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Why more and more teachers are joining the anti-homework movement

The word homework doesn’t just elicit groans from students. Many veteran educators aren’t fans of it either.

Barbara Tollison, a high school English teacher with nearly four decades in the classroom, stopped assigning homework five years ago. In lieu of writing papers, she asks her 10th graders in San Marcos, California, to read more books before bed.

“For the kids who understand the information, additional practice is unnecessary,” she told TODAY Parents . “The kids who need more support are going to go home and not do it right. It's just going to confuse them more. They don’t have the understanding and they need guidance.”

Tollison is part of a growing movement that believes learners can thrive academically without homework. According to Alfie Kohn, author of “ The Homework Myth ,” there’s never a good excuse for making kids work a second shift of academics in elementary and middle school.

“In high school, it’s a little more nuanced,” Kohn told TODAY Parents . “Some research has found a tiny correlation between doing more homework and doing better on standardized tests . But No. 1, standardized tests are a lousy measure of learning. No. 2, the correlation is small. And No. 3, it doesn’t prove a causal relationship. In other words, just because the same kids who get more homework do a little better on tests, doesn’t mean the homework made that happen.”

Kohn noted that “newer, better” studies are showing that the downside of homework is just as profound in 16-year-olds as it is in 8-year-olds, in terms of causing causing anxiety, a loss of interest in learning and family conflict.

Parents Is homework robbing your family of joy? You're not alone

“For my book, I interviewed high school teachers who completely stopped giving homework and there was no downside, it was all upside,” he shared.

“There just isn’t a good argument in favor of homework,” Kohn said.

Katie Sluiter, an 8th grade teacher in Michigan, couldn’t agree more. She believes that the bulk of instruction and support should happen in the classroom.

“What I realized early on in my career is that the kids who don’t need the practice are the only ones doing their homework,” Sluiter told TODAY Parents .

Sluiter added that homework is stressful and inequitable. Many children, especially those from lower-income families, have little chance of being successful with work being sent home.

“So many things are out of the student’s control, like the ability to have a quiet place to do homework,” Sluiter explained. “In my district, there are many parents that don’t speak any English, so they’re not going to be able to help with their child’s social studies homework. Some kids are responsible for watching their younger siblings after school.”

Parents Too much homework? Study shows elementary kids get 3 times more than they should

Sluiter also doesn’t want to add “an extra pile of stress” to already over-scheduled lives.

“Middle school is hard enough without worrying, ‘Did I get my conjunctions sheet done?’” she said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s just too much. We need to let them be kids."

Kohn, who has written 14 books on parenting and education, previously told TODAY that moms and dads should speak up on behalf of their children.

"If your child's teacher never assigns homework, take a moment to thank them for doing what's in your child's best interest — and for acknowledging that families, not schools, ought to decide what happens during family time," he said. "If your child is getting homework, organize a bunch of parents to meet with the teacher and administrators — not to ask, 'Why so much?' but, given that the research says it's all pain and no gain, to ask, 'Why is there any?'"

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Rachel Paula Abrahamson is a lifestyle reporter who writes for the parenting, health and shop verticals. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and elsewhere. Rachel lives in the Boston area with her husband and their two daughters. Follow her on Instagram .

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Nobody knows what the point of homework is

The homework wars are back.

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As the Covid-19 pandemic began and students logged into their remote classrooms, all work, in effect, became homework. But whether or not students could complete it at home varied. For some, schoolwork became public-library work or McDonald’s-parking-lot work.

Luis Torres, the principal of PS 55, a predominantly low-income community elementary school in the south Bronx, told me that his school secured Chromebooks for students early in the pandemic only to learn that some lived in shelters that blocked wifi for security reasons. Others, who lived in housing projects with poor internet reception, did their schoolwork in laundromats.

According to a 2021 Pew survey , 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent.

The issues with remote learning in March 2020 were new. But they highlighted a divide that had been there all along in another form: homework. And even long after schools have resumed in-person classes, the pandemic’s effects on homework have lingered.

Over the past three years, in response to concerns about equity, schools across the country, including in Sacramento, Los Angeles , San Diego , and Clark County, Nevada , made permanent changes to their homework policies that restricted how much homework could be given and how it could be graded after in-person learning resumed.

Three years into the pandemic, as districts and teachers reckon with Covid-era overhauls of teaching and learning, schools are still reconsidering the purpose and place of homework. Whether relaxing homework expectations helps level the playing field between students or harms them by decreasing rigor is a divisive issue without conclusive evidence on either side, echoing other debates in education like the elimination of standardized test scores from some colleges’ admissions processes.

I first began to wonder if the homework abolition movement made sense after speaking with teachers in some Massachusetts public schools, who argued that rather than help disadvantaged kids, stringent homework restrictions communicated an attitude of low expectations. One, an English teacher, said she felt the school had “just given up” on trying to get the students to do work; another argued that restrictions that prohibit teachers from assigning take-home work that doesn’t begin in class made it difficult to get through the foreign-language curriculum. Teachers in other districts have raised formal concerns about homework abolition’s ability to close gaps among students rather than widening them.

Many education experts share this view. Harris Cooper, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke who has studied homework efficacy, likened homework abolition to “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

But as I learned after talking to a variety of stakeholders — from homework researchers to policymakers to parents of schoolchildren — whether to abolish homework probably isn’t the right question. More important is what kind of work students are sent home with and where they can complete it. Chances are, if schools think more deeply about giving constructive work, time spent on homework will come down regardless.

There’s no consensus on whether homework works

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Researchers disagree even on how much research exists on the value of homework. Kathleen Budge, the co-author of Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools and a professor at Boise State, told me that homework “has been greatly researched.” Denise Pope, a Stanford lecturer and leader of the education nonprofit Challenge Success, said, “It’s not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems.”

Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.) Homework proponents argue that while it is difficult to design randomized control studies to test homework’s effectiveness, the vast majority of existing studies show a strong positive correlation between homework and high academic achievement for middle and high school students. Prominent critics of homework argue that these correlational studies are unreliable and point to studies that suggest a neutral or negative effect on student performance. Both agree there is little to no evidence for homework’s effectiveness at an elementary school level, though proponents often argue that it builds constructive habits for the future.

For anyone who remembers homework assignments from both good and bad teachers, this fundamental disagreement might not be surprising. Some homework is pointless and frustrating to complete. Every week during my senior year of high school, I had to analyze a poem for English and decorate it with images found on Google; my most distinct memory from that class is receiving a demoralizing 25-point deduction because I failed to present my analysis on a poster board. Other assignments really do help students learn: After making an adapted version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book for a ninth grade history project, I was inspired to check out from the library and read a biography of the Chinese ruler.

For homework opponents, the first example is more likely to resonate. “We’re all familiar with the negative effects of homework: stress, exhaustion, family conflict, less time for other activities, diminished interest in learning,” Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, which challenges common justifications for homework, told me in an email. “And these effects may be most pronounced among low-income students.” Kohn believes that schools should make permanent any moratoria implemented during the pandemic, arguing that there are no positives at all to outweigh homework’s downsides. Recent studies , he argues , show the benefits may not even materialize during high school.

In the Marlborough Public Schools, a suburban district 45 minutes west of Boston, school policy committee chair Katherine Hennessy described getting kids to complete their homework during remote education as “a challenge, to say the least.” Teachers found that students who spent all day on their computers didn’t want to spend more time online when the day was over. So, for a few months, the school relaxed the usual practice and teachers slashed the quantity of nightly homework.

Online learning made the preexisting divides between students more apparent, she said. Many students, even during normal circumstances, lacked resources to keep them on track and focused on completing take-home assignments. Though Marlborough Schools is more affluent than PS 55, Hennessy said many students had parents whose work schedules left them unable to provide homework help in the evenings. The experience tracked with a common divide in the country between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.

So in October 2021, months after the homework reduction began, the Marlborough committee made a change to the district’s policy. While teachers could still give homework, the assignments had to begin as classwork. And though teachers could acknowledge homework completion in a student’s participation grade, they couldn’t count homework as its own grading category. “Rigorous learning in the classroom does not mean that that classwork must be assigned every night,” the policy stated . “Extensions of class work is not to be used to teach new content or as a form of punishment.”

Canceling homework might not do anything for the achievement gap

The critiques of homework are valid as far as they go, but at a certain point, arguments against homework can defy the commonsense idea that to retain what they’re learning, students need to practice it.

“Doesn’t a kid become a better reader if he reads more? Doesn’t a kid learn his math facts better if he practices them?” said Cathy Vatterott, an education researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. After decades of research, she said it’s still hard to isolate the value of homework, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned.

Blanket vilification of homework can also conflate the unique challenges facing disadvantaged students as compared to affluent ones, which could have different solutions. “The kids in the low-income schools are being hurt because they’re being graded, unfairly, on time they just don’t have to do this stuff,” Pope told me. “And they’re still being held accountable for turning in assignments, whether they’re meaningful or not.” On the other side, “Palo Alto kids” — students in Silicon Valley’s stereotypically pressure-cooker public schools — “are just bombarded and overloaded and trying to stay above water.”

Merely getting rid of homework doesn’t solve either problem. The United States already has the second-highest disparity among OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations between time spent on homework by students of high and low socioeconomic status — a difference of more than three hours, said Janine Bempechat, clinical professor at Boston University and author of No More Mindless Homework .

When she interviewed teachers in Boston-area schools that had cut homework before the pandemic, Bempechat told me, “What they saw immediately was parents who could afford it immediately enrolled their children in the Russian School of Mathematics,” a math-enrichment program whose tuition ranges from $140 to about $400 a month. Getting rid of homework “does nothing for equity; it increases the opportunity gap between wealthier and less wealthy families,” she said. “That solution troubles me because it’s no solution at all.”

A group of teachers at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, made the same point after the school district proposed an overhaul of its homework policies, including removing penalties for missing homework deadlines, allowing unlimited retakes, and prohibiting grading of homework.

“Given the emphasis on equity in today’s education systems,” they wrote in a letter to the school board, “we believe that some of the proposed changes will actually have a detrimental impact towards achieving this goal. Families that have means could still provide challenging and engaging academic experiences for their children and will continue to do so, especially if their children are not experiencing expected rigor in the classroom.” At a school where more than a third of students are low-income, the teachers argued, the policies would prompt students “to expect the least of themselves in terms of effort, results, and responsibility.”

Not all homework is created equal

Despite their opposing sides in the homework wars, most of the researchers I spoke to made a lot of the same points. Both Bempechat and Pope were quick to bring up how parents and schools confuse rigor with workload, treating the volume of assignments as a proxy for quality of learning. Bempechat, who is known for defending homework, has written extensively about how plenty of it lacks clear purpose, requires the purchasing of unnecessary supplies, and takes longer than it needs to. Likewise, when Pope instructs graduate-level classes on curriculum, she asks her students to think about the larger purpose they’re trying to achieve with homework: If they can get the job done in the classroom, there’s no point in sending home more work.

At its best, pandemic-era teaching facilitated that last approach. Honolulu-based teacher Christina Torres Cawdery told me that, early in the pandemic, she often had a cohort of kids in her classroom for four hours straight, as her school tried to avoid too much commingling. She couldn’t lecture for four hours, so she gave the students plenty of time to complete independent and project-based work. At the end of most school days, she didn’t feel the need to send them home with more to do.

