Empowering Children to Lead Change: Incorporating Preparedness Curricula in the K-12 Educational System
Abstract : A combination of both man-made and natural disasters in recent years has revitalized the concept of civil preparedness and defense in the United States. During the State of the Union Address in 2002, President George W. Bush announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Citizen Corps, a component of the USA Freedom Corps initiative developed shortly after 9/11. Additionally, FEMA launched the "Are You Ready?" campaign to provide individuals, families, and communities with in-depth preparedness information and training, and the American Red Cross developed its own educational disaster preparedness program designed to coincide with the daily threat level. While the various programs include several common themes, including a special emphasis on disaster preparedness for children, they lack promotion, visibility, standardization, and coordination. Empowering children to lead change by teaching families and other citizens is one possible methodology to enhance visibility and inspire participation in such programs. This thesis examines the pros and cons of historical and current citizen preparedness campaigns and K-12 preparedness curricula, other countries' approaches to citizen preparedness, elements of successful preparedness programs, Homeland Security stakeholder benefits of preparedness programs for children, and potential arguments against the implementation of such programs. The author concludes the thesis with criteria for a successful K-12 civil preparedness curriculum.
Taking a punch: Building a more resilient Australia
The Australian Government is undertaking a comprehensive review of homeland and border security arrangements in Australia. The review, being undertaken by the former Secretary of the Department of Defence, Ric Smith, will report midyear. In response to 9/11, there’s been considerable planning and investment of resources by the Australian Government focused on Australia’s capacity to prevent, respond to and recover from a major terrorist attack in our homeland. The focus on disrupting the planning of terrorist acts, or to disrupt them once underway, has obscured the potential for much greater deaths and casualties caused by extreme natural disasters and therefore the need for an all-hazards risk approach in understanding and responding to all associated risks: if Cyclone Larry had impacted on Cairns in March 2006, not Innisfail, in conjunction with a king tide and storm surge this could have been Australia’s Hurricane Katrina. A terrorism attack in Australia remains without question a distinct possibility, but assessed against the risk of probability, we have more to fear from natural disasters, which are not exceptional events. More importantly, when it comes to time spent planning and resources applied to managing risks on an all-hazards basis, there hasn’t been sufficient effort to engage the Australian community on what Australians can do for themselves in the face of high consequence events like terrorism and extreme natural disasters. This paper examines how Australia can bounce back from all hazards, not just terrorism. The paper recommends a number of specific measures to a build a more resilient Australia.
History, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past
This article considers why, despite an apparent congruence of subject matter and methodologies, the disciplines of sociological criminology and criminal justice history are not more closely aligned. It contends that intellectual traffic between the two fields is not usually limited by institutional barriers, nor is it a legacy of the disciplinary antipathy which existed between history and sociology in Britain during the mid-twentieth century. Rather, it is due to the different ‘purposes’ with which sociological criminologists and criminal justice historians imbue their work and to the differing disciplinary perceptions of the relationship between the past, present and future which result from this. These different ‘purposes’ are traced via a consideration of the paths of development of the two disciplines from the 1940s. The article concludes by proposing an arena for future collaboration between criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists.