Using context and difference in sex offender treatment: An integrated systemic approach

Summary

The primary objective of this paper is to promote a re-examination of the current use of cognitive-behavioural programmes in work with men who have sexually offended against children or adults and to encourage the application of ideas from the systemic field. In order to support this objective, the paper puts forward and develops the following arguments:

1. That the current content of manualised programmes in this field has been distilled too far and left behind some of the most important principles of the cognitive approach. Returning to the work of Marshall et al (1999), the need for a thorough and broad-based assessment of each individual prior to deciding treatment goals is clearly recommended. Further, there is a need to pay much more attention to differences between, as well as similarities of those who sexually offend.

2. That ideas from within the systemic therapeutic field be integrated within existing approaches to attempt to address some of the limitations of cognitive-behaviour therapy as currently employed. Evidence for the potential benefits of this comes from a broad personal experience of working directly with offenders and consulting to group facilitators.

It is concluded that all therapeutic approaches reach a ‘moment of integration’ (Pinsof, 1994), when their failures are recognised and other approaches are drawn on. It is suggested that this moment may be upon us in this area.     

Diamond signs: generic stones and particular gems

Analysis of narratives from ethnographic research with diamond consumers representing the target market (largely middle-class white women between 20 and 50 years of age) reveals how symbolic associations promoted by industry are refracted through interpretations of both adverts and diamonds in general, but shows that local contingencies (basic attitudes and knowledge about diamonds and their production, circumstances of acquisition, and personal histories) are significant in determining meanings of people's own specific diamonds. Far from being batch absorbers of advert discourse, consumers are idiosyncratic, creative, and sometimes playful interpreters, and furthermore may distinguish between these strategies and those suggested by adverts or as performed by others. These findings are in part explicable on introducing for diamond consumption an important distinction between type and token, whereby a token is a specific instantiation of a generic type. This approach contributes to developing methods supple enough to capture consumers’ multi-dimensional interpretive strategies.     

Sensibility in the era of global communication: a semioethic perspective1

This article proposes a phenomenological and semiotic analysis of sensibility in the era of globalization, which is the era of global communication. How are time, space, self, others, life, death, health, illness, work, employment, unemployment, free-time, development, underdevelopment, and so forth, perceived in today's world? As vast as this excursion may seem, these different issues concerning sensibility all bear on the problem of the relation between identity and alterity. The hypothesis guiding my analysis is that the common denominator in science and sensibility today is the ideology, or ideo-logic, of identity. However, taking Europe as our societal paradigm the ideo-logic of identity reveals itself as a menace to the difficult process of forming the European Union. In Europe – indeed, in world history at large – the logic of identity and of alterity can be traced in all the important phases that have determined peoples’ historical destiny. In the current phase of development in the social reproduction system of advanced capitalism, the contrast between identity and alterity is at an extreme, at the point of exasperation. In this article I intend to explore the possibility of opening sensibility to alterity not only in Europe, but in the anthroposociosemiosic sphere at large.     

Impacts of housing and mortgage market discrimination racial and ethnic disparities in homeownership

Abstract

There are persistent differences in homeownership rates across racial and ethnic groups. Homeownership rates for whites are over 20 percentage points higher than for blacks or Hispanics. This paper uses a model of the housing tenure decision to gain a better understanding of these racial and ethnic differentials in homeownership and employs a decomposition technique that has been applied to labor market discrimination to report the results of the empirical testing of two hypotheses: (1) race (ethnicity) influences the probability of ownership through differences in household endowments (income, education, age, gender, and family type) and market endowments (price and location); and (2) race (ethnicity) directly influences the probability of ownership through racial or ethnic discrimination and other factors that may be correlated with race or ethnicity.

We find endowment effects important in explaining the persistent racial and ethnic disparities in homeownership. In brief, logit analysis of 1989 American Housing Survey (AHS) national sample data reveals that 81 percent (78 percent) of the differences between the predicted probability of ownership between black and white households (Hispanic/non‐Hispanic) are due to differences in group endowments. Direct effects explain 19 percent of the black‐white differentials and 22 percent of the Hispanic/non‐Hispanic differentials. Because the direct effects are modeled as residual differences, it must be realized that the residual components could also be capturing the influence of important omitted or harder to measure variables internal to the market process and correlated with race or ethnicity. These include wealth, household location, employment history, credit history, and cultural predisposition toward homeownership.     

