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Nearly every country has committed to protect children from work that could be harmful or interfere with their education by ratifying the International Labour Organization Minimum Age Convention (C138). Yet there is little transparency and accountability around whether countries have followed through on these commitments by passing legislation to protect children from work. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper reports on analyses conducted of child labor legislation from all 193 United Nations member states to determine whether countries that have committed to ending child labor have taken the first step by passing legislation to protect children and youth from: work that is likely to be hazardous, work that is likely to interfere with their education and work that is harmful to their healthy development.

Findings show one in five ratifiers legally allow children to do hazardous work, and a similar number permit admission to employment at a young age. Moreover, legislative loopholes significantly undermine the protections that do exist in many countries.

Existing reporting mechanisms sometimes obscure whether central legal protections are in place, make cross-country comparisons difficult and impede the analysis of possible relationships between policies and outcomes across countries. This paper illustrates a novel approach to provide transparency and accountability on whether countries are meeting child labor commitments by using quantitative, globally comparable policy indicators.

The questions posed for the national reporters for this International Seminar demonstrate the wide range of issues that can be included as part of an analysis of corporate social responsibility. Even limiting the discussion of corporate social responsibility to employment issues covers a broad scope, represented by the three general questions posed for this Seminar: (1) hiring policy; (2) personnel management policy; and social protection policy. Before entering this discussion of the three questions, though, it may be useful to step back to an even broader question of the meaning of the term, “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). The term, itself, carries an underlying assumption of the legitimacy of a particular economic system and its central actors; that is, corporations are central, legitimate, and functional actors in social relations within a capitalist economic structure. The concept of CSR does not question the existence of corporations and their role in maintaining a system of private ownership and control over capital. The fundamental goal of capitalism and corporations to maximize market control and profits remains intact. Policies favoring CSR, rather, seek to shape the conduct of corporations to increase socially responsible corporate practices, but do not challenge the legitimacy of corporate power. Such social responsibility may range from curbing human rights violations by corporations, such as violence against union organizers, to influencing corporations to provide decent wages to employees, to pressuring corporations to carry out business with out harming the environment. The recent attention to CSR may be understood as an expression of concern over the reduced effectiveness of individual nations to maintain the integrity of social welfare policy within current conditions of global power exercised by transnational corporations (TNC).

This study aims to explore the ways in which young people and prison staff (Prison Officers) within a youth custodial establishment experience empathy. Previous research tends to view empathy as a stable trait and one which people can develop through individual-centred therapy. There has been little consideration of the impact of relationship factors and context in relation to empathy experience and expression. The current study aims to address this by exploring the role of the custodial context in shaping empathy, including the potential impact of relationships, environmental factors and culture.

A qualitative approach was used to enable breadth and depth in the exploration of this area. Individual, semi-structured interviews were carried out with a purposive sample of three young people and three Prison Officers. Data was analysed using inductive thematic analysis informed by the guidelines of Braun and Clarke (2006) and King and Horrocks (2010).

Constructed themes included “constructions of empathy”, “recipe for empathy”, “institutional investment”, “the value of empathy” and “doing empathy”. Together, they provide detailed insight into the interplay of personal and wider contextual factors influencing the experience of empathy in a custodial setting. The findings suggest that the way in which young people and staff experience empathy in the custodial environment is unique. The findings suggest that empathy takes place within the context of relationships and is influenced by the nature of those relationships, along with the wider social context within which it occurs.

The findings of the current study support a move away from understanding empathy as an individual personality trait and instead viewing it as a dynamic experience that is changeable based upon the relationship and the context within which it occurs. The findings suggest that interventions aiming to develop empathy should look beyond the level of the individual and the relationship and focus upon developing environments that are supportive of empathy.

This study provides unique insights into the subjective experience of empathy in a custodial setting, presenting as one of the first to take a more holistic approach to understand this phenomenon.

This study using a prison sample to explore Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), socially dominant inmate behaviour, index offence, age and length of time served in secure environments. A sample of 397 adult male prisoners completed the Direct and Indirect Prisoner Behaviour Checklist‐ Scaled (prisoner behaviour towards other inmates and staff) and the Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) Scale. It was predicted that prisoners would report higher SDO than non‐incarcerated populations and that among inmates those with approach orientated index offences would be higher in SDO than those whose offenses were more remote. It was also predicted that SDO would be related to younger age, higher lifetime rates of incarceration, more negative behaviour towards other inmates and staff, and more resource focused behaviour. The results broadly supported predictions, and possible implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper examines the implications of the disability rights critique of prenatal testing on the development of genetic policy and abortion rights. It traces the reappearance of the disabled body in public deliberations over reproductive and genetic politics that use disability to frame arguments about which bodies are worthy of protection, how and why we limit reproductive choices, and what reasons women may use to terminate their pregnancies. The disability critique of prenatal testing and selective abortion finds itself in productive tension with reproductive rights politics, which increasingly features disability in both pro-life and pro-choice messages. The uneasy alliance between disability and pro-life interests has profound implications for both disability legal scholarship and the sociolegal inquiry into the role of rights articulation – and rejection – by social movements.

