The Changing Relationships of Co-wives Over Time in Rural Southern Uganda

Co-wives are often portrayed both as being rivals for their husband's affections and resources as well as collaborators in managing the family. I explore a further dimension: historical time. The life trajectories of individual women in rural Uganda show how co-wife relationships are established, change, endure or end. In addition to ageing, which plays a part in women's changing conjugal arrangements, political upheavals and HIV and AIDS have also had a profound impact on their lives, affecting not only their relationship and attitude towards their husbands but also towards their children, as well as each other.     

Charitable Choice Implementation: What Public Managers Should Know About Public Opinion and the Potential Impact of Government Funding on Private Giving

Charitable Choice, a cornerstone of President Bush's domestic policy agenda, provides that faith-based organizations (FBOs) will have an opportunity to compete for government contracts. However, few empirical studies examine the impact of public funding to FBOs on individual charitable giving to FBOs. Using public opinion survey data and multivariate analysis to examine this relationship, we find that most financial supporters of FBOs report that they would not change their giving behavior in the wake of increased government funding to FBOs, contrary to the much- established crowding-out hypothesis. The policy and management implications of these findings are discussed.     

Antitrust policy in a hostile environment: institution building in venezuela's procompetencia

Theories of bureaucracy in Latin America generally stress institutional weakness, political volatility and the politicized nature of government agencies. One product of market liberalization in Venezuela was the creation of the anti-monopoly agency called “Procompetencia”, which managed to survive a change of government and a move toward interventionist, anti-market mechanisms hostile to its survival. The strategy and tactics of this agency are reviewed with the objective of detecting bureaucratic responses to threat and successful efforts to survive. Some lessons are derived for infusing more stability into weak institutions.     

New Zealand: Public Registers Report

In September 2007, the Commonwealth Law Bulletin (Vol. 33, No. 3), published an article on the New Zealand Law Commission’s Issues Paper on Public Registers (IP 3, 2007), including the four options for reform that the Commission was putting forward for consideration by interested persons.

The Law Commission’s Public Registers Report ¹ 1 New Zealand Law Commission’s Public Registers Report, NZLC R 101 2008. (the Report) has now been published, completing stage 2 of the Law Commission’s four stage Privacy Review.

It is available on the Law Commission’s website at http://www.lawcom.govt.nz.     

Colonialism and the health transition: Aboriginal Australians and poor whites compared, Victoria, 1850–1985

This paper presents the results of the first two longitudinal historical cradle-to-grave datasets constructed in Australia: the Aboriginal population of the state of Victoria, reconstituted backwards using genealogical research and vital registrations, 1835–1930; and an impoverished European population born at the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857–1900 and traced until 1985. It investigates the hypothesis that the health transition in indigenous people was different from that of the dominant non-indigenous population. Both of these studied sub-populations were highly stressed, resulting in high infant mortality and persistent tuberculosis mortality. The Aboriginal population suffered the additional burdens of racism and social exclusion, even though after the passage of the 1886 ‘Half-Castes Act’, the majority of Aboriginal Victorians were legally ‘white’. The impact of that legislation and the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal Victorians from federal entitlements in the twentieth century sent the Aboriginal health transition into reverse. The contrasting fates of poor whites and ‘unofficial blacks’ during the health transition demonstrate the health burdens of inequality and racial discrimination, and reveal that ‘the gap’ in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is a historical product of long-term government policy and exclusion from citizenship and its entitlements.     

Family Relationships and Family Justice in Europe: Changes and Challenges

The huge diversity in family life and living arrangements across the globe has far‐reaching implications for the ways in which families are supported and family justice is administered. Given the serious concerns about the number of relationships that break down and the potentially detrimental impacts on children and their parents, it is essential to understand the triggers threatening the stability of couple relationships, including the financial stresses caused by the recent global recession and accompanying fiscal austerity. Since family relationships are central to the psychological, emotional, social, and economic well‐being of adults and children everywhere, policy makers and practitioners should collaborate across international boundaries to develop interventions that promote family well‐being, secure the best interests of children, and ensure the conditions and systems in which families can thrive.     

Cross-national differences in female offending and criminal justice processing

The purpose of this study is to assess whether four key theoretical perspectives on female criminality—emancipation, economic marginalisation, net-widening, and modernisation—explain female representation in the criminal justice system equally well for both developed and developing countries and to assess whether the same factors that can explain women’s levels of criminal offending can also explain their representation in subsequent stages of criminal justice processing. Analyzing pooled data for 37 highly developed and 38 less developed countries from 2003 to 2013, the results provide support for modernisation, emancipation, and net-widening theories, but not for economic marginalisation theory. Emancipation and net-widening theories have more explanatory power for more developed countries than less and they can explain women’s representation at different levels of criminal justice processing.     

“Experts by Experience”: The Involvement of Service Users and Families in Designing and Implementing Innovations in Family Justice

Drawing on international research, policy, and practice, this article explores what is meant by service user involvement, how it has developed, and how it has been implemented across different areas of practice. Using examples from across the health and social care fields, it reflects on how the learning from other areas of practice in which service user involvement has been successful may be applied to the family justice field. The arguments presented highlight the value of taking a bottom‐up approach in designing and implementing innovations in family justice, which would embrace the views of family members, including children, as ‘service users.’ It is important, however, to balance both the challenges and the opportunities offered by involving those who are ‘experts by experience’ in the family justice processes, in order to lead to improved services and experiences.