Disentangling the Disability Quagmire in Psychological Injury and Law

This paper aims to critically analyze the evolution of six models of conceptualization, determination, and prediction of occupational disability relevant in the medico-legal context of psychological injury. The six models are the (a) biomedical, (b) forensic, (c) psychosocial, (d) ecological, (e) economic, and (f) biopsychosocial. We will discuss the key commonalities and differences among the models, including disciplinary tradition, research paradigm, recognition of person–environment interaction, key tenets, and implications for practice and research in psychological injury. The paper will highlight and discuss psychosocial issues, often underemphasized in forensic psychological practice, including: (a) balanced assessment of primary, secondary, and tertiary gains and losses, (b) self-perception, (c) disability identity, (d) beliefs and expectations, (e) coping, (f) adaptation and positive growth, (g) social stigma and social reactions to disability, including disability harassment, and (h) recognition of system-based environmental influences and demands. We will provide a special focus on the current state of the science and practice of prediction of disability, of particular interest to researchers and clinicians involved in clinical and occupational prognostication in psychological injuries. Finally, we will draw conclusions and recommendations for future research and best practices in the psychological injury area using a cross-diagnostic, dynamic, functionally based, and integrated biopsychosocial and forensic model of disability.     

The Dead, the Law, and the Politics of the Past

This article explores the role of law in cultural and political disputes concerning dead bodies. It uses three interconnecting legal frameworks: cultural and moral ownership, commemoration, and closure. It begins with a critique of the limitations of the private law notion of 'ownership' in such contexts, setting out a broader notion of cultural and moral ownership as more appropriate for analysing legal disputes between states and indigenous tribes. It then examines how legal discourses concerning freedom of expression, religious and political traditions, and human rights and equality are utilized to regulate the public memory of the dead. Finally, it looks at the relationship between law and notions of closure in contexts where the dead have either died in battle or have been 'disappeared' during a conflict, arguing that law in such contexts goes beyond the traditional retributive focus of investigation and punishment of wrongdoers and instead centres on broader concerns of societal and personal healing.     

Theme: Making us Modern: Australian Writing in Modernity

‘Making us Modern’ brings together articles concerned with the scene of Australian writing and the relevance of ‘modernity/ies’ and ‘modernism/s’ for contemporary writing and reading practices. What is the ‘modern’, who are its subjects, and how has the modern made us—as ‘postmodern’, perhaps? And, who is this ‘us’, anyway? Attempts to theorise modernity and its aesthetics have often taken the white Western male as their subject. Intervening in these theories, however, are the efforts of feminist critics, among others, who seek to install those troubled terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ at the centre of their considerations of modernity, modernism, and reading and writing subjects. The articles in ‘Making us Modern’ contribute to these debates. Twentieth-century Australian modernities have been seen as holding together a mix of trauma and pleasure, constraint and release, sometimes represented in literary texts in seemingly impossible relation. For Esther Faye, writing on the short stories of Australian-Jewish writer Rosa Safransky, the subjective experiences of post-war Australian modernity are characterised by the traumatic dislocation of human subjects in time and space. In Safransky's stories of family and domesticity is seen the trauma experienced by gendered and racialised subjects in the particular context of the Shoah and its aftermath. Although, as she says, ‘the canonical status of the Shoah as the paradigmatic modernist event is increasingly contested’, through a Lacanian reading of Safransky's texts, Esther Faye shows the ways that the Holocaust's radical disruption of time and its dislocation of the Jewish subject in history echoes in its logic the wider deracination of the subject in modernity. It testifies ‘to the traumatic structure of subjectivity itself’, and it testifies, too, to the particular kind of ‘pleasure’ that is constituted in inextricable relation to trauma. In this way, as Esther Faye argues, being Jewish after Auschwitz is a question for all of us.     

The Challenge of Antisocial Behaviour: New Relationships between the State, Children and Parents

Relationships between children, parents and the state do notremain the same over time and are not necessarily consistentat any one time across policy arenas. These relationships, though,can remain unexamined and individually negotiated until theyare highlighted by major policy change. Such a change has recentlyoccured in Scotland, where the Antisocial Behaviour etc. (Scotland)Act 2004 has extended Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) tochildren and introduced Parenting Orders (POs), which can requireparents to attend counselling or guidance sessions. ASBOs shiftstate intervention from focusing on children’s welfareand needs to focusing on their behaviour. The welfare-basedchildren’s hearing system will no longer be the primarydecision-making forum as the court is the decision-maker forboth these new orders. POs emphasize parents’ responsibilityfor controlling their children. POs provide a direct route forparents to receive support, which they did not have before,but only through a compulsory order. Both children and theirparents will be held responsible to their communities’values, in new court-enforced mechanisms.     

