Question Of Vulnerability Research Articles

Self-determined Sex Work as Care Work Between Experiences of Integrity and Vulnerability

Sex work or prostitution marks a controversial topic for Protestant sexual ethics. It is also a multifaceted phenomenon because it can occur in very different forms: the spectrum ranges from poverty, emergency and procurement prostitution to the self-determined and insured sex worker with all imaginable shades in between. In the current economic system, goods and services are exchanged, traded, sold, acquired and paid for, so sex work can also be understood as work. For the purposes of this article, we will therefore start from an understanding of sex work as care work. Care work can be understood as the satisfaction of needs and interests of third parties and the self. If sex work is discussed as care work, this has a variety of consequences. These include the fact that questions of vulnerability and integrity come to the fore. Integrity can be comprehended as self-realisation or autonomy and thus as potentially vulnerable, taking up Axel Honneth’s early reflections on the issue of recognition. Integrity in Axel Honneth’s sense can - according to a first approximation - play a role for sex work on three levels: physical or corporeal level, structural level and lifestyle or way of life level. Finally, the essay discusses the concept of negotiated or consensual morality as a contribution of Protestant ethics.

Disclosure to unknowing victims in criminal justice investigations: Questions of vulnerability, ethics and practice

This article explores the situation in which a victim who has been identified during a criminal justice investigation is unaware of the crime committed against them. We argue that unknowing victims possess a unique vulnerability because discovering their victim status is highly likely to have harmful effects. Where law enforcement officers (LEOs) remain unaware of the victim's knowledge of the crime, this should be perceived as a clue to potential vulnerability. Any subsequent disclosure of the crime to an unknowing victim is an external intervention that exposes them to the risk of harm, thereby raising significant ethical questions. Yet the ethical ramifications of disclosure are not considered in the policing literature and there is no specific professional guidance in England and Wales (and beyond) on this situation. Focusing on two of the primary crime contexts in which a victim can be unknowing (sexual offences and fraud), we scrutinise the ethical issues surrounding LEOs disclosing to an unknowing victim, aligning our analysis with the College of Policing's Code of Ethics and vulnerability-related risks guidelines, and a therapeutic jurisprudence approach to policing.

Digital behavioral technology, vulnerability and justice: towards an integrated approach

ABSTRACT The paper introduces the notion of ‘digital behavioral technologies’ and discusses them from the perspectives of vulnerability and justice, thereby integrating perspectives from bioethics or public health ethics and political philosophy. Digital behavioral technologies have seen a massive uptake in recent years, but the market for them is hardly regulated. We argue that understanding the impact of digital behavioral technologies requires understanding individuals not as abstract, atomized agents, but rather to take their embeddedness into social structures into account. This also allows extending the focus to groups, relationships and whole societies, which are often structurally unjust. This perspective provides a corrective to an overly individualistic consideration of digital behavioral technologies, which may suggest itself because of their focus on individual bodies. We point out some implications of this integrated approach with regard to the regulation of digital behavioral technologies. We conclude by describing some implications both for those who work on digital behavioral technologies and for those who work on questions of vulnerability and justice.

Ethical reflections on filming death in end-of-life documentaries

ABSTRACT The end-of-life documentaries that focus on natural death struggle with the question as to whether cinematic technology is able to express death as an event and whether it should even aspire to do so. In the process of filming dying people, questions of vulnerability, privacy, and empowerment become important, and each filmmaker makes ethical choices about how to approach the topic. By interviewing 14 documentary directors, using one audio commentary, and analysing 14 of their documentary films, I recognised two main approaches to filming death. Most documentaries exclude the moment of death, which becomes a private event outside the public eye. These films narrate the experiences of living people and use metaphorical means to communicate the moment of death. They respect the physical vulnerability of the dying people, and protect the viewer from potentially shocking images. Occasionally, some documentaries include deathbed scenes that confront physical aspects of dying. These films create an affective and embodied connection to death and dying in ways that invite the viewer to co-experience the process. In this article, I discuss the ethical approaches related to these two approaches through questions of consent, the films’ content, and viewer’s responsibility.

