Kategori: News in English

As government representatives gather at the COP29 international climate summit in Azerbaijan, the impact of climate change on young people’s mental health needs to be an urgent priority.

As psychiatrists working with children and adolescents, we’re so concerned that we’re sharing our research at the summit on the link between higher temperatures and suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

Our recent study shows young people are more likely to present at the emergency department for suicidal thoughts and behaviours in hotter weather.

Here’s what we found and why one of us (Cybele Dey) is presenting our findings at COP29.

Mental health is getting worse

Young people’s mental health is getting worse in Australia and across the world.
There is growing evidence inadequate action on climate change is contributing. But it goes beyond young people worrying about how climate change will affect their future.

Climate change is here, and its effects are already damaging young people’s mental health. Extreme weather events – such as Australia’s devastating Black Summer bushfires in 2019 and storms and floods since – disrupt children’s schooling, force displacement and cause trauma, anxiety and stress.

Our study is showing another, less talked about dimension.

Suicidal behaviour risk increases with hotter weather

Small increases in average temperatures can mean a large rise in the number of hot days each year. In 2019, for example, Australia had 33 days averaging over 39°C – more than the total number of the preceding 59 years.

While studies have shown a link between hot weather and adult suicidal thoughts and behaviour, the issue is under-researched among young people.

Given suicide is a major health issue for young people – it is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15-24 – we wanted to investigate this link.

Young people are already being directly affected by climate change, through events such as the Black Summer bushfires.
Joachim Zens/Shutterstock

Our recent study looked at all emergency department presentations in New South Wales for suicidal thoughts and behaviour by people aged 12-24, during the warmer months (November to March) between January 2012 and December 2019.

We looked at these warmer months to focus on daily average temperature and heatwaves, rather than compare between seasons.

We found for every 1°C rise in average daily temperature, emergency department visits by young people for suicidal thoughts and behaviour increased by 1.3%. For example, presentations were 11% higher on days averaging 30°C, compared to days with an average 21.9°C. The risks also increased significantly even on days that were average temperature (not extreme heat), when compared to mild, cool days during the warmer months.

A study like this can only show an association between heat and suicidal thoughts and behaviour, rather than a direct cause. But the relationship was very strong. This means there was a steady and predictable worsening as ambient temperatures got rose.

We also analysed heatwaves, meaning three or more very hot days in a row. Interestingly, presentations increased as much on the first hot day as on later days of a heatwave. That means each single hot day is as bad as another.

Heat and inequality

Our study also found young people in regions with some of Australia’s most disadvantaged suburbs had a higher risk of presenting at emergency for suicidal thoughts and behaviours than those in more advantaged areas, even at the same temperature.

This is significant because previous research has shown socioeconomic disadvantage in itself does not increase risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviour in young people.

But disadvantage can mean people are more vulnerable to the harms of hot weather. For example, this could be through lack of cool shelter or inability to pay for air conditioning or other cooling, as well as a lack of transport and access to trees and water.

Complex interactions for mental health

Understanding mental health impacts of climate change means examining complex interactions between multiple factors, and over time. Simple, linear “cause and effect” models do not capture this.

Anxiety about climate change does also play a role in young people’s mental health. But children and teenagers who show high levels of distress may be expressing a healthy response to an unhealthy reality, rather than a mental disorder.

Inadequate action and dismissive responses by those in authority, including governments, worsens their distress.

Young people’s distress is exacerbated when governments dismiss their concerns about climate change.
Ben Wehrman/Shutterstock

What we’ll be telling COP29

At COP29, leaders must understand youth mental health is already seriously affected by insufficient action on climate change, from increasing extreme weather, heat, forced migration and disruption to school, work and health care.

High-income countries such as Australia must rapidly and equitably transition off fossil fuels, including gas, in line with scientific evidence and leadership by our Pacific neighbours, to reduce climate distress now.

Our research suggests this may help reduce youth suicide and suicidal thoughts and behaviours, and improve mental health more broadly.

How can we adapt?

If we are to adapt to climate change, we need to prepare the mental health system at national, state and local levels.

Public health messaging about heat should also consider the risks of single hot days, not just heatwaves. It should target young people and include information about mental health as well as physical health.

This information should also be part of how health professionals are trained. The current National Health and Climate Strategy includes two recommendations on mental health, focusing on community resilience and building a workforce trained in climate change and mental health. These need to go from policy into action.

Sensible public health measures – such as improving rental standards and equipping bus shelters for extreme heat – are needed now. We must plan for increases in mental health-care needs, including access to primary mental health care and evidence-based, local and culturally-appropriate treatments for children and young people.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency, call 000. Läs mer…

Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote:

The air is thick with tension,My mind is a tangled mess,The weight of my emotionsIs heavy on my chest.

This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT3.5 in response to the prompt “write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath”.

The stanza hits the key points readers may expect of Plath’s poetry, and perhaps a poem more generally. It suggests a sense of despair as the writer struggles with internal demons. “Mess” and “chest” are a near-rhyme, which reassures us that we are in the realm of poetry.

According to a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports, non-expert readers of poetry cannot distinguish poetry written by AI from that written by canonical poets. Moreover, general readers tend to prefer poetry written by AI – at least until they are told it is written by a machine.

In the study, AI was used to generate poetry “in the style of” ten poets: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Dorothea Lasky.

Participants were presented with ten poems in random order, five from a real poet and five AI imitations. They were then asked whether they thought each poem was AI or human, rating their confidence on a scale of 1-100.

A second group of participants were exposed to three different scenarios. Some were told that all the poems they were given were human. Some were told they were reading only AI poems. Some were not told anything.

They were then presented with five human and five AI poems and asked to rank them on a seven point scale, from extremely bad to extremely good. The participants who were told nothing were also asked to guess whether each poem was human or AI.

The researchers found that AI poems scored higher than their human-written counterparts in attributes such as “creativity”, “atmosphere” and “emotional quality”.

The AI “Plath” poem quoted above is one of those included in the study, set against several she actually wrote.

A sign of quality?

As a lecturer in English, these outcomes do not surprise me. Poetry is the literary form that my students find most unfamiliar and difficult. I am sure this holds true of wider society as well.

While most of us have been taught poetry at some point, likely in high school, our reading does not tend to go much beyond that. This is despite the ubiquity of poetry. We see it every day: circulated on Instagram, plastered on coffee cups and printed in greeting cards.

