The psychological impact of stalking on female undergraduates.

This study examined the psychological impact of stalking upon female undergraduates, a population previously determined to experience a surprising stalking prevalence rate. Despite common understanding that stalking has deleterious effects, there have been no previous efforts to systematically assess them with standardized measures. Thirty-six female stalking victims were compared with 43 females who had been harassed and 48 controls. Psychological impact was assessed with the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Scale, the Symptom Checklist-90-R, and the Self-Report Interpersonal Trust Scale. Stalked subjects endorsed significantly more PTSD symptoms and with greater severity than the harassed or control subjects. Stalked subjects also had significantly higher scores on several subscales of the SCL-90, and had significantly higher positive symptom totals and distress indices.     

(Re)entry from the Bottom Up: Case Study of a Critical Approach to Assisting Women Coming Home from Prison

Despite decades of critical reframings, policy and practice on prisoner (re)entry often remains situated within a framework of individual responsibility that fails to acknowledge the structural drivers of criminalization. Attending to individual symptoms rather than root social, political and economic causes, such approaches may ultimately reinforce the inequalities and injustices that fuel imprisonment. This article presents a case study of an alternative approach. It examines A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization in South Los Angeles, California, that offers housing and support to women coming home from prison through a critical and holistic framework—one that attends simultaneously to the physical, mental and social contexts that shape lived experiences before, during and after prison. Drawing from 7 years of observation and participation, supplemented by ten in-depth interviews, I argue that a critical, holistic approach can have a significant positive impact for people returning home from prison.     

Green grabs and biochar: Revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy

Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins – for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health – not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is ‘chopped out’ of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human–nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.     

The Confidence Game: Roping in a Globalized World

This is the last in a series of five articles focusing on how Bernard Madoff’s confidence game (con game) worked. It examines the international money collecting activities by ropers for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities (BLMIS). Before globalization, Madoff’s con game brought him millions of dollars; after globalization, it began bringing him billions, making him remarkably successful until his run of luck was brought to a sudden halt by the worldwide economic downturn.     

A NATIONWIDE SURVEY OF MANDATORY PARENT EDUCATION*

In an effort to take positive steps toward coping with problems for families and children created by high levels of separation and divorce, ever increasing civil caseloads and the exposure of children to interparental conflict, court‐affiliated educational programs have emerged in the United States for parents separating from their spouse or partner or going through a divorce. This article will provide an overview of the creation of such programs and their development, which includes a discussion regarding the numerous states currently mandating parents to attend. It will summarize some of the research which has been conducted as to the efficacy of the programs and will provide the results of our nationwide research for each state's parent education status. There is a discussion of domestic violence issues and sensitivities in the context of parent education programs and possible future directions for mandatory parent education.