The Development and Initial Validation of the COPLAG Scale: Measuring the Concerns of Parents of Lesbians and Gays

This article discusses the development and initial validation of a scale designed to assess parents’ concerns upon their learning about their children's gay or lesbian sexual orientations. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the scale's items resulted in a three-factor solution distinguishing among parental concerns about (1) their children's physical, psychological, and social well-being, (2) themselves as parents of gay or lesbian children, and (3) being rejected by loved ones.     

War and security,women and gender: an overview of the issues

This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities, ‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including comprehensive safety for women. Women's peace movements, worldwide, are theorising that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.     

Promoting Financial Capability of Incarcerated Women for Community Reentry: A Call to Social Workers

ABSTRACT

Female incarceration rates are increasing at unprecedented rates. The majority of women are poor single mothers, serving sentences for nonviolent drug-related and property offenses. Among challenges faced when transitioning back into society are a history of interpersonal violence and financial instability. This study examines literature with regard to the barriers women experience with an emphasis on financial struggles and explores outcomes of one initiative to begin addressing the financial capability of women in a minimum security prison. Findings reveal women benefited from the class experience. Social workers are called upon for additional financial capability programming and research in this area.     

Help-Seeking for Sexual Difficulties and the Potential Role of Interactive Digital Interventions: Findings From the Third British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles

Sexual difficulties are common and can negatively impact health and well-being. A wide range of support is available, but there are multiple barriers to accessing help. Interactive digital interventions (IDIs) for sexual difficulties have the potential to provide a convenient, wide-reaching, and cost-effective source of support, but little is known about who might use them. We explored the potential reach of IDIs by assessing the prevalence of help-seeking among people with distressing sexual difficulties, including who seeks which sources of help. Data came from sexually active men and women, ages 16 to 74, participating in Britain’s third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) (N = 11,637). Help/advice was sought by less than half of those with distressing sexual difficulties, and help-seeking was associated with younger age in women but not men. The most popular sources of support were family doctor (47.5% to 54.8%), Internet (22.0% to 25.6%), and family/friend (20.7% to 41.8%), with older participants (≥ 35), particularly men, preferring to seek help from a family doctor, and younger participants (<35) preferring to seek help from the Internet or family/friend. Despite a paucity of good digital support sites for sexual function, the Internet is a common source of help. As Internet access continues to increase, so too does the potential for well-designed IDIs to support those with sexual difficulties.     

Toward a teacher solidarity lens: former teachers of color (re)envisioning educational research

Based on a two-year self-study by a group of early-career scholars of color, we explore and purposefully name our role, within the contemporary context of neoliberal reform, as educational researchers of color who are former K-12 teachers. We capture the insights that emerged from our self-study through a close reading of dominant neoliberal educational reform discourses, particularly through an examination of the writings of Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp. Along three dimensions of: (1) experience as teachers; (2) solidarity with teachers; and (3) analyses of racism in schooling, we characterize prominent discourses through which educators, researchers, and the public describe teachers and teaching. We name these discursive frames to make explicit the assumptions that are embedded in each and the intentional or inadvertent consequences of each. Finally, we propose a teacher solidarity lens through which we strive to approach our research and work with teachers.     

The Nonmetro/metro Context of Racial/ethnic Outmarriage: Some Differences between African Americans and Mexican Americans1

Abstract Data from the 1990 U. S. Census are used to examine nonmetro-metro distinctions in the outmarriage patterns of the nation's two largest minority groups—African Americans and Mexican Americans. The analysis is guided by a multilevel model combining individual- and community-level determinants of outmarriage. Consistent with notions suggesting that persons in metro areas are less traditional and, perhaps, more tolerant of those different from them, we find that African Americans living in metro areas are more likely to be married to someone from another racial/ethnic group than their peers in nonmetro areas, even after residential differences in individual and community characteristics are taken into account. On the other hand, controlling for other factors, Mexican Americans living in metro areas are not any more likely than those living in nonmetro settings to be exogamous. One possible explanation for this divergent pattern is the relatively recent urbanization of the Mexican American population.     

Some spatial aspects of poverty in the USA

The social problem of poverty in the USA. has important spatial dimensions. The great migration of poor persons from the agricultural South to the industrial North shaped the nation's process of urbanization in the period after World War II. Subsequent suburbanization in the nation's cities was profoundly influenced by this movement and, in turn, had important implications for the urban poor. Also, the changing structure of employment opportunities within urban areas has had direct effects on the nature of the poverty problem in terms of spatial segregation and the persistence of poverty in urban areas. This paper offers a survey of the spatial aspects of poverty in the USA. and relates the problem of poverty to the forces of change that have contributed to the spatial transformation of the US economy.     

Constructing the Transition to Parenthood*

How is the transition to parenthood constructed in a context in which fatherhood and motherhood are therapeutically defined? Relying on ethnographic observations of 66 expectant and new parent couples assigned to 13 different parent educator‐led groups, we show how, with the arrival of a baby, a sense of transition is crafted and often amplified. Our analysis suggests that just as the overall life course is constructed through language and meaningful gesture, so also the transition to parenthood is constructed through verbal and nonverbal signification. Using a vocabulary of contrast and change, parent edu‐cators and expectant and new parents create a collective feeling that they are witnessing a transformation of major proportions. By emphasizing the idea that things are no longer the same, parent educators also establish themselves as authorities whose job it is to steer fathers and mothers through unfamiliar terrain. For their part, expectant and new parents not only listen to but often also replicate the parent educators’ vocabularies and, in so doing, further magnify distinctions between before parenthood and after, and between one stage of parenthood and another. Childbirth stands uncomfortably at the junction of the two worlds of nature and culture. Like death and disease it is a biological event, but the defining feature of biological events in human life is their social character. Ann Oakley (1980:7)     

Using the lessons learned from US and English law to create a regulatory framework for charities in evolving democracies

The evolving democracies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR republics are keenly interested in establishing charities. They have little law on this issue because their former governments did not encourage the development of charities. This article compares US and English regulation of charities and proposes a regulatory framework based on what the authors believe are the best attributes of both. Although the framework is based on the common law system, it can be adapted to the civil law systems of the Eastern European nations and the former USSR republics. The article includes such issues as developing a body of law, tax relief and creating a regulatory agency.Mr Hopkins is a lawyer with Powers, Pyles & Sutter, 1275 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007, and author ofThe Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (1992a).Ms Moore is also a lawyer, 5908 N. 35th St., Arlington, Virginia 22207.The authors would like to thank Mssrs Kersi Shroff and Stephen F. Clarke, Senior Legal Specialists, American-British Law Division, Library of Congress, and Mr. William H. Morris, an attorney at Steptoe & Johnson, Washington, D.C., for their kind assistance during the researching of this article.