Trafficking of Ethiopian women to Europe – making choices,taking risks,and implications

ABSTRACT

This piece focuses on the Ethiopian women victims of trafficking – the agency of these women in the whole trafficking process, and issues of choice – ‘trying a chance’, or just taking a risk to get out of poverty or difficult social circumstances, considering that they are lured, tricked, coerced, or even forced into the hands of traffickers by a wide range of circumstances and people, including family and friends. Traffickers target girls with economic, social, and family problems. Most of the trafficking of women and girls from Ethiopia is carried out through the use of service ‘agencies’ and human smugglers who facilitate the process of migration through a number of routes. Many of those who use the ‘desert route’ often begin from Sudan to North Africa from where they cross to Europe. The data for this contribution were generated in a study – ‘Captured in Flight: Experiences of violence among African women in Sweden’ – funded by the Swedish crime prevention agency (Brottsoffermyndgheten). The research for the project has been carried out in Sweden, but the women whose case studies are presented here have been in the Middle East, Turkey, Italy, Finland, and Greece before coming to Sweden.     

Moral Disengagement and Building Resilience to Violent Extremism: An Education Intervention

This article reports on the development of an education intervention, the Beyond Bali Education Resource funded by the Australian Governments’ Building Community Resilience Grants of the Federal Attorney General's Department, that applies a conceptual framework grounded in moral disengagement theory. Beyond Bali is a five module program for schools that is specifically designed to build social cognitive resilience to violent extremism by engaging self-sanctions and preparing students to challenge the influence of violent extremism that can lead to moral disengagement. The theory of moral disengagement has been applied to the study of radicalization to violent extremism to explain how individuals can cognitively reconstruct the moral value of violence and carry out inhumane acts. The mechanisms of moral disengagement through which individuals justify violence, dehumanize victims, disregard the harmful consequences of violence and absolve themselves of blame have been used in the construction of violent extremist narratives. However, they have not been applied to the development of intervention strategies that aim to counter the radicalizing influences of violent extremist narratives.     

Recycling and expansion: an analysis of the World Bank agenda (1989–2014)

This article analyses the agenda of the World Bank after the Washington Consensus, arguing that it became more encompassing, politicised and intrusive. This agenda expanded and recycled itself since, in addition to liberalisation, privatisation and macroeconomic adjustment, it also advocated the wide-ranging reconstruction of the economy, the relationship between society and nature, the state, civil society and visions of the world and social practices from a neoliberal perspective. It is argued that the fight against poverty was incorporated by the institution, which functioned as an auxiliary mechanism for this liberalisation. The importance of the incorporation of New Institutional Economics for this expansion and recycling is highlighted.     

The International Harmonization Process of Public Sector Accounting in Portugal: The Perspective of Different Stakeholders

This paper investigates the reform of public accounting in Portugal through the IPSAS adoption highlighting the perception of different stakeholders. Two competing theories (NPM and the institutional theory) are used to understand public accounting changes within the Portuguese context. In general, different stakeholders agree with the favorable moment and the context of the reform. The context of financial crises and the great external pressures to cut public deficits and to improve the quality of financial information seem to be the most important factors to stimulate changes in public accounting. In addition, stakeholders recommend the use of different strategies to ensure success.     

The Pracademic and the Fed: The Leadership of Chairman Benjamin Bernanke

When President Barack Obama nominated Ben Bernanke for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve Board in August 2009, he emphasized Bernanke's “bold action and outside‐the‐box thinking” in preventing the recent financial collapse from turning into another Great Depression. While many saw this renomination as providing monetary policy stability and necessary institutional continuity during the crisis, Bernanke's “bold action” has generated robust criticism, mainly because Bernanke initiated fundamental reforms of traditional Fed practices. How has Bernanke's leadership style at the Fed evolved as the financial crisis of 2008–2009 has unfolded? Did his prior academic experience influence his decisions? What are the long‐term implications of Bernanke's innovative strategies for the Federal Reserve as an independent, powerful, policy making institution, traditionally one that possesses tremendous financial and political autonomy? If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject‐object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward … It's not just “intuition,” or unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It's the direct result of contact with basic reality … —Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises. —Benjamin Bernanke, 2009 ¹ 1 This statement was widely cited in media news outlets from NPR to Face the Nation and the New York Times. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/business/21paulson.html .
     

