People with special needs and sexual behaviour problems: balancing community and client interests while ensuring effective risk management

Abstract

Deinstitutionalisation movements of the mid-1900s led to changes in policy and practice in the management of people with special needs (defined for this article as people with severe and persistent mental illness, intellectual disabilities and high levels of personality factors that interfere with treatment participation). Although the majority of clients with special needs receive care in community settings and interact more with family, friends and others in the community, some such clients require more rigorous case management. For clients who have offended, especially sexually, community-based services are scarce, and concerns regarding reoffence potential often supersede traditional understandings of diminished capacity. Recent reports suggest that jails and prisons have replaced hospitals as the institutions-of-choice for clients with special needs who engage in inappropriate conduct. This paper examines policies and practices regarding community risk management of people with special needs who have sexually offended. Vignettes are provided to illustrate how some clients and agencies have been affected, and suggestions are made to ensure best practices in risk management and public safety.     

Blood and bone: body mass,gender and health inequality in nineteenth-century British families

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, a new institution emerged: the modern prison. Some prisons invested in scales. Upon entry, prisoners were measured and personal details documented. These meticulously compiled records afford a new vantage point from which we can peer into the dynamics of the household. Body measurements – height, weight, and body mass (weight adjusted for height) – connect to both patterns of consumption and health risk. Prison data thus speak to both gender and health inequality in the past. The paper juxtaposes a service economy (Wandsworth near London) with a modern manufacturing sector (Paisley near Glasgow) in order to contrast how economic form and opportunities in the market sector shaped relations and outcomes in the household sector. We find that families bargained over the allocation of resources; that bargaining position was influenced by economic value, mediated by maternal sacrifice; that this was an earner bias rather than gender bias; and that new industrial work for women and children supported a more egalitarian distribution that improved everyone's health status via superior heights and heavier weights. We examine Irish immigrants to assess cultural differences in family behaviour. Finally, the paper offers, for the first time, a detailed interpolation of Waaler's health risk for women.     

Regulating for responsibility: reputation and social media

The framework brought forward by the United Kingdom's Defamation Act 2013 underlines a traditional hierarchy of expression in which news media are viewed as high-level speech. Although of a different form, social media are a dominant means of expression. The current study explores the rationale for a more robust and forceful discussion of responsibility in speech on social media platforms. The underlying premise here is that speech should be viewed as a qualified good and that a more appropriate paradigm is one found in the phrase ‘freedom to participate’.     

Identifying with the Nation: Spain's Left-Wing Citizens in an Age of Crisis

This study analyses the extent, sense, and strategies employed by sympathisers with Spanish state-wide left-wing parties to ‘reconstruct’ their affective ties with the Spanish nation after the ‘monopolisation of patriotism’ by Franco's regime. Such an undertaking is further complicated within the context of economic crisis and intensified peripheral nationalism found in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This article applies qualitative analysis to the discourse of left-wing participants from 11 focus groups held in March 2012 amidst the economic (and political) crisis. As expected, this context of crisis favoured the emergence of explicit discourse on the Spanish nation, providing an opportunity to gain a better understanding of its nature. Findings show that welfare nationalism and social patriotism define the kind of attachment developed by the interviewees towards Spain better than the concept of constitutional patriotism, or any kind of ethnic-cultural feeling of belonging.