A follow-up study of the social adjustment of referred children after group termination

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

A follow-up study of the social adjustment of referred children after group termination

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Low skill temporary migration in New Zealand: Labour market and human rights law as a framework for managing future migration

International labour mobility has been on the rise in recent decades. In many countries including New Zealand, there has been a significant shift from permanent migration to temporary migration in order to meet labour demands in critical sectors. While many of those on the move are highly skilled, globally there is demand for particular types of low skill workers. However, almost all low skill workers who are legal migrants are temporary migrants and the main avenue for regulating the movement of low skill workers internationally has been guest worker schemes or temporary migrant worker programmes (TMWP). There are divergent opinions amongst policy makers and researchers on the merits of circular migration. Some see only negatives impacts for migrant workers: including dependency and exploitation, social exclusion, and irreversible social impacts on their families left behind. Others believe that the current iteration of guest worker schemes can complement both labour demand and development (through remittances, skill transfer and experience). This paper focuses on the host country, that is New Zealand’s perspective, and specifically on the human rights and labour law issues that will be relevant for any future expansion of low skill migration to New Zealand. In particular the focus is on low skill caring and related work rather than work in areas such as construction, manufacturing or primary sector industries. New Zealand’s Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme for seasonal horticultural work, was successfully trialled as a new model of temporary migration. However extending work schemes to activities primarily servicing the needs of people and for work that is generally not seasonal, requires close examination. Temporary migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation and their isolation in rural areas or private homes, leaves them detached from the normal checks and balances covering the permanent workforce. Policy design in this area is a balancing exercise and will necessitate some trade off of rights such as family reunification and freedom of movement. However this paper uncovers a gap, notwithstanding the existence of a comprehensive international legal framework on migrant rights, between rhetoric and enforcement of rights in the comparative countries selected for their relevance to New Zealand. Unfortunately a middle ground appears difficult to identify with the reality being that the tap will be turned off when this option becomes too expensive. Ignoring or tolerating irregular migration is not the answer either. New Zealand can learn from the experiences of other countries but none of the models canvassed in this paper are ultimately preferred. Instead it becomes apparent that the success of Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme has no further congruence with TMWP for the domestic and care sector. Work involving people, as opposed to products, is not only most problematic from a human rights and labour law perspective, but is also unlikely to fulfil the ‘triple win’ rationale for the resurrection of the current host of TMWP. Care work for example, necessitates the building of longer term relationships (and understanding of cultural norms of care) and therefore a policy that limits the amount of time a worker is allowed to remain in the country is unlikely to achieve the necessary results. Even if New Zealand favoured migrants from sending states who were actively involved in the training, welfare and protection of their temporary migrating citizens - training, oversight and enforcement in the host country are not straightforward. This paper concludes that the difficult and often more controversial decision to accept that some permanent low skill migration (and the accompanying protections afforded to those migrants) is appropriate and will have to be made. Policy needs to be developed not just from a migrants rights standpoint, but to address demand (which will of course not disappear), continuity of care for the elderly, and similar rights and protections of the clients

Sexual Violence Against Women during the Holocaust: Inside and Outside of Extermination Camps

The article will explore women’s sexual experiences during the Holocaust, specifically the experience of those who were targeted by the Nazi regime for being “inferior” to the Aryan race. During this period, Jewish women, women categorized as “asocial” despite their German citizenship, women who identified as Romani, and Soviet or Ukrainian women were targets of sexual violence mostly at the hands of members of the Nazi Party.1 However, these women were also assaulted by the partisans who helped hide them, liberating soldiers, and male prisoners because of the vulnerable situations many women found themselves in. This article focuses first on the importance of the female experience during the Holocaust, the dangers of the “hierarchy of suffering,” and the various forms of sexual violence women faced regardless of if they were in ghettos, extermination camps, or in hiding. This article also touches on the debate about whether consensual sex existed under Nazi occupation and introduces the concept of “limited choice,” a concept that expresses women’s reduced choices and emphasizes that the reduction of choices forced them to choose options they would not have chosen normally when laws and morality applied. Women during the Holocaust had to make difficult choices to survive, and when faced with sexual assault or death, many women chose sexual assault; however, that does not make the sex consensual

Paid domestic work: A private matter or a public policy issue?

