Monthly Archives: November 2014

do younger Americans think they lack the knowledge to vote responsibly?

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voting_duty

According to a HuffPost/YouGov survey reported by Ariel Edwards-Levy, younger Americans are the most likely to believe that you should only vote if you are well-informed. According to the same poll, younger Americans guess that a majority of their fellow citizens vote in midterm years. They overestimate national turnout far more than older people do. Yet many of these younger respondents do not vote themselves. (We know that actual youth turnout is only about 20-25% in midterm elections). They must see themselves as outliers–in a bad way. They are critical of their own political knowledge and believe that other people know more than they do.

The ones who do vote are quite well informed. According to the exit polls, 77% of 18-29s who voted this November claimed to have followed the midterm election at least “somewhat closely.” But many others may have told themselves that they don’t know enough to vote. As I said to Edwards-Levy, “If anything, they might be putting themselves through too stringent a test.”

Of course, you should inform yourself before you vote. But I don’t think our main problem is uninformed people casting ballots; it’s people staying home because they are actually uninformed or think they are. It is hard to collect political information all on your own just so that you can vote. The traditional solution is to enroll people in multi-purpose organizations that are also conduits for political information. But those organizations are shrinking. As I said in the article, “Twenty or thirty years ago, there were devices for getting information to working-class young people like labor unions, which they belonged to still, and also churches. … Those things have really weakened, so they’re kind of on their own. If you’re a high school dropout and you’re working at Walmart, there’s no way for you to get information except for you to actively seek it.”

The post do younger Americans think they lack the knowledge to vote responsibly? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Help Everyday Democracy Learn, Win $30

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EvDem LogoOur partners with Everyday Democracy, one NCDD’s long-term organizational members, are offering a great opportunity – from now until December 19th, they are seeking input from the engagement community about what kinds of issues we care about and what resources we need. They have created a survey that they will use to help develop future tools and resources for dialogue on community issues – on top of the great resources they already offer – and if you take the survey, you will have a chance to win one of five $30 Amazon gift cards.

We know that many of our NCDD members use Everyday Democracy’s tools and resources, so we strongly encourage you to take their quick 10-minute survey by visiting www.surveymonkey.com/s/2NQTPXZ. You can also find it on Everyday Democracy’s website by clicking here.

The survey closes on December 19th, so we recommend you fill it out now before the holiday rush starts. Soon after the survey ends, EvDem will be sharing the high-level lessons and reflections they take from the survey back out into the community, which promises to be a helpful learning tool in itself, so keep an eye out for that down the line.

We hope you’ll fill out the survey soon! You’ll be helping your D&D community, and you could be getting a little extra money for holiday shopping, too!

New Film Documents Commons-Based Peer Production in Greece

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As one of the countries hardest hit by austerity politics, Greece is also in the vanguard of experimentation to find ways beyond the crisis.  Now there is a documentary film about the growth of commons-based peer production in Greece, directed by Ilias Marmaras. "Knowledge as a common good: communities of production and sharing in Greece” is a low-budget, high-insight survey of innovative projects such as FabLab Athens, Greek hackerspaces, Frown, an organization that hosts all sorts of maker workshops and presentations, and other projects.

A beta-version website Common Knowledge, devoted to “communities of production and sharing in Greece,” explains the motivation behind the film:

“Greece is going through the sixth year of recession. Austerity policies imposed by IMF, ECB and the Greek political pro-memorandum regimes, foster an unprecedented crisis in economy, social life, politics and culture. In the previous two decades the enforcement of the neoliberal politics to the country resulted in the disintegration of the existed social networks, leaving society unprepared to face the upcoming situation.

During the last years, while large parts of the social fabric have been expelled from the state and private economy, through the social movements which emerge in the middle of the crisis, formations of physical and digital networks have appeared not only in official political and finance circles, but also as grassroots forms of coexistence, solidarity and innovation. People have come together, experimenting in unconventional ways of collaboration and bundling their activities in different physical and digital networks. They seek answers to problems caused by the crisis, but they are also concerned about issues due the new technical composition of the world. In doing so they produce and share knowledge.”

George Papanikolaou of the P2P Foundation in Greece describes how peer production is fundamentally altering labor practices and offering hope:  “For the first time, we are witnessing groups of producers having the chance to meet up outside the traditional frameworks – like that of a corporation, or state organization.  People are taking initiatives to form groups in order to produce goods that belong in the commons sphere.”

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Crowdfunding Campaigns for CommonsScope & STIR

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I don’t normally feature crowdfunding campaigns in my blog because there are so many worthy ones to support.  But here are two projects that I have a special affection for:  An ambitious campaign by CommonsSpark to raise money for a new mapping project called “CommonsScope,” and a set of twelve workshops to build local economies hosted by STIR magazine in the UK. 

Ellen Friedman and her colleagues have done a great job in pulling together an amazing number of maps of commons from around the world, featuring such categories as water, transportation, local commons and art commons. In an Indiegogo campaign that hopes to raise $35,000, CommonSpark plans to build a web catalog of hundreds of commons-related maps, data visualizations, open data, and tools – “a knowledge commons about the commons.”

Friedman also notes that CommonSpark is creating a catalog of commons with thousands of profiles that will communicate the story of each commons (who is the community, what is the resource, what are the commoning practices, where is it located, etc) along with best practices and data visualizations to identify patterns of commoning.

The CommonSpark Collective doesn’t want just want to raise money to build this useful web tool; it wants to attract a larger community to help build and steward the new world atlas of commons. You can help the effort by helping build the inventory of commons, joining the community and contributing to the Indiegogo campaign.  If this is any inducment, I've agreed to be a "reward" for any donor that gives $2,500 or more.

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Cooperation and Competition

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I believe that the best solutions come from diverse opinions.

Several years ago, I participated in a simple activity: in a large group we were individually presented with a list of items and asked how we would prioritize taking them if we we about to escape a sinking ship. Essentially, we were asked to identify which items would be most essential to survival. After individually ranking these items we formed small groups and discussed our answers, generating a collective list of priority items.

As a final step we scored our lists – the version we created individually and the version we created collectively. In a room full of 100 people, every one was more likely to survive when they had input from others. Alone, we had each demonstrated imperfect judgement and imperfect knowledge.

That experience helped me realize that cooperation isn’t just nice, it isn’t just something you do to feel good about yourself or to garner a warm and fuzzy feeling. It is literally about survival; about generating better solutions.

Our world is facing many serious problems – economic instability, global warming, and diminishing resources, just to name a few. These problems are non-trivial, and they require non-trivial solutions.

There is not one of us who can do it alone.

So I strongly agree that the best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.

Those who would disagree with this statement would likely highlight the valuable role that competition can play.

In Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a futuristic novel of rich social commentary, one of his characters outlines a parable illustrating the importance of competition. In this space-fairing universe, there is a world called Sanctuary. Of all the worlds in the galaxy, Sanctuary is unique. Not only is it suitable for human life, it experiences virtually no radiation from space. There is no element forcing hardship, mutation, or change. While at first this sounds good, the full picture Heinlein paints illustrates why competition, while perhaps unsavory, can be beneficial.

You see, nothing on Sanctuary every changes. The life there never evolved because it was never forced to evolve. Anyone who moves there becomes virtually trapped in time – genetically, socially, and technically stagnating as they face no challenges to their fitness to survive, no competition forcing them to be better.

Sanctuary, Heinlein concludes, is nice respite to visit, but it is never a place to stay.

I appreciate Heinlein’s vision and I agree that competition does have value. Humanity itself has indeed only evolved as a result of generations of competition.

However, surely as a society we can provide an appropriate balance. I don’t suggest we coddle our young people, encouraging them to never face a hardship or to never know real trouble. But surely – life is hard enough as it is.

The challenges we face individually and collectively are monumental, and it won’t help to be fighting amongst ourselves. As a society we ought to encourage our young people to collaborate, to interact fairly with others, and to improve themselves by learning from others.

There will be plenty of opportunities for competition, plenty of opportunities for young people to get their heart broken and to grow from the hard lessons of life. But as the stewards for the next generation, we must instill a sense of cooperation. Indeed, that is the best thing we can do to support their future leadership.

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This is actually a response to the writing prompt, “how much do you agree with the statement: best way for a society to prepare its young people for leadership in government, industry, or other fields is by instilling in them a sense of cooperation, not competition.” Hence the somewhat formulaic response. Obviously, there are more than two options, and I’m not sure cooperation and competition are actually diametrically opposed.

