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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
He'd been her friend for years. He said he loved her. Then she realised she didn't know him at all... When everything seemed to be falling apart in Sophie's life, she was thankful for her friend Kas, who was always at the end of a phone, ready to listen and to offer comfort and advice. Her father's cold dislike of her and then her parents' divorce had left her with a deep distrust of men. But, gradually, Kas made her believe there was at least one man who truly cared about her. But she was wrong. At first when Sophie went to stay for a few days with Kas in Italy, he was kind and caring, as he'd always been. But three days after she arrived, everything changed. His eyes were cold as he described the things he expected her to do 'for love'. But soon Sophie's bewilderment turned to fear as he punched and shouted at her and threatened to kill her adored younger brothers if she didn't do exactly as she was told...to sell her body on the streets to pay off Kas's debts. Terrified of Kas, the police and the men whose pleasures she was forced to satisfy, Sophie worked seven nights a week for the next six months on the dark and lonely streets of a town in northern Italy. Subjected regularly to Kas's verbal, mental and physical abuse, she knew she would never escape. And then, one day, after she'd been admitted to hospital with stomach pains - and knowing that Kas would kill her if he found out - she dared to phone her mother. But who would reach her first?
This book brings together chapters by academics, researchers and practitioners to analyse how crimes such as sex work, domestic violence and rape and sexual assault have risen up the Government agenda in recent years. For example, the 'Paying the Price' consultation exercise on sex work in 2004, and recent legislation around sex crimes, including the Sex Offences Act (2003). This is a multi-disciplinary, social scientific, pro-feminist collection, which draws upon practice, empirical research, documentary analysis and overviews of research in the areas of sex work and sexual violence. Within Sex as Crime there are two distinct sub-sections: 'Sex for Sale' and 'Sex as Violence', but the broader and overriding link of sex as crime remains a paramount theme that spans the collection. Chapters include discussions of the impact of new regulations on street sex workers, and of street sex work on community residents, the use of the internet by men who pay for sex and men who sell it, sexual violence and identity, sex crimes against children and protecting children online and working with sex offenders. Other chapters explore reasons for such offending behaviour.
Why Are We Yelling is Buster Benson’s essential guide to having more
honest and constructive arguments.
Why Are We Yelling will shatter your assumptions about what makes arguments productive. You'll find yourself having fewer repetitive, predictable fights once you're empowered to identify your biases, listen with an open mind, and communicate well.
Empirical and mathematically rigorous, this book provides a study of the economics of prostitution rather than focusing on the sociological and cultural themes. Using economic tools of analysis, internationally based editors have put together a theoretically informed volume that explores the supply and demand of prostitution. Prostitution is a globalized industry involving millions of workers and it is characterized by a high degree of inequality in working conditions (ranging from slavery to self-managed and legalized unionized employment), by different sub-markets and fully integrated in the productive system. Taking a provocative approach to prostitution, this book is a must read for students and researchers in the area of gender and economics.
Architectural Design and Ethics offers both professional architects and architecture students a theoretical base and numerous suggestions as to how we might rethink our responsibilities to the natural world and design a more sustainable future for ourselves. As we find ourselves on the steep slope of several exponential growth curves in global population, in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, in the gap between the rich and poor, and in the demand for finite resources, Fisher lays down a theory of architecture based on ethics and explores how buildings can and do provide both social and moral dimensions.The book also has practical goals, demonstrating how architects can make better and more beautiful buildings whilst nurturing more responsible, sustainable development. Architectural Design and Ethics will prove an invaluable text not only to those in the architecture field, but to anyone simply interested in the ethical issues surrounding our built environment. It joins the dots between architectural form, ethics and professional practice. It uses the history of ethics to present relevant lessons for today's practitioners. It provides a wake up call to architects, advocating a greater focus on ethics over aesthetics.
'If you think you understand AI and all of the related issues, you don't. By the time you finish this exceptionally lucid and riveting book you will breathe more easily and wisely' - Michael Gazzaniga A leading computer scientist brings human sense to the AI bubble No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. Writing with clarity and passion, leading AI researcher Melanie Mitchell offers a captivating account of modern-day artificial intelligence. Flavoured with personal stories and a twist of humour, Artificial Intelligence illuminates the workings of machines that mimic human learning, perception, language, creativity and common sense. Weaving together advances in AI with cognitive science and philosophy, Mitchell probes the extent to which today's 'smart' machines can actually think or understand, and whether AI even requires such elusive human qualities at all. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans provides readers with an accessible and clear-eyed view of the AI landscape, what the field has actually accomplished, how much further it has to go and what it means for all of our futures.
Birth control offers women the opportunity to prevent pregnancy, plan and space their births, or have no births at all. And yet, in the United States, half of all pregnancies remain unintended, and access to birth control is beset by inequities in education, access, and coverage. Research indicates that women are familiar with the range of contraceptive methods available today. But the persistently high rates of unintended pregnancy, combined with common dissatisfaction and discontinuation, suggest that women's contraceptive needs continue to be unmet. Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know will offer more than a user's guide to available means of contraception: it will examine how supported family-planning infrastructure impacts society as a whole. Through reviews of policy, scientific literature, and supplemental interviews with women, it will uncover women's concerns and apprehensions about contraception, as well as the ways birth control empowers women and increases access to educational and professional opportunities. It will provide an overview the history of birth control, the risks and benefits of contraception, the role of menstruation, and the future of birth control. The goal of this book is to provide accurate, unbiased scientific information about contraception in the context of women's lived experiences and the realities of how individuals make decisions about birth control.
We usually think of women as the victims of pornography rather than its consumers. Whether appearing in films, peering provocatively from the pages of magazines, or posing on explicit Web-sites, women are considered the dehumanized objects of unseen lascivious male viewers. But in her controversial new book "One for the Girls ," Clarissa Smith debunks this myth and challenges women to read, watch, and enjoy pornography on their own terms. Focusing on the British magazine "For Women," Smith looks at its readers' responses to male pinups and erotica and explores the intricacies of women's unique reactions to pornography. "Clarissa Smith has achieved something special with her new proffering from her masculinities repertoire. Smith's text is groundbreaking, multidisciplinary and--equally importantly--extremely readable. It is the last point perhaps that really sets this work apart, as One for the Girls has a great deal to offer both the specialist academic and the general reader. Clarissa Smith's accessible style allows readers with little prior knowledge of critical theory, cultural studies or the 1980s pornography debate, to not only understand these discourses, but to develop a strong grasp of their impact in this context."--Michelle Parsons, "Transition Tradition"""
Modes of Censorship and Translation articulates a variety of scholarly and disciplinary perspectives and offers the reader access to the widening cultural debate on translation and censorship, including cross-national forms of cultural fertilization. It is a study of censorship and its patterns of operation across a range of disciplinary settings, from media to cultural and literary studies, engaging with often neglected genres and media such as radio, cinema and theatre. Adopting an interdisciplinary and transnational approach and bringing together contributions based on primary research which often draws on unpublished archival material, the volume analyzes the multi-faceted relationship between censorship and translation in different national contexts, including Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Greece, Nazi Germany and the GDR, focusing on the political, ideological and aesthetic implications of censorship, as well as the hermeneutic play fostered by any translational act. By offering innovative methodological interpretations and stimulating case studies, it proposes new readings of the operational modes of both censorship and translation. The essays gathered here challenge current notions of the accessibility of culture, whether in overtly ideological and politically repressive contexts, or in seemingly 'neutral' cultural scenarios.
The elephant is a much-admired animal, but it is also endangered. The ivory from its tusks has been in great demand across the centuries and throughout all cultures. What sort of material is it? How has it been used in the past and the present? And what can we do today to protect the world's largest mammals from poachers? This lavishly illustrated volume embarks on a journey through cultural history and takes up a contemporary position. Ivory fascinates. As long as 40,000 years ago people carved mammoth tusks into artful figures and musical instruments, and it remains popular as a material to this day. Ivory polarises, because the animal's tusks also stand for injustice and violence. The exploitation of man and nature, the threatened extinction of the elephant, poaching and organised crime are phenomena which we associate with ivory. The publication approaches the subject critically and poses the question as to our responsibility in our dealings with both animal and material.
