The importance of entertainment for sexuality education

Researchers in sexuality education have tended to focus on formal schooling. However, young people learn about sexuality from a range of sources, including entertainment media. This is particularly important because young people actively seek out entertainment media. They do so because it gives them the kinds of information they want, in ways that seem relevant to them. This is often not the case for formal schooling, for reasons that may not easily change in the near future. Possibilities exist for sexuality education researchers to form productive relationships with entertainment producers: but only if these are approached with respect for the producers' particular skills, including the ability to give audiences what they want.

Everyday resilience : narratives of single refugee women with children

This article offers a critical exploration of the concept of resilience, which is largely conceptualized in the literature as an extraordinary atypical personal ability to revert or ‘bounce back’ to a point of equilibrium despite significant adversity. While resilience has been explored in a range of contexts, there is little recognition of resilience as a social process arising from mundane practices of everyday life and situated in person -environment interactions. Based on an ethnographic study among single refugee women with children in Brisbane, Australia, the women’s stories on navigating everyday tensions and opportunities revealed how resilience was a process operating inter-subjectively in the social spaces connecting them to their environment. Far beyond the simplistic binaries of resilience versus non-resilient, we concern ourselves here with the everyday processual, person environment nature of the concept. We argue that more attention should be paid to day-to-day pathways through which resilience outcomes are achieved, and that this has important implications for refugee mental health practice frameworks.

Their space, my space, our space? Report of the 2009 Redland City Council Youth and Public Space Survey

This report analyses data collected through the Redland City Council’s Young People and Public Space Survey of 2148 high school students aged 12-19. The survey conducted in 2009 explored their sense of safety and experiences in public spaces across the City, and views on what Council could do to improve these. It is apparent they base their assessment of a space as ‘public’ on their ‘use’ of a space alone or with friends, and where strangers may be present, rather than on a type of ownership of a space (public/ private). The findings of the survey are summarised according to the themes of safety, community attitudes towards young people being in public spaces, young people and authorities, young people’s views of what is needed, and understanding different young people’s experiences of public space.

Children and the environment

Children and the environment cover a broad, interdisciplinary field of research and practice. The social sciences often use the word “environment” to mean the social, political, or economic context of children’s lives, but this bibliography covers physical settings. It focuses on a place-based scale that children can see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and navigate: not large, abstract scales such as national identities or population dynamics, or small scales such as environmental impacts on genes or cell functions. Attention to the everyday settings of children’s lives grew in the 18th century, when Romantic literature introduced the theme of children and nature. In the 19th century, concern for children’s welfare included an interest in conditions for children in burgeoning industrial cities, and justifications for early streetcar and railroad suburbs included claims that they would save children from the dangers of cities and provide the healthful benefits of natural surroundings. In the 20th century, academic disciplines developed different lines of inquiry about the impact of the physical environment on children and how children relate to places: ethnographic studies of children in different parts of the world in the fields of anthropology and geography; sociological studies of different populations of children in different settings; educational research on the learning opportunities that different school and out-of-school settings afford; medical research to understand disease vectors and the impact of pollutants on children; and efforts in the field of environment and behavior research more broadly, to understand how built and designed environments affect children physically, cognitively, socially, and emotionally. At the beginning of the 21st century, children and the environment is an active area of inquiry seeking to understand rapidly changing conditions for children as the world urbanizes, opportunities for free play outdoors and independent mobility erode in many parts of the world, media environments consume more of children’s time, and awareness grows that children need opportunities to contribute to creating sustainable societies.

What would it take to optimise young people’s sexual health? A conversational journey with youth workers

Marginalised young people have been consistently identified as a high risk group in relation to sexual health. This research, undertaken through the Youth Affairs Network of Queensland, seeks to explore impacts on youth workers’ ability to provide effective interventions around sexual health? What knowledge,skills, resources, value and ethics, training and support is available to youth workers? What do youth workers identify that they need and what workforce development strategies are recommended to enable the youth sector to respond more effectively? This project report provides a snapshot and introduction to the key themes raised by youth workers and other key stakeholders in Queensland Australia.

Joined-up practice : five areas of exemplary practice for social workers and educators to re-engage homeless youth

Young people seen as ‘at risk’ are a substantial focus across a wide range of policy and practice fields in national and international contexts. This article addresses two of those fields, youth homelessness and youth failing to obtain a basic education that will give them access to employment and full community participation as active citizens. By comparing solutions to the problems of youth homelessness and youth educationally at risk, the article distils key meta-characteristics useful for both social workers and educators in mutually supporting some of the most at risk young people in our communities today. This is what the authors term ‘a joined-up practice’.

