Magister Legum - LLM

This thesis examines the intersection of oil enclave economy and the phenomenon of sexual liaisons in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. The particular focus of this thesis is on the extent to which oil enclavity contributes to the emergence of sexual liaisons between local women and expatriate oil workers. Despite the fact that the Nigerian oil industry has been subjected to considerable scholarly debate for over five decades, this aspect of the social dimension of oil has not received adequate scholarly attention. Gender-specific discourse has tended to focus more on women protest. Other aspects, such as gender-specific violence that women in the region have had to live with, are either ignored or poorly articulated. Picketing of oil platforms by protesting women is celebrated as signs that women are active in the struggle against oil Transnational Companies (TNCs). While women protest is a significant struggle against oil TNCs, it has the potential of blurring our intellectual focus on the specific challenges confronting women in the Niger Delta. This study shows that since the inauguration of the Willink Commission in 1957, national palliatives meant to alleviate poverty in the Niger Delta region have not been gender sensitive. A review of the 1957 Willink Commission and others that came after it shows that the Nigerian state is yet to address the peculiar problems that the oil industry has brought to the women folk in the region. The paradox is that while oil provides enormous wealth and means of patronage to the Nigerian state elite, the oil TNCs, and better paid expatriate oil workers, a large section of the local Oil Bearing Communities (OBCs), especially women and unemployed youth, are not only dispossessed but survive in an environment characterised by anxiety and misery. With limited survival alternatives, youths resort to violent protest including oil thefts and bunkering. Local women are also immersed in this debacle because some of them resort to sexual liaisons with economically empowered expatriate oil workers as an alternative means of survival. This study therefore shifts the focus to women by exploring the extent to which sexual liaison reflects the contradictions in the enclave oil economy. The study employed an enclave economy conceptual framework to demonstrate that oil extractive activities compromise and distort the local economies of OBCs. This situation compels local women to seek for alternative means of survival by entering into sexual liaisons with more financially privileged expatriate oil workers. The study reviewed relevant secondary documentary sources of data. Further, it employed primary data collection techniques which include in-depth interviews/life histories, ethnographic observations, focus group discussions, and visual sociology. Besides obtaining the social profile and challenges facing the women involved in sexual liaisons with expatriate oil workers, the study provides an outline of participants’ narratives on the different social and economic dimensions of the intersection of oil enclave economy and sexual liaisons. The study found that some of the women involved in sexual liaisons with expatriate oil workers have been abandoned with ‘fatherless’ children. Some of them have also been rejected by their immediate family members and, in some cases, by their community. The study also found that the phenomenon of sexual liaisons and the incidents of abandoned ‘fatherless’ children that result from the practice, has over the years been played out through local resentment against oil TNCs and their expatriate employees. This finding helps to fill the gap in narratives and to make sense of the civic revolt and deepening instability in the Niger Delta region.

Workplace violence is an international problem and has negative consequences for individuals, organizations and communities. For individuals, the effect includes symptoms of fear, stress, irritability, feelings of isolation, insecurity, and low selfesteem. Healthcare organizations incur increased cost due to litigation due to poor quality of care, high staff turnovers and absenteeism, and their brands are negatively affected. Community members, who are the recipients of care, are placed in danger and are indirectly the victims of such workplace violence, which in turn affects their trust in private healthcare organizations or professions to provide the quality health care that they expect and deserve. Workplace violence takes many forms such as incivility, horizontal violence and bullying to name but a few. The perpetrators of such violence are doctors, nurses, patients and relatives. Workplace violence takes place in South Africa however, paucity in research was found by the researcher. The aim of the study was to explore and describe the experiences of professional nurses regarding workplace violence in a private healthcare facility in order to develop guidelines to address workplace violence in such a facility. A qualitative, explorative, contextual and descriptive study was conducted, using the Critical Social Theory as the paradigm. Data were gathered from professional nurses that have experienced workplace violence utilizing narratives. Fourteen narrative interviews were done until data was saturated. The data was transcribed verbatim and Tesch’s method of thematic synthesis was used to analyse the data. The three themes that emerged from the data were: Professional nurses acknowledge the existence of workplace violence where they work, Participants described the effect of workplace violence on themselves, others and the work environment, and Participants discussed their views regarding management of violence in the workplace. A thick description of the data with a literature control was provided. Thereafter inferences were made regarding the main themes of the guidelines and these focussed on: Preventing and addressing workplace violence by Nursing Service Managers; Preventing and addressing workplace violence by Nurse Unit Managers and Empowering professional nurses to address workplace violence. To ensure rigour and trustworthiness of the study, the researcher used Lincoln and Guba’s criteria namely: credibility, dependability, conformability and transferability. To protect the right and dignity of the participants and to safeguard the integrity of the study the researcher complied with the following ethical principles: beneficence, non- maleficence, autonomy, justice, veracity, privacy, and confidentiality. The limitations of this study were that data was collected from only one category of nurses and only one private healthcare facility was used. Recommendations from this study include implementation of the guidelines to establish their effectiveness. The findings of this study can be used to empower professional nurses to deal with workplace violence and to prevent the short and long term effects of workplace violence on the individual, the organization and the community. Nursing education institutions can also incorporate workplace violence into their curriculum to increase the awareness of students regarding this phenomenon.

