The role of culture in understanding child sexual offending : examining feminist perspectives

Psychological theories on child sexual abuse continue to dominate etiological and rehabilitative approaches to understanding and treating sexually abusive behavior. However, even though psychological researchers are motivated toward development of comprehensive and highly integrated theories, there has been continued neglect of the cultural dimensions of child sexual abuse. Feminist theories of child sexual abuse have been particularly helpful in filling this explanatory gap, as they have persisted in locating sexually abusive behavior within a cultural context. In this paper we review and critique selected feminist theories on child sexual abuse with the aim of establishing their explanatory scope and utility. Overall, we found that feminist perspectives were useful in justifying and establishing social policies aimed at preventing the sexual abuse of children from ever commencing. However, despite this strength, they offer little guidance in the treatment of individual offenders.

Logic and The Open Society : revising the place of Tarski’s theory of truth within Popper’s political philosophy

This chapter retraces the way in which the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper came to accept a Correspondence Theory of Truth from the work of the Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski. It is argued that Popper’s use of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth reveals crucial insights into the fundamental characteristics of Popper’s social philosophy.  Quite deceptively, arguments based upon Tarski’s theory of truth appear implicitly throughout the text of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). It is then demonstrated how Popper integrated a correspondence theory of truth into a theory of the functions of communicative language that he received from Karl Bühler.

Deleuze : 'Had I not done philosophy I would have done law'

For those too few of us who carry a flame for an idea or shape of community and if necessary law to come Deleuze provides us with some useful signposts and overall a working toolbox with which to tackle both the micro and macro of our daily encounters. The whole package of Deleuzian machines and assemblages can be taken up as an abstract discourse which too outsiders might appear devoid of any linkage to reality. The whole notion of Deleuzian lawyers is one that can easily raise a chuckle, but nevertheless some of us seem to persevere with playing with the law with this toolbox.

Gender inequality and education : changing local/global relations in a ‘post colonial’ world and the implications for feminist research

This article explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity, and how educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of gender restructuring; maps significant shifts in gender equity policy in the wider context of educational and social inequality debates; and through an analysis of recent research on gender identity, schooling and leadership argues that gender can no longer be privileged when identifying and responding to educational inequality. Key assumptions underpinning how social change and education reform delivers equity are questioned, concluding with feminist theorising about how social justice may inform equity policy and practice in culturally diverse educational contexts.

New girl heroes : the rise of popular feminist commentators in an era of sexualisation

The level of public interest in what has variously been called ‘raunch culture’, ‘pornification’ or more broadly ‘sexualisation’ of culture, has created new opportunities for enterprising women. In recent years, a number of immensely popular books have emerged raising concerns about girls and sexualisation by female authors across Western nations such as the USA, Australia and the UK. Here, I explore the media work of two prominent Australian media commentators on girls and sexualisation, Melinda Tankard Reist and Dannielle Miller. I explore how, in their educative work designed to empower girls and free them from the stifling, damaging aspects of sexualised popular culture, these commentators may be citing and performing other normative dimensions of contemporary young femininity that go unremarked upon and are thus reinscribed as normal and expected.