2 Resources Short Assignment #3 Adrian Paris Paterson, Stephanie. "(Re)Constructing women's resistance to woman abuse.

e." Critical Social Policy Vol. 29 No. 1 (2009): 121-45. This paper was published by Critical Social Policy, a branch of SAGE Publications, an independent international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media. The author, Stephanie Paterson, is currently an assistant professor in the Political Science department of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She 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. 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) along with more recent statistics, and explores how effective anti-violence policies and the related infrastructure is in enabling women to use publicly provided services in times of distress or abuse, as opposed to private alternatives, or none at all. Paterson argues that most publicly provided services are in need for reform, and that there are even cases of women who choose not to leave their abusive partners, due to certain financial constraints. According to Paterson, some other causes of the continuation of violence in relationships can be attributed to issues with the police response infrastructure when it comes to issues of abuse, and the manner in which the behaviour of women in abusive relationships tends to viewed as the problem as opposed to the behaviour of the men.

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. An issue I found with this article, is that the author does not acknowledge that resistance might not be a suitable litmus test for all issues of policy success or failure, but seems to generalize total effectiveness for this research. 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. This paper was published by Critical Social Policy, a branch of SAGE Publications, an independent international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media. The author, 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, 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) Brodie is very critical of recent social trends among Canadians that casts gender as being irrelevant, as well as neoliberal policy that has brought about disastrous changes in the accepted family and societal values. 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. (Brodie, 152) This paper has been written in a scholarly manner, and seems to be free of any bias. The author does not seem to have any apparent affiliations with any interest groups, and is affiliated with a well-known academic institution: University of Alberta. This paper has been peerreviewed, 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 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, peerreviewed resources of such quality that draw parallels between violence against women and their financial circumstances. I understand that raw statistical data is valuable, but peer-reviewed scholarly journals are much more suited to this project. 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 also link the document to academic papers, and debates regarding the above issues.