Building an Institution Second to None: Dr. Inabel Burns Lindsay—A Social Work Leader in the Academy

ABSTRACT

This article describes Dr. Inabel Burns Lindsay's leadership as the founding dean at Howard University School of Social Work during her 30 years of service from 1937 to 1967. It chronicles her efforts to build the School as well as her efforts to highlight social injustices of the time. Her lifelong efforts promoted the inclusion of African American social workers in the workforce and the need to understand sociocultural factors in working with different ethnic and racial groups. As a female dean, Dr. Lindsay was an avid promoter of social justice and a prolific writer and speaker on the topic. This article introduces the reader to this under-recognized social work pioneer, with emphases on the challenges of her time and her leadership style.     

Gendered Economic,Social, and Cultural Challenges to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Intervention for Chinese Women

ABSTRACT

China is experiencing the most rapidly expanding HIV prevalence in the world, with the percentage of Chinese women living with HIV/AIDS also increasing significantly. Chinese women's risk of HIV infection is heavily influenced by patriarchal cultural beliefs, Confucian doctrines, and rapid social and economic changes in China. Chinese women generally have a low level of awareness of HIV/AIDS. With inherent inferior social status and economic disadvantage, their vulnerability to HIV infection is heightened by adverse impacts of massive rural-to-urban migration, explosion of the commercial sex industry, and prevalence of gender-based violence. In order to target HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs for Chinese women, their specific needs and gendered obstacles must be addressed and tackled. These include strategies that aim to fight against poverty, improve education, enhance HIV/AIDS awareness, facilitate new life-skills acquisition and behavior change, make available woman-centered services for testing and treatment of HIV, and eradicate gender-based discrimination and violence. There is also an urgent need to further develop various public health infrastructure in China, especially in remote and rural areas. The pool of gender experts in China should also be expanded to conduct a thorough gender analysis and design a national response to address the evolving HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chinese women.     

Adolescent Sexual Debut: A Multi-System Perspective of Ethnic and Racial Differences

Data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth were used to assess the association between family, self, proximate extra-familial, and distal extra-familial system factors and abstinence/virginity and age of first sexual intercourse by ethnicity and race (N = 1,854). Findings show how and in what circumstances measures associated with these four factors vary for Black, White, and Hispanic youth. Findings point to the robustness of class and gender for each ethnic-racial group on timing of sexual initiation and of delinquency and negative peer relations on abstinence among Black and White youth and of religious affiliation among Hispanic youth.     

Young African American Grandmothers: A Missed Developmental Stage

Abstract

In recent years the phenomenon of young black grand-motherhood is attracting the attention of social scientists in many disciplines. This problem stems from the fact that young unmarried teenage girls are giving birth and are thus making their young mothers grandmothers. The complexity of the problem mounts owing to the fact that many young grandmothers have not completed their own developmental tasks. This paper addresses some of the issues involved and provides strategies for social work intervention.     

Approaching Adoption and Foster Care in Brazil

Adoption and foster care have recently undergone various changes in Brazil. Nonetheless, there is a lack of official research data on children who have been adopted or have been living in foster families or institutions. In this paper, after a brief account of the historical aspects of adoption and foster care in Brazil, we focus our discussion on two major points: (1) the difficulties in promoting a “new culture of adoption,” which would develop in “the child's best interest,” and (2) the meanings and prejudices related to late adoption that increase the number of children who remain for many years in institutions.     

The Ethnic Identification of Same-Race Children in Intercountry Adoption

Intercountry adoption is a worldwide phenomenon that has been drawing an ever-increasing amount of research attention. The vast majority of that research has focused on transracial adoptive relationships and, in particular, the ethnic socialization and adjustment of children adopted into racially different families. Very little is known about the ethnic identity development of internationally adopted children who are racially similar to their adoptive parents. In the current study, 50 children adopted into New Zealand from Eastern Europe were interviewed on their ethnic self-identification and self-concept. The adoptees scored in the midrange on an ethnic identity scale and in the high range on a self-concept scale. However, no correlation was found between the two indices, suggesting that ethnic self-identification and self-concept operate independent of each other. These results, plus additional data collected during the interviews, are discussed in light of the New Zealand context and as they relate to the transracial adoption literature.