Societies, Volume 9, Issue 2 (June 2019) – 22 articles

This article is an open letter to assistive technology stakeholders from an assistive technology user perspective. Contemporary systems thinking in assistive technology identifies the interlinking themes of people, products, personnel, policy and provision. We add to the current discourse on these five themes through the voice of an expert assistive technology user, who states that “As a disabled person and as a long-time expert assistive technology user, this is everything that I wish you knew and everything I wish you would do.” Our objective is to provide a user-centered commentary upon current trends and innovations in assistive technology, illuminating real impacts and outcomes from a social perspective and adding a rarely-heard voice to the literature. Full article

The ways we read our bodies and bodily transformations are deeply inscribed in cultural meanings that vary across different historical times and societies. Even if the desire to achieve culturally imposed beauty standards and ideals is relevant to all age groups, anxieties about bodily decline become more pronounced as we approach the final stages of our lives. Physical changes are never just manifestations of cellular and organic loss, but can also be a source of troubled identifies and fragmented personalities caused by the mismatch between our external appearance and the inner perception of the self. This paper offers the longitudinal analysis of female processes of ageing from age-studies and feminist perspectives, as depicted in the works of Erica Jong, a contemporary American writer. It uncovers significant aspects of the pressures older women are subjected to in order to look more appealing in youth-oriented cultures, and demonstrates that the human body is often regarded as a conflicting site of perpetual ambiguities and troubled feelings caused by physical decay. Full article

This exploratory study analyzed how three serial killers (i.e., Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer) potentially rationalized and justified their murders by applying techniques of neutralization. This paper discusses how the use of these neutralizations also functions as a form of stigma management assisting in the maintenance of a positive presentation of self, thus mitigating responsibility for their crimes. This study conducted a content analysis of data comprised from interviews and case histories of these three serial killers. Based on these analyses, the impression is conveyed that these killers used neutralizations to manage their identities (i.e., present “normal” selves), mitigate responsibility for their actions, and minimize the stigma associated with being labeled a serial killer. Full article

Several studies have examined women’s perceptions and experiences of out-of-hospital births, that is, births that take place at home or in birthing centers overseen by midwives. However, White women have primarily been the subject of these investigations. Black women are underrepresented among mothers who have out-of-hospital births, yet they provide an intriguing case for this birthing practice, given their elevated maternal mortality rates and the general rise in home and birth-center births since 2005. This study utilizes a split-sample design to compare the experiences of Black American women who gave birth in out-of-hospital and within-hospital settings in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is an excellent site for such an inquiry, as Black women are a decided racial minority in this Latino-dominated city, and often face healthcare access challenges. Drawing on insights from theories of intersectionality and power, this study uses in-depth interviews to explore how patient-provider power asymmetries emerge and are negotiated by Black American mothers who have out-of-hospital births, in contrast to their hospital-birthing peers. Narratives reveal that patient-provider power relations and asymmetries exist both within and outside of hospital settings, but are distinctly manifested in each setting. Out-of-hospital births are more mother-centered, but power machinations are more covert in such settings. Participants employ various forms of resistance to negotiate asymmetrical relationships with providers. Full article

This article examines the discourses about Sport for All (SFA) and their evolution over the past four decades in Brazil and analyzes the implications of those discourses for social inclusion of Brazilians with impairments in sport and leisure. It provides an overview of four political milestones in the development of sport participation in Brazil: the launch of the SFA program under the military dictatorship; the adoption of the 1988 Constitution; the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Rio 2016 Paralympics. Foucault’s archaeological-genealogical approach has been used to explain how the principle of social inclusion has been practised and enacted through the SFA discourses in Brazil and to discuss the implications of sport and leisure policies for the population with impairments. Full article

Background: This study investigates home ownership and its apparent health outcomes in Urban Ghana, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative datasets. Methods: The sample for the study consisted of 442 respondents using a multi-stage sampling technique. Results: The context in which houses are situated affects social support networks, physical and mental health outcomes. House ownership is then a precondition that enables social contact within neighborhoods. A Cramer’s V test value of 0.750 suggests a strong association between house ownership and health outcomes. Conclusion: House acquisition and ownership can potentially improve overall physical, and mental health and wellbeing. Full article

