Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Necessity of Politics: Reclaiming American Public Life by Christopher Beem. For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy.     

Fatal (F)laws: Law, Literature and Writing

In this article, we develop an account of judgment as writing which displaces and contests the conventional staging of the signifiers ‘law’ and ‘literature’. If judgment is understood as writing, then it is opened out onto the contexts which structure it, but which it must disavow or repress. To investigate this process, we read the judicial judgment of a killing of a gay man. In this text, the context that is simultaneously cited and repressed is that of literature - and specifically, Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Literature functions not as law's other in this judgment, but as a legal concept. Its chief performative effect is the concealment of a corpse: literature enables law to forget the wounds of the murdered man, and to bury his corpse within the grammar of fate. Our reading is an attempt to illuminate the scene of this crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Forensic Assessment of Adults Reporting Childhood Sexualized Assault: Risk,Resilience, and Impacts

Though childhood sexualized assault (CSA) increases risk for varied psychological difficulties, no single condition, syndrome, or set of difficulties is reliably associated with such experiences. CSA likely disrupts or impairs normal development in complex ways that depend on the risk and resilience factors present before, during, and after CSA. CSA characteristics that increase risk for later difficulties include young age, trauma inflicted by another person, number of occurrences, violence or intrusiveness, betrayal of trust, adverse peri-traumatic reactions, negative reactions from others following disclosure, and a context of previous sexualized assault or maltreatment. Resilience increases with positive self-esteem, better intellectual functioning, good self-control, positive social support, and early therapeutic intervention. CSA is associated with impaired psychological development, mental health disorders, behavioural and relationship difficulties, physical health problems, reduced intellectual function, lower educational achievement, lower occupational attainment, and reduced lifetime income. Any particular difficulty may be problematic in its own right and may also contribute to other difficulties in the interlocking domains of individual abilities and attributes, relationships, and significant life activities. In individual forensic assessment cases, general evidence on CSA risk/resilience and impacts can be used in combination with the lifespan developmental analysis (Barnes & Josefowitz, Psychological Injury and Law, 2014), to determine whether and how CSA contributed to psychological injuries.     

救助的扩展:农村居家社区养老服务的发展路径——以北京市为例

以北京为样本,农村居家社区养老服务发展可以概括为两条主线、三个阶段和三类主要模式。两条主线为救助-适度普惠福利服务和居家-社区福利服务,三个阶段指由自发性的帮扶救助到村两委主导再到混合化运营,三类模式包括纯居家互助服务模式、互助服务+就餐模式、互助服务+综合模式。总体而言,农村居家社区养老服务应该是非营利定位的,互助服务是农村居家社区养老服务发展的关键,其发展路径可以概括为:分阶段、分类型地扩展救助型福利服务和适度普惠型福利服务;由福利的国家责任向国家、社会合作(发动社会参与,进行资金和服务互助)转变;由设施建设向服务供给转变;构建农村互助共同体等。     

Public attitudes toward funding preschool programs to prevent violence

Public policy on violence prevention has increasingly focused on early childhood interventions to reduce violence over the life course. This paper examines public attitudes toward funding of programs in schools to enhance learning and to reduce violence. The data come from telephone surveys in a large Southern US City collected from 2004 to 2007. The paper explores the relationship between public funding of programs and increased taxes for programs. PLUM Ordinal Regression models were used to predict attitudes toward prevention programs controlling for demographic variables and political affiliation. Implications of these findings are discussed for understanding of attitudes toward school-based programs and their funding.