Paratransit crime

4 July 2008 – Toronto. Police report the arrest of a paratransit driver charged with sexual assaulting a passenger with cerebral palsy and threatening to kill her. This alleged crime may seem like an unusual event, but it isn’t. In fact, this is the third Toronto paratransit driver charged with sexually assaulting a passenger in the last six months.

Of course, this problem is not unique to Toronto, hundreds people with disabilities have reported sexual assaults over the years and there is reason to believe that the vast majority of cases go unreported. Based on the cases that are reported, the most frequent disability among passengers with disabilities who are assaulted by transportation providers are intellectual disabilities. They are often selected because they are viewed by offenders as unable or unlikely to report or to be believed if they do report. Based on our data on 622 passengers with disabilities who were sexually assaulted by transportation providers, almost half (297) were described as having intellectual or developmental disabilities.

Citizendium

Anyone reading this have any experience with Citizendium? At the Minds and Societies summer institute today I went to a talk by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on Citizendium, which aspires to be “the world’s most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base”. Citizendium is Sanger’s alternative to Wikipedia, the outcome of his unsuccessful arm-wrestle to reform Wikipedia from within. Citizendium chiefly distinguishes itself from Wikipedia by two features: its privileging of editorial expertise (over the pandemonic egalitarianism of WP) and the removal of anonymous authorship. While they sound like relatively small and sensible changes to the structure that Wikipedia has, from the presentation, question period, lunch, and other conversation I got the distinct impression that Citizendium is likely to be significantly more stodgy and less fun than Wikipedia, even if it also contains fewer whacko and misleading articles. It may become Eliteopedia or Boringopedia if the governing council doesn’t loosen or liven up a little, but it’s likely to remain Radicallyincompletopedia for more than a while: it bats at around 7000 articles now, very few of which have been approved by the knowledgable editors that Citizendium prides itself on using, in contrast to Wikipedia, which prides itself on being the encyclopedia that Homer Simpson contributes to (and which also has around 2.5 million articles … just in English, and not all by Homer).