Denise A. Donnelly

Beating the Devil out of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families

Spanking has long been a standard method of punishment in homes around the world. Also while there has always been some concern raises about whether or not it is an acceptable form of discipline, until now, no-one has made a scientific link between spanking and violent behaviour in adults who were spanked as children. The work of Murray Straus indicates that spanking is indeed a form of violence, and that such treatment not only adversely affects the children who experience it, but society as a whole. Straus here argues that corporal punishment is a factor in many conduct disorders, from attacks on siblings to juvenile deliquency, wife beatings and other crimes. Further, he demonstrates that putting an end to such punishment is one of the most important steps that can be taken in our quest for a less violent world.

“Honey, We Don't Do Men” Gender Stereotypes and the Provision of Services to Sexually Assaulted Males

This research examines the effects of gender role stereotypes on the provision of services to adult, noninstitutionalized male victims of sexual assault. Thirty sexual assault crisis providers in a major Southeastern city participated in in-depth interviews focusing on their experiences with male sexual assault victims, their attitudes toward these men, and the services provided by their organizations. Although official reports of male sexual assault victims are relatively uncommon, our research confirms that male victims do exist and that they are more numerous than official statistics indicate. Moreover, our findings suggest that traditional gender role stereotypes, lack of responsiveness to male victims, and gaps in service provision prevent sexually assaulted men from getting the help they need.

Who Has Joint Custody? Class Differences in the Determination of Custody Arrangements.

This article reports the incidence and predictors of joint custody based on a nationally representative sample. Although joint custody has captured much attention, its incidence actually remains low. A logistic regression model shows that those with higher incomes and educational levels, those living in larger cities, and nonwhites are more likely to have joint custody. These class differences suggest that policymakers use caution in establishing systems that strongly mandate or prefer joint custody.

Culture of Prejudice: Arguments in Critical Social Science

that has historically plagued both defenders and challengers of white supremacy in the United States. In doing so, it sheds light on the importance of the family as one of the institutions through which structured inequality persists. Romano’s praiseworthy narrative sustains two criticisms. Despite the fact that her prologue makes definitive statements about the role of prohibitions against black-white intermarriage in the maintenance of races and racial hierarchy and that her epilogue discusses how increased acceptance of intermarriage masks contemporary structures of white privilege based in institutionalized processes of racism, the theoretical conceptualization of race as a social construction that varies over time in the way that it produces inequality does not really inform the central pages of the historical analysis. Since intermarriage behavior and social responses to it change, but the nature of the system of racial privilege does not, there is little room for examination of whether and how the relevance of interracial marriage to the system of racial inequality changes over time. A second criticism focuses on the low level of attention that the author gives to data on class and to the intermarriage experiences of poor and working class individuals. Given the increased importance of class processes of inequality maintenance to U.S. based racial stratification since the Civil Rights movement, the lack of class analysis makes it difficult for Romano’s scholarly endeavor to join contemporary debates on race relations. For example, her epilogue constitutes intermarriage “opportunity” as a class privilege, but in the context of her chronologies of cultural, political, and demographic change—chronologies that are reliant on data that are usually from or about elites—this understanding of intermarriage as opportunity remains an uncritically examined assumption. In addition, the author tells the reader about the existence of elite multiracial families that are highly visible and vocal, but she does not and perhaps cannot place them in the new racial order or relate their status to more contemporary class-based mechanisms of racial stratification. Nonetheless, Race Mixing is a rich and balanced narrative of the evolving story of interracial marriage participants and the social claims being made about the impact of their family formation choices. Its thoughtful treatment of evidence and its connection of privatized, microlevel behavior to macrolevel politics and social movements make it a worthy addition to scholarly literatures on race and on the family.