Manuela Ivone P. da Cunha

Race, Crime and Criminal Justice in Portugal

Any focus on the issue of ethnicity, crime and criminal justice in Portugal has to take into account two specificities which have comparative implications — not to mention the fact that comparability may be hindered from the start at the more general level of the statistical data infrastructure itself.1 First, Portuguese official statistics register only nationalities, not ethnicity or phenotype. Direct or indirect registration by the state of data allowing for the identification of such information is prevented by law in order not to reinforce stereotyping (see Cabecinhas 2007) or the racialization of society.2 The existence of ethnic/racial minorities is therefore not formally acknowledged by the state, which recognizes only individual citizens. Portuguese citizens thus include, without any ethnic specification, ex-immigrants who have acquired the Portuguese citizenship.3

Mothering From Prison and Ideologies of Intensive Parenting Enacting Vulnerable Resistance

“Intensive parenting” ideologies have been increasingly disseminated in popular culture, expert discourses, and social policy. These have impacted particularly mothers owing to their actual or presumed central role in child rearing. One of the main features of these ideologies is an increasing apportioning of rights and responsibilities to families without taking into account the resources needed to sustain the work of caring according to dominant social expectations. Drawing on 20 interviews in a Portuguese female prison, this article explores how mothering is enacted by underprivileged and criminalized women. Data show a complex web of tensions between the norms implicit in “intensive parenting” ideologies and the actual practices, which imprisoned mothers can accomplish. In their mothering from prison, women enact vulnerable resistance to the penal policies that undermine their primary role in child rearing. That is, prisoners creatively negotiate a space within which they can define themselves as “good mothers.”

The Changing Scale of Imprisonment and the Transformation of Care: The Erosion of the “Welfare Society” by the “Penal State” in Contemporary Portugal

Considered in its comparative potential, the concept of support is especially suited to analyze recent Portuguese historical processes that are changing the way the State, moral orders, and social ties intersect, thereby reconfiguring contemporary frameworks of protection, assistance, and solidarity. Bearing both on the personal and the impersonal, on informal networks and institutions, on entitlement and moral obligations, as well as on sentiments and emotions, it allows ground for examining not only the ambiguities at stake, but also the constituting relationship between these frameworks without losing track of their different local meanings, or without diluting the distinct connotations they respectively convey in local ideologies.

Under-vaccinated groups in Europe and their beliefs, attitudes and reasons for non-vaccination; two systematic reviews.

BackgroundDespite effective national immunisation programmes in Europe, some groups remain incompletely or un-vaccinated (‘under-vaccinated’), with underserved minorities and certain religious/ideological groups repeatedly being involved in outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases (VPD).Gaining insight into factors regarding acceptance of vaccination of ‘under-vaccinated groups’ (UVGs) might give opportunities to communicate with them in a trusty and reliable manner that respects their belief system and that, maybe, increase vaccination uptake. We aimed to identify and describe UVGs in Europe and to describe beliefs, attitudes and reasons for non-vaccination in the identified UVGs.MethodsWe defined a UVG as a group of persons who share the same beliefs and/or live in socially close-knit communities in Europe and who have/had historically low vaccination coverage and/or experienced outbreaks of VPDs since 1950. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE and PsycINFO databases using specific search term combinations. For the first systematic review, studies that described a group in Europe with an outbreak or low vaccination coverage for a VPD were selected and for the second systematic review, studies that described possible factors that are associated with non-vaccination in these groups were selected.ResultsWe selected 48 articles out of 606 and 13 articles out of 406 from the first and second search, respectively. Five UVGs were identified in the literature: Orthodox Protestant communities, Anthroposophists, Roma, Irish Travellers, and Orthodox Jewish communities. The main reported factors regarding vaccination were perceived non-severity of traditional “childhood” diseases, fear of vaccine side-effects, and need for more information about for example risk of vaccination.ConclusionsWithin each UVG identified, there are a variety of health beliefs and objections to vaccination. In addition, similar factors are shared by several of these groups. Communication strategies regarding these similar factors such as educating people about the risks associated with being vaccinated versus not being vaccinated, addressing their concerns, and countering vaccination myths present among members of a specific UVG through a trusted source, can establish a reliable relationship with these groups and increase their vaccination uptake. Furthermore, other interventions such as improving access to health care could certainly increase vaccination uptake in Roma and Irish travellers.

Onstage and Off: The Shifting Relevance of Gender in Women’s Prisons

Even though international research on men’s prisons is no longer oblivious to gender, approaches to women’s prisons have tended to be more gender-bound as a whole. Besides having informed a specific reflexive agenda of representation, the angle of gender has presided over most research issues as an analytical overall parti pris—from the gendered nature of prison regimes to the gendered character of prison cultures, socialities and ‘pains of imprisonment’. This more ‘gendercentric’ agenda is, however, becoming more diversified for theoretical and empirical reasons alike. These involve a recognition of the diversity of women prisoners’ experiences and identities, and an attention to a wider variety of aspects of carceral life. Drawing on field approaches to the Portuguese carceral world spanning three decades, I propose to take this debate further by focusing on contextual shifts in the actual saliency of gender as a category of identity and social life in women’s prisons.