Reaching African American Battered Women: Increasing the Effectiveness of Advocacy

This study reports findings from interviews with 242, primarily African American, battered women in Detroit. Most of the women rated domestic violence advocacy as very or somewhat helpful. Satisfaction with police and receiving referrals from the legal system were significantly associated with ratings of advocates helpfulness. Receiving information, being emotionally supported, and having advocates readily available and accessible were the most common reasons why women rated advocates as helpful. Women who gave advocates low helpfulness ratings described them as unavailable, unsympathetic, or ineffective in legally sanctioning abusers. Less than half of the women who experienced severe violence in the focal incident reported that advocates helped them with safety planning, and there was a low rate of follow-up on referrals provided by advocates. This analysis suggests that advocacy can be satisfying for urban, African American women, but more intensive services should be provided to make a significant contribution to their safety.     

Calculating and Believing: Ideological Norms in the Cradle of Utility Maximization

An individualist approach to political phenomena is not necessarily an economic approach. We can assume that beliefs and commitments as well as selfishness motivate individuals. Ideology provides a basis for individual choice for policy makers and for citizens and is as much a micro-foundation as narrow “self-interest.” Employing a “least-likely” case approach this paper shows that we can find legitimacy and norm-sensitive behavior in the cradle of utility maximization, the firm. In this paper I will lay out some puzzles found in the general areas of business, politics, and policy-making and show how the particular piece of behavior can be understood within the logic of ideological frameworks and the normative acceptability or legitimacy of actions. The purpose is more an “analytical narrative” than a systematic empirical investigation. It suggests the critical importance of examining the normative as well as the self-interest foundation of behavior. To that end, the empirical context of the discussion is provided by business social responsibility, by business participation in elections, by a snapshot of an ideologically driven political career, and by an antibusiness policy decision. The narrative moves from the generosity of business corporations, to foreign-owned corporations' political activity decisions in the host country, to Mrs. Thatcher and the median voter, and finally to the decision to abolish the slave trade.     

The Impact of Distributive and Procedural Justice on Social Service Workers

The concepts of fairness and justice are embodied within the organizing principle of social justice. Although social justice is a primary focus of social work, social service workers are not always treated with fairness by their own employers. The results from a survey of 255 social service employees from a variety of agencies in Northwest Ohio indicate that distributive justice and procedural justice, two dimensions of organizational justice, are both significant predictors of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, with procedural justice having two to three times the impact of distributive justice.     

Sex of Spouse Abuse Offender and Directionality of Abuse as Predictors of Personal Distress,Interpersonal Functioning,and Perceptions of Family Climate

This study examines perceptions of personal distress, interpersonal functioning and family climate reported by men and women involved in unidirectional versus bidirectional spouse abuse. Participants were 7253 offenders treated by the USAF Family Advocacy Program from 1988 to 1996. Over a quarter of the sample is female and included among them were both unidirectional and bidirectional offenders. Grouping factors for the analysis are gender, directionality of aggression, history of abuse in childhood, history of recidivism, and severity of aggression. Females and offenders raised in abusive homes reported more negative perceptions across the measured spheres. Unidirectional abusers reported more personal distress, but bidirectional abuse had more conflicted family climates. Few differences were noted in offenders' perceptions based on the severity of their abuse or their history of repeat offenses. Tests for interactions yielded no reliable pattern indicating that grouping factors were related to outcomes in an additive fashion.     

Women’s Productive Role and Marital Violence in Bangladesh

This study assesses the role of womens participation in productive activities in reducing the risk of marital violence. Data were collected from villages where numerous nongovernment organizations (NGOs) had microcredit-based income generating programs for the poor. Both the survey and in-depth interviews were used to collect information from a randomly selected sample of 500 currently married women aged < 50 years living in 70 villages in 10 districts of Bangladesh. Findings reveal that the prevalence of marital violence such as mental torture and physical assault had negative association with womens participation in economic activities. Situation that invoked violence against women had most often been their failure of performing expected role in the household. Womens productive roles not only improved womens position in their household but also significantly reduced both mental torture and physical assault against them. The paper argues that participation in productive activities has the potential to bring a significant reduction in the risk of marital violence among women in the poor community.     

