A discounting framework for regulatory impact analysis

This article presents a methodology designed to facilitate the systematic comparison of alternative discounting procedures for the costs and benefits of industrial regulatory activity. A discounting framework developed by Bradford is adapted for use in the context of industry regulation. Within this framework, the choice among the various discounting procedures is reduced to a choice between assumptions about various economic and financial parameter values. As an illustration of the way in which the framework can be applied, the article includes an examination of the validity of parameter assumptions implied by the discounting approach currently used by regulatory agencies in their analyses of regulations affecting the motor vehicle industry. Several hypothetical programs are analyzed to demonstrate the broad differences in program treatment that might be expected if this current discounting approach were replaced by procedures generated within the framework from more reasonable parameter assumptions. Sensitivity of the benefit/cost calculations to uncertainty about underlying parameters is also briefly discussed.     

Uneasy freedom: Women's experiences of contraception

This article discusses the effect of available contraceptive methods upon women's lives. It quotes extensively from letters received from women who answered a press appeal for information. The main argument is that contraception is by no means the trouble free panacea it is often assumed to be. For many women, contraception can bring considerable mental and physical side- effects—pain, anxiety, discomfort. Women also have to deal with the patriarchal attitudes of the medical profession and—often unsympathetic—partners. The women's accounts show how experience of contraception can be a radicalising experience—feeding the beginnings of a feminist awareness.The article was written before the latest evidence of a connection between the pill and breast cancer was made known.     

The Impact of COVID-19 Restrictions on Victim Advocacy Agency Utilization Across Pennsylvania

This brief report highlights the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions on the utilization of Victim Advocacy Agencies’ (VAAs’) services across Pennsylvania, using VAA utilization data from 2019–2020. VAA utilization data in this report were collected from 2019–2020 by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape (PCAR). VAA utilization data were anchored to COVID-19 restriction timelines, defined by the Pennsylvania Office of the Governor. For each month, a percent change in VAA utilization (e.g., Jan 2020 utilization compared to Jan 2019 utilization) was calculated. A one-way ANOVA was run to assess whether the association between restriction phase and percent change in overall VAA utilization from 2019 to 2020 was statistically significant. A substantial decrease in VAA utilization was observed once lockdown restrictions were enacted, as well as a sustained decrease in utilization between 2019 and 2020. When restrictions were eased, an increase in service utilization was noted. This pattern of findings held for the three variables assessed: hotline utilization, new client, and medical accompaniments for FREs per month. The one-way ANOVA confirmed a statistically significant decrease in overall VAA utilization when comparing the most severe COVID-19 related restrictions to both pre-COVID and less severe restrictions. A variety of barriers (e.g., financial instability, loss of childcare, technology access, chronic physical proximity to abuser, hospital visitation restrictions, fears of contracting the virus) may result in decreased utilization of VAA services. Future research should investigate the relevance of potential causal mechanisms behind VAA utilization to help inform intervention approaches.

     

Measures Tending to Combat Recidivism Among Women Offenders

[Editor's Note] Traditionally crime has been the domain of males for a number of reasons, chief of which is the fact that they have had more responsibility in both domestic and occupational areas. In the administration of justice differential treatment has been practiced in accordance with age, sex, social status, race, ethnicity, wealth, education, prestige, and other idiosyncrasies of individuals. Females have a distinct advantage over males in the following areas: 1) the public's report to the police; 2) police arrest; 3) the court's sentence; 4) incarceration. There is evidence to show that because of this males not only risk becoming offenders more than females, but also risk becoming victims of that offense.

To cite some examples, in 1972 male arrests outnumbered female by almost six to one in the United States, and only 18 percent of the arrests for Crime Index offenses were women. According to an F.B.I. report approximately 20 per cent of total property crime arrests in 1972 were female. Yet it should be noted that some crimes are committed more by females than by males, such as offenses against chastity and common decency, prostitution, embezzlement and fraud, forgery and counterfeiting, larceny and theft. Recently the F.B.I. reported a rise in female offenses, particularly among those under the age of 18. According to this report, well over half the runaways apprehended are young women.

As a result of a higher educational level among women, more women remaining single due to professional and occupational interests, and the Contemporary Women's Liberation movement, a gradual increase in criminality among women is anticipated, although this is disputed by the French correspondent in the following article who argues for a reverse trend. Yet with more women competing with men in the future and becoming more active politically to achieve equality, crime as a predominantly male pattern of behavior may change.

Crime among women has yet to be thoroughly studied. Some criminologists maintain that female criminality is “masked” or “suggestive” behavior because to a great extent female criminals are hidden or unreported, or in some instances men commit crime on behalf of women. Any meaningful assessment of female criminality must take into account complex physiological, psychological and socio-cultural factors.

The meeting of the International Council of Women in conjunction with the Third United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in 1965 marked only a small beginning in the understanding of this segment of criminal behavior. This article deals only with recidivism among women offenders, and readers are advised to discover how other societies treat female criminals. Although several recommendations are made as to how women offenders can best be served, much more research into female criminality must be done before reaching any definite conclusions. Some causal factors paralleled the male counterpart, but before this segment of criminality can be treated effectively, causal elements of a more general nature must first be established. [Source: “Measures Tending to Combat Recidivism Among Women Offenders,” article submitted by the International Council of Women, Standing Committee for Social Welfare to the 3rd United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Stockholm, A/CONF. 26/NGO/2, 4 May 1965.]     

Colonialism and the health transition: Aboriginal Australians and poor whites compared, Victoria, 1850–1985

This paper presents the results of the first two longitudinal historical cradle-to-grave datasets constructed in Australia: the Aboriginal population of the state of Victoria, reconstituted backwards using genealogical research and vital registrations, 1835–1930; and an impoverished European population born at the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857–1900 and traced until 1985. It investigates the hypothesis that the health transition in indigenous people was different from that of the dominant non-indigenous population. Both of these studied sub-populations were highly stressed, resulting in high infant mortality and persistent tuberculosis mortality. The Aboriginal population suffered the additional burdens of racism and social exclusion, even though after the passage of the 1886 ‘Half-Castes Act’, the majority of Aboriginal Victorians were legally ‘white’. The impact of that legislation and the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal Victorians from federal entitlements in the twentieth century sent the Aboriginal health transition into reverse. The contrasting fates of poor whites and ‘unofficial blacks’ during the health transition demonstrate the health burdens of inequality and racial discrimination, and reveal that ‘the gap’ in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a historical product of long-term government policy and exclusion from citizenship and its entitlements.     

What can security do for food? Lessons from Brazil

What are the analytical benefits of using the security vocabulary when addressing issues of human well-being? And to what extent can a security framing of these issues be useful in the normative and political sense – that is, when making judgements about existing policies and when formulating and implementing alternative ones? This article uses the case of food security to engage with these questions. It argues for a shift away from conceptual fine-tuning of what food security should mean and towards an appreciation of how security functions as a political modality. Whilst acknowledging that this modality can work to encourage international conflict, enable governmental control and empower global capitalism, the idea that security has an inherent logic which denies progressive politics is refuted. Drawing on the idea of emancipation in critical security studies, and applying it to empirical examples from contemporary Brazil, it is shown how food security can help expedite action to address harm and vulnerability, reinforce the public sphere and widen the scope of social concern.