Critical Thinking and Cedaw: Women\u27s Rights as Human Rights

This thesis is designed as an exercise in critical thinking which attempts to trace the little-known and vaguely understood international effort to address women\u27s rights as human rights. Specifically, it is intended to introduce and actively engage the reader in the application of critical thinking processes through an analysis of the history and status of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW. Given the potential significance of CEDAW for the United States, it is ironic that this human rights treaty is not commonplace in discussions regarding women\u27s rights. Many associate the women\u27s rights movement with efforts during the 1970s to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA. Some may recall that the ERA was penned in 1921 after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, or simply the efforts to secure voting rights for women. Few, however, associate the women\u27s movement with international efforts to codify such rights into law through treaties such as CEDAW. CEDAW emerged as a product of the three World Conferences for Women that comprised the Decade for Women from 1975 through 1985. In 1995, a Fourth World Conference for Women followed. Of all of the documents produced, however, CEDAW stand alone as a legally binding treaty which, under Article II, section 2 of the Constitution, has the potential to become …the supreme Law of the Land. CEDAW serves as a contextual framework for the introducing the processes of, and understanding the need for, critical thinking. The central hypothesis of the studies is that critical thinking enables the public to determine if information is accurate, reliable, relevant and sufficient to support of refute a given option. Correlated with the fundamental premise that a democracy requires a well informed citizenry, is that information must be accessible and citizen need to think critically. Upon these premises rests the hope that the resultant standards will be applied in the adjudication of the important social issues. This thesis asserts that issues of substance can easily be obscured and even discarded when selective emphasis is placed on secondary issues. Analyses of CEDAW are made with respect to medial presentation, US Senate proceedings, and provocative topics, which served to prevent the public from being well-informed. The results of these analyses reveal an astounding degree of misinformation (in the form of omission, Bias, digression, fragmentation, contradiction, and general confusion) that continues to obscure CEDAW from public consideration and debate. Although, through an in-depth critical analysis the status of this treaty may be tragically unclear, the flaws in the treatment of human rights issues, a well as path of correction, are exposed for public consideration. In sum, critical thinking processes are viewed as necessary to protect the public\u27s perception of the issues. Absent critical thinking, the public may fall prey of misinformation. Through its use, it is hoped that a higher level of humanity, understanding, and truth will emerge within the process and as the product of the sound and careful reasoning

An investigation of the predictive effects of bullying behaviors and the psychosocial environment of schools on behaviors of middle school students

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among a school\u27s psychosocial environment and the prevalence and types of bullying behaviors that either lead to or resulted from that environment. More specifically, this study examined how the frequency of aggressive behaviors (e.g., bullying) experienced by students (as perpetrators and victims) contributed to their interpretation of their schools\u27 psychosocial environment and how those environments effected the existence of ongoing aggressive and avoidance behaviors. The data for this study was archival, having originally been collected for a study of school culture, climate and violence from the Philadelphia School District during the school year of 1993-1994. The current study used structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to develop a theoretical model of predictive relationships among (a) students\u27 perceptions of bullying behaviors and safety at school, (b) the schools\u27 psychosocial environment as measured by the students and (c) the students\u27 reactionary behavior to both (a) and (b) in order to understand the consequences of bullying in schools. The sample of 5,153 student surveys was randomly split into two groups in order to examine and test a model for Group 1 and then to be able to test a cross-validation analysis with the data from Group 2. This cross-validation helped to determine if the proposed model accurately predicted the proposed relationships across different samples