Death on Demand explores the polarizing role of Jack Kevorkian-"Dr. Death"-as the most visible leader of the right-to-die movement. From a feature on the cover of Time magazine to interviews on shows like 60 Minutes, Kevorkian was a high-profile figure in the right-to-die movement, capturing constant media attention as he helped more than one hundred people kill themselves. The book opens with the death of Janet Adkins in 1990-Kevorkian's first assisted suicide-then travels back to Kevorkian's medical school days and follows his nearly four decades as a lone activist. Death on Demand draws on Kevorkian's interviews and published work as well as newspaper and magazine articles to describe the doctor's publicity stunts, criminal trials, years in prison, and activities after he was paroled. Author Michael DeCesare examines Kevorkian's actions in the context of the right-to-die movement to understand his crucial role in bringing the controversial practice of assisted suicide into the public conversation.
This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.
With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century political pornography. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. In addition to the satires which previous scholars have discussed in this context, Mowry brings to light hitherto unexamined pornographies as well as archival texts that reveal the ways in which the satires helped shape the social policies endured by prostitutes and bawds. Her study includes substantial archival evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Mowry argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. Sex work, partisans repeatedly asserted, inherently disrupted ancestral systems of property transfer and distribution in favour of personal ownership, while the republican belief that all men owned the labour of their body achieved a nightmarish incarnation in the prostitute's understanding that the sexual favours she performed were labour. The prostitute's body thus emerged in the loyalist imagination as the epitome of the democratic body politic. Carefully grounded in original research, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 is a cultural study with broad implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of women's sexuality.
Through her own gripping story of escape from human trafficking, Rebecca Bender teaches us what trafficking in America looks like - and what we can do about it - as she reveals the light of God in even the darkest places. In Pursuit of Love is a riveting read that will give you the confidence to pursue your own purpose and take you on a journey to places you never thought possible. Born and raised in a small Oregon town, all-American girl Rebecca Bender was a varsity athlete and honor roll student with a promising future. Then a predator pretending to be her boyfriend lured her into a web of lies that sent her down a path she never imagined possible. For nearly six years, Rebecca was sold across the underground world of sex trafficking in Las Vegas. She was branded, beaten, told when to sleep and what to wear, and traded between traffickers. Forced into a dark sisterhood, Rebecca formed bonds with her trafficker and three other women, creating a false sense of family. During that time, God began revealing himself to her. And in the midst of her exploitation, she found the hope she needed to survive. After a federal raid, Rebecca escaped. Her life was forever changed as she felt the embrace of her heavenly Father guiding her to healing and wholeness. Rebecca soon began to use her own experiences to change the lives of others as she went back into the darkest places she had known - assisting FBI, VICE, and law enforcement across the country in some of their most difficult cases. Through Rebecca's incredible story of redemption, we remember that our past does not have to determine our destiny.
Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress offers the reader an analysis of prostitution and trafficking as organized interpersonal violence. Even in academia, law, and public health, prostitution is often misunderstood as sex work. The book's 32 contributors offer clinical examples, analysis, and original research that counteract common myths about the harmlessness of prostitution. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress extensively documents the violence that runs like a constant thread throughout all types of prostitution, including escort, brothel, trafficking, strip club, pornography, and street prostitution. Prostitutes are always subjected to verbal sexual harassment and often have a lengthy history of trauma, including childhood sexual abuse and emotional neglect, racism, economic discrimination, rape, and other physical and sexual violence. International in scope, the book contains cutting-edge contributions from clinical experts in traumatic stress, from attorneys and advocates who work with trafficked women, adolescents, and children and also prostituted women and men. A number of chapters address the complexity of treating the psychological symptoms resulting from prostitution and trafficking. Others address the survivor's need for social supports, substance abuse treatment, peer support, and culturally relevant services. To stay up-to-date on this powerful subject, visit the Traffick Jamming blog at http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/blog. Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress examines: The connections between prostitution, incest, sexual harassment, rape, and domestic violence Clinical symptoms common among those in prostitution, including dissociation, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance abuse Peer support programs for women escaping prostitution Culturally relevant services for women escaping prostitution The connection between prostitution and trafficking, including trafficking from Mexico to the United States, and prostitution of adolescents in Cambodian brothels Online prostitution How gay male pornography harms gay men Accessing public assistance funds for survivors of prostitution Arguments against legalizing or decriminalizing prostitution From the editor's Preface: Prostitution is to the community what incest is to the family. Slavery, at its height, was normalized in the United States as unpleasant but inevitable, yet it is now considered to be an institution that violated human rights. Perhaps we will at some point in the future look back on prostitution/trafficking with a similar historical perspective. It is my hope that this book will assist the reader in understanding prostitution and trafficking and in how to help women and children escape it.
This is the second volume of Melvin Lasky's The Language of Journalism, praised as a "brilliant" and "original" study in communications and contemporary language, and as "a joy to read." It broke ground in focusing on the comparative styles and prejudices of mainstream American and British newspapers, and in its trenchant analysis of their systematic debasement in the face of obligatory platitudes and compulsory euphemisms. Lasky's subtle and richly detailed text documents the possibly terminal crisis affecting honest, thoughtful, and independent journalism in the Western world. It extends the research in his first volume, and deepens the interpretation. It also adds the personal touch of both wit and anecdote expressed by an experienced international journalist and historian. The central chapters on the "F-word" carry the public emergence of the infamous "expletive deleted" beyond the conventional lexicographer's approach. Lasky's pages on the use of formerly forbidden language is a triumph of sinuous semantics. Here, in incisive analysis, is the tortuous struggle of a once Puritanized literary culture writhing to break free of censorship and self-censorship. Lasky critically evaluates the historic effort of the avant-garde of "dirty realism" to find a path towards what he calls "a usable profanity." In the meantime, newspaper style books become comic texts, as asterisks take over from square brackets and millions of readers purse their lips and indulge in "participatory obscenity." In dealing fully with the phenomenon of profanity, the new book adds another dimension to Lasky's thesis on mass culture's trivialization of real social and political phenomena. It underscores as well oursociety's embrace of banality, in standardizing politically correct jargon, slang, patois, pidgin, and various other "grunts and growls." The reader of the first volume will find here a wholly new range of references to illuminate the detail of what our newspapers have been publishing, and how the alert and sophisticated reader can make sense of the realities they purport to represent.
Guns have never before been as important in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns focus on either the gun as a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended, with most debates deadlocking on the ultimate role of humans in causing gun violence-that, as the cliche goes, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." And yet for all this attention, too much of the discussions on gun violence and gun control take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from science studies, law, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as a technology and thus as an object with its own power and agency. In approaching guns from a tech perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these specific objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together a great breadth of perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues, ultimately broadening our conception of what counts as an issue in these debates.
The tragedy of American science is that its direction is determined by private profit rather than by the desire to improve the human condition. As a result, Conner argues, Big Science has been irredeemably corrupted by Big Money. This corruption threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take. The Tragedy of American Science explores how the U.S. economy's addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite. That those trillions of dollars in resources and scientific talent are not devoted to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and environmental destruction is one of the greatest tragedies of our times. While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible, utopian dream. But to get there, we'll need to grapple with this important history.
Conversations around diversity, equity, and inclusion in science communication are in danger of generating much concern without effecting change and systematic transformations. This radical volume addresses these circular discourses and reveals the gaps in the field. Putting the spotlight on the marginalised voices of so-called 'racialised minorities', and those from Global South regions, it interrogates the global footprint of the science communication enterprise. Moving beyond tokenistic and extractive approaches, this book creates a space for academics and practitioners to challenge issues around race and sociocultural inclusion, providing mutual learning, paradigm-shifting perspectives, and innovative ways forward for the science communication advancement agenda. Chapter 12 is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This is an examination, from a feminist historian's standpoint, of the background to the present system of regulating prostitution in Britain - which is generally admitted to be not only unjust and discriminatory, but ineffective even in achieving its stated aims. Concentrating on the 1950s, and especially on the Wolfenden Report and the 1959 Street Offences Act, it is a thorough exposure of the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying legislation relating to prostitution. In addition to the detailed analysis of the 1950s legislation and the background to it, there is an exposition of the subsequent workings of the Act, and of attempts to amend or repeal it.