A review of food literacy interventions targeting disadvantaged young people

This report identifies and evaluates intervention strategies that address food literacy and are used or have been used with young people experiencing disadvantage. The review was commissioned by the Health Department of Queensland.

Ten truths about Australia's rush to mine and the mining workforce

The sky is falling because the much-vaunted mining ‘boom’ is heading for ‘bust’. The fear-mongering by politicians, the industry and the media has begun in earnest. On ABC TV's 7:30 program on 22 August 2012, Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott blamed the Minerals Resource Rent Tax and the Carbon Tax for making ‘a bad investment environment much, much worse’ for the mining industry. The following day, Australia's Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson told us on ABC radio that ‘the resources boom is over’. This must be true because, remember, we were warned to ‘Get ready for the end of the boom’ (David Uren, Economics Editor for The Australian 19 May 2012) due to the ‘Australian resource boom losing steam’ (David Winning & Robb M. Stewart, Wall Street Journal 21 August 2012). Besides, there is ‘unarguable evidence’ that Australia's production costs are ‘too expensive’ and ‘too uncompetitive’: mining magnate Gina Rinehart said so in a YouTube video placed on the Sydney Mining Club's website on 5 September 2012. Can this really be so? What is happening to the mining boom and to the people who depend upon it?

The value of community wellbeing for locality based practice

This presentation put forward six propositions regarding the value and character of community wellbeing, in particular the economic contribution of social and community programs and initiatives. The six propositions are: 1. Community wellbeing is a useful umbrella concept 2. Everyone benefits from public programs 3. There is an economic as well as social cost of not responding well 4. Local government is key in fostering community wellbeing 5. Good practice involves bringing together a number of perspectives and levers, including social and cultural initiatives 6. Engaging with the community around wellbeing offers an opportunity to enhance the political process

The late discovery of adoptive and donor insemination offspring status : ethical implications for conceptual understandings of the ‘best interests of the child’ principle

Late discovery is a term used to describe the experience of discovering the truth of one’s genetic origins as an adult. Following discovery, late discoverers face a lack of recognition and acknowledgment of their concerns from family, friends, community and institutions. They experience pain, anger, loss, grief and frustration. This presentation shares the findings of the first qualitative study of both late discovery of adoptive and donor insemination offspring (heterosexual couple use only) experiences. It is also the first study of late discovery experiences undertaken from an ethical perspective. While this study recruited new participants, it also included an ethical re-analysis of existing late discovery accounts across both practices. The findings of this study (a) draws links between past adoption and current donor insemination (heterosexual couple only) practices, (b) reveals that late discoverers are demanding acknowledgment and recognition of the particularity of their experiences, and (c) offers insights into conceptual understandings of the ‘best interests of the child’ principle. These insights derive from the lived experiences of those whose biological and social worlds have been sundered and secrecy and denial of difference used to conceal this. It suggests that acknowledging the equal moral status of the child may be useful in strengthening conceptual understandings of the ‘best interests of the child’ principle. This equal moral status involves ensuring that personal autonomy and the ability to exercise free will is protected; that the integrity of the relationships of trust expected and demanded between parent/s and children is defended and supported; and that equal access to normative socio-cultural practices, that is; non-fictionalised birth certificates and open records, is guaranteed.

Framing sexual harassment through media representations

This article examines mainstream news media texts reporting sexual harassment in four industrialized countries. The study first identifies the aspects of sexual harassment cases considered newsworthy by asking how the media texts characterize such cases. Second, the study illuminates the discourses evident in these texts, which are theorized as a mode by which understandings of workplace gender (in)equality shape, and are shaped by, individuals, organizations and the community. The analysis reveals that the media most frequently reports “classic” sexual harassment and emphasizes scandalous allegations and overtly sexualized conduct. The hegemony of a discourse of sexual harassment as an individualized problem of inappropriate employee behavior is also evident. By contrast, discourses presenting sexual harassment as a systemic issue, or as symptomatic of broader gender inequality, are less frequent. We argue that these media representations limit opportunities to frame sexual harassment as dynamic, complex, and part of the practice of gendering in and beyond organizational boundaries.