scholarly journals Global perspectives on physical and nonphysical discipline: A Bayesian multilevel analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 016502542098164
Author(s):  
Andrew Grogan-Kaylor ◽  
Berenice Castillo ◽  
Garrett T. Pace ◽  
Kaitlin P. Ward ◽  
Julie Ma ◽  
...  

Background and Objective: Sixty countries worldwide have banned the use of physical punishment, yet little is known about the association of physical and nonphysical forms of child discipline with child development in a global context. The objective of this study is to examine whether physical punishment and nonphysical discipline are associated with child socioemotional functioning in a global sample of families from 62 countries and whether country-level normativeness of physical punishment and nonphysical discipline moderated those associations. Methods: Data for this study are from 215,885 families in the fourth and fifth rounds of the United Nations Children’s Fund Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. Bayesian multilevel logistic models were used to analyze the associations of physical punishment and nonphysical discipline (i.e., taking away privileges and verbal reasoning) with three different outcomes representing children’s socioemotional functioning: getting along well with other children, aggression, and becoming distracted. Results: The use of physical punishment was not associated with getting along with other children, was associated with increased aggression, and was associated with increases in distraction. Taking away privileges was associated with lower levels of getting along with other children, higher levels of aggression, and higher levels of becoming distracted. Verbal reasoning (i.e., explaining why a behavior was wrong) was associated with higher levels of getting along with other children, higher levels of aggression, and higher levels of becoming distracted. Country-level normativeness moderated some of these associations but in general the direction of effects was consistent. Conclusions: Results suggest that eliminating physical punishment would benefit children across the globe and align with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls for all children to be free from physical violence. More attention needs to be focused on the associations of nonphysical forms of discipline with child functioning across the globe.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172097433
Author(s):  
Svanhildur Thorvaldsdottir ◽  
Ronny Patz ◽  
Klaus H Goetz

In recent decades, many international organizations have become almost entirely funded by voluntary contributions. Much existing literature suggests that major donors use their funding to refocus international organizations’ attention away from their core mandate and toward serving donors’ geostrategic interests. We investigate this claim in the context of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), examining whether donor influence negatively impacts mandate delivery and leads the organization to direct expenditures more toward recipient countries that are politically, economically, or geographically salient to major donors. Analyzing a new dataset of UNHCR finances (1967–2016), we find that UNHCR served its global mandate with considerable consistency. Applying flexible measures of collective donor influence, so-called “influence-weighted interest scores,” our findings suggest that donor influence matters for the expenditure allocation of the agency, but that mandate-undermining effects of such influence are limited and most pronounced during salient refugee situations within Europe.


Youth Justice ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 147322542110228
Author(s):  
Jo Staines ◽  
Nadia Aghtaie ◽  
Jessica Roy

Using the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) in Iran as an illustration, this article explores the continued resistance against girls’ rights in some Islamic countries. The gendered construction of childhood in Iran has resulted in a differential MACR, which for boys is notably higher than that recommended by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, yet for girls is unacceptably low. While breaches of girls’ rights in other areas are defended on the grounds of paternalistic concerns, it is argued that the MACR is a religious-politico decision that, in Iran, upholds the rights of boys but denies the rights of girls, propagating their wider subjugation.


Author(s):  
Gerison Lansdown ◽  
Roberta Ruggiero ◽  
Ziba Vaghri ◽  
Jean Zermatten

AbstractThis publication is one of the outcomes of over a decade of work, under the auspices of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, to explore how to monitor and evaluate States Parties’ compliance with the obligations they undertook when they ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention). A full account of the project work to date has been provided in Vaghri, Krappmann, and Doek’s article ‘From the Indicators of General Comment No. 7 to GlobalChild’ (2019). Grounded in that foundational work, this book relies on that project work to provide a conceptual framing of the Convention, through the identification of the attributes of each right that provides the basis for the development of indicators against which to measure progress.


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