Inequalities of Redress: Australia’s National Redress Scheme for Institutional Abuse of Children

ABSTRACT

The national redress scheme proposed by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is unique and unusual in the world of government redress. It is unique with its inclusion of both care leavers and non-care leavers (it is the only government scheme to do so), and it is unusual in focusing on sexual abuse alone (18% of government schemes do). These unique and unusual qualities come at a price for justice. Care leavers and non-care leavers are different groups with respect to their experiences of abuse and social status as child victims. Unless these group differences are explicitly recognised in guidelines for the monetary payment, care leavers will be disadvantaged. Two corrective measures are proposed: adopting an inclusive understanding of sexual abuse in closed and open settings, and addressing the negative bias that may result from care leavers’ lower social status as children compared to that of non-care leavers. Their lower status is likely to affect (that is, devalue) judgements of the severity and impact of abuse.     

Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts

Within a negotiation, when an act by one party is out-of-keeping with the previous moves and underlying logic of the interaction, the act and those that follow hold the potential for creating a transition to a new logic of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the presence and role of seven distinct types of transitions resulting from out-of-keeping acts across ten complex legal negotiations. The data reveal that a critical feature differentiating across the types is the abruptness/gradualness of the transition. We explore the combination of relational, informational, and procedural acts comprising the transitions and find that all three components are present across transitions, but in different proportions and orders. Understanding the role of out-of-keeping acts in negotiations facilitates a more complete picture of the microprocesses involved in the creation of critical moments in negotiations.     

The Consequences of Knowledge about Elite Deviance

The present study sought to understand the consequences of knowledge about elite deviance. Four hundred and eight participants completed an online questionnaire that measured (1) their level of knowledge about white-collar crime and (2) their perceived seriousness of, and punitiveness toward, it. Results of statistical analyses suggest a positive relationship between knowledge and punitive sentiments toward crimes of the powerful. Conversely, less knowledgeable subjects, comprised disproportionately of men, politically Conservatives, Republicans, and conservative Protestants were often more lenient toward elite offenders, both in terms of perceived seriousness of the offenses and punitiveness toward them, when compared with street crime. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Green economy and carbon markets for conservation and development: a critical view

Green economy aims to use economic rationality and market mechanisms to mute the most ecologically damaging effects of globalized capitalism while reviving economic growth in the global North, fostering development in the South, and decoupling economic growth from environmental decline. An archetypal application of green economy is transnational trade in ecosystem services, including reduced emissions for deforestation and degradation (REDD+). By compensating developing countries for maintaining forests as carbon sinks, this approach is meant to transcend politics and circumvent conflicts over the responsibilities of industrialized and ‘less-developed’ countries that have stymied global climate policy. However, carbon-offset trading is unlikely to result in lower greenhouse gas emissions, much less combined conservation and development gains. The troubled record of payment for environmental services and other schemes or commodification of nature illustrates that living ecosocial systems do not fit the requirements of market contracts. Disputes over proto-REDD+ projects point to the dangers that REDD+ will disadvantage or dispossess rural communities and distract attention from underlying causes of forest and livelihood loss. Two decades of all-but-futile climate negotiations have shown that global warming cannot be managed by means of technocratic expertise nor dealt with separately from the politics of inequality and the paradox of economic growth. The deceptive promise of greening with growth can blind us to these realities. Counter-hegemonic discourses to growth-centered green economy under the headings of buen vivir, mainly in the global South, and degrowth, mainly in the global North, therefore merit attention.     

India and Vietnam compared: Family planning and everyda ylife

Abstract

In India and Vietnam, as in North America, the term “family planning” refers mainly to birth control. There is, however, a broader sense in which this term may be used, namely governmental planning for the welfare and happiness of families, and for democracy and social justice among their members. In this sense family planning is very prominent in Vietnam, but largely absent in India. It is in this sense that I prefer to use the term, although I will first discuss birth control in the overall context of planning for the size of families, as well as for the nation's population growth.