The researchers suggest that “by many metrics, specialized AI models are able to produce high-quality poetry”. But they don’t interrogate what we actually mean by “high-quality”.

In my view, the results of the study are less testaments to the “quality” of machine poetry than to the wider difficulty of giving life to poetry. It takes reading and rereading to experience what literary critic Derek Attridge has called the “event” of literature, where “new possibilities of meaning and feeling” open within us. In the most significant kinds of literary experiences, “we feel pulled along by the work as we push ourselves through it”.

Attridge quotes philosopher Walter Benjamin to make this point: literature “is not statement or the imparting of information”.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that literature is not simply the imparting of information.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Yet pushing ourselves through remains as difficult as ever – perhaps more so in a world where we expect instant answers. Participants favoured poems that were easier to interpret and understand.

When readers say they prefer AI poetry, then, they would seem to be registering their frustration when faced with writing that does not yield to their attention. If we do not know how to begin with poems, we end up relying on conventional “poetic” signs to make determinations about quality and preference.

This is of course the realm of GPT, which writes formally adequate sonnets in seconds. The large language models used in AI are success-orientated machines that aim to satisfy general taste, and they are effective at doing so. The machines give us the poems we think we want: ones that tell us things.

How poems think

The work of teaching is to help students to attune themselves to how poems think, poem by poem and poet by poet, so they can gain access to poetry’s specific intelligence. In my introductory course, I take about an hour to work through Sylvia Plath’s Morning Song. I have spent ten minutes or more on the opening line: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”

How might a “watch” be connected to “set you going”? How can love set something going? What does a “fat gold watch” mean to you – and how is it different from a slim silver one? Why “set you going” rather than “led to your birth”? And what does all this mean in a poem about having a baby, and all the ambivalent feelings this may produce in a mother?

In one of the real Plath poems that was included in the survey, Winter Landscape, With Rooks, we observe how her mental atmosphere unfurls around the waterways of the Cambridgeshire Fens in February:

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,plunges headlong into that black pondwhere, absurd and out-of-season, a single swanfloats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mindwhich hungers to haul the white reflection down.

How different is this to GPT’s Plath poem? The achievement of the opening of Winter Landscape, With Rooks is how it intricately explores the connection between mental events and place. Given the wider interest of the poem in emotional states, its details seem to convey the tumble of life’s events through our minds.

Our minds are turned by life just as the mill is turned by water; these experiences and mental processes accumulate in a scarcely understood “black pond”.

Intriguingly, the poet finds that this metaphor, well constructed though it may be, does not quite work. This is not because of a failure of language, but because of the landscape she is trying to turn into art, which is refusing to submit to her emotional atmosphere. Despite everything she feels, a swan floats on serenely – even if she “hungers” to haul its “white reflection down”.

I mention these lines because they turn around the Plath-like poem of GPT3.5. They remind us of the unexpected outcomes of giving life to poems. Plath acknowledges not just the weight of her despair, but the absurd figure she may be within a landscape she wants to reflect her sadness.

She compares herself to the bird that gives the poem its title:

feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,brooding as the winter night comes on.

These lines are unlikely to register highly in the study’s terms of literary response – “beautiful”, “inspiring”, “lyrical”, “meaningful”, and so on. But there is a kind of insight to them. Plath is the source of her torment, “feathered” as she is with her “dark thoughts”. She is “brooding”, trying to make the world into her imaginative vision.

Sylvia Plath.
RBainbridge2000, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The authors of the study are both right and wrong when they write that AI can “produce high-quality poetry”. The preference the study reveals for AI poetry over that written by humans does not suggest that machine poems are of a higher quality. The AI models can produce poems that rate well on certain “metrics”. But the event of reading poetry is ultimately not one in which we arrive at standardised criteria or outcomes.

Instead, as we engage in imaginative tussles with poems, both we and the poem are newly born. So the outcome of the research is that we have a highly specified and well thought-out examination of how people who know little about poetry respond to poems. But it fails to explore how poetry can be enlivened by meaningful shared encounters.

Spending time with poems of any kind, attending to their intelligence and the acts of sympathy and speculation required to confront their challenges, is as difficult as ever. As the Plath of GPT3.5 puts it:

My mind is a tangled mess,[…]I try to grasp at something solid. Läs mer…

Every US election throws up a cast of figures adjacent to the campaign who endorse one candidate or another. Kamala Harris had a long line of celebrity backers, from Beyoncé to Bruce Springsteen.

Donald Trump had his own celebrities, such as Hulk Hogan, but he was also supported by a group of converted Democrats: Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, (just chosen as Trump’s director of national intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Trump’s pick to head the federal health agency), and Elon Musk, who has been selected to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.

These figures are notable not just because they switched sides, but because they were part of an immensely popular online phenomenon born in the mid-2010s: the intellectual dark web.

After Trump’s victory, I found myself exclaiming: my God, the intellectual dark web just won the election! Though the name is now rarely used, understanding the phenomenon can help us understand what just happened.

The intellectual dark web became increasingly well known during the first Trump presidency. It gained mainstream attention through a 2018 New York Times article, which described it as “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation – on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums – that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now”.

Many of these figures, the Times noted, were building their own media channels. It identified The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which has an audience in the tens of millions, as a focal point. “People are starved for controversial opinions,” Rogan has said. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”

In the week before the election, podcast episodes with Trump, JD Vance and Musk gained 80 million views on YouTube alone. Interestingly, in the week after the election, MSNBC’s viewership was down 39% and CNN’s down 22%, compared with their October averages. The audience of Fox News jumped 39% in the same period.

JD Vance campaigning with Tulsi Gabbard.
Gene J. Puskar/AAP

What was the intellectual dark web?

In the mid-2010s, longform podcasts became an unexpected success. Rogan’s was one of the most successful. His conversations with academics, politicians and media personalities went for hours and were uncensored, and his approach was very different from the heavily produced interviews of mainstream media.

The “core” of the intellectual dark web included Rogan, psychologist and bestselling author of 12 Rules for Life Jordan Peterson, neuroscientist Sam Harris (who voted for Hillary Clinton), and Eric Weinstein, managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm until 2022 (and a Bernie Sanders supporter).

However, there were 50 or more others like Musk and Gabbard who appeared on Rogan’s podcast (and those of other core figures), who had similar values and concerns.

Musk and Gabbard both first appeared on Rogan’s podcast in 2018. Musk has appeared five times and Gabbard seven times. Kennedy Jr, a latecomer, has appeared once so far, in June 2023.

Gabbard, a former congresswoman for Hawaii, even announced her resignation from the Democratic party on Rogan’s podcast, in October 2022. “The people in charge of the Democratic party… have created this cult-like atmosphere,” she said. “The Democratic party of the past – the party that I joined – doesn’t exist anymore. The party of JFK, of Dr Martin Luther King … The big tent party that welcomed and encouraged this marketplace of ideas.”

The rise of podcasting coincided with campus politics spilling over into the wider world. “Cancel culture”, which grew out of this, has often been mentioned on Rogan’s podcast as a problem.

For the intellectual dark web, the worst aspects of campus politics are driven by postmodernism’s degradation of traditional liberal values. Once, the great liberal objective was to try to grasp the truth – the nature of reality. This was done through open and civil discussion, and by drawing on reasoning and evidence.

Jordan Peterson was a key figure of the intellectual dark web.
Szilard Koszticsak/AAP

Postmodernism, ‘woke’ and disputed realities

The 1960s saw the rise of poststructuralism, which led to postmodernism from the 1980s. The latter was influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was concerned with dissecting power. Foucault believed power “produces reality”.

Postmodern thinking argues there is no objective truth: apparent claims to it are always related to power. Postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of identity politics – what many now refer to as being “woke”.

For postmodern thinkers, the task of the intellectual activist is to prevent or transform the speech of the powerful. The introduction of gender-neutral pronouns (they/them) and, relatedly, the term “Latinx” (a gender-neutral term for Latino) are examples. For postmodern and “woke” thinkers, the “truth” that matters belongs to those without power in our society. According to this way of thinking, the less power you have, the greater your worth, and vice versa.

“There’s no real world. Everything’s a social construct,” Peterson said of postmodernism. “And it’s a landscape of conflict between groups.”

The intellectual dark web’s criticism of “woke” politics is centred on this disputed reality (and ideas about power) – spanning issues as diverse as biological sex and gender, debates over police violence and Black Lives Matter, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies. While they accept that social norms influence us, they object to the idea that language conjures reality into existence.

The intellectual dark web’s criticism of ‘woke’ politics includes debates over police violence and Black Lives Matter.
BLM ZZ STRF STAR MAX IPXl/AAP

These kinds of discussions had, for decades, been routinely shut down in universities. For example, last year, students called for the cancelling of “gender-critical feminist” Holly Lawford-Smith’s course on feminism at the University of Melbourne, due to her arguments for the significance of biological sex.

And these opinions (which are associated with conservatism) are rarely heard in the liberal mainstream media, where conservatism is the enemy.

Free speech as the path to truth

The intellectual dark web championed free speech as the pathway to truth.

Intellectual dark web thinkers do not believe in gender as a social construct: they see it as a biological reality, with real implications for men, women and relationships between them.

Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, who has appeared on intellectual dark web podcasts, argues gender difference is not just physical, but psychological – and that women do not benefit from casual sex, despite liberal feminism encouraging it. Peterson exhorts men to follow a middle path between emasculation and being like the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.

Yes, the manosphere is real: Rogan’s audience is mostly male, as is Peterson’s. And Rogan’s guests are also mostly male. But the term “manosphere” is inherently dismissive. It ignores concerns that seemed to resonate with many US voters.

The intellectual dark web, in its commitment to reality, also bemoans the postmodern devaluation of merit. “I think the pathology that’s at the core of the culture war is an attack on competence itself,” says Peterson.

For me, Raygun’s recent performance at the Olympics, which was internationally criticised as poor, is a clear example of the postmodern devaluation of merit. As Rogan said: “It’s an offense to actual breakdancers that that lady did that. Actual high-level breakdancing is an athletic art form.”

Raygun’s Olympic performance can be seen as ‘a clear example of the postmodern devaluation of merit’.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP

This devaluation of merit is at the core of the intellectual dark web’s criticisms of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Black economist Glenn Loury, a member of the intellectual dark web, argues such initiatives don’t even help those they are designed to help. “I hate affirmative action,” he says. “It is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete.”

In such ideas, there is a recurring tension between creating equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. For instance, US President Joe Biden was urged to pick a Black woman as vice president and promised to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court – both of which he did. He has been criticised for making these choices based on identity rather than merit.

These are complex discussions: there is a long history of Black people and women suffering discrimination when they have merit. But, arguably, the Democratic party has increasingly become concerned with a superficial equality of outcome, at the expense of the party’s erstwhile base: workers.

As US Senator Bernie Sanders said following Trump’s election win: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Rogan endorsed Sanders, who appeared on his podcast in 2019, as the Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
Andrew Harnik/AAP

In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Sam Harris spoke some then-taboo truths about the absurdity of calls to defund the police in the US. “Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society,” he said.

“Woke capitalism” is a concept that circulated within the intellectual dark web. It argues that identity politics might seem radical, but in fact works hand-in-glove with the corporate world. Rather than actually improving the lot of workers, many corporations prefer to make costless gestures by running diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Where to now?

While Trump won for many reasons, including immigration and the economy, my sense is that Trump, forever the populist, harnessed a widespread dissatisfaction with a form of identity politics promulgated by a quite often well-paid, white-collar class: psychologist Steven Pinker’s “chattering class”.

The intellectual dark web, which can be seen as a broad populist movement spanning the left and right, has been going on about identity politics and its postmodern roots for more than a decade. Now, its ideas and figures have helped elect a president, and some of them – Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy Jr – have roles in Trump’s administration. Läs mer…

It’s one of the most thrilling sequences in Ridley Scott’s new film Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to the 2000 Oscar-winning blockbuster.

Water gushes from the Colosseum’s fountains and floods the arena. A crew of men led by the film’s hero, Lucius Verus (played by Paul Mescal), row a warship while firing arrows at another ship. Sharks loom in the surrounding water, while the Emperor Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) watches on laughing.

Gladiator II trailer.

It’s Hollywood’s first re-enactment of an ancient Roman naval battle – and it’s spectacular. The special effects from this sequence will have been a major component of the film’s reported US$310 million budget.

