Family structure,family attributes,and delinquency in a sample of low-income,minority males and females

A popular thesis in criminology links broken homes to juvenile delinquency. This thesis has been invoked to explain higher rates of delinquency among youth from low-income, minority families than among youth from mainstream backgrounds. The study reported here employs data collected at two points in time to assess the thesis that family structure is significantly associated with self-reported delinquency within a sample of black males and females from low-income families. The relationships between an array of family variables, including family structure, and each of four types of self-reported delinquency are examined in analysis conducted separately for males and females. Findings indicate that few family factors are significant for delinquency and family structure is of minimal importance for the types of delinquency examined. The results differ for males and females. These findings raise serious questions about the cogency of the broken-home thesis of delinquency to explain delinquency among nonmainstream groups in our society.Research reported here was supported in part by NIMH Grant 1 RPI MH33488-01A1 and conducted in part under the auspices of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan. Views expressed by the author do not represent official positions of those agencies.The author received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Georgia in 1981. Her research interests at present include the effects of social stratification processes on delinquency and crime, particularly the effects of such social correlates of crime as race, sex, and social class.     

Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Women's Rights,Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu

There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes.     

‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.     

Sex-Based Occupational Segregation in U.S. State Bureaucracies, 1987–97

Is the extent of sex-based occupational segregation in U.S. state bureaucracies related to agency policy missions? Drawing on arguments by Lowi (1985), we contend that levels of sex-based occupational segregation in state bureaucracies vary depending on whether an agency's policy mission is distributive, regulatory, or redistributive. We employ data on the distribution of administrative and professional employees by sex in several types of state agencies across all 50 states for 1987–97. Our findings indicate high levels of occupational segregation among administrative cadres in agencies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments; however, professional workforces in these agencies have become less gender segregated over time. We find no evidence of occupational segregation among administrative and professional workforces in redistributive agencies. We argue that researchers need to examine the relationship between glass walls and other kinds of sex-based employment impediments, such as glass ceilings.