Since the 1980s, the fear of child sexual abuse (CSA) has become a major cultural feature of a large part of the Western world. Internationally, the unintended consequences of the fear surrounding CSA are rarely investigated and doing so is often controversial. The purpose of this study was to investigate how this widespread fear of CSA has influenced practices and teacher–child relationships at childcare institutions. This is the first study of Danish childcare facilities’ guidelines for protecting children against CSA, and staff against wrongful allegations of CSA. Examples of such guidelines include staff being forbidden to have children sit on their lap, or male staff being forbidden to change diapers. This mixed methods survey, which involved the participation of 2051 directors and teachers from approximately one-quarter of Danish childcare facilities, showed that the majority of institutions had guidelines that were aimed mostly at protecting staff from wrongful allegations. The study revealed that the guidelines were a sign that male workers were being stigmatized, and that some institutions had discriminatory guidelines that applied exclusively to men. Furthermore, the guidelines conflicted with staff’s trusting relationships with children, and the task of caring for them. Full article

This paper illuminates the potential of diversely embodied sporting cultures to challenge ableism, the ideology of ability. Ableism constructs the able body as conditional to a life worth living, thus devaluing all those perceived as ‘dis’-abled. This hegemonic ideology develops into a ‘logic of practice’ through a cultural appropriation of body’s lived complexity, by reducing it to symbolic dichotomies (able/disabled). The path to challenge ableism is then to restore body’s complexity, by turning attention toward its lived embodied existence. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of a sitting volleyball (SV) community, we condense multiple data sources into a sensuous creative non-fiction vignette to translate the physical embodied culture of the sport. In exploring SV physicality through the ethnographic vignette, it is our intention to activate the readers’ own embodiment when interpreting and co-creating this text. By placing the reader in the lived reality of playing SV, we hope that the potential of this physical culture to destabilize engrained ableist premises becomes apparent. Ultimately, our goal is to promote a shift from ableism towards an appreciation and celebration of differently able bodies. This cultural shift is crucial for long lasting social empowerment for people with disabilities. Full article

Instances where men were the victims of female violence in the past are very difficult to explore, especially when the violence took place in a domestic setting. There is now a notable body of work on violence in the nineteenth century but none that looks specifically at male victims of violence where there was a female perpetrator, and their treatment by the courts. This article goes some way in filling that gap by using data collected in researching female offenders at the end of the nineteenth century in Stafford. It argues that, as with violence where there was a female victim and female perpetrator, the courts and the press were similarly unconcerned and somewhat dismissive of female violence towards men in a domestic setting, thus being unsympathetic towards male victims of female violence. Full article

The combination of choice as a contested concept and its increasing adoption as a policy principle necessitates a critical analysis of its interpretation within Australia’s reforms to disability services. While choice may appear to be an abstract and flexible principle in policy, its operationalization in practice tends to come with conditions. This paper investigates the interpretation of choice in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), via an interpretive policy analysis of assistive technology (AT) provision. Analysis of policy artefacts reveals a diminishing influence of disability rights in favor of an economic discourse, and contradictory assumptions about choice in the implementation of legislation. The language of choice and empowerment masks the relegation of the presumption of capacity to instead perpetuate professional power in determining access to resources by people with disability. Full article

In the recent decades, fashion brands and retailers in the West have introduced supplier’s Codes of Conduct (CoC) to strengthen international labour standards in their supply chain. Drawing from the concept of workers’ agency and the theory of reciprocity, this paper examines the implementation of CoC from the workers’ perspective and identifies the mechanism used by the workers to negotiate with their employer. Qualitative data was collected from forty semi-structured interviews with mangers, union representative and workers at a garment factory in Vietnam which manufactures clothes to a few well-known fashion brands in the US and Europe. The findings show that, externally, workers are united with the management in hiding non-compliance practices to pass labour audits while, internally, workers challenge the management about long working hours and low pay. This finding highlights the active roles workers play on the two fronts: towards their clients and towards the management. Their collaboration is motivated by the expectation that the management will return the favour by addressing their demands through a reciprocal exchange principle. This paper sheds light on an alternative approach to understanding collective bargaining and labour activism at the bottom of the supply chain and provides recommendations for further research. Full article

This study delves into the relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being by gauging the role played by opportunities at the country level. Using data from the World Value Survey, we estimate multilevel models to explain cross-country differences in individuals’ life satisfaction. Opportunity and inequality exert a significant effect per se on life satisfaction, and their joint effect explains the puzzling positive relationship between income inequality and life satisfaction in low- and middle-income countries. Income inequalities reduce the well-being of individuals if opportunities are low, but inequality is not relevant for life satisfaction if opportunities in the country are high. Among the aspects of opportunity that really matter, we show that inclusiveness and access to advanced education play a more major role than political freedom or personal rights. Results apply for different social, income, and education groups. Full article