But is there much history to be found here, especially given Ridley Scott’s disdain for historical realities in his films? Did the Romans watch naval battles as entertainment?

Whatever is viewed in the circus and the amphitheatre […] let this be the only sea fight known to posterity. – Martial in Liber Spectaculorum, book 28

War on the water

The term “naumachia” refers to both the staging of naval battles for mass entertainment and the structure or natural feature in which these recreations took place. Naumachiae did exist. And while they seem to have been rare, the death rates would have been high.

Much of what we know of them (and what is written in this article) comes from writing from a handful of historians, including Suetonius, Dio Cassius and Tacitus.

This fresco wall painting on a panel from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii depicts a naumachia.
Wikimedia/Naples National Archaeological Museum, CC BY-SA

The earliest known naumachia was hosted by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE. Suetonius describes a basin dug near the Tiber river, in Rome’s Campus Martius area, which was large enough to host ships with more than 2,000 combatants and 4,000 rowers – all prisoners of war.

An even grander event was held in 2 BCE by the emperor Augustus for the inauguration of the Temple of Mars Ultor. It was held on an artificial lake, or “stagnum”, spanning more than 530 metres by 350 metres. An estimated 270,000 cubic metres of water would have been required to fill it.

This naumachia featured the reenactment of a naval battle between the “Athenians” and “Persians”. According to Augustus himself, more than 3,000 men fought in 30 vessels.

The largest recorded naumachia came some years later. This reenactment of battle between the “Rhodians” and “Sicilians” was staged by Claudius in 52 CE on the natural lake in Abruzzo, Italy. The event consisted of 100 naval ships and 19,000 combatants – all prisoners who had been condemned to death.

According Dio Cassius, the condemned men saluted Claudius with the phrase Ave imperator, morituri te salutant, or “Hail emperor, those who are about to die salute you”. Although this phrase is now commonly and erroneously assumed to have been spoken by gladiators prior to combat, this remains the only recorded example of its use.

Naumachiae were commonly presented as historical or pseudo-historical reenactments of real naval conflicts. Claudius’ spectacle, for instance, was between fleets representing the “Rhodians” and the “Sicilians”.

Naumachiae in amphitheatres

A new development took place in the 1st century CE: naumachiae began being performed in amphitheatres. The earliest recorded event took place in 57 CE under the rule of emperor Nero, in a wooden structure thought to have been located in the Campus Martius.

For the inauguration of the Flavian amphitheatre (the Colosseum) in 80 CE, Emperor Titus presented two naumachiae: one in Augustus’ stagnum and the other in the Colosseum itself. Titus’ successor, Domitian, is also said to have flooded the Colosseum to host a naumachia circa 85 CE.

This 1625 print by Giacomo Lauro depicts a naumachia held under the emporer Domitian.
Wikimedia

The term naumachiae became less frequent in historical literature after the Flavian era (69–96 CE). There’s no evidence the Colosseum was hosting naumachiae as late as the 3rd century, when Gladiator II is set.

Other water spectacles across the Empire

There is some better-preserved evidence of aquatic spectacles on a smaller scale outside of Rome. In Spain, ampitheatres at Verona and Mérida feature central basins connected to water supply and drainage channels.

However, only modest naumachiae would have been possible in these – the arenas presumably covered with wooden floorboards when not used for this purpose.

The ampitheatre at Mérida, Spain, with a sunken basin visible in the centre of the arena.
Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Water was also used in other forms of entertainment, such as to display marine animals. For instance, in 2 BCE 36 crocodiles were released in a flooded arena and hunted. It was also common for female swimmers to portray Nereids (water nymphs) in flooded arenas, similar to modern artistic swimming.

However, there is no evidence of sharks ever being on display – despite Ridley Scott’s insistence.

A case study from Cyprus

Just as there is evidence of older Roman theatres being converted for gladiator contests and beast hunts, there is also strong evidence of theatres having been modified for aquatic spectacles. This includes theatres in the Greek cities of Corinth and Argos, as well as in Ostia, Italy.

Recent investigations by University of Sydney archaeologists have revealed further evidence of such modifications at the site of Paphos in Cyprus.

They’ve found evidence of the Paphos theatre’s orchestra being converted for water spectacles in the mid-third century – its floor covered with a cement and coloured stone. With an estimated capacity of 310 cubic metres, this theatre was likely too small to host naumachiae, but would have been ideal for displaying animals or water nymphs.

A semicircular containment wall about one metre high separated the audience from the action, while drains and terracotta pipes indicate the flow of water from a large reservoir excavated behind the theatre. Analysis of the plaster on the floor has also confirmed it was waterproof.

The site provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of Roman water spectacles.

In this photo of the Paphos theatre, you can see the semi-circular containment wall surrounding the orchestra. This wall acted as abarrier between the arena and the audience in the third century CE.
Photo by Bob Miller/Paphos Theatre Archaeological Project, CC BY-SA

So when you’re watching the naval battle in Gladiator II, it’s worth remembering how the ancient Romans viewed this spectacle in much the same way. Just like back then, a lot of money was spent to bring this entertainment to life.

Luckily, nobody had to die this time around. Läs mer…

Since the Industrial Revolution, country after country has turned to fossil fuels to power their transport and industry.

Now the bill is coming due. Huge volumes of long-buried carbon are in the atmosphere, warming the planet. Climate disasters are arriving more often and getting worse.

But the pain from climate change is not distributed fairly. Developing nations are suffering the worst, despite emitting far fewer greenhouse gases. To date, two regions – Europe and North America – have contributed fully 60% of the world’s total emissions. This has made them much richer, but at a cost borne largely by those of us in the Global South.

This injustice will be in the spotlight this week, as leaders and diplomats gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the yearly United Nations climate talks. Climate finance is high on the agenda – specifically, the vexed question of who pays.

Who is responsible for climate change?

Historically, North America and Europe are the highest emitters.

Asia’s emissions have grown sharply in recent decades, due to its high population size, sustained economic growth in China and high emitting, oil-reliant Gulf states.

By contrast, Africa and South America are each only responsible for 3% of the world’s total emissions over time.

This is a necessarily simplistic picture. It hides, for instance, which companies and organisations emitted most in Europe and North America, as well as which income groups emit most.

But even at this level, it is increasingly clear the wealthiest people in the world are the highest emitters – including the rich who live in the Global South.