Queers with Guns? Against the LGBT Grain

Sociological literature on gun ownership in the United States has primarily centered on white, heterosexual, cisgender men and vulnerability to violence. However, many gun owners do not fit this profile. In this article, I begin to fill this gap by focusing on one group—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people—and answer the question: How does the status of being a vulnerable gender and/or sexual minority shape LGBTQ gun owners’ perspectives on gun ownership? To do so, I focus on gun literature, LGBTQ lives, and questions of vulnerability, and draw on in-depth interviews with 30 LGBTQ gun owners from across the United States. In this study, LGBTQ gun owners highlight two major themes. First, they discuss how their gender expression/sexuality creates possibilities for violence. Second, they relate minority oppression with the violent uprisings that created the LGBT movement. As such, these LGBTQ gun owners go against the LGBT movement’s discourse of pro-gun control and structural change.

“Into the mutation”: Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea than Tar” (2019) as Climate Fiction

In this paper, Nigerian author Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s 2019 short story “More Sea than Tar” is used as a template for “Climate Fiction.” This ecodystopian short story is read within the broader category of speculative fiction and is part of an emerging stream of dystopian fiction from Nigeria and Africa more generally. I first analyse the poetics and politics of the “African Anthropocene” through a close reading of the text and through references to other writers and philosophers’ works. Then, the question of vulnerability is raised, as Ize-Iyamu puts forward an environment that has become unfamiliar and hostile, in order for the readers to “experience fear in their guts.” Finally, I study how Ize-Iyamu weaves both resilience and hope into his narrative in order to counterbalance the sinister atmosphere. Despite the “ecodystopian” environment, there are dreams of a better world, and strategies of survivalism that are put in place. “More Sea than Tar” can also be read as a cautionary tale, a pedagogical nudge to the readers in order for them to lead more ecofriendly lives.

On the question of vulnerability

Within the Government’s COVID-19 strategy three groups of “vulnerable people” are defined (HM Government, 2020, p 51): The “Clinically Extremely Vulnerable” (at greatest risk of severe disease because of other health conditions around whom a “protective shield” should be wrapped);The “Clinically Vulnerable” (at higher risk of severe disease because of their age or health condition);and “Vulnerable People (Non-clinical)” who may require support for other reasons The traditional image of people with serious mental health challenges as unpredictable and inadequate and frequently dangerous has often placed them in the “low competence/low warmth” quadrant, evoking fear, anger and disgust – “contemptuous prejudice” (Table 1) [ ]the entitlement to support was embedded in the Department of Health (2000) definition of a “vulnerable adult” as someone: […] who is or may be in need of community care services by reason of mental or other disability, age, or illness;and who is or may be unable to take care of him or herself or unable to protect him or herself against significant harm or exploitation Vulnerability is a universal condition but there are some people and groups of people who are rendered vulnerable by lack of resources, social support and services and by discriminatory social organisation and structures (Herring, 2016): We cannot accept charitable solutions to structural problems

Bezbednost informacionih sistema

In modern business conditions, organizations have achieved their missions, visions and goals of using information systems. They enable them to share data, information and knowledge with a changing environment, to carry out daily activities smoothly, and to create the basis for strategic decisions. As new modalities for compromising information systems security emerge due to the changing unsafe environment and threats that lurk from cyberspace, it is necessary to pay attention to them and to respond appropriately, since it is no longer only a question of vulnerability of information and communication infrastructure and information, but also of human life. In the security of information systems itself, in addition to the technical security measures implemented following the defined security policy, it’s necessary to pay attention to the human factor and security awareness, as the weakest link, and to act to minimize threats.

Emmanuel Levinas and the “specter of masochism”: A Cross-Disciplinary Confusion of Tongues

This article addresses persistent concerns within clinical contexts that Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics harbors a “masochistic”—or otherwise unwholesome—conception of subjectivity. Mobilizing Emmanuel Ghent’s distinction between masochism and surrender, and extending it into ethical terrain, I argue that Levinas instead offers us an ethics of surrender. What underpins this vital distinction, I propose, is a different orientation to the question of vulnerability vis-à-vis relational trauma. I argue that post-traumatic psychopathological formations (such as masochism or narcissism) defend against relational vulnerability—a defense that manifests as a form of “ethical impairment.” Levinas’s ethical for-the-other existence, by contrast, is predicated upon a defense of relational vulnerability—as the condition of possibility for ethical subjectivity. This crucial point of difference not only explains why Levinasian ethics is not moral masochism but also invests Ghentian surrender with a decidedly ethical dimension.

