Alcohol-related Rape Among University Students

Background: Alcohol-related rape among university students is clearly a major concern. However, there have been no large-scale surveys of the prevalence of this offence among university students in the UK. The aim of the current paper is to investigate the prevalence and characteristics of alcohol-related rape among university students in seven universities in Wales.

Methods: All universities in Wales were approached to take part in the research. Eight of the nine universities agreed to take part and seven universities emailed their students as planned. On the launch date, emails were sent by the universities to all students requesting that they take part in the survey. The email contained a link to a questionnaire covering a range of topics including: demographics, lifestyle factors, and substance misuse.

Results: In total, 7,846 students submitted a questionnaire. Overall, just under six per cent of females reported being the victim of alcohol-related rape while at university compared with one per cent of males. Sexual orientation was significantly correlated with alcohol-related rape, with three per cent of heterosexuals reported being the victim of alcohol-related rape, compared with eight per cent of lesbians or gays. Students who drank alcohol frequently and those involved in binge drinking were also significantly more likely to report the offence.

Conclusions: The government and universities should play a more direct role to ensure that actions are taken to deter, prevent, and treat the consequences of these largely unreported offences.     

Fostering Constructive Action by Peers and Bystanders in Organizations and Communities

Peers and bystanders play important roles in organizational and community conflict management. Bystanders often learn relevant information and have opportunities to act in ways that can affect three of the basic functions of a conflict management system (CMS.) They can help (or not help) to identify, assess, and manage behaviors that the organization or community deems to be “unacceptable.” Examples in which bystanders play important roles include sexual and racial harassment, safety violations, unethical research, national security violations and insider threats, cyber‐bullying and cyber‐sabotage, violence, fraud, theft, intimidation and retaliation, and gross negligence. Bystanders often are a missing link in conflict systems. For the purposes of this article, I define peers and bystanders as people who observe or learn about unacceptable behavior by others, but who are not the relevant supervisors, or who knowingly engage in planning or executing that behavior. I define CMS managers as all those people, including line managers, who have responsibility for managing conflicts. Conflict managers face many challenges in fostering constructive behavior from bystanders. The interests of bystanders may or may not coincide with the interests of conflict systems managers in an organization or community. Bystanders often have multiple, idiosyncratic, and conflicting interests, and experience painful dilemmas. In addition, peers and bystanders, and their contexts – often differ greatly from each other. Blanket rules about how all bystanders should behave, such as requirements for mandatory reporting, are often ineffective or lead to perverse results. Bystanders are regularly equated with “do‐nothings,” in the popular press. In real life, however, helpful bystander actions are common. Many bystanders report a wide variety of constructive initiatives, including private, informal interventions. In this article, I report on forty‐five years of observations on bystanders in many milieus. I present what bystanders have said are the reasons that they did not – or did – take action, and what can be learned to help organizations and communities to support bystanders to be more effective when faced with unacceptable behavior.     

The origins of severance pay in unemployment compensation: a comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to an under-developed field in the social policy literature through an analysis of the origins of severance pay (SP)/redundancy pay schemes and, more specifically, their first designs in nine countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. It has two objectives: first, to identify the key actors who shaped the design of the first SP schemes; second, to explain variations in terms of their mode of regulation, generosity and coverage. By building on the state-centric and power-resource perspectives, it identifies the conditions under which the state had an autonomous role vis-à-vis organized labour in SP reforms and the circumstances under which organized labour was the main actor. When the state was the key actor, it preferred legislation for the regulation of SP either to legitimize its apparatus in a ‘revolutionary’/‘potentially revolutionary’ context or to facilitate structural transformations of the economy in a ‘reformist’ context. When organized labour was the key actor, its preference was to regulate SP through ‘only collective bargaining’ or ‘legislation’, subject to the degree of unionization. Lastly, the paper argues that key actors (the state or organized labour) took into account the distributive structure of existing UI schemes when designing the coverage and generosity structure of the first SP schemes during the post-war era.     

就业困难大学生群体的特征、成因及对策研究——基于对上海某高校2010-2011届毕业生就业状况的调研

本文以上海某高校2010-2011届毕业生的就业调查数据和历年访谈资料为基础,以就业不困难大学生群体为对照组,以就业困难大学生群体为实验组,从就业目标、就业准备和就业能力等方面分析就业困难大学生群体的特征,从劳动力市场机制、教育体制、家庭教育方式以及学生个体特征等方面分析其成因,进而提出相应的对策建议.     

