��Ī - Mark de Rond

Opinion: I spent three years in a paedophile hunting team – here’s what I learned

Anonymous — Wed, 11 May 2022 23:00:02 +0000

By the time you finish reading this article, at least one new case of child sexual abuse will have been reported. In the US, a child is sexually assaulted every nine minutes. In the UK, this figure is closer to one every seven minutes. The sexual abuse of children is a horrifying and widespread problem that police admit they cannot arrest their way out of.

High-profile cases of systemic child sexual abuse – Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, cardinals, bishops and priests – have placed the threat front of mind and led members of the public to take matters into their own hands. Social media has given them the means to do so effectively.

Pretending to be children online, hunters wait for predators to initiate sexual communications. When predators ignore reminders that they are talking to “children”, hunters expose them in livestreamed “stings” once they have sufficient evidence of grooming. Several cases have shown that talking to decoys as though they were a real child can be grounds enough for sentencing.

These stings take place in public (where a predator has asked a child to meet him in a park or shopping mall) or at the predator’s home. In the UK alone, over 150 hunting teams were collectively responsible for 1,148 confrontations with suspected paedophiles in 2021. Their evidence helped secure prosecutions in hundreds of cases.

I spent three years embedded with one of the UK’s most prolific hunting teams. An analysis of 356,799 words of private, online team chats during this period, and 831 pages of field notes and interviews, offers unique insights into what it’s like to hunt another human being.

For many involved in these groups, there’s the thrill of the chase. But some also found a deep sense of purpose in confronting a moral pandemic. Many hunters themselves have experienced abuse, and this colours how they view their hunting activities. “So many in this community have been deeply affected by these scum”, one said. “If I can save one child from seeing the world through a survivor’s life then I am blessed”, another added.

Hunters spend nearly as much time judging each other’s stings as they do baiting predators. They do so to reaffirm the purity of their motive – to keep children safe – compared to other teams they accuse of hunting purely for entertainment by poking fun at predators or being physically or verbally abusive.

Still, almost all teams value viewing figures and having an audience. As one explained: "The two we did this weekend have some great exposure: a quarter of a million and 200,000 [viewers]."

The hero’s journey

The way paedophile hunters talk about their work follows a narrative akin to the hero’s journey found in tales like Batman. A selfless hero saves his community from an evil threat when formal institutions (police, politicians) fail to do so. Having restored the moral order, the superhero recedes into obscurity.

Hunters refer to sexual predators as “monsters” and “vile beasts” that prey on “the innocent”. They constantly remind each other to “keep safe” during stings, even as hunters outnumber predators four or more to one.

This attitude offers a logic and a moral justification for what hunters do. Believing that “police should be grateful we are doing their job for them”, they position themselves as society’s last line of defence.

These characters feed off each other: the more impotent the police or parents are perceived to be, the more vulnerable the child, the more beastly the monster, the more heroic the hunter.

Relationship with police

While police broadly welcome citizen involvement in fighting crime, they think hunters unhelpful, even given the role of the evidence they collect. The police accuse hunters of acting on insufficiently robust evidence and jeopardising ongoing investigations. They also say hunters fail to safeguard suspects with learning difficulties who may prove difficult to prosecute, nor do they take sufficient action to protect suspects and their families from reprisals by neighbours and psychological injury.

It can be difficult to understand why hunting teams persist with live streaming stings when less harmful alternatives are easily available. They could, for example, simply hand any evidence to police, upload sting footage only after convictions are secured in court or avoid filming the target’s face to not reveal his identity online.

Since predators are typically released on bail following arrest, hunters argue that live streaming alerts the public of a predator in their midst. Parents deserve to know “there’s a nonce roaming the neighbourhood”, they reason.

My experience suggests that hunters persist with live streaming stings not because they are not aware of less harmful alternatives, but because it is the apotheosis of their quest. The sting is the final battle between good and evil that tests the character of a hunter and must be played out before a live audience – any subsequent convictions in court are, for some teams, neither here nor there. What police presume is a means to an end is, for hunters as heroes, an end itself.

Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography, ��Ī Judge Business School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Mark de Rond from ��Ī Judge Business School discusses his three years embedded with one of the UK's most prolific paedophile hunting teams, in this article for The Conversation.

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Opinion: The challenges faced by doctors and nurses in conflict zones

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:34:40 +0000

Quite aside from the deadly and disorienting consequences for Ukraine’s citizens, Russia’s invasion places unique pressure on its doctors and nurses.

