Promoting awareness and prevention of child sexual victimization using the Red Flag/Green Flag program: An evaluation with follow-up

This study describes an evaluation of a school-based sexual abuse awareness and prevention program that featured the “Red Flag/Green Flag People” coloring book and included presentation of a film (“Better Safe than Sorry II”) and discussion of hypothetical and actual experiences involving inappropriate physical touching. Children, parents, and teachers from two experimental schools participated in the program and were compared to similar groups from a control school. Outcomes were evaluated using pre-post (2-month) assessment questionnaires. Among the findings obtained, experimental group children reported learning more about the differences between good and bad touching, and being more likely to both report instances of sexual victimization and utilize program-specific preventive skills, relative to controls. Parents exposed to program materials acknowledged greater improvements in knowledge about program goals and more positive communication at home about abuse. Although no significant differences were obtained for teachers, the ratings for one experimental group were consistently higher than those of the other groups. Staff volunteers evaluated the program as overwhelmingly positive and without adverse effects. Still, some children from all groups reported being touched inappropriately. Some of these improvements were also noted for the experimental group at 6-month follow-up assessment. The findings were discussed in the context of conceptual, clinical, training, and empirical considerations.     

Mothers and Their Adolescent Daughters: Relationship Between Self-Esteem,Gender Role Identity,Body Image

The relationship between the predictor variables of self-esteem and gender role identity, and the criterion measure of body image, were examined for 82 mothers and their menstrual daughters, and for 31 mothers and their premenstrual daughters. Findings from the regression analyses indicated that higher self-esteem was significantly related to positive body image scores for menstrual daughters and both groups of mothers, but not for the premenstrual participants. The role of gender identity in contributing to body image was more complex, with greater femininity being correlated with more positive body image for the premenstrual daughters and for the mothers of the menstrual daughters, and greater masculinity being correlated with more positive body image scores for the menstrual girls in the study. Mothers' body image scores were positively correlated with their daughters' body image scores for mother/menstrual daughter pairs but not for the mother/premenstrual daughter pairs in the study. Results support a complex relationship between age, physical maturation, and mother/daughter dynamics in contributing to the development of a positive body image for adolescent girls during puberty.     

Reviews

Timothy J. Colton & Robert C. Tucker (eds), Patterns in Post‐Soviet Leadership. Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, ix + 245 pp., £40.95 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Jeremy Lester, Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle for Hegemony in Russia. London & New York: Verso, 1995, xiii + 307 pp., £34.95 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Robert W. Orttung, From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Democratisation in a Russian City. Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Press, xiii + 332 pp., £33.50 h/b.

Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr & Jeffrey Paul (eds), Liberalism and the Economic Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, xv + 319 pp., £16.95.

Mario I. Blejer & Fabrizio Coricelli, The Making of Economic Reform in Eastern Europe: Conversations with Leading Reformers in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, v + 156 pp., £35.00.

George Blazyca & Janusz Dabrowski (eds), Monitoring Economic Transition: The Polish Case. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, xiii + 175 pp., £30.00.

Laszlo Csaba, The Capitalist Revolution in Eastern Europe: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Systemic Change. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 342 pp., £49.95

Robert V. Daniels, Soviet Communism from Reform to Collapse. Lexington Mass., Toronto: D.C. Heath, 1995, xxviii + 387 pp., No price.

David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, London: Penguin Books, 1994, xii + 586 pp., £7.99.

Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime. London: Macmillan, 1995, xiv + 277 pp., £40.00.

Janusz Bugajski, Nations in Turmoil: Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, xiv + 265 pp., £44.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

Dennis P. Hupchick, Culture and History in Eastern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1994, xvii + 226 pp., £24.00.

David Kirby, The Baltic World 1772–1993. Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London and New York: Longman, 1995, viii + 472 pp., £16.99.

Payam Akhavan & Robert Howse (eds), Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: Reflections by Scholars from the Region. Washington: The Brookings Institution, and Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1995, xxviii + 188 pp., £25.75 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

Sabrina Petra Ramet & Ljubi?a S. Adamovich (eds), Beyond Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics, and Culture in a Shattered Community. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995, x + 502 pp., £37.00.

Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945–1990. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995, xvi + 443 pp., £42.50 h/b, £14.95 p/b.

Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania. Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995, xvii + 340 pp., £35.00.

Tom J. Winnifrith, Shattered Eagles, Balkan Fragments. London: Duckworth, 1995, 171 pp., £20.00

Milenko Karanovich, The Development of Education in Serbia and Emergence of Its Intelligentsia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, x + 270 pp., £25.00.

James Dingley & Arnold McMillin (eds), Occasional Papers in Belarusian Studies. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1995, viii + 73 pp., No price.

Christopher Smart, The Imagery of Soviet Foreign Policy and the Collapse of the Russian Empire. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995, 180 pp., £47.95.

Hafeez Malik, Soviet‐Pakistan Relations and Post‐Soviet Dynamics. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994, x + 383 pp., £47.50.

Theodore Taranovski (ed. and trans.), with the assistance of Peggy McInerny, Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle? Washington, DC, and Cambridge, England: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995, xiii + 436 pp., £40.00.

Leo Schelbert & Nick Ceh (eds), Essays in Russian and East European History: Festschrift in Honor of Edward C. Thaden. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, v + 252 pp., $45.00.

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Collected Writings 1947–1994. Los Angeles: Charles Schlacks, Jnr, 1994; vii + 312 pp., $39.95.

Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 469 pp., £35.00.     

Medical malpractice problem.

The medical malpractice problem is extremely complex and is perceived very differently by health care providers, patients, and other segments of society. As a widely recognized problem, it is of relatively recent origin. Its potential societal consequences include disruption of health services, waste and maldistribution of economic and human resources, and a severe strain on a variety of our traditional social institutions. The "crisis" of malpractice is a product of many forces, including a disturbing level of negligent and improper medical care, frequently unrealistic patient expectations, and the growing "philosophy of entitlement" which is rampant among Americans. Responses to the problem have sometimes been ill-advised and emotional. Most often, the problem is seen as one of inadequate or overpriced malpractice insurance, though careful analysis suggests that insurance issues are merely symptoms of the real problem. Nevertheless, insurance-based solutions have proven to be politically expedient and have produced at least temporary alleviation of the problem. Ultimately, though, other approaches will be necessary, and careful, objective research is required to identify and test long-term options.     

Telecommunications Reform in Mexico from a Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the process of reform in the Mexican telecommunications sector and makes comparisons with similar processes in the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil. Differences in policy responses are explained by the structure of the political institutions and the policy context in any given country. The policy lessons to be drawn from the regulatory experiences examined are that the sequence and the pace of reform influence policy outcomes. The speed with which the Mexican reform was carried out led to a lack of the institutional and legal support necessary to create a level competitive playing field. The permanence of a vertically integrated firm in the Mexican market, moreover, introduced consequential costs to the regulation of the industry. The results of this paper support the theoretical argument that privatization, in itself, does not guarantee the development of the sector and point to the need to attain a more effective regulation of competition in telecommunications.