In industrialised countries most of the goods and services traditionally undertaken in the home are now largely sourced outside the household. The main exceptions are childcare, food preparation and washing and cleaning, which can be unpaid work or can be undertaken on a paid basis: this is paid domestic work. The ILO estimates that there are over 100 million domestic workers globally. These workers are often the most disadvantaged and vulnerable and, in many countries, are migrants, sometimes working illegally and sometimes part of guest worker schemes. Most domestic workers internationally are women. In New Zealand, domestic work was once an important source of paid employment for women with shortages of workers met by migration from the British Isles. While it had almost disappeared as a paid occupation post World War II, a number of reasons suggest a likely increase in the number of paid domestic workers in the near future, probably met, again, by migration. Nevertheless, little is known about New Zealand domestic workers, and paid domestic work fits uncomfortably with labour law, principally because the workplace is the private home. This has meant that overall, paid domestic work has, in a variety of ways, been a private matter in New Zealand. However, we suggest that it is time that paid domestic work is viewed as a public policy issue, particularly in relation to labour law and migration policy development

The future supply of caregivers for the elderly: should Australia and New Zealand look to the Pacific?

No abstract availabl

Pacifying Leviathan: Back to basics in peace-building out of conflict

This thesis focuses critically on contemporary theory and practice of peace-building where there has been conflict. The commonality of the resumption of violence after peace processes in many recent examples, suggests that both theory and practice have not worked as intended. The thesis explores insights that might improve the odds that governing institutions (or, more particularly, the people who work in them) can put aside violence. In the terms used in this thesis: how might Leviathan be pacified? Therefore, the thesis deals with basics evident in all recorded (and probably pre-historic) human experience. For the modern states of Western Europe and North America, pacifying Leviathan followed centuries of conflict (including two world wars), interspersed with governance reforms and constitutional adjustments. The process is ongoing, but by the middle of the 20th century “the liberal state” clearly emerged, with features that included constitutions, the rule of law, the protection of human rights and the market system. There appeared to be a widespread view after World War II that the liberal state apparatus’ essence could be written down in documents, transplanted into many different historical and cultural contexts and would work much as the model predicted i.e. was easily reproducible, perhaps infinitely, even in smaller and smaller versions. From 1945 to 2010, the numbers of states at the United Nations almost quadrupled (51 to 192). Member 193 (South Sudan) may emerge from decades of conflict in 2011. In all that state formation, the optimistic view was that the new documents and institutions would provide structures within which political and/or ethnic competitors/combatants would engage in non-violent political competition. In this thesis, “reverse-engineering” is the term given to this notion. Such optimism was severely dented by the experiences of many newly-independent states in the mid-late 20th century. As violence escalated in new and existing states all over the world after the Cold War ended (taken, for convenience, as 1990), reverse-engineering remained at the core of the formula for peace-building after conflict. As with the post-colonial period, liberal peace-building since 1990 have also been repeated failures to work as intended, including the resumption of conflict. The most fragile states have posed the hardest problems, not only for the suffering citizens but for the international community seeking how best to help. With this in mind, and accepting that each state and society is unique, this thesis sets out building blocks for alternative approaches. It does not suggest there are simple answers in pacifying Leviathan, either generally or in relation to any particular example. If it is indeed possible in any place (e.g. Haiti) to reduce ongoing conflict, the argument is that these blocks should be amongst the foundations of theory to inform practice. The core thesis is thus that the chances of pacifying Leviathan might be significantly improved if domestic and international actors: • Adopt a conflict transformation approach to guide theory and practice; • Come to terms with groupism – how/why humans bond into groups and the potential this poses for violence and peace; • Understand the importance of receptivity - the notion that critical masses of key actors should squarely face (often when they have become exhausted by) the consequences of violent competitiveness and seek alternatives; • Translate receptivity into learned constitutionalism – learning to govern by rules amongst sufficient actors; and • Develop international assistance guided by the above perspectives, and which, with the consent of the peoples concerned, find ways to stay appropriately engaged for the time needed to strengthen the factors that should pacify Leviathan. The thesis does not focus on future strategies of conflict-reduction – such as economic development to give people stakes in the society, along with disarmament of combatants. Many other studies explore these. Here, the exploration is of the nature of human society, informed by history, examples, case studies and a sweep of cross-disciplinary analysis. Understanding why pacifying Leviathan is so hard is the basic first step, which forms the bulk of this thesis. Putting such understanding into practice involves many further steps. Important as these might be for current and future policy and practice in peace-building, their full development is beyond the scope of this thesis. Some suggestions are made, especially in the conclusion, but elaboration will have to await further work

Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: A Real-time Application to COVID-19

Tracking human activity in real time and at fine spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. We show that these data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit movement patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantifies social contact within venues. We use these indices to document how pandemic-induced reductions in activity vary across people and places