SOC 150: Class Analysis

The five most important things I have learned throughout my semester in SOC 150 are about crime and perception of social problems, how fines and fees keep people in jails, about mobility and poverty, sexual assault on college campuses, and lastly about the school-to-prison pipeline. During our unit on crime I learned about the perception of a social problem in different parts of the country as well as to a single individual. The two readings about crime, “Crime Rates Have Plummeted” and “U.S. Crime Is Up but Americans Don’t Seem to Have Noticed” demonstrate that crime is a social problem to be interpreted differentially based on the person perceiving the problem. What happens with crime is that crime is more likely to be thought of as a social problem based on what the media is reporting. The media will broadcast the

Before this class I had never watched or heard of the film The Hunting Ground. I immediately downloaded Lady Gaga’s song to my phone. I felt I learned the most from this unit as well as feeling the most connected to what we were talking about in class. The film taught me that sexual assault on campuses is more common than I thought as well as less reported than I thought. It was shocking to learn of how colleges had ways of protecting a lot of the accused offenders, for example the athletes or fraternities. I also learned from the film that sexual offenders are not always the strangers hiding behind the bushes but people that the survivors of sexual assault knew or had had a relationship with. From this unit I also took away that sexual assault cases are treated objectively in court, based on the facts, and that the survivors, who are mostly but not always woman, are blamed for the assault questioning how much they had to drink or what they were wearing. Rape is extremely unreported to or unrecorded by police and rape kits almost never get