The status of women police officers: an international review

This paper reports on a survey of English-language police department websites, annual reports and other reports in order to identify key aspects of the status of women police internationally. Findings are reported for England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Eire, the United States, Canada, Australia (eight departments), New Zealand, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji. Data on the proportion of female officers were available from 18 of 23 locations, with a range between 5.1% and 28.8%. Recruit numbers were available for six locations, and ranged between 26.6% and 37.0%. Limited data on rank and deployment indicated overall improvements. Available longer-term trend data suggested that growth in female officers was slowing or levelling out. Overall, the study showed an urgent need to improve gender-based statistics in order to better inform strategies aimed at maximising the participation of women in policing

‘I feel like a foreign agent’: NGOs and corporate social responsibility interventions into Third World child labor

A field study focused on a Western-led Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) intervention into Pakistan’s soccer ball industry is used to explore the dynamics surrounding local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) staff charged with implementation. Those dynamics include the post-colonial conditions pervasive in Third World contexts that frame the perception, interpretation, and reaction to Western interventions. NGO staff must navigate these conditions, which impel them into multiple subject positions and contradictory rationalities resulting in unsatisfactory experiences. Like many Western-led interventions resting on universalistic, paternalistic, de-contextualizing, and atomistic assumptions, this one brought negative unintended consequences. This leads to a suggested reconfiguration of CSR from a post-colonial perspective insistent on an inclusive ‘bottom-up’, ‘reversed engineered’ approach, wherein CSR problems are traced back to Western multinational corporations’ policies and practices