Mentoring for Educational Success: Advancing Foster Care Youth Incorporating the Core Competencies

A collaborative relationship among three organizations developed a mentoring project using social work students (mentors) and independent living program (ILP) foster youths (mentees). The goal was to increase the mentees' awareness of educational possibilities beyond high school graduation while analyzing the mentors' learning as defined by the Council on Social Work Education core competencies. This pilot project paired mentors with ILP youths in this experiential opportunity conducted on a university campus. The students, acting as positive role models applying social work skills, engaged in an effort to improve the mentees' educational outcome, which would ultimately lead to self-sufficiency.     

Therapeutic management of preschool cases of alleged but unsubstantiated sexual abuse

Alleged sexual abuse among preschoolers is often difficult to substantiate, and is rarely criminally prosecuted. Yet very young children are vulnerable when abuse is suspected but cannot be proven. These cases call for a special form of structured therapeutic management that seeks to inhibit the possibility of abuse while buying time for these very young children so that potential later abuse can be reported more accurately.     

The Abuse of Deinstitutionalised Persons with Mental Handicaps

A decade or more ago there were a number of Government reports published of inquiries into the ill-treatment of patients in mental hospitals. Now that fewer people with mental handicaps are going into hospitals and others are leaving them to be integrated into the community will they be any better treated by those around them? The situation is briefly reviewed and a solution proposed to the problems uncovered, but the main purpose of the paper is to generate awareness debate and possibly some action.     

Indigenous family life in Australia: A history of difference and deficit

Indigenous family life has been a key target of family and child policies in Australia since colonisation. In this paper, we identify four main policy eras that have shaped the national and state policy frameworks that have impacted Indigenous families: the protectionism, assimilation, self-determination and neoliberalism eras. Our analysis of these national and state policy frameworks reveals an enduring and negative conceptualisation of Indigenous family life. This conceptualisation continues to position Indigenous families as deficient and dysfunctional compared with a white, Anglo-Australian family ideal. This contributes to the reproduction of paternalistic policy settings and the racialised hierarchies within them that entrench Indigenous disempowerment and reproduce Indigenous disadvantage. Further, it maintains a deficit paradigm that continues to obfuscate the positive aspects of Indigenous family life that are protective of Indigenous well-being.     

Gendered Black Exclusion: The Persistence of Racial Stereotypes Among Daters

Employing questionnaires of 381 college students, this study examines the reasons why Latinos, Asians, and whites choose to include or exclude blacks as potential dates. First, we find that past structural explanations for low rates of interracial intimacy explain current disparities less among young people today. Only 10 % of respondents cited a structural explanation, lack of familiarity, or contact, as the reason they excluded blacks as possible dates. Second, the reasons for black exclusion vary across racial–ethnic–gender groups. Among non-blacks, whites were the most open to dating blacks, followed by Latinos and Asians. Asians and Latinos were more likely to exclude blacks because of social disapproval, and whites were more likely to exclude blacks because of physical attraction. Black women were more highly excluded than black men and more excluded because of their perceived aggressive personalities or behavior and physical attraction. Black men were more excluded because of social disapproval. Thus, persistent racial ideology continues to drive the social distance between blacks and non-blacks, particularly toward black females.     

Tokyo Story: Aid Sells Books

Book reviewed in this article: Japan's Foreign Aid Challenge: Policy Reform and Aid Leadership. By Alan Rix Yen for Development: Japanese Foreign Aid and the Politics of Burden-Sharing. Edited by Shafiqul Islam The OECF Research Quarterly, 1993/1 No. 76 Japan's Foreign Aid: Power and Policy in a New Era. Edited by Bruce M. Koppel and Robert M. Orr, Jr. Boulder, CO     

Aid Without Power

Book reviewed in this article: Western Middle Powers and Global Poverty. The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Edited by Olav Stokke The Emergence of Japan's Foreign Aid Power. By Robert M. Orr Jr. Development Cooperation, 1990 Report. Efforts and Policies of the Members of the Development Assistance Committee. OECD Development Assistance Committee