South Africa’s borders were opened up in 1994 after Nelson Mandela became president. Since then South Africa has been battling xenophobia as immigrants from African nations started to come to the rainbow nation for a better life away from persecution, civil wars, and extreme poverty. Still, up until 2008 when massive riots broke out in Alexandria Township in Gauteng, xenophobia was an unknown word to most people outside academic, social work, and government circles. This has all changed now as 2008 will in all likelihood be remembered as the year when xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa and became a general feature in our daily media bulletins, prime time television broadcasts, and in our society as a whole. The South African university where the current study took place was also affected by xenophobia although without any displays of public violence. The current study sought to understand and describe the lived experience of xenophobia by individual, international, African students at a South African university. The study adopted a qualitative approach and the methodology used was multiple case studies employing Tesch’s model of content analysis. The findings of the study showed that the research participants, as a combined group, have lived through a wide range of xenophobic experiences excluding physical violence and that the research participants’ personal characteristics influenced their exposure to and experience of xenophobia. The study contributed to the understanding of the lived experience of xenophobia within a South African university by international, African students.

The aim of the present research is to investigate three factors, namely perceptions of fairness in intergroup situations, ingroup identification and spatial dimensions that are assumed to contribute to why individuals participate in violence against the police in soccer stadiums. In Study 1 perceptions of fairness, identification and spatial perspective were manipulated and the results indicated a significant interaction effect between identification and spatial perspective. This interaction effect had a significant influence on negative behavioural tendencies towards police. In Study 2, identification and spatial perspective were manipulated and once again the interaction effect between identification and spatial perspective was found. A main effect of identification was found in that participants who identified lower with fans showed significantly more positive attitudes towards police. The results of the two studies highlight the importance of looking beyond the inherent nature of the crowd itself when analysing situations of police/fan conflict, and also the need to further investigate the spatial dimension and how it influences social judgment and decision making.

Using a purposive sampling technique, this study employed an online questionnaire to assess the relationship between attitudes towards gender-related constructs (e.g. rape myth acceptance, shared power in relationships, the acceptability of dating violence and perceived seriousness of dating violence) and the tolerance of dating violence among undergraduate students in the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Ottawa. Linear regression models were conducted to identify the most salient predictors of the tolerance of dating violence. A general/combined model was examined as well as three subtype-specific models (e.g. psychological, physical and sexual dating violence). A total of seven predictor variables were entered into each model in three blocks: sociodemographic variables were entered first, followed by sex and then gender-related constructs (e.g. rape myth acceptance, power in relationships, the acceptability and seriousness of dating violence). The results identify a number of variables that are associated with the tolerance of dating violence scales and some that led to a decrease in scores on these scales. Findings suggest that the link between gender-related constructs and the tolerance of dating violence is complex and multidimensional and warrants further research to explain the variation observed.

This dissertation investigates discourses of anti-violence strategies in the context of international development. While violence against women is, of course, an urgent problem, this dissertation explores how the urgency to end violence against women is socially, culturally, economically, and politically constructed. I consider the manufacturing of urgency in three case studies of contemporary anti-violence initiatives: i) American foreign policy including what has been branded as “The Hillary Doctrine” and proposed International Violence Against Women Act; ii) the World Bank’s report entitled The Cost of Violence; and iii) the United Nation’s UNiTE To End Violence Against Women and Say NO campaigns. In doing so, I argue that World Bank, the United Nations, and American foreign policies are too often technocratic, narrow, depoliticized, and are executed in an urgent manner in the interest of neoliberal economic growth, security concerns, and “feel good” aid at the expense of more holistic, effective and accountable responses to global violence against women.

