Moral Turpitude Research Articles

Comparative Literature in Hong Kong

In reporting on the situation vis-a-vis in Hong Kong, I need to allude to Rene Wellek's 1983 essay, Name and Nature of Literature. I think it fair to say that the name of Comparative Literature is moribund if not well-nigh dead in Hong Kong, but the of remains as vital and as flourishing as ever. Let me first deal with the name. The Hong Kong Association died in the 1980s. Its last president, Professor P. K. Leung, then a professor in the program at Hong Kong University, now a Chair Professor of at Lingnan University, is an active and productive poet, teacher, and cultural studies scholar, who recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany. In Hong Kong, there was (and is) only one department, and that was (and is) at Hong Kong University--although comparatists were to be found in the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well. In the course of the past twenty-five years, the legacy that was left by such luminaries and stalwarts as Anthony Tatlow (HKU, 1965-1996), John Deeney (CUHK, 1977-1997), Yuan Heh-hsiang (CUHK, 1974-1998), Chou Ying-hsiung (HKU, 1979-1985; CUHK, 1985-1994; HKU, 1991-1994), and Yu Kwang-chung (CUHK, 1974-1985) has taken many forms and assumed many guises. They have not, however, materialized in a single department of distinction, although distinguished comparatists dot the landscape in Hong Kong. The decline of Hong Kong University's department stemmed from a combination of moral turpitude, administrative ineptness, and academic pusillanimity. Some individuals were asked to leave; some fled in disgust; some were reassigned. In the interest of discretion, I will detail only those who fled HKU; they include: P. K. Leung, a distinguished poet and scholar; Gregory Lee, a renowned scholar of Chinese modernism, and an expert on the Chinese translations of French poetry by Dai Wangshu; Anne Mette Hjort, formerly of McGill and Aalborg University in Denmark, who has contributed studies of Danish Cinema as well as a monograph on the Hong Kong director, Stanley Kwan. Given the diminution of at Hong Kong University over the years, it is perhaps ironic as well as symbolic that the most influential work produced by the Hong Kong University faculty in the last generation was Ackbar Abbas's Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997). When I first proposed in 1999 that the 17th Congress of the International Association be held in Hong Kong, it was assumed that the Hong Kong Association would play a central role. Alas, despite efforts to revive it in 1999, Lazarus would not rise from the dead, even though, as we shall see, is alive and well in Hong Kong. The 17th Congress of the ICLA in 2004 (originally scheduled for 2003, but postponed as a result of the global hysteria about sars) attracted over 350 participants from over fifty countries, and involved keynote speakers from Taiwan, Beijing, and Tokyo, as well as sixty-nine panels, forty-nine workshops, seven special workshops, and thirty-seven roundtables. Although the name Comparative Literature has fallen on hard times in Hong Kong, the nature of Literature--in its cross-cultural dimensions, in its preoccupation with both high and low culture, in its interest in studies across media, both verbal and visual--more than survives. Even if departments are not to be found in Hong Kong, courses are staples in English, Chinese, and translation departments. At Lingnan University, where I teach, courses are offered in the Chinese and English departments, as well as in the new visual studies program. It could be said that all the courses in the translation department are, indeed, courses (indeed, many of the instructors have been trained in Literature), if one believes, as I do, that, contrary to the outlandish claims of a Susan Bassnett-McGuire, translation studies is a subset of Literature--and not the other way around. …

Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the VictorianFin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson

Reviewed by: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue Ross G. Forman (bio) Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson; pp. x + 180. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, $89.95, £55.00. In his “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously urged Parliament to create a class of English-speaking Indians to “act as interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” (par. 34). Naturally, Macaulay did not consider that learning the English language would give this new set of speakers any sense of ownership over it. They were to translate from English into the vernacular but in no way to reshape the “mother tongue” of the mother country. As the nineteenth century progressed and English increasingly became the language of the elite in India and elsewhere within the Empire, this view came to vie with other conceptions of English’s global role. Many such conceptions were grounded in the Darwinian frame that Christine Ferguson takes as the jumping-off point for her lucid and compelling investigation of the relationship between language theory and [End Page 489] Victorian literature, and many were grounded in an Orientalist study of “Eastern” texts that no longer endorsed Macaulay’s view that a single shelf of a “good European library” was worth “the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (par. 10). Ferguson’s work fits into a long line of scholarship that stretches from Marxist criticism’s exploration of what Gareth Stedman-Jones has termed “languages of class” to Gauri Viswanathan’s demonstration, in Masks of Conquest (1989), that the institutionalization of English Studies was a crucial ideological tool of imperialism. Ferguson is also clearly familiar with the arguments made by many postcolonial writers and theorists that the language gifted by imperialism can be (and has been) reappropriated and rearticulated and served to contest the very hegemonies it was intended to bolster. The Brutal Tongue shares with these works an investment in the Foucauldian notion that language and power are inextricably intertwined and in deconstructive techniques that see texts as potentially self-deconstructing and promote a destabilizing of language’s normalizing potential. Ferguson’s reading of Dracula (1897), for instance—a revised version of her superb article in ELH—envisages Bram Stoker’s novel as a celebration of “an English without a centre” that “rejects both late-century language purism . . . and the reactionary concern with social homogeneity that critics often find in horror fiction” (10). She therefore sees the linguistic sterility of the vampire—his inability to modify language or to mimic the multifarious englishes which appear in Stoker’s narrative—as the key to his destruction. The Brutal Tongue also strikes out into new territory by participating in a recent twist in postcolonial studies: the focus on language theory. Like Rachel Gilmour’s Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (2006), Ferguson’s work foregrounds Victorian linguistic discourses as a means to understand the colonial encounter and its narrativization. Moreover, Ferguson’s turn to Victorian popular culture—and her call to revise the image of popular literature as homogenizing and regressive—provides a salutary check on previous scholarship that has seen the representation of dialect and other forms of non-standard English mainly in relation to canonical literature and often in terms of such texts’ marginalization of the voices of the working classes, women, and denizens of the “Celtic fringe.” Ferguson also resurrects nineteenth-century linguistic thinkers such as Max Müller. Although their theories of the origin of language and its defining role in separating the brute from the human may be discredited or overlooked today, she demonstrates how influential their ideas were to the Victorians and how they filtered into the popular consciousness through the types of literature that she studies. In her first chapter, “What Does Brutal Language Mean?”, Ferguson focuses on Victorian science’s engagement with the principle that language distinguishes men from beasts. She notes that verbal dearth, not profusion, marked “moral turpitude” (17) and that decline, “in savage societies at least, is evidenced through a silencing of words, through an absence where...

Corporate Stakeholder Management

In recent times there have been scores of corporate failures all over the world due to moral turpitude, lack of good governance, and erosion of values. The need for a change in corporates’ approach towards stakeholder management is greater now than ever before. Though the term ‘stakeholder’ was first used in the West in the 1930s, this concept has been highlighted in the ancient Indian scriptures written centuries ago. These highlight the methodologies the kings used to ensure the welfare of all their stakeholders. The kings of yore, who considered themselves as trustees of their kingdom, can be compared to the top management in corporates of this era. Thus, the concepts highlighted in these ancient scriptures find as much relevance and applicability even in today's times. This article takes a brief look at few of the studies undertaken in this area and also highlights excerpts from the ancient Indian scriptures to prove that the concept of stakeholder management owes its origin to India.

Reading John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath through Man Ray's eye

John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath continues to be a kind of litmus test for competing groups of scholars and poets – you either agree with Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Bonnie Costello et al. tha...

