The legal concept of personhood in Colombia: are there biological reasons to change it?]

Nowadays, as a consequence of scientific advances in embryology, genetics and assisted reproduction techniques, the scientific community ask for new laws to establish new parameters to use with these recent discoveries. Discoveries that have changed the legal concept of "person". In many countries this concept is absolutely useless when facing new techniques such as cloning, stem cell research and embryo storage. That is why it is necessary to change its definition to guarantee the right to life and give a better protection to human embryos.     

Diversion from youth courts in five Asia Pacific jurisdictions: welfare or restorative solutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a trend to move away from punitive and retributive approaches to reintegrative practices. This article provides an account of how young offenders in five Asia Pacific jurisdictions are diverted from being prosecuted in the youth courts and of to where they are diverted. The five cases demonstrate that diversionary measures in the Australasian jurisdictions tend to be more restorative in their practices than are those in Chinese-dominated jurisdictions, which adopt welfare responses. It is concluded that although there is some progress in the areas of decarceration and delegalization, the diversion goals of decategorization and deprofessionalization in Chinese-dominated jurisdictions have yet to be achieved. Such diversionary strategies carry the risk that many more young people committing minor offences may be subject to more intrusive measures and disguised social control in the name of diversion, welfare, or the prevention of future offending.     

Time use and change in academic achievement: A longitudinal follow-up

As a follow-up of the research of Smith in 1990, academic achievement results from two years later are added to the data for 1208 of the 1584 seventh and ninth graders for whom Smith studied relationships between achievement and time use. Growth in academic achievement over two years, like contemporaneous achievement, is not positively related to time spent on homework or with parents at the beginning of the period. The other findings are also in general accord with the results of the previous study, although the associations are somewhat weaker and less consistent. Growth in reading, language, and overall achievement is significantly negatively related to time spent on house-hold chores, suggesting that chores may compete with academic or other intellectual activities or may cause destructive resentment. Growth in reading achievement is significantly negatively related to time spent listening to radio and recordings, suggesting negative effects of the adolescent subculture. Growth in mathematics achievement tends to be positively associated with time spent watching television among students with parents in lower-status occupations but has a statistically significant negative association with TV time among those with higher status parents, supporting previous findings of interaction between family SES and TV viewing. The results are interpreted in terms of competition among various time uses for the time and attention of adolescents.Research for this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants SES-8507004 and SES-8920852, and by The University of South Carolina. The earlier study (Smith, 1990), which this one follows up, was also supported by the former NSF grant, but the acknowledgment was inadvertently omitted when the paper was published in the sixth issue in Volume 19 of this journal.Doctorate in sociology was granted by The University of Minnesota. Main research interests are parent-adolescent relations and influences on academic achievement.     

Retrospective reports of parental partner abuse: Relationships to depression,trauma symptoms and self-esteem among college students

This study tested whether retrospective reports of childhood exposure to parental partner abuse were associated with internalizing aspects of adult adjustment. Participants were 550 men and women college students. Among women, childhood exposure to partner abuse was related to depression, trauma-related symptoms, and low self-esteem; among men, exposure was associated with trauma-related symptoms. These relationships were statistically independent of reported parental alcohol abuse and divorce. Relationships of parental partner abuse to low self-esteem and depression among women were also independent of variation in retrospective reports of child sexual and physical abuse. However, the relationship of partner abuse to trauma-related symptoms depended, in part, on the co-occurrence of child abuse. The discussion addressed implications of the findings for future research and for clinical practice.