Lifting the Domestic Violence Cloak of Silence: Resilient Australian Women’s Reflected Memories of their Childhood Experiences of Witnessing Domestic Violence

Recognition is growing that childhood witnessing of domestic violence is tantamount to child abuse due to the damage the experience may have on the witnessing child’s long-term emotional and social wellbeing. This paper helps to lift the cloak of silence that surrounds the child witnessing phenomenon by presenting the recollected adult memories of six female former child witnesses. Utilizing a mixed case-study and consensual qualitative research design, the study’s findings reveal that the potential threat to a child witness’s immediate and long-term wellbeing can be mediated through the progressive development of a range of adaptive coping strategies. Of these, the strategy of establishing a safe place and a supportive relationship outside of the abusive nuclear family home seems pivotal to the witnessing child’s resilient ability to move on and lead a ‘rewarding’ adult life. The paper closes with a discussion on how the research findings can be progressed.     

Rationalizing pay inequity: women engineers,pervasive patriarchy and the neoliberal chimera

This article argues that neoliberalism with its pervasive patriarchy and co-option of feminism, renders women tacitly complicit in gendered pay inequalities. We show that in New Zealand, one of the world’s most neoliberal nations, women who might precisely be best equipped to argue for equal pay – engineers – do not do so because neoliberalism makes many feel responsible for, and accepting of, their lower salaries. In interviews and focus groups, many women engineers talk of deserving less pay than men because of their ‘choices’, their ‘personality’ and their lack of ‘responsibility’. In a disempowering environment, some women show agency by disavowing gender as a reason for the pay gap. Such narratives of individualized shortcomings reduce hope of collective action that might uncover and dismantle the systemic causes of pay inequity, which are not due to a woman’s choice or personality but rather what we frame as the neoliberal chimera.     

Utility of the Revised Level of Service Inventory (LSI-R) in Predicting Recidivism After Long-Term Incarceration

Assessing an inmate’s risk for recidivism may become more challenging as the length of incarceration increases. Although the population of Long-Term Inmates (LTIs) is burgeoning, no risk assessment tools have been specifically validated for this group. Based on a sample of 1,144 inmates released in a state without parole, we examine the utility of the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) in assessing risk of general and violent felony recidivism for LTIs (n = 555). Results indicate that (a) the LSI-R moderately predicts general, but not necessarily violent, recidivism, and (b) this predictive utility is not moderated by LTI status, and is based in part on ostensibly dynamic risk factors. Implications for informing parole decision-making and risk management for LTIs are discussed.