Focusing on women who have experienced sex trafficking, and who are excluded from the government legal protection of trafficked persons. This paper is based upon findings generated by interviews with trafficked women, interviews with various professionals involved in the field, in which working on combating sex trafficking.

The majority of sex trafficked persons are women and, in these interviews and accounts, women from China in my study were trafficked because One Child Family policy and male supremacy culture. Therefore, women were sacrificed to work at young age to support the family financial. We raise the issue of gender inequality in the process women are lured to be trafficked.

The paper will also explore the difficulties faced by women who have experienced forms of trafficking harm as they are arrested by the Taiwan authorities. Although Taiwan has passed the Law of Combating Human Trafficking on 23rd January 2009, we argue that the current definition of sex trafficking is leaky, and women who are trafficked may be not identified as victims. We will use the cases in our study to discuss if women can be identified as victims under the Law of Combating Human Trafficking. This paper aims to explore the social exclusion in which trafficked women seek and/or receive help and assistance in Taiwan.

Full paper: Lin_Ku_2009_gender_inequality.pdf

This paper leverages three years of research - including a year of empirical fieldwork - to provide a comprehensive and critical account of Japan's new policies for socially excluded youth. Identified as 'NEETs' for being neither in education, employment or training, 15 to 34 year old non-employed young people were constructed as a 'social problem' in 2004 and, after a ferocious public debate, two extraordinary programmes were enacted for this group, one in 2005 and another in 2006. Known as the Youth Independence Camp and the Youth Support Station, these novel measures represent Japan's first public services for the explicit purpose of engaging and socially including young adults who have fallen outside education and the labour markets.

   Yet the details of such new youth policies remain elusive: Who was it exactly that promoted them in the first place, and why was the category 'NEET' so crucial in the policy process? How was it even possible to make tangible policies for a group that the public came to see as 'lazy' and undeserving, and how is 'social inclusion' carried out in practice?

By investigating, in turn, the three levels of youth policy discourse, policy-making and policy delivery, this paper uncovers a nuanced reality where 'youth' are not necessarily all that young, where 'employment' measures transform into welfare services, where 'disciplinarian' approaches morph into lenient ones, and where 'social inclusion' indeed produces exclusion as its side effect. Yet, behind such a thick web of paradoxes one does discern an emerging approach to social inclusion that relies upon local face-to-face networks, gradual confidence-building activities and alternative jobs. As the paper argues, it is precisely in such practices and realities at sites of youth support that the meaning of 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' - in its particular Japanese context but not without implications to other East Asian societies - is most vividly revealed and rendered accessible to analysis.

The last three decades have witnessed tremendous social, political and economic changes in China since the adoption of the open-door policy in the late 1970s. A market economy was adopted as a replacement of the planned economy to allocate resources in the country. Since then, however, sociologists' attention has been drawn to social inequality, as notable disparities are noticed across the country between urban and rural areas, between regions and between different social groups. Given that much of the public good attached to education has been displaced in the transformation from a planned economy to a market economy, the problem of educational inequality has been looked at within the context of social equity and equality.

This article employs social exclusion theory as the analytical framework to examine education inequalities in China within the context of the transition from a planned economy to a market economy. It starts with a brief introduction of social exclusion theory. By using Sen's approach to analyze educational inequities in China, it then argues that four types of inequalities, namely constitutive deprivation, instrumental deprivation, active exclusion and passive exclusion, can be identified in China's education. It closes by considering the adverse effect of existing social exclusion on education inequality, despite the fact that the Chinese government has made effort to confront the increasing pressure from educational inequalities.