What's the grand story? A macro-narrative analytical model and the case of Swiss child and adult protection policy

This paper expands on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by adding a theoretical and empirical exploration into macrolevel narratives. Existing NPF research largely neglects macrolevel narratives, which prevents the NPF from developing its full power. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) It provides a definition of macrolevel narratives by conceptualizing them as the “story form” of a policy paradigm. (2) It proposes a model and an empirical approach, which may lay the foundation for a standard macrolevel NPF approach. (3) It contributes to the NPF's aim of connecting the macro and meso level. The paper tests the model in a comparative multi-method design applied to the Swiss child and adult protection policy. The findings show that macrolevel NPF analysis helps understand where mesolevel policy debates come from, namely from an underlying paradigm and its effects on institutions and culture that enable and constrain macrolevel narratives.     

The naming of orphans in France during World War One: A study of a nationwide cohort of pupilles de la Nation

The investigation of a simple behavior, child naming, can provide insights into the varying reactions of families confronted by the extraordinary war losses of the First World War. The current study analyses names given in a large cohort of French orphans born 1914–1916, constructed thanks to the linkage of civil registers with a nationwide database of soldiers who died during the War. It shows that a prenatal loss of father was associated with a strong increase in father's name transmission. The phenomenon was twice as intense in officers' offspring. Regression analysis suggests the precise timing of the father's death controlled this change in naming behavior: father's name transmission was at a maximum when the father died at the very beginning of pregnancy.     

‘And now imagine her or him as a slave,a pitiful slave with no rights’: child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine

This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, who were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forced labour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In her analysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forced labour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propaganda tasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in its aftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries, above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as a new war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters' ‘territory of memory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, there were socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, and the first steps were taken towards institutionalising Ostarbeiter associations. This, in turn, facilitated the process of analysing the construction and presentation of the image of the child Ostarbeiter on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional support, public interest and scholarly research that is taking place in contemporary Ukraine.     

A Review of the Evidence for Melanoma in Nine Inca Mummies

An often cited statement in the medical literature is that nine Inca mummies (c.400 bc ) had skin and osseous lesions from melanoma. However, a review of the pattern and type of osseous lesions exhibited by these individuals and the age of at least one of them indicate the data are inconsistent with a diagnosis of melanoma. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Human Remains and Funerary Rites in the Phoenician Necropolis of Motya (Sicily)

The aim of this paper is to examine the fresh evidence retrieved in the early cemetery or ‘archaic necropolis’ (eighth to sixth century bc ) on the island of Motya, one of the main Phoenician colonies in the Mediterranean. Because of its integrity and the large number of finds, the cemetery has been considered one of the most relevant sites for the study of early burial customs in the West. The absence of anthropological data, completely neglected in the past, was a major shortcoming of previous research. This failing is now being rectified by a new project of fieldwork and excavation undertaken on the island by a team from Palermo University. This report provides a close examination of the human remains from a group of 32 graves discovered during three seasons (2013–2015) in a combined archaeological and taphonomic perspective and contributes to shed light on the funerary practices of the Phoenicians in Sicily. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creating New Schools for Bradford’s ‘Factory Children’: Obstacles and Outcomes, 1836–1850

Industrialization brought extensive factory development to northern English counties during the early nineteenth century, with new cotton, wool and worsted mills that employed many child workers. By 1840, some 1800 children, aged less than thirteen, worked in mills across the widespread Bradford parish – mostly in the central townships and predominantly in the worsted trade. Under the 1833 Factory Act, these factory children were restricted to forty-eight hours work per week and were required to attend school two hours each day. Available school provision was often poor and ill-adapted to mill-working hours. After delays, diversions and sustained lobbying, new Bradford schools – under the auspices of the ‘National Schools Society’ but specially targeted on factory children – started to come into being, soon reaching an attendance of some 1000 children. One of these schools – in a new, hastily constructed, building – gained recognition as a ‘model factory school’. Despite the perceived deficiencies of the 1833 Act, despite opposition and despite recurrent difficulties over finance, the 1833 legislation gave ‘leverage’ that, in Bradford, generated a new pattern of schooling.     

Earning their keep: child workers at the Birmingham Asylum for the Infant Poor, 1797–1852

This article examines the attitudes of the Guardians of the Poor in Birmingham towards childhood and child labour from the end of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Utilising minutes of meetings for the Birmingham Asylum for the Infant Poor, it finds that children were removed from the workhouse to separate accommodation with workshops sited on the premises so that children as young as five years old could become economic contributors to their own welfare. It argues that over the course of five decades, pauper children made significant contributions to Birmingham finances.     

Time,temporality, and woman–child relations

This is the second in a series of Viewpoints about a symposium on the intersections and antagonisms between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This article traces the various ways in which time and temporality were mobilised in symposium papers and discussions and considers the implications for efforts to conceptualise woman–child relations. In conclusion, the potentials and risks of focusing on temporality when theorising relations between those positioned as women and those positioned as children are considered.     

Girl soldiers with Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda fighting for survival: experiences of young women abducted by LRA

For this study the narratives of 16 young women who had served as child soldiers with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda were collected. They had spent between 2 months and 16 years in captivity before managing to escape. All of them spent time at the Gulu Support the Children Organization Rehabilitation centre, from which 12 had moved back into their communities. The narratives start with their capture, the time with the LRA, the escape and the returning and reintegrating. Even though the narratives included appalling stories about the time in captivity, the participants expressed hope for the future and focused on giving their children a good start in life. We used Antonovsky’s theories about ‘sense of coherence’ coupled with resilience theory to discern the factors that helped these young women cope. The participants all managed to leave captivity. We have no comparative information about those who are still in captivity.     

Effects of mothers’ deaths on children’s schooling in Matlab subdistrict,Bangladesh

This quantitative analysis examines evidence for the impacts of mothers’ death on the schooling of their left-behind children (ages 6–17 years) in the Matlab Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) area of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. The analysis compared the completed levels of primary and junior secondary schooling in 2005 (respectively Class 1 among ages 6–17, Class 5 among ages 12–17 and Class 7 among ages 15–17) of children whose mothers had died during 1982–2005 (from maternal and/or nonmaternal causes, and any cause) with the completed schooling of children of surviving mothers in 2005. The results, after controlling for selected socioeconomic variables, indicate that children whose mothers had died had lower completion of schooling levels, and that those children from poorer households fared worst.