Rick Linden

Addressing elder abuse: the Waterloo restorative justice approach to elder abuse project

The Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) of Waterloo Region, in partnership with a number of other social service agencies, designed and implemented a restorative justice model applicable to older adults who have been abused by an individual in a position of trust. The project was very successful in building partnerships, as many community agencies came together to deal with the problem of elder abuse. The program also raised the profile of elder abuse in the community. However, despite intensive efforts, referrals to the restorative justice program were quite low. Because of this, the program moved to a new organizational model, the Elder Abuse Response Team (EART), which has retained the guiding philosophy of restorative justice but has broadened the mandate. The team has evolved into a conflict management system that has multiple points of entry for cases and multiple options for dealing with elder abuse. The team has developed a broad range of community partners who can facilitate referrals to the EART and also can help to provide an individualized response to each case. The transition to the EART has been successful, and the number of referrals has increased significantly.

Administering Justice Without the State: A Study of the Private Justice System of the Hudson's Bay Company to 1800 *

In 1670, a royal charter granted by the English monarchy gave the Hudsons Bay Company the exclusive right to rule over an area that encompasses most of what is now the western part of Canada. As part of its original charter, the Hudsons Bay Company was given the power to enact any laws and regulations not repugnant to the laws of England that were deemed necessary to govern its relations with its servants and to maintain social order throughout the vast territory known as Rupertsland. This paper examines the development of the “private” legal system of the Hudsons Bay Company to 1800. Particular attention is given to examining the specific methods of legal ordering and social control that were used within the Company to discipline Company employees. The data examined in the study provide an empirical foundation for broader theorizing about the nature of non-state forms of governance, legal pluralism, and social control. Specifically, the study provides evidence which shows the complex and varied ways in which legal ordering and social control occur outside the state

Dualistic and Wholistic Views of God and the World: Consequences for Social Action

The authors pose dualist and wholist types of orientation to social action and propose that these types represent distinctly different views of God and the World. which should result in very different forms of social attitudes. They identify respondents on the dualist end of the continuum as fundamentalist theologically who come more often from ethnic rural communities. Wholists are more liberal theologically and operate within a social system that is more urban and more open culturally. They found that Dualists who show more other-worldly tendencies are less involved in this-worldly processes and are also more supportive of traditional personal morality and the ethnic community. Wholists, on the other hand, are more this-worldly and more liberal with regard to traditional personal morality, community control, and minority rights. Wuthnows dualist and wholist perspectives seem to apply to religious Mennonite adherents, and the two views of God and the world result in very different social attitudes.

Properties of Norms as Predictors of Alcohol Use among Mennonites

In spite of the traditionally important role that the concept of “norms” has played in sociology, there is little agreement on how it should be defined or measured. This paper uses the framework suggested by Gibbs (1965, 1972, 1978) who proposes that we focus on normative properties whose presence or absence is a matter of degree. The set of normative properties analyzed in this paper relate to collective evaluations about alcohol use among Mennonites in Canada. Variation in degree of group agreement, evaluative intensity, saliency of the issue, permissible variation in situations and actors are measured. Regression procedures are used to test the relationship between these normative properties about alcohol use and self-reported alcohol consumption in five independently selected samples of Mennonites. Since the groups vary in their evaluation of alcohol use, the usefulness of the normative properties as predictors of behavior can be tested. While the percent of the variance explained is high and quite consistent across the groups, the relative importance of the normative properties within and between the groups varies substantially.

Governance of Transnational Policing: The Case of Peacekeeping

Modern states have relied upon the public police to provide internal security and upon the military to protect their territorial integrity (Dandeker, 1990). However, this situation has now changed. Policing within nation-states has been transformed over the past two decades by the development of alternatives to the public police. As Nigel South has argued “the post-war expansion of the private security industry has revolutionary implications for the nature of modern social control and the policing of society” (1988: 150). Globalization is causing analogous changes at the international level. Transnational security requires police agencies to undertake many tasks that are far-removed from their traditional ones. It also requires other agencies such as the military and a wide variety of non-governmental organizations to become involved in security issues that depart from their normal mandates.