The vast bulk of the discourse surrounding reproduction is centered on women. Yet, the rate of childlessness in the United Kingdom (and much of the world) is higher among men. Recently, there has been an increased focus on fatherhood and fathering in academia, policy, practice, and the general media. However, data on men who do not become fathers has been excluded and their experiences minimized and dismissed. Infertility research has shown that failure to achieve the high social status of parenthood has the similar effects on mental and physical health as a diagnosis of life-threatening illness. In this chapter, I will draw on two qualitative research studies to show how not achieving the pronatalist ideal of parenthood impacts on men’s identity, sense of self, behaviors, health and well-being and social networks across the life course. The workplace is an arena where people who do not fit socio-cultural norms and expectations are overtly and/or covertly stigmatized and discriminated against through policy, working practices and everyday interaction between groups and individuals. I will argue that failing to acknowledge men’s experience of non-reproduction has a significant impact on both individuals and institutions alike.

This study aims to examine the scope and contribution of Forensic Clinical Psychology (FCP) advice from the National Crime Agency (NCA) to criminal investigations in the UK to address the gap in current knowledge and research.

The 36 FCP reports reviewed were written between 2017 and 2021. They were analysed using Toulmin’s (1958) application of pertinent arguments to the evaluation process. The potential utility of the reports was analysed in terms of the advice provided.

Most of the reports involved murder and equivocal death. The reports focused primarily on understanding the offender’s psychopathology, actions, motivation and risk to self and others using a practitioner model of case study methodology. Out of the 539 claims, grounds were provided for 99% of the claims, 91% had designated modality, 62% of the claims were potentially verifiable and 57% of the claims were supported by a warrant and/or backing. Most of the reports provided either moderate or high insight into the offence/offender (92%) and potential for new leads (64%).

The advice provided relied heavily on extensive forensic clinical and investigative experience of offenders, guided by theory and research and was often performed under considerable time pressure. Flexibility, impartiality, rigour and resilience are essential prerequisites for this type of work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically evaluate forensic clinical psychology reports from the NCA. It shows the pragmatic, dynamic and varied nature of FCP contributions to investigations and its potential utility.

LIBRARIES have come impressively into the public picture in the past year or two, and seldom with more effect than when Their Majesties the King and Queen opened the new Central Reference Library at Manchester on July 17th. In a time, which is nearly the end of a great depression, that the city which probably felt the depression more than any in the Kingdom should have proceeded with the building of a vast store‐house of learning is a fact of great social significance and a happy augury for libraries as a whole. His Majesty the King has been most felicitous in providing what we may call “slogans” for libraries. It will be remembered that in connection with the opening of the National Central Library, he suggested that it was a “University which all may join and which none need ever leave” —words which should be written in imperishable letters upon that library and be printed upon its stationery for ever. As Mr. J. D. Stewart said at the annual meeting of the National Central Library, it was a slogan which every public library would like to appropriate. At Manchester, His Majesty gave us another. He said: “To our urban population open libraries are as essential to health of mind, as open spaces to health of body.” This will be at the disposal of all of us for use. It is a wonderful thing that Manchester in these times has been able to provide a building costing £450,000 embodying all that is modern and all that is attractive in the design of libraries. The architect, Mr. Vincent Harris, and the successive librarians, Mr. Jast and Mr. Nowell, are to be congratulated upon the crown of their work.

During the COVID-19 pandemic people worldwide in the same household spent more time together and school children engaged in remote learning throughout extended lockdowns and restrictions. The present study aimed to explore parents' perceptions of their involvement and enjoyment in food-related interactions with their children during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-associated lockdowns/restrictions and changes in their children's food intake, especially children's lunches during the remote learning period.

Data from parents (n = 136) were collected via an online survey in 2020. Parents' responses to closed-ended questions were analysed via descriptive statistics and open-ended responses were analysed thematically.

Most parents (62%) reported that they interacted more with their school-aged (5–17 years) children about food during COVID-19 compared to pre-pandemic times. These interactions included cooking, menu planning, eating, conversations around food, and gardening. Most parents (74%) prepared meals with their children during the pandemic and most of them (89%) reported that they enjoyed it. Most parents (n = 91 out of 121) perceived that their children's lunches during remote learning were different to when attending school in person and these changes included eating hot and home-cooked food and more elaborate meals.

This study sheds important insights into a sample of Australian parents' food-related interactions with their school-aged children during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns and parents' observations and perceptions of changes in the children's food intake during the remote learning period.