Access Contested

Access Contested

Experts examine censorship, surveillance, and resistance across Asia, from China and India to Malaysia and the Philippines. A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world's largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world's most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China's Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. Access Contested, the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering in-depth accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

Access Contested

Divorce and Family Mediation Research Study in Three Canadian Cities

The findings described in this report come from a two-year study of court-based divorce mediation and separation counselling in Saskatoon, Montreal, and Saint John's. This document reviews the issues of concern with respect to divorce and family mediation and some of the findings from social science research which underlie the rationale for non-adversarial approaches to marriage breakdown. It also describes the research design and data base for each of the research modules and sites. It provides a descriptive account of the three courts and their mediation service and approach. In addition, it looks at mediation in Canada more generally, and includes an analysis and evaluation of the outcomes of divorce mediation, with particular reference to the economic situation of couples and their children, to custody and access, to parenting generally, and the impact of mediation on various aspects of the court process.