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viewing concessions dampens rancor

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In the Atlantic, Robert Wright describes research that my team at Tufts University conducted in partnership with him. He summarizes the research question:

Suppose you’re a conservative or a liberal, and you’re watching a debate, and the debater you consider your ideological opponent throws in a “to be sure” sentence—a sentence that qualifies his or her basic policy position, underscoring some point of agreement with your ideological ally. Will that make you more favorably disposed to the person—more likely to take their views seriously, less likely to demonize them?

This was the method:

The study involved some 1,600 people, about half of whom identified themselves as liberal and half as conservative. Everyone watched an excerpt from one of two debates: one between Tim Noah and Glenn Loury on whether the minimum wage should increase, and one between Sarah Posner and Michael Dougherty on whether the government should be able to mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover contraceptives.

The excerpt shown to each viewer was short, but it clearly conveyed which person supported which position—in other words, who was the conservative and who was the liberal (on the issue in question, at least). For half of the viewers, the clip also included, at the end, a segment in which the speaker on the other side of the ideological fence from them added a to-be-sure.

Our conclusions:

The researchers at Tufts found that “viewing a concession created a more positive reaction to the ideological opponent.” Viewers who saw their ideological opponent make a concession were less likely than viewers who saw no concession to call their ideological ally the more credible of the two or the more knowledgeable of the two. And they were less likely to say they liked the ally more than the opponent.

Finally, Wright draws out two implications:

First, a message to people on the left and right who opine in public: Don’t forget to throw in a to-be-sure sentence; it may sound like a “concession,” but it could wind up helping your cause, especially if your cause includes not seeing America consumed by bitter acrimony. And it’s especially advisable to do this when you’re in “enemy territory”—when liberals are on Fox News, when conservatives are on MSNBC.

Second, it would be nice if the formats that mediate our discourse made it practical to add a to-be-sure sentence. For example, a pet crusade of mine is to change the structure of Twitter in a way that, while maintaining the 140-character limit on tweets, would nonetheless make it easier to add a short elaboration.

The post viewing concessions dampens rancor appeared first on Peter Levine.

Should Higher Ed Engagement Be More Political?

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We recently read a great interview on the Kettering Foundation’s blog with NCDD supporting member Timothy Shaffer. Tim contends that community engagement projects in higher education are an important civic infrastructure, but that to be more democratic, they need to be more political. We encourage you to read the interview below or find the original version here.

Real Impact: The Challenges of Community Engagement in Higher Education

kfMany communities lack the basic civic muscle necessary to form a strong community. Conflict management and decision-making skills seem far and few, and basic political knowledge about our communities and nation, many argue, seem scarce. There are many ways to talk about this problem: for example, Robert Putnam has talked about a decline in social capital, while John McKnight has problematized what he sees as an overly intense focus on individuals’ and communities’ deficits; a problem that undervalues the assets citizens bring to public life.

The Kettering Foundation has talked about these problems more broadly as “problems of democracy” that keep democracy from working as it should. For example, there are concerns over too few opportunities for young people to learn the skills required to help strengthen their communities. On this point, the Kettering Foundation has a large collection of publications (see The Civic Spectrum: How Students Become Engaged Citizens) and a strong group of scholars and practitioners concerned with just this problem (see Doing Democracy). Tim Shaffer has been actively working to address both of these areas in his professional career.

Shaffer recently left a position as director of the Center for Leadership and Engagement at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York, to pursue opportunities that are more explicitly connected to democratic and political engagement. He is currently working as educational consultant with the Andrew Goodman Foundation in support of the Vote Everywhere program. He was previously a research associate at the Kettering Foundation while finishing his doctoral dissertation from Cornell University, where he studied education, with a focus on adult and extension education. Tim holds an MA and MPA from the University of Dayton and a BA in theology from St. Bonaventure University. Previously, Tim worked at the Mount Irenaeus Franciscan Mountain Retreat. Former KF research assistant Jack Becker sat down to talk with him.

Note: When Tim Shaffer and Jack Becker sat down to talk, Shaffer was the current director of the Center for Leadership and Engagement.

Jack Becker: One of the perennial questions at Kettering is a simple one: why do people get involved in public life? You’ve been engaged in teaching and learning for democracy for quite some time now. Why do you keep coming back?

