Battered Women’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: Decentring the Law

This article takes up Smart??s suggestion to examine the way the law works in practice. It explores the context of current criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences in Queensland, Australia. This article argues that legal method is applied outside the higher courts or ??judge-oriented?? practice and that the obstacles inherent to legal method can be identified in the practices of police, lower court staff, magistrates and lawyers. This article suggests that it may be difficult to deconstruct legal method, even by focussing on law in practice, and as a result it may be difficult to successfully challenge law??s truth claims in this way. The analysis of criminal prosecutions of domestic violence offences reported here supports Smart??s earlier findings that women and children who seek redress through the criminal justice process find the process at best ambivalent and at worst, destructive. However, the article also shows how, in the Queensland context, women sometimes find their way to feminism and personal empowerment by going to law.     

The Co-development of Friends’ Delinquency with Adolescents’ Delinquency and Short-term Mindsets: The Moderating Role of Co-Offending

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - The companions in crime hypothesis suggests that co-offending moderates the link between peer delinquency and adolescent delinquency. However, this hypothesis has...     

To Pay Suspicious Attention: Following the Weave of ‘Mixed Logics’ in Women’s Ethical Decision Making

This article explores areas of law loosely within English equity and trusts law that have not conventionally been subject to feminist debate, and within the context of a discussion about feminist method. The particular areas examined are whistleblowing and trustees’ powers of investment, each of which calls for consideration of decision-making processes which have an ethical content. These sites are chosen because they take debate outside the all too familiar locations of woman or ‘the body of woman’, including the family home, where feminist analysis in relation to equity and trusts tends to stray. In exploring these chosen fields, Hobby’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 219–255) critique of gender dimensions in relation to whistleblowing and Dunn’s (Feminist Perspectives on Equity and Trusts, Cavendish Publishing, 2001, pp. 179–196) account of women trustees’ investment decisions are evaluated and developed. The debate within feminist legal criticism of the possibility of integrating an ‘ethics of care’ and an ‘ethics of rights’ is acknowledged. Whilst acknowledging of the difficulty of adopting an approach that recognises ‘mixed logics’, it is concluded that women (and men) do integrate the ethics of care and the ethics of rights in their decision-making. It is argued that the effort should be made to trace the specific weave in particular circumstances, thereby paying suspicious attention to the values that underlie courts’ analyses of ethical choices.     

Juvenile Offenders’ Alcohol and Marijuana Trajectories: Risk and Protective Factor Effects in the Context of Time in a Supervised Facility

The current study modeled trajectories of substance use from ages 15 to 20 among 1,095 male serious juvenile offenders (M age = 16.54; 42% African-American, 34% Latino, 20% European-American, and 4% other ethnic/racial backgrounds) and prospectively predicted trajectories from risk and protective factors before and after controlling for time spent in a supervised setting. Results indicated that supervised time suppressed age-related growth in substance use. Trajectories of offenders with no supervised time and low levels of supervised time increased in substance use across age, whereas offenders with high levels of supervised time showed no growth. Almost all risk and protective factors had effects on initial substance use but only adolescent history of substance use, impulse control, and psychosocial maturity had an effect on change in substance use over time. Findings highlight the importance of formal sanctions and interventions superimposed on normal developmental processes in understanding trajectories of substance use among serious juvenile offenders.

Sleep and Delinquency: Does the Amount of Sleep Matter?

Sleep, a key indicator of health, has been linked to a variety of indicators of well-being such that people who get an adequate amount generally experience greater well-being. Further, a lack of sleep has been linked to a wide range of negative developmental outcomes, yet sleep has been largely overlooked among researchers interested in adolescent delinquency. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between hours of sleep and delinquent behavior among adolescents by using data from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (n = 14,382; 50.2% female, 63.5% white). A series of negative binomial regressions showed that youth who typically sleep seven or fewer hours per night reported significantly more property delinquency than youth who sleep the recommended 8–10 h. Further, youth who reported sleeping 5 or fewer hours per night reported significantly more violent delinquency than youth who reported sleeping the recommended number of hours per night. The findings suggest that sleep is an important, and overlooked, dimension of delinquent behavior and studies that focus on adolescent health should further investigate the effects of insufficient sleep. Finally, the authors recommend that sleep and other relevant health behaviors be considered in the context of more comprehensive approaches to delinquency prevention and intervention.     

It’s a Two-Way Street: The Bidirectional Relationship Between Parenting and Delinquency

As the primary socializing institution of youth, the family has long been recognized as important for predicting delinquency. Social control theory focuses on the effects of parental behavior on adolescent delinquency but fails to take into account the effect of adolescent delinquency on parental behaviors. This study addresses this problem by estimating eighteen models examining bidirectional relationships between general, property, and violent delinquency and parental attachment, monitoring, and involvement. The magnitude of both parent and child effects were examined using data from 12,505 youth ages twelve to seventeen who participated in the Add Health study. These youth were an average age of 14 and were predominantly white (65%); just over half (50.42%) were female. Cross-lag regressions showed that while parental attachment has an effect on delinquency, an adolescent’s delinquency also impacts parental attachment, regardless of the type of delinquency. Findings also revealed no significant parental effects of monitoring or involvement on any type of delinquency, and the only child effects revealed for monitoring or involvement were for involvement, which decreases when overall or property delinquency increases. The findings regarding parental attachment provide strong evidence for the existence of a reciprocal relationship between parenting and delinquency, consistent with the transactional and interactional models of reciprocal parent–child relationships.     