On the record: Talking about Day Zero and beyond: the impact of the water crisis on questions of vulnerability, risk and security

Few Capetonians would argue against the claim that the City has been rocked by the current water crisis that many have dubbed the most severe in modern history. Discussions about water saving techniques, membership of the ‘Water Warriors’ club, dinner party comparisons of family daily usage figures, discussion of toilet habits (to flush or not to flush?) and frenzied buying to secure 25-litre water containers have become part of daily life for those of us faced by the imminent (but previously unconscionable) threat of our taps running dry. Even the ‘proudly oily’1 premier of the Western Cape has boasted that she only showers every three days to help beat back Day Zero. But the water crisis has not only raised important questions about residents’ rights to, and responsibility for, the water they use. It has also brought to the surface interesting issues about criminality and crime control, and our individual and collective relationship to water. Stories of violence and incivility at water collection points and in supermarkets have captured attention on social media, and city dwellers have hotly debated the threat of organised crime, laws against rebottling and reselling of municipal water, and the Western Cape government’s Water Disaster Plan, which gives the police and army responsibility for maintaining safety and order at water collection points. Of course, while questions of water saving, risk and safety feel quite new to many Capetonians, scholars, activists and policymakers (including criminologists) have been writing about these issues for much longer. The Centre for Law and Society approached two scholars/activists to discuss the water crisis and its impact on questions of vulnerability, risk and security. Nick Simpson, an environmental and human development consultant (and post-doctoral scholar at the University of Cape Town), discussed questions of criminology in the age of the Anthropocene, and Vivienne Mentor-Lalu, a researcher/facilitator for the Women and Democracy Initiative at the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, spoke to us about the gendered impact of the drought. Nolundi Luwaya, Kelley Moult, Diane Jefthas and Vitima Jere contributed to this piece.

Exploring neglected narratives: understanding vulnerability in narrative inquiry

Framed by a question around vulnerability in narrative inquiries, we show the multiple ways that vulnerability is evident in narrative inquiry. We take up the concerns around vulnerability to show how, as narrative inquirers, we are searching to find ways to think with vulnerability and with what others have called neglected narratives. Drawing on one study with Aboriginal youth and their families, we make visible how questions of vulnerability need to be considered in framing of research puzzles, selecting participants, and moving from field to field texts to interim and final research texts. In composing final research texts, we struggled with the notions of vulnerability that are placed on Aboriginal youth by labels and single stories. These assigned vulnerabilities lead to interpretations that could create experiences of judgment. We returned again to the importance of making experiences visible, in order to shift understandings of who Aboriginal youth are, and are becoming, in a complex world that will not write over or ‘erase their Indianness’ nor their or our vulnerabilities. We showed the ways questions of vulnerability are inextricably interwoven into narrative inquiry.

Nick Simpson and Vivienne Mentor-Lalu

Few Capetonians would argue against the claim that the City has been rocked by the current water crisis that many have dubbed the most severe in modern history. Discussions about water saving techniques, membership of the ‘Water Warriors’ club, dinner party comparisons of family daily usage figures, discussion of toilet habits (to flush or not to flush?) and frenzied buying to secure 25-litre water containers have become part of daily life for those of us faced by the imminent (but previously unconscionable) threat of our taps running dry. Even the ‘proudly oily’1 premier of the Western Cape has boasted that she only showers every three days to help beat back Day Zero. But the water crisis has not only raised important questions about residents’ rights to, and responsibility for, the water they use. It has also brought to the surface interesting issues about criminality and crime control, and our individual and collective relationship to water. Stories of violence and incivility at water collection points and in supermarkets have captured attention on social media, and city dwellers have hotly debated the threat of organised crime, laws against rebottling and reselling of municipal water, and the Western Cape government’s Water Disaster Plan, which gives the police and army responsibility for maintaining safety and order at water collection points. 
 Of course, while questions of water saving, risk and safety feel quite new to many Capetonians, scholars, activists and policymakers (including criminologists) have been writing about these issues for much longer. The Centre for Law and Society approached two scholars/activists to discuss the water crisis and its impact on questions of vulnerability, risk and security. Nick Simpson, an environmental and human development consultant (and post-doctoral scholar at the University of Cape Town), discussed questions of criminology in the age of the Anthropocene, and Vivienne Mentor-Lalu, a researcher/facilitator for the Women and Democracy Initiative at the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, spoke to us about the gendered impact of the drought. Nolundi Luwaya, Kelley Moult, Diane Jefthas and Vitima Jere contributed to this piece.

