The Media Abuse of Children. Jake's Progress from Demonic Icon to Restored Childhood Innocent

While scholarly analysis of child protection and the media has grown substantially during the 1990s (Aldridge, 1994; Franklin and Parton, 1991; Kitzinger and Skidmore, 1995), studies have ignored a crucial dimension which forms the focus for discussion here. We wish to suggest that media reporting of children and child abuse may itself constitute an abusive activity. Media presentations of children and childhood, since press coverage of the Bulger case in 1993, have assumed a distinctive and sinister guise which, we argue, fundamentally revises the previously held perception of children and childhood. We suggest that this new understanding of childhood is damaging to children and, because of the impact of such media presentations on the public mood and policy climate, harms their interests. The discussion is in three parts. First, newspaper reporting of the Bulger case is analysed to reveal how coverage challenged the idea of childhood as a period of innocence and replaced it with a perception of childhood as essentially ‘evil’. Second, the characterization of Jake, the central figure in Alan Bleasdale's recent television dramaJake's Progress, is analysed to serve as an illustrative exemplar of this new construction of childhood. Finally, we consider the possible messages conveyed by such presentations to perpetrators and victims of abuse.     

Social Ills in Rich Countries: New Evidence on Levels,Causes, and Mediators

Social Indicators Research - The income inequality hypothesis claims that in rich societies inequality causes a range of health and social problems (henceforth: social ills), e.g. because economic...     

Do Professionals Take Over? Professionalisation and Membership Influence in Civil Society Organisations

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - While many scholars have postulated the decline of membership influence as an important consequence of the...     

The Older Worker in the Low Countries

Abstract. The paper deals with present, demographically-based problems in highly-developed labour markets, with special reference to the Belgian and Dutch experience. Both sluggish inflow by young cohorts and early retirement by senior workers are analysed. The first of these phenomena can be explained by the falling birth rate and increasing educational levels; the second phenomenon is the result of technological changes in the labour market and a social security system which offers attractive opportunities for early outflow. For companies, this trend translates into a loss of experience and a loss of corporate culture. On top of this, the social security system is coming under heavy pressure and scarcity symptoms are likely to develop on the supply side of the labour market.     

SOCIAL BACKGROUND,EDUCATION, AND INEQUALITY

The role parents' education plays for the educational achievements of children is a source of unequal opportunities. Through this channel the number of educated affects the options of future cohorts, creating a social multiplier effect making improvements in education self‐reinforcing. Policies to compensate for inequalities of opportunities—public education or transfers—have very different implications. Transfers not only reduce inequality on impact but also reduce social mobility, while public education—even if a perfect substitute to private education—works in the opposite direction. Social impediments to education are similar to a market imperfection, and publicly provided education may lead to a Pareto improvement. (JEL D3, I2, H2, H4)     

Ecosystem services deficits in cross-boundary landscapes: spatial mismatches between green and grey systems

Urban Ecosystems - Quantitative analyses of the influence of boundary lines on ecosystem services distributions remain rare. Approaches towards integrative assessments of green and grey landscape...     

Eye-tracking methodology: exploring the processing of question formats in web surveys

In social research, the use of agree/disagree (A/D) questions is a popular method for measuring attitudes. Research has shown that A/D questions require complex cognitive processing and are susceptible to response bias. Thus, some researchers recommend the use of item-specific (IS) questions. This study examines the processing of A/D and IS questions, using eye-tracking methodology. By recording respondents’ eye movements, how respondents process survey questions can be evaluated. The results reveal that IS questions cause more and longer fixations. However, this only applies to the response categories. There are no differences regarding the question stems. Altogether, it seems that IS response categories trigger deeper cognitive processing than A/D response categories.     

Forced Migration and Mortality in the Very Long Term: Did Perestroika Affect Death Rates Also in Finland?

In this article, we analyze mortality rates of Finns born in areas that were ceded to the Soviet Union after World War II and from which the entire population was evacuated. These internally displaced persons are observed during the period 1971-2004 and compared with people born in the same region but on the adjacent side of the new border. We find that in the 1970s and 1980s, the forced migrants had mortality rates that were on par with those of people in the comparison group. In the late 1980s, the mortality risk of internally displaced men increased by 20% in relation to the expected time trend. This deviation, which manifests particularly in cardiovascular mortality, coincides with perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union, which were events that resulted in an intense debate in civil society about restitution of the ceded areas. Because state actors were reluctant to engage, the debate declined after some few years, and after the mid-1990s, the death risk again approached the long-term trend. Our findings indicate that when internally displaced persons must adjust to situations for which appropriate coping behaviors are unknown, psychosocial stress might arise several decades after their evacuation.     

The matching extension problem in general graphs is co-NP-complete

A simple connected graph G with 2n vertices is said to be k-extendable for an integer k with \(0<k<n\) if G contains a perfect matching and every matching of cardinality k in G is a subset of some perfect matching. Lakhal and Litzler (Inf Process Lett 65(1):11–16, 1998) discovered a polynomial algorithm that decides whether a bipartite graph is k-extendable. For general graphs, however, it has been an open problem whether there exists a polynomial algorithm. The new result presented in this paper is that the extendability problem is co-NP-complete.