Popular and scholarly accounts of Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of the United States on the part of the American white working-class use different variables to define the sociodemographic group because there is no “working-class White” variable available in benchmark datasets for researchers to code. To address this need, the Author ran a multinomial regression to assess whether income, education and racial identity predict working-class membership among white Americans, finding that income and education are statistically significant predictors of working-class whiteness, while racial identity is not. Arriving at a robust definition of “white working-class” in light of these findings, the paper next turns to a review of the extant literature. By retrieving studies from searches of computerised databases, hand searches and authoritative texts, the review critically surmises the explanatory accounts of Trump’s victory. Discussion of the findings from the review is presented in three principal sections. The first section explains how working-class White communities, crippled by a dearth of social and geographic mobility, have been “left behind” by the political elites. The second section examines how white Americans, whose dominant group position is threatened by demographic change, voted for Trump because of resonance between his populist rhetoric and their latent “racist” attitudes. The third and final section explores the implications of a changing America for native-born whites, and how America’s increasing ethnoracial diversity is eroding relations between its dominant and nondominant groups. The Author surmises by arguing that these explanatory accounts must be understood in the context of this new empirical approximation of “working-class White”. Full article

Over the years, the role of victims in the criminal process has considerably evolved in common law jurisdictions, particularly in the United States and England and Wales. These notable developments have varied greatly between these two jurisdictions. These differences are in great part attributed to the different forces and rationales behind the emergence of the early victims’ movements in these respective jurisdictions. Indeed, the movements in the United States and England and Wales adopted different philosophies, strategies, and members came from different backgrounds, which can account for the differences in policies. This article engages in a process of comparative distancing between the forces that drove the movements, as well as the context under which they operated in order to understand the different policies, legal responses and debates that relate to the role of victims of crime in the two selected jurisdictions. Full article

The determinants of domain satisfactions could be differently evaluated depending on the aspect of life considered, which would lead to different implications for public policies. To test this hypothesis, using the German Socio−Economic Panel (GSOEP), we analyse the effect of different economic and non−economic factors on satisfaction with financial situation, job and health status. The main results confirm that several determinants exert different effects depending on the aspect of life that people are evaluating. For instance, household income only improves satisfaction with financial situation but it does not explain job or health satisfaction. However, those people with an active social life, who are less worried and distrustful, are more satisfied regardless of the aspect of life considered. These findings reflect the importance of studying the main determinants of the domain satisfactions using a comparative perspective to design and evaluate specific public policies, since some measures could be effective for improving satisfaction in one area of an individual’s life but not for others. Full article

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) creates duties for States Parties and UN agencies to ensure that individuals under their protection have equal enjoyment of the full range of human rights. This includes the Article 25 right to enjoy ‘the highest attainable standard of health without discrimination on the basis of disability.’ However, refugees, who are forced to seek protection outside their state, face particular obstacles to maintaining an adequate level of wellbeing and accessing services to meet their health needs. Among this group, those who have a disability may confront multiple intersecting challenges. This paper draws on the findings of research across countries that play host to significant refugee populations. It explores the contribution of the CRPD to the international human rights framework for refugees, with particular attention to the right to health. Incorporating evidence from the field, it discusses the implementation of these rights and related duties in humanitarian responses across the world. This article discusses common barriers to health services for refugees with disabilities in six host countries. Based on the broad conceptualization of health and wellbeing established in the international legal framework, it also examines the relationship between the fulfilment of Article 25 and other basic socioeconomic rights. It provides examples of good practice and identifies strategies to better ensure the rights set out in Article 25 of the CRPD. Full article

Blind and visually impaired people have to cope with the safe movement through public space and the (lack of) knowledge of spatial issues and walkable routes. These challenges often lead to a fear of accidents and collisions, frequently also of disorientation. This, in turn, can result in a reduced radius of action, restricted mobility, and later on, in social isolation. Against this background, the project TERRAIN aims at developing a technical guidance system for orientation and navigation in urban space. For the development of this assistance system, the project pursues an approach in which reflexive, responsive, and deliberative dimensions have been integrated to address the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) in a co-design process. This paper focuses on the participation of citizens independent of vision impairments in the project which provided a variety of relevant indications of impacts and potential technical adaptations from an ‘outer’ point of view. In addition, conclusions can be drawn about the existing desirability and acceptance of the technical solution among the potential users as well as their social environment of potential users. In addition, it turned out that the citizen participation process raised different expectations among the project partners. Therefore, this article evaluates the participation results from the perspective of the technology developers and the technology assessors. Full article

