Throughout history, runaways have persisted as a formidable presence on the social landscape. Leaving behind families and friends for any number of reasons, these youths are quickly and almost invariably exposed to the brutal reality of a harsh life on the streets. Idealized images of adventure-loving adolescents seeking an escape from the monotony of suburban life are quickly replaced by the more…
The label gang has been applied to various groups including outlaws of the nineteenth-century American West, prison inmates, Mafioso and other organized criminals, motorcyclists, and groups of inner city youths. Despite its diverse application, the term gang almost always connotes involvement in disreputable or illegal activities. Social scientists use the term gang most frequently when describing…
Unemployment is widely regarded as a major social and economic global problem. When referring to someone as unemployed, most people have in mind a state consistent with the International Labour Office's (ILO) definition, namely a person who does not have a job, is available for work, and is actively looking for work (ILO 1998). This is certainly the case for government agencies, like the Bu…
Although conflict in families has been a consistent theme in world literature since ancient times, elder abuse did not surface as a social problem until the mid-1970s, first identified in British literature, followed soon after in the United States and Canada. During the next decade several European countries and Australia began publishing reports on elder mistreatment. By the 1990s elder abuse re…
The passage from life to death should be serene and dignified, not an agonizing ordeal. This conception of eu (good) thanasia (death) is expressed in the term itself as it comes from Greek antiquity. A serene death might be achieved through skilled and compassionate care, as well as by the dying person's own sense of having lived a righteous life. There were circumstances, however, in which…
Families are widely recognized as the "most basic institution within any society, because it is within [families] that citizens are born, sheltered, and begin their socialization" (Ambert 2001, p. 4). The importance and centrality of family is accepted across cultures. Families both influence and are influenced by the wider societies in which they exist. Violent societal-level confli…
Women's movements are among the most global of modern social movements. From nineteenth-century Canadian women's suffrage campaigns to recent direct actions for sustainable development in India, wherever women's movements have been established, national organizations and local grassroots groups have worked together for the interests of women and girls. Varied, even conflicting…
Society places a heavy burden on families by assigning responsibility for childrearing to parents. Families must transmit values so as to lead children to accept rules that they are likely to perceive as arbitrary. It should be no surprise, therefore, to find that family life bears a strong relation to juvenile delinquency. Family life can be viewed from three general perspectives. The first is st…
Abortion is one of the most difficult, controversial, and painful subjects in modern society. The principal controversy revolves around the questions of who makes the decision concerning abortion, the individual or the state; under what circumstances it may be done; and who is capable of making the decision. Medical questions such as techniques of abortion are less controversial but are sometimes …
Historically and culturally, sexual relationships rarely have been granted a place independent of the social, emotional, familial, generational, economic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience. That may be why the idea of premarital abstinence will continue to be a feature of philosophy and practice, even though many avenues of sexual involvement seem to be expanding in contemporary Western…
When people hear the word rape, it often conjures a mental image: perhaps a stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes at night and forcing a woman to engage in sexual intercourse. Defining rape is no easy matter, however. Definitions come from the law, the media, research, and political activism. Even within any one of these domains, definitions vary. Historically, in English common law, rap…
Incest is the sexual exploitation of a person who is legally unable to give informed consent due to age, intellect, and/or physical impairment by an older person having a close family blood tie (e.g., parent, grandparent, sibling, aunt, uncle, or cousin) or a substitute for such a blood tie (e.g., stepparent, stepbrother, or stepsister). In short, incest can be defined as the sexual exploitation o…
The incest taboo is one of the oldest and most perplexing mysteries encountered by students of human society. Historically, western scholars believed that the incest taboo—long proposed as a cultural universal—is vital to understanding the human condition. Thus, interest in the incest taboo has an extensive history. Although the incest taboo varies in meaning by society, it is freque…
Over the past two decades, violence by an intimate partner has become identified throughout the world as a serious physical and mental health concern. Spouse abuse, in particular, was recognized, at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 as a human rights concern worldwide. Various terms are used to characterize the violence between intimate partners. For example terms such a…
Infanticide is the deliberate killing of infants under the age of one year. This restricted definition conceptualizes infanticide as a postnatal abortion procedure rather than as a type of child abuse. Infanticide and abortion are often used as family planning mechanisms, carried out to protect the health of unweaned children, the family economy, or the mother's social standing. Information…
The word suicide covers a wide range of behaviors, including (1) completed suicide; in which the individual dies as a result of the self-destructive act; (2) attempted suicide, in which the individual survives the act; and (3) suicidal ideation, which refers to the individual thinking about and planning suicidal behavior, but not putting these thoughts into action. A controversy exists over the te…