Where the homeless come from: A study of the prior address distribution of families admitted to public shelters in New York City and Philadelphia

Abstract

This study investigates hypotheses regarding the association of census tract variables with the risk for homelessness. We used prior address information reported by families entering emergency shelters in two large U.S. cities to characterize the nature ofthat distribution.

Three dense clusters of homeless origins were found in Philadelphia and three in New York City, accounting for 67 percent and 61 percent of shelter admissions and revealing that homeless families’ prior addresses are more highly concentrated than the poverty distribution in both cities. The rate of shelter admission is strongly and positively related to the concentration of poor, African‐American, and female‐headed households with young children in a neighborhood. It is also correlated with fewer youth, elderly, and immigrants. Such areas have higher rates of unemployment and labor force nonpartici‐pation, more housing crowding, more abandonment, higher rates of vacancy, and higher rent‐to‐income ratios than other areas.     

Comment on “Does the Likely Demographics of Affordable Housing Justify NIMBYism?”

Abstract

Automated underwriting (AU) systems have become the tool of choice in mortgage lending decisions. While these systems provide significant benefits to mortgage originators and investors, questions have been raised about their impact on underserved populations. The questions focus on the relative accuracy of AU compared with manual underwriting and whether AU has increased the flow of mortgage credit to underserved consumers.

Using information from Freddie Mac's Loan Prospector AU service, we provide statistics useful in examining these issues. The data strongly support our view that AU provides substantial benefits to consumers, particularly those at the margin of the underwriting decision. We find evidence that AU systems more accurately predict default than manual underwriters do. We also find evidence that this increased accuracy results in higher borrower approval rates, especially for underserved applicants.     

HOPE VI relocation: Moving to new neighborhoods and building new ties

Abstract

Severely distressed public housing developments are being torn down and redeveloped through the HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) VI initiative in cities across the United States. This article examines how families from one HOPE VI site decided where to move and how they fared in building social ties with their new neighbors. Semistructured interviews from a random sample of 41 families with children were analyzed.

Families that chose to move into public housing expressed concern about the unreliability of the Section 8 program and their own ability to pay the extra utility costs involved. Those who used Section 8 vouchers to relocate had more education on average and made this choice to improve the neighborhood for their families. Over the past two years, regardless of what kind of neighborhood they moved into, families have not rebuilt the close ties most of them had in their former neighborhood.     

STEIN'S SILK ROAD LEGACY REVISITED

An account of the four expeditions to Chinese Central Asia made at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Hungarian scholar, Aurel Stein; his discoveries and excavations in the ancient cities of the Silk Road, including the famous cache of scrolls he found at Dunhuang. The second part of the article covers the present day activities of the International Dunhuang Project and an expedition made in 2008 to retrace Stein's footsteps and replicate his photographs.     

Book reviews

Bremmer I &; R Tarras (eds), Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 565pp., index.

Bulloch J &; H Morris, No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds. London: Penguin Books, 1993 (new epilogue). 257pp., index.

Cable J, Gunboat Diplomacy 1919 ‐ 1991: Political Applications of Limited Naval Power. London: Macmillan, 1994, 246pp.

Evans R, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993, 339pp.

Gaddis JL, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 301pp.

Jeffrey R, What's Happening to India? Punjab, Ethnic Conflict, and the Test for Federalism. London: Macmillan, Second Edition, 1994, pp. ii &; 252pp.

Mazrui AA &; C Wondji (eds), Africa since 1935. Paris: UNESCO; Oxford: Heinemann Educational; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. (UNESCO General History of Africa Series, Vol. VIII) xxiii, 1025 pp. Illustrated, maps, plates, bibliography and index.     

Introduction: Great Underappreciated Works Deserving of Renewed Attention

Although news is a social construction that narrates events in the world by assimilating them to existing cultural categories, there are many cultural categories from which to choose. How do journalists determine whether an event calls for a melodramatic frame or an ironic frame or some other narrative convention? Reviewing two recent studies—of news coverage of 9/11 and news coverage in the early 1990s of an accidental killing of a Japanese exchange student in New Orleans—this article argues that the character of “the events themselves” helps limit what narrative frames journalists select.