Water crises: political construction or physical reality?

Various definitions of water crises emerge from epistemic communities deploying a great disparity of methodologies and fundamental hypotheses. Scientists' perceptions of which power structures legitimately carry out water management affect their definition of a crisis, their capacity to ask questions and the manner they formulate them. This determines the stakes and the actors they can observe or the scale of analysis they find relevant. This leads some to recommend a ‘solution’ that appears to be a disaster to others. This article examines how three epistemic communities have each built their science by promoting very specific understandings of what is a water crisis. Proponents of the ‘global water crisis’ spawned Integrated Water Resources Management while proponents of the ‘municipal water crisis’ locked the perception of water equity within the Millennium Development Goals. Researchers on small-scale irrigation and property regimes have often disagreed with such recommendations, often presented as inevitable.     

A Pre-Trial Domestic Violence Intensive Supervision Unit: Exploring Case Seriousness and Successful Disposition

This study measures the seriousness of domestic violence cases from the population of cases (N = 96) sentenced to a pre-trial domestic violence intensive supervision unit in one county probation office in Florida from April 1, 2006, to April 30, 2007. No significant differences were found in seriousness across sex, self-reported drug use, or attorney type. Furthermore, no relationship was found between the number of special conditions imposed by the court and the seriousness index value for a case. However, non-Whites had a significantly higher mean case seriousness index than Whites. Findings suggest that using the seriousness index presented in this study, some of the cases examined were not serious enough to warrant being sentenced to the pre-trial domestic violence intensive supervision unit. Implications for future research, including the use of lethality assessments, are addressed.     

‘An Unsolvable Justice Problem’? Punishing Young People's Sexual Violence

This article addresses the paradox that whilst young offenders in general are increasingly diverted from formal justice, there continues to be resistance to the idea of diversion for those young people who commit sexual offences. It explores the ways in which tensions arising from this paradox are currently being played out within criminal justice systems in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Building on published and new research on criminal justice responses to young sexual offenders, the article highlights the problems of responding within any one justice framework to the – at times – competing concerns about risk, welfare, and control that these young offenders provoke. Drawing on criminological, psychological, and sociological work, the article argues that these concerns are accentuated in relation to young sexual offenders because of interrelated fears about the progressive nature of sexual offending; the ability of 'newer' justice practices to meet the need for 'affective' and 'effective' justice in relation to sexual crimes; and because of wider societal anxieties about sexual crimes, particularly where the victims and the offenders are children or young people.