Taking a Chance? The Risks Associated with Going Missing from Substitute Care

This paper reports on a study of over 200 young people going missing from residential and foster care in four local authorities. The proportion of young people missing from residential care was high, ranging from 25 to 71% of all 11 – 16‐year‐olds in mainstream children’s homes. Two types of absence were identified: the ‘runaways’ profile (those who ran away or stayed out) and the ‘friends’ profile (those missing to be with friends). There were variations in levels of risk for different sub‐groups within the sample. Risks included immediate risks of victimization, sexual exploitation (including prostitution), offending and substance misuse. A longer‐term risk of detachment was identified among those going missing often, involving high levels of non‐school attendance, detachment from carers and involvement in offending and in substance misuse. Difficulties in the assessment of risk are discussed and approaches to managing risk for young people who go missing from substitute care are explored. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shifting Discourse and Practice on Food Banks: Insights from a Community–University Partnership

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In the context of an entrenched food bank system, there is broad recognition of the need to move beyond charity-based...     

Will the children use it?—A RE-AIM evaluation of a local public open space intervention involving children from a deprived neighbourhood

Knowledge on how to improve public open spaces in deprived neighbourhoods to increase active living among children is scarce and comprehensively evaluated public open space interventions are needed. Firstly, the aim was to explore if involving 39 local fifth-grade children (10–11 years old) from a deprived neighbourhood in creating playable installations in a public open space influenced their use of this space. Secondly, we wanted to explore if the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance framework (RE-AIM) was useful for evaluating different stages in the intervention project. RE-AIM was applied through a convergent mixed-methods triangulation design using survey, accelerometer, GPS, and interviews as data sources. Effectiveness outcomes revealed that on average the space was used less by the 39 children after the intervention. The implementation and maintenance dimensions revealed aspects of why most children involved in the project did not use the space after intervention. The evaluation cast light on children’s perceptions of their role, and importance of maintenance when the intervention was completed. In future, all dimensions of built environmental projects would benefit from being planned and evaluated in a collaboration with all project partners using an evaluation framework integrated and applied from the beginning of the project.     

Activists beyond Brussels: Transnational NGO Strategies on EU–West African Trade Negotiations

The literature on civil society interaction with European trade policy-making limits its analysis on Brussels-based campaigning and finds low impact levels. At the same time, the EU identifies global civil society as one factor of explaining the stalling of trade negotiations with African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. This article presents a case study of NGO campaigns on the EU–West African trade negotiations to suggest that the growing complexity of global governance presents the same political opportunities for non-state actor participation in trade as they have been shown to skilfully use in other policy domains. It concludes that political economy studies should integrate insights from the transnational activism literature in order to better grasp the effects of ongoing globalisations on trade policy-making.

La literatura sobre la interacción de la sociedad civil con la elaboración de políticas comerciales europeas, se limitan a analizar las campañas basadas en Bruselas, encontrando niveles de bajo impacto. A su vez, la UE identifica a la sociedad civil globalizada, como un factor que explica el estancamiento de las negociaciones comerciales con los países africanos, caribeños y del Pacífico. Este artículo presenta un estudio de caso de las campañas de una ONG sobre las negociaciones comerciales entre la UE y África occidental, que sugiere que la creciente complejidad de la gobernabilidad global, provee las mismas oportunidades políticas de participación en el comercio de actores no estatales, como lo han utilizado hábilmente en otros campos políticos. El artículo concluye que los estudios de política económica deben incluir conocimientos de la literatura sobre el activismo trasnacional, con el fin de comprender mejor cómo se afecta la elaboración de políticas comerciales en el ámbito de una globalización cada vez mayor.

关于市民社会与欧洲贸易政策制定互动作用的文献将其分析局限于以布鲁塞尔为基地的运动,研究发现其影响力处于低水平。与此同时,欧盟将全球市民社会认定为是解释欧盟与非洲、加勒比以及太平洋国家贸易谈判停滞的一个作用因素。本文展现欧盟—西非贸易谈判中一个非政府组织运动的案例,认为全球治理的日益复杂表明,非国家行为体在贸易中的政治参与机会,正如在其他政策领域已表明熟练运用的机会一样。本文的结论是,政治经济研究应当将跨国政治活动主义文献中产生的洞见整合进来,更好地捕捉正在经历的全球化对贸易政策制定的影响。     

Spatial turn,beyond geography: a new Agenda for sciences of religion?

