Gender Down Under: Welfare State Restructuring in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the governments of both Australia and New Zealand embarked upon programmes of economic reform. In the same period, they have also undertaken extensive, if incremental, restructuring of their social policy gender models, away from the male breadwinner family form and towards dual-earner partnerships based on individualized entitlement. This paper examines and compares this restructuring. It aims to identify those respects in which similarities and differences in this restructuring express enduring cross-national differences in social policy, and in what respects simply reflect differences in the timing of otherwise similar developments.     

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy Maternal Cohort Study—Exploratory Analysis

The bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) maternal cohort study supports a role both for direct maternal transmission and for inherited genetic susceptibilty to the BSE agent. Additional data from the main BSE database do not resolve whether the risk of direct maternal transmission of BSE from dam to calf is concentrated in the interval within 5 months before the onset of BSE in the dam, as data from the BSE maternal cohort study suggest. The reason for this is that we cannot rely, as our analysis requires, on the survival of calves or traceability of the dam being independent of the interval from the birth of a calf to onset of BSE in the dam. Accordingly, for the present, we place most weight on evidence from the BSE maternal cohort study. Direct maternal transmission of the BSE agent from dam to calf has not been ruled out; vertical transmission of the new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (NVCJD) from mother with NVCJD to baby is therefore also possible. Actions to quantify, and minimize, the transmission risk, if any, from a mother with NVCJD to her baby, or to delivery teams, should be taken without delay.     

Challenging the Child/Adult Distinction in Theory and Practice on Prostitution

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the 1990s to characterize men's prostitution abuse of adult women as constituting legitimate work, choice and agency for the women themselves, and to construct a profitable prostitution industry which can create profits for governments and sex industrialists. I will argue that child and adult prostitution are inextricably interlinked, both in personnel (the women and children work together), in terms of the abusers (who make no distinctions), in the harm they cause and in that both constitute harmful traditional practices which must be ended. The acceptance of men's prostitution abuse as the basis for the industrialization of adult prostitution increases the scale and harm of child prostitution. Thus only policies to eradicate all of men's abusive prostitution behaviour will serve to mitigate child prostitution.     

Youth Profiles of Police-Initiated Post-Traumatic Stress Symptomatology

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Police-initiated post-traumatic stress symptomatology (PI-PTSS) refers to post-traumatic stress symptoms that are rooted in interactions with police...     

Understanding Persistent Food Insecurity: A Paradox of Place and Circumstance

Survey data from a U.S. Department of Agriculture funded multi-state longitudinal project revealed a paradox where rural low-income families from states considered prosperous were persistently more food insecure than similar families from less prosperous states. An examination of quantitative and qualitative data found that families in the food insecure states were more likely to experience greater material hardship and incur greater housing costs than families in the food secure states. Families in the food insecure states, however, did not have lower per capita median incomes or lower life satisfaction than those in the food secure states. A wide range of strategies to cope with food insecurity reported by families in both food insecure and food secure states was examined using the Family Ecological Systems Theory. Families in the food insecure states used several risky consumption reduction strategies such as curbing their appetite and using triage. Families in the food secure states, on the other hand, employed positive techniques involving their human capital.

Habitat use in basking Northern water (Nerodia sipedon) and Eastern garter (Thamnophis sirtalis) snakes in urban New Jersey

The habitat use of basking northern water (Nerodia sipedon) and Eastern garter (Thamnophis sirtalis) snakes was examined along the Raritan Canal, an urbanized area of central New Jersey. There were significant differences between the two species with respect to cloud cover, canopy cover, and the distance to the path and the water, but not with respect to percent of the body exposed to the sun, and percent of the snake that was visible. Water snakes were more likely to bask on bushes, branches and logs than were garter snakes. Garter snakes basked when both the air and water temperature were lower than did water snakes. The lack of basking sites in the water suggests that those along shore are important, including the low hanging branches used by the watersnakes.