The Toleration and Erotization of Rape: Interpreting Charles Perrault s Le Petit Chaperon Rouge within Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Jurisprudence

Fairy tales encapsulate the enduring myths of a culture, encoding the traditions and the moral values by which we like to think we live. (Garton 289) Ce que le monde fournit au mythe, c est un r el historique, d fini, si loin qu il faille remonter, par la fa on dont les hommes l ont produit ou utilis ; et ce que le mythe restitue, c est une image naturelle de ce r el. […] Le mythe ne nie pas les choses, sa fonction est au contraire d en parler: simplement, il les purifie, les innocente, les fonde en nature et en ternit , il leur donne une clart qui n est pas celle d explication, mais celle du constat. (Barthes, Paris, 230) What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality. […] Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. (Barthes, New York, 142-43)     

Evaluation of the Education Sector Enhancement Program in Barbados

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the education production function literature, we examine the short-run impact of comprehensive education reforms in Barbados on primary school student outcomes. Using a variety of specifications to test the robustness of our results, we find modest and mixed changes in student test scores. Our findings are discussed in the context of management challenges that resulted from the need to coordinate a multi-faceted project in a rapidly developing nation; alignment of goals and schedules of two multi-national development banks, the Ministry of Education, Youth Affairs and Sports (MES), and the Government of Barbados; and, a very rapidly changing information technology environment that led, in part, to changes in planned capital improvements in schools, equipment needs, and had implications for teacher training.     

Bureaucratic politics and the translation of movement agendas

Research on social movement outcomes focuses on the publicly visible stages of government policymaking. It rarely opens the black box of government's translation of movement demands beyond the agenda‐setting stage and before their materialization into legislative bills. Using a bureaucratic politics perspective, we suggest that bureaucrats play a central role in translating movement agendas into concrete problems and policy solutions, which they tend to link with their bureaus' missions and existing programs. We further suggest that relative consensus among bureaucrats when coupled with politicians' disinclination to intervene in the translation process tends to advantage conservative interpretations of movement agendas. Conversely, interbureau confrontation and political intervention are associated with more radical policy responses. Empirically, we examine the responses of the Israeli government to the large‐scale mobilization, in 2011, surrounding the rising costs of housing and living. We build on archival research and interviews with senior bureaucrats located in 11 central‐government ministries.