Tim Shaffer: At the heart of it is my own question that I keep coming back to: how do we live with each other? Or, how do we live well with one another and do a better job at that?

As I think about these questions, I see that my work has revolved around three major areas of thinking and acting: Cooperative Extension, the classroom, and community. A big piece of public life for me is what also keeps me coming back, and that is looking at how citizens understand and wrestle with an issue. This is especially true as it connects to these three areas of practice. For example, the Cooperative Extension Service in the 1930s and 1940s wasn’t just about solving problems, but also concerned about developing community. It wasn’t simply a technical focus on solutions, as so much problem solving has become in that context and others.

For you it sounds like this question revolves primarily around a very human dimension of why we choose to engage each other and how we go about that process. Is that right?

Yes. Wagner is part of the Kettering Foundation’s new centers project. With that, we’re beginning to wrestle, as an institution, with the question: how should we engage the community with an explicit commitment to deliberation?

I’ve gotten some pushback at Wagner from a political scientist who asks me, “Why spend time bringing people together to deliberate when we know what the problem is already?” So for example, we were talking about food insecurity around Staten Island, New York. This professor’s position is that we know what the problem is and we can find the right mix of data to solve it. “They don’t need to talk about why there isn’t food. They just want food. There need to be more groceries,” he said. His view is that we don’t need to talk about things, we just need to give people food and solve the problem.

That kind of mindset and focus on solutions can be very dismissive of the orientation to engagement that says we first need to have the community talk about this problem in their own terms. This is a fascinating situation where I am confronted and challenged to think about why I do this work and my particular approach.

Can you talk a little about your role at Wagner: What does community engagement look like for students, professors, and the college as a whole?

At Wagner College, I am situated in the Center for Leadership and Engagement. This is a college-wide center and is guided primarily by the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts. The institution’s curriculum is based on the belief that students ideally learn by doing. Within this curriculum, students engage in experiential learning, with a good portion of that being about civic engagement. Engagement looks like a variety of things at Wagner. Since it is a small liberal arts institution, Wagner’s main focus is on student learning. So for us, engagement is primarily embodied in curricular settings supporting faculty in the First Year Program and Senior Learning Community, both elements of the Wagner Plan.

Additionally, the Center for Leadership and Engagement is home to programs that include Bonner Leaders, IMPACT Scholars Civic Network, and a collaborative effort among the Center for Leadership and Engagement, Athletics, and the Center for Academic and Career Engagement – the MOVE program. Engagement also occurs through Wagner’s Port Richmond Partnership, a commitment to support efforts within a community located on Staten Island in New York City, just a few miles away from the campus of Wagner College. The partnership focuses on areas such as educational attainment, immigrant advocacy, health and wellness, economic development, and increasingly the arts.

So when you ask about what engagement looks like, it’s primarily connected to students and faculty around course-based work. But because of the Port Richmond Partnership, engagement for the college is also supported as an institutional commitment and that can sometimes transcend narrowly focused curricular approaches.

One of the oft-cited critiques of university-based community engagement is that it too frequently compartmentalizes different aspects of engagement. How do you think Wagner is fairing in this regard?

Wagner College is recognized for its civic engagement work through the president’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, and it has received the Community Engagement Classification designation from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. I note all of this because the college does have a commitment to civic engagement, but I refer to it as such because I don’t think it’s fully democratic engagement. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is that it pushes the institution, semantically, into a place it doesn’t want to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Wagner is continually growing in its understanding of engagement with the broader community. But that engagement is first and foremost about student learning. Helping to bring about real and substantive change in the Port Richmond community, for example, is an institutional goal. Nevertheless, I think the institution, alongside most colleges and universities, has sidestepped the political dimension of civic engagement. For that reason, I wouldn’t frame what Wagner – or virtually any college or university – has done or is currently doing as “democratic” engagement. And this points to one of the problems in the broadly defined civic engagement movement: what can be expected beyond increased student opportunities and marginal improvements in communities if an institution doesn’t situate its work within a democratic or political framework?

So as I think about civic infrastructure, I think higher education still has quite a bit of work to do to move beyond an inward orientation that is primarily, and understandably, concerned about student learning, experiences, and opportunities. Even when colleges and universities think of themselves as being civically engaged, they still retain much of the infrastructure that they claim to have left behind. By and large, higher education still operates from an expert-model mentality. We bring together select groups of actors to improve communities. To really contribute to civic infrastructure, colleges and universities will need to ask fundamental questions about how they are structured and how they operate – both internally and externally.