What can we learn from the tragedy of these exploited young people?In Thailand, a thriving sex industry makes its money exploiting the young. Some children are coerced into prostitution and some have been sold into sexual slavery by their own families, but just as tragically there is no shortage of young girls (and boys) willing to work as prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand: Listening to Rahab searches for the reasons why. This uniquely insightful book looks into the lives--and even more importantly, listens to the words--of ten Thai prostitutes. Child Prostitution in Thailand is about what we can learn from them--who they are, what they go through, and why.In their own words, the young prostitutes you'll meet in this book Thailand discuss what brought them into this life. Some have come from a tragic home situation, but not all are impoverished, orphaned, or abused. Nevertheless, they have entered into a dangerous and degrading lifestyle that often leads to violence, sickness, and early death. Of these ten prostitutes, one has already passed away and four more are dying with AIDS.This remarkable volume will help you to understand: how Thailand's child prostitution industry developed the impact upon girls and young women of Thailand's evolution from an agriculturally based economy to an industrial one changing forms of child prostitution who the customers are the role of tourism and its impact on child prostitution in Thailand how poverty, poor education, a sexually focused mass media, lack of religious emphasis, disability, and the lack of a clear policy on child prostitution help the sex industry to thrive This book also explores the details of child prostitution in Thailand--for instance, in open-air "restaurants" and "pubs" in Chiang Mai, your young waitress may double as a sex worker--and her provocative "uniform" represents a dress code enforced by the establishment's owner. A "cafe" is another kind of sex service disguised as (and functioning as) a bar/restaurant. Here, young girls working ten- and eleven-hour shifts in short skirts must wear price tags pinned to their shirts and may have to service five to ten clients per night.The head of the U.S. State Department's office for international women's issues estimates that traffickers bring 50,000 women and children into the United States illegally each year. The lessons Listening to Rahab teaches can help us to better understand the situation here at home as well as overseas. A helpful appendix assessing incidents of child prostitution around the globe bring the information even more clearly into focus.
Empathy is a term used increasingly both in moral theory and animal ethics, with the suggestion that empathy enhances our moral ability and agency. Yet, its precise meaning is often left unexplored, together with the various obstacles and challenges met by an empathy-based ethic, such as those concerning the ways in which empathy is prone to bias and may also facilitate manipulation of others. These oversights render the contemporary discussion on empathy and animal ethics vulnerable to both conceptual confusion and moral simplicity. The book aims to tackle these problems by clarifying the different and even contradictory ways in which "empathy" can be defined, and by exploring the at times surprising implications the various definitions have from the viewpoint of moral agency. Its main question is: What types of empathy hinder moral ability, and what types enable us to become more morally capable in our dealings with the nonhuman world? During the contemporary era, when valuable forms of empathy are in decline, and the more hazardous, self-regarding and biased varieties of utilising empathy in the increase, this question is perhaps more important than ever.
When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantanamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantanamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.
Animals, like humans, suffer and die from natural causes. This is particularly true of animals living in the wild, given their high exposure to, and low capacity to cope with, harmful natural processes. Most wild animals likely have short lives, full of suffering, usually ending in terrible deaths. This book argues that on the assumption that we have reasons to assist others in need, we should intervene in nature to prevent or reduce the harms wild animals suffer, provided that it is feasible and that the expected result is positive overall. It is of the utmost importance that academics from different disciplines as well as animal advocates begin to confront this issue. The more people are concerned with wild animal suffering, the more probable it is that safe and effective solutions to the plight of wild animals will be implemented in the future. |
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