275 research outputs found
Mandatory reporting laws: Their origin, nature, and development over time
No full textDozens of countries have enacted mandatory reporting laws in various forms to respond to child abuse and neglect. Other countries including England are currently considering whether to introduce them, and if so in what form. It is important for policymakers, practitioners and researchers to understand these laws’ background, nature and purpose. This chapter outlines the origins and provenance of the first mandatory reporting laws; discusses their nature; describes major developments over time; and identifies some major effects and their consequences. It is shown that the laws are a heterogeneous, organic, flexible mechanism enabling social intervention where otherwise such intervention is severely compromised or impossible. Their primary function is to comprise but one aspect of a multifaceted child welfare system by identifying cases of serious maltreatment which would not otherwise come to light: sexual abuse and severe physical abuse are paradigm examples. The essential role of these laws is therefore primarily a tertiary aspect of a public health model, rather than a purely preventative strategy. Mandatory reporting laws are made by each specific jurisdiction according to its preferred design and function within its socio-political system. There is a spectrum of different approaches from which a jurisdiction can choose: they can apply to a broad or a narrow range of reporter groups, a broad or a narrow range of types of maltreatment, and a broad or a narrow range of instances where abuse or neglect occurs
A theoretical framework for designing and evaluating strategies to identify cases of serious child abuse and neglect
No full textA central dimension of the State’s responsibility in a liberal democracy and any just society is the protection of individuals’ central rights and freedoms, and the creation of the minimum conditions under which each individual has an opportunity to lead a life of sufficient equality, dignity and value. A special subset of this responsibility is to protect those who are unable to protect themselves from genuine harm. Substantial numbers of children suffer serious physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and neglect at the hands of their parents and caregivers or by other known parties. Child abuse and neglect occurs in a situation of extreme power asymmetry. The physical, social, behavioural and economic costs to the individual, and the social and economic costs to communities, are vast. Children are not generally able to protect themselves from serious abuse and neglect. This enlivens both the State’s responsibility to protect the child, and the debate about how that responsibility can and should be discharged. A core question arises for all societies, given that most serious child maltreatment occurs in the family sphere, is unlikely to be disclosed, causes substantial harm to both individual and community, and infringes fundamental individual rights and freedoms. The question is: how can society identify these situations so that the maltreatment can be interrupted, the child’s needs for security and safety, and health and other rehabilitation can be met, and the family’s needs can be addressed to reduce the likelihood of recurrence? This chapter proposes a theoretical framework applicable for any society that is considering justifiable and effective policy approaches to identify and respond to cases of serious child abuse and neglect. The core of the theoretical framework is based on major principles from both classical liberal political philosophy (Locke and Mill), and leading political philosophers from the twentieth century and the first part of the new millennium (Rawls, Rorty, Okin, Nussbaum), and is further situated within fundamental frameworks of civil and criminal law, and health and economics
Mandated reporting is still a policy with reason: empirical evidence and philosophical grounds
No full textA major criticism of mandated reporting laws is that they produce many unsubstantiated reports, increasing workload for child protective services, wasting resources, and reducing the quality of service given to known deserving children and families (Ainsworth, 2002). Some critics go further: Melton (2005) claimed mandated reporting is now "a policy without reason". Melton stated "the primary problem is no longer case-finding" (2005, p. 10), and argued that "common sense and empirical research" show mandated reporting is "a bankrupt policy" (2005, p. 15). Further, Melton proposed that jurisdictions with these laws should revise their systems “to facilitate voluntary assistance to children and families—to create or sustain the norms of caring that prevent harm to children” (2005, p. 15), and urged countries without a US-type system to adopt another model. However, we argue that without a system of mandated reporting, a society will be far less able to protect children and assist parents and families, because many cases of abuse and neglect will not come to the attention of authorities and helping agencies. We accept that mandated reporting schemes are imperfect. But, using child safety as the primary concern, and drawing on evidence from several nations, we argue that a child protection system needs a form of case identification beyond voluntary help-seeking; that mandated reporting produces a large number of substantiated reports and to sacrifice this compromises child protection; that the most serious problems in systems having mandated reporting appear to lie not with the reports, but with responses; and that the economic and social justice advantages of mandated reporting far outweigh any disadvantages
Theseus' Paradox:: History, Authenticity and Identity
No full textIn the Life of Theseus, Plutarch observes: "The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus. They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became a standing illustration for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.” (Plutarch, Perrin, 1914, V 1,49). Thereafter, the paradox sparked discussion regarding an object's authenticity and identity. For Barthes (1974), the paradox presents form-permanence as a Structural argument. Walter Benjamin (1969) disagreed noting that "[t]he presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” When original producers are not available we can evaluate the relationship of contemporary design with historic modes of production through Material Culture. By privileging knowledge of what the spatial product is and how it was produced, the essay examines the role of History in addressing spatial authenticity. The essay uses Theseus' Paradox as a theoretical framework to evaluate authenticity and identity. Architectural objects either continue or discontinue the aesthetic language of their context; as designers cite History to generate designs claiming contextual site sensitivity, it is important to evaluate the validity of this approach. Specifically, Theseus' Ship is deconstructed using the philosophical arguments of atomism and essentialism. Atomism, a Positivist tool, determines elementary physical characteristics of a society's spatial practice. Essentialism (Aristotle) focuses on the nature of the spatial product: what it has been, it is, and could be. Designers can use Theseus' Paradox as a comparative framework to evaluate to what degree their proposal continues authentic modes of production rooted in historic spatial traditions and identity-based placemaking
