Seen but Not Heard? Parallels and Dissonances in the Treatment of Rape Narratives across the Asylum and Criminal Justice Contexts

A significant proportion of women seeking refugee status in the United Kingdom will claim to have been raped in their country of origin. Even where this is not the sole basis of an asylum claim, it may be relevant to its determination. While criminal justice responses to rape have been the subject of extensive academic criticism and legislative reform, the processes of disclosure and credibility assessment in the asylum context have received little attention. This article explores possible parallels and dissonances in the treatment of rape across the asylum and criminal justice contexts, drawing in particular on the findings of a 2007 pilot study. It considers how problems such as the underreporting of rape, the inability of the victim to 'tell the story' in her own words, a hostile adjudicative environment, and the tendency to regard factors such as late disclosure, narrative inconsistency, and calm demeanour with suspicion – may be replicated and compounded in asylum cases. It also acknowledges the complex intersection of race, gender, culture, and nationality in this context.     

Youth participation informing care in hospital settings

Abstract

In this article, we use an ecocultural framework to understand young people’s experiences of the care provided by a specialist children’s hospital. This framework conceptualizes hospital culture as situated and embodied rather than separate from people and practices. Young people’s responses, gathered during a one-day forum at the hospital, suggest ways in which a hospital can respond to them not just as individual bodies but also as members of the families and peer groups who form their broader web of care. Their input highlights the importance of consulting young people about the operations of health services themselves, not just about the patient-medico relationships that they experience whilst using a service.     

'Intemperate and Unchaste': Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity

In this article, Carr examines Jean Rhys's ambivalent feelings about her West Indian origins. She looks at the problems both she and others have had in deciding whether her work can be truly considered to belong to the category of Caribbean literature. The difficulty lies not just in her expatriate existence or European themes, but goes back to her position as a white Caribbean Creole woman, the descendant of slave-owners. Carr looks at the traditional representations of the Creole woman, and suggest that the characteristics assigned to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre , 'intemperate and unchaste', persisted to Jean Rhys's day, and that all her fiction, even when not explicitly Caribbean, can be seen to write back to such representations. When Rhys arrived in England, she was immediately identified as Other because of her Caribbean accent, something that marked her out as disturbingly associated with non-white West Indians; in England, she was no longer really white, although back in the Caribbean her whiteness made her unacceptable to so many of her fellow Dominicans. Much of the power of her fiction comes from her knowledge of the violent scars left in the Caribbean by the colonial past, and her own experience of the prejudices and oppressions of a hierarchical metropolitan society. In particular, if it had not been for her stigmatization as the always racially dubious West Indian when she reached England, her insight into the injustices of metropolitan and colonial society might never have been so acute.