Just Fathers

This chapter explores how perceptions of masculinity play into the ways in which Chinese migrant fathers in Africa perceive and perform parental care from afar. Migration not only redefines institutional structures of the family, it also changes or challenges existing notions of parenthood. Separated from their family members, migrant fathers are compelled to negotiate notions of fatherhood and effectively “re-do” gender from afar. Ideas of fatherhood are very salient in contexts of transnational migration, in which ideas about what makes a “just” father often reflect differences in perspective among migrants as well as between migrants and non-migrant kin. By negotiating Chinese fatherhood, men attempt to bridge gaps between the reality of family separation and the expectations of parental duty and care.

Health and Rights in the Vaccine-Critical Movement

This chapter introduces the leaders, organizations, and underpinning ideologies of the vaccine-critical social movement mobilized around the vaccine court. Activists understand fundamental concepts like risk, harm, health, and parental duty in ways that are incompatible with the mainstream, and these divergences in turn help explain why they do not see vaccine court evidence in the same way. They perceive themselves as fighting for individual health freedom at the same time as they muster an aggrieved and vulnerable minority status to protest vaccination and to criticize the vaccine court.

The Parental Duty to Teach Children Torah

The paternal obligation to teach sons Torah has developed from the halahkic approach of the Talmud period through the halakhic approach of medieval ages scholars (especially Maimonides), to the modern halakhic approach of the Israeli Rabbinical Courts. This development reflects the transformation of the Teaching-Torah concept from a strict paternal religious commandment toward sons to a comprehensive parental-cultural responsibility to young children.

Children v. Parents: A New Tort Duty-Situation for Psychiatric Injury?

SummaryRecognition of liability in negligence for personal injury, whether physical or psychiatric, is a question of public policy par excellence. In English tort law, public policy is a transparent judicial requirement in fixing liability even when negligence is established otherwise. In considering the tortious liability of a local authority to children in its care, the English House of Lords has, in obiter dicta, raised doubts as a matter of public policy concerning the enforceability of claims for damages by children against a parent for emotional neglect causing psychiatric injury. In Israel, by contrast, the Supreme Court recently extended tortious liability by enforcing the parental duty of care to children through a claim for psychiatric injury. So far Israeli law is unique in this development. Variations in judicial policy concerning the recognition of claims by children for psychiatric injury are considered here, in the contexts of English tort law, and Israeli, US and European human rights law.