This unequal distribution of emissions gave rise to the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” in international environmental law in the 1990s.

This phrase speaks to the common responsibility to tackle climate change, the fact some nations have contributed less to the problem and some much more, and that some can respond more easily to the threat.

The idea was first articulated in the 1992 Rio Declaration on sustainable development. It was featured in the 1996 Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Pain for the poor

Until very recently, economic growth went hand in hand with using ever more fossil fuels.

The problem is the benefits were localised (an industry booms, a country gets wealthier), the environmental cost was deferred until later, and the damage would be borne more widely.

If fast-growing countries like Ethiopia, and Indonesia took the same route, climate change would get even worse and the world would blow through its shrinking carbon budget.

This is just one of many cruel twists of fate. As the damage done by climate change intensifies, developing countries have to spend more of their budgets on maintaining the status quo – repairing broken bridges, keeping farmers afloat – and less on improving the lives of their citizens.

Climate change also poses major financial risks to developing nations. To cope with more and worse disasters, governments have to borrow more. More of their budgets have to go towards servicing debt, leaving less for everything else.

Right now, millions are going hungry in southern Africa, after an unprecedented drought devastated crops. Zimbabwe has lost 80% of its crops, Zambia 70%.

In 2022, catastrophic floods in Pakistan forced almost 8 million people to leave their homes and forced another 20 million to seek immediate humanitarian aid.

These disasters are bad enough. But they can also disrupt national climate efforts. The hydroelectric Kariba Dam has long provided low-carbon power to Zambia and Zimbabwe. But the water level has dropped sharply due to the drought. In September, the dam stopped generating electricity – and brought power cuts across both nations. In response, the governments have looked to solar and even coal.

The Kariba dam between Zambia and Zimbabwe has been turned off, as water levels were too low to generate power.
Keith Syse/Shutterstock

Who pays for loss and damage?

Adapting to climate change can only go so far. In response, nations in the Global South have sought recognition of the disproportionate loss and damage they were suffering.

In 2013, the world community set up the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damage in a bid to tackle this injustice.

It took a decade of negotiation, stalling and delay before agreement was reached to create the Loss and Damage Fund at last year’s COP climate talks. It will be hosted in the World Bank at first. No funds have yet flowed.

This year’s COP meeting has been dubbed the “finance COP”. On the table will be how to structure this fund. One challenge will be securing funding, given contributions are voluntary and the Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund are also seeking funding for mitigation and adaptation projects.

At present, pledges come to a meagre US$661 billion. Wealthier countries have consistently tried to avoid liability for climate change and have blocked the use of terms such as “compensation” or “reparation”.

Will we see progress?

In 2009, nations agreed to fund climate change adaptation and mitigation at $100 billion a year. This figure has now been reached.

The top item at this year’s climate talks will be setting a bigger goal for these climate funds. We don’t know yet whether loss and damage will be included alongside adaptation (living with it) and mitigation (preventing it). Leaders and activists in the Global South have called for a much larger sum for loss and damage, starting at $724 billion per year.

Climate change is already costing poor nations a great deal of money, estimated at $100 to $500 billion in damage each year.

If this year’s COP is to correct this injustice, funding must be in line with expected costs. Funding should flow largely as grants, rather than loans. And wealthy nations should also contribute towards the loss and damage already being suffered.

Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to see this happen if history is any guide. The COP discussions will be overshadowed by the election of Donald Trump, who has promised to give fossil fuel companies free rein.

Even so, these talks offer an important way to get wealthy nations to pay attention to the very real damage done by climate change, far from the headlines. Persistence and advocacy may still pay off.

Read more:
COP29: who pays for climate action in developing nations – and how much – becomes more urgent Läs mer…

Police departments around the world are increasingly using body-worn cameras in an attempt to improve public trust and accountability. But this has created huge amounts of data, about 95% of which is never reviewed or even seen.

Enter companies such as Axon, Polis Solutions and Truleo. These companies market artificial intelligence (AI) tools for analysing the data generated by body-worn cameras and other policing technologies.

Some police departments in the United States previously launched trials of these tools before abandoning them because of concerns about privacy.

Truleo told The Conversation that police in Australia were now using its technology, but did not name any specific department. However, when The Conversation asked Australian police departments if they were using or considering using Truleo’s software, all except the Queensland Police Service said they were not.

In a statement, a Queensland Police Service spokesperson said it is currently conducting an AI trial with “a variety of technology” as part of its work tackling domestic and family violence. The spokesperson added: “Once the trial is completed, a detailed evaluation will be undertaken before the QPS considers future options for using the technology”.

But AI will not solve the challenges facing police – at least, not by itself.

The unfulfilled promise of body-worn cameras

The increased use of body-worn cameras by law enforcement agencies in recent years follows a number of high-profile cases involving police using force. In Australia, for example, a police officer is currently on trial for the manslaughter of a 95-year-old great-grandmother by using a taser.

There is debate about whether body-worn cameras actually make police officers’ behaviour more transparent and accountable.

Some experts have said their effectiveness is uncertain. Others have said they are a failed attempt at reform.

These sentiments were echoed by a major study published earlier this year.

The study examined the use of body-worn cameras in response to domestic and family violence in Australia. It acknowledged their potential utility but showed how data from these technologies might not be used to support victim-survivors. This is because of more foundational problems with how police engage with victim-survivors.

AI’s many uses in policing

Police have been using AI as part of their work for a long time.

For example, in 2000, New South Wales Police launched a program that used data analytics to predict which people were at risk of committing a crime, to enhance police supervision.

A report from the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission later revealed the program disproportionately targeted Indigenous youth, who subsequently faced heightened surveillance and increased arrests for minor crimes. This led to NSW Police ending the program in 2023.

The Queensland Police Service has also proposed a program using AI technologies to predict risk of domestic and family violence.

Experts, however, have pointed to potential unintended consequences, including criminalising victim-survivors.

Companies such as Truleo, which provides police with AI tools to analyse body-worn camera footage, say these tools improve police “professionalism”. However, it is not clear if what is being measured and assessed as “professionalism” correlates with officers’ core duties and responsibilities.

In fact, the Seattle Police Department in the US ended its contract with Truleo despite acknowledging it was a “promising” trial.

It did so after finding a case of unprofessional conduct in which the police union cited the use of camera footage as infringing on the police officer’s privacy.

About 95% of all body-worn camera footage isn’t reviewed or even seen.
John Gomez/Shutterstock

The need for structural reform

AI tools could help police manage and analyse body-worn camera data. Their value depends on several conditions.

First, police must thoroughly evaluate any AI tools to ensure they are fit for purpose in a local context. Many of these technologies are developed overseas and trained on data that have linguistic features such as accents, inflections and insults that are not common in Australia.

Second, police – and the companies that offer AI data analysis tools – must also be transparent about how they use body worn camera footage. In particular, they must share where, how and by what arrangements data is processed and stored.

Finally – and most importantly – the use of AI technologies by police should not supersede organisational and structural reforms.

Police need to examine the impact of behaviours and processes that have resulted in inequitable surveillance practices. AI technologies are not solutions to these underlying dynamics.

Without an understanding of the systemic structures that sustain disparities in the criminal legal system, police will not be prepared to address the implications of integrating AI technologies into their work. If they do not, these technologies are more likely to exacerbate existing injustices and inequalities.

In short, the questions about AI shouldn’t be simply about technology but about police legitimacy. Läs mer…

Language trends change quickly at the hands of social media users. They explode into our screens, rather than slowly evolve. This can change the ways we talk about diagnoses such as autism and concepts like neurodiversity.

But before we use a term, we should look at how it came to be and what it means to people.

So where does the new word “neurospicy” come from? And why do some people embrace it, while others reject it?

First, let’s unpack ‘neurodiversity’

The term neurodiversity evolved collectively in the mid-1990s in an online space dedicated to autistic people.

The term refers to the neurological diversity found across the human species. It is a way to include brains and minds that diverge from what society considers neurologically typical or “neurotypical”.

Australian sociologist Judy Singer first used the term in academia in her 1998 honours thesis and it made its way to mainstream media the same year.

The terms neurodivergent and neurotypical are now well studied and well defined by academics and the neurodiversity movement. Outside of this, though, language can change meaning.

The neurodiversity movement promotes equality

The neurodiversity movement came from the autism rights movement, and for many, the term neurodivergent is associated with autism.

The concept of neurodivergence has broadened over time to include people with conditions such as intellectual disability, mental illness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and acquired brain injury.

However, a person cannot be diagnosed as neurodivergent. A person can only be diagnosed with a condition that indicates neurodivergence.

The term neurodivergence has broadened beyond autism.
Galyna Andrushko/Shutterstock

The neurodiversity movement is a disability rights movement that focuses on equal rights for neurodivergent people.

Advocates say people with conditions such as autism and ADHD should be accepted rather than “cured”. They argue an inclusive society should ensure equal access to ethical care and support to everyone, including neurodivergent people.

This movement began at a time when most of the autism research focused on finding a cure.

Some argue it doesn’t represent people with high support needs

One of the main criticisms of the neurodiversity movement is it doesn’t address the complex needs of many autistic people.

An autistic person can be non-speaking, have intellectual disability and severe anxiety, requiring a lot of daily support. The people who advocate on behalf of autistic people with complex needs are parents and concerned clinicians.

To these advocates, an acceptance of neurodiversity and an equal rights campaign is not enough. Some argue that neurodivergence, particularly autism, is a medical problem that needs “treatment”.

But both groups want to highlight the care and support needs of this part of the autistic population.

Why do some people favour the term ‘neurospicy’?

Words like neurodiverse, neuro-inclusive, neuro-affirming and neurospicy are neologisms (new words) related to neurodiversity.

These words don’t come from the original group in the 1990s or from medical professionals. They come from a large online community of neurodivergent people.

Neurospicy is a way of describing a person who experiences multiple forms of neurodivergence, or a collective, such as a family that has many neurodivergent members.

For some, the use of neurospicy avoids disclosure of a diagnosis.

Others feel it’s a creative way of pushing back against medical terms such as “mild autism”.

Blogger Randi Owsley writes:

Neurospicy embodies the richness, the zest, and the profound depth that characterise our unique neurological makeup. It’s a celebration of the vibrant, sometimes intense, facets of our identities.

Why do some people dislike it?

The use of neologisms like neurospicy is controversial inside and outside the neurodivergent community.

Some parent advocates feel that terms associated with neurodiversity erase the profound difficulties of autistic people.

Speaking of her son Zack, author Whitney Ellenby says:

Blurring his identity under the indistinct banner of “neurodiverse” erases Zack’s lived history – all that he has endured and overcome to get here.

Neurodivergent people have also had some strong reactions to the word neurospicy. Neurodivergent podcaster Danielle Sullivan asks if neurospicy is just a cute, quirky word or a way to avoid saying disabled.

Some argue we should abandon words such as neurospicy and “neurosparkly” and be clear that we’re talking about disability:

Facebook

So it seems that some neurodivergent people and people who support the medical model of autism agree about refocusing on disability.

So is it OK to say neurospicy?

Before picking up a new language trend, consider the history and the power of words.

Moving forward, we can ask individuals and families how they refer to themselves and their diagnosis. We will find a variety of responses including neurospicy, autistic, disabled, neurodivergent, has autism or ADHD, or my disability doesn’t define me.

Asking about people’s preferences gives us an opportunity to provide an affirming environment for all, and a space to continue to explore this conversation. Läs mer…

Just as a Formula 1 team wouldn’t use shoddy fuel for their cars, elite athletes shouldn’t eat poorly as they try to get the best out of themselves.

Nutrition is crucial for fuelling athletes for training, performance and recovery.

The two most important macronutrients for athletes are carbohydrates and protein.

Carbohydrates provide energy – they fuel the body for exercise and help to sustain performance, and then aid recovery after exercise. Protein is important to repair and build muscles after exercise.

Athletes’ nutrient requirements for carbohydrates and protein will depend on the type, intensity, and duration of the exercise they complete and their body weight.

How much do athletes need?

Reflecting their importance for performance, there are specific carbohydrate and protein guidelines for athletes.

There are also guidelines to promote high carbohydrate availability for training sessions and competition.

Individual requirements vary: athletes will need more carbs through the day if they exercise at greater intensities for longer periods. Also, the more the athlete weighs, the more carbs and protein they will require.

Although research in this area has grown and there is increased focus on education, it seems many elite athletes still find it difficult to fuel their bodies.

What did we look at?

