School-Based Violent Victimization in Turkey: An Examination of the Cross-National Generality of Lifestyle-Routine Activities and Self-Control Theories

ABSTRACT

The authors examined victimization among Turkish school students as a function of individual lifestyles and routine activities, perceived school guardianship/control, and low self-control. In doing so, they aimed to provide a much-needed explanatory test of school victimization in Turkey while also offering an important test of the cross-cultural generalizability of self-control and opportunity-based theories of victimization. Logistic regression models of violent victimization were estimated using a subsample of over 900 Turkish school students. Regression coefficients were estimated for 20 datasets generated through a multivariate sequential imputation technique, with results then pooled. Lifestyle measures associated with school-based victimization included in-school delinquency, delinquent self-cutting, gang membership, and number of gang friends. Perceived school guardianship/control was also related to victimization, as was low self-control. The authors found little evidence that the effects of low self-control were mediated or moderated by lifestyle characteristics or perceived school security. Findings suggest that the propositions of lifestyle-routine activities and self-control theories regarding victimization risk can largely be generalized to Turkish high school students. Findings imply that school-based victimization prevention in Turkey should target individual-level criminogenic traits and lifestyles as well as risky environmental school characteristics.     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Forum Internum</Emphasis> Revisited: Considering the Absolute Core of Freedom of Belief and Opinion in Terms of Negative Liberty,Authenticity, and Capability

Human rights theory generally conceptualizes freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief as well as freedom of opinion and expression, as offering absolute protection in what is called the forum internum. At a minimum, this is taken to mean the right to maintain thoughts in one’s own mind, whatever they may be and independently of how others may feel about them. However, if we adopt this stance, it seems to imply that there exists an absolute right to hold psychotic delusions. This article takes the position that this conclusion is ethically problematic from the perspective of psychiatric treatment and the rights of persons with psychosis. The article reflects on this particular challenge and sets forth an understanding of freedom in the forum internum that might apply to situations where for various reasons it is not, necessarily accurate to maintain that persons have an absolute right to their own thoughts. For the purpose of proposing such an understanding, the article engages with current debates within human rights theory and political philosophy and analyzes discussions about psychotic delusions and the way in which involuntary treatment is justified. Based on this analysis, this article in turn conceptualizes freedom in the forum internum as ‘negative liberty’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘capability’. This article suggests that when forum internum is redefined as encompassing a right to certain internal capabilities, the right remains meaningful for persons with psychotic delusions as well.     

Adoption and Victorian culture

In 1888, evangelical, educator and feminist Constance Maynard adopted Effie Anthon, a six year old girl from a Salvation Army orphanage. Her mother, Rosabianca Fasulo was an unmarried, Italian woman recently “rescued” by the Salvation Army. Maynard anticipated that Effie would one day join her at her college but she met none of the expectations for her. She entered domestic service but fell ill with tuberculosis and died in a workhouse in 1915. This is one particular case history of an adoption when the practice was not yet formalized but small numbers began to adopt children unknown to them. It tentatively opens up the history of adoption in Victorian Britain. It also illuminates some broader questions about family ties, the meanings associated with motherhood, and how the body and character formation were understood.     

The limits of policy

This article uses public documents and first-hand accounts of late 19th and early 20th centuries child life to examine attempts by public policymakers in the United States and New Zealand to change the quality of rural child life in those countries through compulsory schooling and other related measures. These attempts, however, largely failed due to the demands of the farming economy and the unwillingness of public officials to go to extraordinary lengths on behalf of farm children, as opposed to urban children. Rural children's lives would be changed, not by policy, but by technological developments and the vagaries of the farm economy.     

Girl Farm Labour and Double-shift Schooling in The Gambia: The Paradox of Development Intervention

This article examines the intensification of Gambian girls’ domestic and farm labour contributions as a result of the introduction of double-shift schooling. Drawing on fieldwork among female farmers and their daughters in Brikama the article puts forth the following arguments: doubleshift schooling facilitates the intensification and increased appropriation of surplus value from girls’ household and farm labour because girls are more readily able to meet gendered labour obligations that are central to the moral economy of the household and to the demands of agrarian production; secondly, double-shift schooling highlights the paradoxical nature of development intervention where, on the one hand, legislation and policy call for a reduction in child labour by increasing access to school and, on the other, neo-liberal educational policy serves to facilitate the intensification of girls’ domestic and farm labour. This paper maintains that the intensification of girls’ workmust be placed within a wider context where children’s — particularly girls — cheap, flexible and/or unremunerated labour is central to the functioning of local and global processes of accumulation.     

The Criminalization of Aliens: Regulating Foreigners

Intergroup contact and conflict is inevitable in the context of global economic competition and geopolitical interests. Immigrant and migratory groups have particularly been subjected to unequal treatment by members of dominant host groups, generally as a means of promoting and protecting their own economic and political interests. Immigrants often serve as a dependent and secondary labor force, useful within fluctuating cycles of labor shortage, economic crises, and economic prosperity. Likewise, criminalization is one tool that perpetuates notions of “otherness,” which in turn maintains immigrant minorities as a secondary labor force; and justifies penal punishment of them. For instance, in the United States, Chicanos and Mexican immigrants have been exploited as secondary labor, and have also been more likely than many other groups to be swept up in the Criminal Justice System. Drawing on neo-Marxist perspectives and postcolonial notions of “otherness”, this paper examines the relationship between incarceration of foreigners and economic conditions, economic threat, population change, and otherness. As hypothesized, country level data suggests that factors such as a free market economy, population change, economic competition, and a concentration of immigrants in the population are related to the level of imprisonment of foreigners. Implications for further research are also discussed.