Automatic Encoding of Ambiguous Child Behavior in High and Low Risk for Child Physical Abuse Parents

Recent theory and research suggest that physically abusive parenting behavior might be understood as originating from: 1) greater accessibility of hostile/negative schema, and/or 2) lower accessibility of benign/positive schema. This study examined whether parents at high and low risk for child physical abuse (CPA) differed in the extent to which they spontaneously encoded ambiguous caregiving contexts in negative versus positive terms. Twenty-five high and forty-one low risk for CPA parents were asked to memorize a set of sentences that described ambiguous caregiving situations. After a brief delay, participants were asked to recall the sentences. During recall, cues were given (e.g., negative and positive words) to facilitate recall. According to the cued-recall paradigm, to the extent that recall was facilitated by negative/positive cues, it was inferred that negative/positive meaning was activated when the ambiguous sentences were encoded. Although all parents tended to recall more information in response to negative relative to positive cues, the influence of cue type on recall was greater for high CPA risk parents. That is, high, compared to low, CPA risk parents obtained significantly higher recall difference scores (M = 4.6 versus M = 2.3); with higher recall difference scores indicating greater recall in response to negative relative to positive cues. Present findings are consistent with the proposition that high and low CPA risk parents differ in how they spontaneously encode information in ambiguous caregiving contexts.     

Violence as Obscenity: Offensiveness and the First Amendment

Many efforts have been made to restrict minors' access to violent media content basing the definition of the content to be restricted on the legal definition of obscenity, which requires the content to be offensive. Without exception, such restrictions have been found to violate the First Amendment, partly because the laws have defined the violence to be restricted with reference to its offensiveness, while the purpose of the laws has been to protect children from the harms believed to be caused by exposure to such content. This has created a problematic lack of fit between the content to be restricted and the purpose of restrictions. This article examines whether restricting minors' access to offensive violent media content to protect them from its offensiveness makes it any more likely such restrictions will survive First Amendment scrutiny.     

Shared Services in Australian Local Government: Rationale, Alternative Models and Empirical Evidence

Widespread enthusiasm amongst Australian policy elites for structural reform in local government has evaporated as disappointing outcomes of council amalgamation programs became evident. As a consequence, emphasis has now shifted towards shared serviced models as a means of enhancing service provision and reducing costs. However, a disturbing feature of the current debate on shared services has been the absence of a well-articulated economic and political rationale for this form of service delivery, a lack of analysis of alternative models of shared service provision and a neglect of available empirical evidence. This article seeks to remedy these deficiencies by considering the analytical foundations of shared local services, conducting a review of alternative models as vehicles for shared services and evaluating available empirical evidence.     

The Elite Politics of Media Advocacy in Human Rights

ABSTRACT

Advocacy nongovernmental organizations based in the North adopt digital tools to bypass repressive regimes, raise awareness amongst global publics, sustain grassroots activists in the South, and engage in political action. Social media was expected to offer innovative platforms for mobilizing participants to act on behalf of “distant others.” But the practices of some organizations signal that something else is at play. Rather than empower individuals, digital campaigns reify elite politics, using outsider strategies to support insider lobbying. Through communicative processes of mediatization, organizations pay homage to the existence of a movement, but only afford thin forms of participation. Using the framework of media advocacy to explore Human Rights Watch and the Enough! Project, we argue that social media becomes a top-down platform that exacerbates the elite design of organizations, enabling them to assert legitimacy for political actions, while disingenuously marketing themselves as democratic with bottom-up credibility.     

Sexual orientation and gender identity in Nepal: Rights promotion through UN development assistance

United Nations (UN) development agencies have been actively working to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights in Nepal, despite having no official mandate to work on these rights. This presents an important example of how such agencies are able to act independently to set their own agenda and illustrates the “open system” approach to international bureaucracies. It also suggests that these agencies have the potential to be important instruments of LGBTI rights promotion outside the traditional human rights machinery such as the Human Rights Council and various committees. Based on extensive interview research as well as documentary evidence, this article traces the origins of the UN's engagement with LGBTI rights. It then discusses the work of UN agencies in South Asia, and Nepal in particular, focusing on the UN Development Programme, the UN Children's Fund, UNAIDS, and UN Women. Political changes in Nepal since 2006 have opened it up for change in its approach to these rights, and UN agencies have worked actively to change both legal norms and social attitudes. The conclusion considers whether these lessons are applicable to other states and whether the UN development machinery must be considered an important ally in pursuing LGBTI rights worldwide.     

Soy states: resource politics,violent environments and soybean territorialization in Paraguay

Soy production has radically transformed the social, ecological, territorial and political form of Paraguay. This paper traces waves of sojización – soy territorialization – to analyze how soybean resource politics are changing environmental governance and state–society relations in Paraguay. I argue that political, social and ecological ruptures mark each territorialization: agrarian reforms that reconfigured land control, the introduction of genetically modified soy varieties, and most recently a ‘parliamentary coup’ preceded by spectacular acts of violence against campesinos. The violent rejection of post-neoliberal politics espoused by former President Fernando Lugo marked the beginning of a third wave of sojización defined by the increasing influence of the soy industry, campesino and indigenous dispossession, and violent environments. Paraguay reveals unexpected consequences and contradictions of the Left Turn in Latin America. The country’s experiment with post-neoliberal politics created conditions that eventually broadened and deepened neoliberalizations of nature. The term ‘soy states’ indicates three conjunctures of soy production and how they reconfigure state–society relations and conceptions of ‘the state’ in Paraguay vis-à-vis soy production. My arguments draw from extensive qualitative field research and applied work in Paraguay coupled with secondary source analysis, contributing to debates about neoliberalizations of nature, plant territoriality, agrarian political ecology and state formation.     

Incarceration in the Household: Academic Outcomes of Adolescents with an Incarcerated Household Member

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, yet there is relatively little information on how the removal of these adults from households impacts the youth who are left behind. This study used a child-centered lens to examine the impact of incarceration on the school outcomes of youth who resided with a family member or family associate who was incarcerated prior to the youth’s 18th birthday. We used data from 11 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth: Child and Young Adult (n?=?3,338, 53?% female). Initial analyses indicated that youth who experienced a household members’ incarceration evidenced more socioeconomic challenges, more frequent home adversities, and lower cognitive skills relative to youth who did not experience a household members’ incarceration. Results also revealed that youth who had experienced a household member’s incarceration were more likely to report extended absence from school and were less likely to graduate from high school relative to those youth who did not experience a household members’ incarceration. Counter to our hypotheses, results revealed the incarceration of an extended family member being in the household was the only relation significantly associated with worse school outcomes. Plausibly, families who allow non-immediate criminally involved individuals to reside in the household are experiencing a more pervasive chaotic home environment than those with a parent or sibling incarcerated. Our study suggests that efforts to address the needs of children with incarcerated parents need to be widened to those who experience the loss of any household member due to incarceration.