THE ALIENATED CHILD:A Reformulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome

In this article, controversies and problems with parental alienation syndrome are discussed. A reformulation focusing on the alienated child is proposed, and these children are clearly distinguished from other children who resist or refuse contact with a parent following separation or divorce for a variety of normal, expectable reasons, including estrangement. A systemic array of contributing factors are described that can create and/or consolidate alienation in children, including intense marital conflict, a humiliating separation, parental personalities and behaviors, protracted litigation, and professional mismanagement. These factors are understood in the context of the child's capacities and vulnerabilities.     

THERAPEUTIC WORK WITH ALIENATED CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES

This article describes goals and strategies for family-focused counseling and therapy when children are alienated from a parent after separation and divorce. The confidential intervention takes place within a legally defined contract and is based on a careful assessment of the dynamics of the multiple factors that contribute to the alienation and how the chilďs development is affected. Strategies for forming multiple therapeutic alliances with often reluctant, recalcitrant, and polarized parents are discussed together with ways of helping the child directly.     

Regulation and the Role of Trust: Reflections from the Mining Industry

The role of prosecution in achieving compliance with social regulation is a highly contentious issue, nowhere more so than with regard to work-related injury and death in the New South Wales mining industry. Following a mining disaster, political pressure prompted the mines inspectorate to abandon its traditional 'advise and persuade' approach in favour of a much tougher, deterrence-oriented approach. Our field-work suggests that while the former approach can result in regulatory capture, the latter can be equally counterproductive. In the mining industry, interactions between inspectors and the regulated industry are frequent and ongoing and trust is central to constructive relations. When those relations break down (as under an inappropriate prosecution policy) then dialogue ceases, information is withheld rather than shared, in-firm accident investigation, prevention, and remedial action are inhibited and both sides retreat to a form of adversarialism that undermines regulatory effectiveness. Through a 20-year case study of the mines inspectorate, the article demonstrates the centrality of trust to regulatory effectiveness, how it can be lost, and how it can best be regained.     

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.     

Japan,Korea, the Philippines,China: four syndromes of corruption

Both generalizations about “Asian corruption”, and claims about greater or lesser amounts of corruption, tend to overlook the many variations existing among and within Asian societies, and among the corruption problems they experience. I suggest that deeper influences in social, political and economic development, and contrasting institutional settings, create four distinctive syndromes of corruption, each with its own set of implications for relationships between wealth and power. Japan is an example of “influence markets” in which private interests buy or rent influence over relatively specific policy outcomes within a strong state. Korea is a case of “elite cartels”, in which collusion and corrupt incentives enable several kinds of elites to cooperate in governing, enriching themselves, and resisting rising political competition. The Philippines is marked by “oligarchs and clans”, with powerful families and their entourages plundering a weak state in a climate of uncertainty and insecurity. China experiences “official mogul” corruption, in which officials abuse state power with impunity, although that process is becoming increasingly fragmented. The four syndromes may help us understand why corruption and rapid growth have coexisted in some, but not all, Asian states for long periods of time, and may also help us understand why some of those states will adapt to new global realities only with some difficulty. They also show how “consensus”-driven reforms emanating from the west may not only be ineffective, but may actually make matters worse.     

The Privatization of Urban Housing in China and its Contribution to Financial System Development

The privatization of urban housing and the subsequent development of a mortgage market have played a major role in the development of China's financial system. This paper explores the history and development of China's urban housing market, its impact on the financial system, and the government's efforts to grapple with new issues that have surfaced alongside these reforms. This paper concludes that although housing privatization has helped strengthen the financial standing of state-owned enterprises, urban residents, and commercial banks alike, systematic weaknesses must be addressed in order to promote sustainable economic growth.     

“I Had a Confidence Epiphany!”: Obstacles to Combating Post-Identification Confidence Inflation

Research shows that eyewitnesses often become more confident with their selections from a lineup over time, a problem labeled "confidence inflation." Wells et al. (1998) Law and Human Behavior, 22, 603-647 suggested that eyewitnesses provide a confidence statement immediately following their selection to capture an unadulterated measure of confidence. Three experiments tested the effectiveness of introducing such a statement to combat the effects of confidence inflation on mock-juror judgments. All experiments provided evidence that the attributions participants formed about the eyewitness' confidence inflation differentially impacted their judgments. Although mock-jurors generally discredited eyewitnesses who showed confidence inflation and sometimes lowered probability of guilt ratings for the defendant, a clear exception occurred when mock-jurors attributed the inflation to an epiphany. Use of post-identification confidence statements to decrease the impact of confidence inflation in the courtroom may be insufficient.     

The Initial Changes of Fat Deposits During the Decomposition of Human and Pig Remains

Abstract:  The early stages of adipocere formation in both pig and human adipose tissue in aqueous environments have been investigated. The aims were to determine the short-term changes occurring to fat deposits during decomposition and to ascertain the suitability of pigs as models for human decomposition. Subcutaneous adipose tissue from both species after immersion in distilled water for up to six months was compared using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. Changes associated with decomposition were observed, but no adipocere was formed during the initial month of decomposition for either tissue type. Early-stage adipocere formation in pig samples during later months was detected. The variable time courses for adipose tissue decomposition were attributed to differences in the distribution of total fatty acids between species. Variations in the amount of sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium were also detected between species. The study shows that differences in total fatty acid composition between species need to be considered when interpreting results from experimental decomposition studies using pigs as human body analogs.