This article examines Police Services and local media discourses on street checks in Hamilton, Ontario, from June 2015 to April 2016 and their usage as a form of psychological abuse known as gaslighting. Despite the widespread coverage that the Hamilton Police Service received as a result of being linked to systemic racist practices, a year later, the Hamilton Police Service was able to avoid being implicated in deliberately conducting racial profiling through strategic tactics in the discourse they relied upon and presented in the media. Through an analysis of 27 local news media articles on the topic of street checks, it is argued that the Police Services and local media discourse enact gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse that is used to manipulate object(s) in order to deceive and undermine the credibility of the target. The psychological effects of gaslighting on people of color included a sense of alienation, disenfranchisement from the community, and distrust toward the police. Through a case study application, it is suggested that gaslighting is part of a systemic, historical process of racism that has been used by the police and government organizations to both illegally target people of color and deny complicity in racial profiling.
Partnership and principles of self-determination, equity, and social justice are keys to community-based participatory research that aims to break down barriers between the researchers and researched. Because community partners are valued as equal contributors to the research project, research advisory groups consisted of members of the community researched are essential to this approach. We discuss the challenges that arose in our first meeting with research advisory group members, where discussions of experiences of racism, in sharing the topic of the research, were initiated with youth from a diverse racialized community. We discuss the ‘development of a shared critical consciousness’, one that incorporated both the researcher’s reaction and the research advisory group members’ development (from initial resistance to critical consciousness). This approach respects the richness of the growth process during research, values the contributions of the researchers and the researched, and via the dialogical process captures contribution in a way that does not finalize or determine people.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.