You’ve outlined quite the range of activities centered on student learning at Wagner. In 2007, CIRCLE’s “Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement” found that college students were more engaged than any other generation before, but that this engagement “lacks connections to formal politics.” That’s a thought-provoking finding; does it ring true in your work?

By and large I would say that college students, at least at Wagner and from my time at the University of Dayton and Cornell University, are not engaged in politics. There is a view that formal politics is corrupt and undermined by money. In that sense, formal politics is seen as a different set of issues that people are interested in. College students are more often interested in the action piece of it. For example, Port Richmond is a poorer immigrant community, and students want to take action there to improve people’s lives. They want to have an impact. The “disconnect” is that many of the systemic problems of this community have to do with government policy – with formal politics.

But we as educators, and even college students themselves, don’t really talk about this. We keep our hands off it. Underneath much of our action are big questions that do require us to engage elected officials and aspects of representative democracy. But if you’re only functioning at a local threshold, how will we solve these big problems? We need a more honest acknowledgement of the political dimension of this work across the field. If we want to provide services for the local community, that’s fine, but at the same time, if students are not actually engaging the political questions, then we are really missing out on some big questions.

Do you think students and colleges are approaching community engagement with the mindset that they are being more helpful than they really are – or than the people they purport to help believe they are?

I’m hesitant to say. There are these throwaway phrases of “we’re improving people’s lives,” or “the community benefited from that.” A lot of this work, across institutions, is still very much centered on student learning and a benefit that creates experiences for students. That’s not inherently bad for institutions that are built around students. But sometimes we can oversell the impact on communities.

The contributors to The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning (2009) talked about the challenges that many community members experience when they are cast as partners. There are real constraints to an institution that says, we will help you, but only during the academic year and on a Tuesday afternoon. There is a real challenge to what work we say we’re doing and the actual impact of that work. I think this is something we have to be more honest about. Students and community members need more than a “great experience.”

Jack Becker is a former Kettering Foundation research assistant. He currently works for Denver Public Schools Office of Family and Community Engagement. He can be reached at jackabecker@gmail.com. Follow him on twitter: @jackabecker

You can find the original version of this Kettering Foundation piece by visiting http://kettering.org/kfnews/real-impact.

How should we tackle our field’s biggest barriers to success?

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Ideas & Next Steps from NCDD 2014 Conference

The results of NCDD’s recent Codigital engagement project are quite interesting, and having a record of the ideas shared and how our community ranked those ideas is going to be incredibly useful — for NCDD and hopefully for others in our field.

NCDD2014-WideShortGroupShot

As a reminder, on the second day of the 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, we created the space for our 415 attendees to launch discussions about four barriers to the dialogue and deliberation community’s success:

  1. How might we overcome the lack of trust in our Democracy, our leaders, and in one another?
  2. How might we make our D&D work more equitable, inclusive and empowering?
  3. How might we more clearly delineate our field of practice for ourselves and those we seek to serve?
  4. How might we eliminate structural barriers in our democratic systems?

Click on any of the four list items to see the full report of the Codigital discussion in that area, including all ideas shared and their rankings.

These four barrier “areas” were identified by looking through the results of an earlier engagement project we ran on Codigital that was focused on the question “What do you want to see happen when our field comes together at NCDD 2014?”

In total for the 4 topics, there were 156 ideas posted and 5494 votes/rankings. 2386 people were invited to participate (all members plus all conference attendees), about about 100 people actively participated. Many more watched, but didn’t jump in.

Some of the ideas NCDDers shared are things that many of us could do, like the #2 idea under the “clearly delineate our field” barrier:

“Create some clear, simple tools and infographics for describing, assessing, and bringing to life dialogue and deliberation work. Identify the good material that is out there already and make it is easy for practitioners or public leaders to use.”

And the top-ranked idea in the “lack of trust” barrier:

“Focus on D&D work at the local level, where engagement efforts are much more likely to influence decisions. Work with public leaders to build/rebuild trust in government decision by decision, from the ground up.”

A few of the ideas are things that are already in place or in the works, like #4 in the “delineating our field” category:

“Gather *short* communication examples that practitioners have found successful: metaphors, anecdotes, sample experiences, images, videos, evocative language, etc. Organize by work context for easy reference. In progress. Need more people to join us!”  (contact Kim Crowley at learnwrite@sbcglobal.net to get involved in this ongoing project that launched at NCDD 2012)

And #14 in the same category:

“Follow up on Grande Lum’s offer at the NCDD conference to hold meetings across the country between NCDD members and DOJ Community Relations Service regional directors to see what kind of collaboration might be possible.” (see http://ncdd.org/16724 for more on this)

Some of the ideas are specific to the NCDD conference, like #10 in the Equity barrier, which focuses on making equity and individual empowerment central themes of NCDD.

Many would require funding and significant levels of collaboration among numerous actors in our field, like #2 in “structural barriers”:

“NCDD members collectively crowdsource, model and invent one or more systems for truly participative democracy, built in a way that could scale to including every citizens’ voice.”

Suffice it to say there is a lot to unpack here, and a lot to discuss!  I wanted to get these results posted without further delay, but we’ll certainly find many ways to dig into these ideas further. What are your reactions to these ideas and their rankings? Let us know by adding your comments to this post.

Also, a huge thank you to James Carr for donating his time and software to NCDD once again. Codigital is a dream to work in, and we really appreciate James’ generous support. James can be reached at james@codigital.com.  I can’t recommend James and Codigital highly enough.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

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Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

The fact that we need such a day is a tragedy in and of itself. Transgender Day of Remembrance is a day to memorialize the lives lost to transphobic violence.

The mind reels to think there even could be such a thing.

According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), in 2013 there were 2,001 incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence. That same year, 72% of LGBTQ homicide victims were transgender women, including 67% transgender women of color.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) reports that in schools, 16.8% of transgender students report being physically assaulted as a result of gender expression, while 32.1% experience physical harassment.

There is no universe in which that reality is okay.

Taken from the Transgender Day of Remembrance website, here is a list of those who have died from transphobic violence in the last year. That there should be one name on this list is too many -

Jacqueline Cowdrey (50 years old)
Cause of death: unknown
Location of death: Worthing, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Date of death: November 20th, 2013
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Rosa Ribut (Jon Syah Ribut – 35 years old)
Cause of death: blunt force trauma
Location of death: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Date of death: November 24th, 2013
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Betty Skinner (52 years old)
Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the head
Location of death: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Date of death: December 4th, 2013
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Brittany Stergis (22 years old)
Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head
Location of death: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Date of death: December 5th, 2013
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Elizalber Oliveira de Mesquita (39 years old)
Cause of death: stoned to death
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: January 5th, 2014
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Paloma
Cause of death: multiple gunshots to the head and chest
Location of death: Belém, Pará, Brazil
Date of death: January 8th, 2014
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Rayka Tomaz (20 years old)
Cause of death: multiple stab wounds.
Location of death: Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
Date of death: January 10th, 2014
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Prince Joe (Joseph Sanchez – 18 years old)
Cause of death: multiple stab wounds, dumped on the street
Location of death: Belize City, Belize
Date of death: January 12th, 2014

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Toni Gretchen (50 years old)
Cause of death: multiple stab wounds
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: January 16th, 2014
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Luana (20 years old)
Cause of death: gunshot to the chest
Location of death: Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil
Date of death: January 10th, 2014
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Cristal (Alexandre Nascimento de Araújo – 22 years old)
Cause of death: Gunshot
Location of death: Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.
Date of death: January 19th, 2014
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Thifani (18 years old)
Cause of death: dismembered
Location of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Date of death: January 27th, 2014
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Joice (José Antônio Vieira Freitas – 32 years old)
Cause of death: multiple stab wounds
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: January 28th, 2014
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Sarita (Marcos de Almeida Oliveira)
Cause of death: gunshot
Location of death: Itabela, Bahia, Brazil
Date of death: January 29, 2014
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Juju (Julian de Souza Cruz – 32 years old)
Cause of death: beaten and stoned to death
Location of death: Salgueiro, Pernambuco, Brazil
Date of death: January 29th, 2014
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Raíssa (Lourivaldo Xavier)
Cause of death: 6 gunshots to head and chest
Location of death: Cuiabá,Mato Gross, Brazil
Date of death: February 1st, 2014