A similar limited-homework philosophy worked at a public middle school in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A couple of teachers there turned as much class as possible into an opportunity for small-group practice, allowing kids to work on problems that traditionally would be assigned for homework, Jessica Flick, a math coach who leads department meetings at the school, told me. It was inspired by a philosophy pioneered by Simon Fraser University professor Peter Liljedahl, whose influential book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics reframes homework as “check-your-understanding questions” rather than as compulsory work. Last year, Flick found that the two eighth grade classes whose teachers adopted this strategy performed the best on state tests, and this year, she has encouraged other teachers to implement it.

Teachers know that plenty of homework is tedious and unproductive. Jeannemarie Dawson De Quiroz, who has taught for more than 20 years in low-income Boston and Los Angeles pilot and charter schools, says that in her first years on the job she frequently assigned “drill and kill” tasks and questions that she now feels unfairly stumped students. She said designing good homework wasn’t part of her teaching programs, nor was it meaningfully discussed in professional development. With more experience, she turned as much class time as she could into practice time and limited what she sent home.

“The thing about homework that’s sticky is that not all homework is created equal,” says Jill Harrison Berg, a former teacher and the author of Uprooting Instructional Inequity . “Some homework is a genuine waste of time and requires lots of resources for no good reason. And other homework is really useful.”

Cutting homework has to be part of a larger strategy

The takeaways are clear: Schools can make cuts to homework, but those cuts should be part of a strategy to improve the quality of education for all students. If the point of homework was to provide more practice, districts should think about how students can make it up during class — or offer time during or after school for students to seek help from teachers. If it was to move the curriculum along, it’s worth considering whether strategies like Liljedahl’s can get more done in less time.

Some of the best thinking around effective assignments comes from those most critical of the current practice. Denise Pope proposes that, before assigning homework, teachers should consider whether students understand the purpose of the work and whether they can do it without help. If teachers think it’s something that can’t be done in class, they should be mindful of how much time it should take and the feedback they should provide. It’s questions like these that De Quiroz considered before reducing the volume of work she sent home.

More than a year after the new homework policy began in Marlborough, Hennessy still hears from parents who incorrectly “think homework isn’t happening” despite repeated assurances that kids still can receive work. She thinks part of the reason is that education has changed over the years. “I think what we’re trying to do is establish that homework may be an element of educating students,” she told me. “But it may not be what parents think of as what they grew up with. ... It’s going to need to adapt, per the teaching and the curriculum, and how it’s being delivered in each classroom.”

For the policy to work, faculty, parents, and students will all have to buy into a shared vision of what school ought to look like. The district is working on it — in November, it hosted and uploaded to YouTube a round-table discussion on homework between district administrators — but considering the sustained confusion, the path ahead seems difficult.

When I asked Luis Torres about whether he thought homework serves a useful part in PS 55’s curriculum, he said yes, of course it was — despite the effort and money it takes to keep the school open after hours to help them do it. “The children need the opportunity to practice,” he said. “If you don’t give them opportunities to practice what they learn, they’re going to forget.” But Torres doesn’t care if the work is done at home. The school stays open until around 6 pm on weekdays, even during breaks. Tutors through New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development programs help kids with work after school so they don’t need to take it with them.

As schools weigh the purpose of homework in an unequal world, it’s tempting to dispose of a practice that presents real, practical problems to students across the country. But getting rid of homework is unlikely to do much good on its own. Before cutting it, it’s worth thinking about what good assignments are meant to do in the first place. It’s crucial that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds tackle complex quantitative problems and hone their reading and writing skills. It’s less important that the work comes home with them.

Jacob Sweet is a freelance writer in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, among other publications.

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The Surprising History of Homework Reform

Really, kids, there was a time when lots of grownups thought homework was bad for you.

Homework causes a lot of fights. Between parents and kids, sure. But also, as education scholar Brian Gill and historian Steven Schlossman write, among U.S. educators. For more than a century, they’ve been debating how, and whether, kids should do schoolwork at home .

At the dawn of the twentieth century, homework meant memorizing lists of facts which could then be recited to the teacher the next day. The rising progressive education movement despised that approach. These educators advocated classrooms free from recitation. Instead, they wanted students to learn by doing. To most, homework had no place in this sort of system.

Through the middle of the century, Gill and Schlossman write, this seemed like common sense to most progressives. And they got their way in many schools—at least at the elementary level. Many districts abolished homework for K–6 classes, and almost all of them eliminated it for students below fourth grade.

By the 1950s, many educators roundly condemned drills, like practicing spelling words and arithmetic problems. In 1963, Helen Heffernan, chief of California’s Bureau of Elementary Education, definitively stated that “No teacher aware of recent theories could advocate such meaningless homework assignments as pages of repetitive computation in arithmetic. Such an assignment not only kills time but kills the child’s creative urge to intellectual activity.”

But, the authors note, not all reformers wanted to eliminate homework entirely. Some educators reconfigured the concept, suggesting supplemental reading or having students do projects based in their own interests. One teacher proposed “homework” consisting of after-school “field trips to the woods, factories, museums, libraries, art galleries.” In 1937, Carleton Washburne, an influential educator who was the superintendent of the Winnetka, Illinois, schools, proposed a homework regimen of “cooking and sewing…meal planning…budgeting, home repairs, interior decorating, and family relationships.”

Another reformer explained that “at first homework had as its purpose one thing—to prepare the next day’s lessons. Its purpose now is to prepare the children for fuller living through a new type of creative and recreational homework.”

That idea didn’t necessarily appeal to all educators. But moderation in the use of traditional homework became the norm.

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“Virtually all commentators on homework in the postwar years would have agreed with the sentiment expressed in the NEA Journal in 1952 that ‘it would be absurd to demand homework in the first grade or to denounce it as useless in the eighth grade and in high school,’” Gill and Schlossman write.

That remained more or less true until 1983, when publication of the landmark government report A Nation at Risk helped jump-start a conservative “back to basics” agenda, including an emphasis on drill-style homework. In the decades since, continuing “reforms” like high-stakes testing, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Common Core standards have kept pressure on schools. Which is why twenty-first-century first graders get spelling words and pages of arithmetic.

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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August 16, 2021

Is it time to get rid of homework? Mental health experts weigh in

by Sara M Moniuszko

It's no secret that kids hate homework. And as students grapple with an ongoing pandemic that has had a wide-range of mental health impacts, is it time schools start listening to their pleas over workloads?

Some teachers are turning to social media to take a stand against homework .

Tiktok user @misguided.teacher says he doesn't assign it because the "whole premise of homework is flawed."

For starters, he says he can't grade work on "even playing fields" when students' home environments can be vastly different.

"Even students who go home to a peaceful house, do they really want to spend their time on busy work? Because typically that's what a lot of homework is, it's busy work," he says in the video that has garnered 1.6 million likes. "You only get one year to be 7, you only got one year to be 10, you only get one year to be 16, 18."

Mental health experts agree heavy work loads have the potential do more harm than good for students, especially when taking into account the impacts of the pandemic. But they also say the answer may not be to eliminate homework altogether.

Emmy Kang, mental health counselor at Humantold, says studies have shown heavy workloads can be "detrimental" for students and cause a "big impact on their mental, physical and emotional health."

"More than half of students say that homework is their primary source of stress, and we know what stress can do on our bodies," she says, adding that staying up late to finish assignments also leads to disrupted sleep and exhaustion.

Cynthia Catchings, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist at Talkspace, says heavy workloads can also cause serious mental health problems in the long run, like anxiety and depression.

And for all the distress homework causes, it's not as useful as many may think, says Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and CEO of Omega Recovery treatment center.

"The research shows that there's really limited benefit of homework for elementary age students, that really the school work should be contained in the classroom," he says.

For older students, Kang says homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night.

"Most students, especially at these high-achieving schools, they're doing a minimum of three hours, and it's taking away time from their friends from their families, their extracurricular activities. And these are all very important things for a person's mental and emotional health."

Catchings, who also taught third to 12th graders for 12 years, says she's seen the positive effects of a no homework policy while working with students abroad.

"Not having homework was something that I always admired from the French students (and) the French schools, because that was helping the students to really have the time off and really disconnect from school ," she says.

The answer may not be to eliminate homework completely, but to be more mindful of the type of work students go home with, suggests Kang, who was a high-school teacher for 10 years.

"I don't think (we) should scrap homework, I think we should scrap meaningless, purposeless busy work-type homework. That's something that needs to be scrapped entirely," she says, encouraging teachers to be thoughtful and consider the amount of time it would take for students to complete assignments.

The pandemic made the conversation around homework more crucial

Mindfulness surrounding homework is especially important in the context of the last two years. Many students will be struggling with mental health issues that were brought on or worsened by the pandemic, making heavy workloads even harder to balance.

"COVID was just a disaster in terms of the lack of structure. Everything just deteriorated," Kardaras says, pointing to an increase in cognitive issues and decrease in attention spans among students. "School acts as an anchor for a lot of children, as a stabilizing force, and that disappeared."

But even if students transition back to the structure of in-person classes, Kardaras suspects students may still struggle after two school years of shifted schedules and disrupted sleeping habits.

"We've seen adults struggling to go back to in-person work environments from remote work environments. That effect is amplified with children because children have less resources to be able to cope with those transitions than adults do," he explains.

'Get organized' ahead of back-to-school

In order to make the transition back to in-person school easier, Kang encourages students to "get good sleep, exercise regularly (and) eat a healthy diet."

To help manage workloads, she suggests students "get organized."

"There's so much mental clutter up there when you're disorganized... sitting down and planning out their study schedules can really help manage their time," she says.

Breaking assignments up can also make things easier to tackle.

"I know that heavy workloads can be stressful, but if you sit down and you break down that studying into smaller chunks, they're much more manageable."

If workloads are still too much, Kang encourages students to advocate for themselves.

"They should tell their teachers when a homework assignment just took too much time or if it was too difficult for them to do on their own," she says. "It's good to speak up and ask those questions. Respectfully, of course, because these are your teachers. But still, I think sometimes teachers themselves need this feedback from their students."

©2021 USA Today Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Homework: is it worth the hassle?

Parents and educators question the value of setting assignments for students. But what does the neuroscience say?

Like all teachers, I’ve spent many hours correcting homework. Yet there’s a debate over whether we should be setting it at all.

I teach both primary and secondary, and regularly find myself drawn into the argument on the reasoning behind it – parents, and sometimes colleagues, question its validity. Parent-teacher interviews can become consumed by how much trouble students have completing assignments. All of which has led me to question the neuroscience behind setting homework. Is it worth it?

Increasingly, there’s a divide between those who support the need for homework and those who suggest the time would be better spent with family and developing relationships. The anxiety related to homework is frequently reviewed.

A survey of high-performing high schools by the Stanford Graduate School of Education, for example, found that 56% of students considered homework a primary source of stress. These same students reported that the demands of homework caused sleep deprivation and other health problems, as well as less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits.

Working memory?

When students learn in the classroom, they are using their short-term or working memory. This information is continually updated during the class. On leaving the classroom, the information in the working memory is replaced by the topic in the next class.

Adults experience a similar reaction when they walk into a new room and forget why they are there. The new set of sensory information – lighting, odours, temperature – enters their working memory and any pre-existing information is displaced. It’s only when the person returns to the same environment that they remember the key information.

But education is about more than memorising facts. Students need to access the information in ways that are relevant to their world, and to transfer knowledge to new situations.

Many of us will have struggled to remember someone’s name when we meet them in an unexpected environment (a workmate at the gym, maybe), and we are more likely to remember them again once we’ve seen them multiple times in different places. Similarly, students must practise their skills in different environments.

Revising the key skills learned in the classroom during homework increases the likelihood of a student remembering and being able to use those skills in a variety of situations in the future, contributing to their overall education.

The link between homework and educational achievement is supported by research: a meta-analysis of studies between 1987 and 2003 found that: “With only rare exceptions, the relationship between the amount of homework students do and their achievement outcomes was found to be positive and statistically significant.”

The right type of work

The homework debate is often split along the lines of primary school compared with secondary school. Education researcher Professor John Hattie, who has ranked various influences on student learning and achievement, found that homework in primary schools has a negligible effect (most homework set has little to no impact on a student’s overall learning). However, it makes a bigger difference in secondary schools.

His explanation is that students in secondary schools are often given tasks that reinforce key skills learned in the classroom that day, whereas primary students may be asked to complete separate assignments. “The worst thing you can do with homework is give kids projects; the best thing you can do is reinforce something you’ve already learned,” he told the BBC in 2014.

So homework can be effective when it’s the right type of homework. In my own practice, the primary students I teach will often be asked to find real-life examples of the concept taught instead of traditional homework tasks, while homework for secondary students consolidates the key concepts covered in the classroom. For secondary in particular, I find a general set of rules useful:

• Set work that’s relevant. This includes elaborating on information addressed in the class or opportunities for students to explore the key concept in areas of their own interest.
• Make sure students can complete the homework. Pitch it to a student’s age and skills – anxiety will only limit their cognitive abilities in that topic. A high chance of success will increase the reward stimulation in the brain.
• Get parents involved, without the homework being a point of conflict with students. Make it a sharing of information, rather than a battle.
• Check the homework with the students afterwards. This offers a chance to review the key concepts and allow the working memory to become part of the long-term memory.

While there is no data on the effectiveness of homework in different subjects, these general rules could be applied equally to languages, mathematics or humanities. And by setting the right type of homework, you’ll help to reinforce key concepts in a new environment, allowing the information you teach to be used in a variety of contexts in the future.

Helen Silvester is a writer for npj Science of Learning Community

Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach . Join the Guardian Teacher Network for lesson resources, comment and job opportunities , direct to your inbox.

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Is Homework Good for Kids? Here’s What the Research Says

A s kids return to school, debate is heating up once again over how they should spend their time after they leave the classroom for the day.

The no-homework policy of a second-grade teacher in Texas went viral last week , earning praise from parents across the country who lament the heavy workload often assigned to young students. Brandy Young told parents she would not formally assign any homework this year, asking students instead to eat dinner with their families, play outside and go to bed early.

But the question of how much work children should be doing outside of school remains controversial, and plenty of parents take issue with no-homework policies, worried their kids are losing a potential academic advantage. Here’s what you need to know:

For decades, the homework standard has been a “10-minute rule,” which recommends a daily maximum of 10 minutes of homework per grade level. Second graders, for example, should do about 20 minutes of homework each night. High school seniors should complete about two hours of homework each night. The National PTA and the National Education Association both support that guideline.

But some schools have begun to give their youngest students a break. A Massachusetts elementary school has announced a no-homework pilot program for the coming school year, lengthening the school day by two hours to provide more in-class instruction. “We really want kids to go home at 4 o’clock, tired. We want their brain to be tired,” Kelly Elementary School Principal Jackie Glasheen said in an interview with a local TV station . “We want them to enjoy their families. We want them to go to soccer practice or football practice, and we want them to go to bed. And that’s it.”

A New York City public elementary school implemented a similar policy last year, eliminating traditional homework assignments in favor of family time. The change was quickly met with outrage from some parents, though it earned support from other education leaders.

New solutions and approaches to homework differ by community, and these local debates are complicated by the fact that even education experts disagree about what’s best for kids.

The research

The most comprehensive research on homework to date comes from a 2006 meta-analysis by Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who found evidence of a positive correlation between homework and student achievement, meaning students who did homework performed better in school. The correlation was stronger for older students—in seventh through 12th grade—than for those in younger grades, for whom there was a weak relationship between homework and performance.

Cooper’s analysis focused on how homework impacts academic achievement—test scores, for example. His report noted that homework is also thought to improve study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness and independent problem solving skills. On the other hand, some studies he examined showed that homework can cause physical and emotional fatigue, fuel negative attitudes about learning and limit leisure time for children. At the end of his analysis, Cooper recommended further study of such potential effects of homework.

Despite the weak correlation between homework and performance for young children, Cooper argues that a small amount of homework is useful for all students. Second-graders should not be doing two hours of homework each night, he said, but they also shouldn’t be doing no homework.

Not all education experts agree entirely with Cooper’s assessment.

Cathy Vatterott, an education professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, supports the “10-minute rule” as a maximum, but she thinks there is not sufficient proof that homework is helpful for students in elementary school.

“Correlation is not causation,” she said. “Does homework cause achievement, or do high achievers do more homework?”

Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs , thinks there should be more emphasis on improving the quality of homework tasks, and she supports efforts to eliminate homework for younger kids.

“I have no concerns about students not starting homework until fourth grade or fifth grade,” she said, noting that while the debate over homework will undoubtedly continue, she has noticed a trend toward limiting, if not eliminating, homework in elementary school.

The issue has been debated for decades. A TIME cover in 1999 read: “Too much homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” The accompanying story noted that the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to a push for better math and science education in the U.S. The ensuing pressure to be competitive on a global scale, plus the increasingly demanding college admissions process, fueled the practice of assigning homework.

“The complaints are cyclical, and we’re in the part of the cycle now where the concern is for too much,” Cooper said. “You can go back to the 1970s, when you’ll find there were concerns that there was too little, when we were concerned about our global competitiveness.”

Cooper acknowledged that some students really are bringing home too much homework, and their parents are right to be concerned.

“A good way to think about homework is the way you think about medications or dietary supplements,” he said. “If you take too little, they’ll have no effect. If you take too much, they can kill you. If you take the right amount, you’ll get better.”

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Why Online Learning Is Torture for Some Kids

How to reduce the stress of online learning at home..

Posted February 13, 2021

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One of the biggest challenges of teaching is the reality that children have vastly different ways of learning. Online learning has added to that challenge with the question:

How do teachers use online learning to engage all kinds of learners?

I sat down with Marce Lotito, nurse, health coach, certified Ashtanga Yoga instructor, and loving mother to four, to discuss the particular challenges children and teenagers face with online learning. Here’s what she had to say:

What are the most common stressors that may make online learning difficult for some kids?

I believe the majority of kids struggle with online learning. We are asking so much of them. Given the constant executive functioning demands, it’s like putting a second-grader in college.

Children are missing the sensory experience of school. Imagine sitting in a classroom. The sun shining on your face through the window, the sound of the school bell, and the shuffle of feet hurrying to get to your desk, you see the familiar face of a friend; feel the cool smooth surface of your desk and smell of newly sharpened pencils. What we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste are coded into our minds, processed through our nervous system , and our perception of the world is created.

Added online learning challenges for children include:

• The distraction of home life.
• Loss of sensory and tactile experience of learning.
• Weaker connection to friends and classmates.
• The physical toll of staring at a screen for hours a day.
• Loss of tension outlets, such as exercise or yard play.

What children are more likely to struggle with online learning?

Neurodivergent children are likely to struggle and are already at a higher risk for burnout and anxiety . Without the physical presence of teachers trained to assist them, they are at risk of falling behind. Also, children who have suffered trauma , such as sick or dying family members, are at greater risk of falling back academically, especially without school connections and counselors’ support.

Kids that are most challenged by online learning are likely to have struggled with:

• Attention or hyperactivity (ADD or ADHD ).
• Auditory processing difficulties.
• Visual processing challenges, such as astigmatism.
• Other Learning disabilities.
• Anxiety and depression .

What other stress does online learning create for kids?

Online learning can be incredibly stressful for a child who is not a self-directed learner. While self-directed learners have an easier time learning independently, asking for help, navigating new technology, and staying organized, kids who may lack these skills are often left feeling disorganized, overwhelmed, frustrated, and not knowing how to ask for help.

Children are also struggling with being separated from friends or acquaintances they sat next to in the classroom. If they didn’t hear what the teacher said, they could lean over and ask that friend for help. Your child may have a favorite teacher that they felt safe enough to talk to for emotional support.

Then there are sleep issues related to the additional screen time and the blue light they are absorbing. Some behaviors to look for in your kids are rubbing the eyes, complaining of their eyes feeling tired, blurry-eyed, irritability, and lack of focus. They may not complain because they think these symptoms are typical.

This pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the digital divide creating even more stress on children from lower-income families who lack access to computers and ample Wi-Fi. According to a recent PEW study , about one-third of low-income parents say it is at least somewhat likely their children will not complete schoolwork because they do not have access to a computer at home.

Are there specific learning styles that do not adjust well to online learning?

The research is leading us away from teaching from a learning style perspective. Instead, schools are using metacognition . Your readers can go to Metacognition and Why it Matters in Education. This approach allows children to understand how their minds work, understand themselves as a unique individual, and learn through reflection and slowing down what they need to be successful. It gives them the ability to plan how they would like to study, monitor during the process, and evaluate to understand what they need to succeed in learning. Another useful link is Thinking About Metacognition.

Are there specific interventions parents can make with a child who struggles with online learning?

Yes, do your best to limit exposure to electronics, video games, youtube, or television. Circle is a beautiful app that allows parents to control electronic devices from anywhere. Limit blue light; for example, Apple has a setting on your iPhone.

• Go to settings
• Choose the display & brightness option
• Select the night shift button
• Adjust the settings on this menu to schedule or enable the night shift

You can apply screens to devices, blue light reflecting glasses, or dim the brightness on your devices.

Any other tips you can offer for lowering the stress of online learning?

If possible, start your day outside or with nature. Something as simple as a quick backyard walk, walking the dog around the neighborhood, sitting on a balcony, opening a window for fresh air, cloud watching, and asking each other to describe what different shapes you see or purchase a plant and have your child help you take care of it.

My son enjoys a bath before starting the day. It is quick, but it gives him enough transition time that he needs to gently wake up, have breakfast, and begin his school day. Our morning rituals do have a biological effect on our success.

Have meaningful conversations about what it means to move online or the changes that occur within the family. Ask open-ended questions, become curious. Under pressure, the hippocampus, the part of our brain that allows us to imagine, shrinks.

So get creative, dance, sing, paint, play, and write. Set up peer Zoom playdates, make cards for friends and family, and find ways to help those in your community. At times, this moment may feel isolating and overwhelming, but it is just that moment in time. This, too, shall pass.

For information on virtual parenting workshops for your school, visit www.SeanGrover.com .

Sean Grover, L.C.S.W. , is an author and psychotherapist who leads one of the largest group therapy practices in the United States.

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Expert Commentary

Does torture work? The research says, “No”

As the Trump administration considers torturing suspected militants, the question of whether it helps elicit information or discourage insurgents is again important to policymakers, journalists, scholars and the public.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by The Journalist's Resource, The Journalist's Resource January 26, 2017

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/does-torture-work-research-says-no/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

During the George W. Bush administration, the CIA employed what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees around the world. This included waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, beatings, sexual humiliation, and threats to hurt a detainee’s children or rape a detainee’s mother. Barack Obama banned torture when he assumed office, though his tenure was dogged by allegations that abuse continued , if not in American prisons then in allied countries’ facilities. A 2014 Senate report declared these methods “not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation.”

As the Donald Trump administration  considers  torturing suspected militants, the question of whether it helps elicit information or discourage insurgents is again important to policymakers, journalists, scholars and the public.

Below we highlight studies that look specifically at the effectiveness of torture and its consequences — for example, receiving potentially unreliable information, possibly losing international prestige, risking retaliation and the emotional toll on victims and torturers. We did not include discourses on morality or interpretations of international law.

——

“Ethically Investigating Torture Efficacy: A New Methodology to Test the Influence of Physical Pain on Decision-Making Processes in Experimental Interrogation Scenarios.” Houck, Shannon C.; Conway, Lucian Gideon III. Journal of Applied Security Research , 2015. doi: 10.1080/19361610.2015.1069636.

Abstract:  “Torture’s effectiveness is a frequently debated yet under-researched topic. This article describes a new experimental method to ethically investigate one component of torture: The influence of physical pain on people’s decisions to reveal secret or false information. In particular, participants played a game that was designed to be a proxy of an interrogation scenario. As part of the game, participants were instructed to keep specific information hidden from an opponent while their hand was submerged in varying temperatures of ice water (a cold pressor test that causes pain). Further, their opponent (actually a confederate) verbally pressured them to reveal the information. Participants could choose to give false information to their opponent, true information, or a combination of both. Results suggested the potential usefulness of this method to examine the effectiveness of using pain for information retrieval in a scenario similar to interrogation: Analyses revealed that participants were more likely to reveal false information when exposed to the cold pressor test, and this effect became more pronounced as manipulated water temperatures became colder (from 10 degrees to 5 degrees to 1 degree). This study offers a methodological advance on a challenging topic to research, and can inform our understanding of the efficacy of physical pain as an information retrieval tool.”

“Interrogational Torture: Or How Good Guys Get Bad Information with Ugly Methods.”  Schiemann, John W. Political Research Quarterly , 2012. doi: 10.1177/1065912911430670.

Abstract: Debate about the sources of intelligence leading to bin Laden’s location has revived the question as to whether interrogational torture is effective. Answering this question is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for any justification of interrogational torture. Given the impossibility of approaching the question empirically, I address it theoretically, asking whether the use of torture to extract information satisfies reasonable expectations about reliability of information as well as normative constraints on the frequency and intensity of torture. I find that although information from interrogational torture is unreliable, it is likely to be used frequently and harshly.

“The Effects and Effectiveness of Using Torture as an Interrogation Device: Using Research to Inform the Policy Debate” Costanzo, Mark A.; Gerrity, Ellen.  Social Issues and Policy Review , 2009. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-2409.2009.01014.

Abstract:  “Governments sometimes characterize torture as an indispensable interrogation tool for gathering strategic intelligence. In this article, we review the relevant social scientific research on the effectiveness, impact, and causes of torture. First, we summarize research on false confessions and examine the relevance of that research for torture-based interrogations. Next, we review research on the mental health consequences of torture for survivors and perpetrators. Finally, we explore the social-psychological conditions that promote acts of cruelty (such as those seen at Abu Ghraib) and examine the arguments typically offered to justify the use of torture. We argue that any hypothesized benefits from the use of torture must be weighed against the substantial proven costs of torture. These costs include the unreliable information extracted through interrogations using torture, the mental and emotional toll on victims and torturers, loss of international stature and credibility, and the risk of retaliation against soldiers and civilians.”

“Erroneous Assumptions: Popular Belief in the Effectiveness of Torture Interrogation” Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie.  Journal of Peace Psychology , 2007. doi: 10.1080/10781910701665766.

Abstract: “People generally believe that torture is effective despite strong counterclaims by experienced military interrogators and intelligence experts. This article challenges us to reexamine some of our basic assumptions about torture by presenting four psychological factors — primarily errors and biases in human judgment — that help account for this mistaken popular belief.”

“International Law, Constitutional Law, and Public Support for Torture” Versteeg, Mila; Chilton, Adam S. Research and Politics , 2016.

Abstract:  “The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, we conducted a survey experiment to explore the impact of international and constitutional law on public support for torture. We found that a bare majority of respondents in our control group support the use of torture, and that presenting respondents with arguments that this practice violates international law or constitutional law did not produce a statistically significant decrease in support. These findings are consistent with prior research suggesting, even in democracies, that legal prohibitions on torture have been ineffective.”

“What Stops the Torture?” Conrad, Courtenay Ryals; Moore, Will H.  American Journal of Political Science , 2010. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00441.x.

Abstract:  “States whose agents engage in torture in a given year have a 93 percent chance of continuing to torture in the following year. What leads governments to stop the use of torture? We focus on the principal–agent relationship between the executive and the individuals responsible for supervising and interrogating state prisoners. We argue that some liberal democratic institutions change the probability that leaders support the creation of institutions that discourage jailers and interrogators from engaging in torture, thus increasing the probability of a state terminating its use of torture. These relationships are strongly conditioned by the presence of violent dissent; states rarely terminate the use of torture when they face a threat. Once campaigns of violent dissent stop, however, states with popular suffrage and a free press are considerably more likely to terminate their use of torture. Also given the end of violent dissent, the greater the number of veto points in government, the lower the likelihood that a state terminates its use of torture.”

“The (In)Effectiveness of Torture for Combating Insurgence” Sullivan, Christopher Michael. Journal of Peace Research , 2014. doi: 10.1177/0022343313520023.

Abstract: “It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting torture’s effects remains severely limited. This study provides the first micro-level statistical analysis of torture’s relation to subsequent killings committed by insurgent and counterinsurgent forces. The theoretical arguments contend that torture is ineffective for reducing killings perpetrated by insurgents both because it fails to reduce insurgent capacities for violence and because it can increase the incentives for insurgents to commit future killings. The theory also links torture to other forms of state violence. Specifically, engaging in torture is expected to be associated with increased killings perpetrated by counterinsurgents. Monthly municipal-level data on political violence are used to analyze torture committed by counterinsurgents during the Guatemalan civil war (1977–94). Using a matched-sample, difference-in-difference identification strategy and data compiled from 22 different press and NGO sources as well as thousands of interviews, the study estimates how torture is related to short-term changes in killings perpetrated by both insurgents and counterinsurgents. Killings by counterinsurgents are shown to increase significantly following torture. However, torture appears to have no robust correlation with subsequent killings by insurgents. Based on this evidence the study concludes that torture is ineffective for reducing insurgent perpetrated killings.”

“The ‘Game’ of Torture” Wantchekon, Leonard; Healy, Andrew. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 1999.

Abstract:  “The authors explain the prevalence of torture by modeling its institutional structure as a game of incomplete information involving the state, the torturer, and the victim. Once the state endorses torture as a mechanism for extracting information, its will is carried out with positive probability. This is because (a) even a ‘soft’ and ‘sensitive’ state agent might torture the victim to test his or her ability to resist and (b) a weak victim might hold out momentarily to find out whether the torturer is sensitive or ‘sadistic.’ When the state uses torture to intimidate political opposition, all types of torturers will behave sadistically. As a result, torture becomes more widespread and more cruel. The authors explain why a ‘culture’ of individual resistance is the only effective solution to torture.”

“The Failure of Constitutional Torture Prohibitions” Versteeg, Mila; Chilton, Adam S. The Journal of Legal Studies , 2015. doi: 10.1086/684298.

Abstract:  “The prohibition of torture is one of the most emblematic norms of the modern human rights movement, and its prevalence in national constitutions has increased steeply in the past three decades. Yet little is known about whether constitutional torture prohibitions actually reduce torture. In this article, we explore the relationship between constitutional torture prohibitions and torture practices by utilizing new data that correct for biases in previous measures of torture and a recently developed method that mitigates selection bias by incorporating information about countries’ constitutional commitments into our research design. Using these new data and this new method, as well as more conventional data sources and methods, we find no evidence that constitutional torture prohibitions have reduced rates of torture in a statistically significant or substantively meaningful way.”

“Behind This Mortal Bone: The (In)Effectiveness of Torture” Bell, J. Indiana Law Journal , 2008.

Abstract:  “This essay addresses the theoretical debate on torture in an empirical way. It urges that as part of our evaluation of the merits of torture, we take a shrewd look at the quality of information brutal interrogations produce. The essay identifies widespread belief in what the author identifies as the ‘torture myth’ — the idea that torture is the most effective interrogation practice. In reality, in addition to its oft-acknowledged moral and legal problems, the use of torture carries with it a host of practical problems which seriously blunt its effectiveness. This essay demonstrates that contrary to the myth, torture and the closely related practice, torture ‘lite’ do not always produce the desired information and, in the cases in which it does, these practices may not produce it in a timely fashion. In the end, the essay concludes, any marginal benefit the practice offers is low because traditional techniques of interrogation may be as good, and possibly even better at producing valuable intelligence.”

Other resources:

• Journalist Christopher Hitchens submitted himself to waterboarding in 2008. He describes the experience, which was captured on video, here .
• In early 2017, the Pew Research Center found the American public split over whether torture should be used to combat terrorism.

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Can torture ever be ethical.

Alvin Powell

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Safra Center speaker, former fellow, says perhaps

In 2004, German police captured a man they believed had kidnapped a young boy. They questioned him for two days, and then, fearing for the child’s safety, a senior officer authorized an interrogator to use pain, if necessary, to get information.

After being told what was being planned but before any force was used, the suspect confessed and told police he had killed the boy and where they could find the body.

Though they had gotten the desperately needed information without resorting to violence, both the superior and the interrogator were charged with a crime under the German constitution’s absolute ban on torture. Rather than going to jail, however, the two were let off with a fine after the court found “massive mitigating circumstances.”

German courts, even faced with a constitutional prohibition, found that in this case, torture was “quasi-acceptable,” according to University of Texas Law Professor Sanford Levinson, otherwise the two would have gone to jail.

That’s just one example of the “ticking time bomb” situation where police, military, or other government personnel are faced with a desperate need for information to save lives, Levinson said. Multiply the German child’s life by a thousand, or several thousand, and you have the national security situation in the United States, where the public and policy debate over torture is raging.

Levinson, a former fellow at the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, used the German case to help illustrate the conundrum that torture presents ethicists, policymakers, and ordinary people who are concerned about the issue.

Levinson spoke Thursday (Oct. 26) at the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Starr Auditorium. Safra Center Director Dennis Thompson said that as a way to mark its 20th anniversary this year, the center is inviting former fellows to return and speak during its lecture series.

