Dealing with the Unthinkable: a Study of the Cognitive and Emotional Stress of Adult and Child Homicide Investigations on Police Investigators

Although the death of a child is without doubt one of the most distressing events imaginable, when it occurs in suspicious circumstances, such as at the hand of a parent or close family member, its effects are often more acute and incomprehensible. This paper presents an exploratory study comparing the cognitive and emotional stressors experienced by police when investigating child and adult homicides. The results of an online survey questionnaire with 99 experienced UK police investigators are presented, with key differences found in the cognitive and emotional stress experienced depending on whether the victim is a child or an adult, key differences and similarities identified in the ways investigators deal and cope with adult and child homicide cases, with a tentative discussion of the implications for the well-being and training of police investigators provided.     

Political parties and public investments: a comparative analysis of 22 Western democracies

When do political parties push for public investments in education, research, and infrastructure? Existing literature has mainly answered this question by pointing to parties’ state?market ideology. In contrast, this article presents a novel argument highlighting the role of parties’ aspirations to office and their ambitions to maximize votes. It builds on the idea that investments not only constitute redistributive tools for politicians, but also work as public means to foster economic growth in the long run. This unique feature makes investments attractive for parties with high office and vote aspirations, because they anticipate government responsibility in the future and can use investments’ dispersed growth effects to appeal broadly to a large, heterogeneous pool of voters. Support for this claim is found through time-series cross-sectional analyses of party manifestos from 22 Western democracies between 1947 and 2013. Results also indicate that parties’ positions on the second social value dimension matter.     

Theorising Children's Rights in Youth Justice: The Significance of Autonomy and Foundational Rights

This paper develops a theoretical approach to children's rights in youth justice, located within a wider rights‐based theory of criminal justice which emphasises the centrality of citizens' autonomy. Understanding what is special about children's rights in the youth justice system requires an understanding of how children's autonomy differs from that of adults. One difference is that within the legal system children are not considered to be fully autonomous rights‐holders, because childhood is a time for gathering and developing the assets necessary for full autonomy. These assets should be protected by a category of ‘foundational’ rights. It is argued that an essential component of a rights‐based penal system for children is that it should not irreparably or permanently harm the child's foundational rights. The concept of foundational rights can then underpin and strengthen international children's rights standards, including those relating to the minimum age of criminal responsibility, differential sentencing for children and adults and a rights‐based system of resettlement provision.     

Walter Scott and the Reform of the Scottish Judicature 1806–10

The significance of the effort to reform the Court of Session in the early nineteenth century lies in the fact that it represented the first time Westminster had proposed to alter a key Scottish institution protected by the articles of the 1707 Act of Union. Scott as a Clerk of Session played a crucial role in the process, initially resisting reform and then undertaking to shape it. At the same time, his literary patriotism as Britain's best-selling poet was criticized by Britain's most famous cultural critic, Francis Jeffrey, a fellow member of the Faculty of Advocates. Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review wrote a controversial review of Scott's best-selling poem about the Battle of Flodden, Marmion, which accused Scott of being too ‘English’ in his treatment of this Scottish tragedy. And yet, more than Jeffrey, Scott was opposed to the Whig project of reforming Scottish law to make it more ‘constitutional’ or ‘English’. Using original documents held by the National Archives of Scotland, the Advocates Library, and the National Library of Scotland, this article examines Scott's role in making this controversy a matter of interest for both British literature and legal history.     

Public Investments in Education and Children’s Academic Achievements

While the benefits of additional schooling in the developing world are widely recognised, the best use of scarce resources to improve academic achievement remains unclear. We compare public investments in school infrastructure, school improvement grants, teacher qualifications, and attendance incentives on independently-gathered measures of academic skills as well as grade progression for 8–11 year olds in India. We match a rich household survey containing a skills-assessment module, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), with detailed measures of each district’s education resources from the District Information Survey on Education (DISE). We also include border-pair fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that incentives for children to attend school were associated with arithmetic, reading and writing skills, and grade progression. Investment in teachers were associated with greater probability a child could write and do more advanced math. Small improvement grants to schools were associated with better reading skills and writing ability. Investments in school infrastructure were only associated with improved writing ability.     

Participation in a residential mobility program from the client's perspective: Findings from Gautreaux Two

Abstract

In 2002, the Gautreaux Two housing mobility program provided low‐income families living in Chicago public housing with the opportunity to move to more affluent, less racially isolated communities. This article presents findings on their complex search and moving process. Only about one‐third of enrolled families actually moved through the program ("leased‐up"). In‐depth interviews with a randomly chosen sample of 71 families and an additional 20 “likely mover” families showed that movers fell into four groups distinguished by personal characteristics that made it easier for them to move or by residence on Chicago's North Side.

Nonmovers faced a variety of obstacles, both external (a tight rental market, discrimination, and bureaucratic delays) and internal (limited experience and program comprehension, large household size, and health problems). Also, some nonmovers were too busy with work or school to engage in what proved to be an onerous process of identifying a suitable unit and moving.