Reconciliation: I Know It When I see It 1

States emerging from conflict increasingly seek ways in which to address the violence and human rights abuses of the past in order to move forward into a more peaceful future. The initial responses to mass atrocities were based in legal processes focused on the punishment of the person responsible for the harm. The inadequacy of such an approach resulted in the introduction of a variety of new goals in the transitional period, including the abstract notion of reconciliation which is increasingly advanced as the central goal in dealing with the legacy of the past. This article argues that the failure to examine the relationship between a discourse originally based on human rights and legal approaches and the introduction of reconciliation has only added new challenges rather than resolved existing ones and therefore must be re‐examined. The article also argues that no single approach should take prominence in addressing mass atrocities. Rather a range of options should be available to victims, in particular given the relative youth and inexperience of approaches to violent conflict.     

Prison Recruitment as a Policy Tool of Local Economic Development: A Critical Evaluation

Like the sports franchises and foreign auto plants that preceded them, state and local governments are touting prisons as the latest means of economic miracle‐making, often for small towns and communities that are economically depressed. The building of prisons is supposedly tied to the development of a just, fair, and rational criminal justice policy in a civil democratic society. Prison building has positive and negative social and political consequences for these communities. This critical essay explores some of these consequences in light of the literature on prison siting, the experiences of communities and prisoners, and relevant statistical data in the public domain. It also offers an alternative framework for evaluating prison recruitment as a strategy for local economic development.     

Gender differences in violent offending: results from a multicentre comparison study in Dutch forensic psychiatry

ABSTRACT

The past two decades, a disproportionate growth of females entering the criminal justice system and forensic mental health services has been observed worldwide. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the background of women who are convicted for violent offenses. What is their criminal history, what are their motives for offending and in which way do they differ from men convicted for violent offenses? In this study, criminal histories and the offenses for which they were admitted to forensic care were analyzed of 218 women and 218 men who have been treated between 1984 and 2014 with a mandatory treatment order in one of four Dutch forensic psychiatric settings admitting both men and women. It is concluded that there are important differences in violent offending between male and female patients. Most importantly, female violence was more often directed towards their close environment, like their children, and driven by relational frustration. Furthermore, female patients received lower punishments compared to male patients and were more often considered to be diminished accountable for their offenses due to a mental illness.     

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.     

Network strategies of nineteenth century Hesse-Cassel emigrants

Between 1820 and 1930 over 5 million Germans emigrated to overseas destinations, most to the U.S. By the 1850s the number of German migrants living in the U.S. was large, a consequence partly of cumulative causation. I provide evidence for the dramatic increase in networks by using micro-level data for the German principality of Hesse-Cassel in the mid-nineteenth century. A conservative measurement of network relationships finds that after 25 years almost half of them were related to a previous family member from the same village. Migrants who used family networks tended to move in small units. Usually only a few years separated networked family members, but some links lasted over a decade. Women were unlikely to start a network but more likely than men to travel to the U.S. Within some families, migrants switched from continental destinations to the U.S., perhaps due to the failure of the 1848 March Revolution.     

Gender differences in the dispersal of children in northern Sweden and the northern USA in 1850

In the course of time families disperse and kin relationships change. In this study gender differences in spatial dispersion of adult children from their fathers were investigated in two areas of the world in 1850: the Skellefteå region in northern Sweden and the northern part of the USA, both largely rural populations. The results from the Skellefteå region where data on both genders were available were used to estimate gender differences among a native born population in the northern USA where women were often not followed in the sources after marriage. Most adult children resided in the same place as their fathers, but the distances separating relatives were greater in the USA. However, the proportion of adult sons living in the same locality as their fathers was the same in both. More daughters than sons were located elsewhere in Skellefteå and probably also in the USA. Although sisters in Skellefteå joined each other in places separate from their parents, men lived in patrilineal clusters to a greater extent than women due, in part, to patrilineal inheritance and virilocal marriages. Various reasons for these patterns are discussed and their implications for kin networks discussed.     

The true servant: Self-definition of male domestics in an Italian city (Bologna, 17th–19th centuries)

Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a “true” servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed “filthy” tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the “true” servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants.     

The legal possibilities of Antwerp widows in the late sixteenth century

This article assesses the ability of widows and other women in Antwerp to act independently of men to defend their economic interests and those of their children. Consideration is given to both legal norms and actual practice in a number of different areas including writing wills, making marriage contracts, managing financial assets and pursuing claims and defending themselves in the civil courts. Analyses of these issues indicate that widows in Antwerp enjoyed in practice a greater degree of independence than was available to widows in many other parts of Europe, despite their weaker position in law.

Particular attention is given to the role in Antwerp of women merchants whose position freed them from male control and supervision. It is argued that their favored status did not derive from the desire of the authorities to protect the interests of their male relatives or to advance the economic interests of these women. Rather their legal freedom is seen as reflecting acknowledgement of the importance of their business activities and the wish to safeguard the interests of their customers who could pursue claims against the woman merchant in the event of a dispute.     

Managing a large household. The gender division of work in orphanages in Dutch towns in the early modern period, 1580–1800

Early modern social institutions were modelled analogous to the family, and work within these institutions strongly depended upon the co-operation of women and men. This type of organization seems to be contradictory to processes of professionalization and bureaucratization. This article investigates to what extent professionalization and bureaucratization took place in early modern orphanages and how this influenced the gender division of work. By analyzing various occupations, remuneration and access to work in three Dutch orphanages it becomes clear that the frequently mentioned characteristics that made ‘typical’ women's work combinable with women's reproductive tasks, were not all applicable and cannot wholly explain female access to these occupations. Work was characterized by an increasing differentiation, hierarchy and, to a certain extent, bureaucratization tendencies. At the same time, the gender division sharpened. However, the late eighteenth century ideology of women as nurturers and the strong analogy to the role women were supposed to play within the household prevented exclusion from this domain.     

After father's death: Authority and conflict in the eighteenth-century French household

This article argues that Parisian widows, in taking over a guiding role in the household, upset normative gender roles. One result of that change was violence in the household between widows and their adult sons. In asserting their authority, widows found unlikely allies in the institutions of the State, legal structures and the guild system. Ultimately, widows' roles in their families demonstrated the ways that gender roles were fluid in lived experience, as opposed to the ways they were articulated in rhetorical texts.