The AFLW is an emerging sport, and we were interested to see if these elite women footballers met the recommendations for daily protein and carbohydrate intake as well as during competition.

We asked AFLW players from one team to tell us what they ate across the season by filling out electronic food diaries.

We were also interested in what they ate on match days.

In addition to filling out a diary at home, we videoed and directly observed what they ate when they were at the football ground.

What did we find?

We found more than 80% of these athletes did not consume enough carbohydrates across pre-season and in-season competition.

On match days, only 18% met their daily carbohydrate requirements.

We also found they did not eat carbohydrates at the right time to fuel their performance – which is before (pre-game) and during a game. Interestingly, when the games were scheduled later in the day, athletes were more likely to meet the pre-game recommendations.

All athletes ate enough carbohydrates after a game.

When it came to protein, all the athletes in our study met their requirements across the season, including on match days.

This isn’t new

Unfortunately, these findings are not unusual for women athletes.

In a systematic review that combined 20 studies of field-based women athletes across different sports, many athletes had low energy and carbohydrate intakes. This was also found in women soccer and volleyball players, and individual sport athletes such as gymnasts.

On average across these studies, less than 50% of the women athletes typically met the recommended daily amount of carbohydrates.

Why is this a problem?

While low energy and carbohydrate intakes can negatively impact an athlete’s performance, it also impacts on their general health.

Athletes who consistently fail to eat enough energy and carbohydrates over a long period of time may be at risk of low energy availability. This can result in physical and mental health problems, a syndrome known as relative energy deficiency in sport REDs.

In addition to poor sports performance outcomes, REDs can result in mood disturbances, reduced sleep quality, impaired growth and development, reduced cardiovascular function and impaired bone health.

Reduced performance during exercise could include decreased muscle strength, endurance, power, ability to recover and reduced motivation.

Why do women athletes avoid carbohydrates?

It’s hard to know exactly why an athlete would consume so few carbs but one reason could be due to the messaging on social media spruiking low-carb and keto diets.

It may also be due to the increased time demands for semi-professional athletes: many AFLW athletes are still working while training.

Athletes often report gut discomfort and suppressed appetite, which may also affect their food choices before training and competition.

How to boost your carb intake

Sports dietitians promote a food-first approach, which focuses on using everyday foods to meet athletes’ daily energy and nutrient needs before considering sports foods.

Sports foods are convenient alternatives to everyday foods to fuel performance (such as energy gels or protein bars). There are, however, some potential downsides to consuming them.

While our research focused on elite women athletes, it is relevant for all women involved in sport.

Regardless of your level of competition, or even if you are a weekend warrior, it is important to meet your energy goals with adequate carbohydrate intake for your activity.

Here are some examples of foods and drinks you can eat to help increase your carbohydrate (and energy) intake for improved performance: Läs mer…

In a world coping with climate setbacks and Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States, the growing prominence of international carbon markets may just be the good news we have been looking for. Canada should take notice.

More than a decade after the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, the most recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) global Conference of the Parties (COP29) meeting appears to have already seen important breakthroughs. This includes a decision on a new UN carbon offset mechanism under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, while finalization of rules for emissions trading continue.

Similarly, in North America, voters in the state of Washington rejected a ballot initiative on Nov. 5 that would have revoked the state’s climate mitigation efforts. This paves the way for the state’s planned linkage of its emissions trading system with that of California and Québec.

As the International Carbon Action Partnership reports, emission trading systems are on the rise. New York and Maryland are developing carbon markets that might see advantage in linking with California-Québec-Washington. Looking globally, the same report indicates that a number of emerging economies are also developing emissions trading systems — including India, Brazil and Indonesia.

However, the Canadian federal government’s 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan hardly mentions international carbon markets.

As the world warms, there is an urgent need to discuss how Canada can engage with growing international carbon markets. More than simply a way to bring down the costs of climate change mitigation for Canadians, they are a form of international co-operation. International carbon markets are a means of sharing the cost of climate change mitigation across participating jurisdictions.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaks during a plenary session at the COP29 UN Climate Summit, on Nov. 12, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

Carbon markets 101

There are two variants of the carbon market, emissions trading and carbon offsetting.

Emissions trading is based on firm-level emission inventories that are aggregated by the government to form a hard cap that is reduced over time. Carbon offsets are individual projects where the project developer argues that emissions will decline relative to a counter-factual baseline scenario. This counter-factual baseline is what emissions would be if the investment into the carbon offset project were absent.

Emissions trading systems allow regulated firms flexibility to reduce emissions at lowest cost. Firms that are able to reduce their emissions below a government-imposed quota— the “cap” — can sell their surplus to firms unable to do so. Governments require that aggregate emissions across firms in a particular jurisdiction decline over time. As such, a price for carbon emerges through this system, measured per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).

Firms can trade carbon within the same jurisdiction but different jurisdictions can also link their carbon markets, allowing trading between firms across borders. This is what California and Québec have been doing since 2014.

The costs of reducing emissions varies significantly around the world due to a range of factors. For example, research suggest that the costs of decarbonization are relatively higher in Canada than in the United States. International carbon markets could help spread out these costs. Important differences in the costs of decarbonization globally make the benefits of an interconnected carbon market perhaps even more attractive.

For example, the International Monetary Fund has suggested that the goals of the Paris Agreement might be achieved through introduction of a uniform global carbon price of approximately CDN $104 per tCO2e by 2030. This is substantially lower than the $170 to which the revenue-neutral carbon tax of the federal Canadian government is slated to rise by 2030.

A video explaining how carbon markets work produced by The Economist.

Carbon offsetting, by contrast, tends to be restricted to emissions in sectors that are difficult to measure or in developing countries where there is insufficient capacity for emissions trading. Organizations developing carbon offset projects are usually tasked with collecting baseline information against which the emission reductions of their projects is measured.

The prospect of project developers manipulating baselines continues to raise concerns. However, counter-factual baselines are routinely used in development co-operation.

Political headwinds in Canada

Canadians should seriously consider a carbon market system linked with other jurisdictions — including across Canada, globally and with individual U.S. states.

The Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has started to “bend the curve” as Canada’s emissions dropped one per cent from 2022 to 2023. But to reach the federal government’s 2030 emission reduction target of 28 per cent below 1990 levels, Canada will need to reduce emissions at least five per cent year-upon-year through 2030.