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton We are delighted to open the second issue of volume 18, as we did the first, by featuring one of the highlights of the 2005 Berkshire Conference: Tani Barlow's contribution to the plenary session "Beyond a Boundary: Women, Borderlands, and Frontiers across the Globe." Like her co-panelist Afsaneh Najmabadi (whose presentation we featured in our last issue), Barlow raises critical questions of method and theory that have emerged from the specificities of her own work in gender history, but have profound implications for all of us. In a provocative intervention on "History and the Border," Barlow challenges us to think about what it means to go "beyond boundaries"—to transcend, to cross, even to erase. These very acts of moving beyond, she argues, stand as affirmation of a boundary's ghostly presence. Working through a range of troubled and troubling evidence—from commercial advertisements for fertilizer to "real women" like Yoshiko "Shirley" Yamaguchi—Barlow demonstrates how we can displace borders with what she calls historical catachreses. Through close readings of anachronistic, occult bits of evidence, she suggests, whose intelligibility is anchored to specific historical junctures, we are able to move beyond the linear pull of historicity and catch glimpses of an ambiguous, unstable past—a "present" that is not about transition to something, but represents a moment in time all its own. Appropriately enough, the first two articles in this issue are also about "Challenging Boundaries," though in different ways and with very different kinds of evidence than those at the core of Barlow's project. Charlene Boyer Lewis, in "Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: 'Ill Suited for the Life of a Columbians Modest Wife,'" examines the fascinating life story of the woman who married Napoleon's brother, Jerome, in 1804 and who, through her "scandalous" behavior and taste for provocative French fashion, became the focus of major debates over gender and national culture in the new American republic. In contrast to much of the historical literature, which focuses on the ideal of republican motherhood, Lewis demonstrates how Bonaparte's challenge to prescribed gender roles and expectations, including motherhood, provided alternative models for women and fed into important cultural debates during the republican experiment. Gendered boundaries and debates also feature prominently in Caroline Waldron Merithew's contribution to this issue, though her article transports us across both temporal and class lines in the United States in its exploration of working-class housewives in the coal fields and their struggles to expose the gender and class hypocrisy of all-male unionism in the 1930s. Focusing on the Women's Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners, "'We Were Not Ladies'" [End Page 6] explores how battles between the Progressive Miners and the United Mine Workers opened up a space for women to wage their own struggles against a homosocial unionism that ignored the gendered dimensions of class. In their calls for "Bread and Freedom," women refashioned the rhetoric of motherhood and claimed their spaces in union-led struggles for better working conditions. The second set of articles takes up the question of the state and mechanisms for "Policing Women's Bodies" in two very different national contexts. In "Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy," Deirdre Moloney focuses on how the United States sought to police women immigrants who broke gendered rules of heterosexual propriety: those who bore children outside of marriage, and those who were accused of prostitution or of having sex outside of marriage. While moral turpitude was seldom the explicit reason for deportation, it was often implicit in accusations that a woman was "likely to become a public charge"—accusations that were grounded in the belief that women were morally vulnerable and economically dependent on men. The end result, as Moloney demonstrates, were highly racialized immigration policies that limited migration opportunities for women, especially those deemed to be "non-white." In "Problematic Modernity," Dora Barrancos shifts our focus to the Argentinian state with a careful examination of how and why neoliberal forces, despite their modernizing, secular rhetoric, were able to forestall women's access to divorce and contraception. Looking at two periods of liberal hegemony in Argentina (at...

Sex, lies, and law: Moral turpitude as an enforcer of gender and sexuality norms

Misdemeanor crimes said to involve moral turpitude sometimes involve theft or misrepresentation, but another significant category involves sexual behavior. Severe collateral consequences, including witness impeachability, employment disqualification, denial of naturalization, and even disenfranchisement, are often attached not only to felony criminal convictions but also to misdemeanor turpitude offenses. We argue in this article that categorizing misdemeanor sexual conduct as turpitude is problematic because no rational relationship between most sexual conduct and general honesty exists. Linking sexual conduct and dishonesty in legal discourse, while backed by common-law tradition, serves primarily to reinforce norms of gender and sexuality, further marginalizing people without serving the purposes of turpitude law. We demonstrate and applaud a modern trend toward limiting turpitude consequences to exclude sexual conduct.

Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy

This article examines how U.S. federal immigration policy in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century regulated female immigrants who bore children outside of marriage, had sexual relations outside of marriage, or were suspected of prostitution. The author examines the ways in which immigration officials racialized the application of the moral turpitude clause in immigration law, and how this racialization reflected deeper social concerns about women's shifting economic and political roles and the definitions and expectations of marriage. Although few women were actually deported on moral turpitude grounds, patrolling women's sexuality and economic status at the borders reduced migration opportunities for women in general, subjected them to intense scrutiny by the state, constricted the contours of their personal relationships, and in some cases permanently separated them from their infant children.

Brief by Amici Curiae The Immigrant Legal Resource Center; The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project; The Immigration Law Clinic, Rogers College of Law; Washington Legal Defender Association; and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers' Guild in Support of Petitioner, Fernandez-Ruiz v. Gonzales, 466 F.3d 1121 (9th Cir. 2006) (28 Feb. 2006)

This amicus curiae brief argues that under the logic of Leocal v. Ashcroft, 543 U.S. 1 (2004), and recent circuit court cases, it is clear that Congress intended the term crime of violence in 18 U.S.C. Section 16(a) to encompass a narrow array of offenses; the Petitioners' misdemeanor simple assault convictions - which lack an element of force against persons or property - are not among them. Crimes committed with a mens rea of recklessness lack such an element because the use of force requires intent. Also, the elements of injury and force are distinct because one can cause injury without employing force. Nor does the fact that the victim is a person protected by a jurisdiction's family laws place Petitioner's offenses within the definition of the term crime of moral turpitude; the latter term encompasses only crimes with an aspect of baseness or depravity that is lacking in the case of simple assault. Finally, amici urge the Ninth Circuit to establish that a federal court will only give effect to a criminal sentence to the extent that the sentence does not exceed the statutory maximum under the law of the sentencing jurisdiction.

Handling Investigations of the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners

The Texas State Board of Medical Examiners (TSBME) has the authority to investigate its licensees, including physicians, to determine whether the Medical Practice Act (“the Act”) has been violated (1). Violations of the Act include practice inconsistent with public health and welfare (generally a failure to act in accordance with the standard of care), unprofessional and dishonorable conduct, disciplinary actions against a licensee by another state board or peer group, repeated and recurring meritorious health care liability claims against a licensee (3 or more claims in any 5-year period), and crimes by a licensee that involve moral turpitude (2). If a violation is determined to exist, the board can impose penalties that include reprimands, administrative fines, and license restriction, suspension, and revocation (3).

Moral turpitude: a benchmark toward eligibility for registered nurse licensure?

The purpose of this descriptive study was to explore the concept of moral turpitude and related terms as they are used in the process of licensing professional nurses. The researchers reviewed applications for licensure and nurse practice acts or rules and regulations for nursing for the 50 states and Washington, DC. Terms such as moral turpitude, moral character, and morality are used by approximately half of the states and, when used, are not usually defined. Agreement among states on uniform definitions and standards of nursing practice can be a step toward aligning practice acts, bringing consistency to disciplinary actions, and informing the public about the profession's standards for practice.

Overcoming Violence in Practice

In Christian thought, the classic theological response to evil and suffering, known as operates on a metaphysical level. It aims to elucidate questions about God: God's power to prevent evil, God's goodness and justice, and God's purposes in allowing evil. It also examines questions about humanity: Are humans chronically prone to sin and violence? Does suffering serve good purposes? Does God redeem suffering? In recent Christian attempts at theodicy, attention has focused on divine omnipotence and human freedom in attempts to exculpate God for cruelty in allowing the magnitude of suffering visible in such events as the Holocaust, where six million Jews and five million Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and other noncombatants were killed under Nazi orders. Symmetrical with exploration of the front end explanatory questions of why bad things happen in a supposedly good world, theodicies also explore the back end justificatory questions of how God can heal the damage, unevenly and unfairly distributed, in this life or the afterlife. Key exemplars of modern theodicy are Leibniz and Hegel, thinkers who have greatly influenced twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy of religion, respectively. Despite the urgency of responding to evil, theodicy has been criticized for its abstract, global approach to suffering and its programmatic focus on justifying God in the face of violence. My own critique of theodicy has epistemic and moral components. Theodicy rests on epistemological hubris, building precarious intellectual systems in pursuing knowledge of God. Additionally, theodicy is guilty of moral turpitude on account of its single-minded focus on explanation, which smooths over the scandal of suffering and overlooks the prevention and alleviation of violence.2 Fortunately, there are more promising alternatives than theodicy in Christian thought. Particularly in the twentieth century, existentialist and Marxian philosophical movements have contributed to practical rather than theoretical emphases in response to theodicy questions. Reflection on the situatedness of the subject has prompted this shift as theology becomes more self-conscious of its cultural assumptions. Especially since the 1960s, contextual varieties of theology have emerged that recognize its socially embedded character. Theology is never purely dislocated conceptual reflection, innocent of ethical consequences, but a discourse with practical origins and effects. To use Marxian vocabulary, all theology is an ideology expressing the conscious and unconscious interests of a social group or class. This insight

