Empowering looked-after children

Children's rights include the right to participation in decisions made about them. For looked-after children, this right is enshrined in the Children Act (England & Wales) 1989. This article reports the results of a study of children's views about their experience of being looked after and the degree of power that they felt they had to influence decision making. Their main areas of criticism were frequent changes of social worker, lack of an effective voice at reviews, lack of confidentiality and, linked to this, lack of a confidante. The findings are discussed in relation to recent policy changes. Specifically, the Looked After Children documentation and the Quality Protects initiative, by setting out uniform objectives and performance criteria, seem to restrict the freedom of local authority management and of social workers to respond to individual children's preferences, or to give weight to what the children themselves consider to be in their best interest.     

Is EM really necessary here? Examples where it seems simpler not to use EM

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - If one is to judge by counts of citations of the fundamental paper (Dempster in JRSSB 39: 1–38, 1977), EM algorithms are a runaway success. But it is...     

Strategies,Action Repertoires and DIY Activism in the Animal Rights Movement

Following Tilly, this paper argues that a social movement is what it does as much as why it does it. This approach is particularly important in the case of the animal rights movement, which is often demonized as extremist and violent. Critics of the movement claim that animal activists use letter bombs, arson attacks and threats to intimidate those they see as animal abusers and that violent direct action of this kind is typical of the movement as a whole. The present paper argues that the mainstream animal movement – in the USA, the UK and Australia – is overwhelmingly non-violent and that its core strategies and tactics have two broad aims, namely to gain publicity for the movement and to challenge conventional thinking about how we treat non-human animals. This is achieved primarily by the deployment of the key tactical mechanisms of persuasion, protest, non-cooperation and intervention. These tactics may be deployed collectively or as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) activism which many grassroots animal activists – ‘caring sleuths’ to use Shapiro's apt term – seem to prefer. The paper focuses on demonstrations and pamphleteering as examples of publicity strategies or liberal governance strategies as well as critical governance strategies or interference strategies such as the hunger strike, ethical vegetarianism and undercover surveillance.     

Ideas, thinkers, and social networks: The process of grievance construction in the anti-genetic engineering movement

Popular commentaries suggest that the movement against genetic engineering in agriculture (anti-GE movement) was born in Europe, rooted in European cultural approaches to food, and sparked by recent food-safety scares such as “mad cow” disease. Yet few realize that the anti-GE movement's origins date back thirty years, that opposition to agricultural biotechnology emerged with the technology itself, and that the movement originated in the United States rather than Europe. We argue here that neither the explosion of the GE food issue in the late 1990s nor the concomitant expansion of the movement can be understood without recognizing the importance of the intellectual work carried out by a “critical community” of activists during the two-decade-long period prior to the 1990s. We show how these early critics forged an oppositional ideology and concrete set of grievances upon which a movement could later be built. Our analysis advances social movement theory by establishing the importance of the intellectual work that activists engage in during the “proto-mobilizational” phase of collective action, and by identifying the cognitive and social processes by which activists develop a critical, analytical framework. Our elaboration of four specific dimensions of idea/ideology formation pushes the literature toward a more complete understanding of the role of ideas and idea-makers in social movements, and suggests a process of grievance construction that is more “organic” than strategic (pace the framing literature). Rachel Schurman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy of food and agriculture, environmental sociology, and social movements. She is co-editor of Engineering Trouble: Biotechnology and Its Discontents (University of California Press, 2003) and several articles and book chapters on the anti-genetic engineering movement. Her current book project, with William Munro, explores how organized social resistance to GMOs has shaped the trajectory of agricultural biotechnology. William Munro is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, International Studies Program, at Illinois Wesleyan University. His research and writing focuses on the politics of agrarian change and state formation in Africa, as well as post-conflict development. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the State: Conservation, Community Development and State-Making in Zimbabwe (Ohio University Press,1998). He is currently collaborating with Rachel Schurman on a book about social resistance to agricultural biotechnology.     

Policy assignment in the European union

EMU will see a re‐allocation of responsibility between different tiers of government for different elements of economic policy, yet policy assignment in the EU often reflects political compromises rather than dispassionate analysis or principles. This article explores the arguments for assigning responsibility for economic policy to different tiers of government in the EU. In the light of these arguments, the case for re‐assigning policy for prudential supervision of credit institutions, regulation of utilities and industrial policy is examined. This leads to the conclusion that closer economic integration will require potentially substantial changes in the assignment of policy.     

The contribution of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to understanding and promoting the interests of young people making the transition from care to adulthood

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) acknowledges that young people without parental care are entitled to special support and assistance from the State. In detailing their expectations, the UN Committee have issued Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children which recognise that State parties have a number of responsibilities towards care leavers. The paper explores how the UNCRC reporting process, and guidelines from the Committee outlining how States should promote the rights of young people making the transition from care to adulthood, can be used as an instrument to track global patterns of change in policy and practice. Content analysis of State Party Reports and Concluding Observations from 15 countries reveals that to date there has been limited engagement with understanding and promoting the needs of this group in the reporting process; although where a government is committed to developing legislation and practice then this does find its way into their national reports. Data supplied by affiliates of the International Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood from Care (INTRAC) reveals that national concerns, political ideology, public awareness, attitudes and knowledge of the vulnerability of care leavers influence service responses to protect and promote the rights of this group and the attention afforded to such issues in reports to the Committee. Findings also suggest that global governance is not simply a matter of top down influence. Future work on both promoting and monitoring of the impact of the UNCRC needs to recognise that what is in play is the management of a complex global/national dynamic with all its uneven development, levels of influence and with a range of institutional actors involved.     

In vino silentium? Individual, situational, and alcohol-related factors in reporting violence to the police

This study identifies the individual, situational, and alcohol-related factors associated with reporting violent victimization to the police. Factors positively associated with reporting included older age and incident severity (the assailant's use of a weapon, incurring injury that required attendance at an emergency department). Factors negatively associated with reporting included higher educational qualifications, assault in the nighttime economy (NTE), and drinking more than two alcoholic drinks immediately prior to victimization. It is possible that drinkers engage in "moratorium" on reporting violence in the NTE. Recognizing and reducing the acceptability of violence in the NTE may help reduce incidence of alcohol-related violence. Organizations that use police records of violence to inform practice and policy should account for uneven distributions in reporting behavior when analyzing trends in violence.