Nick Simpson and Vivienne Mentor-Lalu

Few Capetonians would argue against the claim that the City has been rocked by the current water crisis that many have dubbed the most severe in modern history. Discussions about water saving techniques, membership of the ‘Water Warriors’ club, dinner party comparisons of family daily usage figures, discussion of toilet habits (to flush or not to flush?) and frenzied buying to secure 25-litre water containers have become part of daily life for those of us faced by the imminent (but previously unconscionable) threat of our taps running dry. Even the ‘proudly oily’1 premier of the Western Cape has boasted that she only showers every three days to help beat back Day Zero. But the water crisis has not only raised important questions about residents’ rights to, and responsibility for, the water they use. It has also brought to the surface interesting issues about criminality and crime control, and our individual and collective relationship to water. Stories of violence and incivility at water collection points and in supermarkets have captured attention on social media, and city dwellers have hotly debated the threat of organised crime, laws against rebottling and reselling of municipal water, and the Western Cape government’s Water Disaster Plan, which gives the police and army responsibility for maintaining safety and order at water collection points. 
 Of course, while questions of water saving, risk and safety feel quite new to many Capetonians, scholars, activists and policymakers (including criminologists) have been writing about these issues for much longer. The Centre for Law and Society approached two scholars/activists to discuss the water crisis and its impact on questions of vulnerability, risk and security. Nick Simpson, an environmental and human development consultant (and post-doctoral scholar at the University of Cape Town), discussed questions of criminology in the age of the Anthropocene, and Vivienne Mentor-Lalu, a researcher/facilitator for the Women and Democracy Initiative at the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, spoke to us about the gendered impact of the drought. Nolundi Luwaya, Kelley Moult, Diane Jefthas and Vitima Jere contributed to this piece.

The stop and search of minors: A ‘vital police tool’?

Police stop and search powers have been widely criticized for the disproportionate manner in which members of black and ethnic minority communities are targeted. However, the use of such powers on minors in England and Wales has largely escaped comment, despite good evidence that such practices are harmful and counter-productive. Whilst data on the stop and search of under-10s and even toddlers has been reasonably widely reported by the mass media, there has been little interest in the welfare of older children who are subject to such police powers. Drawing on police data, qualitative research and information obtained through Freedom of Information requests, this article considers the relationship between potentially corrosive stop and search practices, young people’s use of public space and the question of vulnerability. It is concluded that policy and practice around the use of such powers should be amended to take account of the specific needs of individuals under the age of 18, and that children’s welfare should be a central consideration.

When wounds travel

This article explores trauma as a form of ‘social wound’, entrenched in the intersections of local histories and social experiences of violence and displacement. Building on ethnographic accounts of displacement of Iraqis in Lebanon in the wake of the US occupation of Iraq (2003–2011), I ask: what happens when wounds travel across different social worlds and local histories of violence? The account presented tells the story of Hussein, an Iraqi refugee who escaped Iraq during the height of sectarian violence (2006–2007) and claimed asylum status as a torture victim in Lebanon. For displaced people like Hussein, the experiences of violence and uprooting were amplified by the uncertainties of everyday life in Beirut. His case shows that the selective sorting of refugees around questions of vulnerability and victimhood weaves further tensions into the social fabric of displaced peoples and their host communities. In contexts of layered histories of war, violence, displacement, and humanitarian interventions, which characterize much of the Middle East, wounds constitute the interstitial tissue of the social; they are what brings people together and what sets them apart. An ethnography of such ‘travelling wounds’ might account for the complex ways that discourses of trauma and histories of violence unravel in everyday encounters.

