The victim syndrome

Her books include Women and War (1987)and most recently Power Trips and Other Journeys,a collection of essays.     

Women,Wives and the Campaign Against Pit Closures in County Durham: Understanding the Vane Tempest Vigil

The majority of the women who campaigned to save the Vane Tempest Colliery from closure in 1993 were involved because of their political understanding and allegiances rather than as a consequence of their practical involvement in mining life. Even those women who were married to miners did not conform to the stereotypical conception of ‘miner's wife’. However, the supporting labour movement and the media persisted in conceptualizing the Women's Vigil through romantic and masculinist discourses of miners and mining communities which could only locate the women as ‘wives’, which confined the campaign within historical stereotypes no longer appropriate to the actual situation and which persistently set the idea of socialism against that of feminism. This not only situated the women's campaign as secondary and subject to that of the NUM but it also subverted the possibilities of the women fully articulating their own experience and understanding within the campaign. The situation was further complicated by memories of the miners' strike of 1984-5 in which women played such an important role. One aspect of this role, that of maintaining mining families in the face of hardship, continued to inform understanding of the women's role in the fight to prevent closure, although it was no longer appropriate.The Women's Vigil engaged with a much wider set of concerns and with a wider range of individuals and groups than did that of the miners themselves. There were serious possibilities for broadening the political campaign around the women's slogan of ‘Jobs, community and environment’ which were never fully exploited because of the difficulties of admitting that women could inhabit any position other than that of ‘miners’ wives'.This experience of the Vane Tempest Vigil indicates the significance and the centrality of gender issues within class based political action.     

The political economy of targeting

One of the most widely used method of targeting is to reduce welfare benefits as income rises. Although the need for such targeting is clear enough, it also entails two important difficulties. Firstly, the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can be a deterrent to work harder. Secondly, by reducing the number of recipients, targeting reduces the political support for taxation and redistribution. The purpose of this paper is to study the voting equilibrium of the degree of targeting and the level of taxation in an economy where labour supply is variable. The analysis reveals that targeting may be fatal for redistribution even though it rejects strictly less than the richest half of the population, and that it is not possible for a coalition of the extremes to form and reject the middle income group from the welfare system. Moreover, because targeting affects labour supply, we find that Pareto improvements are possible when targeting is either “too low” or “too high”. We also find that voting simultaneously over taxation and targeting is favourable to the poor in the sense that they can converge to their most-preferred policy by successively forming a majority coalition with the rich to increase targeting and with the middle to increase taxation.     

Sleep disturbance in adolescents: Sleep quality,sleep habits,beliefs about sleep,and daytime functioning

This study examined the prevalence and correlates of sleep disturbance in adolescents. Two hundred seventy-seven 9th- and 10th-grade students completed a questionnaire on sleep quality, sleep habits, beliefs about sleep, and daytime mood and functioning. Based on their responses, subjects were classified as good sleepers (66%), occasional poor sleepers (23%), and chronic poor sleepers (11%). Occasional and chronic poor sleepers reported being significantly more depressed, without energy, tense, moody, and irritable and less rested and alert than good sleepers. They were also more likely to describe themselves negatively. However, poor sleepers were not consistently more tired than good sleepers. Rather, they tended to be least tired in the evening, the time when most good sleepers reported feeling tired. There were few differences in the sleep habits and beliefs about sleep of good and poor sleepers. All subjects reported shifts in bedtimes and waketimes from weekdays to weekends, with occasional and chronic poor sleepers showing a tendency toward greater shifts, a possible factor contributing to their sleep disturbance. Occasional and chronic poor sleepers also reported more observable behaviors and feelings of stress than good sleepers. The need for early intervention with particular attention to teaching adolescents about good sleep habits and the need for stable bedtimes and waketimes and the possibility of joint intervention on daytime stress and sleeping problems are discussed.