Assessing Best Practice as a Means of Innovation

This paper argues that Best Practice and innovation are different, if related activities, with Best Practice being just one of the means by which organisations can innovate. After reviewing the literatures on innovation diffusion and policy transfer, this paper reports the findings of two surveys of Best Practice in English local authorities on, respectively, regeneration and community safety. The paper finds that innovation is related to the CPA, but use of Best Practice is not; that greater capacity affects both innovation and the use of Best Practice; and that there is little link within authorities in the degree of innovation between policy sectors. In evaluating the use of Best Practice, the paper finds that local authorities encounter problems with assessing whether Best Practice is appropriate for their authority and judging whether Best Practice is in fact best practice. With Best Practice guides, the key problem is the difficulty in assessing whether the practice is as effective as the guides suggest and whether it would really work in a particular authority. The paper concludes that more effort could be made to ensure that readers of Best Practice guides can find out how the innovations really work and how they can be adapted to local needs.     

Engaging With Criminal Prosecution: The Victim's Perspective

Despite more than a decade of policies that encourage prosecutors to proceed without the victim's input or actions in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), prosecutors still often rely on the victim's participation to move a case forward. The purpose of this study was to identify the barriers and motivators influencing female IPV victims' engagement with the criminal justice system and their preferences regarding prosecution. Findings from focus groups with women who had experienced police response to IPV revealed that women wanted the violence to end but faced numerous barriers to engaging with the criminal prosecution process. The dominant voice favored police and prosecutors taking action toward prosecution without depending solely or heavily on the victim's active participation.     

Mixed marriage, ‘a grave injury to our church’: An account of the 1957 Fethard-on-Sea Boycott

The family was central to the religious formation and indeed the survival of southern Irish Protestantism in the mid-twentieth century. The largest Protestant denomination in the Republic of Ireland, the Church of Ireland (comprising approximately 5% of the national population in 1950) was challenged by demographic trends of late and low rates of marriage, emigration and the ever-prevalent threat of mixed marriage. Against this backdrop the church emphasised the essentiality of the socialisation of children into the church community. It cautioned against the dangers of inter-church marriage where the enforcement by the Catholic church of the 1908 Ne Temere decree obliged the Protestant partner in a mixed marriage to consent in writing to the upbringing of any children of the union as Catholics. The actions of one woman in the small village of Fethard-on-Sea in county Wexford in 1957 in challenging this dictate led to a sectarian and divisive boycott of Protestant business in the locality. Eileen Cloney, a member of the Church of Ireland, chose to leave her home with her two daughters, against the wishes of her husband Seán, rather than allow her eldest daughter attend the local Catholic school in the village. Her ‘abduction’ of her children was condemned by local and national Catholic clergy culminating in the call for a boycott of Protestant businesses and farms by the local Catholic Curate, Fr. Stafford on 12 May 1957. In this article, original oral history research as well as previously unseen documentary sources will be used in an examination of this divisive boycott and its local and national repercussions. The article will explore contemporary discourse on marriage as well as highlighting the significance of the family in church and state discourse.     

Pornography and the construction of misogyny

Summary

In this paper I return to my work in Pornography: Women, Violence and Civil Liberties, the edited volume published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, and subsequently my work on pornography, harm and human rights (Itzin, 1995, 1996a), and to pornography and child sexual abuse (Itzin, 1996b, 1997a,b, 2000a,b,c). I draw from and build on that work and from the contents of the pornography special issue of the Journal of Sexual Aggression (Itzin and Cox, 2000). This paper covers key issues such as legislation and regulation, censorship' and ‘freedom’, the literature on pornography effects, the role of pornography in the aetiology of sex offending and in the construction of desire. In particular, the paper is concerned with theorising aetiology, causality and the ‘epistemology of public policy’ on pornography. It draws from and builds on the scholarship and activism of radical feminism in conceptualising and campaigning against pornography-related harm.     