Every Crisis Is an Opportunity

In the same way that a war mobilizes the creative energies of a nation and often leads to major advances in science, technology, and medicine, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provided a powerful impetus to advance the traumatic stress field. Stung by our inability to provide policymakers with recommendations on evidence-based, early interventions for survivors of the September 11, 2001, attacks, we have been forced to confront the major gaps in our current knowledge.These gaps are myriad and include our limited understanding of the natural longitudinal course of psychological consequences from the immediate post-impact phase to months and years later. They also include our inadequate scientific understanding of the psychological and psychobiological mechanisms underlying acute and long-term reactions to traumatic events and sparse empirical literature on which to base decisions concerning best practices for interventions. Questions of vulnerability and resilience have taken on a new urgency as we struggle to determine when to respect natural recovery processes and when to provide a formal intervention. With the recognition that there is little empirical justification for psychological debriefing as a one-stop early intervention panacea for the population-at-large has come intensification of efforts to develop and test a variety of novel early interventions that may be suitable for adults and children during the acute aftermath of catastrophic events.

Health Psychology, Embodiment and the Question of Vulnerability

The topic of the body is now firmly on the agenda for psychology, as it has been for sociology for some time. What contribution will health psychology make to this debate? This article argues that the biomedical view of the physical body is inappropriate for a psychology addressing the key concerns of suffering and healing. Instead, health psychology needs to theorize what it means to be embodied in the context of illness and of health care. To do this requires investigation of the practical relationships between staff and patients as well as of experiences of sufferers. By reflecting critically upon the relationship between clinical practice and the conceptualization of the body, a health psychology embracing the idea of embodiment becomes possible.

A cognitive theory of obsessions

It is proposed that obsessions are caused by catastrophic misinterpretations of the significance of one's thoughts (images, impulses). The obsessions persist as long as these misinterpretations continue and diminish when the misinterpretations are weakened. Evidence and arguments in support of the theory are presented, and the questions of vulnerability and the origins of the thoughts are addressed. A firmly focused treatment strategy is deduced from the theory.

General Papers

This paper summarizes the results of a longitudinal study on young asthmatic children and particularly on the mother-child relationship in this illness: At both observation times--14 to 30 months and 4 to 6 years--the majority of the children appeaed to be developing in a very adequate manner, both in the area of autonomy and opposition. Similarly, in most situations, the mothers appeared quite adequate in the face of their child's illness, and mother-child relationships, generally, seemed harmonious. However, a certain vulnerability in the area of opposition was more marked in a few cases, more frequently between 4-6 years than between 14-30 months. The author attempts a brief history of the development of the concept of the "bad mother" who has become a scapegoat not only in childhood asthma but also in many illnesses encountered in child psychiatry. In questioning the role which may have been played by dynamic theories in this evolution, psychoanalytic writings are reviewed (for example, S. Freud, M. Klein, Spitz, Brody) and it is hypothesized that psychoanalytic theory has had more of a catalytic than a causal influence in relation with a strong tendency in our culture to the eclosion of negative attitudes toward the mother in her relationship with her child. The emphasis placed by North American culture on the nuclear family, the hypertrophy of the maternal function coupled with a paternal role much reduced in time, as well as the almost complete disappearance of maternal substitutes, have all probably greatly influenced the development of this concept of the "bad mother". The author notes however, that happily, in recent years some child development theories insist on the concept of mother-child interaction and on the mutual role that mother and child have on one another in their exchanges. A review is made of the work of Sander, Bowlby, Schaffer, Lewis and Rosenblum which demonstrates this new trend. The author also studies the question of vulnerability within parent-child relationships, leading to the appearance of child psychopathology, and discusses the development of methods which could help in its early detection. Recent attempts in this direction are reviewed, particularly those of Broussard, Gray et al., Lézine. The importance of Thomas and Chess' work is particularly underlined, which emphasizes the specific interaction between the temperamental characteristics of the child and the parents' specific responses to them, at all levels of development. More recent studies by Brazelton et al. and by Korner are also reviewed, suggesting a very early interaction between mother and child. The author concludes by briefly developing the preventive implications of these works and stressing the importance of closely following the efforts made at pre- and post-natal levels which may have much influence in the early prevention of psychopathology in parent-child relationships.