Cardiac arrests, caesareans and appendectomies are now often accompanied by injuries that should be relatively rare: gunshot and shrapnel wounds, third-degree burns, double or triple amputations, loss of sight, brain and spinal cord injuries. Were chemical weapons to ever be deployed, one can add blistering, convulsions and muscle paralysis. Then there are decisions unimaginable to many of us but unavoidable when resources are scarce: who will live and who will not.

With advance notice, medical staff can stock up on vast blood supplies, platelet-rich plasma and refrigerators. They can hone the specialist skills required for resuscitating and then repairing what war destroys. During the long war in Afghanistan, for example, military medical staff from allied forces underwent rigorous training before deployment. British surgeons and anaesthetists were required to complete a five-day military operational surgical training course at the Royal College of Surgeons where they practised damage control surgery on human cadavers, deliberately “wounded” to mimic typical injuries sustained during war.

From London, they’d move to an old aeroplane hanger outside the ancient English cathedral city of York to reappear, as if by magic, in a replica of Camp Bastion field hospital in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Here, they relied on actual amputees and theatrical makeup artists to reenact the patient journey from a helicopter to an intensive care unit. Even the thumping of an approaching Chinook was played over the sound system as doctors and nurses rolled up their sleeves.

Given the speed at which the conflict is advancing, Ukraine’s doctors make do instead with a 12-hour online equivalent designed and run by Dr David Nott and Dr Henry Marsh. Nott has 30 years’ experience working in conflict and disaster zones as a general and vascular surgeon and, through his David Nott Foundation, offers lifesaving treatment for victims by better equipping local doctors who care for them.

Unseen injuries

Other challenges facing doctors and nurses are more subtle, longer lasting, and more personal. War can be deeply traumatising, even for doctors and nurses not in the line of fire, meaning that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are often as high for medical staff as for those at immediate risk of injury or death.

Until recently, the causes of PTSD were not well understood. We now know more about the extent to which cultural expectations, professional role identity, and organisational protocol (or formal rules) can exacerbate feelings of senselessness, futility, and surreality, and threaten people’s existential grounding.

This is because these contexts can trigger and amplify repeated experiences of senselessness (or the inability to justify war and its consequences), of futility (or the inability for medics to live up to their own expectations of “making a difference” as “compassion fatigue” sets in), and of surreality (or the inability to reconcile the absurdities of war with “life as normal”).

Senselessness, futility and surreality characterise the experience of war for many who are exposed to it. And when these experiences are sustained, they can dislocate a person’s sense of what they consider “meaningful”, “good” and “normal” to the point where they become an existential threat. They are war’s invisible injuries.

To compensate for this sense of dislocation, doctors and nurses have been observed to resort to innovative coping strategies. For example, they will refrain from publicly criticising the war effort for fear of hurting morale. They avoid emotional engagement by not attending funerals. They use humour to deflect and manage constant exposure to the cruelty of war. They establish enclaves of normality by importing home comforts (for example, in Camp Bastion, doctors organised Friday night pizzas and Sunday morning pancakes). They create improvised spaces in which to temporarily withdraw from war and catch up on Netflix. They grow flowers in the most uninhabitable spaces.

Sadly, the unintended consequence of this is often that it makes war even more surreal and cruel and the ability to help turn the tide more difficult.

Under circumstances such as those facing doctors and nurses in Ukraine today, the best prevention may be to accept that war is ugly, indiscriminate and savage. It is also a reminder of what is lost and what we must now work hard to preserve and repair.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Mark de Rond from ��Ī Judge Business School outlines some of the unique pressures faced by doctors and nurses in Ukraine, in this piece originally published in The Conversation.

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Patient being treated in a Kharkiv hospital during a 2015 military operation

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Have we misunderstood post-traumatic stress disorder?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 14:08:30 +0000

It’s long been assumed that war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stems from how well a person copes psychologically with exposure to violence or the threat of violence. A new study, published in the Academy of Management Journal, finds that this is only half the story, however.

The researchers behind the study say that the context through which war is experienced – based on a person’s cultural, professional and organisational background – may be equally important in determining how warfare can be traumatic for some and not for others.

The research focused on military doctors in Afghanistan, and found that the “dissonance” between what the medics experienced on the ground and their values as dedicated professionals resulted in “senselessness, futility and surreality” – factors that can lead to PTSD and other mental health problems.

“This understanding of the connection between PTSD and the context of those who suffer from it could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare,” said Mark de Rond of ��Ī Judge Business School, who co-authored the study with Jaco Lok of the University of New South Wales Business School in Australia.

