma, then this book could be for you. Otherwise, I guess you could read over The Scout Mindset one more time while congratulating yourself for being so much more objective than the rest of us.
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