Measuring grievance thinking in sexual offenders: The revised Dissipation–Rumination Scale

Abstract

Rumination is an important part of “grievance thinking”, which has been linked to recidivism in sexual offenders. Grievance thinking is a dynamic risk factor that can be targeted in treatment, and is characterized by a perception of being wronged accompanied by angry, hostile rumination about revenge, and has similarities to the “dangerous world” implicit theory . A revised version of the Dissipation–Rumination Scale is used currently to measure grievance thinking in sexual offenders incarcerated in England and Wales. The study aimed to establish whether this revised measure is valid to use with this population. The scale demonstrated adequate reliability and good convergent validity. However, analyses revealed problems with both construct and predictive validity. Further, it is suggested that the scale may not be sufficient to measure the whole of the “grievance thinking” concept. The results do not provide overwhelming support for the use of this tool with sexual offenders; further research is required before firm conclusions can be drawn regarding the scale's utility. Directions for future research are discussed.     

“Team Australia”: Cartoonists Challenging Exclusionary Nationalist Discourse

In the context of the “war on terror”, Australian leaders announced that an increased threat of terrorist activity existed within Australia in 2014, which was generated by young people travelling to engage in military activity in the Middle East and returning “radicalised”. The prime minister at the time, Tony Abbott, called on Australians to rally together, in the face of such a threat, as “Team Australia”. This article analyses the responses by cartoonists to this call, focusing on the way the notion of Team Australia is portrayed as a challenge to core aspects of Australianness, such as mateship, multiculturalism and the “fair-go”. Frame analysis is used to explore how the cartoons connect with the broader populace and represent, challenge, reconstruct and rely on implicit and explicit understandings of Australianness. The cartoons frame Abbott’s Team Australia as exclusionary, unfair, politically elitist, anti-multicultural and “un-Australian”, even while pursuing a nationalist project.     

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

This article explores the convergences and divergence between transitional justice and peacebuilding, by considering some of the recent developments in scholarship and practice. It examines the notion of ‘peace’ in transitional justice and the idea of ‘justice’ in peacebuilding. It highlights that transitional justice and peacebuilding often engage with similar or related ideas, though the scholarship in each field has developed largely in parallel to each other, and often without any significant engagement between the fields of inquiry. The article also notes that both fields share other commonalities, insofar as they often neglect questions of capital (political, social, economic) and at times, gender. It is suggested that trying to locate the nexus in the first place draws attention to where peace and justice have actually got to be produced in order for there not to be conflict and violence. This in turn demonstrates that locally, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ do not always look like the ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ drawn up by international donors and peacebuilders; and, despite the ‘turn to the local’ in international relations, it is surprising just how many local and everyday dynamics are (dis)missed as sources of peace and justice, or potential avenues of addressing the past.     

Qualitative Exploration of the Influence of Domestic Violence on Motherhood in the Perinatal Period

The perinatal period may include domestic violence (DV). In this study, the perinatal period extends from the start of pregnancy to the end of the child’s second year of life. DV places the safety of both mother and child at risk and undermines the mother–child attachment bond. In this article, we look at the challenges for motherhood in a context of domestic violence during the perinatal period (DVPP). In semi-directed interviews, 17 mothers shared their stories of DVPP. Interview questions focused on the trajectory of DVPP, perceptions and occupation of motherhood within two years of childbirth and the associated challenges. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis and discussed in a feminist conceptual framework and a parental theoretical model. DVPP negatively influences the experience and practice of motherhood, in addition to increasing parental responsibility to protect the child. Three main themes were noted: 1) A parental experience impoverished by the context of DVPP, caused by an increase in tasks, a weakened bond with the child and a loss of self-confidence; 2) Parenting responsibility in a context of DVPP is expressed as greater vigilance and the need to protect the child from violence; and 3) Parenting practices: the children as targets and victims of violence, resulting in additional child needs that mothers must meet. The results underscore the need for early detection of DVPP and a trauma-informed approach in health services. Specialized support services should be provided to help mothers cope with violence.