Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Battered Mothers\u27 Testimony Project, Women\u27s Narratives, and Court Reform

In November 2002, the Wellesley Centers for Women’s Battered Mothers’ Testimony Project released Battered Mothers Speak Out, a report detailing human rights abuses committed against forty battered mothers and their children who had litigated cases in the Massachusetts family court system. Although the report initially generated a great deal of attention, the response from the courts was overwhelmingly negative, and the report prompted no change in the courts. Because the stories of these women resonated with my own experiences representing battered women, I wondered why the report had so little effect on system change. The official response of the courts was that the report employed a flawed methodology, both in its use of the narratives of the women affected and in its reliance on human rights investigation. In my article, however, I site the work done in Battered Mothers Speak Out squarely within the tradition of using narratives in social science, human rights investigation and the law and argue that “flawed methodology” is really a pretext for gender bias. The article contends that bias against battered women, presented both through social science research and the gender bias task force reports of various courts, was the real reason for dismissing these narratives. The article questions whether the authors would have achieved more if they had relied on third person narratives or a quantitative report. The article concludes that while there might be easier ways to reform courts, narratives, particularly battered women’s narratives, are essential for a number of reasons, including the need for battered women’s stories to be told and for courts to hear them

Law and Justice are not Always the Same : Creating Community-Based Justice Forums for People Subjected to Intimate Partner Abuse

What constitutes justice in cases involving intimate partner abuse has historically been determined not by the person subjected to abuse, but rather an actor within the legal system—a police officer, a prosecutor, an advocate, or a judge—and those individuals most often define justice in terms of what the legal system has to offer. People subjected to abuse may conceive of justice quite differently, however, in ways that the legal system is not well suited to address. For people subjected to abuse who are interested in punishment, whose goals are congruent with the legal system’s goals of safety and accountability (as defined by the state), and who are willing to use state based systems, society offers a response: the criminal justice system. Imperfect though that response might be, in theory it meets the justice needs of some people subjected to abuse. For people who are more interested in healing and are willing to work through state systems, society also offers a response, albeit a more limited one: restorative justice. But for those who are not interested in a state-based response, little by way of justice exists for people subjected to abuse. This article seeks to fill that void by suggesting the development of community based forums to deliver justice. In her 2003 article, Battering, Forgiveness and Redemption, law professor Brenda Smith suggested a number of alternative models that might be used to address intimate partner abuse. Building on her work, and recognizing that there are parallels between the experiences of people seeking justice for violations of human rights and people subjected to intimate partner abuse, this article borrows from the structures used to find justice after atrocity, including truth commissions and community-based courts, to flesh out what community-based justice forums to address intimate partner abuse might look like. The article imagines how international human rights processes might productively inform efforts to create new alternatives for finding individualized justice, voice, validation and vindication outside of the criminal justice system and considers the crucial questions that such a radical reimagining of justice provision raises--about the role of the state, the problems of gendered justice, the existence of community, and the provision of resources

Gale-Shapley Matching in an Evolutionary Trade Network Game

This study investigates the performance of Gale-Shapley matching in an evolutionary market context. Computational experimental findings are reported for an evolutionary match-and-play trade network game in which resource constrained traders repeatedly choose and refuse trade partners in accordance with Gale-Shapley matching, participate in risky trades modeled as two-person prisoner's dilemma games, and evolve their trade behavior over time. Particular attention is focused on correlations between ex ante market structure and the formation of trade networks, and between trade network formation and the types of trade behavior and social welfare outcomes that these trade networks support. Related work can be accessed here: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/tnghome.htmGale-Shapley matching; partner choice; agent-based modeling; evolutionary market game; Trade Network Game (TNG)

Dynamic Testing of Wholesale Power Market Designs: An Open-Source Agent-Based Framework

In April 2003 the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed a complicated market design - the Wholesale Power Market Platform (WPMP) ï¾– for common adoption by all U.S. wholesale power markets. Versions of the WPMP have been implemented in New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic states, the Midwest, and the Southwest, and California. Strong opposition to the WPMP persists among some industry stakeholders, however, due largely to a perceived lack of adequate performance testing. This study reports on the model development and open-source implementation (in Java) of a computational wholesale power market organized in accordance with core WPMP features and operating over a realistically rendered transmission grid subject to congestion effects. The traders within this market model are strategic profit-seeking agents whose learning behaviors are based on data from human-subject experiments. Our key experimental focus is the complex interplay among structural conditions, market protocols, and learning behaviors in relation to short-term and longer-term market performance. Findings for a dynamic 5-node transmission grid test case are presented for concrete illustration. Annotated pointers to related work can be accessed here: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/AMESMarketHome.htm

Bargaining Over Labor: Do Patients have any Power?

Using data on births from Australia, we estimate the level of patient bargaining power in negotiations over birth timing. In doing so, we exploit the fact that parents do not like to have children born on the “inauspicious” dates of February 29 and April 1. We show that, in general, the birth rate is lower on these dates, and argue that this reflects parent preferences. When these inauspicious dates abut a weekend, this creates a potential conflict between avoiding the inauspicious date, and avoiding the weekend. We find that in approximately three-quarters of cases, this conflict is resolved in favor of the physician. This suggests that while doctors have more power than patients, patients are sometimes able to influence medical decisions for non-medical reasons.timing of births, weekend effect, bargaining power

Does the Lunar Cycle Affect Birth and Deaths?

There is a commonplace notion that full moons affect natality and mortality. To test this theory, we obtain daily births and deaths data from Australia, covering all 10,592 days from 1 January 1975 to 31 December 2003. We find that full moons are not associated with any significant change in the number of conceptions, births, or deaths. Moreover, our standard errors are sufficiently tight to make it possible to rule out even modest positive or negative effects of the lunar cycle.conceptions, births, deaths, timing, lunar cycle, full moon

How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant

We employ several different approaches to estimate the political position of Australian media outlets, relative to federal parliamentarians. First, we use parliamentary mentions to code over 100 public intellectuals on a left-right scale. We then estimate slant by using the number of mentions that each public intellectual receives in each media outlet. Second, we have independent raters separately code front-page election stories and headlines. Third, we tabulate the number of electoral endorsements that newspapers give to each side of politics in federal elections. Overall, we find that the Australian media are quite centrist, with very few outlets being statistically distinguishable from the middle of Australian politics. It is possible that this is due to the lack of competition in the Australian media market. To the extent that we can separate content slant from editorial slant, we find some evidence that editors are more partisan than journalists.competition, media bias, media slant, economics of elections

Africa's growth prospects in a European mirror : a historical perspective

Drawing on recent quantitative research on Europe reaching back to the medieval period, and noting a relationship between the quality of institutions and economic growth, this paper offers a reassessment of Africa’s growth prospects. Periods of positive growth driven by trade, followed by growth reversals which wiped out the gains of the previous boom, characterized pre-modern Europe as well as twentieth century Africa. Since per capita incomes in much of sub-Saharan Africa are currently at the level of medieval Europe, which did not make the breakthrough to modern economic growth until the nineteenth century, we caution against too optimistic a reading of Africa’s recent growth experience. Without the institutional changes necessary to facilitate structural change, growth reversals continue to pose a serious threat to African prosperity. Only if growth continues after a downturn in Africa’s terms of trade can we be sure that the corner has been turned