Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women's reproductive bodies have become a setting for political struggle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio‐legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women's abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women's decision‐making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio‐cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non‐judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.     

John Porter Lecture: Waves of Protest—Direct Action,Deliberation, and Diffusion

The book Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle argues that the process of diffusion is dependent on social processes in the receiving context. The most important in social movements is an egalitarian and reflexive deliberation among diverse actors. The book traces the direct action tactics associated with the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and how these spread to activists in Toronto and New York City. It shows how the structure of the political field, racial and class inequalities, identity boundaries, and organizational and conversational dynamics limited deliberation among activists, and thus limited the diffusion of the Seattle tactics. By constraining the spread of the Seattle tactics, this slowed the global justice movement's wave of protest. In this paper, I explore the application of and implications of this model of protest tactic diffusion to the recent Idle No More mobilizations. Le livre Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle fait valoir que le processus de diffusion dépend de processus sociaux dans le contexte de réception. Le plus important pour les movements sociaux est une délibération égalitaire et réflexive entre divers acteurs. Le livre retrace les tactiques d'action directe associés aux manifestations de Seattle contre l’Organisation Mondiale du Commerce en 1999 et comment ils se propagent à des militants de Toronto et de New York. Il montre comment la délibération de la structure des inégalités le domaine politique, raciales et de classe, les limites de l'identité et de la dynamique de l'organisation et de la conversation limitée parmi les militants, et donc limiter la diffusion de la tactique de Seattle. En limitant la propagation de la tactique de Seattle, ce ralentissement de la vague de protestation du mouvement altermondialiste. Dans cet article, j'explore l'application et implications de ce modèle de diffusion protestation de tactique pour les dernières Idle No More mobilisations.     

Inequality in Volunteering: Building a New Research Front

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the...     

Key questions in considering guided practice for vulnerable Australian children

Anna Yeatman and Joanna Penglase (August 2004) provide a useful review of the literature on ‘Looking After Children’ (LAC), a guided practice system for children living in out‐of‐home care. In summarising the polarised debate, the authors point to an unresolved situation in which advocates have uncritically adopted individualised care planning, as a way of improving outcomes in child welfare while critics have not offered alternatives for systemic reform. This is an area of troubled social policy and the debate cannot rest here. This paper suggests a number of pressing research questions to be addressed. The urgency of the issues and the characteristics of local service systems mean LAC needs to be evaluated in the Australian context, taking into account the local experience and participation of children, families and their social workers.     

Measuring Children's Experience of Their Right to Participate in School and Community: A Rights‐Based Approach

This paper discusses the development of a children's rights‐based measure of participation and the findings from its use in a survey of 10‐ to 11‐year‐old children (n = 3773). The measure, which was developed in collaboration with a group of children, had a high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.89). Findings suggest that children's positive experience of their participation rights is higher in school than in community, and higher for girls compared to boys. It is argued that involving children in the ‘measurement’ of their own lives has the potential to generate more authentic data on children's lived experiences.     

WOMEN AND THE INTERNET The natural history of a research project

This article represents a narrative, 'women and the internet', as a women and technology origin story with a fixed beginning, a contested centre, and an open ending. This article analyses our engagement with this narrative as a pilot study was conducted to look at women's perceptions of, and relationships to, the internet. Although this story felt like a coherent and persuasive narrative, this was questioned as the outcomes of the pilot study were reflected upon. Women coming to the 'net' led to a reconstruction of the questions that need to be addressed in researching gender and information technology. This article begins by describing and deconstructing the motivating story which was brought to this research project. Three genres are introduced-'the webbed utopia', 'flamed out' and 'locked into locality'-which are seen as forming the contested centre of this narrative. While each genre has its own narrative logic, all of them draw on a common tale of historical origins. From each of these perspectives 'Women and the internet' has an ending which is still open, but is rapidly closing. Three questions are then identified which have been raised by analysis: what do we mean by 'access'?; what do we mean by 'the internet'? and 'which women'? The seeming simplicity of these questions disguises serious difficulties which research in this area must address.     

‘Cinema,Glamour, Atrocity’: Narratives of Trauma

Abstract

Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction between Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of the perpetrators, and the Mtimkulu family during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings. Ian Gabriel's fiction film, Forgiveness (2004), uses key aspects of this history in his treatment of a repentant perpetrator seeking forgiveness from his victim's family. In my analysis, I argue that respect for a realist aesthetic – the notion that the camera can and does reveal the world to us – may be combined with self-reflexivity, narrative layering and generic innovation to produce a complex representation of truth, victim and perpetrator. I suggest, further, that the initial choice of subject will determine to some extent the degree of complexity with which issues of truth, on the one hand, and the nature of the victim and the perpetrator, on the other, will be developed.     

From pillar to post: Women and social work studies in the 21st century

Abstract

A decade or so after the acknowledgement and inclusion of women's issues in mainstream social work courses, we find the circumstances in which such education occurs have changed. The 'third wave' of feminism has revisited the feminist agenda of the 1960s and 1970s; there has been a paradigm shift in what tertiary education is perceived to offer; and global theories have been replaced by post modern interpretations. This article discusses the impact of these changes for social work education drawing on the authors' experiences with the 'Women and Social Work' elective subject in the Bachelor of Social Work Degree at the University of New South Wales, Australia. This elective was popular until the mid 1990s when it failed to attract students. The authors reflect on their experience of teaching the subject and their understanding of current feminism to identify a way forward in the attempt to rekindle student enthusiasm for feminist understandings and provide education which will further the emancipatory project of social work.