Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control. Robert Bursik , Harold Grasmick

refugee children, Watters’ book provides more generally significant insights into a wide array of issues relevant to contemporary refugees. Rather than concentrating on those who receive refugee status from host societies, Watters asserts “the focus of this book is not restricted to legal and administrative definitions of refugee children, but instead accords with what Zolberg has referred to as a ‘sociological’ definition ‘grounded in observable social realities’” (p. 2). In addition, Watters draws extensively from contemporary theorists of inequality, exclusion and domination—Michel Foucault, Aihwa Ong, Pierre Bourdieu, Homi Bhabha, Liisa Malkki among them—to create a refined appreciation of the ways that states and bureaucracies affect refugees’ understandings of themselves, their social position and their ability to act in their own interest. Refugee Children is based upon the analysis of refugees in several (mostly European) countries of settlement, including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and especially the U.K., which according to the author is regarded by many stateless persons as the most desirable point of settlement. In addition, the book examines populations originating from and travelling through multiple world regions. Drawing from his own research as well as his reviews of journalistic and academic literature, Watters gives readers numerous first-hand accounts of the settings, interactions and assistance programs that refugee youth encounter. The author carefully attends to the origins of refugees, considering their history, religion and cultural background. Based on this, he questions both the assimilationist approach to refugee resettlement that would compel recent arrivals into the acceptance of host society practices in order to facilitate access to jobs and health care, as well as multicultural models that see refugees as inextricably immersed in the cultural and religious patterns of their country of origin, and as such, fundamentally unlike persons native to the host society. Championing neither, he regards both as paternalistic and potentially limiting to refugee children’s ability to make choices based upon their own outlooks, goals and understandings. In a like manner, Watters assesses models of resettlement in terms of their allocation of resources. He critiques both tight-fisted programs that fail to provide minimal levels of support as well as therapeutic regimes that assume all forced migrants to be deeply wounded and as such, in immediate need of culturally alien and sometimes unwanted rehabilitation. Despite its impressive scholarship, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is not simply an exercise in academic analysis. Rather, it offers valuable information with many practical examples drawn from successful programs devoted to refugee youth. If there is one downside to this book, it is that the volume is so rich in theories, examples, case studies, suggestions for practice and evaluations of the political and ethical implications of various approaches to working with young refugees, that readers may become overwhelmed. Its scholarly exuberance notwithstanding, Refugee Children: Towards the Next Horizon is a thought-provoking and sophisticated resource for scholars and practitioners interested in the experience of forced migrants in general and refugee youth in particular. The book does an impressive job of filling the conceptual, contextual and theoretical gaps that have, until recently, limited the breadth and quality of research on forced migrants.

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse

‘Arrested Justice’ framed within a black feminist perspective of activism and resistance is an excellent read. In search of social justice for low-income black (African American) women, the text is...

Arrested justice: black women, violence and America's prison nation

Behavioral change interventions based on social norms have proven to be a popular and cost-effective way in which both researchers and practitioners attempt to transform behavior in order to increase environmental and social sustainability in real-world contexts. In this paper, we present a systematic review of over 90 empirical studies that have applied behavioral change interventions based on social norms in field settings. Building on previous research about the sources of information that people use to understand social norms and other local determinants of behavior, we propose a framework organized along two axes that describe intervention context (situated interventions applied in the same context where the target behavior happens versus remote interventions that are applied away from that context) and type of normative information leveraged (interventions that provide summary information about a group versus interventions that expose participants to the opinions and behaviors of others). We also illustrate successful applications for each dimension, as well as the social, psychological and physical determinants of behavior that were leveraged to support change. Finally, based on our results, we discuss some of the elements and practical mechanisms that can be used by both researchers and practitioners to design more integral, effective and sustainable social norm intervention in the real world.

Using Social Norms to Change Behavior and Increase Sustainability in the Real World: a Systematic Review of the Literature

Addiction and Substance Abuse

Women are the fastest growing sector of the incarcerated population. Community reentry is challenging for both men and women. However, pathways out of crime and reintegration have been found to be ...

Justice-Involved Women: Narratives, Marginalization, Identity and Community Reintegration

A Brief High School Prevention Program to Decrease Alcohol Usage and Change Social Norms

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Justice-Involved Women and Redemptive Narratives: The Role of Personal Resources and Environmental Factors on the Desistance Process

This article presents Our Stories–Our Journey, a group-work intervention with justice-involved women. This narrative-based intervention helps members to develop insight into self-identity and to restructure narratives via mutual aid. Through a group-work intervention using empowerment and narrative theories with pecha-kucha (the word for chit-chat or chatter, in Japanese), incarcerated women work to create empowering stories that will support them in constructing new narratives. Considering the traumatic pathways to prison for women and the oppressive correctional environments, models of innovative programs that are strength based and empowering are needed that will guide the social work profession to work effectively with justice-involved populations.

Elizabeth Allen

Papers

Justice-Involved Women: Narratives, Marginalization, Identity and Community Reintegration

A Brief High School Prevention Program to Decrease Alcohol Usage and Change Social Norms

Justice-Involved Women and Redemptive Narratives: The Role of Personal Resources and Environmental Factors on the Desistance Process

Our Stories–Our Journey: An Empowerment Group Approach for Justice-Involved Women using Pecha-Kucha