A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD ISSUE:

In 1997, the Office of Child Support Enforcement initiated the State Child Access and Visitation (AV) Grant Program, which involves annual awards of $10 million to states to promote the development of programs to alleviate access problems. Telephone interviews with 970 parents who used mediation, parent education, and supervised visitation programs funded by AV grants in nine states revealed that the programs are reaching diverse groups of parents including many low-income, non-White, and unmarried parents who receive no other type of access assistance. The programs also appear to be achieving the major objectives posited for them by the federal government. One-third to one-half of noncustodial parents in every program type reported that parent–child contact increased following program participation, with supervised visitation users who typically had the lowest levels of parent–child contact reporting a significant increase in the number of days of contact. A review of child support records for 173 program users in three states revealed that child support payments increased among participants following program participation, especially for never-married parents who paid a significantly higher proportion of what they owed. These findings are similar to results reported in a five-state study of mediation programs funded by AV grants that was conducted by the Office of the Inspector General. However, both studies have some serious limitations, including low response rates and the absence of a nontreatment comparison group.     

September 11: A societal reaction perspective

This article illustratesthe application of the labeling or societalreaction theory regarding the events ofSeptember 11, 2001. It explains thevarious types of labels that societyassigned to ``September 11' and how societalreactions led to governmental and lawenforcement changes. Pertinent opinionpolls were analyzed to indicate the powerof labeling which, in turn, was used todemonstrate how the USA PATRIOT Act waspassed during heightened societalreaction.     

Shaped on the Anvil of Mars: Vance and Nettie Palmer and the Great War

In Australia as elsewhere within the belligerent nations of the Great War, dissenting thinkers were marginalised with the mobilisation of militarism. Vance and Nettie Palmer, Australia's most important literary partnership in the interwar period, were initially critical of the war, their response typical of the English radical intelligentsia among whom they were living at the time of its outbreak. Forced back to Australia in 1915, the Palmers had to re-establish themselves in its increasingly turbulent intellectual battlefields. Nettie's earlier anti-war beliefs and cosmopolitanism were undermined while Vance became ever more deeply enmeshed in a discourse concerning the virtues of the “ordinary people”, which encompassed the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Nevertheless, in their extensive writings about Australia, neither Palmer ever endorsed the legend of the heroic Anzacs. The Great War, however, profoundly shaped their political consciousness and their choice of genre and writing strategies, as it did others of their literary generation. This article will show that the war was a far more important influence on their work than usually acknowledged in Australian literary scholarship, and thereby reveal some of the cultural patterns that shaped their generation of Australian radical writers and intellectuals — particularly in Melbourne, arguably the heartland for the tradition of democratic literary nationalism which the Palmers have been seen to epitomise.