"Who Is a Homosexual?": The Consolidation of Sexual Identities in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Immigration Law

This essay uses court records to trace the federal government's attempts to regulate homosexuality among immigrants in the mid-twentieth century, asserting that such attempts illustrate the state's struggle to make homosexuality visible, to produce a homosexuality that could be both detected and managed. I focus on the process by which two competing paradigms for understanding homosexuality (status and conduct) were consolidated into a single model in which homosexual identity could be deduced from homosexual acts. Federal officials and the courts initially treated homosexuality as a form of conduct, most commonly deporting homosexual aliens for having committed crimes of moral turpitude. Later, these same government entities relied on status provisions, deporting immigrants charged with homosexuality as aliens “afflicted with psychopathic personality.” While the “psychopathic personality” terminology supported the notion that the homosexual was a kind of person rather than a set of behaviors, it also depended upon psychiatrists to support the claim that homosexuals were by definition psychopathic. When many psychiatrists distanced themselves from that idea, the government refused psychiatric opinion that differentiated psychopaths from homosexuals by arguing that these terms connoted legal-political rather than medicalized identity categories. While this conception arose out of a conservative impulse by immigration officials and the courts to fix homosexuality as identity so that it could be regulated (by bureaucrats rather than psychiatrists), I argue that the emphasis on legal-political identity categories licensed a conception of the homosexual as a kind of citizen that had some emancipatory as well as repressive effects.

Should we presume moral turpitude in our children?--small children and consent to medical research.

When children are too young to make their own autonomous decisions, decisions have to be made for them. In certain contexts we allow parents and others to make these decisions, and do not interfere unless the decision clearly violates the best interest of the child. In other contexts we put a priori limits on what kind of decisions parents can make, and/or what kinds of considerations they have to take into account. Consent to medical research currently falls into the second group mentioned here. We want to consider and ultimately reject one of the arguments put forward for putting medical research into the second category. We will argue that some objections to children's participation in research are either based on an implausibly restrictive conception of what is in fact in the child's best interests or that there is an implicit and false premise hidden in this argument; i.e., the premise that our children have so deeply fallen into moral turpitude that we must assume that they would not want to fulfill their moral obligations, or, that they will grow up to be morally deficient and will then wish not to have acted well while a child.

Abortion Policy and the Market

The only true scarce resource is the human mind. Yet abortion is perhaps the most potent enemy of the human mind, since it destroys the one thing in life that cannot be replaced. Ecmomic analysis suggests that abortion policy will fail to serve the public iruerest due to public choice and knowledge problems, and it will adversely distort beneficial market phenomena like adoption services. Even if markets fail to produce zero unwanted pregnancies, it is not clear that abortion policy has avoided more tragic government failures. Theologians argue that killing innocent human beings is moral turpitude, since an irreplaceable soul is lost. But abortion is also a huge social loss in an economic sense. Society loses from legalized abortion by losing a mind and from the social costs that devolve from destroying that mind. Hence, classical liberals should embrace the recent pro-life momentum.

