The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson

Exposition and Dissemination

One of the biggest obstacles to work in this area is the widespread silence that has followed the misuse of population data systems. The silence seems to be a mixture of both genuine ignorance and a reluctance by government statisticians to address the matter due to fear that forthright discussion of past problems may adversely affect future response. However, the evidence seems to indicate that such reticence only fosters respondent mistrust (Seltzer and Anderson, 2000). Fortunately, in recent years, statistical agencies in a number of countries have begun to address the role they and their former leaders may have played in past abuses. For example, the French and German statistical authorities separately decided to commission studies to thoroughly examine the possible role of their national statistical systems and methods in furthering the Holocaust. The results of these two studies were released in Azema, Levy-Bruhl, and Touchelay (1998) and Wietog (2001), and Statistics Norway published Sobye's study in 1998. After reexamining the evidence related to the role of the United States Census Bureau in the surveillance and internment of Japanese Americans in 1941 and 1942, including the findings of Seltzer and Anderson (2000), the director characterized the bureau's role with respect to the Japanese Americans in this period as "proactive." By contrast, the Dutch statistical office, Statistics Netherlands, has itself yet to take any action. Preliminary results from a review by a member of the Statistics Netherlands staff, the only study so far undertaken by a Dutch statistician (Nobel, 2000), concluded that the staff and leadership of the Dutch central statistics office were blameless.

Exposition and dissemination in other areas are also valuable, including those involving different types of safeguards. For example, compilations and comparative studies of national laws relating to confidentiality and data protection, the organizational and operational measures used in different countries, and the relevant ethical standards and guidelines can be of great assistance, as can training materials that cover these matters. Of particular importance is the translation of a number of basic documents in the field. By their nature studies of the misuse of population data systems are often highly technical and rarely are covered by more general translation efforts. For example, for English speakers, Aly and Roth (1984), Azema, Levy-Bruhl, and Touchelay (1998), Remond (1996), Sobye (1998), and Wietog (2001) are a few of the texts that ought to be carefully translated.

The Role of Population Data and Population Data Systems in Documenting, Investigating, and Prosecuting Human Rights Abuses

This paper has focused on a dark side of numbers: how data and data systems have been used to assist in planning and carrying out a wide range of serious human rights abuses throughout the world. Fortunately, this is only one side of the story. Our introduction briefly referred to the general social utility of population data systems in a variety of fields. In addition to these benefits, population data systems and the results they produce have often directly aided efforts to document human rights abuses and prosecute perpetrators of these abuses. For example, statistics have been used to document and mobilize opposition to the lynching of African Americans (Wells-Barnett, 1991 [1895]) and the genocidal policies of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo (Hochschild, 1999), and in the trials of Nazi war criminals (Seltzer, 1998). These applications were often carried out by those with little real training or experience in population data. Moreover, some human rights workers and social scientists have placed special stress on what they consider to be the questionable usefulness of quantitative data in studying human rights abuses (for example, Goldstein, 1986).