PROTECTING LIVES,CAREERS, AND PUBLIC CONFIDENCE: FLORIDA'S EFFORTS TO PREVENT OFFICER‐INVOLVED DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Florida's innovative Law Enforcement Families Partnership (LEFP) was created to reduce and prevent officer‐involved domestic violence in the state. Administered by the Institute for Family Violence Studies at Florida State University and supported by the criminal justice and victim's advocacy communities, the LEFP is the first statewide project of its kind. It includes several components, the cornerstone of which is an online curriculum that teaches officers about the dynamics and consequences of domestic violence perpetrated by officers. This article describes the project and early data from the surveys attached to the curriculum.     

Characteristic Features of Severe Child Physical Abuse—A Multi-informant Approach

Minor child physical abuse has decreased in Sweden since 1979, when a law banning corporal punishment of children was passed, but more serious forms have not decreased. The aim of this study was to examine risk and background factors in cases of severe child abuse reported to the police. Files from different agencies (e.g., Social services, Adult and Child psychiatry and Pediatric clinic) for 20 children and 34 caretakers were studied. An accumulation of risk factors was found. It is concluded that when the following four factors are present, there is a risk for severe child abuse: 1) a person with a tendency to use violence in conflict situations; 2) a strong level of stress on the perpetrator and the family; 3) an insufficient social network that does not manage to protect the child; 4) a child that does not manage to protect him or herself. Thus, multiple sources of information must be used when investigating child abuse.     

Postmodernism the Movie

Postmodern cinema, in its various expressions over the past three decades, represents a form of popular culture characteristic of the post-Fordist, globalized phase of capitalist development most visible in the United States. As a crucial dimension of media culture with its strong emphasis on new modes of technology, commodification, consumerism, and the society of the spectacle, filmmaking today celebrates increasingly diverse, experimental, and in some cases subversive types of aesthetic representation. It often questions established social hierarchies and discourses while at the same time depicting a society in the midst of turmoil, chaos, fragmentation, and violence - a social order that gives rise to and sustains a popular mood of anxiety, cynicism, and powerlessness. Postmodern cinema reflects and helps reproduce this milieu through its embrace of disjointed narratives, dystopic images, technological wizardry, and motifs dwelling upon mayhem, ambiguity, death of the classical hero, and breakdown of dominant values or social relations. While such film culture calls into question certain dimensions of the class and power structures, it simultaneously negates prospects for collective identity and subjectivity required for effective social change; its cultural radicalism is never translated into anything resembling political radicalism. On the contrary, postmodern cinema more than anything encourages a flight from politics - a cynical, detached, disempowering attitude toward the entire public sphere - typical of an increasingly depoliticized society.