The Victim Advocacy and Research Group: Serving a Growing Need to Provide Rape Victims with Personal Legal Representation to Protect Privacy Rights and to Fight Gender Bias in the Criminal Justice System

The Constitutional guarantee of procedural due process, arguably the most essential principle of the American justice system, provides that no person should be deprived of their rights without, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing. Yet the personal rights of crime victims and other third parties are often violated in criminal proceedings in the absence of even minimal respect for due process. The problem persists, in part, because the system does not provide victims with personal legal advocacy and prosecutors are neither obligated nor empowered to serve as the victim's lawyer. This lack of systematic zealous advocacy for victims produces harmful common law principles that depend on and perpetuate false and prejudicial notions about the credibility of rape victims, and women as a class. This article calls for the creation of public and privately supported lawyers for victims at both the trial and appellate levels of the criminal justice system in an effort to ensure respect for fundamental constitutional principles, and to identify and eradicate gender bias in the criminal common law.     

Wherein Lie the “Secrets of Life”?: An Argument Against Biological Essentialism

There is a very strong trend in American culture to impute fixed, stable, and universal properties to a wide range of behaviors and conditions, thereby essentializing their qualities and locating them within nature. Both persons with disabilities and queers have been designated as nature's deviants. The author explores parallels and points of divergence in the responses of both disability rights and queer rights activism and scholarship to this assigned classification. She further illuminates this exploration by drawing upon insights derived from growing up with a congenital disability. As a child, the author felt that her body was a text composed, crafted, and edited by those who had the power to manipulate it. Recently, she entered a lesbian relationship, and together she and her partner planned a commitment ceremony that allowed her to reclaim her own body, because the body of the text that ensued was one of their own creation.     

Pathologising the victim: law and the construction of people with disabilities as victims of crime in Ireland

Victimologists have for many years explored the construction of identities associated with the ‘victim of crime’, and how certain groups in society are understood as more ‘deserving’ of victim status than others. This paper considers the victim subjectivities ascribed to people with disabilities¹¹ In Ireland, ‘people with disabilities’ is the preferred term to ‘disabled people’.View all notes as victims of crime in Ireland by exploring the legal frameworks that shape their encounters with the criminal justice system. The legislative bricolage that exists is shaped by disjuncture, whereby anti-discrimination measures grounded in people with disabilities’ equal rights to access the justice system sit alongside those that construct them in terms of incapacity. Criminal law overwhelmingly pathologises people with disabilities as crime victims, with impairment dominating their victim status. The paper suggests that notions of victimhood that associate people with disabilities with dependency and passivity will do little to raise awareness of the disabling barriers that characterise their encounters with the criminal justice system.     

The VFW — A case study in the “iron law of oligarchy” and goal displacement

The iron law of oligarchy is applied to the VFW. Using participant observation and qualitative interviews, membership of the VFW is dichotomized into a leadership oligarchy and a drinking membership. Opinions of members of the two groups about the purposes of the organization and about each other are documented. An historical analysis traces the change in organizational goals over time from promoting nationalism, fraternalism, and special benefits for members to political advocacy of veterans' rights.     

Social Movements and Rights Claims: The Case of Action Groups in the Niger Delta of Nigeria

This article examines how the various claims to, and demands for, rights have enabled and shaped the various equity and justice seeking social movements that have emerged in the Niger Delta of Nigeria, the key point being that claims to rights are fundamental of the logic and coherence of social movements. The article is divided into three sections. The first sets the conceptual and analytical frame by elaborating on the rights–social movements nexus. This is followed by a discussion of the historical and conceptual location of the Niger Delta. The rest of the article interrogates the contexts of relative deprivation, rights denial, and injustice within which social movements have emerged in the Niger Delta. A major objective is to account for why the social movements have been largely ethnic and most recently generational and to analyze the dynamics and outcomes of the rights struggles waged by the various social movements.

Making Minorities: Cultural Space,Stigma Transformation Frames,and the Categorical Status Claims of Deaf,Gay, and White Supremacist Activists in Late Twentieth Century America

This article compares the efforts of movement activists in three dissimilar groups to replace a stigmatized status with a valued one by portraying their groups as resembling established minorities (claims of contiguity in cultural space) and as differing from groups stigmatized as deviant (claims of distance). The most common claims assert similarity to African Americans, and frequently incorporate civil rights themes (exemplifying frame diffusion). Tactically, these minority status claims exploit both the resonance of cultural pluralism and state recognition of minorities. Strategically, minority status framing enables stigmatized groups to claim legitimacy without changing — simultaneously asserting both normality and difference.     

