Security, Equality, and the Clash of Ideas: Sweden's Evolving Anti-Trafficking Policy

Seeking to explain the emergence of anti-trafficking initiatives, scholars have explored two sets of ideas??national security and gender equality??thought to shape policy. In this study, we examine whether such ideational influence accounts for Sweden's evolving anti-trafficking policy over the past decade. As powerful domestic ideas about gender inequality informed the adoption of an abolitionist prostitution policy in the 1990s, one would expect similar ideas to influence domestic responses to the related issue of cross-border trafficking. However, our case study shows that the policy area of trafficking has largely followed a different ideational path. Gendered ideas, periodically nested in a human rights discourse, have been salient in the public debate on trafficking in human beings, especially during the campaign to boycott the 2006 FIFA World Cup. However, they have exerted substantially less influence on Swedish legislative initiatives to combat trafficking, with security concerns still holding sway.     

An den Grenzen der Demokratie – Citizenship und Flucht

Current diagnoses of the crisis of democracy mostly refer to a specific type of mass democracy as it was characteristic of the second half of the 20th century. Its political space is the nation state. The presence of refugees in receiving countries now raises the basic democratic question: How can people participate in political decisions that determine their own living conditions? Refugees, lacking citizenship status, hardly have any formal political influence. The article discusses the relationship between democracy, citizenship, and forced migration in three steps. First, it presents the core arguments of the current debates on the crisis of democracy and outlines the main characteristics of democratic welfare capitalism. Thereupon, it analyzes current transformations of citizenship with regard to forced migration. It will be shown that citizenship is differentiated in the course of transnationalization and economization processes. Finally, the paper shows that potentials for democratization become visible when refugees come into view as “activist citizens” who politicize and scandalize the discrepancies between moral and legal norms as well as the limitations of democracy.     

Consistency of adolescents' self-report of sexual behavior in a longitudinal study

This study examines three issues relevant to adolescent self-reported sexual behavior: the extent to which adolescents rescind reports of sexual intercourse, changes in reporting of lifetime sexual intercourse, and changes in reported age at first sexual intercourse. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study of health-compromising behaviors among a cohort a 758 rural adolescents. Students completed a self-administered questionnaire on health behaviors annually in eighth, ninth, and tenth grades. Findings show that 88.8% of students in eighth grade and 94.3% in ninth grade who reported having had sexual intercourse gave the same answer in a subsequent year. Approximately 15% of students reported fewer numbers of lifetime sexual intercourse experiences in tenth grade than they did in ninth grade. Age at first sexual intercourse was reported inconsistently by 67% of the students. Inconsistency rates differed by racial-gender groups, question sensitivity, and prior sexual experience.Received Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include adolescent health and early adolescent development.Received Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include personality, stress, and coping.Received Ph.D. from University of Chicago. Research interests include adolescent delinquency and substance use.Received Dr. P.H. from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include rural adolescents and international health issues.Received Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Research interests include adolescent sexuality and contraceptive decision making.     

The Impact of Children on Legal Actions Taken by Women Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

Successful criminal or civil legal system response to assaults against intimate partners (intimate partner violence; IPV) usually rely on the victim’s participation in the legal process, including having contact with the prosecutor, filing charges, and/or applying for an order of personal protection. Using data abstracted from criminal and civil legal system records for a county-wide cohort of 990 female IPV victims over a 4-year period, we examine the impact of having children, and of specific child factors, on victims’ engagement with the criminal prosecution of their abusive partners and/or seeking a personal protection order (PPO) in the civil court system. Having children increased victim’s contact with the prosecutor and applications for PPOs, but did not increase her likelihood of wanting to file or drop charges. Findings support prior work suggesting both the importance and complexity of children on mothers’ decision-making. Policy makers and service providers may want to assess survivors’ thoughts about the role children play in their decision-making. Additionally, by offering survivors interventions to help their children address the impact of IPV exposure, survivors may be more willing to engage with services.     

Environment,security and regionalism in the Asia-Pacific: is environmental security a useful concept?

From the very beginning the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been occupied with the task of finding common solutions to common security problems. To a large degree, one may say that security questions have been a driving force for continued regional integration in Southeast Asia. In the future questions of environmental security may be playing the same role. The states around the South China Sea are to a large degree interdependent when it comes to questions of the human environment. They are interdependent to the degree that if they fail to find common solutions to environmental problems they may end up in violent conflict against each other. In general, environmental interdependence is both a source of conflict and a potential for international integration. The direction of the development, i.e. whether it leads to conflict or not, is to a large degree a question of how the decision-makers perceive the situation. This paper addresses the usefulness of the concept ‘environmental security’ in relation to political perception of environmental interdependence in Southeast Asia. If the political actors address serious environmental problems as security matters they are more likely to put them at the top of the agenda and deal with them in satisfactory manners, i.e. to cooperate and find solutions that are acceptable to all parties involved.     

Globaler Wettbewerb und Unsicherheiten beim Einstieg in den Arbeitsmarkt

Hintergrund des Beitrages ist die Beobachtung, dass sich durch zunehmenden globalen Wettbewerb die Beschäftigungsstrategien von Firmen verändern und prekäre Beschäftigung und Arbeitslosigkeit für immer mehr Erwerbstätige wahrscheinlich werden. Dabei ist aber anzunehmen, dass die konkreten Formen prekärer Beschäftigung und die differenzielle Betroffenheit bestimmter Beschäftigtengruppen vom nationalen institutionellen Kontext abhängen. Ziel des Artikels ist es, zum einen die Abhängigkeit vom institutionellen Kontext zu skizzieren und zum anderen empirisch zu untersuchen, in welchem Ausmaß bestimmte Personengruppen beim Einstieg in den Arbeitsmarkt im Deutschland der 80er und 90er Jahre von prekärer Beschäftigung und Arbeitslosigkeit betroffen sind. Es wird analysiert, inwieweit das Risiko befristeter Verträge und Arbeitslosigkeit nach Bildung, Ausbildung, Klassenlage, Geschlecht, ethnischer Herkunft und Region (Ostdeutschland vs. Westdeutschland) ungleich verteilt ist. Es zeigt sich, dass sowohl hoch wie niedrig qualifizierte Gruppen überproportional von befristeten Arbeitsverträgen betroffen sind; befristete Beschäftigung erhöht das Risiko von Arbeitslosigkeit, schließlich variiert das Arbeitslosigkeitsrisiko deutlich nach Bildungsabschluss, Klassenlage, Region und ethnischer Herkunft.