Bystanders to Prevent Peer Sexual Violence: Understanding Patterns of Prosocial Behavior Over Time from Early to Later Adolescence

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Programs to prevent peer sexual violence that encourage positive bystander intervention are proliferating. Yet, little is known about how these prosocial...     

Don't help victims of crime if you don't have the time: Assessing support for Good Samaritan laws

Criminologists tend to study crimes that include active behaviors by offenders. Much less attention is given to inaction - or crimes that are defined by the absence of behaviors. A number of different crimes of omission, however, are included within state statutes. In recent times, a great deal of legislative attention has been directed towards whether Good Samaritan laws should be developed- laws that require bystanders to help those who are imperiled. This article describes a pilot study involving a survey of 134 “bystanders” to determine their attitudes about helping and their support for laws mandating that bystanders help crime victims. Results show that the sample overwhelmingly indicated that they would help others themselves, but there was mixed support for laws requiring that individuals help those in need. Support for Bad Samaritan laws was related to age and education. Implications are provided.     

From the Centre to the City: modernity,mobility and mixed‐descent Aboriginal domestic workers from central Australia

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a number of young Aboriginal women, of mixed descent, were brought down from Alice Springs in central Australia to the city of Adelaide, to work as domestic servants. Their mobility was a product of the colonizing project, inextricable from the very modernity that was discursively denied Aboriginal people at that time. Indeed, these domestic workers were young women whose journeys crossed all kinds of boundaries and frontiers, and whose very presence in the households of the colonizers was inherently destabilizing. While their journeys from the centre to the city have been all but invisible in feminist historiography of the frontier, this article argues the historical significance of a different kind of moving female frontier—one in which Aboriginal women made mobile by colonization were themselves active historical agents.     

Power tug of war: hegemonic and posthegemonic text control in Gustavo Sainz's Obsesivos días circulares (1969)

This article examines the novel Obsesivos días circulares (1969) by Gustavo Sainz from the point of view of the narrator's and characters' attempts to control the text. It analyses the distribution of influence on the text between the first-person narrator (Terencio) and one of the key characters (Leticia), and the changing locus of text control in the narrative line that includes Leticia. First, I examine Terencio's letters to Leticia and determine whether the text construct Leticia is created and manipulated through them. Secondly, I concentrate upon a section of Chapter 3 which appears to be a non-sequitur in the context of the narrative as a whole; it contains a vignette of a party where an apparently enigmatic exchange takes place between Terencio and Leticia. Finally, the article will address the changes in the narrator's character as a result of this encounter and the subsequent shift and split of the locus of text control between the narrator and one of the characters. Since the article explores various means of the distribution of text control, the theoretical foundation used here will include hegemonic masculinity and the relationship between hegemony and posthegemony in the context of text control.     

Colours of a revolution. Post-communist society,global capitalism and the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

The Ukraine crisis is usually treated either as Russia’s return to the old-style empire-building (the right) or as a clash of two imperialisms (the left). However, the essence of this crisis can be understood only from the dual perspective of the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the modern global capitalism. The most rotten sections of the Soviet bureaucracy moved the society to capitalism. However, this effort could secure only a peripheral (Ukraine) or at best semi-peripheral (Russia) position in the capitalist world-system as a provider of cheap raw materials. Meanwhile, modern capitalism led to world economic crisis. In these conditions, the capital of the core capitalist countries obviously decided to strengthen its control over the periphery, and Russia’s aspirations to secure its domination over the former Soviet space were in the way. To thwart them, Western powers decided to provoke a Ukraine crisis, exploiting Ukrainians’ justified indignation at the backwardness and corruption inherent in their own peripheral capitalism. Hence, a study of the properties of the post-Soviet societies and their place in the world hierarchy is the key to understanding the Ukraine crisis.     

Context Matters: Reactive and Proactive Bystander Action to Prevent Sexual and Dating Violence in High Schools

ABSTRACT

Given high rates of relationship violence among adolescents, there is a need to understand variables that influence adolescents’ helping behaviors to reduce risk for dating and sexual violence (reactive) and promote prevention before violence happens or risk factors are evident (proactive). The current paper examined individual and school variables related to greater actionism in a large sample of high school students. Baseline, cross-sectional data used in the current analyses were gathered before intervention as part of a prevention program evaluation across 25 high schools in New England from students in grades 9–12 (N= 3,404). Students who self-reported a greater number of proactive actions taken were students who identified as sexual minorities, had a history of victimization, and were in schools with supportive peer norms. The current findings suggest a model for prevention that might include training individuals and attending to school level variables.     

Confronting Law Affectively: Encounters of a Patpong Sex Tourist

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises.