Gender,Nationalism and Colonial Policy: prostitution in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948

The aim of this article is to discuss the way prostitution was perceived during the British rule in Palestine (1918–48), analyzing the differing perspectives of the British colonial authorities and the Jewish national community. The major concerns of the civil and military colonial authorities were focused on issues of ‘social hygiene’ and the trafficking in women and children. This often involved the transfer of both legislation and discourse from the metropolis. The Jewish community, on the other hand, was concerned mainly with the evolving national project. Prostitution was seen as a ‘mixing ground’ of Jewish women and British and Arab men, thus threatening the boundaries of the national collective. Whilst the article is attentive to the importance of studying prostitution in its historical specificity, it also considers the many ways in which this case study illuminates the complex series of relationships between both colonialism and prostitution, and gender and nationalism. Women were important to the imagining of the nation not only for their symbolic power—as ‘mothers of the nation’, for example; the construction of nationalist discourses also involved focusing on ‘negative’ gendered phenomena, such as prostitution. In these ways, the article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the multiple significance of gendered categories in the process of nation-building.     

Echoes of domestic silence: mechanisms of concealment in cases of ‘Family Honour Killings’ in Mandate Palestine

This article deals with the manner in which family and community in Mandate Palestine attempted to keep the criminal justice system from intervening in cases defined as ‘Family Honour Killing’. Drawing on criminal court cases, we argue that the familial, domestic and communal features of this crime and its social, predominantly rural, context were critical for the attempts to keep it within the community and to prevent state intervention by obstructing, concealing and denying evidence. We focus on the mechanisms used by members of the family and community for that purpose. Our case study is in line with previous findings indicating the under-reporting of domestic violence, especially when witnesses were closely related to both the victim and the perpetrator. This domestic and communal alignment was most likely reinforced under colonial rule, though it was not necessarily caused predominantly in opposition to it.     

Plantations and modes of exploitation

Persistent Poverty. Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World by George L. Beckford. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Pp. xxvii + 303, Index; £3.45 (hardback) and £1.40 (paperback).     

The impact of the right to refuse treatment in a forensic patient population: six-month review

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found that 29 percent of patients already on psychotropic medication initially refused further treatment as opposed to 75 percent of newly admitted patients. Of refusers, 32 percent eventually resumed taking medication voluntarily; courts overturned the refusals of all the 51 percent who maintained their refusals, after an average delay of over a month. The length of procedural delays actually increased over the six months of the study as the courts learned of the decision. The authors compare their findings with other reported studies of implementation of right to refuse treatment decisions and discuss differences between the right to refuse treatment for civilly and criminally committed patients.     

The determination of local public expenditures and the principal and agent relation: A case study

The principal and agent relationship is important in the public sector. There, elected or appointed representatives act on behalf of the citizens of their jurisdictions. This paper examines the importance of the budget referendum, which allows the principals to approve or disapprove the proposal of a set of agents, in the context of local public expenditure decisions. We test the null hypothesis that the institution of referendum, when compared to a nonreferendum institution, does not lead to significantly different expenditure behavior.