Constructing a global understanding of the social ecology of leaving out of home care

Engagement with globalisation is growing in the field of youth transitions from out of home care. This includes cross national exchange of research, policy and practise, regional advocacy networking and global policy development. Furthering this emerging international child welfare perspective requires extending it to countries in the developing world and building conceptual frameworks which encompass a social ecology of care leaving, including its global dimension, the latter needs to address not only the needs, expectations and rights of care leavers but also the theories of change underpinning service design and delivery. Such a model is presented combining resilience and social capital as personal assets situated within a social ecology of support. To illustrate how this provides a means to help engage with the experience of countries where there appears to be very little information available on care leaving, a small scale South African initiative is considered. SA-YES is a youth mentoring project for young people leaving a variety of out of home placements. Planned as a three-year pilot, initial results are encouraging but require more rigorous evaluation focusing on program process and outcomes, quality of interpersonal relationships and synchronisation with cultural expectations and policy environment.

We Never Give Up II

Ten years after the production of the initial 'We Never Give Up' film, this documentary filmis a follow-up film about the experiences of ten survivors of South Africa apartheid and their struggle for reparations. Produced by the Human Rights Media Centre, Cape Town, the film was directed and filmed by Cahal McLaughlin in a collaborative relationship with Khulumani Support Group Western Cape.

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This documentary film, produced with the Human Rights Media Centre, Cape Town, and in collaboration with Khulumani Support Group Western Cape, is the ten-year follow up to We Never Give Up (2002), which addressed the issues of reparations as dealt with by the South African government and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We Never Give Up II (2012) returns to these themes and to the same participants, asking how life has changed in the interim. The process of collaborative practices acknowledges the importance of sharing ownership/authorship in the storytelling processes as well as in validating traumatic experiences by those who survived major and sustained political violence. Made over a two-year period, involving close consultation with participants, the film offers insights, by those most directly affected, to what might constitute legal, financial, social and psychological reparations. The film has been screened in Cape Town, Bloemfontain, Zanzibar Film Festival, Belfast (Belfast Film Festival), Brighton, Guildford, Galway and London, always accompanied by discussion of the issues raised in Q&As. To emphasise the importance of the film for debates on policy around reparations, a 25 minute edited version was selected to be screened on SABC on ‘Special Assignment’ by SABC on April 29th, 2013 (South Africa’s ‘Freedom Day’), followed by a debate with Department of Justice spokesperson, Dr Khotso De Wee. The chapter 'Maureen Never Gave Up' in Daniels, McLaughlin and Pearce (eds.) 'Truth, Dare or Promise' (2013) Cambridge Scholars Press (ISBN: 1-4438-4959-6, ISBN 13: 978-1-4438-4959-3, Release Date: 2013-09-01), which analyses the production of this film, is offered as part of the portfolio.

Old truths and new politics:Does truth commission 'publicness' impact democratization?

This article analyzes the relationship between truth and politics by asking whether the 'publicness' of a truth commission - defined by whether it has public hearings, releases a public report, and names perpetrators - contributes to democratization. The article reviews scholarship relevant to the potential democratizing effects of truth commissions and derives mechanisms that help explain this relationship. Work from the transitional justice field as well as democratization and political transition more generally is considered. Using a newly-constructed Truth Commission Publicness Dataset (TCPD), the analysis finds that even after statistically controlling for initial levels of democracy, democratic trends in the years prior to a commission, level of wealth, amnesties and/or trials, the influence of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and different cutoff points for measuring democratization across a number of models, more publicness predicts higher levels of democracy years after the commission has finished its work. The more public a truth commission is, the more it will contribute to democratization. The finding that more public truth commissions are associated with higher levels of democratization indicates particular strategies that policymakers, donors, and civil society activists may take to improve prospects for democracy in a country planning a truth commission in the wake of violence and/or government abuse. © The Author(s) 2012.

Toothwear and the older patient

Toothwear is commonly observed in dentate older patients and may be physiological or pathological in nature. Toothwear can be caused by abrasion, attrition, erosion or a combination of aetiologies. Where treatment is required, a number of options exist, including the use of adhesive materials and fixed and removable prosthodontics.

Debating Darwin at the Cape

This paper focuses attention on the fortunes of Darwin's theory among the English-speaking community in Cape Colony during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The paper begins with a review of early encounters with Darwin dwelling particularly on the response of figures like Roderick Noble - professor and editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine, the geologist John Shaw, and Sir Henry Barkly, governor of the colony. Besides these more theoretical responses, Darwin's ideas were also mobilised in a range of scientific inquiries on such subjects as birds and butterflies. But most conspicuous was the use of evolutionary thought-forms in the work of the eminent philologist Wilhelm Bleek, cousin of Darwin's leading German apologist, Ernst Haeckel. The prevailing sense is of a liberal intelligentsia calmly interacting with a novel theory with all due deference. During the 1870s, an address by Langham Dale at the South African Public Library injected new energy into the Darwin discussion. Dale expressed disquiet over some of the anthropological implications of evolution as well as its apparent reductionism, and this stimulated a range of reactions. Several anonymous commentators responded but the most sustained evaluation of Dale's position emanated from the Queenstown physician and later politician, Sir William Bisset Berry. Then, in 1874, copious extracts from John Tyndall's infamous 'Belfast Address' were printed in the Cape Monthly and this added yet further impetus to the debate. Tyndall's seeming materialism bothered a number of readers, not least Hon William Porter, former attorney-general of Cape Colony. To figures like these the materialist extrapolations of radical Darwinians such as Haeckel were deeply disturbing, not just for religious reasons, but because they seemed to destabilise the moral and pedagogic progressivism that lay at the heart of their civilising credo. While reservations about Darwin's proposals were certainly audible, taken in the round Darwinian conversations among the English-speaking literati at the Cape were conducted with liberal sentiments, not least when evolutionary science approached questions of race. For Darwin's writings were seen to confirm a monogenetic account of the origin and unity of the human race, and could readily be called upon to justify the paternalistic ideology that governed colonial affairs.