This book explores sexual violence and crime in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of intense social and legal change. Driven by the sexual revolutions, second wave feminism, and ideas of the rights of the child, there was a new public interest in the sexual assault of women and children. Sexual abuse was studied, surveyed and discussed more than ever before in Australian society. Yet, despite this, there remained substantial inaction, by government, from community and on the part of individuals. This book examines several difficult questions of our recent history: why did Australia not act more firmly to eradicate rape and child sexual abuse? What prevented our culture from looking seriously at trauma? How did we fail to protect victim-survivors? Rich in social and legal history, this study takes readers into the world of victims of sexual crime, and into the wider community that had to deal with sexual violence. At the core of this book is the question that resonates deeply right now: why does sexual violence appear seemingly insurmountable, despite significant change?

This book explores sexual violence and crime in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of intense social and legal change. Driven by the sexual revolutions, second wave feminism, and ideas of the rights of the child, there was a new public interest in the sexual assault of women and children. Sexual abuse was studied, surveyed and discussed more than ever before in Australian society. Yet, despite this, there remained substantial inaction, by government, from community and on the part of individuals. This book examines several difficult questions of our recent history: why did Australia not act more firmly to eradicate rape and child sexual abuse? What prevented our culture from looking seriously at trauma? How did we fail to protect victim-survivors? Rich in social and legal history, this study takes readers into the world of victims of sexual crime, and into the wider community that had to deal with sexual violence. At the core of this book is the question that resonates deeply right now: why does sexual violence appear seemingly insurmountable, despite significant change?

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has given national consciousness to the problematic treatment of sexual assault in Australia's past. Yet we still have little knowledge of the policing, prosecution and punishment of sexual crimes in the past. Sex Crimes in the Fifties examines this history by investigating Australia in the 1950s. The 1950s has remained a decade with a nostalgic reputation for upholding the sanctity of the nuclear family. Fewer remember that it was this same decade that saw the sharpest rise in Australian history of arrests and prosecution of sexual assault and was the origin of many of our contemporary beliefs about sexual crimes. Using transcripts of 500 trials, Sex Crimes in the Fifties examine the full range of sexual assaults that came before the court, including rape, crimes against children, homosexuality and acts of indecency, to consider the ways sexual crimes was policed and treated, as well as the ways the wider public understood these offences.

On television, Wal-Mart employees are smiling women delighted with their jobs. But reality is another story. In 2000, Betty Dukes, a fifty-two-year-old black woman in Pittsburg, California, became the lead plaintiff in "Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores," a class action, representing 1.6 million women. In her explosive investigation of this historic lawsuit, journalist Liza Featherstone reveals how Wal-Mart, a self-styled "family-oriented," Christian company: Deprives women (but not men) of the training they need to advance. Relegates women to lower-paying jobs like selling baby clothes, reserving the more lucrative positions for men. Inflicts punitive demotions on employees who object to discrimination. Exploits Asian women in its sweatshops in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth. Featherstone goes on to reveal the creative solutions that Wal-Mart workers around the country have found, like fighting for unions, living-wage ordinances, and childcare options. "Selling Women Short" combines the personal stories of these employees with superb investigative journalism to show why women who work these low-wage jobs are getting a raw deal, and what they are doing about it. A new preface to the paperback edition will reflect on Wal-Mart's response to this lawsuit and its critics-including this one.

United Students Against Sweatshops heads a wave of anti-sweatshop organizing that has reached over two hundred American college campuses in the past four years. From the northeast to the southwest, at public and private, large and small universities, their campaigns have wreaked havoc on the corporate campus and ruffled multinational companies whose profits depend on young consumers; they have also led to a more broadly based engagement with issues of social justice and provide a potential model for transnational student/worker solidarity.

"Few of the countless real-life stories of workplace discrimination suffered by men and women every day are ever told publicly. This book boldly and eloquently rights that wrong, going where no plaintiff testimony could ever dare because these stories are often too raw, honest, ambiguous, and nuanced to be told in court or reported in a newspaper." from the Foreword Telling Stories out of Court reaches readers on both an intellectual and an emotional level, helping them to think about, feel, and share the experiences of women who have faced sexism and discrimination at work. It focuses on how the federal courts interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Offering insights that law texts alone cannot, the short stories collected here all but two written for this volume help readers concentrate on the emotional content of the experience with less emphasis on the particulars of the law. Grouped into thematic parts titled "In Their Proper Place," "Unfair Treatment," "Sexual Harassment," and "Hidden Obstacles," the narratives are combined with interpretive commentary and legal analysis that anchor the book by revealing the impact this revolutionary law had on women in the workplace.At the same time, the stories succeed on their own terms as compelling works of fiction, from "LaKeesha's Job Interview," in which a woman's ambition to move from welfare to work faces an ironic obstacle, to "Plato, Again," in which a woman undergoing treatment for cancer finds her career crumble under her, to "Vacation Days," which takes the reader inside the daily routine of a nanny who works at the whim of her employer."