完善儿童权益保护之探析——以设立虐童罪为视角

少年之于国家的重要性是不言而喻的,我们理应保证未成年人有一个健康安全的成长环境,然而近年来越来越多虐待儿童事件的爆发,引起了人们对于儿童健康成长的强烈关注。目前,我国尚未设立虐童罪,然而调查表明90%的人支持设立虐童罪。随着虐童事件的发酵,关于虐童罪的讨论成为最受关注的话题之一。鉴此,分析虐童现象及其产生的原因,通过立法增设"虐童罪",无疑是遏制虐童现象的重要举措。     

Acting Like It Matters: A Scoping Review of Simulation in Child Welfare Training

Simulation-based training is often used to prepare health practitioners and is increasingly employed to train child welfare workers. This scoping review systematically searched the published and grey literature for studies that evaluated training for child welfare practitioners and used simulation methods that included standardized actors. Three studies met inclusion criteria, all documenting improvement in participants' use of specific skills. Other outcomes were mixed, possibly reflecting the heterogeneity of samples, study methods, measures, training of actors, theoretical frameworks, and content areas. Though results were mostly positive, the small number of studies indicates a substantial need for further research.     

Barriers to Cross-Systems Collaboration in Child Welfare,Education, and the Courts: Supporting Educational Well-being of Youth in Care Through Systems Change

Cross-systems collaboration between child welfare, education, and the courts benefits when challenges and priorities are identified early. We measured perceptions of educational stability in foster youth with a statewide survey of 1,603 professionals in education, child welfare, and the courts. Results reveal commonalities among perceived challenges to collaboration across systems (e.g., multiple foster care placements; school changes) and differences in perceived importance or significance of a given issue by professional group. Results guided collaborative work in Kansas and may assist other states seeking strategies that inform cross-systems collaboration to improve educational well-being for youth in foster care.     

Beauty is not always better: perfect babies and the tyranny of paediatric norms

During the early twentieth century, better baby contests were all the rage at agricultural fairs across the United States. Inaugurated at the Iowa State Fair in 1911, when progressive female reformers decided that the time had come to apply the techniques of breeding superior cattle, horses and hogs to infants, better baby contests stood at the crux of several overlapping trends of modern medicine and culture. One facet of a burgeoning eugenics movement, the contests were based on emergent notions of race betterment that increasingly focused on reproduction, sexuality and children. They also reflected and helped to promote the solidification of paediatrics as a medical profession dedicated to the unique physiological organism of the child. Stern examines the dynamic better baby campaign launched during the 1920s in Indiana, and argues that the norms utilized to test, measure and assess the young contestants were representative of a new optics of perfectibility. No longer judged by their apparent beauty and fulsomeness, babies began to be gauged by indicators, such as height-weight ratios and mental tests, that generated invisible statistical abstractions. The contests were critical to the severing of the Victorian association between beauty and physical perfection, ushering in a new way of visualizing the health and vigour of children. Furthermore, they were vehicles of racialization, as physicians and nurses determined deviation and difference according to scales and charts for which white, urban middle-class children had served as the objective base-line subjects. Stern raises questions about the complicated optics of race, medicine and heredity, and suggests that eugenic projects in the early twentieth century have left an intractable and often insidious mark on paediatric norms of child development.     

FAMILY GROUP CONFERENCES

Family group conferencing has emerged as a child welfare system–transforming practice that fosters new collaborations between families, child welfare practitioners, and the courts. The key components of the model are explained. This article highlights the strengths and challenges associated with incorporating family group conferencing into traditional child welfare agency and court practice. It suggests future practice considerations and outcome-based study that are necessary to strengthen and sustain family group conferencing as a prevention/intervention strategy.     

"儿童读经运动"质疑--与南怀谨先生商榷

儿童读经运动以"填鸭"、"填牛"之强制灌输方法,让儿童死记硬背、生吞活剥古代"经典",企望以此使儿童获取"一生取之不尽,用之不竭"、"一劳永逸"之学问,这公然悖离了儿童教育的近现代观念,是走历史的回头路.儿童读经运动是不可能扫陋习、除时弊、正世风、开新学的,更不可能建设现代化、全球化之文化中国.南怀谨先生对儿童读经运动的支持,对传统教育中记诵方法的推崇,对新旧教育的某些认识和评论,以及退回旧式教育的主张,都是值得商榷的.南怀谨先生主张的儿童读经运动之所以能够大行其道,是因为当代中国文化尚未从根本上接纳近现代形态的儿童教育观念.     

The impact of social class and parental maltreatment on the cognitive functioning of children

The purpose of the present investigation was to compare the cognitive functioning of maltreated children with two groups of nonmaltreated children: those matched for age and SES and those matched only on age. All of the children ranged in age from 6 to 16 years. The rationale for employing two comparison groups was to examine the role of maltreatment and SES separately to determine which factor, if any, is associated with children's cognitive functioning. Additionally, the present investigation sought to expand on previous work by employing both global measures of cognitive functioning (WISC-R) as well as measures designed to tap specific abilities (e.g., selective attention, short-term memory). Results indicate that maltreated children demonstrated deficits in cognitive functioning but that these are no more pervasive than those found in children from the same low socioeconomic backgrounds. These findings suggest that it may be deprived family circumstances common in maltreating families, not maltreatment per se, that is responsible for the cognitive deficits often noted in maltreated children.     

Infant Homicide: Victim/Offender Relationship and Causes of Death

The phenomenon of infant homicide (infanticide) has been examined, explained, justified, and treated according to physiological, psychiatric, and psychological correlates. There has been little examination of the social correlates directly pertaining to infant homicide. However, social correlates are often indirectly addressed in the medical and psychiatric literature. This paper tests relationships between social correlates often asserted, but typically not tested, in the medical and psychiatric literature. Using a sample of 380 infant homicides in Texas from 1981 through 1991, a multivariate analysis between victim/offender relationship, cause of death, and victim's age at time of fatal injury, predicts the age at which an infant (34 months) is likely to be fatally injured. The findings support the following hypotheses: (1) as the age of the victim increases, the level of violence used to fatally injure the infant increases; and (2) as the level of relational intimacy decreases, the level of violence used to fatally injure the infant increases.