Relying on a review of recent literature (and, sometimes, older publications), this paper attempts to highlight issues relating to the ‘spatial turn’ in religious studies. It outlines a series of developments in the study of religions related to issues in space, location and territory that have been enhanced by the intellectual framework of globalism and the empirical context of globalization. The challenges of such a geographic focus on religions are epistemological, theoretical and methodological. An examination of new and not-so-new issues in geographic approaches to religion shows how topical the perspective is, and how necessary it is to think the geography of religion beyond the boundaries of geography. In what ways do these new regimes of territoriality, these new concepts of religious space, and these new methods to understand the changes of material and cultural expressions of religion, whether wide-scale or local, partake on a paradigmatic shift? And how promising is it?     

Women’s employment and the decline of home cooking: Evidence from France, 1985–2010

We here investigate the extent to which labour-market changes explain the decline in the time spent home cooking by married women in France between 1985 and 2010. Using time use data and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, we find that rising women’s employment and observed wages together account for about 60% of the fall in the time married women spent cooking. We then use a semi-parametric matching technique to construct an implicit wage rate, which better reflects the change in labour-market incentives that individuals face. The rise in women’s implicit wages explains no more than 20% of the decline in their cooking time, while the wage of their partner has no effect. Changing labour-market incentives are thus far from being the main driver of the decline in home-cooking. We also find evidence that home cooking continues to be structured by the gendered social norm of the “proper family meal”.     

Bridging the qualitative–quantitative divide: Experiences from conducting a mixed methods evaluation in the RUCAS programme

Quantitative and qualitative approaches to planning and evaluation in education for sustainable development have often been treated by practitioners from a single research paradigm. This paper discusses the utility of mixed method evaluation designs which integrate qualitative and quantitative data through a sequential transformative process. Sequential mixed method data collection strategies involve collecting data in an iterative process whereby data collected in one phase contribute to data collected in the next. This is done through examples from a programme addressing the ‘Reorientation of University Curricula to Address Sustainability (RUCAS): A European Commission Tempus-funded Programme’. It is argued that the two approaches are complementary and that there are significant gains from combining both. Using methods from both research paradigms does not, however, mean that the inherent differences among epistemologies and methodologies should be neglected. Based on this experience, it is recommended that using a sequential transformative mixed method evaluation can produce more robust results than could be accomplished using a single approach in programme planning and evaluation focussed on education for sustainable development.     

Incest: Self‐report findings from a nonclinical sample

Self‐reports of incest experiences from a nonpatient, nonoffender sample of 100 individuals are described. The purpose is to document the wide range of incest types by correlating the negative‐to‐positive perceived outcome of the experience with sex, age, exploitation, and guilt. A 23‐item questionnaire was administered to respondents contacted through nationally circulated classified advertisements. Respondents, were categorized as perpetrators, victims, and consenting participants. Incestuous experiences with age peers, adult or child, constitute 42% of the accounts. Of the cross‐generational reports, 33% are from adult males describing incest with children, and 63% are from adults retrospectively describing childhood incest with adult males. Both exploitative and nonexploitative experiences are perceived by some respondents as negative and by others as positive. There was no correlation between positive‐to‐negative outcome and type of erotic activity, consanguinity, or sexual orientation.     

Comparative research in social work: methodological considerations using the ‘diachronic–synchronic’ distinction in linguistics

Although there has been a significant increase in the number of comparative studies in social work, there has, to date, been a deficit in terms of methodological discussion and development in this domain. In this article, a linked pair of methodological concepts (‘diachronic’–‘synchronic’), drawn from linguistics, and often used in comparative research studies in the humanities and social sciences, has been applied to the field of comparative research in social work. The use of this distinction in comparative research of social work contributes to the progress of social work as a research-based scientific discipline. The distinction also offers the potential for the development of research methodology in the field of comparative social work research.     

