Women's Empowerment Through Access to Safe Transport: The Impact of Sexual and Nonsexual Victimization on Female Commuters in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

An examination of women's experience on public transport in Bangladesh and Cambodia found that victimization does reduce perceived safety or transport use. In a cultural context where women are socialized to fear and avoid public spaces, experiencing victimization may confirm rather than change previous beliefs. Moreover, it is possible that the participants' use of public transport was driven by necessity rather than choice and that they were unable to change travel patterns in response to victimization. These findings underscore the importance of targeting public violence toward women and the broader societal norms that limit their participation in public life.

The movement and translation of drug policy ideas: The case of 'new recovery'.

INTRODUCTION: 'New recovery' can be conceptualised as both a social movement and a broader policy agenda to restructure treatment service systems towards 'recovery-oriented systems of care'. Emerging initially out of the United States, new recovery has gained currency as a policy agenda in other jurisdictions - perhaps most distinctly in the United Kingdom. In 2012, the ideas behind 'new recovery' were debated in the Australian alcohol and other drug field as the Victorian government sought to incorporate recovery principles into policy and service design. This paper uses the policy transfer and policy translation literature to understand how international policy ideas about 'new recovery' were negotiated in the Australian context, focusing specifically on the role of non-government actors in the process. METHODS: This paper draws on an analysis of policy documents, organisational documents and interviews with representatives from the Australian non-government alcohol and other drug sector to consider how new recovery was translated into Victorian drug policy. RESULTS: The interactions between organisations and actors - including bureaucrats, governmental agencies and policy entrepreneurs - facilitated the circulation and translation of policy ideas in the Victorian context. Despite this, the analysis suggests that policy transfer was largely a symbolic exercise: overall, some of the key features of new recovery policy from the United States and the United Kingdom, such as encouraging peer-led recovery and mutual aid, were not incorporated in the Victorian policy. NGOs resisted what they considered to be some of the more problematic elements of 'new recovery', and informed the local translation of the policy. DISCUSSION: The results have implications for understandings of the relationship between social movements, non-government organisations and the state, as well as the dynamics of knowledge transfer in drug policy.

Representations of women and drug use in policy: A critical policy analysis.

Contemporary research in the drugs field has demonstrated a number of gender differences in patterns and experiences of substance use, and the design and provision of gender-responsive interventions has been identified as an important policy issue. Consequently, whether and how domestic drug policies attend to women and gender issues is an important question for investigation. This article presents a policy audit and critical analysis of Australian national and state and territory policy documents. It identifies and discusses two key styles of problematisation of women's drug use in policy: 1) drug use and its effect on women's reproductive role (including a focus on pregnant women and women who are mothers), and 2) drug use and its relationship to women's vulnerability to harm (including violent and sexual victimisation, trauma, and mental health issues). Whilst these are important areas for policy to address, we argue that such representations of women who use drugs tend to reinforce particular understandings of women and drug use, while at the same time contributing to areas of 'policy silence' or neglect. In particular, the policy documents analysed are largely silent about the harm reduction needs of all women, as well as the needs of women who are not mothers, young women, older women, transwomen or other women deemed to be outside of dominant normative reproductive discourse. This analysis is important because understanding how women's drug use is problematised and identifying areas of policy silence provides a foundation for redressing gaps in policy, and for assessing the likely effectiveness of current and future policy approaches.

Governing drug use through partnerships: Towards a genealogy of government/non-government relations in drug policy.

Drug policy in Australia is underpinned by the idea of partnerships wherein the non-government sector is one important partner in both delivering services and contributing to policy and decision-making processes. This article presents a genealogy of the concept of government/non-government 'partnerships', tracing its emergence and development within drug policy discourse in Australia. We find that the rise of neo-liberal policies since the 1980s has been a key factor facilitating the emergence of government/non-government 'partnerships' rhetoric in drug policy. Since the 1980s, the role of non-government organisations (NGOs) in drug policy has been articulated in relation to 'community' responsibilisation in contrast to the welfarist reliance on expert intervention. We link the rise of this rhetoric with the neo-liberal turn to governing through community and the individualisation of social problems. Furthermore, although we find that governments on the whole have encouraged the service delivery and policy work of NGOs at least in policy rhetoric, the actions of the state have at times limited the ability of NGOs to perform advocacy work and contribute to policy. Constraints on NGO drug policy work could potentially compromise the responsiveness of drug policy systems by limiting opportunities for innovative policy-making and service delivery.