This paper investigates the relationship between school-based sex education policies and sexual health-related statistics of young 1 people in four developed countries: the Netherlands, France, Australia, and the United States of America. Drawing upon literature searches in relevant CD-ROM databases, Internet websites, government reports and libraries, school-based sex education policies and a range of sexual health indicators for young people are described for each country. While the average age of first intercourse is approximately the same for each country, the analysis indicates that those countries with pragmatic and sex positive government policies (France, Australia and especially the Netherlands) have better sexual health-related statistics than the one country with a primarily sexual abstinence-based policy (the United States). The findings suggest that abstinence-based policies do not necessarily result in improved sexual health outcomes for young people. Furthermore, liberal policies do not necessarily 'promote' sexual activity and may serve to better equip young people with skills that enable sexual health sustaining behaviours. Although a causal relationship between school-based sex education policies and sexual health outcomes cannot be proved, the analysis does suggest that young people's reproductive and sexual health is best served when sex between young people is acknowledged, accepted and regulated rather than proscribed in all contexts outside marriage.
This paper systematically reviews evidence about factors associated with harmful alcohol use amongst forcibly displaced persons, including refugees and internally displaced persons. Bibliographic and humanitarian-related databases were searched. The number of quantitative and qualitative studies that were screened and reviewed was 1108. Only 10 studies met inclusion criteria. Risk factors identified included gender, age, exposure to traumatic events and resulting posttraumatic stress disorder, prior alcohol consumption-related problems, year of immigration, location of residence, social relations, and postmigration trauma and stress. The evidence base was extremely weak, and there is a need to improve the quantity and quality of research about harmful alcohol use by forcibly displaced persons.
This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.
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