Responding to staff concerns about anti-social behaviour among students (n ¼ 311, 50.5% boys, age range 13 -16 years) at a low socio-economic Adelaide metropolitan school, we investigated victimisation and bullying and associated patterns of thinking. Two instruments were administered: the How I Think Questionnaire, which measures self-serving cognitive distortions; and the Bullying Experiences Questionnaire, which requires students to rate victimisation and bullying. The study revealed that: levels of distorted thinking were high; the most frequent forms of victimisation and bullying were verbal, indirect and physical; there were low levels of more extreme forms of victimisation and bullying; and there were higher levels of cognitive distortions among bullies and bully-victims. The research confirms the role of distorted thinking in the enactment of anti-social and bullying behaviours and provides a contemporary update of the types of victimisation/bullying in an Australian secondary school in 2011. Implications for interventions using social-cognitive approaches are addressed.
Loyalty between soldiers is idealized as an emotion that promotes cohesion and combat effectiveness. However, little empirical work has examined how military personnel understand, feel, and enact loyalty. We use a symbolic interactionalist informed frame to explore the lived experience of 24 retired Australian Defence Force members via in-depth semi-structured interviews. Our analysis revealed three core themes: (1) Loyalty as reciprocity, where there was an expectation that loyalty would be returned no matter what. (2) The importance of emotional connection for cohesion. (3) Loyalty as a prioritizing process, where a soldier’s loyalties gave them a way of choosing between competing demands. Loyalty is a moral emotion that enabled sensemaking. Close interpersonal loyalties tended to trump wider/diffused loyalties. Respondents understood their loyalties to fellow soldiers within wider social constructs of mateship and professionalism. The findings show the risks that come from a reliance on loyalty for combat cohesion.
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has recently undergone the most comprehensive review of its organizational culture since federation. Western militaries across the USA, Canada and the UK are similarly engaged. Military misconduct, including rape, assault and the long traditions of hazing and bastardization, have been increasingly exposed, engaging civil society, agitating government and undermining military integrity. The Skype Affair is described as a particularly important military misconduct scandal that brought these relations, and ruling relations more specifically, into focus. The article describes the contest over democratic control of the armed forces initiated when the jurisdictions and authority of the Defence Minister, the Chief of Defence and the Commandant of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) converged over the management of this military scandal. This article looks at how relations between Australian civil society, the military and the state are affected by the varying engagements of these sectors with the question of violence in the military and, subsequently, military modernization. The news-mediated discourse is one that highlights the structural split of civilmilitary relations, between two white masculinized institutions in a context of distinct cultural divergence over the rule of nation.
The inclusion of men and masculinities in gender and development policies and practices has emerged in the last decade as a critical component for achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. This article analyses the contemporary character and progress towards ‘men‐streaming’ of gender and development, and argues that implicit in any action towards gender equality and working with men is the requirement to base action on a clear understanding of the politics of masculinities and the relational aspects of gender equity and equality.
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