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Tatty
Cause of death: facial injuries
Location of death: Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Date of death: February 7th, 2014
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Rafaela (Alexsandro Alderotti José dos Santos – 32 years old)
Cause of death: multiple gunshots
Location of death: Recife, Brazil
Date of death: February 11th, 2014
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Alex Medeiros (8 years old)
Cause of death: Beaten to death by father for refusing to cut hair, liking women’s clothes, and dancing.
Location of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Date of death: February 18th, 2014
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Paulete
Cause of death: multiple gunshots to the face
Location of death: Taguatinga, Brazil
Date of death: February 19th, 2014
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Camila Veronezi (24 years old)
Cause of death: suffocation
Location of death: Bragança Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: February 21st, 2014
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Lu (Célio Martins da Silva)
Cause of death: multiple stab wounds
Location of death: Nova Serrana, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Date of death: February 23rd, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: gunshots
Location of death: São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: February 27th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: gunshots
Location of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Date of death: February 28th, 2014

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Kitana
Cause of death: 3 gunshot wounds to the head
Location of death:Aracaju, Sergipe, Brazil
Date of death: Feburary 28th, 2014
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Sarita do Sopão (39 years old)
Cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: January 29th, 2014
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Andressa Pinheiro
Cause of death: 15 stab wounds, dragged, fractured skull
Location of death:João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil
Date of death: March 1st, 2014
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Rose Maria (32 years old)
Cause of death: stabbed in the neck
Location of death: Brás, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: March 5th, 2014
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Vitória (16 years old)
Cause of death: 2 gunshot wounds to the chest
Location of death: Boa Vista, Roraima, Brazil
Date of death: March 12th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: burned to death
Location of death: Jardim Ingá, Goiás, Brazil
Date of death: March 14th, 2014
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Paulete (Paulo Roberto Lima dos Santos – 19 years old)
Cause of death: gunshot
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: March 17th, 2014
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Marciana
Cause of death: gunshot
Location of death: Iguatu, Ceará, Brazil
Date of death: March 24th, 2014

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Nicole (Marcos Vinicius Machado – 20 years old)
Cause of death: hands and feet bound, stabbed in the neck and abdomen
Location of death: Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil
Date of death: March 28th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: dismemberment
Location of death: São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: March 23rd, 2014
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Giovana Souza Silva (33 years old)
Cause of death: gunshots
Location of death: São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: March 29th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: beaten with weapon, fists by several people, dragged through the street.
Location of death: João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil
Date of death: March 29th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: blow to the head with iron bar
Location of death: Sobral, Ceará, Brazil
Date of death: April 2nd, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: beaten and strangled to death.
Location of death: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Date of death: April 2nd, 2014
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Mileide
Cause of death: 4 gunshot wounds
Location of death: Santo Antônio, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Date of death: April 7th, 2014
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Valquíria (aka Josivaldo Ribeiro Oliveira Brito)
Cause of death: gunshot to back.
Location of death: Praça dos Carreiros, Rondonópolis, Mato Grosso, Brazil.
Date of death: April 20th, 2014