Significance of Family Risk Factors in Development of Childhood Animal Cruelty in Adolescent Boys with Conduct Problems

The literature suggests that physical child abuse, sexual child abuse, paternal alcoholism, paternal unavailability, and domestic violence may be significant in development of childhood animal cruelty. Two groups of early- to late adolescent boys (CTA and N-CTA) in residential treatment for conduct disorder were compared in the current study on histories of these family risk factors. The adolescents in Group 1 were comprised of boys who had conduct problems with documented histories of animal cruelty (n = 50; CTA). Group 2 consisted of adolescent boys (n = 50; N-CTA) with conduct problems, but without documented histories of animal cruelty. Results showed that children in the CTA group had significantly greater histories of physical and/or sexual child abuse and domestic violence in comparison to children in the N-CTA group. These results suggest that physical and/or sexual abuse to a child, and exposure to domestic violence, may be significant in the development of childhood animal cruelty.     

Am I Respected or Not?: Inclusion and Reputation as Issues in Group Membership

Six studies examined why and when respect vs. disrespect influences people’s emotions, self-worth, and behavior. Following relational models of justice, we argued that people use groups to derive information about the social self and as such value respect information because it indicates (a) whether or not they are accepted, and (b) how their status within the group is evaluated. These two identity concerns were operationalized by means of reinforcing people’s desire to belong (i.e., the identity concern of acceptance) and concern for reputation (i.e., the identity concern of one’s status evaluation). In line with predictions, the first three studies demonstrated that respect matters only among those whose concerns to belong are made salient. Studies 4–6 further showed that respect only influenced reactions among those who have strong concerns for reputation. It is concluded that respect communicates information relevant to people’s identity concerns—i.e., inclusion and reputation.     

Postmodern Global Governance and the Critical Legal Project<Superscript>1</Superscript>

The crisis of the New Deal constitutions and the shift to ?biopolitical’ forms of global governance in the late 20th century have dramatically disturbed the epistemological groundings and the political locations of contemporary critical legal movements. In epistemological terms, the emergence of the ?biopolitical’ has rendered transparent the impossibility of the binaries that have thus far sustained critical legal theories. With the divide between ?inside’ and ?outside’, ?base’ and ?superstructure’, ?state’ and ?society’, ?society’ and ?law’, no longer operative, critical legal movements have to outgrow their legal realist ?roots’. Could deconstruction provide here a viable option? Confronted by an order of governance that is now both ?global’ and ?imperial’, critical legal movements cannot recover a politics through such ephemeral theories. Rather, the future of critical legal movements must be located in an affirmation and promulgation of radically new constitutional principles which would confront the realities, but also harness the emancipatory potential, of the ?biopolitical’ horizon [eds.].     

Fictions of Origin: Law,Abjection, Difference

This article seeks to offer a critique of what it terms ‘Law-as-Logos’ (the Western conceptualisation of ideal Law in terms of pure ‘Presence’) from a perspective that combines some of the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, deconstructive and feminist theory with recent developments in critical legal studies. The essay seeks to offer a re-theorisation of law, not as ‘Logos’ but as ‘difference’. The law, it will be argued, exists only as that arbitrary point of demarcation between the space of the sacred and the space of the abject and, to re-orient psychoanalytic readings of abjection towards a Derridean understanding of differance, the law may be articulated as the ‘trace’ that makes ‘presence’ possible whilst at the same time threatening its total erasure. Law-as-difference thus becomes maddening in its capacity to establish and erase boundaries and the second part of the essay examines this phenomenon particularly in the context of the relation between law-as-difference and the textuality of a Law that requires to be ‘put into writing’. It argues, in conclusion, that a theorisation of law-as-difference raises inevitably the question of the relation of ‘woman’ to the law and it ends with a re-positioning of the figure of Antigone as a means of interrogating the relation of the ‘feminine’ within the Western symbolic economy to the scandalous impurity of law-as-difference.¹ P. Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1990), 268