Paterson, Stephanie. "(Re)Constructing women's resistance to woman abuse." Critical Social Policy Vol. 29 No. 1 (2009): 121-45.

This paper was published by Critical Social Policy, a branch of SAGE Publications, which is a major database of Political Science literature. The author, Stephanie Paterson, earned a PhD in public policy from the school of public policy and administration at Carleton University, Canada. She specializes in feminist policy studies and has published in the areas of Canadian family policy, midwifery legislation, and conjugal violence against women. She is currently an assistant professor in the Political Science department of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. This paper looks at the policies adopted against womens violence and abuse in Canada, and the resistance of women towards anti-woman abuse policy in Canada. The author uses the Canadian General Social Survey on Victimization (1999), and explores how effective these policies are in enabling women to use publicly provided services, as opposed to private alternatives, or still worse, none at all. Paterson argues that most publicly provided services are in need for reform, for example, in the case of women who do not want to leave their abusive partners. The issues of the continuation of violence in relationships is attributed to issues with the police response infrastructure to issues of abuse, and even more pressing, the financial constraints facing these women who are in abusive relationships.

The argument that single women are not able to maintain an acceptable standard of living, and thus are forced to remain in abusive relationships, is very frightening and policy must be created to fight such violence against women. There does not seem to be any particular bias in this paper, and the author does not seem to have any apparent affiliations with any interest groups. This paper has been peer reviewed, and well documented with scholarly sources, showing that it is an acceptable piece of scholarship with high academic standards. This paper offers a scholarly perspective of the policies regarding violence against women in the Canadian context, as it considers the failures within the current policy by examining womens resistance to the current infrastructure and policies adopted by different levels of the Canadian government.

Brodie, Janine. "We are all equal now: Contemporary gender politics in Canada." SAGE Publications Vol.9 No.2 (2008): 145-64. Janine Brodie is a Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters and several books on the politics of gender in Canada. This article focuses on the equality (not only procedural, but substantive equality) of women in policy decisions among the different levels of government within Canada, and examines changes in policy based on changes in political parties and the advent of neoliberalism. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick eld of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node of social liberalism became a critical eld of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. (Brodie, 145) The author is very critical of recent social trends among Canadians that casts gender as being irrelevant and neoliberal policy that has brought about disastrous changes in the accepted family and societal values, resulting in negative policy changes. The author is very familiar with the problems facing gender politics over the last couple decades, due to the neoliberal policies within the Canadian system, and concludes that these problems may no longer be rendered visible through the lens of social liberalism or the language of citizenship equality, but they also cannot be contained or sublimated by the conceits of the neoliberal project.

This paper has been written in a scholarly manner, and appears to be relatively free of obvious bias. The publisher of this source seems to be neutral, and simply reflects various voices within the academic sector. The author does not seem to have any apparent affiliations with any interest groups, and is affiliated with a well-known academic institution. This paper has been peer reviewed, and well documented with scholarly sources, showing that it is an acceptable piece of scholarship with high academic standards and is a worthy source for any academic publication. This paper offers a scholarly perspective of the policies regarding women in the Canadian context, by evaluating the effect of government expenditures that are targeted towards women who actually need government help, particularly aboriginal women, victims of abuse, and the elderly. (Brodie, 159) For my group project in the FAFIA group, I will have to gain more scholarly, peer reviewed resources that draw parallels between violence against women and their financial circumstances. Furthermore, I will need to collect resources that evaluate the current policies in place to prevent violence against women, and examine the successes and failures of such policies. I will also find more academic sources relating to education, employment and violence of women in Canada, which will allow our group to provide FAFIA with much more than a mere statistical update of their document, but a broader connection that reflects academic papers and debate of the above issues.