The School Girl Attacks

Sociological Perspective Paper

SOC/100

September 10, 2013

The video, “School Girl Attacks”, is about a young girl named Zahira living in Afghanistan. While walking home from school, Zahira and five other girls were sprayed with acid by men on a motorbike (NBC News, 2011). The five girls were hospitalized. The men were reported to be militant Taliban’s (NBC News, 2011). The Taliban’s believe females are unholy if they attend school (NBC News, 2011). The girls survived the attacks and returned to school five days later (NBC News, 2011). Although Zahira lives in fear, she continues to go to school in hopes of becoming a doctor.

The applied sociological perspective is the Functionalist Perspective. The Functionalist Perspective focuses on a macro sociological view, which focuses on a large scale of behavior (Schaefer, 2011). The key concepts of the Functionalist Perspective are manifest functions, latent functions, and dysfunctions (Schaefer, 2011). This perspective may use public punishment to reinforce social order (Schaefer, 2011). The Functionalist Perspective views of social order are: the different parts of society work together in cooperation to achieve a common goal (Schaefer, 2011).

Taliban believe that women should not go to school and should stay home serving the man or their husband (Filkins 2009). Afghan women feel threatened if they go to school and feel dysfunctional in social gathering. Afghan girls are much more courageous now, they can walk to school without a man’s (father) presence. The government of Afghanistan provides more security around school, so students, especially girl student and female teachers, feel secure attending school. Dysfunction is the key perspective approach on the video because Taliban belief is disrupting the social system in Afghanistan, especially to girls that wants to go to school. Now, the government wants to enforce more security or police around the school in order for students and teachers to be safe....