Restoring Faith: Resolving the Roman Catholic Church’s Sexual Scandals Through Restorative Justice (Working Paper I)

Two years ago, Independent Academic Research Studies, a UK based international network, started a research and implementation project to explore the potential of restorative justice to help resolve sexual offending cases involving children and young people. One aspect of this project is the use of restorative justice with sexual offending cases that occurred within the Catholic Church. The purpose of this article is to report on the main findings of the first stage of the project, based on desk research into existing or past international projects dealing with the matter. The aim, however, is not to provide a literature review of the main arguments surrounding the topic, but rather a critical overview of the restorative programs and research projects that have been implemented to test the notion’s application in sexual offending cases. The results of these programs will be contrasted with notorious cases that have been processed through the traditional criminal justice system. Therefore, this article is the first in a series on how restorative justice could be applied to help resolve the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church.     

Labor strategies of families: An introduction

The collection presents an approach to history in which the dominance of structure is replaced by the effects of human agency. Individual motives and actions are the subject of these studies. In particular, the articles focus on the economic approach of family strategies, starting with a methodological discussion of the problematic concept of strategies: how to disentangle the influence of social structure, family circumstances, and individual behavior. The conflicting interests of individuals resulted in replacing the so-called “joint utility function” with that of “bargained family decisions.” The focus of the contributions is on the labor deployment of family members. All articles deal with three factors influencing labor deployment: adaptation to the structural environment, regulation of labor within the family, and reconciliation of choices at transition points during the individual life course of family members.     

Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women: Comparing Greece and The United Kingdom

While Western societies are striving to become more honest about gender inequality, terms such as ‘violence against women’ have started to appear in policy debates in Asia and worldwide. The response is largely punitive. The option of restorative justice has been considered, but evidence on actual practice with these cases is scarce. Following international attempts to block restorative justice for violence against women cases, this paper argues that a better understanding needs to be developed before further steps are taken in any direction. The authors examined cases from their respective countries, Greece and the UK, to identify common elements, differences and minimum standards when applying restorative justice in cases of violence against women. An abstract implementation mode for further research is constructed.     

Visual representation,editorial power,and the dual ‘othering’ of black men in the South African gay press: The case of Gay Pages

Abstract

This article considers some of the ways in which black gay men are marginalised within the queer community and have limited ‘visibility’ in mainstream queer visual culture. The formation of a minority within a minority (or the ‘other’ Other) is ultimately what the article sets out to expose. Thus, we argue that images of black gay men are far less ubiquitous than, for example, those of white, male and middle-class gay men. In order to illustrate this, a purposive sample from the South African gay men's lifestyle magazine Gay Pages is considered and critiqued. We argue that the visual mode of Gay Pages gives the impression of promoting a hegemonic gay male identity. This identity appears to be ‘natural’, but is in fact one-sided and stereotypical, as are most cultural constructions and representations. The narrow and limited representation of gay men endorses an exclusive, homogenous and inaccurate portrait of the queer constituency (in the minds of heterosexual and gay South Africans alike) and suggests the question that leads this investigation: If ‘belonging’ is articulated through the consumption of queer culture, what then of those queers who do not fit the ‘mould’ standardised by mainstream gay print media? This exploration of queer visual media deals not only with that which is frequently represented (white homomasculinity), but also, more significantly, with that which is not (black homomasculinity).     

Networks, Management and Institutions: Public Administration as 'Normal Science'

How does network analysis fit into the development of public administration as an academic discipline? This article tries to bridge theoretical developments in public administration between the middle of the 1970s and the first half of the 1990s. The benchmarks being used are (1) the now classical account by Vincent Ostrom of The Intellectual Crisis in (American) Public Administration - published 25 years ago this year - and (2) Christopher Hood’s reconstruction of core values in (British) new public management. Rather than representing analytical developments as an endless succession of different or even mutually exclusive approaches, this contribution tries to reconcile different foci for analysing public administration. Administrative theory provides us with a rather stable meta-theoretical framework for studying the meaning of quality in government, governance and public administration at various levels of analysis. By relating the emergence of network analysis in PA to parallel developments such as the resurgence of (neo-)managerial and (neo-)institutional analysis, it also becomes clear that network analysis is useful as an analytical device, but that it needs to be linked to theoretical perspectives that provide us with operational assumptions about ‘networks’. Network analysis in itself only provides split ground for reinventing government and refounding public administration.     

COIN Machine: The British Military in Afghanistan

This article assesses the British military effort in Afghanistan looking at three key elements in the campaign: strategy, military operations, and the inter-agency “Comprehensive Approach.” We start by recognising the scale of the challenge that has faced the British: of all the provinces in Afghanistan, Helmand is the toughest to stabilize and secure. We then examine the evolution of all three elements above and find significant improvements in each: a flawed strategy has been corrected; the military have received more resources and become significantly better at COIN; and there is significant progress in the development of the inter-agency approach. In short, what the Americans will find in Helmand is a British COIN machine; a little creaky perhaps, but one that is fit for purpose and getting the job done. We briefly conclude on the prospects and the key to success: namely the development of a more coherent international strategy that accommodates the challenges posed by both Afghanistan and Pakistan.     

LGBTQ “selves” in films from the Reel-Lives project as signifiers of political and social change,and of personal value

To accurately reflect the complexities of unusual sexual or gender identifications in non-stereotypical ways, film documentarians are challenged to represent people as both sexual/gender identities and as subjectivities engaged in personal experiences. This imperative is explored through a semiotic lens focused on films produced through the Reel Lives youth media training project, which aims to give voice to marginalised youth, and which presents their stories on the Reel Lives website through two consequent layers of signification that successfully represents LGBTQ people in complex ways. On the one hand, the search function reflects a typology of shared characteristics associated with identity categories that speaks to political change. On the other, the film grammar showcases shared circumstances within communities in ways that redirect focus from political change to a more durable and transformative socio-cultural change. The films in turn serve a third function: to reflect gender and sexual identification as a personal resource on which participants might subjectively call for the positive recognition and re-presentation of their value as individuals.     

Adolescent egocentrism: The association among imaginary audience behavior,cognitive development,and parental support and rejection

Two theoretical perspectives have been advanced to account for heightened egocentrism during early adolescence. One perspective assumes that formal operational thought is associated with increased self-consciousness. The second perspective proposes that parental support and affection diminish egocentrism, while parental rejection enhances self-conscious reactions by young adolescents. Data analysis using responses from 251 early adolescents (131 males, 120 females) on measures of cognitive development and perceived parental support revealed that (a) formal operations diminished adolescent egocentrism, while (b) perceived parental relations were predictive of self-consciousness. Contrary to posttheoretical assumptions, seventh graders functioning at the level of concrete operations were higher in self-conscious egocentrism than were formal-operations youths. Further, perceived parental support was associated with diminished egocentrism, while perceived parental rejection was predictive of heightened self-consciousness.Her research interests focus on early adolescent development.His research interests focus on personality and social development during adolescence.His research interests focus on clinical and counseling psychology and psychotherapy.     

Reflections on the President's 1991 Federal Budget

The president's new budget arrived to Congress two and one-half weeks late. Its contents had been reduced to a single volume and a brief pamphlet. And it included proposals for improving the federal budgetary process. That budget is profiled herein, including discussions of the conditions under which it was submitted, the economic assumptions made within it, and the proposed expenditures and anticipated revenues.