The Transformation of Sexual Harassment from a Private Trouble into a Public Issue

Sexual harassment, i.e., unwanted sexual attention, is not a new phenomenon for working women. Yet only in recent years have the behaviors constituting it been challenged and recognized as detrimental to society. This paper documents the process by which sexual harassment emerged on the public agenda. It identifies the major elements–media attention, activities of interest groups, court actions, and legislation–involved in the process of redefinition and examines how and why each promoted the issue. The data, gathered from analyses of publication and language trends, records of congressional hearings, and interviews with several participants in the process, are used to further understanding of how these elements converged during a period of social concern for women's rights and enabled a public reconceptualization of sexually harassing behaviors.     

U.S. Deportation Policy,Family Separation,and Circular Migration

Since the mid‐1990s the United States has enacted a series of laws that make it easier to deport noncitizens. Drawing on findings from interviews with a random sample of 300 Salvadoran deportees, we examine how family relations, ties, remittance behavior, and settlement experiences are disrupted by deportation, and how these ties influence future migration intentions. We find that a significant number of deportees were long‐term settlers in the United States. Many had established work histories and had formed families of their own. These strong social ties in turn influence the likelihood of repeat migration to the United States.     

Socio-pathologie et paradoxes de la société moderne

Society builds itself up across representations, interactions and elaborations of the subjects invested in it. Their experience is symptomatic of that society. Their sufferings reflect its paradoxes and conflicts, the gaps between imaginary and reality which can lead to the crisis. Experience has no more meaning and the social link comes undone. Economy, technology and democracy itself lock the hypermodern society in contradictions, in front of which politics reveals itself helpless. The psychic suffering of the subject expresses then itself in the social field, through the disinvestment or the violence, amplifying the crisis effect and showing the interdependence between psychic and social.     

Promoting food security and well-being among poor and HIV/AIDS affected households: Lessons from an interactive and integrated approach

Participatory and interdisciplinary approaches have been suggested to develop appropriate agricultural innovations as an alternative strategy to improve food security and well-being among HIV/AIDS affected households. However, sustainable implementation of such interactive approaches is far from easy and straight forward. This study reports of the Interactive Learning and Action (ILA) approach, a methodology for agricultural innovation which has been adapted to the context of HIV/AIDS. Role players in agriculture and health were brought together to stimulate and sustain innovation among three support groups for poor and affected households in a rural high HIV/AIDS prevalence area in South Africa. The effectiveness of the approach was evaluated using both outcome and process criteria. The results indicate that an interactive approach in which service providers/researchers engage themselves as actors to explore the livelihood system and develop appropriate solutions in joint collaboration with resource users has potential. However, it also revealed that cooperation among participants and stakeholders at the interface of agriculture and HIV/AIDS is complicated and sensitive to erosion. Of particular concern was the difficulty of mobilizing members from poor and affected households to participate and to overcome stigma and discrimination. Lessons and potential applications for the further development of interactive approaches are discussed.     

Identifying Childhood Age Groups for Exposure Assessments and Monitoring

The purpose of this article is to describe a standard set of age groups for exposure assessors to consider when assessing childhood exposure and potential dose to environmental contaminants. In addition, this article presents examples to show how the age groups can be applied in children's exposure assessments. A consistent set of childhood age groups, supported by an underlying scientific rationale, will improve the accuracy and comparability of exposure and risk assessments for children. The effort was undertaken in part to aid the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in implementing such regulatory initiatives as the 1997 Presidential Executive Order 13,045, which required all federal agencies to ensure that their standards take into account special risks to children. The standard age groups include: birth to <1 month; 1 to <3 months; 3 to <6 months; 6 to <12 months; 1 to <2 years; 2 to <3 years; 3 to <6 years; 6 to <11 years; 11 to <16 years; and 16 to <21 years. These age groups reflect a consideration of developmental changes in various behavioral, anatomical, and physiological characteristics that impact exposure and potential dose. It is expected that the availability of a standard set of early-life age groups will inform future analyses of exposure factors data as well as guide new research and data collection efforts to fill knowledge gaps.     

Effects of Provocation on Maltreated and Nonmaltreated Preschoolers' Understanding of Moral Transgressions

This study examined maltreated and nonmaltreated preschool children's judgments regarding hypothetical provoked and unprovoked moral transgressions. Maltreated children (17 physically abused and 19 neglected) and 19 matched nonmaltreated children rated the severity and deserved punishment and evaluated affective responses to six hypothetical moral transgressions which were depicted as both unprovoked and provoked by another child's actions. All children rated unprovoked transgressions as more serious and deserving of punishment and as eliciting more happiness and fear and less anger than transgressions that were depicted as provoked by another's actions. No gender or maltreatment status differences in ratings of transgression severity and deserved punishment were found; however, patterns of affective responses to hypothetical transgressions differed as a function of maltreatment subtype. Findings are discussed in terms of previous research on maltreatment and moral judgment development.     

Explosion Probability of Unexploded Ordnance: Expert Beliefs

This article reports on a study to quantify expert beliefs about the explosion probability of unexploded ordnance (UXO). Some 1,976 sites at closed military bases in the United States are contaminated with UXO and are slated for cleanup, at an estimated cost of $15–140 billion. Because no available technology can guarantee 100% removal of UXO, information about explosion probability is needed to assess the residual risks of civilian reuse of closed military bases and to make decisions about how much to invest in cleanup. This study elicited probability distributions for the chance of UXO explosion from 25 experts in explosive ordnance disposal, all of whom have had field experience in UXO identification and deactivation. The study considered six different scenarios: three different types of UXO handled in two different ways (one involving children and the other involving construction workers). We also asked the experts to rank by sensitivity to explosion 20 different kinds of UXO found at a case study site at Fort Ord, California. We found that the experts do not agree about the probability of UXO explosion, with significant differences among experts in their mean estimates of explosion probabilities and in the amount of uncertainty that they express in their estimates. In three of the six scenarios, the divergence was so great that the average of all the expert probability distributions was statistically indistinguishable from a uniform (0, 1) distribution—suggesting that the sum of expert opinion provides no information at all about the explosion risk. The experts' opinions on the relative sensitivity to explosion of the 20 UXO items also diverged. The average correlation between rankings of any pair of experts was 0.41, which, statistically, is barely significant (p= 0.049) at the 95% confidence level. Thus, one expert's rankings provide little predictive information about another's rankings. The lack of consensus among experts suggests that empirical studies are needed to better understand the explosion risks of UXO.