“The study highlights the urgent and serious nature of dealing with PTSD – beyond the very real impact on many veterans, to others who work in the theatre of war, such as medical personnel,” says Lok.

Between 20 and 30 per cent of the 2.7 million US troops sent to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011 returned with some form of psychological injury, says the US Department of Veterans Affairs, while the British charity Combat Stress reported a four-fold increase in former service personnel seeking help for mental disorders in the past 20 years. In 2013, a former commander of Australian forces in the Middle East warned of a “large wave of sadness coming our way.”

The new study is based on fieldwork by de Rond, Reader in Strategy & Organisation at ��Ī Judge Business School, who was “embedded” with a team of military surgeons at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan for six weeks in 2011 – and includes tales both harrowing and tragi-comic.

“The doctors I was embedded with were known as Rear Located Medics, who don’t have a combat role, so they have less reason to fear for their lives than frontline personnel,” says de Rond. “Studying this group was an excellent way to look beyond psychological reaction to the horrors of warfare in order to also analyse contextual elements that lead to PTSD.”

For example, the Camp Bastion army medics were particularly disturbed by rules of the camp’s small 50-bed field hospital that required the quick transfer of badly mutilated children (often double amputees due to Improvised Explosive Devices encountered while playing) and other Afghan civilians to inferior local hospitals, often within 48 hours, to make way for new battlefield casualties. This was a specific, local organisational requirement.

“(It was) difficult for them to come terms with rules, practices and experiences on the ground that appeared contradictory to their purpose and values, thus amplifying feelings of senselessness,” the study says.

As an example of the surreal hopelessness faced by the medics, the study relates a conversation between two medics: “They talked about the frustration of bringing a stable, anesthetised patient over to some hospital only to be met by an empty van, having to hand over a wired-up patient to someone with no equipment at all.”

This practice tore at the fabric of their professional purpose and responsibility and highlighted the contrast between the medics’ actual experience in a warfare setting with their professional expectations as doctors – a life of “the meaningful, the good and the normal.”

The doctors’ real names are not used, but the study instead substitutes the names of characters such as “Trapper,” “Hawkeye” and “Potter” from the hit TV show “M*A*S*H”. Among de Rond’s field notes chronicled in the study, some incidents seem like they could have come out of the “M*A*S*H” gallows-humour playbook:

“One of the theatre nurses told me of an experience over Easter weekend, when a double amputee had come in… One of his legs had come off, and (the nurse) was asked to please take it to the mortuary (and from there to the incinerator). As he crossed the ambulance bay carrying a yellow (container) with a leg, he ran into the Commanding Officer and a TNC (Travel Nurse Corps) nurse walking the other way, dressed in bunny ears and carrying Easter eggs.”

Such a contrast “between the human gravity of the situation on the one hand, and the casual nature of everyday rituals and routines on the other” can have a very disorienting effect, the study says.

When such disorientation is sustained over time, it can also permanently damage the ability of everyday rituals and routines to provide a sense of meaning and predictability to life back home. This may be one important reason why many war veterans find it so difficult to adjust back to home life.

Camp Bastion, which was constructed in 2005 and handed over to Afghan forces in 2014, was the largest British overseas military camp since World War II, accommodating 32,000 people. The field hospital was staffed by mostly British and American doctors, with some Danes and Estonians, many of them “battle-hardened” by previous deployments to other war zones such as Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

Reference:
Mark de Rond and Jaco Lok. ‘Some things can never be unseen: the role of context in psychological injury at war.’ Academy of Management Journal (2016). DOI: 10.5465/amj.2015.0681

Adapted from a ��Ī Judge Business School press release.

In understanding war-related post-traumatic stress disorder, a person’s cultural and professional context is just as important as how they cope with witnessing wartime events, which could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare.

This understanding of the connection between PTSD and the context of those who suffer from it could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare.

Mark de Rond

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Fact: there is an I in team

sc604 — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 08:05:00 +0000

It’s one of the most well-worn clichés in business: there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’. But research by Dr Mark de Rond, Reader in Strategy & Organisation at ��Ī Judge Business School, demonstrates there is indeed a place for the individual within a team.

His book, There Is An I in Team, and his fieldwork with groups operating under high pressure – from elite rowers on the Cam to hard-pressed army surgeons at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan – has thrown up numerous questions that defy the conventional wisdom on teamwork.

Why do even highly effective teams often feel dysfunctional? High performers introduce risks – how can these be mitigated? When does it make sense to sacrifice competence for likeability? Why are teams best under-resourced? And why do problems arise in teams even when they’re not in conflict?