This paper examines the role of the victim through the prism of prosecutor in the first third of the nineteenth century when England did not have a public prosecutor or national police force and most crimes were prosecuted in the courts by the victim. The selection of cases is drawn from a larger investigation of female offenders punished by transportation to New South Wales, Australia. The cases demonstrate the diversity of victims, the power they held as prosecutors and highlight the process from apprehension to conviction. Historical records of regional English Assizes and Sessions were investigated to identify the victim and record the prosecution process. Full article

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) recognizes the role of Assistive Technologies (AT) in enabling independent living and inclusion of people with disabilities. Research into the provision of AT and disability services in general has highlighted the importance of social context and its influence on individual outcomes. However, there is little recognition of sibling roles, relationships and rights in the guidance available for practitioners. This paper explores the socio-technical context of home modification practice and the importance of involving siblings. The international context and concepts behind AT provision, including home modifications, and issues emerging from practice in Australia’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are discussed. Based on extensive practical experience and peer review, the “5 S’s for Siblings” is presented as a practice approach for involving siblings in the home modification process. Policy and practice implications are presented, including communication strategies for working in partnership with individuals and their families, and alignment with national standards and human rights principles. Involving siblings in the home modification process recognizes the important role they play in the lives of people with disabilities, both now and in the future. Full article

This article examines one element of the state’s responses to crime: the provision of a taxpayer-funded compensation scheme for victims of personal and sexual violence. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2012 sits within a political context that seeks to ensure that victims of crime are better served by the criminal justice system of England and Wales, the jurisdiction that is the focus of this article. The government’s fundamental policy is that this scheme exists to compensate only those victims who are ‘blameless’, either in terms of their character, criminal record, conduct at the time of the incident, or in their engagement with the criminal justice agencies. It is a policy that illuminates elements of two of the questions that the editors posed for this Special Issue of Societies. Reviewing the increased urgency in government policies concerning the treatment of victims of crime, the first section addresses the question of how, why and when victims came to shape political and criminal justice discourse and practice. The question of how, and to what end, cultural representations have shaped perceptions of victims is addressed in the second and third sections, which examine the notion of victim status and illustrate the ways in which eligible (‘ideal’) victims are perceived and their claims under this scheme are determined. Full article

In 2015, the Belgian Health Ministers launched a plan intended to evolve towards an integrated care system for chronic patients. This plan is implemented through pilot projects involving local actors. Therefore, the researcher raised the following research question: how does the use of pilot projects as implementation instruments structure the collaboration between parties involved in a pilot project? The term “pilot project” refers to a collaborative work method coupled with an experimentation purpose. This is further developed in the paper via a literature study. This qualitative research draws on interviews, focus groups, direct observation, and a documentary analysis. During the two first phases of the process, field workers had to create multidisciplinary local consortia and write an application file describing the project they would implement during the third phase, which raised challenging collaboration issues. Many people learned to work together over time, progressively overcoming the traditional fragmentation of care. They met regularly, understood their respective roles, and dealt with controversies through negotiation to reach an agreement on a common project. In conclusion, the researcher shows that, thanks to its characteristics, the pilot project instrument supports the development of collaborative care networks; in this example of community-based integrated care networks. Full article

Child abuse in youth custody in England and Wales is receiving an unprecedented degree of official attention. Historic allegations of abuse by staff in custodial institutions which held children are now being heard by the courts and by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and some criminal trials have resulted in convictions. A persistent question prompted by these investigations is that of why the victims of custodial child abuse were for so long denied recognition as such, or any form of redress. Drawing on original documentary research, this article aims to explain why and how state authorities in England and Wales failed to recognise the victimisation of children held in penal institutions between 1960 and 1990, and argues that this failure constitutes a disavowal of the state’s responsibility. We show that the victims of custodial child abuse were the victims of state crimes by omission, because the state failed to recognise or to uphold a duty of care. We argue further that this was possible because the occupational cultures and custodial practices of penal institutions failed to recognise the structural and agentic vulnerabilities of children. Adult staff were granted enormous discretionary power which entitled them to act (and to define their actions) without effective constraint. These findings, we suggest, have implications for how custodial institutions for children should think about the kinds of abuse which are manifest today. Full article