Current Social Sciences - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2023

Women and access to justice are global issues, especially in patriarchal societies. There is a surprisingly small body of research on access to justice in the informal court system in patriarchal societies. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical qualitative study on a local court case and use the findings to provide a critical analysis of women and access to justice in the informal court setting in Ghana.

The exploratory qualitative research approach and phenomenological research design were used in the study, which followed Colaizzi's process of descriptive phenomenological data analysis. The study collected data from fifteen women who had used the informal court system to address their grievances using in-depth interviews and focus group discussions as data collection techniques. The data was collected via tape recording and then transcribed word for word.

The major themes that emerged from the research were as follows: (i) traditional gender roles as impediments to justice (ii) social harmony-based adjudication, and (iii) the social consequences of the court's decisions on the family households. Sub-themes are used to discuss these major themes. According to the findings, women cooking and taking care of children, behavioural socialisation norms, women as housewives, informal court decisions based on social harmony, masculine rulings, lack of appeal for cases, women experiencing marital divorce, and lack of enforcement for rulings were identified as significant factors influencing gender and access to justice among women in the informal court system.

Informal courts are accessible and affordable to women who do not have the privilege of using formal courts due to the cost involved; however, the courts' decisions are reconciliatory and do not provide women with equal access to justice. To provide fair justice to all people in rural communities, the informal courts should be integrated with the formal procedure. As a result of the findings, it is recommended that a comprehensive training programme for traditional court judges on land issues, inheritance, and family law, dispute resolution, as well as international human rights standards be implemented so they can handle cases in their respective jurisdictions.

Since the second half of 2021, the prices of natural gas, coal and oil have soared, but at the same time, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is likely to become a catalyst for Europe and the world to accelerate the green and low-carbon transformation of energy, prompting countries to accelerate investment in renewable energy, improve energy security and achieve energy independence and the energy crisis started in Europe and eventually spread around the world. Under the new circumstances, the global green and low-carbon energy transition is imperative. The International Energy Agency released the “2023 Global Electric Vehicle Outlook” report, which showed that global electric vehicle sales will grow by 35% in 2023 from the previous year to 14 million units, increasing the total share of the overall vehicle market to 18%. Replacing traditional fossil fuels with low energy consumption and low pollution has become a trend in the automotive industry.

Therefore, this paper studies the travel distribution pattern of electric vehicles in Dalian city, which paves the way for the future development of the electric vehicle industry.

First of all, this paper predicted the number of electric vehicles in Dalian in the next five years. Next, the gravity model and double-constraint gravity model were used to predict and analyze the travel generation, attraction and distribution of each traffic district. The gravity model is based on the concept of gravity in physics, this model can simulate the travel attraction between transportation communities. The dual constraint gravity model is an extension of the gravity model, taking into account the impact of factors other than distance on traffic distribution. For example, land type, land intensity utilization coefficient, etc. Finally, taking Shahekou District of Dalian city as an example, this paper made an empirical analysis of the travel distribution of electric vehicles in Shahekou District.

This article fully considers the impact of land use types on residents' travel. Residential land is an important factor affecting travel volume, while public facility land is an important factor affecting attraction volume. For areas with high travel attractions, it is necessary to consider building more charging facilities around them to solve the problem of difficult charging. The distribution results showed that the amounts of travel in each traffic community were not much different, but their attraction volumes were greatly different.

After understanding the distribution of electric vehicle traffic in various residential areas, it is possible to arrange the planning of public charging facilities more reasonably. The research provides practical guidance for the transportation planning of electric vehicles in such urban cities as Dalian city.

The socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 added to the learning challenges across Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) and significantly increased the resources required to deliver on basic education goals.

This article makes the case for greater budgetary allocations to the education sector by quantifying the annual funding needs for 20 governments in ESA to achieve different classroom size targets for all levels of education by 2030.

Building on earlier estimation techniques, it develops a teacher costing and affordability model based on macroeconomic and demographic projections as well as education sector performance indicators from global databases.

To meet goals around education and learning, governments in ESA need to pay for more than five million additional teachers by 2030. When compared to affordability estimates, which reflect the latest teacher compensation spending trends, the funding shortfall is nearly 50 percent. While there is variation across countries, the compounding shortage of teachers is a serious risk to improving learning across the region.

The findings underscore the need to invest more resources in teachers and education systems more generally. If governments can progressively increase their investment in education to reach six percent of GDP in 2030, which is in line with the most ambitious target in the Incheon Declaration, they could recruit an additional three million teachers, which partially closes the gap. However, to achieve basic learning goals, most governments will need to invest much more, including up to eight percent of GDP.

In this study, we examined the prevalence of apologies and predictors (i.e., empathy, guilt, and psychopathy) of apologies for actual or asserted sexual impropriety in experimental scenarios.

Our goal was to determine the extent to which a workplace sexual harassment scenario differed from an interpersonal (non-workplace) sexual scenario in terms of the extent to which apologies were elicited and the personal characteristics that predicted apologies in each situational context.

The objective of this study is to better understand the motivations for apologies in scenarios wherein the actor was or was not at fault.

Participants (N = 643) responded via text-based responses to one of two vignettes-one involving workplace sexual harassment and the other involving cheating on an intimate partner. Participants were recruited from both introductory psychology classes at a Midwestern University (n = 447) and from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 196).

This study confirms that many people apologize for alleged sexual impropriety regardless of fault. However, we also found that people who did not commit sexual acts are less likely to apologize in a work scenario and more likely to apologize in an intimate partner cheating scenario.

This study highlights how complex apologies can be regarding both true and false assertions of sexual impropriety. It also demonstrates the importance of situational and relationship contexts in predicting apologies and emotional responses.

Globally, policy and leadership and management skills of principals that are congruent foster future-focused learning and guide teachers and students towards a passion for learning and for growing creatively and collaboratively.

The qualitative research was undertaken and the Cultural-Historical Activity theory was used as a theoretical lens to determine the impact of policy on principals’ leadership and management skills and student achievement.

The results showed that policy and leadership and management skills enabled school principals to effectively implement, assess, monitor learning activities, enhanced student behaviour and provision of resources.

Implications uncovered in this research include providing school principals with access to training courses to improve their understanding of the teaching and learning methodologies to enhance student achievement, particularly in science.