关于完善未成年人家庭法律保护的思考

保护未成年人的合法权益,保障少年儿童的健康成长,是关乎整个国家和社会的大事.本文通过对几个典型案例的分析,阐述了家庭虐待、遗弃以及买卖儿童所造成的危害及其所反映出的法律问题,强调了未成年人家庭法律保护的重要性.指出应该通过加强立法、执法、完善组织保障体系、加强普法教育等途径,来实现对未成年人的家庭法律保护,防范家庭对未成年人的伤害事件.     

Developmentally disabled children can be adopted

People have often thought that developmentally disabled children were hard to place and poor risks in adoption. However, this research shows that a large number of children of all ages and disabilities were placed for adoption with few disruptions. In light of these findings, agencies may well put more effort into identifying developmentally disabled children as suitable candidates for adoption services.     

Looks can be deceiving: Using a risk assessment instrument to evaluate the out-comes of child protection services

This study explores the use of a risk assessment instrument based on the Illinois CANTS-17B in the child protection services division of a large urban public social services agency. It addresses the usefulness of the instrument as an outcome measure tool, that is, as means of measuring successful case outcomes based on reductions in maltreatment risk between case opening and case closing. Two separate studies were conducted in which the initial and closing risk levels on the 14-item scale were compared. Results were highly statistically significant in both studies, with the difference being in the expected and desired direction: a decrease in risk scores at case closing. However, a more detailed exploration of the data and of the practice issues involved in the agency setting strongly suggests that these differences are largely due to the artificial inflation of initial risk scores by caseworkers in order to ensure children's acceptance for ongoing child protection services. These factors are discussed in detail, along with the policy decisions that ensued from the study.     

The right to be different: Implications for child protection

This paper traces the historical emphasis of defining the disabled child or adult as ‘abnormal’—to be made ‘normal’! Such an emphasis disempowers the child, who comes to believe that his or her difference is as ‘bad’, ‘unacceptable’, and readily allows him or her to be viewed as ‘useless’. Such disabilist attitudes have fostered the belief that child protection services would not be relevant for this child population. The experiences of disabled women are explored, and clear messages emerge that can help us consider the environment of disabilism and the effects of this on disabled children. It helps us to see that, even before the disabled child is abused, his or her experience is one of oppression.     

How bad can a voting location be

Two questions concerning the location of a single facility by a voting process are investigated for transportation networks:

- What is the maximum number of customers located on the network preferring some rival point over a voting solution?

- How does the average distance of the customers to the facility increase when a voting location instead of a Weber location is chosen for the facility?

Complete answers are given for general networks and for certain planar networks, viz., the so-called generalized cacti.     

Recent legal trends in child sexual abuse cases: Direction for child protection workers

Considerable changes have occurred in criminal proceedings involving sexually abused children. As a result, perpetrators of child sexual abuse have been convicted more easily and sentenced to long prison sentences. However, a number of these convictions have been tainted and, thus reversed on appeal, based on either problems in the investigatory process or expert witnesses' exceeding the limits of proper testimony. Because many investigators and some expert witnesses were social workers, the author discusses recent decisions where appellate judges have criticized child protection workers' behaviors. By becoming familiar with cases such as these, child protection workers should gain a better understanding of the limits of their roles in the investigatory process and court proceedings. The result more likely would be that just convictions would be upheld by appellate courts, and falsely accused defendants would be spared the stigma of accusation, trial, and perhaps conviction.     

Remittances from labor migration: evaluations,performance and implications

2 evaluative views of worker remittances draw opposite conclusions. The negative one posits that remittances increase dependency, contribute to economic and political stability and development distortion, and lead to economic decline that overshadows a temporary advantage for a fortunate few. The positive view sees remittances as an effective response to market forces, providing a transition to an otherwise unsustainable development. They improve income distribution and quality of life beyond what other available development resources could deliver. The implications are tested for labor supply countries to Europe and the Middle East. The implications of the negative are not supported. Although the dire predictions of the pessimistic view have not materialized, the converse - contributions of remittances to economic performance - should not be overstated due to a lack of data.     

建立乡镇企业法律咨询服务体系必须解决几个认识问题

法律咨询服务体系是市场经济条件下社会化服务体系的一个重要方面,它既是沟通政府和企业之间的桥梁,又是市场经济在法制条件下运行的一个重要条件。随着我国市场经济体制的逐步建立和完善,我国法律咨询服务体系也逐步形成,在社会经济生活中发挥着日益重要的作用。但是,不能不看到,与市场经济体制推进的速度相比,法律咨询服务体系的建设还是非常滞后的。对乡镇企业系统来说,这一体系的建设,甚至是一张白纸。乡镇企业法律服务体系建设严重滞后,是和我们对乡镇企业的认识有关系的,特别是和我们对乡镇企业的特殊性、乡镇企业在新时期的历史地位…     

Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas

The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.     

Without love there can be law but no justice

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Globalizations builds the case across a diverse group of papers that law is in need of decolonization, especially law systems structuring settler-colonial societies. This is because law's dispossessing character in these contexts is hidden by the prevalence of nomophilia; that is, an uncritical love of law for the neutrality and objectivity it self-proclaims to possess. The collection of papers for this special issue constitute a collective critique of colonial law and crime that does its part in disrupting law's empire of violence by tracking the legalized violence across the axes of class, race, gender, and sexuality. The popular expression of ‘fuck the law’ captured by Agozino in the leading paper of this issue establishes the context in which we make a call for the necessity of love to enter the realm of law as an urgent decolonizing praxis. Without love there can be law, but no justice.     

Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election

We show that a voting scheme suggested by Lewis Carroll can be impractical in that it can be computationally prohibitive (specifically, NP-hard) to determine whether any particular candidate has won an election. We also suggest a class of impracticality theorems which say that any fair voting scheme must, in the worst-case, require excessive computation to determine a winner.Presented at Purdue University, March 1987; at the University of Arizona, April 1987; at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 1987; at Yale University, November 1987; at Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques, Marseille-Luminy, April 1988. This research was supported in part by Presidential Young Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation to the first two authors (ECS-8351313 and ECS-8451032), and by grant N00014-86-K-0173 from the Office of Naval Research.The authors thank the editor and three anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions.     

Peer evaluations and team performance: when friends do worse than strangers

We use peer assessments as a tool to allocate joint profits in a real-effort team experiment. We find that using this incentive mechanism reduces team performance. More specifically, we show that teams composed of acquaintances rather than strangers actually underperform in a context of peer evaluations. We conjecture that peer evaluations undermine the inherently high level of intrinsic motivation that characterizes teams composed of friends and possibly exacerbate negative reciprocity among partners. Finally, we analyze the determinants of peer assessments and stress the crucial importance of equality concerns.