The answers are never simple. But Dr de Rond’s work is being used by numerous companies, including the McLaren Group, Stonehage and KPMG, to enhance their teamworking.

Steve Hollis, chairman of the KPMG Midlands Region, says a leadership development programme delivered by Dr de Rond and rooted in his findings had a considerable impact on partners’ team management.

In particular, the sessions empowered all team members to speak out and challenge the status quo.

This has been particularly beneficial, Hollis adds, given that it is the younger team members who are in a position to give relevant input on electronic and social media communication.

The Midlands region also had the fastest growing financial performance in the UK in 2012 – an outcome Hollis attributes directly to the application of Dr de Rond’s research.

“My work methods are very old-fashioned,” says Dr de Rond. “I study people by living with them full-time to try and tease out the subtle dynamics of teams of high performers. These are not ordinary teams. Theses are people who are forced to work together under difficult circumstances. They might inhabit hypercompetitive environments, like the ��Ī University boat crew, where up to 40 people compete for only eight places in a Boat Race against Oxford."

Or a highly emotional environment, like the surgeons at Camp Bastion. They operate on people who are young and horribly injured, wearing the same uniforms as they do, or on young children as collateral damage of the war.

I live with them to try and understand how, when people are pushed to the extremes, they continue to operate effectively – or not.

It’s important to understand these dynamics. Many people, de Rond points out, have no choice but to work together. A surgeon or a rower can’t achieve anything alone but have to learn to coordinate perfectly with individuals very like themselves and with whom they also compete at other levels.

This kind of finely detailed, qualitative research doesn’t offer any easy generalisations.

But it can come up with new ways of thinking – such as, for example, recognising that tension within teams isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Sometimes tensions are best left alone because they exist quite naturally,” says Dr de Rond. “The teams I study are typically made up of people who are inherently competitive. That is how they got to where they are. To form them into a team and expect this need for rivalry to disappear is not realistic.

“In rowing, the only way to make a boat go fast is perfect coordination. You have to get eight people to synchronise. Even if you work harder than anyone else, if you lose synchronisation, you slow the boat down. So you effectively have an environment in which competition and collaboration co-exist and feed off each other.

"People compete for places in the team, yes, but they can only compete effectively by collaborating perfectly with the people they are competing against. That’s an extreme case. But there are versions of this in most working environments."

And Dr de Rond is continuing to explore the idea of team performance under high pressure. He has just returned from his latest fieldwork project – being a member of the first-ever team to row the entire length of the river Amazon – which, he says, may bring more new insights.

“There’s a common assumption that harmony is a prerequisite for performance, so if you and I get along, the better we will perform,” he says. “By contrast, experiments in social psychology show that harmony is more likely to be the consequence than cause of performance. But the Amazon experience suggests that the relationship between harmony and performance in teams is subtler. These things are very complicated. Much of what I try to do is get a more subtlety and nuance in human behaviour.”

Working on the Cam and at Camp Bastion, Dr Mark de Rond is turning the theory of teamwork on its head

These are not ordinary teams. Theses are people who are forced to work together under difficult circumstances

Mark de Rond

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��Ī University Boat Club

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In search of Life at Lady Mitchell Hall

bjb42 — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:00:57 +0000

‘Life’ is the subject for 2012, as all eight lectures will delve into the many aspects of this broad yet compelling topic from various disciplines. Previous themes in years past include Beauty, Risk, Identity, Conflict, and Survival.

Life as a cell, life in a military field hospital in Afghanistan, and life after death are some of the topics explored in the multi-disciplinary lecture series. The first lecture entitled From Genomes to the Diversity of Life was presented on 20 January by Professor Michael Akam of the ��Ī. Subsequent talks will be held by Professor Frances Ashcroft from Oxford University, ��Ī’s own Dr Robert Macfarlane, Dr Michael Scott, Dr Mark de Rond, Professor Chris Bishop, and Professor Ron Laskey. The University of Southampton’s Professor Clive Gamble concludes the series with his talk: The After Life.

The Darwin College lecture series began in 1986 and has proved to be one of the most sought after events in ��Ī ever since. The series marks one of the key events at Darwin College and has run every year from January to March since inception.

The lectures continue from 27 January and continues every Friday for six weeks at 5.30pm at the Lady Mitchell Hall. Because the annual series is extremely popular, organisers suggest that anyone hoping to attend should arrive early to ensure a place. The organisers have also secured an adjacent theatre with live television coverage so that those who are unable to secure a place in the main hall are able to still view the lecture.

The continuing schedule is as follows:

27 January, Dr Robert Macfarlane, ��Ī Life in Ruins

03 February, Professor Frances Ashcroft, University of Oxford The Spark of Life

10 February, Dr Michael Scott, ��Ī Life in the Ancient World

17 February, Dr Mark de Rond, ��Ī Life in Conflict

24 February, Professor Ron Laskey, ��Ī Life and Death of a Cell

02 March, Professor Chris Bishop, ��Ī Artificial Life

09 March, Professor Clive Gamble, University of Southampton The After Life

Past lectures are also available on iTunes, and Darwin College Lecture books are available from the ��Ī University Press.

Darwin College continues the popular Darwin College lecture series this week on 27 January with Life in Ruins. The annual eight week series held at Lady Mitchell Hall is free to the public and is renowned for its famous speakers and thought-provoking discussions.

The annual series is popular as organisers suggest that anyone hoping to attend should arrive early to ensure a place.

Darwin College

Darwin College Lecture Series 2012

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The making of a Boat Race crew

ns480 — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:55:14 +0000

Founded in 1828, the ��Ī University Boat Club (CUBC) has one purpose only: to beat Oxford in the annual Boat Race. This race has always been a thing of sharp contrasts: it remains a private match between two universities but enjoys a following of millions worldwide; it is marked by intensive rivalry yet mutual respect too; it is quintessentially British though clones of it exist everywhere; it is all about taking part and yet the pain of losing is unimaginable.

So what does it really take to earn a seat in the coveted Blue Boat? How does one create a world-class crew from a dysfunctional cohort of 39 hopefuls? And how are relationships affected by ongoing selection pressures? Unsurprisingly, the answers are not straightforward.

Crew selection

The performance of individual rowers is only ever meaningful in the context of the crew. It is easy to establish what rowers are capable of as individuals. However, place them in a crew and they perform differently depending on who else is in the boat and what seat they are assigned. The implication for coaching and team building is twofold: first, crew selection becomes a matter of finding the right combination of rowers; and, second, coaches need to decide whether to cater to someone’s ego (e.g. by giving him a particular seat) or to suppress it in the interest of the team. Moreover, in crew selection it occasionally makes sense to sacrifice technical competence to gain social cohesion. Although a particular rower may be sub-optimal in terms of technique, he may optimise crew performance by virtue of his social skills in drawing better performances out of the others, even for a sport reliant on technique, synchronisation and rhythm.

Pulling together

Those bold enough to compete for a seat in ��Ī’s Blue Boat can only do so effectively by collaborating effortlessly with their rivals. Rowers express individuality in wishing to remain on the coaches’ radar screens, but collectivity in building team spirit. They are expected to adopt a rowing style that is quintessentially ��Ī, but, in so doing, to sacrifice what they know has made them go fast in the past.

In the aftermath of yet another defeat in 2006, ��Ī’s chief coach decided to part with tradition by granting athletes more voice in training, selection and race planning. Given that rowing coaching is almost universally undemocratic, this rather more egalitarian approach is not risk-free. While the athletes welcome more participation, being asked to take responsibility for each other’s development feels unnatural. Even so, their shared commitment to turning the tables on Oxford, to exploiting their superior blade-work, to avoiding division within the crew and to pulling together seamlessly drove ��Ī to take a leap and innovate. It was to become one of their most daring team-management experiments in two centuries of Oxbridge rowing.

After months of anxiety, conflict and rejection – including the controversial decision to drop a veteran coxswain just 14 days before the race – the training season came to a conclusion for the ��Ī crew on 7 April 2007: although Oxford started well, ��Ī recovered to find their rhythm and won by over a length. And in a real sense, it is the unremitting search for rhythm that explains selection choices. It explains why five returning Blues fought to get one socially gifted oarsman selected despite being technically further removed from the ��Ī ideal than the oarsman he would unseat.

It explains why ��Ī won the 2007 Boat Race, and why it almost lost.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Mark de Rond (mejd3@cam.ac.uk) at Judge Business School. Dr de Rond was recently awarded a prestigious Fulbright Distinguished

Mark de Rond spent 200 days with the ��Ī University Boat Club as an organisational ethnographer researching the social dynamics of high performance teams.

Although a particular rower may be sub-optimal in terms of technique, he may optimise crew performance by virtue of his social skills in drawing better performances out of the others, even for a sport reliant on technique, synchronisation and rhythm.

rowfotos from Flickr

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