The social movements of #metoo and #notokay illuminated the extent of sexual violence. By providing a safe platform the movement enabled victims/survivors opportunity to share their own experiences of victimization, often in a delayed disclosure, years after the violence occurred. With new disclosures of sexual violence, also comes a growing awareness of the lasting impact and the requirement to take steps to improve responses to sexual violence across the social and clinical spectrum to address and respond to victims/survivors' holistic needs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychiatric and mental health (PMH) nurses integrate the concept of trauma-informed care into practice, policy, and education. Despite the frequency of PMH nurses practicing in a trauma-informed manner, there is a paucity of literature focused on integrating trauma-informed principles into research methods. Professions outside of the nursing sphere, specifically social work and social sciences, predominate the discourse around trauma-informed research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Medical invalidation is a well-documented phenomenon in the literature on chronic illnesses, yet there is a paucity of research capturing the perspectives of young adults living with chronic illnesses, and especially of those who are gender diverse or from groups that face broader societal marginalization. Our study sought to answer the following question: How do young women and nonbinary adults living with chronic illnesses characterize their experiences of medical invalidation and its impact on their health and well-being?
Methods: This was a patient-oriented qualitative study informed by feminist disability theory. Eligibility requirements included self-identifying as having a chronic illness, self-identifying as a woman or nonbinary person receiving health care in Manitoba, and being between the ages of 18 and 35 years.
In Northern Karnataka, South India, boys' behaviours and attitudes towards girls are regarded as one of the many important proximate structural barriers impeding girls' access to education and academic performance in rural communities. In response to these barriers, public health practitioners developed an intervention, known as the Parivartan program, to confront the wider social and structural influences that shape adolescent boys' perspectives on gender relationships and practices that subjugate adolescent girls. Drawing upon a project ethnography approach, this study presents the findings from two phases of research conducted between 2014 and 2016 among adolescent boys who participated in the Parivartan program.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Transgender people (those people whose sex at birth does not "match" their felt gender identity) are a priority group for healthcare as they experience high rates of discrimination and related illnesses. Despite this, there is a trend of poor healthcare access for trans people due, in large part, to the denial of care on the part of physicians. A small body of literature is beginning to suggest that this denial of care may be due to a lack of physician knowledge as well as, in some cases, to transphobia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmidst a barrage of policy documents, bio-medical research, and press items concerned with the "crisis" of obesity, a growing scholarship is concerned with what has come to be known as "obesity stigma." This scholarship hails from a range of sources including critical obesity scholars who problematize the idea of obesity as a health concern, as well as from "mainstream" organizations and researchers who, while maintaining obesity is a world-wide health problem, also argue that "obese" people are the targets of discrimination. In this paper, we analyze both interpretations of obesity stigma, particularly as that stigma applies to obese women's experiences of accessing and receiving reproductive care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResting on the notion that rural spaces are "food deserts," rural adolescents are increasingly regarded as a "problem population" in Western obesity narratives. Using qualitative data gleaned from interviews with 51 teenage participants from rural areas across Canada, this paper focuses on the ways in which obesity is constructed as a rural disease in the Canadian context, demonstrating in particular how discourses of food deserts and related rural obesity rely on classist imaginings of obesity as a working-class embodiment. The paper will further question the understanding of the rural as a food desert, showing the ways in which rural teens acquire fresh, healthy foods in part through an informal economy of food growing and sharing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecently, public health agents and the popular media have argued that rising levels of obesity are due, in part, to "obesogenic" environments, and in particular to the clustering of fast food establishments in Western urban centers that are poor and working class. Our findings from a multi-site, cross-national qualitative study of teenaged Canadians' eating practices in urban and rural areas offer another perspective on this topic, showing that fast food consumption is not simply a function of the location of fast food outlets, and that Canadian teens engage in complex ways with the varied dimensions of choosing (or rejecting) fast foods. Drawing on evidence gleaned from semi-structured interviews with 132 teenagers (77 girls and 55 boys, ages 13-19 years) carried out between 2007 and 2009, we maintain that no easy relationship exists between the geographical availability of fast food and teen eating behaviors.
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