Disease, Deformity, and Defiance: Writing the Language of Immigration Law and the Eugenics Movement on the Immigrant Body

[T]he following classes shall be excluded from admission to the United States ... All idiots, insane persons, epileptics, and persons who have been insane within five years previously; paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with a loathsome or with a dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude. --32 Stat. 1214, sec. 2 of 1903 US Statutes at Large Immigration should first of all be considered a long-time investment in family stocks. --American Eugenics Society (quoted in Kevles 95) The process of migration, acculturation, and naturalization for immigrants to the United States is, under the best of circumstances, traumatic. Their bodies, as repositories of their cultures, serve as microcosms of the homelands they have left behind. As they change and Americanize, they are in a sense destroying these homelands. Although immigrant aid societies, immigrant churches, and ethnic communities have traditionally done their part in smoothing immigrants' transition to the US, their efforts have often been undermined by the attitudes of the country's dominant group and by the tenor of its immigration laws. The restrictive language of US immigration law has from its first appearance been surprisingly vivid, often bearing close structural and rhetorical resemblance to the nativist utterances of contemporaneous American writers and thinkers. Both sources bristle with emotionally loaded catalogues of negative attributes describing the immigrant body. It seems likely, therefore, that the language and the sentiment of the immigration statutes were fed by nativist rhetoric, and that these statutes, in turn, helped legitimate and perpetuate such prejudices. Immigrant authors, in response, have written in both their fiction and their memoirs about how this language has affected the ways that they have imagined themselves as embodied individuals. The interplay between laws and nativism, and the literary responses triggered by both, is complex and wide-ranging, manifest in many immigrant groups over more than a hundred years of US history. I will limit my inquiry here to the immigration statutes enacted between 1891 and 1924 and to the role that the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States played in the production of those laws. The stories written by Anzia Yezierska and Mary Gordon that take place during this same period will provide examples of literary responses. Although Yezierska is an immigrant and Gordon a third-generation American writing about her grandmother's generation, both appear preoccupied with the effects of nativist sentiment on the immigrant body. In this article I argue that the regulation and repression of immigrants' behavior in their new land and their discomfort with their embodied selves is an important strain in their literature, one that is closely linked to the official language of the law and the unofficial language of the dominant group. Anxiety over American immigration during the second half of the nineteenth century was triggered less by the oddness of those who were entering the country than by their number. The Jews and the Irish--the two groups whose literature I am using as examples--were in evidence in the country from its earliest days, but as long as their numbers were few, they did not seem menacing. Indeed, between 1769 and 1875 the country had an open-door immigration policy. There were no restriction clauses in US immigration laws until 1875 because of the country's desperate need for settlers and workers. As the Jews and the Irish, as well as many other immigrant groups, became more noticeable, however, the country's dominant group, Protestants whose ancestors came from northern Europe, began to seek reasons for exclusion. They found fertile ground in the pseudo-science of eugenics. Both the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning well born, and the movement itself began in England in 1883 with Francis Galton, a statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. …

