Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-105).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-105). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2003. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-219).

Bakgrund: Sexuell och reproduktiv hälsa är en mänsklig rättighet och innefattar rätten att ta beslut gällande sin egen kropp och sin vård. Barnmorskan träffar och vårdar mestadels kvinnor i sitt arbete och har en viktig roll i att värna och främja kvinnors rätt. Sverige ses som ett av världens mest jämställda länder, men det kan finnas strukturer och faktorer även i det svenska samhället som påverkar kvinnors möjligheter till självbestämmande negativt. Syfte: Att undersöka vilka barriärer barnmorskan upplever och uppfattar hindrar kvinnors rätt att bestämma över sin kropp utifrån professionella, sociokulturella och hälsoekonomiska perspektiv. Metod: Kvalitativ innehållsanalys med deduktiv ansats. Data från åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer utförda 2016, med legitimerade barnmorskor inom olika verksamhetsområden analyserades utifrån ramverket "What Prevents Quality Midwifery Care". Resultat: De professionella barriärer barnmorskorna uppfattade resulterade i tre subkategorier: "Lagar, riktlinjer och vårdprogram", "Kunskap, utbildning och profession" och "Personalens personliga åsikter, förutfattade mening och engagemang". Sociokulturella barriärer kategoriserades som: "Politik, jämställdhet och samhällets ideal", "Kultur, religion och familjeförhållanden", "Språk" samt "Personliga förutsättningar". Hälsoekonomiska barriärer delades in i: "Personal och tidsbrist" och "Kostnader och resurser". Slutsats och klinisk tillämpbarhet Studien visar att barnmorskor uppfattar att det finns professionella, sociokulturella och hälsoekonomiska barriärer för kvinnans självbestämmande gällande sin egen kropp i det svenska samhället. Studien kan bidra till att olika yrkeskategorier inom vården kan öka sin förståelse och kompetens i mötet med kvinnor och kan då hjälpa kvinnan att stärka sin position, personligen och samhälleligt. Studien kan ge en bättre förståelse för barnmorskans roll när det gäller att hjälpa individer i en utsatt situation, genom att stärka deras autonomi och känsla av självbestämmande. Studien kan även få vårdpersonal att tänka kritiskt kring att de själva är en del av en kulturell kontext med en förförståelse för andra individer. / Background: Sexual and reproductive health is a human right and involves the right to make decisions concerning your own body and care. The midwife mostly meets and care for women and have an important role in defending and advocating women’s rights. Today there are global political influences that restricts women’s rights even though Sweden is considered to be one of the world’s most equal countries, there can be structures and factors in the Swedish society that affects women’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies in a negative way. The aim: To investigate midwives perceptions and experiences concerning professional, sociocultural and health economic barriers for women regarding decisions about their own bodies. Method: A qualitative content analysis with a deductive approach. Data from eight semi structured interviews with Swedish registered midwifes, active in different areas of the midwife profession, was analyzed based on the framework "What Prevents Quality Midwifery Care". Result: The professional barriers that the midwives perceived resulted in three subcategories: "Laws, clinical guidelines and policies", "Knowledge, education and profession" and "Caretakers personal opinions and commitment". Sociocultural barriers were categorized in: "Politics, equality and the society’s ideals", "Culture, religion and family relations", "Language" and "Personal abilities". The health economic barriers were divided in to: "Lack of time and staff" and "Costs and resources". Conclusion and clinical applicability: This study shows that there are professional, sociocultural, and health economic barriers that affects women’s autonomy in the Swedish society according to the midwives’ perceptions. The study can help caretakers increase their understanding and competence in meeting with women in care and help them strengthening their position in the society as well as on a personal level. This study can give a greater understanding for the midwife’s role when it comes to helping individuals in an exposed situation, by strengthen the women’s autonomy and sense of control. The study can also help caretakers to increase critical thinking regarding themselves in their own cultural context and preunderstanding for other individuals.

Contemporary young women would appear to enjoy greater freedoms to consume alcohol and socialise in bars, pubs and clubs than their predecessors. However, concern about women’s level of alcohol consumption, drink spiking and drug-assisted sexual assault have contributed to a renewed focus on safety advice for young women in these social settings. This thesis examines the views, experiences and behaviours of 35 young women in relation to their safety in bars, pubs and clubs using qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with young women (18-25 years) in Scotland. Exploring the divergent claims made within feminist structural and poststructural perspectives, this thesis develops a nuanced understanding of young women’s safety in bars, pubs and clubs by drawing upon the theoretical concepts of power, resistance and social control. Constraints on women’s leisure imposed by patriarchal structures, safety concerns and notions of ‘appropriate femininity’, formed a significant focus of early feminist theorising in this area. More recently, however, poststuctural feminist theorists have highlighted the opportunities that leisure experiences may offer women for liberation by providing a means to resist conventional cultural discourses around feminine identities. To a certain extent, the findings from this study challenge the conventional construction of consuming alcohol and socialising in bars, pubs and clubs as a masculine leisure pursuit, by identifying this leisure activity as a central aspect of young women’s social lives. However, young women’s experiences and behaviours within bars, pubs and clubs remain significantly structured by gender and young women perceive the risks that they experience in these settings to have increased over time. The continuing salience of gender is evident in the way that women access bars, pubs and clubs, their safety concerns and experiences, and ultimately their behaviour within these venues. Young women’s safety concerns in this context are overwhelmingly related to the fear and reality of sexual violence, lending credence to social control theories espoused by radical feminists. These concerns and the individualising discourse embodied within safety literature results in women normalising and taking individual responsibility for preventing sexual assault. This reflects the positioning of sexual violence as an inevitable fixed reality, thus evading the need to question the behaviour of men who choose to sexually assault and harass women in bars, pubs and clubs. Safety behaviours adopted by young women in bars, pubs and clubs are complex and contradictory in that they simultaneously adopt, resist and transgress those advocated within safety literature. Since these safety behaviours are inextricably linked to normative femininity and gendered expectations of women’s behaviour in bars, pubs and clubs, they are more adequately theorised as ‘accommodating techniques’ than ‘resistant practices’. These findings pose significant difficulties for locating women’s experiences of consuming alcohol in bars, pubs and clubs within a poststructuralist framework of liberation and freedom; in some respects, it would appear that women’s behaviour within these social spaces is subject to heightened regulation and control. While poststructural theorising about power and resistance is of some assistance in illuminating the process of how safety concerns regulate women’s behaviour, alongside the possibility of resistance, understanding young women’s safety is best served by an appreciation of feminist structural perspectives which highlight the salience of gender, and in particular the power of gendered norms and taboos which continue to operate with regard to women’s sexuality. Ultimately, bars, pubs and clubs remain a social space infused with gendered expectations and risks.

