Search results for ""Author Bernard Schissel""

Canada is a signatory on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which guarantees the protection and care of children and youth. About Canada: Children and Youth examines each of the rights within the Canadian context – and finds Canada wanting. Schissel argues that although our expressed desire is to protect and care for our children, the reality is that young people, in Canada and around the world, often lack basic human rights. The lives of young people are steeped in abuse from the education and justice systems, exploitation by corporations, ill health and poverty. And while the hearts of Canadians go out to youth in distant countries suffering under oppressive circumstances, those same hearts often have little sympathy for the suffering of youth, particularly disadvantaged youth, within Canada. This book explores our contradictory views and argues that we must do more to ensure that the rights of the child are upheld.

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The media-enhanced moral panic surrounding youth has continued unabated over the past two decades. Its form and substance varies, but the politics of blaming and exploiting children underlies it all. Despite the reality that rates for most youth crime have gone down, the public condemnation of youth, especially through the news media, continue unabated, and the position of children and youth in our societies is still as precarious as ever. Put bluntly, the lives of too many children and youth are fraught with potential danger. Not only are they the victims of excessive legal scrutiny and scapegoats for panic-driven public policy, but they also go off to war proportionately more than adults and they work at unskilled jobs for no benefits and insultingly low wages. Children and youth live outside the protections of human rights. STILL Blaming Children, an expanded and updated version of Blaming Children, shows how "getting tough" on young offenders ignores the reality of their lives and the reality of their misconduct. The book ends by describing more humane and mindful alternatives for youth offenders, based on the human rights our children deserve.

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This well-received criminology textbook, now in its third edition, argues that crime must be understood as both a social and a political phenomenon. Using this lens, Marginality and Condemnation contends that what is defined as criminal, how we respond to crime and why individuals behave in anti-social ways are often the result of individual and systemic social inequalities and disparities in power. Beginning with an overview of criminological discourse, mainstream approaches and new directions in criminological theory, the book is then divided into sections, based on key social inequalities of class, gender, race and age, each of which begins with an outline of the general issues for understanding crime and an introduction that guides readers through the empirical chapters that follow. The studies provide insights into general issues in criminology, ranging from the historical and current nature of crime and criminal justice to the various responses to criminality. Readers are encouraged and challenged to understand crime and justice through concrete analyses rather than abstract argumentation. In addition to a new introductory chapter that confronts how we define crime, measure crime, and understand and use criminology in this millennium, the third edition provides new chapters examining crime in relation to the environment, terrorism, masculinity, children and youth, and Aboriginal gangs and the legacy of colonialism. "

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