The partisanship of silence: Symbolic politics of school desegration in Boston

This article analyzes the symbolic aspects of the school desegration controversy using disputes in Boston as a case in point. The symbolic communication between actors in the public forum contains implicit views of the rights and obligations of different participants in the controversy, and the role of various individuals and collectives in the history of the controversy. These views also provide a framework for understanding the position of specific actors, which may constrain their ability to participate effectively in the controversy. This article analyzes these constraints with respect to those actors who attempted to establish a mediator role between pro-integration and anti-busing forces.Prepared under grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-6-00-3-0187, NIE-6-76-0038), National Institute of Mental Health, (R01-MH-27618) and the Carnegie Corporation.     

Can I Speak and Do You Hear Me? Quest(ion)s for R/Evolution

Young people have been and will always be the vanguards and visionaries of civil rights movements and liberation-oriented communities. Young queers, however, are still struggling to be heard, even within gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. The author offers the Encounter-Reaction Model as an analytical framework to explore the dynamics of power and oppression from the top-down perspective. He also raises probing questions to those in authority on their knowledge of disenfranchised communities' identities and realities, their strategies for leadership development, inclusion and accountability, and their motivations in regard to working and structuring their relationships with those at the margins. Finally, he unpacks the roots and manifestations of being silenced.     

Social class and social liberalism

The relationship between social class and politics has been a central concern of political sociologists over the years. Recently various scholars have contended that the last twenty years have witnessed the emergence of noneconomic or social issues (e.g., equal rights, personal freedom) and of a middle class liberalism, especially on these social issues. In fact, it was claimed that this privileged radicalism has led to an inversion of the traditional relationship between class and political ideology, as now it is the middle class which is more supportive than the working class of liberal positions on the important social issues of the day. In this paper we subject these claims to a rigorous empirical test using 1973–1982 NORC data. Our findings indicate that there is little support forclass differences in social liberalism, and that most of the apparent differences are due to education. Furthermore, affluence does not have a consistent effect on social liberalism. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analyses for the nature of class differences in American society.     

Mothers construct fathers: Destabilized patriarchy in La Leche League

This paper examines changing masculine ideals from the point of view of women homemakers through a case study of La Leche League, a maternalist organization dedicated to breastfeeding and mother primacy. We suggest two reasons for studying the League: first, an emerging literature suggests that changing norms are seeping into many such seemingly conservative groups, and second, the League continues to be highly successful among white, middle-class, married women. The paper looks at two aspects of masculinity, examining changes in the League through fieldwork, interviews, and content analysis, and finds that new norms of increased father involvement and decreased rights over women's bodies have both influenced League philosophy. We conclude that while in some respects a measure of the decline of men's patriarchal privileges, the League's changes also may contribute to a restabilization of male dominance in a modified, partial form.     

Images of Struggle: Teaching Human Rights with Graphic Novels

The authors explore how graphic novels can be used in the middle and high school social studies classroom to teach human rights. The article begins with a rationale on the benefits of using graphic novels. It next focuses on four graphic novels related to human rights issues: Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds (Speigelman 1986), Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (Sacco 2010 Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. [Google Scholar]), War Brothers: The Graphic Novel (McKay 2013 McKay, Sharon. War Brothers: The Graphic Novel. Toronto: Annick Press, 2013. [Google Scholar]), and March Book Two (Lewis and Aydin 2015 Lewis, John, and Andrew Aydin. March Book Two. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2015. [Google Scholar]). Each graphic novel is briefly discussed and classroom activities are provided. Example activities demonstrate how the texts and visuals within them can be combined to teach human rights issues. An appendix of human rights-related graphic novels is also included.     

Western secularism in an age of religious diversity

In the last decade several Western countries have been updating the law concerning the relationships between State and Churches. This clearly testifies that many legal instruments, created for carrying out secularism in societies dominated by a single culture and tradition, are not any longer adequate to meet the needs of today's multicultural communities. In fact, those legal instruments were tailored on the requirements of traditional creeds; therefore, they are not able to accommodate the demands coming from diverse religious denominations.

The author will point out some specific legal approaches (namely the French laïcité as well as the dual-system and joint governance approaches), which have traditionally carried out secularism in some Western countries. He will try to demonstrate that in contemporary democracies, as has occurred in the past, secularism has to find a balance between the universal need for a peaceful coexistence and the protection of religious-cultural rights – not only the rights of a group to be different, but also the rights of individuals within these groups.     