Morocco is oftentimes praised by academics, development workers, and women’s rights activists as a trailblazer for the empowerment of women in the Middle East and North African region. Its reforms in the realm of family legislation and progress made in human development place the country at the helm of liberalising Arab Muslim-majority societies, even more so after the Arab Spring and Morocco’s peaceful transition to a ‘new’ constitutional order. However, a closer look at women’s rights discourses, legal reforms, its texts and implementation, and the public attitudes towards the enhancement of women’s rights reveals a less empowering situation. The purported goals of the Family Code, as the extolled document showcasing Morocco’s attempt at ameliorating (married) women’s rights, of ‘doing justice to women’ while ‘preserving men’s dignity’ mask the reformed law’s reconsolidation of patriarchal family relations. Many legal grey areas within this particular law, as well as clashing principles emanating from other laws such as the Penal Code, allow judges and the ʿaduls (religious notaries) to exercise discretion and apply the law as they see fit and, to a large extent, as it conforms to their and the community’s vision of the ideal moral order. Moreover, because ‘doing justice to women’ affects men’s and family’s honour, the project of the enhancement of women’s rights has had as a result retraditionalisation of family relations and hierarchical gender structures. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the status of educated single adult girls from provincial areas. They may be poster girls for the development community, but they are pitied by their own communities because they fail to become complete women––married (non-employed) mothers. The story of Morocco’s professed progress is a story of empowering its citizens, but one which does so on paper only. It is also a story which hides the salient details of poorly written reformed laws, obstructed access to justice, continuing widespread misogyny, material poverty and social marginalisation, and cohesive socio-economic programmes, which are rarely followed through.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-56).

This investigation explores the international perspectives of causality of human traffic, specifically, traffic into commercial sexual exploitation. Current Western approaches to combat trafficking centre around law and order, immigration issues, and victim protection programs. While these are important for a holistic effort to deter traffic, these foci overlook prevention endeavors, thereby acting as a band-aid on a bullet wound, addressing the symptoms, but not the foundation of trafficking. Western perspectives toward prevention concentrate on economic aspects of supply and demand while crediting the root cause to be poverty. Using social exclusion theory, this thesis demonstrates that the current paradigm of viewing human trafficking in purely economic terms is an oversimplification. This project proposes to widen the focus of prevention efforts those cultural and social structures which push and pull victims into trafficking. The research is a response to an international call for further initiatives to prevent human trafficking, the recent rise of human traffic in Guatemala, Central America and the lack of research which focuses on the social links with trafficking and mainstream society. Research conducted in Guatemala, included a thirteen-month ethnography and involved one-hundred and thirteen qualitative interviews conducted in nine Guatemalan cities strategically located along trafficking routes. The target research population included women sex workers and former traffic victims from Central America and included insights from non-governmental organizations workers. Twenty-three interviewees were Central American migrants which provided insight in the wider regional structures of traffic and commercial sexual exploitation. The interviews aimed at understanding the lived experiences of exploitation in order to determine whether social exclusion affects human traffic within commercial sexual exploitation. The findings revealed the underlying social and cultural structures which reinforce human trafficking. Empirical data collected provides real-time data on trafficking networks, commercial sexual exploitation and reveals the geo-political significance of Guatemala as a hot-spot for traffic. Analysis of interviews illustrates variations in the experience of human traffic and commercial sexual exploitation which challenges current western stereotypical ideas on traffic victims. Conceptually, macro-structures—political, economic, social, and violence—are presented as a back drop for the formation of wider networks of exploitation. The exploration of violence as a push factor challenges international forced repatriation policies. Micro-structures—gender roles, family, violence, and coping strategies—are examined in the ways they perpetuate social systems of trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Theoretically, the thesis argues against the current paradigm which narrowly focuses on economics, but calls for the incorporation of social exclusion theory to understand the multi-dimensionality of human traffic and its wider links to society in order to open up new dialogue for prevention between the West and the majority world.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2004. / "A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" Bibliography : leaves [361]-388.