Reviews

Women writing in India

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India — 600 B. C. to the Present; Volume 1: 600 B. C. to the Early Twentieth Century (The Feminist Press, City University of New York) New York, 1991.

Poststructuralism and politics

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge) New York and London, 1990; Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds), Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1989.

Postponed lives, secondary data and pushing our own barrow

Laura S. Brown and Esther D. Rothblum (eds), Fat Oppression and Psychotherapy: A Feminist Perspective (Haworth Press) New York, 1989; Helen Roberts (ed.), Women's Health Counts (Routledge) London, 1990; Health Sharing Women, The Health Sharing Reader: Women Speak about Health (Pandora) Sydney, 1990.

Primatology and feminism

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (Routledge) New York, 1989, distributed by the Law Book Company Limited.

Domestic violence

Heather McGregor and Andrew Hopkins, Working for Change: The Movement Against Domestic Violence (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Jan Horsfall, The Presence of the Past: Male Violence in the Family (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991.

Feminist strategies and the state

Clare Burton, The Promise and the Price (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Hester Eisenstein, Gender Shock (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Gretchen Poiner and Sue Wills, The Gifthorse (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1991; Margaret Thornton, The Liberal Promise (Oxford University Press) Oxford, 1990.     

Child witnesses and the confrontation clause

InMaryland v. Craig, the United States Supreme Court relied heavily on a brief prepared by a committee of the American Psychology-Law Society on behalf of the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA brief concluded that sexually abused children may be particularly vulnerable to distress in the legal process, especially when forced to confront the defendant face to face, and that such acute distress may be inconsistent with the state's interests in promotion of reliable testimony and child welfare. APA also argued that psychological theory and research provide foundations for individualized determination of the need for measures to protect children from face-to-face confrontation. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AFE06051 00002     

The environmental nightmare of the economic miracle: Land abuse and land struggles in Taiwan

Abstract

This is an article about gut feelings: The kind of gut feeling you get when you step out of an elegant wood-paneled coffee shop in Taipei, where you have sipped a dense European brew at U.S. $6.00 for a small cup, and are assaulted by a whirl of grit and trash in the humid eddies of air, the noxious fumes of motorcycles, and the growl and honk of nearby traffic. The mounting nausea you feel when you cannot avoid eyeing slop spilled from restaurant pails left for pickup by pig farms, mounds of used styrofoam bowls and drink cartons, mangy dogs rooting in the corner garbage heaps awaiting early morning collection, and scraps of rotting wood and rusting metal from long-abandoned carts. The unease you feel when you seek escape from the congested city center and find debris from construction sites egregiously scattered in supposedly scenic spots, and industrial and household waste piled up on every otherwise open piece of land, whether vacant lot or graveyard knoll. The choke and dry cough that becomes habitual after a few days of too many hours in stop-and-go city traffic, evenings of endless banquets with chain smokers, and nights in which the smoke of chemical emissions from faraway factories—venting illegally but with impunity under cover of darkness—seeps into your apartment, where you thought you were safe with your cool tiled floors and humming air conditioners.     

Understanding Children's Use of Secrecy in the Context of Eyewitness Reports

To investigate socioemotional influences on children's eyewitness accuracy, we examined children's reports for activities they were motivated to conceal. Forty-eight 3–6-year-old children participated in a standardized play session with their mothers. Half of the children were told by an experimenter not to play with certain toys, but did so at the urging of their mothers, who told their children to keep the play activities secret. The remaining children were not restricted from playing with the toys, nor told by their mothers to keep the play activities secret. Later, all children were interviewed about the activities with free narrative and detailed questions. Half were given an interview that consisted of highly suggestive questions; half were given an interview consisting of specific, less suggestive questions. Results indicated that older children who were instructed to keep events secret withheld more information than did older children not told to keep events secret. Younger children's reports were not significantly affected by the secret manipulation. There were no significant effects associated with interview type. We discuss implications for understanding the development of children's knowledge and use of secrecy, and applications of the research to issues that arise when child witnesses give reports in legal contexts.