Custody Stalking: A Mechanism of Coercively Controlling Mothers Following Separation

This paper adds to our understandings of women’s post-separation experiences of coercive control through the introduction of a new concept—custody stalking. It is defined as a malevolent course of conduct involving fathers’ use of custody and/or child protection proceedings to overturn historic patterns of care for children. The experience of custody stalking is explored through three composite narratives derived from twelve mothers who participated in an exploratory, qualitative study on the involuntary loss of maternal care time following separation. The losses suffered caused these mothers tremendous grief, damaged their psychological wellbeing and had a detrimental effect on their mothering relationships. Yet custody stalking, as a form of malevolent attack, is not well recognised and mothers’ resultant losses are largely culturally invisible. This is in marked contrast to paternal filicides, another form of post-separation avenging attack committed by some fathers that also leads to maternal loss experiences, albeit more absolute.     

At the Back of the Class. At the Front of The Class: Experiences as Aboriginal Student and Aboriginal Teacher

This is a personal account of an Aboriginal woman who went through the education system in Australia to obtain finally her law degree.Aboriginal people experience many hurdles in the education system. Many Aboriginal children feel alienated within the legal system which until recently focused on a colonial history of Australia, ignoring the experiences, indeed the presence, of indigenous people in Australia.The Australian government had a policy of not educating Aboriginal people past the age of 14. The author was one of the first generation that could go straight from high school to university. She speaks of the debt she feels towards the generations of her people that fought for her right to access to higher education.The author went on to become the first Aboriginal person to be accepted into Harvard Law School which brought different personal challenges and allowed for reflection on comparisons of the sensitivity towards race in both education systems.When the author returned to Australia, she took a position teaching at the University of New South Wales. She had to come to terms with working within a system that she had felt alienated within as a student. Her position at the front of the class has created a sense of empowerment that she can pass on to her Aboriginal and female students.     

Escaping Assimilation's Grasp: Aboriginal women in the Australian women's military services

During the assimilation era of the 1930s–60s, most Australian Indigenous women living in proximity to white Australia were forced to work as domestic servants with few other education or employment prospects. One significant yet under-studied exception was employment in the armed services' women's auxiliaries. As a consequence of such employment, Aboriginal ex-servicewomen learned new skills and new opportunities to improve their social statuses. Through analysis of oral histories from four Aboriginal ex-servicewomen who served in the 1940s–60s, this article examines how work in the women's forces empowered Aboriginal women and represented an escape from assimilation policies.     

biting the hand that feeds: Australian cuisine and Aboriginal sovereignty in the Great Sandy Strait

Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson (1851–1933) is lauded in both academic and popular circles as the author of the first uniquely Australian cookbooks, which she wrote between 1876 and 1895. Rawson was a prolific writer and stressed that she was the first white woman settler at Boonooroo in the colony of Queensland, where she was ‘beholden to the blacks’ to show her what to eat (Rawson, 1895, p. 54). Rawson’s cookbooks famously codified how to use Australian non-human animals, including wallaby, parrot and goanna, as meat, and her published memories of this time detailed the context in which she implemented and refined these recipes. Rawson organised and policed racialised frontier space as a white woman, claiming British sovereignty over Butchulla country in order to profit from and teach other settlers to profit from the coastal land and waterways. This paper draws on ecofeminist and postcolonial theory and works to explore how Rawson organised food production to exercise violent colonial claims to sovereignty as a white woman, explicitly advising other settlers to do the same.     

Gendered endeavours: women and the reshaping of business culture

Traditional approaches to business history have assumed masculine norms. As such, women have either been ignored or treated as marginal. Though women's and gendered history have changed the face and interpretations of most branches of historical research, business historians reacted slowly. The recent refocusing of the business ‘malestream’ is still in its infancy, but its potential to make profitable contributions is far reaching. To date American historians have done much of the refocusing, but Europeans are now involved in incorporating female endeavours. In examining the reshaping of male business cultures this article considers both the deconstruction of the ‘master’ narrative and the alternatives offered by gendered business histories     

The right to culture and the culture of rights: a critical perspective on women’s sexual rights in Africa

The opposition of ‘culture’ and ‘rights’ is not uncommon in feminist legal discourse. This article argues that such an approach is fraught with danger as it creates an extremely restrictive framework within which African women can challenge domination; it limits our strategic interventions for transforming society and essentially plays into the hands of those seeking to perpetuate and solidify the existing structures of patriarchy. Drawing examples from a parallel research on Gender, Law and Sexuality, I propose that a more critical and interpretative approach to these two concepts may present a different perspective to portrayals of ‘tradition’ as constraining and/or fixed often displayed in mainstream feminist legal thinking.     

Adolescent room culture: Studying media in the context of everyday life

For the past several years, the authors have been investigating adolescent room culture in order to learn more about the relationship between teens and the media. The bedroom, they have found, is an important haven for most teenagers, a private, personal space often decorated to reflect teens' emerging sense of themselves and where they fit in the larger culture. Teens listen to music, read magazines, watch television, do homework, and consider the events of the day in their rooms. They appropriate and transform media messages and images to help them make sense of their lives. By looking closely at how teens draw from the media as they construct their identities and personal worlds, the authors have come to see adolescent media use as a dialectical process played out through everyday practices. Their Adolescents' Media Practice Model highlights the connections between adolescents' identities and media selection, interaction, and application.An earlier draft was presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in San Diego, California, February 1994.Received M.S. in television-radio from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Research focus is on the relationship between the media and public health.Received Ph.D. in mass communication from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research focus is on adolescent health and mass media.