Online Virtual Supervised Visitation During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: One State's Experience

This paper describes how supervised visitation programs in Florida rapidly transitioned from in‐person supervised visits to virtual, online visits during the COVID‐19 pandemic to protect the health of families and staff. Structured telephonic interviews and an online survey revealed that although most program directors had not previously developed guiding policies or hosted such visits, within weeks they were providing hundreds of online “virtual visits” between children and their non‐custodial parents to maintain the crucial parent–child relationship in a safe manner. Vignettes from this data provide lessons regarding parent and child reactions to virtual visits, advantages and disadvantages of virtual visits from the programs' perspectives, and levels of enthusiasm for using virtual visits going forward. In addition, the data includes recommendations for new program guidelines and protocols for the ongoing use of virtual visits. Although it is too early to call these policies best practices, the study does offer insight into the challenges and opportunities afforded by virtual visits and can inform disaster planning that supervised visitation programs develop to prepare for inevitable future disruptions in services to families.     

Lost in translation: managing medicalised motherhood in post-World War Two Australian migrant accommodation centres

Women who began their lives as ‘New Australians’ in migrant centres, arriving from refugee camps and war-ravaged homelands, brought with them a range of interpretations of good health and its management. In post-WWII Australia, the medicalisation of maternity and infant welfare intensified in the context of a renewed anxiety about population and recent medical developments. This article investigates the systems and quality of care given to pregnant women, infants and new mothers in government funded accommodation centres. This care was delivered in the highly politicised context of a mass migration scheme sold to the host population as coming at minimum social and economic cost. We assess the impact of this political context on the care that was provided and reveal health care settings to be crucial sites for the examination of the complex biopolitics of gendered citizenship within the mass migration scheme.     

The framework convention on tobacco control: The politics of global health governance

This paper analyses the particular challenges that tobacco control poses for health governance in an era of accelerating globalisation. Traditionally, health systems have been structured at the national level, and health regulation has focused on the needs of populations within individual countries. However, the increasingly global nature of the tobacco industry, and the risks it poses to public health, require a transnational approach to regulation. This has been the rationale behind negotiations for a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) by the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organisation (TFI/WHO). In recognition of the need to go beyond national governments, and to create a governance mechanism that can effectively address the transnational nature of the tobacco epidemic, WHO has sought to involve a broad range of interests in negotiations. The contributions of civil society groups in particular in the negotiation process have been unusual. This paper explores the nature and effectiveness of these contributions. It concludes with an assessment of whether the FCTC constitutes a significant shift towards a new form of global health governance, exploring the institutional tensions inherent in attempting to extend participation within a state-centric organisation.     

Eye‐Catching Eyebrows: Training and Evaluating Humans for Periocular Image Verification

High‐quality periocular images have sufficient variability between people that they can be used for automated recognition. However, there are no standards for training people to compare periocular images in a forensic context. Potential methods for training people to compare eyebrow images are investigated in this article. Pairs of images were presented to volunteers who decided whether the images showed the same person or different people. A control group with minimal instruction and no training responded with 87.6% accuracy. A second group viewed 100 training pairs before the test and achieved 94.2% accuracy. A third group rated specific features in the images and had 0.1% improvement over the second group. Experimental results show that actively comparing at least thirty training images and receiving immediate feedback improves trainees’ performance six to seven percent. If a quantitative quality score is needed, a linear combination of similarity ratings on different features may be used.     

Examination of Illicit Drug Use Frequency Using Multiple Drug Assessment Methods in Mothers Referred to Treatment by Child Protective Services

It has long been established that illicit drug use contributes to child maltreatment. However, investigators have yet to comprehensively examine illicit drug use in mothers referred to treatment by Child Protective Services (CPS). In this study, 77 mothers who were referred to treatment by CPS for co-existing drug abuse and child neglect were administered the Timeline Follow-Back measure to assess their substance use frequency during the four months preceding treatment. Reports of the mothers’ substance use were obtained for the same time period from the mothers’ significant others and CPS caseworkers, and mothers were administered urinalysis testing. The purpose of this study was to examine the concordance of these multiple reports, and identify unique predictors of different drug use reporting patterns. The practice of using urinalysis results as a prompt during the mothers’ Timeline Follow-Back administration may have contributed to greater frequency of drug use reporting in mothers. Mothers reported progressively more drug use for more distant time periods, as compared with caseworkers. Findings also suggested mothers’ reports of drug use were influenced by CPS investigatory case status (i.e., open or closed), ethnicity, and defensive responding. Implications of these findings for clinical practice and future research are discussed.