Using law to identify, manage and prevent child maltreatment
No full textThis chapter identifies ways in which laws are capable of responding to child maltreatment, both as an immediate regulator of conduct, and as an influence on a society’s cultural development and approach to children’s welfare. Informed by practices and experiences in selected common law\ud
systems, the chapter provides examples of legal mechanisms that can inform discussion of optimal strategies to identify and manage child maltreatment in many different societies. Both positive and negative aspects of these mechanisms are noted. While controversies arise as to what kinds of laws are best in preventing and responding to child\ud
maltreatment, and even, more fundamentally, whether there is a role for law in protecting children, this chapter offers evidence that a variety of legal tools can be employed to address child abuse and neglect, for any\ud
cultural setting in which there is willingness to act to prevent and treat its various forms
The battered child syndrome : changes in the law and child advocacy
No full textIn 1962, Dr C. Henry Kempe and his colleagues published the single most important article written to date about child maltreatment: The Battered-Child Syndrome. This chapter analyses the threefold nature of what these authors achieved: clearly identifing the medical evidence of severe child physical abuse and naming it as a syndrome; identifying the medical profession's resistance to its identification; and then translating their scholarship into advocacy for social and legal change. The chapter also traces some of the effects of Kempe's work, including the nature and effect of the subsequent introduction of mandatory reporting laws in the USA and internationally
Embodied Contradictions and Post-Industrial Built Environments
No full textIn October of 2004, the Museo de Medicina Laboral (Museum of Labor Medicine), opened to the public in Real del Monte, State of Hidalgo, Mexico. The museum, located on the grounds of what had been the Hospital Minero (Mining Hospital), was a building complex conceived, built, and operationalized at the height of Mexico’s Industrial Revolution and the region’s only medical facility specializing in the healthcare needs of miners and their families. Utilizing historical analysis, the hospital reveals contradictions frequently embodied by the era’s Modernist built environments. Inaugurated in 1907, the hospital was the culmination of the United States Smelting Refining and Mining Company (USSRMC) and its Mexican subsidiary, Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca’s (CRMyP) efforts to bring healthcare to its employees while maximizing production. On one hand, the hospital’s design and operation expressed an optimism wrought by the dissemination of positivist and utilitarian philosophies and economic growth spurred by technological innovation; on the other, growing wealth inequality and deteriorating, often brutal, labor conditions.
Nearly 120 years later, the hospital again embodies a global reality. In contemporary post-industrialist economies, once these built environments cease being productive, they are usually abandoned or demolished; only a few are transformed and repositioned for other uses. As the region’s mining industry ceased productivity, the hospital was first abandoned and later rescued by a newly privatized enterprise that donated the medical building complex to a non-for-profit civil association focused on mining heritage. Now the Museum, an architectural expression that fused global and local economic, technological, and aesthetic sensibilities, has become an example of commodified didactic heritage
Capturing citizenship: Authentication and authority in romances of early settlement by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and William Gilmore Simms
No full textThis study argues that American authors of the historical romance used the genre as a means to connect themselves to the republic. The writers under discussion manipulate inherited categories of race and gender in such a way as to challenge contemporary boundaries of a national identity. Recent scholarship applying post-colonial theory to cultural productions of White Europeans in the United States has been challenged on the grounds that these immigrants did not undergo a true colonial experience and that their productions participated in the imperialist project of manifest destiny. The current study argues against these readings by demonstrating how authors in a so-called Second World settler culture like the United States resisted imperial forms and categories by creating liminal sites through which inherited categories of identity were given new meanings. The works of Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms, insofar as each author was inspired by a previous frontier romance, provide an example of how these writers used the conventions of sentiment, captivity and the romance to explore the limits of individual freedom during a period when this combination of the terms “individual” and “freedom” formed the fault line along which liberal values sublated republicanism. This study concludes that gender and race became protean signs at least as useful for negotiating and revising political identities as they were for manipulating or restricting them
Corporate poetics and the Virginia Company of London, 1607-1655
No full textThis dissertation answers calls for new literary consideration of the Old Dominion\u27s archive. This study counters the dismissal of the literature of seventeenth-century Virginia as fragmentary and inconsistent, and constructs a literary history of early modern Virginia through the lens of corporate personhood. Through careful attention to issues of authorship and textual production, I treat the Virginia Company of London as a single, corporate author whose texts and literary legacy shape the discourse surrounding Virginia for the rest of the century. By theorizing a corporate poetics that allows us to understand what it means for a corporation to engage in authorship, I correct for a diffuse version of Virginia\u27s literary history that belies the colony\u27s archive in order to more thoroughly understand how non-human actors contributed to and shaped the literature of early America
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