Gender Mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectionality in a Post‐Colonial Un‐doing?

This article explores some critical reflections engaged in as part of the earliest stages of applying for an international development project grant. Though most of the funding came from the North, which had the potential to reproduce typical North–South relations, both parties involved in the project agreed to predicate relationships on principles of equity in an attempt to decolonize relationships, or what could be seen as a sort of ‘un‐doing’ of traditional colonial relations. Tensions emanating from within and among the teams at early meetings underscored the complexity of un‐doing colonial relationships, as well as the way that colonial relations awkwardly but seamlessly intersect with gendered, classed and heteronormative individual and organizational relations. It also highlights the messiness and difficulty in transform(ing) hegemonic social conditions in a single international institution or project.     

From Bondage to Freedom on the Red Sea Coast: Manumitted Slaves in Egyptian Massawa, 1873–1885

The study of 239 manumission acts registered in the court records of the Red Sea port of Massawa, now in the modern state of Eritrea, allows us glimpses into the practice of slavery and emancipation in that town in the 1870s and 1880s. The evidence sheds light both on urban slaves owned by local Massawans, commercial entrepreneur-sojourners, Egyptian officers and the Egyptian government, as well as on those slaves who might have been captured en route before their shipment across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. In the context of the scanty historiography of slavery in the Ethio-Eritrean area, the data provides unique information about gender, age, names, origins, geographic provenance and the circumstances of manumission of 276 slaves, many of whom originated in what are today areas of south-western and western Ethiopia, but also from the Eritrean borderlands and the Sudan. The evidence also provides insights into ethnic and racial distinctions and categorisations, as well as the experience of slaves before and after manumission, including concubinage, marriage and, perhaps, employment with the Egyptian government which ruled Massawa between 1865 and 1885.     

Italian Immigrants and the Mexican Nation: The Cusi Family in Michoacán (1885–1938)

This article considers the trajectory of the Cusi family, a family of Italian immigrants in Mexico. After arriving in the 1880s, the family accumulated significant land, which was later expropriated under redistributive policies of the 1930s. The Cusis' class status, however, does not explain this expropriation entirely, and this article turns to the family's Italian heritage to explain it more fully. In doing so, it tracks the perception of the Cusis over a 50-year span and points to the shifting boundaries of the Mexican nation. Finally, it analyses a memoir written by a member of the Cusi family as a response to those shifting boundaries and an effort to claim a place in the nation.     

The disability–poverty nexus and the case for a capabilities approach: evidence from Johannesburg,South Africa

Debates about the relationship between poverty and disability continue and are important in that they contribute to policies regarding how best to address the needs of disabled people living in conditions of poverty. Increasingly, researchers have begun to use Sen's capabilities approach in understanding disability. However, the approach has not been adequately applied to understand the nature of the poverty and disability nexus, particularly in developing contexts. This article seeks to address this gap by reporting on evidence from a study conducted in eight of the poorest wards in Johannesburg. Using the capabilities lens we demonstrate the ways in which both poverty and disability compound one another to limit the capabilities of people. The findings point to the need for broad-scale as well as targeted social development policies and programmes to address the consequences of poverty and disability.     

Sister–Sister Incest: Data from an Anonymous Computerized Survey

Retrospective data were entered anonymously by 1,521 adult women using a computer-assisted self-interview. Thirty-one participants were victims of sister–sister incest, 40 were victims of brother–sister incest, 19 were victims of father–daughter incest, 8 were victims of sexual abuse by an adult female (including one mother), and 232 were victims of sexual abuse by an adult male other than their father before reaching 18 years of age. The rest (1,203) served as controls. The victims of sister–sister incest had significantly more problematic outcomes than controls on many measures as adults. Victims of sister–sister incest were more depressed and more likely than controls to be distant from the perpetrator-sister and to have traded sex for money, experienced an unplanned pregnancy, engaged in four different types of masturbation, and engaged in 13 different same-sex behaviors. Our findings were consistent with other reports of early eroticization and persistent hypereroticization of incest victims.