Forced marriage of people with learning disabilities: a human rights issue

This paper reports some of the findings of an exploratory study which sought to better understand the demographics of forced marriage of people with learning disabilities and the contexts in which such marriages may occur. It was found that forced marriages of people with and without learning disabilities showed broad similarities in relation to ethnicity, some differences in terms of age and substantial differences in terms of gender. Men and women with learning disabilities are equally likely to be victims of forced marriage. The reasons for people with learning disabilities being forced to marry are most often associated with a desire on the part of families to secure permanent care, but can also be associated with cultural (mis)understandings of the nature of disability. These findings are contextualised by considering the relationship between forced marriage, human rights and learning disability.     

"We are not aliens, we're people, and we have rights." Canadian human rights discourse and high school climate for LGBTQ students

Canadian law protects people from discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but our public schools do not fulfill their ethical and legal obligations where sexual and gender minority youth are concerned. This article reports on a national survey study on homophobia and transphobia in Canadian high schools. Participants (n = 3,607) were questioned about school climate, harassment, school attachment, and institutional interventions. We found that schools were neither safe nor respectful for sexual and gender minority students, and we argue that ongoing exposure to this situation undermines students' respect for the Charter of Rights and their faith in adults.     

The future of equality and human rights in Britain--opportunities and risks for disabled people

The Government plans to introduce a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR), covering disability, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion/belief and age. This presents both opportunities and risks for the achievement of disability equality. This paper analyses implications and proposes a long term disability rights agenda, geared to mainstreaming disability equality into the CEHR and major policy developments across Government. It suggests that the widest involvement of disabled people, policy makers and academics in the field of disability will be necessary to achieve this. The DRC will be very active in this work.     

Religion,human rights and intercultural education

Religions in the contemporary world are Janus-faced institutions. They have the potential of being positive forces but also the capacity of being negative forces. Educators can use the positive aspects and dimensions of religion to foster interfaith and intercultural understandings. In this respect, educators can use the human rights instruments that most nations have approved to ensure that the legal and secular basis of the state provides safety and security to all faiths. This paper discusses these issues and the role of intercultural education in facilitating interfaith education and understanding.     

Open adoption records,the human rights of adopted people,and discrimination: the case of Odièvre v France 2003

The recent judgement by the European Court of Human Rights in the Odièvre v France case has denied some adopted people the right to access identifying information about their family of origin. Yet, in the UK, adopted people have enjoyed the right to access identifying information for many years. The evidence from practice and research has demonstrated the positive benefits adopted people and their birth and adoptive relatives have gained from an open record policy. In this paper, the authors argue that denying some adopted people access to information that could enhance their personal identity creates an act of discrimination.     

AIDS,travel and migration: legal and human rights aspects

This article discusses the legal and human rights aspects of AIDS, travel, and migration in Africa. Restrictions upon migration and travel in the context of HIV/AIDS have directed attention on the jeopardy of free international movement and the need to uphold it. International travel and migration have been blamed for introducing HIV and restrictions imposed to prevent the import of such disease. Contemporary legal and administrative barriers to free movement of people across national borders are similar to the physical barriers imposed to prevent the spread of diseases in past centuries. However, physical barriers failed to prevent the international spread of diseases and legal and administrative barriers have been proven ineffective. Meanwhile, responses to HIV/AIDS set patterns for other health-related issues and to affect the entire legal framework of international travel and migration. Based on previous studies, data on migratory flows and numbers of travelers and migrants are scarce in Africa. Migrants represent more or less 10% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa or 35 million persons, including some 60 million refugees.     

Integrating leadership processes: redefining the principles course

Current research indicates the gap between what a student can do in public relations upon graduation and what professionals, both academic and practitioner, ideally would like is a statistically significant disparity. This finding should concern professionals greatly as the future of the field of public relations is currently being challenged by other disciplines.This article revamps the principles of public relations course, the first professional course in the public relations sequence, by integrating a leadership process and a service-learning component. With 5 years of experience with this approach, the project results indicate more students are reflecting the interpersonal and team skills desired in the 1998 national study on public relations.Employers need students who understand organizational systems, who can work independently as well as effectively in teams, and who can see the long-term goals of a project and/or campaign. Finally, the certification and accreditation programs sponsored by professional organizations must reflect these new standards.     

Art and law,land rights and overcoming injustice: The example of the Spinifex people

This study explores the presence of cultures in the apprenticed and self‐taught collectivities of tattooists. Adopting a fragmentationist perspective of culture we accept and explore ambiguities within and across these collectivities. Distinguishing between membership and participation enhances our understanding of culture in at least three ways. Firstly, individual tattooists can be members of single (for example, self‐taught or apprenticed) or multiple (for example, self‐taught and apprenticed), overlapping collectivities. Secondly, individuals can be members of a collectivity, but not participants in the cultures. For example, not all individuals in the apprenticed collectivity participate in the cultures emerging from this collectivity. Finally, individuals can enact cultural identities from multiple, overlapping cultures. Apprenticed tattooists participate in cultures evident in both their own collectivity espousing values of professionalism and tradition, as well as in other collectivities privileging artistry and creativity. By distinguishing between membership and participation we advocate a cultural perspective that envisions cultural boundaries as fluid and blurred.     

Place,people and processes in waste theory: a global South critique

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences have long sought to theorize waste, and more particularly the relationship between humans – their history, society, culture, art and thought – and their discards. My contention, though, is that these theories, since Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) and Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979), have been predominantly based in and on global North contexts and, concomitantly, have taken as their axiom the distance between our cultures, lives, experiences and our material rejects. By intersecting existing cultural theories of waste with two important emerging schools of thought – environmental justice and new materialism – I argue that the exclusion or side-lining of places, notably in the global South where countless people live on a day-to-day basis with, on, and off waste, leads to certain imbalances, biases and gaps. Most notably, the livingness and agency of material rejects is often overlooked in theories that oppose humans and other-than-human waste. By way of conclusion, I propose the notion of ‘living waste’ – a more literal and material take on Bauman’s well-known concept ‘wasted lives’ – as a new point of departure for a reconceptualization of waste that might escape the prevailing dualisms and account simultaneously for ‘full-belly’ and ‘empty-belly’ contexts, human (wasted) lives and other-than-human waste materials, and understandings of lived experiences of waste.     

Dementia,disability rights and disablism: understanding the social position of people living with dementia

This article considers the recent history and consequences of positioning people living with dementia in the realms of disability, disablism and disability rights. The geo-political focus is the United Kingdom and neighbouring resource-rich nations in the Global North. The first section examines the growing trend of identifying ‘dementia’ with ‘disability’, a trend fuelled by the expansion of dementia-related activism and research. The second section focuses on how researchers who have published in Disability & Society and other journals have applied the social model of disability to individuals living with dementia. The third section discusses three conceptual challenges that lie ahead for those who choose to research and theorise the dementia/disability connection. These challenges concern: theorising dementia as disability; understanding intersectionality in dementia contexts; and understanding ‘abuse’ in dementia contexts.     

Disability rights in practice: the relationship between human rights and social rights in contemporary social care

Using the contemporary arena of social care as an example, this article challenges the either/or dichotomy set up by some disability writers and activists between the favoured civil and human rights on the one hand and discredited social rights on the other. Rather, the article concludes, claims to these differing types of right are mutually reinforcing and can be mobilised strategically in disabled people's struggles for greater social justice. In particular, there is the potential for expanding disabled people's social rights to both direct services and direct payments by enforcing the positive obligations on public authorities conferred by human rights legislation and challenging rationing regimes.     

Companion piece: Needs, rights, and the human family: a bio-psycho-social-spiritual perspective

This article sets forth a bio-psycho-social-spiritual perspective on the needs and rights of children. Consideration is first given to the philosophical nature of need. The nature of rights is then examined in relation to need as a basis for social justice claims. Various need paradigms, such as human development needs, socially constructed needs, and needs hierarchies, are considered and compared to the rights paradigm presented in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Rationale for ratification is then presented.     

Scalar properties of the transnational field of human rights: Field effects and human rights in Bahrain

Whilst a body of work exists that has engaged with and conceptualised transnational fields, and in particular for this paper, the transnational field of human rights, more work needs to be done to elaborate on the effects of transnational fields, at the national level. Using Bourdieu's field theory, and more recent scholarship that focuses on scalar aspects of fields, this research focuses on a human rights field at the national level in Bahrain. The paper addresses two levels/dimensions of the transnational field of human rights: the transnational level and the national level, focussing on the field's vertical autonomy. Based upon nineteen in-depth interviews, the research retrieves the biographical trajectories of Bahraini human rights activists and activists from iNGOs with a specific remit that includes Bahrain. The paper argues that the vertical autonomy of the transnational field of human rights has demonstrable field effects at the national level, and that this has a number of implications. First, where transnational fields have greater vertical autonomy, the national level can operate with varying hierarchies, with actors adopting practices that diverge from those acting transnationally. Second, as a result of these scalar differences and the vertical autonomy of the transnational field, actors at the national level may have to adapt their practices, others can be side-lined as a result of ‘symbolic pollution.’ Third, in order for local actors to engage with transnational advocacy networks, they must be the right type of actor.     

An exploration of kaupapa Maori research,its principles,processes and applications

This article discusses whether the focus group method can be employed with troubled groups and for the discussion of high‐involvement topics. It analyses focus groups' discourse of high‐involvement topics, such as ‘the body’, ‘relationships’, and ‘sexuality’, conducted with female adolescents aged 15–20 years at a detention home. Contrary to the traditional belief that the focus group method is designed for low‐involvement topics and mainstream groups, our analyses of the discursive devices employed suggest that the method can indeed be used for high‐involvement topics. We also argue that other methods would not have given us ‘deeper’ insights and that the focus group method can be seen as a less intrusive method to be used in this setting.