The Progress Report: Erasing Hidden Hazards

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Zachary: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive Director of The Progress Network, and we are coming to you today for our weekly progress report where we highlight some news of the week that you almost inevitably would’ve missed, that I would’ve missed, that Emma would’ve missed, that we all would’ve missed unless you made a concerted effort to find it.

Finding good news in the very deep and full sea of negative news is a task. One has to seek out good news. Bad news just reluctantly comes to us in a regular metronomic tsunami, and that’s part of the problem of the world we live in, is that we are inundated with negative news because news is by almost definition negative, but there’s a lot going on in the world that is more constructive.

All the time, every day, everywhere, every place. And it is our belief at The Progress Network. It is our belief as individual, Zachary and Emma and at all humans, that paying attention to some of the good is necessary for our collective wellbeing. It is necessary for us to recognize where progress is being made, in order to make progress, and it is necessary to identify.

Things that are happening that are good in order to make sure that things good continue to happen. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re coming to you from slightly different venues today. If you are watching the YouTube clips, I am in Joshua Tree. Not necessarily on a vision quest, but not necessarily not on a vision quest.

And Emma, as usual is coming to us from Athens, Greece. Not Athens, Georgia.

Emma: Actually I am not in Athens.

Zachary: Oh my God. I got it wrong actually. 

Emma: Surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise.

Zachary: Are you in Amsterdam?

Emma: I’m, I am in a port city called IJmuiden, which is near Amsterdam. 

Zachary: Okay. Yes. So there we go. We are both in not undisclosed locations because we have just disclosed them.

We are in different locations, which may or may not provide a different lens on the world, probably, but you never know.

Emma: I mean, It’s the cruise ship capital of the Netherlands. Wow. Fun facts that, who knew man? Nobody cares about or knows.

Zachary: You knew.

So how’s, how’s the view up north there, Emma?

Emma: It was hailing. It was hailing a few hours ago, but it’s bright and sunny now, so we’re doing all right.

Zachary: It’s a metaphor for world as we see it. Bad weather. Bad weather will give way to good weather.

Emma: That’s right, and the Netherlands is a perfect place for that because the weather is constantly, constantly changing.

Are we ready for our first piece of good news for the new podcast season?

Zachary: That’s my really inept drum roll. I will not quit my day job. I don’t have a day job, so I can’t really quit it, but whatever it is, I won’t.

Emma: So it turns out all of you’re sea and tsunami and water-based metaphors. Were really apropos because we’re gonna talk about drowning.

Zachary: Oh, always

Emma: We need to talk about depressing topics. Sorry. It’s just, just part of the game here.

Zachary: Okay.

Emma: So good news coming out of the World Health Organization, they actually put preventing drowning under their purview for the first time 10 years ago. And we have the very first global report on the status of preventing drowning and whether or not the WHO has done anything in the last 20 years.

So they measured it, you know, for 20 years, but it’s been under their period for 10. And in fact, we have made progress. The death rate from drowning has gone down by 38% globally. Of course, that is different in different places, but that equates to about 75,000 people. So. A decent number.

Zachary: Just outta curiosity, do we know how one actually takes measures to prevent drowning?

I know in the United States and other countries we have all the pool fence rules for kids. Other than that, I, I’m not sure like what, what does one, do you have lifeboats on mandatory on all boats? Are there things I am missing?

Emma: Yeah, so it depends on the country, right? Because some countries are kind of further behind on this than others.

As you mentioned in the States, we are not perfect per WHO recommendations about drowning prevention. Not every state has those laws about pools and so on, but that is one of them. Fencing around private and public. Pool areas, but generally speaking, if you’re just talking more about like globally, what helps teaching kids how to swim?

’cause most of the people that drown are quite young between one and four or quite old. So it’s the elderly and the really young kids that that tend to drown laws around life jackets. Lifeboats, yes, but, but more like life jackets and that you should be wearing them if you’re on certain watercraft.

Certain, actually having daycare in some countries really helps because in places like Vietnam, people were like kind of leaving their young kids ’cause they didn’t have anyone to watch over them. Those kids would wander around and drown. So having daycare really helps and weather alerts. Because in the states, obviously we have very advanced weather alerts.

We know when generally speaking, a storm is coming, a flood might occur. But if you live in a poorer country where you don’t know that you can get caught out in a severe weather disaster.

Zachary: So that one I wouldn’t have thought of, but that’s That’s interesting. The weather alert part. Yeah, that makes sense.

Emma: It makes sense. It’s, I mean, things to take for granted, right? Because we’re so used to just opening up our iPhones and seeing the weather or having, you know, the, the news constantly tell you that the hurricane is coming, doesn’t happen in other parts of the world. So there you go. 

Zachary: Yeah.

Emma: Decent progress.

Okay. And, and I will say progress too, that the countries where the drowning rates were really high also made very particular progress. So places like Belarus, Laos, Bangladesh, they all dropped their rates by more than two thirds. So kudos to them.

Zachary: Next up.

Emma: Next up. I’m full of, as per usual, the most inspirational and not at all dispiriting topics.

So after this we’re gonna talk about rape kits. I know, I know. You’re so happy you turned into this podcast.

Zachary: Absolutely. Yeah.

Emma: But there is,  the rape kit backlog

Zachary:. Are you gonna tell us that the rape kit backlog is finally being addressed?

Emma: We are exactly going to talk about the rape kit backlog, and then that’s exactly what I’m going to say.

That in fact, of course, exact numbers of how big the backlog is is impossible to come by, but by some estimates there were three or 400,000 backlog kits in the United States. Others say like 200,000. Anyway, the current count right now is a little over 71,000. Which is dramatic. I mean, of course it’s still quite a backlog.

I think it’s something like 13 states that have cleared their backlog entirely. There are some cases where a state will clear their backlog and then it’ll creep up again. But I mean, there has been really substantial progress on this issue, especially since 2016, and also every single state except for Maine.

Shame on you, Maine. Has passed some kinds of rape kit reform law. So that’s around funding for getting the backlog cleared the victim’s right to know the status of their kit, things of that nature. Every single state except for Maine, I don’t know what’s going on in Maine, but they are considering some bills in this upcoming session.

Zachary: And this builds on the work that a lot of people have been doing literally for 20 plus years. So Maka Harte of Law and Order SVU Fame has a charity called Joyful Heart, which for years was pounding the table about this rape kit backlog. You know, you, you had these reforms right in the eighties and nineties where rape kits became a thing and then they would just sit, right?

’cause there was no money. Its the backlog to test them or no political will to allocate the money is probably the accurate way of putting it. And so you just had this, you know, women had gone through this ordeal and then kind of the secondary ordeal. ’cause reporting it and having the rape kit done is not exactly a fun experience either.

And then they would just sit around and it took really more than a decade of people saying, Hey, wait a minute, this is ridiculous. You’ve allocated all this money to. Presumably to create hard evidence of who a rapist was and then prosecute, and we’re doing nothing to actually work through that backlog.

So that’s, that’s a major, major move that’s happened. One of these things that sort of, everything happened slowly till everything happened quickly. I.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. And I will say too, that something that I learned researching this issue is that it’s not only just a justice issue for a victim like that, they’re gonna find the person that attacked them.

It’s also a public safety issue because a lot of the people, when they find out, when they finally test these kits, a lot of these people are repeat offenders. So they could have been off the streets, you know, like years prior if the kit had gone through.

Zachary: So that’s, that’s good news about bad news.

Emma: Good news about bad news.

Our specialty here at The Progress Network. And we’re gonna end on one more good news about bad news. We are gonna talk about Cambodia and landmines. Because the end of February was National Mine Awareness Day, which probably people don’t know, but it was on February 24th, and I wanted to talk about the progress that Cambodia has made clearing the country of landmines and unexploded ordinances in the nineties.

That’s the result of a civil war that they had there in the seventies and eighties. For those that don’t know. And they have gotten casualties down to like under 50 per year, and there used to be like thousands. There’s over 4,000 in 1996 and 49. In 2024, they’ve cleared most of the country. I think it’s like 80 or 90%.

They are facing some challenges about kind of getting the very last bit done, particularly because there’s some land with the border of Thailand that they’re, they’re having trouble delineating who’s allowed to do that stuff there. And they are, I should say caveat behind schedule. They had the goal of clearing the entire country by 2025 and they announced recently that they’re not gonna make, that they’re, they’re gonna push it to 2030, but still.

They have done an incredible amount of work clearing the vast majority of the country of these landmines and unexploded ordinances. So I think they deserve some collapse as well.

Zachary: Absolutely, and it’s true if anybody who’s gone to Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam and you see these signs just either don’t go in this area or there’ve been various nonprofits as well as UN as well as US sponsored to some degree.

We were until recently. I think some of these programs have been actually cut and were under USAID. Although I have to look into that, but we were funding the clearing of the minds that we laid, particularly in laws. And we didn’t lay minds in laws, we bombed laws, we laid a lot of minds in Vietnam and, you know, even 25 years as you just mentioned, after these conflicts ended there were people dying from stepping on unexploded minds.

This was also somewhat an issue after World War II in Belgium and elsewhere. And it’s gonna be a huge issue in Eastern Ukraine. So even if there’s this ceasefire or whatever happens between Russia and Ukraine, there’s just an entire several hundred mile swath of Eastern Ukraine that is saturated with mines, all of which are lethal and often kill kids ’cause they’re the ones playing in the fields, kids and farmers.

And so you had this year after year after year, 25 years after the Vietnam War ended, you know, you still had, as you said, hundreds of people or thousands of people dying in Cambodia or dying in Vietnam. And it’s just astonishing when you think about it that the kind of the long-term effects of dot dot dot,, ’cause of course we always think the war’s done right, it’s done, we’re done.

We can just go back to our lives, which may be true in large measure, but clearly not true if you’re field is full of minds. So just one of these aspects of modern warfare in particular that I suppose, get no attention. And then the clearing of it is thankless work, but absolutely vital and necessary.

Emma: Yeah, I mean one bit about the US funding is that this information that I was just sharing came from the Cambodian News source and it does particularly thank the US funding for allowing some of this stuff to occur. Of course, we don’t know if this funding is gonna continue Secretary of State,

Marco Rubio just announced that they’ve cut 83% of USAID’s programs, but we don’t know which ones. So, likely it doesn’t continue, but who knows? We’ll see. And, I wanted to add as well, what I, I learned recently from looking into this is that it wasn’t just people who were fighting in the war that laid minds.

It was also people trying to protect areas, like trying to protect temples and things like that. They would circle the temple with minds. So, it’s, it’s really, yeah, it really goes quite deep. And of course, there’s no records about where these mines were placed, so it’s also like you don’t have any idea where they are.

Zachary: wow.

Emma: So, yeah. Quite the challenge. Getting rid of them. Yeah.

Zachary: Okay, so this week we had a, a, a slightly different take on our good news stories, as in it was the good news about the bad news. But part of the, part of the point we’re making in all this is, you know, much of human history is human solving problems that humans created, and this is one iteration of it.

So, to be fair, often good news is in fact, the amelioration of prior bad news or prior bad human behavior, or destructive human behavior. We kind of innovate. Sometimes we innovate our way out of a problem. Sometimes we just clean up a problem that we’ve created. But there is a dialectic that goes on there where we create a lot of bad things and then we try to do a lot of good things to solve the bad things.

And that is kind of the way society moves maybe, unfortunately, like it would certainly be better to have not done the things in the first place, but that requires a completely different human race than the one that currently exists. So there we have it. We have progress in the face of bad stuff people have done.

I guess drowning is not bad stuff people have done. Drowning is just things that humans do when they, it’s a fact to life, right?

Emma: Yeah. I mean, right.

Zachary: So that’s that. Probably that one’s a little different. That’s us dealing with just what does it mean to be alive on a planet where there are risks, but even so, so we will be back with you with our longer form interview also called What Could Go Right?

You can tell on whatever media platform you’re on, I guess no one’s on an iPod anymore. I kind of meant to say your podcast. Podcast.

Emma: It’s good throwback though. 

Zachary: Yeah, I mean, that’s where podcasts came from, so at least there’s some connection to the original idea. So whatever platform you’re on, if it’s a shorter episode, it’s the progress report.

If it’s a longer episode, it’s the What to Go Right interview if that’s not clearly flagged. So we will be back with you with our longer interview. We will be back next week with our next Progress Report. We wanna thank you for listening as always. And we have one ask, which is if you come across interesting, constructive stories, please share them with us.

There’s an email address at The Progress Network dot org and you can send it along and maybe we will highlight it and credit you accordingly. As you should be. So please do that and thank you for listening. And thank you, Emma, for scouring and finding. Thank you Zachary for hosting as always, and thank you everyone for tuning in.