Contentious Social Issues

Question

Although there are a number of social issues that receive a large degree of media coverage, such as the violation of a persons’ human rights or the standard of care provided to hospital patients. Are there any other social issues that do not receive adequate coverage?

Answer

Introduction

A social issue is an area of discussion that is considered to influence a number of members of a particular society, be it global or smaller in scale.

Many of these issues are common and could almost be considered universal in their societal applicability, such as discrimination or poverty.

Uncommonly discussed however, are a number of other considerable important social issues, that many believe warrant a larger degree of attention.

Below, are two examples that have been provided to demonstrate this assertion.

Censorship

Censorship is a term that is synonymous with suppression, i.e. it applies to situations where an act performed or something created is prevented/restricted from being engaged with by others.

Suppression can allow important information considered useful to society to be restricted, thereby hindering development in an array of different ways.

To illustrate a situation where attempted censorship was circumvented through petition and the outcry of society, the recent EU stance on Net Neutrality makes a perfect example.

A number of internet service providers had intended to bottleneck access to the information of bodies who did not pay a sum to their services, those who did pay such a sum would not be subject to these restrictions.

Clearly this type of restriction could be left at the whim of abuse as it has the real potential of preventing less influential, wealthy etc., bodies from sharing information on the internet.
The EU decided this move to restrict information was illegal, ‘appropriately’ (opinion) preserving the freedom of individuals to access information.

Classicism

A considerably contentious issue, classicism refers to the often held belief that those with more wealth or ‘social-standing’ are often considered to be ‘better’ or more important than their societal counterparts.

This notion of parties within society belonging to these particular sub-groups often gives rise to drastic consequences.

Such as the recent Parliamentary discourse concerning the introduction of new grammar schools and how their introduction could potentially increase the class ‘divide’.