Gendering transnational radio: women listeners and the BBC Empire and Overseas Services, 1932–1967

ABSTRACT

The BBC World Service, today a respected broadcaster on the global stage, had its origins in the BBC Empire Service of the 1930s. Shortwave radio broadcasts from London explicitly targeted isolated white men in the geographically dispersed British colonies and dominions, with the intention of strengthening them in their imperial endeavours. BBC staff positioned women at the margins of programming and scheduling decisions. Yet for some women listeners radio was a crucial constitutive element of their multi-sensory empire (and post-empire) experience. This paper draws on the BBC Written Archives collection to explore the neglected topic of gender in relation to international broadcasting, focusing on how white women ‘exiles’ and settlers used and understood radio in their daily lives from the 1930s to the 1960s. BBC Overseas broadcasting, as the Empire and later General Overseas Services, provides a fruitful channel into further exploration of the gendered nature of the transnational domain, illustrating women's agency in the complex webs of empire.     

‘It’s Not OK’, but ‘It’ never happened: parental alienation accusations undermine children’s safety in the New Zealand Family Court

ABSTRACT

While the public campaign slogan in New Zealand when referring to family violence, is ‘It’s Not OK’, many women in New Zealand report that the Family Court prefers the catchphrase ‘It never happened’. When women and children escaping violence and abuse reach out to the New Zealand Family Court for protection believing the justice system will help them, they often enter an alternative reality where they are not believed and are subsequently made less safe. This is particularly so for those women whose well-founded fears for their children’s safety get reinterpreted as evidence of a deliberate attempt to alienate the children from their fathers. The Backbone Collective, an independent organisation, surveyed New Zealand women about their experiences in the Family Court, finding that many women reported being accused of parental alienation. This paper investigates the sources of these allegations of parental alienation and how they impact mothers and their children. We argue that the use of parental alienation in the New Zealand Family Court is undermining the international rights of children.     

Managing victim status in group therapy for men: a discourse analysis

In contrast to the abundance of research on women victims, this article sheds light on the discourse of men who are self-identified as victims of their female partners' abuse. The purpose of this study was to investigate the most salient identity constructions and abuse conceptualizations among participants of group psychotherapy for men who have been abused in intimate, heterosexual partner relationships (i.e., Calgary Counselling Centre's 14-week group program titled "A Turn for the Better"). The men's identity work was examined using the methods and theoretical perspective of discourse analysis. Analysis of the talk demonstrated that the group agenda was to work through the ambiguity of abuse in the service of having the men identify themselves as victims. Thus, both the men and the group facilitators actively constructed "true victim" subject positions through their resistance to commonsense orientations of (a) "men as perpetrators" and (b) whether abuse consisted of more than physical violence. The therapeutic language of resistance was a common strategy used to manage victim status but also required further negotiation as it entailed a component of abuse (i.e., risked positioning the men as abusers rather than victims). The discussion focuses on how these findings may differ from the identity work present in women victim therapeutic groups. In addition, we note that it is difficult to uphold the victim-versus-perpetrator dichotomy in therapeutic discourse.     

Foreign Direct Investment,Regime Type,and Labor Protest in Developing Countries

We explore the relationship between FDI, regime type, and strikes in low‐ and middle‐income countries. We argue that FDI produces social tensions and opportunities for protest that can result in higher levels of industrial conflict. However, the effect of FDI is moderated by regime type. While democracies tend to have higher levels of protest overall, they are better able than authoritarian regimes to cope with the strains arising from FDI. We cite two reasons. First, political competition forces regimes to incorporate workers, which shifts conflict from industrial relations to the political arena. Second, democracies provide workers with freedom of association rights, which facilitate institutionalized grievance resolution. We test the argument using a new dataset of labor protest in low‐ and middle‐income countries for the period 1980–2005.     

Treatment and Intervention for Opiate Dependence in the United Kingdom: Lessons from Triumph and Failure

The history of opiate treatment in the United Kingdom (UK) since the early 1980s is a rich source of learning about the benefits and pitfalls of drug treatment policy. We present five possible lessons to be learnt about how factors outside the clinic, including government, charities and researchers can influence treatment and outcomes. First, do not let a crisis go to waste. The philosophical shift from abstinence to harm reduction in the 1980s, in response to an HIV outbreak in injecting users, facilitated expansion in addiction services and made a harm reduction approach more acceptable. Second, studies of drug-related deaths can lead to advances in care. By elucidating the pattern of mortality, and designing interventions to address the causes, researchers have improved patient safety in certain contexts, though significant investment in Scotland has not arrested rising mortality. Third, collection of longitudinal data and its use to inform clinical guidelines, as pursued from the mid-1990s, can form an enduring evidence base and shape policy, sometimes in unintended ways. Fourth, beware of the presentation of harm reduction and recovery as in conflict. At the least, this reduces patient choice, and at worst, it has caused some services to be redesigned in a manner that jeopardises patient safety. Fifth, the relationship between the third and state sectors must be carefully nurtured. In the UK, early collaboration has been replaced by competition, driven by changes in funding, to the detriment of service provision.     

Extent and characteristics of woman batterers among federal inmates

Efforts to identify men who batter women in clinical settings have increased in recent years, but batterer research in United States federal prisons is lacking; low security federal prisons are logical places to consider batterer screening and treatment given the number of men, the domestic violence "risk markers" associated with these men and the likelihood they will be released and return to female partners. This study examined intake assessment data for 115 low security federal inmates. The inmates evidenced high levels of risk markers for woman battering, one in three (33%) acknowledged recent physical violence against women partners, 1 in 10 (13%) admitted severe violence, and the self-identified batterers showed more substance use and personality problems than other inmates. The findings suggest that batterer screening and treatment may be needed in federal prisons and that more research is warranted with a burgeoning male population that ultimately returns to society.