By The Human Rights WatchThe 81-page report documents increasing poverty and the failure of Germany's social security system to ensure an adequate standard of living, particularly affecting single mothers and older women living alone on low incomes.
Human Rights Watch, March 24, 2025, 81p.
By
The Global Campaign to Decriminalise Poverty and Status
Throughout the globe, governments use petty offenses, such as vagrancy and loitering laws, to exert social control over poor and marginalized communities. Moreover, people experiencing homelessness regularly face the threat of criminal sanctions for fulfilling basic needs. These petty offenses enable the policing of public spaces to reinforce social hierarchies and rigid gender norms. Many of these laws are in place in the Caribbean, inherited as part of the colonial legacy that permeates its systems today.
This report provides a baseline assessment of the criminalization of homelessness in the Dominican
Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The analysis thus focuses on three Caribbean localities with diverse
histories connected to Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States (U.S.). The report addresses both laws criminalizing vagrancy and loitering, as well as life-sustaining activities. It further examines the laws on the books, their implementation in practice, and their various impacts on people in each country.
Miami: Human Rights Clinic, University of Miami School of Law, 2024. 60p.
USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP
By Gordon Kavanagh
FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Traditionally the effects of the Irish Famine have been interpreted as a watershed in Irish history, creating new conditions of demographic decline, altered farming structures and new economic policies, not to mention an institutionalised Anglophobia among the Irish at home and abroad. The Famine devastated the country and brought Ireland to its knees. The Famine was primarily the result of a crop disease, which destroyed the potato crop in 1845. The disease would return again in the ensuing years. It was not until the early 1850's that the country finally began to recover. In the meantime its people had experienced such horror and heartbreak that is difficult to comprehend today, where Ireland is a relatively affluent country, with much wealth and comfort….”
Ireland. Gordon Kavanagh and Gabriel Kavanag. 2003. 155p.
By Li Cunxin
In a compelling memori of life in Maoist China, the acclaimed dancer describes how he was swept from his poverty-stricken family in rural China to study ballet with the Peking Dance Academy, his rise to success in the world of Chinese ballet, his dramatic defection at age eighteen in the United States, and his new life in the West.
Raised in a desperately poor village during the height of China's Cultural Revolution, Li Cunxin's childhood revolved around the commune, his family and Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
Until, that is, Madame Mao's cultural delegates came in search of young peasants to study ballet at the academy in Beijing and he was thrust into a completely unfamiliar world.
When a trip to Texas as part of a rare cultural exchange opened his eyes to life and love beyond China's borders, he defected to the United States in an extraordinary and dramatic tale of Cold War intrigue.
Told in his own distinctive voice, this is Li's inspirational story of how he came to be Mao's last dancer, and one of the world's greatest ballet dancers.
Australia. Penguin Random House. 2005. 522p.
By Ian Braybrook
Ian Braybrook was a radio broadcaster in Central Victoria for many years. His childhood and early teen years are far removed from the "glamour" of that job.
Ian's family was desperately poor and the early death of his father had a far-reaching effect on his life. By the age of thirteen, when he got his fi rst job, he had lived in twenty homes and changed schools ten times.
His story moves from Daylesford, Trentham and Blackwood districts in the Central Highlands to East Gippsland, South Gippsland, the Western District and the Riverina of NSW. His many jobs included a telegram boy, farm hand, builders and general labourer, storeman, shift worker, fruit picker, shearing shed wool presser and truck driver. Along the way he was homeless, suffered two potentially fatal illnesses, experienced violent abuse and suffered a sexual assault.
Written originally for family, the story proved to be of far wider interest. The adventures and misadventures crammed into the first eighteen years of Ian's life provide an important record of the way life was for some in the depression and post-depression era.
Castlemaine Vic. Marilyn Bennet Publishing. 2018. 286p.
Edited by George J. Borjas and Jeff Crisp
This book examines the economics of immigration and asylum migration, focusing on the economic consequences of legal and illegal immigration as well as placing the study of immigration in a global context.
Houndmills UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 445p.
By the National Vigilance Association.
Transactions of the International Congress on the White Slave Trade....held in London, 1899. The White Slave Trade is the traffic in girls for immoral purposes, which is unhappily carried on not only in the East, where slavery is avowed, but more or less throughout Europe, For such girls there is a constant demand in the markets of vice, on the part of the infamous persons who keep houses of ill-fame with resident inmates. In all such houses the position of the miserable women is one of servitude. Their isolation, their friendlessness, the contempt with which they are usually regarded by respectable society, keep them under the control of the keepers of the houses ; who by charging them extortionate prices for everything supplied, and retaining the ownership of even the clothes they wear, keep them always nominally in their debt, a debt which is recovered when they sell the girl to another house. For the girl is often procured and bought at great expense, and as she becomes less and less valuable for the corrupt purpose, she is sold to lower and lower houses. This trade is of course comparatively little known in England, owing to the publicity of proceedings, and the high rate of wages, though the societies which concern themselves with such matters are continually coming across cases of young girls decoyed, or persuaded away to foreign parts; and even in England it is not always easy, in practice, to get a girl out of a brothel. But the poorer parts of Europe are visited by travelling agents, who have their local purveyors, and conduct their victims to the East and West, where they are lost in the bad houses. One large branch of the trade goes through Constantinople, another has its destination in the South American ports, chiefly Buenos Ayrea.
London : Printed by Wertheimer, Lea and Co., 1899. 174p.