Thompson, Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Kennedy School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, praised Levinson’s views on the U.S. Constitution as often going against prevailing views, but being widely respected nonetheless.

Levinson’s talk drew from a variety of sources, but he concluded that, despite his inclination to think an absolute ban on torture might be best, he still believes there will be situations in which governments must resort to torture for a larger public good.

One problem with banning torture, he said, is that in doing so, those writing the laws must define what torture is. Once that is done, he said, it immediately legitimizes techniques that may be very close, but that don’t fit the legal definition. It also may legitimize actions that are as bad as those banned, but are not on the list.

If torture is not to be banned, then the country needs to set up a system where it is regulated so that it doesn’t become widespread. One way of doing that would be for the president to authorize its use, but to then become responsible – and liable for punishment – should that specific case later be deemed unacceptable.

Either way, Levinson said, the nation’s lawmakers need to wade into this difficult territory.

Levinson compared torture with slavery – citing the Dred Scott case – and warfare. Like slavery, he said, torture is abhorrent to our society. Also like slavery, torture is largely about control. It is conceivable, he said, that if the questioners control the subject’s environment completely and the subject recognizes that he or she is completely in the questioner’s control, violence will not be needed.

“Both Dred Scott and those who defend torture today ask us to believe there are entire categories of people who have no rights,” Levinson said. “Torture may be less about concrete acts and more about total control and subordination.”

War, on the other hand, is more accepted by society than torture, Levinson said. Wars, though violent, are distinguished from torture by having willing participants on both sides. That distinction blurs, however, as war increasingly involves civilians.

The problem with the current war on terror, Levinson said, is that the opponent is not tied to another country against which retaliatory strikes can be made. Without the certainty of retaliation, there is no deterrence. That makes prevention an important way to head off a terrorist act, which can mean getting information about imminent strikes from members of terrorist organizations.

“Do we really believe there is no possible situation to legitimize the use of torture in any case?” Levinson asked. Related links:

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Letter to the editor: Schools give too much homework

The increasing volume of homework assigned to students is a growing concern that requires immediate attention.

I believe it is a big issue due to it stressing students out and causing them to crunch their time every day after school trying to fit in after-school activities like sports and extracurricular activities and also other things they may have to do every day. It has affected students in many different ways and even causes them to cheat or not actually try on their homework due to their busy schedule, not being able to fit in all their homework as well. 

The article “This is why we should stop giving homework” from the Human Restoration Project explains how families feel crushed by their children's work overload and trying to help them and figure it out. This issue is important because it's causing children to get in the habit of cheating and just trying to find answers from their classmates because they're doing it every day as a daily habit. It stresses out parents and makes their home life harder. 

I believe that everything that students need to learn should be taught and practiced at school. I think there should be no such thing as homework, and most school-related things other than studying should be done at school.

A way that could help this issue is teachers teaching and practicing everything in class to make it where kids don't need to bring their schoolwork home. 

Jason Thain, Green

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What is Really Wrong with Torture?

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Alon Harel, Assaf Sharon, What is Really Wrong with Torture?, Journal of International Criminal Justice , Volume 6, Issue 2, May 2008, Pages 241–259, https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqn017

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How can deontologists reconcile the stringency of the moral prohibition on torture with the recognition that it may sometimes be the only means to prevent catastrophe? This article proposes a conception of deontology that allows for the resolution of this dilemma. Casting deontology in terms of the distinction between categorical and conditional obligations, we articulate a theoretical distinction between principles and exceptions. Torture can never be permitted or authorized by a rule or principle. Whenever it is justifiably performed it is performed under urgent and exceptional circumstances. On this basis the practical necessity of torture may be acknowledged, while the categorical nature of the prohibition on torture is maintained. This explains how torture might be categorically prohibited by international law, yet at the same time be subject to a defence of necessity or duress under international criminal law.

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• v.7(2); 2013 May

The psychological impact of torture

Amanda c de c williams.

1 University College London, London, UK

Jannie van der Merwe

2 Consultant Clinical and Health Psychologist, London, UK

Many refugees in the developed world are survivors of torture and present with health needs without their traumatic experience being disclosed or identified. Chronic pain is a common problem, as are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, and other distress. Current circumstances, particularly poverty, uncertainty about asylum, separation from or loss of family and roles, and difficulties settling in the host country, all contribute to current psychological problems and exacerbate existing ones. Psychological treatment studies tend to be focused either on PTSD diagnosis and use protocol-driven treatment, usually in the developed world, or on multiple problems using multimodal treatment including advocacy and welfare interventions, usually in the developing world. Reviews of both of these, and some of the major criticisms, are described. Psychological interventions tend to produce medium-sized changes in targeted measures of distress, when compared with waiting lists or standard treatment, but these may fall well short of enabling recovery, and long-term follow-up is rare. A human rights context, with reference to cultural difference in expressing distress and seeking help, and with reference to the personal meaning of torture, is essential as a basis for formulating treatment initiatives based on the evidence reviewed.

Summary points

• Refugees with a history of torture may have a wide range of psychological and social difficulties which do not easily fit within diagnostic categories.
• Torture and its sequelae can have multiple meanings and, in the clinical context, it is the interpretation of the torture survivor that matters.
• There are doubts about applying the concept and measures of post-traumatic stress disorder: symptoms should be assessed separately.
• Current circumstances can be as important as trauma history in understanding the psychological state of a torture survivor.
• Cognitive behavioural therapy and narrative exposure therapy seem equally effective in reducing trauma symptoms, and to a lesser extent, depression.

Torture as context

Torture is variously defined, but the most widely used definition is Article 1 of the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. United Nations Convention Against Torture, Article 1.1 1

This definition has been extended to include violence by unofficial agents, as in civil conflict, but all definitions refer to intentional infliction of pain and/or suffering.

Given the centrality of pain, the intensity of many profoundly cruel and destructive torture practices, and the distress at the time of infliction, it is unsurprising that chronic pain is a common result in survivors. 2 Psychological effects can also last or develop later, and we would not endorse the common practice of distinguishing between physical and psychological torture methods and torture effects, since the effects of any torture on health are widespread, and assuming specific effects in physical or psychological domains is inconsistent with the evidence (United Nations). 3 Pain clinicians, therefore, are likely to encounter torture survivors with persistent pain and with psychological problems, commonly in the context of social and financial difficulties.

Under-recognition by generalist and specialist healthcare workers of torture survivors is the norm, 4 and disclosure occurs in only a minority of cases, and rarely at first meeting. Most patients have described their experiences mainly to immigration officials and may well anticipate scepticism and hostile questions. Doctors, psychologists, or other health workers may even have been present at their torture. However, the alert clinician who is aware of (or who carries out a quick search on the Internet) political, ethnic, or religious persecution in a patient’s country of origin can raise the topic and ask the patient if he or she were affected. A positive response can be followed by more specific questions. Even if the individual does not feel prepared, or trust the clinician sufficiently, to disclose at that time, he or she has in effect an invitation to disclose. Fearing the patient’s disclosure can be a deterrent to asking such questions, and the account can be very distressing for the clinician, who needs to be prepared to handle it.

The context of torture, for both pain and psychological difficulties, is very important and the meanings of the experience differ enormously among torture survivors, from feelings of defeat and despair to pride in survival and resilience. There is no substitute for asking the patient. Torture is widespread and not confined to any one ethnic, national, or geographic group, but practised throughout the world. The physical and psychological consequences are often compounded by further trauma and challenges to resources during flight, on arrival and in detention in the host country, and in current circumstances. Long-term psychological problems reported by survivors of torture are usually classified as trauma, anxiety, depression, and, more rarely, problems of a psychotic nature, but health problems including pain are very frequent, and may include serious disease such as tuberculosis or human immunodeficiency virus with a background of poor nutrition and severe and immunocompromising stress. The normal buffers of social support and financial resources have almost always been lost on fleeing the home country, and even basic communication in English may be a struggle.

A refugee is defined by being outside his or her country and being unable to return there because of ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’ (UNHCR). 5 Asylum is protection given under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. However, the country to which application for asylum is made forms its own judgement of whether or not the fear is ‘well-founded’, and may return unsuccessful asylum applicants to persecution, torture, and death.

The process of claiming asylum is slow and bureaucratic, although the decision may be made and acted upon suddenly; many adverse decisions are successfully appealed. 6 To either applicants or their advocates, the system does not seem to to be fair or accountable. 7 While awaiting the decision, the applicant may be put in detention for days or months, again without being given a reason, and there is plentiful evidence of retraumatisation by this imprisonment. 8 Out of detention, the asylum seeker is offered accommodation anywhere in the UK without the right to choose where he or she lives, and is entitled to free health care and to a proportion of income support: currently less than £40 per week for a single person over 18 (UK Borders Agency, 2013). 9 He or she is not permitted to work, so paying for phone calls in pursuit of the asylum claim or to family members abroad often means going hungry. Once asylum is granted, the refugee can seek work, and is entitled to welfare, but accommodation is no longer provided, and many become homeless at this point until confirmation of their civil status allows them to claim benefits. Such difficulties can contribute substantially to the mental health problems experienced by the asylum seeker. 8

There is no clear planning to address the health and welfare needs of refugees, including those seeking asylum. Much arises in the voluntary sector, so is unevenly provided across the country and is increasingly dependent on unpaid help or diverting resources into fundraising as statutory funding decreases. In the USA, Campbell 10 calculated that although there were probably as many torture survivors in the country as Vietnam veterans, only the latter had received extensive development of services specific to their needs.

Psychological problems following torture

The applicability of psychiatric diagnostic categories is vigorously debated. 10 , 11 Diagnoses are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( http://www.2shared.com/document/4aLsR1RA/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man.html ), used mainly in the USA, and the International Classification of Diseases (www.who.int/classifications/icd/), used more in Europe. In particular, the applicability of the concept and measures of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is disputed. At one level, there is always a question about applying diagnostic categories and descriptions of symptoms or behaviour developed in Western societies to people from the developing countries with very different personal, political, or religious beliefs and perspectives. One of the most marked differences is between individualist societies where realisation of personal goals often takes priority over the needs of kin and societal expectations, and collectivist societies in which the needs of family and prescribed roles take precedence over personal preferences. Another evident difference is the belief in a subsequent life in which suffering in this life is rewarded, and this has emerged in some studies of torture survivors in South East Asia.

On a different level, the development of the diagnosis of PTSD for American veterans of the Vietnam War can be understood as a political act which labelled the collective distress of a defeated USA as individual psychopathology. Proponents of this view point to the depoliticisation of the distress of torture survivors by describing their distress, disturbance, and profound sense of injustice in psychiatric terms. 11 These are not only conceptual issues but affect treatment, since recovery is associated with reconstruction of social and cultural networks, economic supports, and respect for human rights.

The rich research on treatment of PTSDs in veterans has substantially informed treatment offered to torture survivors. It is more appropriate than extrapolation from work with civilian survivors of single events as individuals (assault, accidents) or as communities or groups (natural or man-made disasters). Some literature distinguishes between single-event trauma (type 1) and prolonged and repeated trauma, such as torture (type 2). There is no doubt that (disregarding concerns about the diagnosis) rates of PTSD are much higher in refugees than among people of a similar age in the countries where the refugees settle, and that, among refugees, rates of PTSD are even higher among those seeking asylum. 12 , 13

The argument that torture causes unique problems waxes and wanes, and is often associated with claims to particular expertise in treatment, and therefore claims on funding, but Gurr et al. 14 describe how torture targets the person as a whole – physically, emotionally, and socially – so that PTSD is an inadequate description of the magnitude and complexity of the effects of torture. When the diagnosis of PTSD is applied, some survivors of torture who have very severe symptoms related to trauma may still not reach the criteria for diagnosis. Categories such as ‘complex trauma’ have been proposed, and it may be that the next iterations of the diagnostic compendia may modify the criteria.

Other than post-traumatic stress symptoms, torture survivors have elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and adjustment problems, 15 including outbreaks of anger and violence directed towards family members. 10 Symptoms should always be understood in the context above. No diagnostic terminology encapsulates the deep distrust of others which many torture survivors have developed, nor the destruction of all that gave their lives meaning. Guilt and shame about humiliation during torture, and about the survivor’s inability to withstand it, as well as guilt at surviving, are common problems which discourage disclosure. On top of this, uncertainty about the future, including the possibility of being sent back to the country in which the survivor was tortured, and the lack of any close confidant or even of any social support, compound the stress. Some current conditions are identifiable as additional risk factors: social isolation, poverty, unemployment, institutional accommodation, and pain can all predict higher levels of emotional distress in torture survivors. 16 , 17

Treatment of psychological problems

There are few reviews of treatment of trauma-related disorders in torture survivors, and more of refugees, among whom may be an unknown or undisclosed number of torture survivors. A helpful distinction is between studies of treatment for PTSD, often defining the population by diagnosis at baseline, and studies of multimodal treatment, and they will be described in that order.

The main treatments for PTSD are cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and narrative exposure therapy (NET). In fact, CBT often includes exposure sessions, and was recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence 18 for the treatment of post-traumatic stress in non-refugee populations. Exposure is the practice of systematic attention to feared and avoided cues related to the trauma, with the aim of extinguishing the learned association between those cues and the responses. However, this is simpler where there was a single event rather than multiple events, even though in a single event fear may be generated by multiple cues in several modalities (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, proprioceptive). Some of the concerns about applying exposure are elaborated in the review by Nickerson et al. 19

CBT typically includes an educational component, normalising physical and psychological reactions to traumatic events, and challenging interpretation of cues, including intrusive images and thoughts, as threatening. NET draws on the practice of writing testimony, developed particularly with refugees from Latin America in the 1970s, which was mainly for the purpose of witnessing and validating experiences, and advocacy on their behalf. However, creating a coherent account of traumatic events from often fragmentary and painful memories, usually in several sessions, has an element of exposure, and may recontextualise them in the politics or conflicts of the time, normalising them to some extent. The combination (as NET) of imaginal exposure and creating a narrative, which may be used as a public statement, is a more recent development but appears to be as effective as CBT. NET is well described in a review by Robjant and Fazel, 20 who argue its suitability for people who have suffered prolonged trauma. Their review encompasses adult and child treatments, and reviews studies separately by low/middle-income countries (in refugee camps, or after the conflict has ended) and high-income countries, and they discuss treatment outcomes other than PTSD.

A review in 2004 21 found only one randomised controlled trial (RCT) of psychological treatment in this population, but more recent reviews 12 , 19 identified about 10. Participants are defined by meeting the diagnosis of PTSD at baseline, and most studies took place in the developed world, among resettling torture survivors. CBT, NET, and exposure, in various combinations, were compared with active controls (the most comparable of which was supportive counselling) or with waiting lists or treatment as usual (which does not control for non-specific effects of an intervention). All showed benefits with effect sizes around 1 (although confidence intervals were often not provided), not only for PTSD symptoms but also some for anxiety, depression, and physical health measures. There were no systematic differences between treatment types. Confidence in the findings is somewhat modified by methodological problems: small numbers, lack of concealment of allocation, and non-blind assessment of outcomes. Combination of CBT with pharmacotherapy, compared with pharmacotherapy alone, showed no difference (see ref. 22), and there were no trials of eye movement desensitisation, which is one of the recommended treatments for non-refugee populations with PTSD 18 ; it uses sensory stimulation to disrupt the association between recalled traumatic memories and negative emotions.

Where the focus is broader than PTSD, interventions are often multimodal and there are too few randomised controlled trials to combine in meta-analyses. Multimodal interventions are the commonest clinical service, in both high-income and low/medium-income countries, although they are often much briefer in the latter. Interventions are designed on the basis of breadth of need of torture survivors, not on testing a therapeutically rigorous intervention. Mental health interventions, often based more on counselling than CBT or formal psychotherapy, are combined with legal and welfare advice and advocacy, practical assistance, language classes, social services, and similar services. In a review of mental health and social support interventions in humanitarian settings, Tol et al. 13 found the most common were individual, family, or group counselling; facilitation of community and social support; and provision of child-friendly spaces. Evidence from meta-analysis of trials of building support was good, but participants were not identified as torture survivors, so effectiveness with this group is unknown.

A recent systematic review of community-based interventions 23 describes various group activities with outcomes including quantity of social support and daily functioning, but although the trials recruited refugees who had been subjected to trauma, there were no studies specifically with torture survivors. A review of interventions with torture survivors 24 found some 40 studies, of which 11 were RCTs with a focus on trauma symptoms; they demonstrated improvement in those symptoms, but, as with the PTSD reviews above, did not indicate superiority of any particular treatment or method of delivery. McFarlane and Kaplan 24 were critical of the focus on PTSD, and of the assumption that a statistically significant reduction in symptoms or numbers meeting diagnostic criteria was equivalent to clinical significance for participants. They also expressed scepticism about the cultural relevance of the model and measurement instruments. They argue for attention to current status, from living conditions to risk of being returned to torture and death; current losses and separation; and the influence of political changes in the country from which the torture survivor fled and where his or her family may still live. All these can have very significant impacts on the outcome of treatment, a familiar issue for clinicians but largely ignored in trials. Lastly, they argue that while psychological and physical well-being are important outcomes, they still represent problems in medical terms, where the purpose of torture is to destroy social meaning, and the proper context of any treatment is a human rights perspective.

Torture survivors in healthcare settings

For the clinician, in medicine rather than in psychiatry, it is useful to recognise that symptoms of post-traumatic stress can complicate presentation and treatment. Pain predicts greater severity of both PTSD symptoms and major depression, 25 and intrusive memories and flashbacks can exacerbate existing pain. While under-recognition and undertreatment of torture survivors is common, there are useful guidelines for good medical practice, 26 although not specifically concerned with pain, and for good psychological practice (Jaranson 2001, reproduced in ref. 10).

Most people die during torture; many survivors are too disabled and destitute to find their way to safety. A large element of chance, and, to a lesser extent, resources and resilience, enable a minority to arrive in developed countries. Nevertheless, they often present multiple and complex problems, which the clinician can find overwhelming. For all these reasons, an interdisciplinary approach to assessment and treatment is therefore recommended, guarding against either disregarding significant psychological distress as inevitable in torture survivors or discounting physical symptoms by attributing them to psychological origin.

Rehabilitation and reparation are part of the rights of the torture survivor under the United Nations Convention, yet far less attention is paid to health needs on a national or international basis than to legal and civil claims. Collaborative efforts are needed, involving survivors themselves, to understand better the usefulness and limitations of existing assessment instruments and treatment methods. Some excellent studies exist, such as that by Elsass et al., 27 who interviewed Tibetan Lamas on the quantification of suffering in scales used to evaluate intervention with Tibetan torture survivors.

Education of medical and other healthcare personnel needs to address issues concerning treatment of torture survivors, who will be seen in all possible settings but not necessarily recognised or treated adequately. Teaching on ethics is also important, since medical students can have worryingly tolerant views of torture, and medical and healthcare staff complicity continues in many countries. 28 Medical staff are often in a key position to try to prevent torture, and to help those who have survived.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Nimisha Patel and Blerina Kellezi for sharing literature searches that are part of ongoing collaborative work.

Conflict of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Further reading

Amris K and Williams A C de C. Chronic pain in survivors of torture. Pain Clinical Updates, The International Association for the Study of Pain 2007; XV, Issue 7.

Kivlahan C and Ewigman N. Rape as a weapon of war in modern conflicts. BMJ 2010; 340: c3270.

Miller K and Rasmussen A. War exposure, daily stressors, and mental health in conflict and post-conflict settings: Bridging the divide between trauma-focused and psychosocial frameworks. Soc Sci Med 2010; 70: 7–16.

Montgomery E and Patel N. Torture rehabilitation: reflections on outcome studies. Torture 2011; 21(2): 141–145.

Nemat M. Prisoner of Tehran . New York: Free Press, 2007.

Quiroga J and Jaranson JM. Politically motivated torture and its survivors: a desk study review of the literature. Torture 2005; 15: 1–111.

Steel Z, Chey T, Silove D, et al. Association of torture and other potentially traumatic events with mental health outcomes among populations exposed to mass conflict and displacement. A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA 2009; 302: 537–549.

Taylor B, Carswell K and Williams A C de C. The interaction of persistent pain and post-traumatic re-experiencing: a qualitative study in torture survivors. J Pain Symptom Manage (2013, in press).

Why Do They Torture Us With Homework?

We’ve written the book, isn’t that enough? Now they want us to write a query, a pitch, a proposal, a synopsis! What next?

Every agent and editor understands that the dreaded synopsis or query or full proposal is anything but fun. And yet, it gives them a real look into the author’s actual skills. A quickly thrown together synopsis reveals the inability to follow through. A poorly addressed pitch tells them that the author isn’t really sure what the theme of their novel is at the core. And a badly written proposal indicates a lack of ability to organize or follow directions.

So is the purpose of writing these a test? Not at all. Everything is needed for the agent to convince someone else that the author’s work is worthwhile. If you can’t convince the agent, how will she convince the editor?

So let’s break this down. First, a great pitch will intrigue the agent or editor enough that they will want to read more. It’s like a twenty word hook that simply mesmerizes the individual, lures them to read on. The synopsis is a more detailed look at the entire novel’s outcome, telling the agent that the writer can write an introduction, middle, and ending well. And finally, the proposal gives the agent all of the details that he needs to take this brilliant story to an editor and hopefully have it be picked up.

Yes, it’s homework in a sense. It’s the final chapter to the novel that is needed to sell a work. It’s tedious, but necessary. Torture? Maybe a little bit, but all of us as writers have been there, and we all made it to the other side.

Blessings to you and your writing from one who survived.

Linda S. Glaz is an agent with Hartline Literary Agency, and also the author of eight novels and two novellas, so she “gets” writers. She represents authors in both the Christian and secular communities. She speaks at numerous conferences and workshops around the country each year. Married with three grown children and four grands, she lives in a small town where everyone is family.

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Opinion Wyoming’s wolf-elimination policy leads to torture and darkness

The alleged torture and killing of an adolescent female wolf earlier this year in Wyoming has brought international outrage, a demand that the perpetrator be incarcerated and policies reformed to prevent any more cruelty to predators.

When it comes to wolves in Wyoming, where wildlife is plentiful and people are scarce, it’s open season, 24/7/365. No license is required in “predator zones,” which cover 85 percent of the state. In 2021, the Republican-led legislature passed a law calling for the extermination of 90 percent of the state’s gray wolves. The state also protects hunters’ identities, thanks to a 2012 law passed after the harassment of an Idaho wolf hunter whose name had been posted online.

It’s not hard to see how such standards for killing could lead someone like Cody Roberts, 42 , to think it would be fun to mow down an adolescent female wolf with a 600-pound snowmobile, then drag her through a bar in Daniel, Wyo., and then pose for photos . This is what Roberts allegedly did on the night of Feb. 29. He taped the agonized wolf’s jaws shut, shocked her repeatedly with a shock collar, according to witnesses, and then dragged her outside, where he shot her.

Well, maybe not so easy for decent people to see. I’ve been trying to un-see for several days so I could bring myself to write about this barbarism. Videos and photographs quickly circulated around town and online, showing Roberts kneeling and grinning as he held up the suffering animal and a celebratory beer. Outraged animal-welfare activists worldwide have spread the word about Roberts and the obscene fate of a grievously wounded animal.

Yet Roberts was fined just $250 for illegal possession of “live, warm-blooded wildlife,” which — Hail, Mary — is against the law. I’m glad something is.

Nowhere near satisfied, animal-welfare groups are offering a $20,000 reward for anyone providing additional evidence to police and prosecutors that leads to Roberts spending at least one year in prison. Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy, also has given the poor wolf a name — Theia, for the Greek goddess of light, sight and prophecy — so that she will be remembered as a noble creature whose sacrifice will drive a movement toward more humane policies.

To this end, the Center for a Humane Economy and other groups are calling for a ban on using snowmobiles to run down and crush animals, the abolition of Wyoming’s predator zones, and bans on the use of hunting dogs, wire snares and steel-jawed leghold traps.

If Roberts has a reason to feel he did nothing wrong, it is the lax Wyoming laws that have created a wolf-hunting free-for-all. But, really, what kind of state allows people to run over animals with a snowmobile? This is rhetorical, obviously.

I reached out to Roberts by phone but got no answer.

A legal analysis by the center suggests that Roberts still could be prosecuted under the state’s animal cruelty statute, which provides for felony-level penalties. But Wyoming officials disagree, saying that cruelty laws don’t apply to predatory species — defined, beyond wolves, as coyotes, red foxes, stray cats, jackrabbits, porcupines, raccoons and striped skunks. Theoretically, under current state law, all such animals could be tortured with impunity.

Officialdom has been annoyingly mum on policy related to wolves. In its first public statement about the Roberts incident just a few days ago, Wyoming Game and Fish officials cited a state law that they contend says any information regarding wolves taken in Wyoming is not public record.

This applies even to wolves killed in neighboring states. Wyoming hunters have killed Colorado wolves that wandered too close to the border, and also have lured wolves into their state to be killed. Wyoming refuses to share wolf information with Colorado and reports only the aggregate number killed.

Colorado operates differently. Last year, it implemented a program voted on in 2020 to reintroduce wolves in the state where once they were plentiful. People there apparently understand the valuable role wolves play in the ecosystem, as do at least some folks in Wyoming.

Jim Keen, a veterinarian, epidemiologist and rancher in Wyoming, was among about 200 people who attended a Game and Fish Department hearing on Wednesday to express their outrage about Roberts. (“Those pictures,” said Lorraine Finazzo , an attendee all the way from South Carolina. “I couldn’t sleep.”)

Keen testified that the no-holds-barred approach to wolf killing actually poses a threat to hunting and ranching, in part because so many deer and elk in Wyoming have chronic wasting disease. In the absence of their natural predators, these animals pose a threat to hunters and others who eat them. Wolves, Keen said, selectively cull unhealthy animals from deer and elk herds.

Moreover, when hunters reduce the size of packs, wolves can no longer take down elk or moose, so they instead kill smaller animals such as sheep and calves.

There’s never any excuse for torturing any animal under any circumstances. Roberts deserves to be punished — for the sake of justice and as a warning to others. If Wyoming doesn’t revamp its policies, Keen warned, the federal government might well step in and take over management of the wolves.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) has condemned Roberts’s actions . But for Theia’s sake, and the sake of our shared humanity, let’s hope national authorities move quickly.

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Album review

On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .

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Human rights group alleges widespread torture, abuse of detainees accused of IS affiliation in Syria

FILE - Women residents from former Islamic State-held areas in Syria line up for aid supplies at Al-Hol camp in Hassakeh province, Syria, March 31, 2019. Amnesty International said Wednesday, April 17, 2024 it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)

FILE - Kurdish forces patrol al-Hol camp, which houses families of members of the Islamic State group in Hasakeh province, Syria, on April 19, 2023. Amnesty International said Wednesday, April 17, 2024 it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File)

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BEIRUT (AP) — Amnesty International said Wednesday it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria.

The centers and camps hold about 56,000 people — the majority of them children and teens — and are run by local authorities affiliated with the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF and its allies, including U.S.-led coalition forces, defeated the Islamic State group in Syria in 2019, ending its self-proclaimed Islamic “caliphate” that had ruled over a large swath of territory straddling Iraq and Syria.

What to do with the suspected IS fighters and their families has become an intractable issue. Many countries whose citizens traveled to Syria to join IS have been reluctant to repatriate them , as have local communities in Syria.

“People held in this system are facing large-scale violations of their rights, some of which amount to war crimes,” Nicolette Waldman, Amnesty’s senior crisis advisor, told journalists.

The United States is also responsible for the alleged violations because it played a key role in establishing and maintaining the detention system, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to the SDF and affiliated forces and regularly interrogating detainees, Waldman said.

The human rights group interviewed 126 people accused of IS affiliation currently or formerly detained, along with representatives of the local administration and aid workers.

The Amnesty report said the vast majority of detainees are being held “indefinitely, without charge or trial, in violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” while those who have been tried were, in many cases, convicted on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.

The alleged abuses include “beating, stress positions, drowning, electric shocks and gender-based violence,” including a male detainee who said he and others had been sodomized with broomsticks by guards, the report said. Detainees were also deprived of food, water and medical care and subjected to extreme cold and heat in overcrowded cells, with some allegedly dying of suffocation, it said.

The report added that many of the approximately 14,500 women and 30,000 children held had been victims of human trafficking, including women who were forced to marry IS fighters and minors who were forcibly recruited by the group, and that local authorities had failed to set up a “mechanism to identify trafficking victims” and protect them.

The report also criticized the practice of forcibly separating adolescent boys — some as young as 11 or 12 — from their mothers and placing them in rehabilitation centers indefinitely.

Amnesty called on local authorities, the U.S. government and other allies to bring the detention system into compliance with international law and urged the United Nations to work with them to establish a screening process to release all who are not “reasonably suspected” of having committed a serious crime.

The Autonomous Authorities of the North and East Syria Region, the civilian administration affiliated with the SDF, wrote in response to the Amnesty findings that it had not received any official complaints regarding torture in detention facilities and “if this happened, they are individual acts.”

The administration said it would take action against employees who committed violations if evidence is provided. It denied allegations that inmates were deprived of food, water and medical care. It acknowledged overcrowding in the facilities, which it attributed to lack of financial resources to secure larger centers.

The local authorities took issue with the allegation that people were arbitrarily detained, asserting that most detainees “are members of a terrorist organization and were arrested during the battles” and that many had committed crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The U.S. State Department said in its own response that “we share many of (Amnesty’s) concerns” and it has been working to address them. It called on the international community to “aid local entities’ management of these challenges” and for countries with citizens held in detention in Syria to repatriate them.

Waldman said she believes Washington “very likely knew about these poor conditions from the beginning.”

She added: “We think that it may not be the case that they are doing everything they can. They need to accept a much greater responsibility, especially since they played such a key role in establishing the situation in the first place.”

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Taylor Swift shocker: New album, "The Tortured Poets Department," is actually a double album

By Alex Sundby , Brian Dakss

Updated on: April 19, 2024 / 10:28 PM EDT / CBS News

Anticipation was growing at a fever pitch before Taylor Swift's latest album, " The Tortured Poets Department ," dropped at midnight EDT. But the pop superstar had a huge surprise on tap: It's actually a double album.

When Part One dropped, Swift wrote on Instagram , "All's fair in love and poetry... New album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. Out now 🤍"

Then came the shocker, revealed in an Instagram post saying , "It's a 2am surprise: The Tortured Poets Department is a secret DOUBLE album. ✌️ I'd written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you, so here's the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 extra songs. And now the story isn't mine anymore… it's all yours. 🤍."

What's Taylor Swift's new album about?

Swift described the album as "new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time — one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure."

She also said that time has been "closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted."

"Entertainment Tonight" correspondent Denny Directo called the record some of her most vulnerable work.

"Fans were left with more questions than there were answers, so good luck trying to decipher who these songs are about, what they mean," Directo told CBS News. "… I feel like there's more heartbreak songs on this than there are love songs."

Hours ahead of the record's release, Swift said on social media that its first single was "Fortnight," featuring Post Malone, and its music video was released Friday night .

Swift praised the Grammy-nominated artist's musical experimentation and melodies "that just stick in your head forever."

"I got to witness that magic come to life firsthand when we worked together on Fortnight," Swift said in her post .

"Fortnight" isn't the only track on the album on which Swift worked with another artist. Florence and The Machine is also featured.

What's on "The Tortured Poets Department" tracklist?

Swift posted an initial tracklist to social media in February one day after she announced the album at  the Grammys , where she won for best pop vocal album. Here's the list of all 31 songs:

• "Fortnight"
• "The Tortured Poets Department"
• "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys"
• "So Long, London"
• "But Daddy I Love Him"
• "Fresh Out the Slammer"
• "Florida!!!"
• "Guilty as Sin?"
• "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"
• "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)"
• "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart"
• "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived"
• "The Alchemy"
• "Clara Bow"
• "The Black Dog"
• "imgonnagetyouback"
• "The Albatross"
• "Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus"
• "How Did It End?"
• "So High School"
• "I Hate It Here"
• "thanK you aIMee"
• "I Look in People's Windows"
• "The Prophecy"
• "Cassandra"
• "The Bolter"
• "The Manuscript"

What are Taylor Swift's concert dates for The Eras Tour?