Mobility in pastoral societies of Northern Mali: Perspectives on social and political rationales

Since the 1980s, the so-called “nomadic” populations in the regions of Northern Mali and Niger have embarked on an extensive process of settlement. Today they mostly live in villages or “settlement sites”. But, at the same time, individuals and small groups among these same populations have considerably enlarged their area of mobility and accelerated the rate and the value of the trade in which they engage. These two phenomena could, at first sight, appear contradictory. But the observation of empirical situations shows, rather, compatibilities, similarities even, between these two concomitant phenomena. Building on innovative debates conducted in geography and sociology, this article puts forward the hypothesis that the building of villages, as well as integration into military bases and barracks, proceeds from (social) rationales of mobility, just as much as transhumance, journeys, migration. Much more than a simple displacement in space, the notion of mobility could describe an “art of doing”, a way of being to others and to the world.     

Trading in development: norms and institutions in the making/unmaking of European Union–African,Caribbean and Pacific trade and development cooperation

This paper offers a contribution to recent debates on European Union (EU) external trade and development policy, with a specific focus on the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries. The question asked is why the EU encountered such difficulties in the attempt to translate its normative preferences for freer trade and closer economic integration into a series of binding agreements? Drawing on both economic constructivist and historical institutionalist insights, it is argued that the case for reform initially rested on a strong convergence between institutions and ideas, enabling the EU to discursively present desired policy reforms as necessary to satisfy World Trade Organisation trade rules. However, in due course, the institutional dynamics behind the latter began to diverge from the EU's policy preferences and blunt its norm-based argument – thus creating the space for transnational coalitions to, first, question and, ultimately, undermine aspects the EU's trade and development prospectus for the ACP.     

Elder-Child Interaction Analysis

Abstract

This study reports on the interactions of 60 children and 12 older adults in a school-based mentoring program, as well as four teachers' perceptions of the relationship between such interactions and the children's subsequent classroom behavior. Dyadic interactions were assessed using the Elder-Child Interaction Analysis instrument (Newman & Onawola, 1989). The authors concluded from recorded observations that, overall, the elders and the children had interacted with each other in a positive and constructive manner. The teachers interviewed perceived that the mentoring interactions were followed by an increase in students' self-management skills, interest in school work, and by improved peer relationships.     

China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: sub-national regions and networks of global political economy

This paper argues that the Chinese government’s ‘belt and road’ initiative – the Silk Roads vision of land and maritime logistics and communications networks connecting Asia, Europe and Africa – has its roots in sub-national ideas and practices, and that it reflects their elevation to the national level more than the creation of substantially new policy content. Further, the spatial paradigms inherent in the Silk Roads vision reveal the reproduction of capitalist developmental ideas expressed particularly in the form of networks, which themselves have become a feature of contemporary global political economy. In other words, the Silk Roads vision is more of a ‘spatial fix’ than a geopolitical manoeuvre.     

School punishment and interpersonal exclusion: Rejection,withdrawal, and separation from friends

School suspension is a common form of punishment in the United States that is disproportionately concentrated among racial minority and disadvantaged youth. In labeling theories, the implication is that such stigmatized sanctions may lead to interpersonal exclusion from normative others and to greater involvement with antisocial peers. I test this implication in the context of rural schools by 1) examining the association between suspension and discontinuity in same-grade friendship ties, focusing on three mechanisms implied in labeling theories: rejection, withdrawal, and physical separation; 2) testing the association between suspension and increased involvement with antisocial peers; and (3) assessing whether these associations are stronger in smaller schools. Consistent with labeling theories, I find suspension associated with greater discontinuity in friendship ties, based on changes in the respondents’ friendship preferences and self-reports of their peers. My findings are also consistent with changes in perceptual measures of exclusion. Additionally, I find suspension associated with greater involvement with substance-using peers. Some but not all of these associations are stronger in smaller rural schools. Given the disproportionate distribution of suspension, my findings indicate that an excessive reliance on this exclusionary form of punishment may foster inequality among these youth.