Secularization and the politics of traditionalism: The case of the right-to-life movement

Research on the traditionalist movement against abortion needs alignment with currents in historical sociology, the theory of social movements and the sociology of politics. The religious (specifically, Christian) basis of the right-to-life movement has attracted considerable attention in the literature. The movement is seen as a traditionalist bloc claiming to oppose secularization and return to customary restrictions. However the tradition in question appears to be a recent social construction. There is slim warrant in the actual traditions of Western religion for asserting a categorical right to life. As a result, the movement's ideology is best approached as the product of—rather than the antidote to—secularizing processes (including the demographic transition, discourse about rights, markets for symbolic entrepreneurs and the separation of church and state) and possibly as an unintended import from non-Western religion. Implications for traditionalism, the functions of religion, and the study of countermovements are explored. This case illustrates the value of attending to historical sequences and the external cultural environments of social movements.     

Durkheim'sdivision of labor in society

The source of social life, according to Durkheim, is the similitude of consciousnesses and the division of labor. The former is best evident among primitive societies where a mechanical solidarity, evidenced by repressive law, prevails; the latter in advanced societies where populations evidence greater dynamic density, and juridical rules define the nature and relations of functions. In combating individualism and basing the existence of societies on a consensus of parts, Durkheim refutes his positivistic emphasis which denies the relevance of ends to a scientific study of society. In his discussion of social ends is a latent anti-mechanistic trend. The theory of unilinear development is established on deficient ethnographic data. It assumes the absence of division of labor among primitive societies and of any mechanical solidarity among modern societies. Repressive and restitutive law Durkheim seeks to use as indexes of mechanical and organic solidarity, but he does not establish with any precision the perfect associations which he assumes obtain between his types of solidarity and of law.Reproduced from theAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40 (1934), pp. 319–328. (© 1934 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.)     

The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village

Conclusions We should note, however, that the achievements of the control system cannot in and of themselves explain the success of the discourse on the Arab village. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, one must acknowledge today that what the control system produced was a secondary order reality at best, a representation superimposed over, and obscuring other social realities. It never managed (nor did it try) to stop the proletarianization of peasants. It never managed (though it did try) to put an end to illegal construction and de-facto urbanization. It did not even manage to repress the emergence of grass-roots national political organization in the villages. More often than not, its sole achievement was to obscure official (and academic) perception of these processes. Thus, one often finds nowadays settlements to which the term village is officially applied, while their physical structure already merits urban status. Urbanization took place in the villages regardless of the designs of planners, and this fact alone is enough to demonstrate how discourse detached them from reality. This was also why, in 1976, Orientalists and government experts were completely taken by surprise, when the committee for national direction (composed of village mayors!) organized mass demonstrations to protest government plans to confiscate more Palestinian lands. The events of this day, later known as land day, signaled the emergence of rural Palestinians as a national political force to be reckoned with. Quite contrary to what the notion of hamula struggle led them to believe, experts discovered that the villages were an effective mobilizing ground for national political action.I think it is precisely the dubious character of the achievements of the control system, arising from the systematic blindness inculcated by discourse, which demonstrates that these achievements were indeed of secondary importance in comparison with what was the raison d'etre of the control system and the discourse on the Arab village: their premier achievement was to reproduce the separatist character of Israeli identity. The origins of the control system were diverse indeed: they included divide and conquer practices developed by Arabists; land planning practices; modernization discourse formulated in response to immigration; cooptation strategies developed by the Labor party for electoral purposes; bifurcation of the labor market by Jewish labor unions. There is no one person or group responsible for these. What organized all these diverse practices together was the specific rationality of the control system. This rationality was not an economic one, nor political, nor scientific, nor was it given in any of these practices. It was identical with Israeli identity and the procedures that separate it from its other. This is why Israelis still adhere to the control system and the discourse on the Arab village, even though they fail to predict Palestinian behavior or control it (i.e., it was not their goal to begin with).It is ironic that the discourse on the Arab village would reach the height of its prestige just as the achievements of the control system were evaporating. The conjunction of these two events cannot be explained by the Weberian view of power as the realization of a will, i.e., by focusing on the interest of Jews in maintaining control over Palestinians. Such a view leads to an unavoidable contradiction: If the action of participants in the discourse and the control system is based on their interests, why are they unable to recognize their failure? And if they are not capable of monitoring their own interests, how were they able to create a coherent and effective control system? The answer is that their action is circumscribed by what discourse and the control system permit them to grasp, and this understanding is indeed both limited and enabled by the premier achievement of discourse and the control system: a position of a Western-modern Israeli subject, strictly demarcated from that of the traditional-Oriental rural Palestinian. Power is not so much exercised to realize an Israeli interest, as it is constitutive of the very self-understanding that underlies this interest, a self-understanding predicated on the rejection of the Orient and its exclusion.In this sense, this article merely provides the rough outlines for a future debate on the origins and nature of Israeli separatism. Such a debate has scarcely begun, but implicit understandings of separatism are implicated in the contemporary political debate in Israel. The mainstream of Israeli political thought tends to treat the separation between Jews and Palestinians as a taken-for-granted fact, a direct consequence of Zionism as a nation-building project. Others, on the political left, question this assumption and suggest that separatism should be understood as an institutional system erected in response to certain economic, military, or political interests, a system based on the control and exploitation of Palestinians by Jews.I think both positions limit the debate about separatism. By ignoring the cultural side of separatism, its character as an identity that requires a permanent effort of constitution, they supply an alibi for intellectuals and academics. These can continue using their disciplines and discourses, and even present these as sufficiently detached for a critique of Israeli politics, without examining their role in the reproduction of a separatist identity. Moreover, if separatism is understood merely as control over Palestinians, thus ignoring its side as the subjection of Jews, the consequence is that the distinction usurped by the Israeli upper class is mis-recognized. This class can continue to present its taste, values, and style of life - all those cultural arbitraries that are marked by the double exclusion of the Orient and the diaspora - as the sacred cultural consensus of Israeli society. It was my aim in this article, on the contrary, to demonstrate that separatism informs the core of Israeli culture, and thus the intellectual tools to understand it and fight it can not be taken from among what it consecrates.     

Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning

It is argued that for organizational learning to occur maladaptive social defenses within the organization have to be altered. The origins of the concept of social defenses are traced through the work of Jaques and Menzies. A new concept of system domain, and related concepts of system domain fabric, and system domain defenses, are proposed in order to account for the difficulties in sustaining organizational change in organizations that share a similar primary task. Organizational learning is defined as occurring when there is co-evolution of organizational container and contained. The article distills variables from three successful consultancy/action research projects which are characteristic of organizations that are learning, and it is hypothesized that the creation of organizational awareness is necessary for organizational learning to occur.     

Toward a Psychology of Societal Change and Stability: The Case of Human Rights and Duties

A distinction is made between two types of psychology concerned with: performance capacity, the abilities of individuals tested in isolation; and performance style, the way things get done and the meanings ascribed to phenomena. Causal explanations are appropriate for performance capacity, and normative ones for performance style. Traditional psychology has focused predominantly on performance capacity and causation. Societal change and stability, it is argued, involves meaning systems and are best understood in terms of performance style and normative models. Stability is achieved through carriers, flexible vehicles that help to sustain meaning systems. As our illustrative example, we consider the topic of human rights and duties. Carriers in some situations widen a gap between formal law and actual behavior. This gap, we argue, is in part due to the faster maximum speed of change in legal and other macrolevel spheres, relative to the psychological level.     

Fighting back: Vulnerabilities,blunders, and countermobilization by the targets in three animal rights campaigns

Among the determinants of social movement success, the characteristics and responses of nonstate organizations under attack by protestors have been overlooked. We examine three campaigns by animal rights groups against experimentation, in 1976–1977, 1987–1988, and 1988–1989. The first two campaigns stopped the research, while the third did not. One influential set of factors was the preexisting vulnerabilities—e.g., unpopular practices, internal factions—on the part of targeted organizations. Another was the strategic responses of these organizations, especially the avoidance of blunders. A growing countermovement, thirdly, affected the organizations' ability to respond effectively and avoid blunders. As a social movement expands and strengthens, it encourages counterorganizing and a hardening of resistance, so that many social movements may actually be less successful as they become larger and more visible.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, DC, August 1990.     

Generalized social welfare functionals: Welfarism,morality and liberty

The concept of a generalized social welfare functional (GSWFL) is introduced to permit the integration of appealing moral principles into the traditional Pareto-inclusive welfarist framework of utilitarianism and welfare economics. Attention is focused on a so-called liberal utilitarian GSWFL which incorporates libertarian rights within the utilitarian calculus in a fashion reminiscent of J. S. Mill's philosophy. It is suggested that welfarist social choice theory may be a far more powerful and flexible tool of political and economic analysis than is commonly thought.Revised version of a paper presented at Summer Public Choice Institute held under the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, July 29–August 19, 1984. The Author would particularly like to thank Nick Baigent, Bill Harper, Prasanta Pattanaik, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Robert Sugden, John Weymark and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Financial support in the form of Killam and SSHRC Fellowships is gratefully acknowledged