Swift resumes her wildly successful Eras Tour next month in Europe with shows scheduled for Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. until August. In the fall, the tour returns to North America with performances in Indianapolis, Miami, New Orleans, Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Here are the dates for upcoming shows:

• May 9 Paris
• May 10 Paris
• May 11 Paris
• May 12 Paris
• May 17 Stockholm
• May 18 Stockholm
• May 19 Stockholm
• May 24 Lisbon, Portugal
• May 25 Lisbon, Portugal
• May 29 Madrid
• May 30 Madrid
• June 2 Lyon, France
• June 3 Lyon, France
• June 7 Edinburgh, Scotland
• June 8 Edinburgh, Scotland
• June 9 Edinburgh, Scotland
• June 13 Liverpool, England
• June 14 Liverpool, England
• June 15 Liverpool, England
• June 18 Cardiff, Wales
• June 21 London
• June 22 London
• June 23 London
• June 28 Dublin
• June 29 Dublin
• June 30 Dublin
• July 4 Amsterdam
• July 5 Amsterdam
• July 6 Amsterdam
• July 9 Zurich
• July 10 Zurich
• July 13 Milan
• July 14 Milan
• July 17 Gelsenkirchen, Germany
• July 18 Gelsenkirchen, Germany
• July 19 Gelsenkirchen, Germany
• July 23 Hamburg, Germany
• July 24 Hamburg, Germany
• July 27 Munich
• July 28 Munich
• Aug. 1 Warsaw, Poland
• Aug. 2 Warsaw, Poland
• Aug. 3 Warsaw, Poland
• Aug. 8 Vienna
• Aug. 9 Vienna
• Aug. 10 Vienna
• Aug. 15 London
• Aug. 16 London
• Aug. 17 London
• Aug. 19 London
• Aug. 20 London
• Oct. 18 Miami
• Oct. 19 Miami
• Oct. 20 Miami
• Oct. 25 New Orleans
• Oct. 26 New Orleans
• Oct. 27 New Orleans
• Nov. 1 Indianapolis
• Nov. 2 Indianapolis
• Nov. 3 Indianapolis
• Nov. 14 Toronto
• Nov. 15 Toronto
• Nov. 16 Toronto
• Nov. 21 Toronto
• Nov. 22 Toronto
• Nov. 23 Toronto
• Dec. 6 Vancouver, British Columbia
• Dec. 7 Vancouver, British Columbia
• Dec. 8 Vancouver, British Columbia
• Taylor Swift

Alex Sundby is a senior editor at CBSNews.com. In addition to editing content, Alex also covers breaking news, writing about crime and severe weather as well as everything from multistate lottery jackpots to the July Fourth hot dog eating contest.

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Iran: Security Forces Rape, Torture, Detainees

Kurdish, Baluch, Azeri, and Other Ethnic Communities Apparently Targeted

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(Beirut) – Iran's security forces raped, tortured, and sexually assaulted detainees while repressing widespread protests in 2022 and 2023, Human Rights Watch said today. The grave abuses are part of a broader pattern of serious human rights violations to repress dissent.

Human Rights Watch investigated abuses against ten detained people from Kurdish, Baluch, and Azeri minority regions that occurred between September and November 2022. Detainees described being raped by security forces and some said they witnessed security forces raping other detainees. In seven of the cases, detainees said that security forces had tortured them to coerce them into making confessions.

“Iranian security forces’ brutality against detained protesters, including rape and torture, are not only egregious crimes, but a weapon of injustice wielded against detainees to coerce them into false confessions,” said Nahid Naghshbandi , acting Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch. “These methods are also a twisted and despicable means of further stigmatizing and repressing marginalized ethnic minorities.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed the survivors by phone between September 2022 and 2023, including five women, three men, and two children. Three shared medical records that supported their accounts.

In December 2023, Amnesty International released a report that documented that security forces “used rape and other forms of sexual violence” to “intimidate and punish peaceful protesters during the 2022 ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising.” Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran have all separately documented Iranian authorities’ use of severe repressive violence in ethnic minority regions.

A Kurdish woman told Human Rights Watch that in November 2022 two men from the security forces raped her while a woman agent held her down and facilitated the rape.

A 24-year-old Kurdish man from West Azerbaijan province said he was severely tortured and raped with a baton by intelligence agency forces in a secret detention center in September 2022. A 30-year-old man from East Azerbaijan province said he was blindfolded and beaten along with other protesters, and he was gang raped with another man by security forces in a van in October 2022.

Human Rights Watch also documented government security forces restraining, blindfolding, and torturing protesters in detention. Authorities beat and sexually assaulted a Baluch woman who witnessed at least two other women being raped in a detention center in Sistan and Baluchistan in October 2022, leaving them physically and psychologically traumatized.

One woman who experienced sexual violence from security forces attempted suicide, while another required surgery for her injuries. A family member of another Baluch woman in her twenties told Human Rights Watch that in October 2022 her relative was raped twice in detention, and after her release she also attempted suicide.

Human Rights Watch previously reported cases of Iranian security forces’ use of torture and sexual assault against men, women , and children , as well as suspicious deaths in detention. The authorities did not provide medical treatment or even basic hygiene supplies to those assaulted by security forces, exacerbating their long-term injuries, and have not investigated these cases or held anyone accountable for these serious violations.

The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Iran should continue to investigate these grave abuses as part of its broader reporting on the Iranian government’s serial human rights violations, Human Rights Watch said.

“Accounts of brutal rape and the lasting traumatic consequences of those crimes should mobilize countries to meet the physical and psychological health needs of survivors who have managed to flee Iran,” Naghshbandi said. “They should also mobilize Iranians at home and abroad to push for accountability and justice.”

Rape, Sexual Assault, and Torture in Sistan and Baluchistan Province

A university student from Sistan and Baluchistan, who, like some others interviewed, asked not to identify her by name, told Human Rights Watch that in October 2022, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces arrested her, along with approximately 20 other women, after they protested and shouted anti-government slogans. The forces beat all of the women so severely during their arrest that one woman lost consciousness.

They blindfolded and bound the women, then loaded them into a van and took them to an undisclosed location. The woman described the place they were transferred to as a small room with a low ceiling. Security forces separated them into groups of three, in separate cells.

The security forces detained the women for over a month, during which the women were subjected to torture and sexual violence, including being kicked in their genitals to coerce false confessions that they were involved with political groups. The woman interviewed said that security forces handed her papers with Revolutionary Guard letterhead to write and sign a confession:

When I told the interrogator that I am not affiliated with any political party and will no longer participate in protests, he said: “No, you won't cooperate, I'll have to deal with you differently.” Then he called two people and said: “This whore likes to be torn apart.” They tore my clothes apart and brutally raped me. I lost consciousness, and when they poured water on my head, I regained consciousness and saw that my entire body was covered in blood.

They blindfolded her and took her to her cell, where her cellmates told her the same thing had happened to them. She said she could see that they were also badly hurt and scared. They told each other that if they get out alive, they would kill themselves.

She said she was raped three times during her approximately 50-day detention, mostly during the first days of her arrest. She was not given any medicine or hygienic supplies:

They didn’t even give us a single tissue, let alone medical aid. They only gave us a pill every night … I didn’t know what it was, maybe some sort of a sedative or sleeping pill. They would make us take the pill and wouldn’t leave the cell until we swallowed it.

She was forced to sign dozens of pages of confessions without any questions. They accused her of “destroying public property” and “disturbing the security of the population.”

She faced charges of “disrupting public order,” “blasphemy,” and “destruction of public property.” She said after she was released, she had an infection in her kidneys and uterus and underwent surgery twice.

Another person interviewed said that a relative of hers, a Baluch woman in her twenties, was arrested and beaten by Revolutionary Guard forces in October 2022 in Sistan and Baluchistan province while participating in a small protest. The security forces informed the detainee’s family about her whereabouts after four days, and she was only allowed to call them herself after nine days. She was in detention for almost a month, facing charges of “blasphemy” and “collaboration with opposition groups,” before being released on bail.

The relative said that the woman was raped twice in detention and was in very poor physical and mental health after her release, during which she attempted suicide. She was rushed to the hospital where she received life-saving treatment. The woman told her relative that nearly 20 other women ages 20 to 26 were detained with her, and she was aware that two others were sexually assaulted and raped.

Sexual Assault in Kermanshah

A 21-year-old Kurdish woman said that in November 2022 she was arrested by security forces while she was walking toward the university campus in Kermanshah with some other students. They were blindfolded and taken to an undisclosed detention center, where two interrogators raped her:

Two men interrogated me, then a woman came and took me to another room. She told me I needed to take off my clothes for a body search and be transferred to the general ward. While I was busy taking off my clothes, two other men came in; one of them grabbed me with that woman while the other raped me. Once the first was done I was already half unconscious and the other man started raping me. After that, another woman came and gave me a paper towel, telling me to clean myself up. She also took me to another room. The next morning, they blindfolded me again and took me to Razi Square, where they threw me out of the car. I managed to make my way back to the dormitory from there.

Sexual Assault in East Azerbaijan Province

Revolutionary Guard plainclothes agents arrested a 30-year-old male protester in October 2022. They took the man and other protesters who were arrested to a mosque courtyard nearby and blindfolded them and started beating them with batons and tasers. The men were then sent into a police van and told to take off all their clothes. Some of them protested, which he said made the security forces angry. The security forces took the man Human Rights Watch interviewed and another man to a riot control vehicle and forcibly took their clothes off using a taser on their back and behind their knees. Three officers raped both men.

The man interviewed said:

I was blindfolded but I could say that they were raping the other man too since we were next to each other, and I could also hear him crying and begging them to stop. He was in his twenties, and I asked him not to say anything to the others when they took us back. When they took us back, they put us in the van with the others and used pepper spray and closed the doors. After all the beating and torture and rape I felt I was dead and the things I was seeing weren’t real.

He was sent to jail in Tabriz, where he was not provided with any medical or hygienic services and finally was released on bail. He had been bleeding from his rectum for days after his release, he said, and is suffering from severe depression. He said he told the judges he had been raped and that one of them responded: “If you don’t shut up, I will rape you myself as well.”

He faced the charge of “assembly and collusion to commit acts against national security” that ultimately wasn’t  substantiated, leading to the charge being dropped and his release.

Torture and Sexual Assault in West Azerbaijan Province

On September 29, 2022, Keivan Samadi, a 24-year-old medical student, was arrested in Oshnavieh by plainclothes officers near his home. Three officers approached him in a car under the pretext of asking for directions. When they got close to him, they threatened him with a pistol and ordered him into their car. He said they pushed his head down so he couldn't see where they were taking him and took him to a hidden detention center.

They placed him in a small cell with a dirty blanket and a toilet without any hygiene items, such as soap. He was held alone in this cell for 21 days, and he was only taken out for interrogation. He said that intelligence agents tortured and sexually assaulted him during interrogation, including raping him with a baton, using a taser on his genitals, burning his body hair, severely beating him with batons, and giving him electric shocks that led to bleeding from his left ear. He said he was whipped on the back, resulting in wounds and skin infection on his lower back:

They were from [Iran’s Ministry of Interior’s Intelligence Agency] in Oshnavieh, I knew this from the papers they gave me to sign a false confession. They kicked me so that I fell from the chair during the interrogation, and they kept kicking me in the stomach and my ear … and eventually my left ear started bleeding, every day they would take me and torture me in different ways using the taser on my neck and back. Another day they whipped me 43 times before I lost consciousness, which resulted in bleeding in my back. I asked them for antibiotics, but they didn’t give me anything. Once one of the interrogators took a cutter and wanted to cut the middle finger of my right hand when the other one stopped him. From day 12 they started using a taser on my genitals. On day 16, they took off my pants I thought they are going to use the taser on my genitals again, but they raped me with a baton. I was shocked at that moment and couldn't believe they would do such a thing. I just stood there, speechless, and couldn't even scream because I was mute, as if four people had grabbed my throat so that my voice wouldn't come out.”

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