Female sexual abusers: Assessing the risk

Successful risk management within child protection is problematic and in many cases is a delicate balancing act between parental and children’s rights. Reversing the expected gender roles creates a dynamic that may increase the difficulties of risk assessment even further. This paper focuses on women who sexually abuse children and discusses the particular problems relating to the assessment of risk in professional practice. The data was gathered in the UK and drawn from a series of qualitative interviews with child protection professionals, including 3 police officers, 2 lawyers, 15 social workers, 6 probation officers, 8 health workers and 11 counsellors. The interview data have identified some links between the gendered assumptions and the rationales used by professionals to explain the abusive behaviour.     

Conditional openness: young people define practices for successful child protection interventions

Taking the reforms of child protection legislation that have occurred since the 1980s as a backdrop, this paper considers young people’s perspectives on the factors that facilitated their engagement with child protection services and the barriers they perceived to effective service delivery. Drawing on findings from a New Zealand study of young people’s experience of multiple service use (child protection, mental health, youth justice and remedial education), the paper identifies that that rather than being ‘resistant’ or ‘hostile’ to statutory child protection intervention, young people reported a ‘conditional openness’. This conditional openness was characterised by three themes: communication; continuity and consistency; and contextual and cultural responsiveness. Interventions with these characteristics activated this conditional openness allowing effective interventions to occur. Using a series of case studies, comprising interviews and agency case file records; the paper considers the experiences of 109 young people (12–17 years) as well as those of the ‘person most knowledgeable;’ an adult nominated by young people because they knew the young person’s situation well.     

Globalization and Vulnerability of Chinese Migrant Workers in Italy: empirical evidence on working conditions and their consequences

Compared with other ethnic groups, Chinese immigrants have a low profile and their voices, contributions, sufferings and needs are not widely recognised. This paper argues that the vulnerability of Chinese migrant workers is related to the poor working conditions in ethnic workplaces and the social isolation they experience, and that these two problems are interwoven. The data were obtained from an empirical survey involving 28 Chinese- and Italian-owned manufacturers in the textile, garment and leather sectors in the Veneto region of northern Italy, selected to enable comparisons to be made between conditions in Chinese-owned and Italian-owned businesses.     

Development of a simulation model to assess the impact of contamination in casework using STRs

Because contamination is usually tube-specific, negative controls cannot give assurance that an associated batch of extracted casework material is contaminant-free. However, it is possible to use them to predict the level of overall (undetected) contamination that is processed by an operational DNA unit. A MATLAB-based program was used to combine results of negative controls with actual casework DNA profiles to assess the probability that laboratory contaminants will give rise to reportable profiles (along with their likelihood ratios). Using data from an operational DNA unit as an example, it was demonstrated that the risk is inextricably linked to guidelines used to interpret DNA profiles. We have demonstrated how computer-based models can predict the levels of contamination expected in the process and, in addition, how the process can be made more robust by changing reporting guidelines. There is a need to compare DNA profiles against staff and plasticware elimination databases in order to determine sources of contamination. The likeliest outcome of a contamination event is false exclusion.     

Reducing Aboriginal Over-representation in Prison

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody attributed the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody to the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison. Most analyses of this over-representation focus on the issue of systemic bias in policing, the law or the operation of the criminal justice system. The present article contends that, while discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people by police and the court system is an historical fact, the leading current cause of Aboriginal over-representation in prison is not systemic bias but high rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime. We argue that efforts to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates through policing or criminal justice system policy have failed and will continue to fail until they succeed in reducing crime in Aboriginal communities. Future efforts to bring down Aboriginal imprisonment rates should focus on this issue.     

In the pursuit of a gender-equal society: do Japanese EFL textbooks play a role?

‘Womenomics’, a signature programme promoted by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, aims to boost the country’s economy by attracting women, an under-utilized resource, to join the workforce. To achieve this aim, the Japanese Government has been promoting a gender-equal society in various areas, including education. This paper seeks to investigate whether the government’s endeavour to promote a gender-equal society is reflected in contemporary Japanese EFL textbooks. Three recently published popular textbooks were examined. The findings revealed evidence of the authors’ gender awareness, including common use of gender-neutral vocabulary and a neutral term of address, Ms, for women. Two textbooks also displayed a balanced distribution of male and female speakers and their amount of talk. However, underrepresentation of women and their achievements is still prevalent in contemporary Japanese textbooks. Other observations include the portrayal of men in a wider range of social roles than women, and the depiction of men using material and cognitive processes and women using relational processes, suggesting that men are more physically and cognitively active than women. A gender dichotomy was also noted in mixed-sex dialogues, with a tendency for men to provide information and for women to seek information.     

The role of the Yorta Yorta people in clarifying the common interest in sustainable management of the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

The Murray–Darling Basin incorporates Australia’s three longest rivers and spans four states and one territory. It is important for an agricultural industry worth more than AUS$9 billion per year, but is also the life source and the spirit of the Indigenous Yorta Yorta people. Here, we address whether the interests of the Yorta Yorta people can encompass the common interest of the wider community in the Basin, and how the colonial legacy and climate change of the past century continue to influence the realization of the common interest moving forward. We find that shared regional governance with an agreed outcome supports the ongoing sustainability of the country and its people, but because of the legal history of Australia since colonization, recognition and mutual respect are no less important. Further, we note that the increasing climatic variability and changing climatic mechanisms that now exemplify the southeast of Australia corroborates the need for adaptive planning with longer time horizons. These lessons are supported by the customary law and practice of the Yorta Yorta people.