Lessons Learned About Resilience

Children, Youth and Environments Vol 13, No.1 (Spring 2003) ISSN 1546-2250 Lessons Learned About Resilience James Garbarino Citation: Garbarino, James. “Lessons Learned about Resilience.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(1), Spring 2003. Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye What have I learned from almost three decades’ experience as a researcher, educator, author, program consultant, and legal expert witness dealing with issues of violence in the lives of children? I have written several books to report on those experiences,1 but I can outline some of what I have learned briefly by speaking about resilience. Human beings are adaptive and resourceful, but resilience is not unlimited, automatic, or universal. Under conditions of numerous serious threats experienced in hostile environments, no child may escape unscathed, no matter how well-equipped the child may be temperamentally. Every child has limits. Much is made in the scientific literature and the popular press of resilience. Although it is defined in numerous ways, resilience generally refers to an individual's ability to bounce back from adverse experiences, to avoid long-term negative effects, or otherwise to overcome developmental threats. Every one of us knows someone whose life is a testament to resilience. The concept of resilience rests on a key research finding: while experiencing any specific negative influence increases the odds of a particular negative outcome, most children escape severe harm. However, as the concept of resilience has been promoted in everwider circles there has been a parallel concern that the concept may easily be misused or misunderstood. Three such limitations are of particular importance in our conceptual toolbox as we look at the lives of children living with violence. First, we must remember that resilience is not absolute. Virtually every youth has a breaking point. Research conducted by psychiatrist Bruce Perry on the impact of trauma and deprivation on brain development leads him to assert that kids are "malleable" rather than "resilient," in the sense that 300 each threat costs them something. What is more, as psychologist Patrick Tolan points out, in some environments virtually all youth demonstrate negative effects of highly stressful and threatening environments. For example, he investigated African-American, adolescent males facing the combination of highly dangerous and threatening low income neighborhoods coupled with low resource/high stress families in Chicago. His data demonstrated that none of the youths were resilient at age 15 when measured by continuing for a two year period without being more than one grade level behind in school nor requiring professional mental health services to deal with psychological problems. Second, we must remember that resilience in gross terms may obscure real costs to the quality of an individual’s inner life. Some people manage to avoid succumbing to the risk of social failure as defined by poverty and criminality but nonetheless experience real harm in the form of diminished capacity for successful intimate relationships. Thus, even apparent social success- performing well in the job market, avoiding criminal activity, and creating a family may obscure some of the costs of being resilient. Though resilient in social terms, these individuals may be severely wounded souls. This has long been evident in comparing the resilience of boys versus girls. Boys who succumb to the accumulation of risk have long been prone to act out in explicitly anti-social behavior (juvenile delinquency) while girls have been more likely to respond with selfdestructive behavior and internalized symptoms such as stomach aches, nightmares, and wretchedly low self-esteem. Does this mean girls are more resilient than boys? A simple accounting of social success variables might lead us to think so. However, if we take into account the full range of harm we can see that such an answer would be wrong. Kids adapt: for better and for worse. Third, we must not forget that resilience does not mean “moral superiority.” The youth who demonstrates resilience has extraordinary attributes and resources that the non-resilient child does not have. Being unable to protect oneself against the accumulation of risk factors does not constitute moral turpitude. Some environments are too much for anyone, and to use the 301 concept of resilience as a basis for moral judgment in these settings may...

A Place To Call Your Own: does housing need make a difference to crime?

In public discussions, offending has long been associated with conditions of poverty. While novelists could readily portray characters whose origins in the slum somehow made sense of their moral turpitude, criminology has been preoccupied with analyzing how social conditions make a difference to patterns of offending. But the impact of housing need in particular has been less clearly understood. In his classic review, William Bonger (1916) referred to several disadvantageous consequences of overcrowding, such as early sexual experience, resort to alcohol, and indiscriminate association with others through interaction on the street. From a present day perspective it appears that the ways in which housing needs affect patterns of offending depends on several conditions and circumstances. We can all think of several ways of defining ‘housing need’, for example

Female Sexuality, Citizenship, and Law

The relationship between sexuality and law encompasses the regulation of sexual activities, expressions, behaviors, and choice of sexual partners. Although the most visible forms of sexual regulation occur in the policing of homosexual activities, heterosexual activities are not exempt, especially the activities of heterosexual females. This article examines how immigration and citizenship law provided the legal basis for the attempted deportation of an American-born female citizen under the “moral turpitude” clause of immigration law. It is a historical snapshot of a moment in which immigration restrictions, sexual politics, and law intersected to create a unique situation that compromised the civic rights of an American-born woman.

The Representation of Women in Medieval China: Recent Archaeological Evidence

Vang Studies 17 (1999) The Representation of Women in Medieval China: Recent Archaeological Evidence PATRICIA E. KARETZKY BARD COLLEGE In the West, recent reports have examined the role of women artists of the past to evaluate the art they created and to assess their role in society and in the artistic establishment. In related studies, analytical efforts have focused on the image of women in the arts and how it reveals attitudes towards women and their social functions . In tandem with such studies in the field of Western art history are similar investigations of women in Chinese art.1 However, these efforts are largely directed to the Song dynasty and later times, since earlier periods are characterized by a dearth of evidence. Yet it is widely averred that during the Tang period women played a significant role in society. The recent spate of archaeological evidence unearthed in China allows for a more detailed analysis of the image of women in the Tang era, and this study utilizes these finds to demonstrate the extraordinary degree to which women were represented in the arts. By looking at this new, dated visual evidence, the role of women in the social arena is further defined. Moreover, this paper 1 For art-historical studies there is Flowering in the Shadows, ed. Marsha Weidner (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1990), which has a series of essays on women in the arts in China, beginning with the Song era, and in Japan. It is interesting to note that there is a considerably smaller section on Chinese women than on Japanese . Another collection of essays on women artists is Viewsfrom the Jade Terrace: Women Artist 1300-1912, ed. Marsha Weidner et al. (Bloomington: Indiana Museum of Art, 1988). For historical studies, see Patricia Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and Life of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1993); and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997). 213 Karetzky: Women in Medieval Art seeks to present the role of women in the Tang within the historical context of earlier periods. IMAGES OF W O M E N I N THE PRE-TANG ERA It is not that ancient Chinese history does not record women's activities. Accounts of women are presentthroughout China's literature . However, women stand in the shadow of patriarchal values that make them secondary. History, within the moral strictures of Confucianism, functions didactically, that is, it morally informs. So stories of paragons of virtue and villains of moral turpitude fill the texts. Biographies such as Liu Xiang's Lienuzhuan describe women who aided their husbands or rulers or morally corrupted them. Naturally such accounts are few in contrast with the number of biographies of men.2 Paragons of virtue include Ban Zhao (first century BCE), who brought her brother's historical opus to completion after his death, was a model wife and later widow, and authored a text on moral instruction for women.3 In politics, few women rose to power, and most who did were berated for their usurpation of the throne. For example, Empress Lu of the early Han is described in the Shiji biography written by Sima Qian as harsh and inhumane in her treatment of those who opposed her.4 So too the evil courtesan Meixi of the Xia dynasty and Daji of the Shang were blamed for the fall of the dynasties under which they lived; and there are other moral examples , like Fu Hao of the Shang, whose tomb has been found.5 2 See, for example, the Han history, translated by Burton Watson, Records of the Grand Historian of China, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961). 3 Julia K. Murray, "Didactic Art for Women, The Classic of Filial Piety," in Flowering in the Shadows, 29. 4 Watson, Records, 3321ff. 5 See K. Foster, One Hundred Celebrated Chinese Women (Singapore: Asiapac Books, 1994). For Fu Hao's tomb, see Zheng Zhenxiang, "The Royal Consort Fu Hao and 214 Tang Studies 17 (1999) Art was also informed by the Confucian doctrine that dominated most Chinese cultural values. Beginning in the Han Dynasty...

The reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom

In this paper, we examine the reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 1988 Education Reform Act. 1 We test the hypothesis that softening tenure encourages incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on academic life [ Carmichael (1988)]. We also assess the economic significance of the English and American case law on tenure, because an understanding of the legal aspects of tenure is required to identify the possible effects of tenure reform. The years after passage of the Act provide an interesting natural experiment, as the broad effect of the legislation was to soften, though not to remove, tenure in British universities. 2 We can find support for the Carmichael hypothesis prereform but do not believe that the Act caused incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on senior posts after the reform. Tenure implies that the holder of a post cannot be removed from it except for good cause, usually based on gross moral turpitude or gross incompetence. Such removal is historically characterized by a costly procedure governed by organizational statutes, as shown in Hines v. Birkbeck College. 3 In the United Kingdom, academic tenure has been associated with open-ended contracts of employment and often had a particularly hard form before 1988. In the United States, where it has often been possible to dismiss academics for financial reasons by abolishing whole departments, tenure has taken a softer form (although often harder to obtain) and can still be held to exist even when an employment contract is of a fixed term as long as it is renewable. 4 The details of universities’ tenure statutes have always varied between institutions, in both the United Kingdom and United States, which is often overlooked. “Before 1988, could your university make academics redundant by giving notice and paying statutory redundancy pay, or was it extremely hard to sack academics—having to buy them out or use arguments based on gross moral turpitude or incompetence?”