For my Advocacy Project, I would either like to continue to do research on the issue of teenage vaping (my issue brief topic) or possibly switch to the discussion of police brutality. For the former, my audience would be targeted towards policymakers, particularly state legislatures, to establish a unanimous minimum age to purchase tobacco/nicotine products. Another potential audience could be targetted towards the teenagers using these vape products in tandem with the companies producing vape products; the teens are undereducated on the dangers of vaping while the companies are poorly advertising their products, making vapes viewed as appealing to young people. However, I am also very interested in bringing awareness to police brutality and the racial prejudice that is rooted within our justice system. People who are African American are much more likely to be pulled over, arrested, and/or shot (or attacked in some way) than their white counterparts for the same crimes/misdemeanors. In many cases, African Americans have been pulled over for no reason at all apart from the color of their skin. This is a crucial issue facing America nowadays and should be eradicated as soon as possible because innocent people are being killed. My audience would be directed towards police officers and the programs that they must participate in before being initiated into the police force. I think that educating people to abandon discrimination and racism is imperative in stopping this issue at its roots. Furthermore, I would suggest addressing the federal or state governments to create stricter punishments for police officers who participate in such brutality because oftentimes, they are simply removed from the police force rather than sent to prison. I think stricter punishments would create an incentive to abandon these discriminatory views, even though it may be for selfish reasons.

As far as the “Photographer as Witness: A Portrait of Abuse” goes, I think it is certainly a piece of advocacy. I am struggling to understand exactly how the photographer and the couple met, as well as why the couple agreed to the photographer’s presence and why Shane completely ignored the photographer taking pictures during the fight. However, I think that the publication of the incident brings awareness to the issue of domestic abuse; there are plenty of people who do not take this issue seriously and are not aware of the pain, suffering, and damage it causes. As the police officer said, the abuser usually does not stop until they kill you (even as they claim that they love you). While I think it is a piece of advocacy, its ethicality is disputable. So long as Maggie agreed to the publication, I think it is ethical. We may not want to see these kinds of images, but sometimes witnessing these traumatic experiences is more influential on us, allowing us to care more about the issue at hand as opposed to simply reading about it. That being said, if at any point Maggie had not agreed to the publication or the picture-taking, I think the ethicality is lost. Furthermore, the argument was raised that the photographer should have intervened during the fight; while I think the photographer was right (in the sense that she may have just been putting herself in danger and further hurting Maggie, she didn’t know that the neighbor was calling the police and perhaps could have done so herself…), especially as people like anthropologists are strictly supposed to document and not intervene – no matter what, I am sure that it would be pretty scarring to not only have your partner abusing you, but someone witnessing and photographing the whole thing rather than helping. I understand that intervening would somewhat destroy the point of this portrait, but as the photographer said, the intended subject was the ex-convict’s life out of prison, not the domestic violence case that resulted unexpectedly.