Parental Incarceration and Multiple Risk Experiences: Effects on Family Dynamics and Children’s Delinquency

Children of incarcerated parents are exposed to factors that place them at risk for delinquency. Few studies have examined the effects of having an incarcerated parent after controlling for other experiences such as contextual risk factors and family processes. Past studies have also not examined effects of recent, but not current, parental incarceration on children. The present study examines an archival dataset, in which children aged 10–14 years and their parents/guardians reported children’s risk experiences (e.g., exposure to poverty, parental substance use), family processes (e.g., level of family victimization, family conflict), and children’s delinquent behaviors at two time points. Parents also reported their recent and past incarceration history. Hierarchical linear regression analyses show that a history of parental incarceration predicted family victimization, delinquent behaviors of children’s older siblings, and delinquent behaviors of the child participants, over and above children’s demographic characteristics and other risk experiences. Recent parental incarceration predicted family conflict, family victimization, and parent-reports of children’s delinquency after also controlling for previous parental incarceration. The role of family processes in research and intervention directions involving children of incarcerated parents is discussed.     

networks of violence in the production of young women’s trajectories and subjectivities

This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women’s lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations of the interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women’s lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed.     

A Model of Sexual Abuse’s Effects on Suicidal Behavior and Delinquency: The Role of Emotions as Mediating Factors

Drawing on Agnew’s general strain theory, we examined whether depressed mood and anger mediated the effects of sexual abuse on suicidal behavior and delinquency. Participants included 9,113 students attending high schools in Iceland. Structural equation modeling showed that, while controlling for family structure and parental education, being exposed to strain in the form of sexual abuse was positively related to both depressed mood and anger. The effects of sexual abuse on suicidal behavior of both boys and girls were twice as strong through depressed mood as through anger. The effects of sexual abuse on outwardly-directed forms of delinquency for both genders were stronger through anger than through depressed mood. These findings highlight the complex nature of the effects of strain on adolescents’ emotions and behavior. Moreover, they show that depression—in contrast to outwardly-directed delinquency, where feelings of anger are predominantly influential—is more relevant than anger to suicidal behavior.

Beyond the Centre: women in nineteenth-century Iceland and the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history

In recent years, women’s and gender historians have paid attention to the dissonance between the grand narratives of European women’s history and the history and experiences of marginal regions and countries. This article discusses the challenge of writing women’s history from the margins—Iceland—into the framework of the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history. It is argued that this framework grounded in theories of progress and modernisation is too narrow, offering little space for different or marginal voices from rural societies. Using the case study of the ‘ordinary’ woman Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809–1871), the article argues that more voices from the margins and different histories, broaden our understanding of the multi-vocal and multi-levelled history of women in Europe.     

Life itself under contract: rent-seeking and biopolitical devolution through partnerships in California’s strawberry industry

Following the legal demise of sharecropping in California’s strawberry industry, shippers and other intermediaries began to forge contractual ‘partnerships’ with former farmworkers and ranch managers, providing financing and market access, while giving these new growers responsibility for hiring labor and paying other expenses. Within an array of contracting arrangements, these operate in the worst of all worlds with many expenses returning to the shipper and little possibility of upside reward. Yet these arrangements are touted in the name of helping former farmworkers become farmers. Building on the literature on contract farming, this contribution discusses the ability to obtain rents as an under-recognized advantage of contracts for shippers, which further compromises the livelihoods of growers, especially those in ‘partnership’ arrangements who are particularly squeezed. This paper then suggests a further advantage to shippers: the ability to devolve biopolitical responsibility to growers. Growers are put in the impossible position of having to produce healthy berries at low cost while protecting human health through enhanced fumigant regulation. Partner-growers who tend to farm in poor ecological conditions are in the worst position to meet these competing imperatives. Shippers, however, are able to take the high road by claiming to move beyond pesticides.     

Latifundio and the logic of underdevelopment: the case of Venezuela’s Sur del Lago

Underdevelopment in Venezuela is often understood as a product of oil dependence, weak state capacity or a subordinate position in the international division of labor. Yet all of these should be seen more as consequences of underdevelopment rather than its causes. This contribution posits an alternative explanation for underdevelopment in Venezuela based on rural property relations and their impact on industrialization and the diversification of the local economy. An in-depth case study of one of Venezuela’s most important agricultural regions seeks to uncover the internal productive logic of the region’s large rural estates, and argues that the dominance of these ‘latifundios’ and the resulting rural economy are at the root of underdevelopment in Venezuela.