Personality features of an adolescent female offending population

The incidence of adolescent offending has been shown to be different for young males and females. However, there is a lack of literature concerning adolescent female offenders, and despite research suggesting that personality factors may be linked with antisocial and criminal behaviour in adolescents and young adults; there have been a lack of studies investigating intra-sex personality differences in young female populations. The Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory, a 160-item self-report personality measure, was administered to 26 non-offending and 28 offending adolescent females. It was found that the offending group was significantly less submissive, less conforming, more forceful, more oppositional and more likely to exhibit borderline personality traits than the control group. The offending group also had higher reported incidences of childhood abuse and family conflict, and were more prone to substance abuse, impulsive actions and suicide ideation. These initial findings suggest that personality differences may well exist between offending and non-offending adolescent females.     

Headscarves, Human Rights, and Harmonious Multicultural Society: Implications of the French Ban for Interpretations of Equality

Through the lens of the French law prohibiting Muslim headscarves in schools, this article examines the way in which societal tensions that arise in the context of religious and cultural pluralism are translated into legal discourses relating to human rights and equality. It explores the way in which the law is rooted in France's broader sociopolitical structure and history and contrasts it to the United Kingdom and Turkey. It proposes that the law is based on an anachronistic, formal interpretation of equality that is inappropriate for addressing the inevitable cultural diversity of modern French society, and through its permeation into law and policymaking more widely, it is a primary cause of the heightened social tensions involving the Muslim minority. An assessment of the legitimacy of a law that restricts minority groups' cultural practices in this way in any society should be based on a substantive interpretation of equality and should necessarily involve an active endeavor to understand the meanings of those cultural practices for those groups within their distinct context. Upon this foundation, law and policy can be developed in a way that better reconciles the pluralism of modern society with the common objectives of social harmony, stability, and tolerance.