Read more:
Global carbon emissions inch upwards in 2024 despite progress on EVs, renewables and deforestation

At the same time, support for federal climate policy appears to have declined.

While the growing popularity of the Conservative Party cannot be attributed to any single factor, Pierre Poilievre’s promise to “axe the tax” has resonated. This should not come as a surprise. Public opinion research consistently finds that climate policy support declines as carbon prices rise.

In contrast, there is little noise being made by major political parties in Québec about the province’s carbon market. One reason is that current carbon market prices are half that of the federal carbon tax at $40 versus $80. Many outside of Québec have decried this discrepancy as unfair. But instead, it should ra be seen as politically astute.

Québec has cut its cost of reducing emissions by linking with California, where it is relatively cheaper to do so. Indeed, if one factors in emissions allowances imported from California, then Québec in fact met its 2020 emissions reduction target — reaching 27 per cent below 1990 levels.

Emissions in Canada will need to fall much more quickly for Canada to meet its 2030 targets without recourse to international carbon market.
(Mark Purdon), Author provided (no reuse)

That being said, some observers have raised concerns about financial outflows from Québec to California. However, Québec firms have, so far, generally supported the carbon market. And for good reason.

Economic modelling suggests that if Québec were to seek to achieve its 2030 emission reduction target unilaterally, without linkage to California, the price of carbon would need to rise to at least $300. That means that Québecers would see the price of carbon paid at the pump rise sharply from the current approximately nine cents per litre to 57 cents. Such a rise would be ripe for political backlash.

Carbon markets can work

Overall, the Québec experience suggests that international carbon markets can work both globally and here in Canada.

There are legitimate concerns about carbon markets on issues ranging from stifling innovation and “mitigation deterrence” to administrative loopholes as well as moral concerns about “selling out.”

Any serious conversation would have to address these concerns, though many of these are perhaps more down to neoliberal economic policy, which has seen its legitimacy erode significantly. A green industrial policy could help address many of these concerns.

Read more:
3 innovative ways to help countries hit by climate disasters, beyond a loss and damage fund

One idea to build bridges between carbon markets and industrial policy is to introduce carbon price floors. These would allow buyer countries to prevent capital flight, while selling countries can ensure climate finance inflows are priced high enough to lead to transformational change.

International carbon markets are a way for Canada to take responsibility for its emissions while supporting emission reductions elsewhere in the world. It is imperative that whoever is in power in Ottawa in the coming years take them seriously. Läs mer…

Given the ever-increasing problem of digital harm, the government’s proposed legislation criminalising stalking is welcome news.

The yet-to-be-named proposed law, set to be introduced to parliament by the end of the year, refers to a range of stalking behaviours, including the “use of technology in modern stalking methods”.

If passed, the new law will make “cyberstalking” illegal, bringing New Zealand in line with other countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia.

But while the legislation is welcome, there are still issues to be addressed to ensure the law is relevant to where the technology is now – and where it could develop in the future.

Using technology to hurt others

Cyberstalking is the repeated use of digital tools to harass, coerce, frighten or intimidate another person. It can include using social media, GPS tracking or spyware tools to covertly monitor someone’s location or conversations.

It also includes sending repeated unwanted messages or threats, posting someone’s personal information online (also known as “doxxing”), setting up fake social media accounts to spread false information about someone, or sharing intimate images or videos of someone without consent.

Although it often coincides with stalking offline, cyberstalking is unique in that perpetrators do not need to share the same physical space as the victim to harm them.

Because of the central role technology plays in our lives, cyberstalkers can create such a sense of omnipresence that their victims feel they cannot escape them.

Like offline stalking, cyberstalking mostly occurs in the context of intimate partner violence or dating violence – and this is what the government has focused on.

But the proposed legislation would also cover incidents of cyberstalking by strangers. This would give police more options when it comes to helping public figures who experience significant cyberstalking and online harassment.

Overlapping rules

The complete text of the proposed legislation hasn’t been released yet. But from what has been announced, there is some potential overlap with offences under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015 (HDCA).

Under the HDCA, it is an offence to post a harmful digital communication with an intent to cause serious emotional distress. It is also a crime to post an intimate visual recording without consent.

These offences cover some aspects of cyberstalking, such as threatening messages, harassment or revenge porn. But they do not cover others such as monitoring or tracking someone, or locking someone out of their social media accounts.

The maximum sentence for these offences is two years imprisonment or a fine of up to NZ$50,000.

The new stalking offence “will capture patterns of behaviour, being three specified acts occurring within a 12-month period”, and will have a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment.

This signals that cyberstalking will be treated as more serious than offences under the HDCA.

Limits of the new law

The focus of the new offence is on patterns of behaviour over a period of time, transforming acts that might be captured under the HDCA into something more serious because of their repetition.

Given the gendered nature of cyberstalking, taking women’s fear seriously in this way is positive and significant. But the government also needs to review the HDCA to ensure there are no unintentional gaps between the two laws.

As well, it’s unclear whether the offence will require proof the victim feared for their safety. As victims advocate Ruth Money has noted, requiring proof of emotional harm forces the victim to give evidence about their experience.

Instead, the offence should require proof that a “reasonable person” would fear for their safety, Money has argued.

Read more:
Technology-facilitated abuse: the new breed of domestic violence

But given the gendered nature of cyberstalking, there are limitations with this, too. The “reasonable person” standard does not easily incorporate the gendered aspects of abuse – the specific ways in which women are targeted.

To address this, the new law could include a list of factors to provide guidance on what would lead a reasonable person to fear for their safety.

Finally, any stalking offence must be defined in a way that is future-proofed as “any stalking facilitated by technology”.

Emerging technologies will undoubtedly introduce new ways to cyberstalk and harass. For example, AI advances are already facilitating non-consensual image manipulation or generation.

The blending of virtual and augmented realities introduces new challenges for addressing harassment in what is often called the “metaverse”.

A blunt instrument

Overall, the proposed law is a step in the right direction for addressing aspects of online abuse.

But it is important to note that criminalisation is a blunt instrument to control behaviour, and often does not coincide with deterrence of that behaviour. The HDCA, for example, has done little to stop the rise of online harassment.

To really address cyberstalking, the government needs to examine the root causes behind the behaviour – including pervasive sexism in the technology development industry and elsewhere. Läs mer…