The Law and Politics of Marital Rape in England, 1945–1994

This article examines the ending of the marital rape exemption in England. It describes the unresponsiveness of the political and legal establishment on the issue from the war to the mid-1970s. The arguments and campaigns that feminists and others advanced against the rule from the 1970s onwards are analysed, together with the political and legal reaction to this campaign. Next, the Parliamentary and legal debates over the rule in the 1980s are discussed: a story of inertia, even hostility, towards such campaigning. Finally, the article considers the demise of the exemption in the 1990s. The article presents a nuanced account of this change, which was both vigorously contested and highly contingent. It also suggests that legal protection from ‘the rapist who pays the rent’, and the campaign to achieve this, deserve appropriate recognition within the story of feminist activism in the late twentieth century.     

Psychologists as ‘the quiet ones with the power’: understanding indeterminate sentenced prisoners’ experiences of psychological risk assessment in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Prisoners serving indeterminate sentences in the United Kingdom do not know when or if they will be released from prison. Release and progression decisions are determined by the risk the ISP presents of reoffending. This makes the assessment of risk a high stakes business for ISPs. Whilst there is a large body of literature focused on prisoners’ general experiences of prison, there is an absence of specific empirical exploration of prisoners’ experiences of risk assessment. This paper aims to address this gap by reporting the results of a qualitative exploration of ISPs’ experiences of psychological risk assessment. Interviews with 10 ISPs were conducted and analysed using Grounded Theory methods. Analysis indicated that prisoners experienced the prison environment as characterised by violence, volatility and suffering. Psychological risk assessment is embedded within this emotionally and physically challenging context but also contributes to the experience of suffering. Within this context, prisoners felt stuck, powerless and out of control in relation to risk assessment, and experienced psychologists as untrustworthy yet powerful. Understanding prisoners’ experiences is the first step in resolving some of the long-reported difficulties in working relationships between psychologists and prisoners as well as making the process more procedurally just.     

Passport to Parenthood: Reproductive Pathways In and Out of Denmark

Denmark has become a destination for single women, lesbians, and heterosexual couples wanting donated sperm. At the moment, women from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, and the UK travel to Denmark. Simultaneously, waiting lists for donated eggs and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile Danish women and heterosexual couples to leave Denmark and travel to Spain, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Greece for egg donation. Informed by Donna Haraway’s notion of “the apparatus of bodily production”, Marcia Inhorn’s development of “reproductive flows”, and the use of Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis”, this paper explores the question: How do global reproductive pathways in and out of Denmark emerge when fertility travellers narrate, negotiate, and cross national borders to go through fertility treatment? Methodologically, we use a multi-sited and multi-modal approach centring on interviews with fertility travellers moving to and from Denmark in combination with ethnographic observations carried out in Danish and Spanish fertility clinics and an analysis of legal regulations. The paper concludes by discussing how the concept of reproductive pathways helps to theorize transnational movements of bodies and contributes to feminist scholarship on transnational reproductive travel.     

Omega-3 supplementation in young offenders: a randomized,stratified, double-blind,placebo-controlled,parallel-group trial

Journal of Experimental Criminology - To examine whether omega-3 supplementation reduces antisocial and aggressive behavior in offenders. In this randomized, double-blind trial, 145 young offenders...     

The Relational Dynamics of World Bank Survey Missions

This article demonstrates that World Bank internal learning has led to significant changes in how the organization interacts with government officials through survey missions. Reviewing evidence of institutional learning and associated changes in practice and focusing on the relational modes being manifest in technical assistance, the article identifies three main phases of World Bank survey missions: general survey missions (1940s–1960s), country assistance strategies (1990s–2000s), and country partnership frameworks (2010s). Overall, World Bank reviews have repeatedly highlighted the importance of non-hierarchical interactions between Bank staff and country officials. In recent years, practice has begun to catch up with these operational insights.     

In the twilight of democracy: public affairs consultants in Switzerland

• Modernization processes within different fields of political communication rise new challenges. Public affairs consultants are said to meet these challenges in both an effective and efficient way. Nevertheless, the rise of public affairs consultants also poses the question of their accordance with basic principles of modern democracy. Do public affairs consultants foster or impede the democratic process with respect to participation and representation? This question is answered on the basis of empirical data on public affairs consultants in Switzerland. The analysis points out three distinguishable fields of service: lobbying, political public relations and campaigning. Whereas campaigning has the strongest public‐orientation and emphasizes direct democratic institutions, the other two fields tend to be more in the backstage of the public. Results regarding public affairs services suggest a structural discrepancy between public and non‐public forms of communication, which according to normative democracy theory has to be judged critically. With view to clients, policy fields and party affiliations, the results show strong imbalances in interest representation, which seem to have mainly structural and economic reasons. In the conclusion, these results are discussed with view to the necessity of more transparency and a further professionalization.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.