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Demography
Published in Miranda Thurston, Key Themes in Public Health, 2014
At a global level, countries differ quite markedly in terms of whether or not their populations are expanding, contracting or static. Understanding these trends is central to health policy development and planning in relation to the assessment of health needs (including the assessment of future needs for school places, jobs, care for the elderly, and so on) and allocation of resources. Recent developments in demography associated with the use of modelling software allow predictions of future population growth and size, as well as the pressures that are likely to ensue. Population growth in low-income regions of the world has been estimated as 1.4 per cent per year, in spite of high mortality from HIV/AIDS and high maternal mortality more generally (Leone, 2010). In these regions, health tends to be poor, particularly among children. By contrast, countries that were once part of the Soviet Union have experienced population decline in recent years due to emigration, increases in death rates (particularly related to alcohol consumption among middle-aged men) and sub-replacement fertility. China has become noted for including population control as a key aspect of its economic reforms, introducing the one child policy in 1979. Whilst this has given rise to smaller family size, it has also resulted in an imbalance in the sex ratio: in 2001 there were 32 million more men under 20 years of age than women, with some predicting that the ratio is likely to worsen in the future (Ding and Hesketh, 2006). The social consequences of these developments are potentially considerable.
Review of School Violence in Taiwan: Prevalence, Types, and Strategies
Published in Journal of School Violence, 2022
According to the overview of the aforementioned phenomenon of increasing school violence in the past 5 years, Hou (2018) stated three factors that have caused the increase in school violence and need to receive public attention. First, the sub-replacement fertility phenomenon in Taiwan has becoming more self-evident. For each of the past five years, the number of newborns was less than 200,000, which was a considerable decline compared with a decade ago. Child protection is an essential core value of Taiwanese families today, and therefore, parents generally cannot tolerate their children exhibiting bullying behavior or being bullied at school. Second, more adolescents have been born into dysfunctional families, which are often troubled by issues such as poor family cohesion, lack of parent–child communication, and spoil-oriented grandparenting. This has led to an increase in problems or deviancy among teenagers and threatens school safety. Finally, adult gangs have recently penetrated into schools and attempt to recruit more members from adolescents. For example, using an in-depth interview method with 10 incarcerated juvenile offenders, Huang (2016) found that those interviewees were recruited to be the gangsters when they studied in senior high schools. Specifically, their job was to receive protection fees from each class and sent the collected money to the gang leaders.