Commercial sex between men: A prospective diary‐based study

This paper describes the results of a self‐reporting dairy completed by 186 male sex workers (MSWs) over a 2‐week period in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, Australia. The diary was completed following each commercial sex encounter by the MSW. The results reveal that MSWs reported 2088 commercial sex encounters during the study period, with an average of 11.2 encounters per MSW. The majority of sex encounters took place in either the client's or the MSW's residence, with significant variations by city. The average sexual encounter lasted 70 minutes, and comprised two sexual acts, masturbation and oral sex. Condom use was reported in 67.4% of all the encounters. Using the AIDS Council safe‐sex classification system, the majority of the commercial sex encounters fell in the “safer sex” category; however, there were significant differences by source of clients and place of the encounter. Use of drugs and alcohol reveal interesting patterns: Clients were more likely to use alcohol, while MSWs had significant differences of usage of the different drugs. This study demonstrates that the majority of MSWs are offering and practicing safe sex behaviours, however, MSWs working in the street setting are still likely to be practising unsafe sex. Male sex work is becoming an organised business and this provides opportunities to implement further public health interventions.     

Engaging diverse experts in a global environmental assessment: participation in the first work programme of IPBES and opportunities for improvement

The need for interdisciplinary expert groups from different regions of the world to be involved in the fields of sustainability science and environmental change research is increasingly recognised. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IBPES) was established in 2012 as a science-policy interface and has gone beyond previous initiatives in its articulation of a clear commitment to inter- and transdisciplinary approaches that mandate a diversity of genders, disciplines and regional backgrounds within its expert groups. The first IPBES work programme, carried out between 2014 and 2018, has been supported by 17 expert groups, comprising over 1000 experts, who have been selected from over 2000 government and stakeholder nominations through formal procedures. In this paper, we present and critique the framework through which IPBES identifies and selects experts to participate in its processes. In addition, we synthesise and carry out a quantitative analysis on the expert nomination and selection data relating to the first assessment activities of IPBES. Identifying that the balance of regions, genders, disciplines and knowledge systems represented within these expert groups is still disproportionally dominated by male natural scientists from the Global North, the paper makes recommendations of how to better engage knowledge holders from different disciplines and diverse knowledge systems in future iterations of the IPBES work programme.     

Kooperative Resilienz – ein soziotechnischer Ansatz durch Kooperationstechnologien im KrisenmanagementCooperative resilience – a sociotechnical approach through cooperation technologies in crisis management

Whilst the concept of resilience in engineering is mainly focussed on the availability of technical systems, we rather see resilience as socio-technical construct and show opportunities to encourage cooperative resilience with the help of cooperation technologies. After a general definition of resilience in our application field of emergency management and in the context of cooperative structures, we present our methodology and the developed cooperation technologies. They address the collaboration of diverse players (such as police, fire department, and citizen) in major emergencies. Finally we discuss the input of this technology for cooperative resilience to overcome crises of cooperation with the help of adaptability to modified realities by means of cooperation technology.     

Easy Sport: Research and Relevance

This paper is an analysis of the Final Report of the Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling. After discussing the origins and political environment of the Commission, the paper focuses on the relationship between the Commission's recommendations and the results of its own research. The author argues that the research was used only where it fitted the Commission's views and was ignored where it did not. The paper concludes with a discussion of the structural factors that led to this outcome.
Criticizing the banal and unsubstantiated policy views of public commissions is easy sport… I do so only to make a simple point: public commissions, on the record, have either made no use of social science… made some use but in ways irrelevant to its policy conclusions…, or made use of relevant but unconvincing research. (Wilson, 1978)     

Sex differences in the use of psychiatric outpatient facilities

Previous research has shown that both symptoms and sociocultural factors are related to use of psychiatric outpatient facilities. However, the utility of using treatment rates from these facilities to make etiological inferences depends on whether sociocultural effects on utilization are trivial or substantial. In this paper data are presented for one such inference, that women are more in need of treatment than men. We find that observed sex differences in the use of a student psychiatric clinic are due both to differential propensities to seek help for problems and also to differential numbers of problems, both of which are higher among women than men. However, the differential propensity to seek help is found to be by far the more important of these two effects.     

Correction to: Think Tanks: New Organizational Actors in a Changing Swedish Civil Society

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In the captions for Figures 1 and 2, a reference was inadvertently omitted.     

Drug use

In “Drug Use,” Peter Reuter, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs and Department of Criminology, examines substance abuse and addiction among welfare and low-income mothers. He describes the changing patterns of drug use in the general population. Reuter explains that drug use increased rapidly in the late 1970s, declined in the 1980s, and remained relatively flat in the 1990s. The patterns, however, are driven largely by changes in marijuana use. The pattern of frequent use of more dangerous drugs, such as cocaine, is somewhat different. The heavy use of cocaine—especially crack cocaine—peaked during the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, the number of new addicts had fallen dramatically, although not many heavy users discontinued their use. As a result, the stock of frequent users held constant through much of the 1990s and only recently began to decline as more users discontinued their use or died. His main data sources are the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program, the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), Monitoring the Future (MTF), and the National Household Survey of Drug Abuse (NHSDA).