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Çağla Joker
Cause of death: gunshot to the chest
Location of death: Tarlabaşı, Beyoğlu, Istanbul, Turkey
Date of death: April 21st, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: four gunshots
Location of death: Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Date of death: May 29th, 2014
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Marcia Moraes (34 years old)
Cause of death: four gunshots
Location of death: Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Date of death: May 29th, 2014
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Kandy Hall (40 years old)
Cause of death: massive trauma, body left in a field
Location of death: Montebello, Maryland, USA
Date of death: June 3rd, 2014
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Paola (Anderson Arruda Camote) (29 years old)
Cause of death: knife wounds to neck, feet and hands tied
Location of death: Arandu, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: June 8th, 2014
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Zoraida “Ale” Reyes (28 years old)
Cause of death:choked to death
Location of death: Anaheim, California, United States
Date of death: June 10th, 2014
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Mia Henderson (26 years old)
Cause of death: massive trauma, found dead in alley.
Location of death: Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Date of death: June 16th, 2014
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Yaz’min Shancez
Cause of death:murdered, and burned
Location of death: Fort Myers, Florida, United States
Date of death: June 19th, 2014
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André Luiz Borges Rocha
Cause of death: gunshot wounds to the face
Location of death: Tijucal, Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brazil
Date of death: June 23rd, 2014
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Tiffany Edwards (28 years old)
Cause of death:shot to death
Location of death: Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Date of death: June 26th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: raped before being brutally executed with blows to head.
Location of death: Coruripe, Alagoas, Brazil
Date of death: June 30th, 2014
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Kellen Santorine
Cause of death: raped before being brutally executed with blows to head.
Location of death: Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Date of death: July 13th, 2014
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Mackelly Castro (age:24)
Cause of death: hanging
Location of death: Teresina, Piauí, Brazil
Date of death: July 18th, 2014
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Lele (age:24)
Cause of death: beaten to death
Location of death: Roatán, Honduras
Date of death: July 18th, 2014
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Dennysi Brandão (age:24)
Cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds to the hip, chest, and back.
Location of death: Contagem, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Date of death: July 24th, 2014
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Alisson Henrique da Silva (age:25)
Cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds
Location of death: Macaíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Date of death: July 31st, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: found dead, with eyes removed.
Location of death: Jardim dos Ipês Itaquaquecetuba, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: August 9th, 2014
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Alejandra Leos
Cause of death: gunshot to the back
Location of death: Memphis, Tennessee, USA
Date of death: September 5th, 2014
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Karen Alanis (age:23)
Cause of death: thrown from vehicle, ran over
Location of death: Caçapava, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: September 9th, 2014

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Marcela Duque (46 years old)
Cause of death: stoned to death
Location of death: Medellín, Colombia
Date of death: September 9th, 2014
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Cris
Cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds
Location of death: Portal da Foz, Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil
Date of death: September 13th, 2014
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Marcela Lopez
Cause of death: Stoning
Location of death: Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia
Date of death: September 14th, 2014
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Mahadevi
Cause of death: pushed off moving train
Location of death: Malleshwara, Karnataka, India
Date of death: September 25th, 2014
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Bruna Lakiss (26 years old)
Cause of death: gunshot wound
Location of death: Várzea Grande, Mato Grosso, Brazil
Date of death: September 30th, 2014
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Aniya Parker
Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head
Location of death: East Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA
Date of death: October 3rd, 2014
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Gaivota dos Santos
Cause of death: three shots to the face
Location of death: Rio Largo, Alagoas, Brazil
Date of death: October 1st, 2014
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Géia Borghi
Cause of death: shot in the chest, bound, gagged, set afire
Location of death: Monte Mor, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: October 9th, 2014

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Jennifer Laude
Cause of death: asphyxiation by drowning
Location of death: Subic Bay, Zambales, Philippines
Date of death: October 11th, 2014

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Sara (27 years old)
Cause of death: Gunshot
Location of death: Camaçari, Bahia, Brazil
Date of death: October 12th, 2014
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Aguinaldo Cláudio Colombelli (45 years old)
Cause of death: 30 stab wounds
Location of death: Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Date of death: October 16th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death: beaten to death
Location of death: Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil
Date of death: October 16th, 2014
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Flávia
Cause of death: three gunshots
Location of death: Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil
Date of death: October 20th, 2014
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Mary Joy Añonuevo (55 years old)
Cause of death: stabbed 33 times
Location of death: Lucena, Quezon, Philippines
Date of death: October 21st, 2014
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Ashley Sherman
Cause of death: shot in the head
Location of death: Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Date of death: October 27st, 2014
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Maicon
Cause of death: Gunshot
Location of death: Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil
Date of death: November 1st, 2014
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Letícia
Cause of death:stabbed in the chest
Location of death: Sorocaba, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: November 6th, 2014
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Raquel
Cause of death:Gunshot
Location of death: Parnamirim, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Date of death: November 6th, 2014
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Adriana (16 years old)
Cause of death:Gunshot, body wrapped in sheet, tied to tree trunk, thrown in river.
Location of death: Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil
Date of death: November 9th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death:throat cut
Location of death: Jundiaí, São Paulo, Brazil
Date of death: November 9th, 2014
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Unknown woman
Cause of death:shot and burned
Location of death: Tblisi, Georgia
Date of death: November 10th, 2014
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Gizzy Fowler
Cause of death:Gunshot
Location of death: Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Date of death: November 10th, 2014

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