Coital Experience Among Adolescents in Three Social-Educational Groups in Urban Chiang Mai, Thailand

This article compares coital experience of Chiang Mai 17-20-year-olds who were: (1) out-of-school; (2) studying at vocational schools; and (3) studying at general schools or university. Four-fifths, two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of males in these groups had had intercourse, compared to 53, 62 and 15 per cent of females. The gender difference for general school/university students, but not vocational school students, probably reflects HIV/AIDS refocusing male sexual initiation away from commercial sex workers. Vocational school females may have been disproportionately affected. Loss of virginity was associated, for both sexes, with social-educational background and lifestyle, and was less likely in certain minority ethnic groups. Among males, it was also associated with age and parental marital dissolution, and among females, with independent living and parental disharmony. Within social-educational groups, lifestyle variables dominated, but among general school/university students, parental marital dissolution (for males) and disharmony (for females) were also important, and Chinese ethnicity deterred male sexual experimentation.     

From floating brothels to surburban semirespectability: two centuries of nonmarital pregnancy in Australia

The sexual revolution that through the 1950s and 1960s saw nonmarital fertility and marital childbearing following premarital conception rise rapidly in Australia, especially among women in their teens and early twenties, received considerable research attention. Now, in the mid-1990s, childbearing following nonmarital pregnancy has assumed a very different character. The pregnant teenaged bride is almost a thing of the past, and nonmarital births occur mainly at normative reproductive ages within consensual unions. Similar trends have occurred in other developed countries, but Australia boasts an unusual precedent for this new phase, in that during its early years of colonial settlement, convictism also gave rise to widespread childbearing within consensual unions. This precedent and the distinctive circumstances that produced it are explored in the context of tracing the full and varied history of fertility associated with nonmarital coitus in Australia.     

TOIL AND TROUBLE: THE REFORM OF THE LABOR LAW

Reform of the labor law has been proposed to alleviate allegedly defective procedures and remedies in the present law. In spite of the fact that numerous violations and abuses of the existing law have taken place over the last several years and that the provisions of the existing law have been inadequate to prevent these violations and abuses, Congress has been unable to pass meaningful reform measures to deal effectively with those inadequacies. The present law allows for long delays in the settling of cases involving alleged unfair labor practices and has become, in the minds of many, a sham which does not protect the rights of workers and, indeed, allows employers to engage in unfair labor practices with very little fear of the consequences. Proponents of labor law reform argue that changes are needed to furnish adequate guarantees that the existing labor law will be effective. The lively debate in Congress over the issue of labor law reform demonstrates that it is one of the most controversial and important questions facing the nation today. Some argue that unless effective reform measures are adopted, workers will continue to labor under the existing ineffective system.