Court improvement of foster care and adoption projects:Ncjfcj Survey Report

Officials from 48 states and the District of Columbia in 1994 accepted federal funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to help improve courts' handling of cases involving child abuse, neglect, foster care and adoption. Through a survey of participating states, members of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges have been analyzing common themes found in state Court Improvement of Foster Care and Adoption Projects. This article examines key survey results.     

CHILD SUPPORT REFORMS

The use of the Australian equivalent to the Internal Revenue Service is described and the far-reaching efforts of the Australian government to collect. Readers from other countries will recognize similar themes: noncompliance with orders, establishing orders in a majority of cases, providing an efficient means for modifying support awards, creation of two classes of enforcement—for those receiving public support and for those who are entitled to support and do not receive pensions, the use of statistics regarding compliance, and many others. This article documents the common concerns for all modern, industrialized nations in ensuring adequate support for children.     

On National Self-determination

This paper argues in favour of a conception of self-determination which involves the equal recognition of different national identities. It proceeds by, first, criticizing the dominant territorial (in contrast to national) conception of self-determination. It then addresses three main criticisms of a principle of national self-determination. These are (1) the argument from indeterminacy; (2) the argument from instability; (3) the problem of overlapping nationalities.     

Family structure,family attributes,and delinquency in a sample of low-income,minority males and females

A popular thesis in criminology links broken homes to juvenile delinquency. This thesis has been invoked to explain higher rates of delinquency among youth from low-income, minority families than among youth from mainstream backgrounds. The study reported here employs data collected at two points in time to assess the thesis that family structure is significantly associated with self-reported delinquency within a sample of black males and females from low-income families. The relationships between an array of family variables, including family structure, and each of four types of self-reported delinquency are examined in analysis conducted separately for males and females. Findings indicate that few family factors are significant for delinquency and family structure is of minimal importance for the types of delinquency examined. The results differ for males and females. These findings raise serious questions about the cogency of the broken-home thesis of delinquency to explain delinquency among nonmainstream groups in our society.Research reported here was supported in part by NIMH Grant 1 RPI MH33488-01A1 and conducted in part under the auspices of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan. Views expressed by the author do not represent official positions of those agencies.The author received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Georgia in 1981. Her research interests at present include the effects of social stratification processes on delinquency and crime, particularly the effects of such social correlates of crime as race, sex, and social class.     

Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Women's Rights,Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu

There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes.