Battered women who kill their abusers: an examination of commonsense notions, cognitions, and judgments

It has been argued that battered women who kill their abusers represent a special class of defendants being unfairly treated in the legal system. As a result, commentators have argued for reforms to permit the judicial system to respond more fairly. Researchers have investigated the influences of these prescribed legal modifications and the possible influence of various demographic and psychological factors on legal reforms. However, social scientists have not yet asked some fundamental, psychological questions. Is the law consistent with what society believes is right and just? Is there a commonsense notion of justice in these cases? What factors constitute cognitive decision rules and influence judgments in cases of battered women who kill their abusers? This study uses a basic, psychological method to identify psychological factors that are important in judgments regarding battered women who kill and to better understand commonsense notions of justice in these cases.     

Educational-entertainment as an intervention with black adolescents exposed to community violence

Witnessing violence is one adverse childhood experience (ACE) associated with living in impoverished Black urban communities. Youth with higher violence avoidance self-efficacy and positive coping are more likely to avoid violence. This study evaluates educational entertainment (edutainment) as an intervention with Black adolescents exposed to community violence. Edutainment has shown success in increasing self-efficacy and positive coping skills in other domains. Self-administered scales were used to measure stress, anxiety, violence avoidance self-efficacy, and coping strategies. Data were collected pre- and nine days post-interventions/no intervention from 20 subjects receiving the edutainment intervention, 19 subjects participating in a group discussion about violence, and 21 subjects receiving no intervention (N?=?60). Edutainment and no intervention were more effective than group discussion alone in increasing violence avoidance self-efficacy. Violence avoidance self-efficacy was found to have an intervening relationship between edutainment and the outcome of stress. This study indicates limited but positive effects for edutainment.     

Alexis de Tocqueville on the Covenantal Tradition of American Federal Democracy

Perhaps no analyst of democracy's potentials for despotism andself-government understood better than Alexis de Tocquevillethe importance of the "favorable circumstances" of America'srepublican and religious origins. America's covenantal heritageinspired the public philosophy of federal liberty and the federalprinciple used to establish governments and political associationsin colonial New England. The Puritans, Tocqueville explained,created the bonds and the liberties of citizenship by theirassent to eternal, transcendent principles, as well as by theirconsent to government. The principles of covenant ultimatelyprovided the institutional and conceptual foundation of constitutionalgovernment, making America's federal democracy less vulnerableto possessive individualism and democratic despotism. Federalprinciples fostered an important indirect role for religionin American politics. Tocqueville not only analyzed the tensionbetween the requirements of faith and democratic norms, butalso distinguished covenantal ways of negotiating these concernsfrom the approach taken by later advocates of religious freedom,fames Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He argued that federalism'smoral foundations will be difficult to preserve if this tensionis resolved in ways that promote individual autonomy by underminingcovenantal thinking.     

'These boots are made for walking': why most divorce filers are women

Because of the financial and social hardship faced after divorce,most people assume that generally husbands have instigated divorcesince the introduction of no-fault divorce. Yet women file fordivorce and are often the instigators of separation, despitea deep attachment to their children and the evidence that manydivorces harm children. Furthermore, divorced women in largenumbers reveal that they are happier than they were while married.They report relief and certainty that they were right in leavingtheir marriages. This fundamental puzzle suggests that the incentivesto divorce require a reexamination, and that the forces affectingthe net benefits from marriage may be quite complicated, andperhaps asymmetric between men and women. This paper considerswomen's filing as rational behavior, based on spouses' relativepower in the marriage, their opportunities following divorce,and their anticipation of custody.     

Courtship Violence Among College Students: A Comparison of Verbally and Physically Abusive Couples

This study used a modified version of the Conflict Tactic Scale (Straus, 1990) to measure the expression of verbal and physical aggression among 572 college students (395 females and 177 males) involved in dating relationships over the previous year. Results indicated that 82% (n = 465) of the total sample reported having engaged in verbally aggressive behavior with a dating partner over the past year, whereas 21% (n = 116) admitted to acting in a physically aggressive manner over the same interval. No significant gender-based difference was found for verbal aggression scores; however, females were significantly more likely to report using physical force than were male students. Male and female students who used verbal aggression were characteristically similar to each. Both had experienced aggression from a parent as children and had drunk alcohol within 3 hours (before or after) an argument with a dating partner. Male and female students who admitted using physical force were dissimilar except that both had experienced parent-child aggression. For male students, having witnessed conjugal violence and their general drinking patterns were also significantly related to their using physical force, whereas for females, the use of physical force was associated with drinking alcohol within 3 hours of an argument with a dating partner.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.     

“Success” in policy piloting: Process,programs, and politics

Research has demonstrated that pilots contain multiple shifting purposes, not all of which relate to simple policy testing or refinement. Judging the success of policy pilots is therefore complex, requiring more than a simple judgment against declared goals. Marsh and McConnell provide a framework against which policy success can be judged, distinguishing program success from process and political success. We adapt Boven's modification of this framework and apply it to policy pilots, arguing that pilot process, outcomes and longer-term effects can all be judged in both program and political terms. We test this new framework in a pilot program in the English National Health Service, the Vanguard program, showing how consideration of these different aspects of success sheds light on the program and its aftermath. We consider the implications of the framework for the comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of policy pilots.