A feminist analysis of the new right

For some years now, the phenomenon known as The New Right has been developing in the United States, and although there is growing recognition of its destructiveness, there is little understanding of its real nature.At first examination The New Right seems to hold contradictory or incongruous beliefs and values, but placed within the context of fascism, authoritarianism, and ultimately masculism, the whole system of doctrine begins to make sense.While ostensibly supporting traditionalist principles of Christianity, American patriotism, and free enterprise economics, The New Right really encompasses groups of individuals unable to negotiate the uncertainties of lived existence and the fear of death and non-being. Drawn, therefore, to the consciousness of authoritarian rigidity, they seek to reinforce a flimsy structure of salvation by insisting upon absolute agreement with their perspective.The entire system of thought and behavior rests upon an alienation from nature lodged in patriarchal, masculist consciousness.Understanding this structure helps us to deal more effectively with The New Right and reinforces our will to oppose it.     

College Student Reporting Responses to Hypothetical and Actual Safety Concerns

Campus violence prevention often includes proactively reducing crime through noticing and resolving concerning situations. Within these efforts, interventions aimed at enhancing reporting have been considered necessary. The current study explored several reporting influences on college students’ responses to hypothetical and actual campus safety concerns. Students were unwilling to report most (i.e., 52%) vignettes of pathway behavior, and most students who witnessed campus safety concerns did not report (i.e., 87%). Students who witnessed several concerning behaviors from a nonfriend perpetrator tended to be more willing to report, especially if personally victimized and understanding the violence risk associated with pathway behavior. Analyses supported campus-wide exhibitions of the dangerousness of various pathway behaviors and the fair, flexible authority problem solving available to struggling students.     

Book reviews: Rewriting Christine

THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES by Christine de Pizan. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. Persea Books, 1982.

COMIC WOMEN, TRAGIC MEN: A STUDY OF GENDER AND GENRE IN SHAKESPEARE by Linda Bamber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982. 211 pp. ($18.50)

THE UNDISCOVERED CONTINENT: EMILY DICKINSON AND THE SPACE OF THE MIND by Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

REGINA by Leslie Epstein. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York. 251 pp. ($13.95). Avon Books ($3.95).

MORE WORK FOR MOTHER: THE IRONIES OF HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY FROM THE OPEN HEARTH TO THE MICROWAVE by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Basic Books, New York, 1983. 219 pp.     

Effects of prior knowledge and expert statement on belief in recovered memories: an international perspective

We tested the hypothesis that beliefs in the purported attributes of recovered memories of child sexual abuse (CSA) are associated with knowledge of the "recovered/false memory debate", and that such beliefs will be related to assessments of the credibility of statements made by participants in a vignette about CSA. Participants from five countries (the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Israel) responded to a questionnaire regarding beliefs about recovered memory as well as self-reported exposure to and knowledge of the debate. In addition, they assessed the credibility of statements made by a daughter (reporting recovery of memories of sexual abuse by her father), her father (denying the allegation and accusing the daughter's therapist of implanting in her false "memories" of abuse), and two experts (each supporting one of the two protagonists). We found that prior knowledge of the debate across countries was linked to beliefs in specific attributes of recovered memories and to a subset of the credibility assessments of statements made by the protagonists and their experts. For individuals, however, credibility assessments were unrelated to knowledge of the debate, but they were related to beliefs about memory recovery. Finally, credibility of the protagonists' statements was differentially associated with those made by the daughter's and the father's experts. The results suggest that whereas familiarity with the debate does not affect the credibility of the statements made by the complainant and the accused, expert testimony does, as has been found in prior research. The psycholegal implications of this conclusion are discussed.     

Power to the parishes ‐ a (missed) opportunity

Parish and town councils form the lowest tier of local government in England, but have been left out of government proposals for a new duty for local authorities. The proposed new duty will give local authorities wide‐ranging power to promote economic and social well‐being. Unlike principal authorities, it is likely that these grass‐roots councils will have to rely on their power under s.137 to spend on activities outside their specific powers. This article reviews the findings of a recent national survey which was designed to assess the extent to which parishes are constrained by current s.137 arranagements.     

Abstracts section

The theme of poverty eradication is now again at the top of the development policy agenda. In November 2000 the UK Department for International Development (DfID) published an important White Paper on International Development with the title Eliminating world poverty: a challenge for the 21st century. The World Bank World Development Report for 2000/2001 also takes poverty as its theme with the title Attacking poverty. It is interesting to note that the World Bank has bracketed the decade of the 1990s with the 1990 World Development Report simply entitled Poverty. After many conflicting theories of economic development, the basic problem of poverty in developing countries is now being addressed in a much more holistic way, as is exemplified in the following articles. It should be noted that two of these act as introductory articles to a special issue of a journal on this topic. The article by Lustig and Stern introduces the December 2000 issue of Finance and Development whose overall title is ‘How we can help the poor’ and the article by Baulch and Hoddinott introduces the August 2000 issue of the Journal of Development Studies entitled ‘Economic mobility and poverty dynamics in developing countries’. These special issues contain articles on poverty in addition to the ones abstracted here. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.