HIV researchers all have hands that can tear fabrics with ease. No bra stood a chance.
She has 26 hits on Google Scholar, including co-author in NEJM and BJM. The NEJM one lists her credential as M.Sc. Most of the articles have "Tanzania" in the title, though many are about other diseases than HIV (mostly STDs). Maybe she specializes in on-the-ground study administration.
One of the articles is titled "Farming with your hoe in a sack: Condom attitudes, access, and use in rural Tanzania.
The Telegraph has longer quotes from the trial if you want more juicy details.
Assertion:
If, according to her first Google hit, she was a PhD student in 2008, she's not much of an HIV expert.
Scientists are assholes. Sounds about right.
I don't understand 6.
I would imagine that public health is a field where one can gain a huge amount of experience, and expertise, before/without getting a PhD.
8: presumably, since she is 45 years old.
I would venture to guess that there are probably more slaves right now in London than at any time in the last 200 years.
What do you mean, HIV expert?
Is this really so obscure???
So damages for being enslaved for six months are only three thousand pounds? Seems very low to me.
I understand via QI that keeping slaves only recently became an offense under British law, to comply with some international standard - previously the state of slavery obviously hadn't been recognized under the law, meaning you could be punished for kidnapping or something, but keeping slaves per se didn't have its own special punishment. They're referring to the charge as "keeping Methodia Mathias in servitude," so I imagine this new law is now being used.
Which isn't a good explanation for the low penalty (or of why they didn't charge her with kidnapping / false imprisonment), but if Parliament were adding the offense just to comply with a treaty or standard, they might not have put much thought into what an appropriate penalty would be.
Here's the law - it turns out there's a penalty of up to 14 years, or 12 months with summary conviction (not sure what the distinction is there).
The Telegraph article linked in 4 makes the whole thing sound even crazier. Two adults and three children shared one bedroom while they sublet the other room? (a) that sounds so unpleasant, even for the mother/slavekeeper/HIV expert! and (b) didn't the subletter notice anything strange about all this?
The bra-cutting is also a very nice, bizarre, detail. What kind of punishment is that? It seems like it would require so much deliberation that it wouldn't be a very satisfying way of lashing out.
Summary: This HIV expert is fucked up.
(b) didn't the subletter notice anything strange about all this?
The subletter had prosopagnosia and didn't notice there was more than one person in the other bedroom.
What kind of punishment is that? It seems like it would require so much deliberation that it wouldn't be a very satisfying way of lashing out.
Combined with cutting up the belt, I bet it was couched at the time as a search for the missing money, rather than as punishment.
And on the cramped conditions, if everyone, including the subletter, grew up in Tanzania, it's possible that the roomsharing didn't seem so weird.
Is this really so obscure???
You don't think it's weird to tag someone an HIV expert and then include zero anything else qualifyingly?
18 - not really; it described her as "scientist" and "HIV expert". That doesn't seem odd.
It sounds a little odd to me. I'd expect "HIV expert epidemiologist" or "HIV expert public health researcher" or "HIV expert virologist". Just "HIV expert" sounds sort of like it's her hobby or something, like model trains.
But this may just be a trans-Atlantic difference in editing norms.
17- I more meant that the subletter would have noticed that MM was being kept/treated as a slave, chased with scissors, etc. than they s/he should have noticed the roomsharing. Which seems more irritating and uncomfortable than legally or ethically off. (except for how the 21-year-old woman was sharing a bed with a 12-year-old boy. I bet that's weird even in Tanzania.)
21: Also doesn't seem that weird to me. What happened was wrong and abusive and criminal, but the word 'slave' makes it sound as if she were chained or regularly beaten or something -- she seems to have been free to leave the house and so forth, and while the violence is unacceptable and criminal, if the specified events were the high points of it, there wasn't all that much that someone else living there would necessarily have noticed.
She just wasn't getting paid, and had her documents withheld so she didn't have the option to quit, which is what made it slavery. But what a third person would have seen wouldn't have been all that far off a boss being a complete asshole to a domestic employee -- the coercion wasn't necessarily visible.
Unless Tanzania is governed by pre-teen boys.
Summary conviction is when you agree to be tried before a judge alone, and therefore the judge can only sentence you to so long in jail. I think most of fences these days are triable both ways.
Methodia wanted to stay in UK so she made up a story. I happen to be Rebecca's brother. Methodia she's the first born of Martias Leopord who's the only son of my aunt Paulina Elieza. Rebecca paid for her school and treated her as a family. It's very an fair how my sister is being trashed in the media. We have faith in God and the truth will come out. The jury and judge were given all the evidence to show how we a related to Methodia but they chose to go with lies from Methodia and her father. If you dontt believe me, contact me and Iwill give all the evidence, even take you to Minziro Tanzania were we are from. This make Briton very naive.
Does this kind of thing happen to the other posters?
The £3000 compensation amounts to the equivalent of about three and a half months pay assuming a 40-hour work week at minimum wage. (Forty hours is the legal maximum work week in Europe.)
This seemed weird to me too when I worked it out - why not require Rebecca Balira to pay the full six months wages, at least?
That did seem weird. One possibility is that the damages (rather than any criminal penalty) are net of money the HIV expert spent on MM -- room and board, maybe clothes, plane tickets. I'm sort of surprised if an 'employer' would be able to net out expenses under these circumstances, but I can't see how else to get a number that low.
Summary conviction is a class action suit against Cliff's Notes for damaging the concept of literary analysis.
Shoot, I never balance between accuracy and tempo right when posting this type of thing (summary conviction is what you get from etc).
I never *get the* balance right. I ban myself.
Did Balira's brother really just show up in this thread, and go unacknowledged?
33. The problem is, who knows? William Howard Taft is commenting on the other thread. Maybe that's Meshack Balira, maybe it's Moby Hick. I dunno.
If it's really Balira, then thank you for your views. I don't know enough about the case to comment, but I certainly don't think your interpretation seems unreasonable, as the whole thing has an air of gothic fiction about it.
It just has that flavor of someone completely unfamiliar with Unfogged. So it's at least not Moby.
I would have said "Opinionated Meshack Balira."
Anyway, 27 could be read as me asking if we should acknowledge him.
I want to go to Tanzania! But, is the offer to be "taken" to Minziro an offer for a free vacation? Or do I have to pay my own way? And how big is the risk that if I accept a free vacation, Rebecca Balira will enslave me?
37: I assumed that 27 was Balira's brother sock-puppeting you, to increase his own credibility.
Which fits with your idea that he was unfamiliar with Unfogged.