Using core competency frameworks to explore the needs of Kenyan youth workers

Since youth work is a relatively new career path, there is debate regarding the competencies necessary to advance overall professional practice. This debate is particularly relevant in African countries, such as Kenya, with a growing number of youth in need of assistance. The purpose of this study was to identify the competencies needed to meet the goals and challenges of Kenyan youth workers, and assess whether these competencies align with prominent youth development competency frameworks. Data were collected from Kenyan youth workers related to the challenges, goals, and barriers they faced. These data were matched to two competency frameworks. Four themes emerged: (1) programs management competencies are most important; (2) holistically developed youth is a primary goal; (3) differences exist in how competency frameworks map to Kenyan youth workers; and (4) all competencies are not equal in the view of youth workers. Implications for program and system development are discussed.     

Problem solving and youth violence: an evaluation of the Boston Gun Project

The Boston Gun Project is a problem-solving policing initiativeaimed at reducing homicide victimization among young peoplein the city of Boston. It represented an innovative partnershipbetween researchers and practitioners to assess the city's youthhomicide problem and implement an intervention intended to havepowerful impacts in the near term. In early 1996, a workinggroup representing a variety of law enforcement and social serviceagencies implemented an intervention that strategically respondedto gang violence, focused enforcement efforts on gun trafficking,and emphasized communication of the strategy to generate deterrence.The intervention is associated with a 60% decline in youth homicidevictimization (i.e., two fewer victims per month). There aresmaller declines in other measures of violence. The declinein youth homicide is sharp and occurs coincident with the introductionof the intervention. Competing hypotheses appear unable to accountfor the decline.     

Maintaining Popular Support for the Chinese Communist Party: The Influence of Education and the State-Controlled Media

Literature on public opinion in China suggests that public support for the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is quite high. No matter how survey questions regarding regime support are phrased, the results are the same. The obvious question arises: how does an authoritarian regime, such as the PRC, garner the support of the vast majority of its citizens? I argue that the exposure-acceptance model best explains the high level of public support in China. This model suggests that educated citizens, who are politically aware, display high levels of political support within an authoritarian regime, but citizens at the highest levels of education are more resistant to political messages and tend to have lower levels of support. However, in a developing country such as China there are unequal educational opportunities for rural and urban citizens. This has a significant influence on how education affects regime support. Despite lower levels of support among the most educated citizens, the CCP still manages to maintain a high level of popular support through strict control over the media and education system.     

Gangsters or Gandhians? The Political Sociology of the Maoist Insurgency in India

This article combines concepts from political sociology with evidence from newspaper reports, insurgent and state documents, and ethnographic studies in order to understand the nature of the Maoist insurgency in India. The first section argues that the insurgency should be conceptualized as a state building enterprise rather than organized crime. It demonstrates that both insurgent violence and fundraising serve, on the whole, the collective interests of the state building enterprise – i.e., to consolidate insurgent control in their base areas – rather than the private interests of individual insurgents. The second section seeks to understand how Maoist state builders undermine and fragment the Indian state’s monopoly of the means of violence and administration in areas where they operate. In some areas the state is totally absent, while in others the state forms alliances with the insurgents at the local level in order to maintain the semblance of a sovereign and democratic ruler.     

Expanding the Conversation: Multiplier Effects From a Deliberative Field Experiment

Do formal deliberative events influence larger patterns of political discussion and public opinion? Critics argue that only a tiny number of people can participate in any given gathering and that deliberation may not remedy—and may in fact exacerbate—inequalities. We assess these criticisms with an experimental design merging a formal deliberative session with data on participants’ social networks. We conducted a field experiment in which randomly selected constituents attended an online deliberative session with their U.S. Senator. We find that attending the deliberative session dramatically increased interpersonal political discussion on topics relating to the event. Importantly, after an extensive series of moderation checks, we find that no participant/nodal characteristics, or dyadic/network characteristics, conditioned these effects; this provides reassurance that observed, positive spillovers are not limited to certain portions of the citizenry. The results of our study suggest that even relatively small-scale deliberative encounters can have a broader effect in the mass public, and that these events are equal-opportunity multipliers.     

Australian Internment Life Stories: Recapturing Salvatore Ragonesi between the Public Record and Family Memories

Since the Archives Act of 1983 Australia's Second World War internees have had access to their wartime files, yet little attention has focused on whether they and their families have consulted these records, or on their responses to them. From the early 2000s historians and archivists began discussing the need for combining private oral testimony with official records as part of a wider discourse on the importance of life stories for deepening knowledge about the past. This article explores the impact of a father's official internment records on his son, through the son's sharing of memories, lived experience and his reactions to official documents, in order to provide a more complete story of his father's internment and life than either the public record or the oral testimony alone can produce. We argue that Sam Ragonesi's oral testimony, especially concerning his encounter with Salvatore Ragonesi's official records, contributes to a greater shared understanding of experiences of war on the home front by integrating social, cultural and family dimensions hidden from Salvatore's public history. In this way intergenerational experiences help both to contest the collective image of internment and create a more complex picture of the War.     

Asia-Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications’ industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.     

Correction to: Feminist Judgments Projects at the Intersection

Feminist Legal Studies - In the original publication of the article, errors in the production stages resulted in Vanessa Munro being listed as sole author.