Joint (ad)ventures and (in)credible journeys evaluating innovation: asset-based community development in Ethiopia

Acknowledging debates about what constitutes effective and useful evaluation practice, this paper explores the particular challenges of evaluating an innovative approach to community development for multiple stakeholders with different interests and different levels of confidence in particular evaluation methodologies. The innovation – applying an Asset Based approach to Community Development (ABCD) in an Ethiopian context – presents further challenges to evaluation because of its open-ended nature and problems of attribution. On the other hand, the culture of risk-taking encouraged by the supporters of innovation provides the space for genuine lessons to be learnt about failure as well as success.     

Mothers of children removed under a care order: outcomes and experiences

ABSTRACT

Focusing on accounts by women who have children taken into care, this paper reports on a socio-legal case study in England, investigating the life experiences of nine mothers, whose children have been made subject to care orders under the Children Act 1989. In particular it considers the women’s experiences of their relationships with their own mothers and places this within the context of the mothers’ own experiences of having their children taken into care. Drawing on free association narrative interviews, the study focuses on the mothers’ accounts of long-term harm that began in their childhoods, especially their experiences of their mothers’ own difficulties and of their experiences of harm. It highlights the impact of relationship difficulties between mother and child, and questions how the legal concepts of harm and reasonable parental care are defined and deployed. In conclusion, it demonstrates a need for the legal framework to address children’s experiences of harm in a more intergenerational and intersubjective way. It highlights a new approach, suggesting consideration of harm, reasonable parental care and welfare to involve an increased concentration on the welfare of mothers and the relationship between mother and child, akin to an intersubjective and intergenerational approach to harm.     

Contemporary criminal defence practice: importance of active involvement at the investigative stage and related training requirements

ABSTRACT

The shifting focus of criminal proceedings from the trial to the pre-trial stages leads to a changing role of criminal defence practitioners across Europe. European criminal defence lawyers are now expected to enter the proceedings earlier and exercise “active” and “participatory” defence as early as the investigative stage. Criminal lawyers, trained in the traditional trial-centred paradigm, are ill-prepared for this role, which results in an important skills gap. Legal representation at the investigative stage presents unique challenges, such as shortage of information, time pressures and the closed nature of pre-trial proceedings. It requires lawyers to operate in a more complex communication environment, than the one to which they have been accustomed. This article sets out the main elements of a professional training programme aiming to fill in the emerging skills gap. The training programme (SUPRALAT) was successfully implemented in Belgium, Hungary, Ireland and the Netherlands, and is being expanded further. The training focuses on effective communication skills, experiential learning and the development of reflective skills. It includes elements of interprofessional training and encourages the development of “communities of practice”.     

Projecting macroeconomic outcomes: Evidence from the IMF

In the process of designing IMF-supported programs, IMF staff members prepare projections of the evolution of key macroeconomic variables for the participating country. These projections are based on countries?? initial situations, and are conditioned on the implementation of reforms and policy measures agreed in the context of programs. In this paper, we examine the accuracy of projections in 291 programs approved in the period 1993?C2009. We focus on the projections of three macroeconomic variables (the ratios of the fiscal surplus to GDP and of external current account surplus to GDP, and real GDP growth) during the years immediately following the initiation of an IMF-supported program. We identify several potential reasons for divergence of projected from actual values: (i) mismeasured data on initial conditions; (ii) country-specific differences in forming projections, (iii) projections that do not reflect the dynamic time-series process of the actual data; (iv) policy forecast error; and (v) random errors in the actual data. Our data analysis suggests that the incomplete information on initial conditions and the country-specific differences in projection error are the largest contributors to discrepancies between projection and actual. We also consider whether the IMF??s forecasts have gotten more accurate in recent years; there is evidence that they have for the shortest horizons, but the quantitative impact on forecast error is small.     

Using the Wrong Policy Tools: Education,Charity, and Public Benefit

A recent decision on the application of public benefit under the Charities Act 2006 sidestepped the political debate surrounding the charitable status of independent fee‐charging schools. The broader political context nevertheless underscores the legislative reforms, and this article questions whether the new statutory public benefit requirement has utility as a welfare policy tool in the field of education. It examines the public benefit requirement in charity law against the backdrop of government policy towards education and the broader political agenda for a mixed economy of welfare provision, and argues that the difficulties Labour faced in developing its education policies were replicated in the application of the post‐Act public benefit requirement to fee‐charging schools. As a result, achieving broader policy goals for widening educational opportunity through public benefit was almost impossible given the regulatory framework and the principles upon which charity law is founded.