Sense Of Desperation Research Articles

Gender and victimization by intimates.

Recent data demonstrate that, although gender has an impact upon the experience of being a victim of an intimate's violence, there is no particular personality pattern that leads one to become a victim. Rather, women--who are socialized to adapt and submit, and who are likely to become victims of men's sexual violence or physical abuse--may not develop adequate self-protection skills as children, especially if they come from childhood homes in which females are victimized, leading to a later vulnerability to physical and sexual abuse. Men, however, socialized to express anger and aggression in an outward manner, learn to model the abuse witnessed or experienced in childhood and often learn that women are the "appropriate" recipients of this violence. Social learning theories of modeling and aggression are used to explain how such personality patterns develop, and the theory of learned helplessness is used to explain battered women's coping responses to their partners' abusive behavior. The extreme situation, in which a battered woman kills her partner in self-defense, is analyzed in order to understand women victims' sense of desperation and entrapment in severely abusive relationships and the extent to which their behaviors are in reaction to the abuse perpetrated by the mate.

Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event

READERS OF BURKE are familiar with the sense of desperation and despair which emanates from his writings on the French Revolution, a revolution which he characterizes as a total revolution, a great revolution in all human affairs-the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.' Indeed, we are aware that the French Revolution threatens Burke's precarious eighteenth-century world, but Burke also sees his threatened by a linguistic revolution in which old words are torn from their historical context and emptied of their historical meaning. These words are then filled with the new revolutionary meaning; in Burke's writings there is a correspondent connection between the revolution in France and the revolution in language. Suddenly the accumulated cultural treasures of the European world are ransacked along with the very language which had brought and held that world in presence. In his Preface to the Address of M. Brissot to his Constituents, Burke specifically connects this revolution in language with the revolution in France (see IV, 217) and in his Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs he links the linguistic revolution with the

China's Social Sciences: Prospects for Teaching and Research in the 1980s

Almost coincidentally with the turn of this decade, China entered a new period of intellectual ferment with a fervor not seen since the May Fourth Movement that began in 1919 and lasted into the 1920s. Then as now, China was seeking new ideas from abroad to help it in its own social and political reconstruction, and to develop its wealth and power. But with China falling apart at the seams, with a shaky republican government doing little to promote republican ideals, and with foreign imperial powers ravaging China, China's reaching out for foreign ideas in the 1920s had a sense of desperation about it. The willingness to explore almost any new idea was an important part of the May Fourth Movement, which let a flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend. Within carefully delineated boundaries, a similar, but recently attenuated, policy under the slogans emancipate the mind and seek truth from fact has been pursued in China since 1978. And today, as in the 1920s, there is again a sense of desperation among some Chinese, who fear the nation may soon be overwhelmed by the developmental problems of its system.

Britain and the Unification of Europe

On August 30, 1954, a close vote on a motion to prevent debate in the French National Assembly consigned to history a spectacular scheme for the unification; of western Europe. The defeat of the European Defense Community (EDC) precipitated a seven-week crisis in the western world that only adroit diplomacy, spurred by a sense of desperation, could overcome. In the ensuing conferences of London (September 28— October 3) and Paris (October 20–23), the foreign ministers accomplished two vital purposes. They salvaged the Atlantic alliance and they brought Adenauer's; Germany into the family of free nations.