Suicide and changing values and beliefs in Ireland

This paper addresses some of the generalized theories explaining rising suicide rates in Ireland. The conclusion here is that linking suicide patterns to changing beliefs and values is problematic. Church attendance as well as adherence to traditional values remain high in this country compared to European levels, and variations in beliefs and values, especially rural/urban differences, do not fit with general explanations. Moreover, attitudes to value areas fluctuate in that justification for suicide--which showed an upward trend in the 1980s--was reversed in the 1990s, and this may have resulted from increased public focus and debate. Generalized explanations are unlikely to decipher complex phenomena such as suicidal behavior. Religious belief, if protective in relation to suicide, is unlikely to act alone. Social transformations have a differential impact depending on one's socio-economic positioning, which translates ideas of a general male vulnerability to suicide into focused areas of male distress.     

The Use of a Sequential Extraction Technique to Characterize Soil Trace Evidence Recovered from a Spade in a Murder Case in Brazil*

Soil trace evidence can be useful in criminal investigations. A homicide which had occurred in South Brazil been concluded through the courts with a guilty conviction. A spade with soil traces adhering to it was seized from the confessed killer's house, it having been established that it had been used to bury parts of the victim's body. In the context of this confession, it provided an opportunity to test a protocol of analysis and verify the potential of discriminate soil sample analysis in such case works. This allowed us to test the practice of sequential analysis which had been developed for forensic case works in Brazil, with three sequential extractions: (i) 0.2 mol/L pH 3.0 ammonium oxalate; (ii) dithionite–citrate–bicarbonate; and (iii) 0.5 mol/L NaOH. It was possible to predict the sequence of events related to the homicide by using the sequential extraction technique and to conclude that: (i) the A horizon soil from the burial location of the torso was found to be very similar to the soil samples which had been recovered from the spade, which was able to be established despite there only being a small amount of soil adhering to the spade; (ii) the location where the legs were buried contributed a low amount of soil adhering to the spade. Therefore, it is suggested that, where possible, sequential extractions should be prioritized from a questioned sample to best provide information about the likely sequence of contact places and this test likely scenarios and criminal events.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

Encouraging Writing on the White Walls: Co‐production in Museums and the Influence of Professional Bodies

Museums, along with other public sector organisations, have been urged to co‐produce. Co‐production may offer increased resourcing and greater effectiveness, and enhances public value through stronger relationships between government and citizens. However, co‐production, particularly that which involves collaboration with communities, is largely resisted by public sector organisations such as museums. This research examines the extent to which museums co‐produce and the role played by professional bodies in driving or inhibiting co‐production. It finds that the study of co‐production in museums reveals the influence of ‘institutional inertia’ and the limits to which professional bodies are able to ‘diffuse’ co‐production and change established professional practice.     

Building and Enhancing Efficacious Coparenting in Parenting Coordination

Parenting coordination is a dispute resolution process to assist the subset of separating/divorcing parents who remain entrenched in high conflict coparenting post‐separation/divorce. Based on factors known to impact positive child outcomes, its goals include assisting parents to protect children from their conflict and implementing a framework that will assist the child to have a good relationship with both parents. Despite significant efforts, parenting coordination often falls short of achieving its intended goals, which include not only healthy child adjustment but also efficacious coparenting, which is itself an important mediator and moderator of child outcomes. This article raises questions and concerns about the extent to which child outcomes may be limited if the goals of parenting coordination are limited to establishing and implementing a disengaged, parallel model of coparenting, while avoiding or giving up on efforts to build and enhance cooperative coparenting. Given preliminary findings indicating some parents note change here express dissatisfaction with the process and outcomes, it is necessary to consider whether the seemingly intractable subset of parents referred for parenting coordination might benefit from something more or different. We discuss two innovations: One aims to strengthen individual parent readiness and responsiveness and the other brings parents together in a child‐centered team‐building approach. Though cooperative coparenting is a challenging and unrealistic goal for some parents, further research is necessary to understand more fully which interventions help which families, when and in what manner.