Orientador: Paulo Eduardo Teixeira / Banca: Lílian Henrique de Azevedo / Banca: Lídia Viana Possas / Resumo: Esta obra é uma investigação acerca da Lei Maria da Penha e as Políticas Públicas associadas ao enfrentamento da violência contra a mulher no Brasil. Tais políticas foram implantadas após múltiplas reivindicações de movimentos sociais e feministas. A pesquisa teve como foco o Centro de Referência de Atendimento à Mulher Vítima de Violência do município de Bauru, em duas frentes, quantitativa e qualitativa. Examinamos as fichas de atendimento desde a criação do Centro em 2010, e entrevistamos duas mulheres, uma que é atendida no Centro e uma funcionária que lá trabalha. Partindo destas narrativas seguimos em busca das razões culturais na formação identitária de homens e mulheres que expliquem a alta incidência de relacionamentos violentos. Por fim apresentamos o atual estágio das discussões no âmbito penal na busca de soluções que unam punição e prevenção de novas violências. / Abstract: This work is an investigation of the Maria da Penha Law and Public Policy associated with addressing violence against women in Brazil. Such policies were implemented after multiple claims of social and feminist movements. The research focused on the Customer Reference Center for Women Victims of Violence in the city of Bauru, on two fronts, quantitative and qualitative. We examined the medical records since the establishment of the Centre in 2010, and interviewed two women, one that is answered in the center and an employee who works there. From these narratives follow in search of cultural reasons in identity formation of men and women to explain the high incidence of violent relationships. Finally we present the current stage of discussions on criminal matters in the search for solutions that unite punishment and prevention of further violence. / Mestre

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Does violence against women increase in the aftermath of war? If so, why? Scholars and policy-makers have begun to ask questions about violence against women in the post-conflict space, yet complexities in measurement and a focus on outcomes (rather than mechanisms) leave essential questions unanswered. This dissertation refines and scopes these questions to learn about whether, how, and why the social context that supports violence against women changes as a result of war. The central argument of this dissertation is that armed conflict fosters protective masculine norms that, in turn, affect how communities socially sanction or punish local crimes, including violence against women. Drawing insights from feminist theory, economics, social psychology and political science, the theory of protective masculine norms describes a process by which the gendered nature of protection and exigencies of community security lead communities to choose more severe punishment for public crimes deemed to threaten their communities. Protection tradeoffs, however, also lead people to choose less severe punishment for other "private" crimes. I derive and examine the observable implications of this theory in the context of eastern DR Congo, a place where there are high levels of violence against women that has also been exposed to high levels of insecurity associated with armed violence in the distant and recent past. Chapter 1 lays the framework for the dissertation; describing the social nature of violence against women, processes of norm change, the research approach, and the derivation of protective masculine norms theory. Then, because protective masculine norms are broadly shared across societies, Chapter 2 investigates the nature of war, law, and punishment processes in eastern DR Congo to understand how the theory and findings travel to other contexts. Chapter 3 motivates the theory of protective masculine norms by providing the empirical foundation for differentiating between forms of violence against women and placing them in a framework with other crimes. Contrary to prominent theories about empowerment, backlash and violent masculinities; armed conflict fails to affect preferences for punishing rape and domestic violence in a unidirectional way. Armed conflict increases how severely people prefer to punish rape and stealing, but decreases how severely people prefer to punish domestic violence. The qualitative evidence underscores the relevance of disaggregating crimes against women in terms of public community threats and private crimes. Chapter 4 explicates the theory of protective masculine norms, grounding it in the literature and in the case. I examine the quantitative and descriptive evidence related to alternative hypotheses that may account for armed conflict's effects: exposure to wartime crimes, security structures and demographic change. Finding little support for alternative theories, I describe the design of and results from qualitative work probing central propositions within protective masculine norms theory: Protection is gendered, people have shared memories of conflict incidents, this affects their subsequent behaviors, and internal crimes are related to perceived provision of protection. Since sanctioning is a public act subject to group dynamics and norms, Chapter 5 examines the implications of protective masculine norms and the findings about preference change for how groups choose to punish crimes. Armed conflict may affect how groups choose to punish crimes by changing individual-level preferences, by changing group dynamics, neither, or both. I find that armed conflict affects group preferences primarly through individual-level preference change, underscoring the relevance of preference change for social sanctioning in the aftermath of war. The data also show that group dynamics make people's preferences more extreme, suggesting the importance of norms to shaping preferences - a central tenet of the theory. Chapter 6 discusses the emerging research agenda of protective masculine norms and its contributions. Questions remain about levels of violence against women after war. But, already protective masculine norms has begun to unify a formerly disparate set of findings emerging about armed conflict, domestic violence, and social and legal change.