Parenting Skills,Family Functioning and Social Support in Situations of Child-to-Parent Violence: a Scoping Review of the Literature

Journal of Family Violence - The aim of this study was to carry out a scoping review to analyze the available evidence regarding parenting skills, family functioning and social support in...     

Glimpsing the Holocaust in post-war British detective fiction

ABSTRACT

Scholars including David Cesarani have noted that there was no concerted effort to represent what we now term the Holocaust in British fiction of the immediate post-war years. What can be found in novels from the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, are suggestive glimpses of how British understandings of the Holocaust were beginning to develop. Detective fiction is a useful point of reference because in the interwar years this form was typically based on simplified or even stereotyped characters, with the war years and the post-war period signalling a turn to greater realism. As Gill Plain has argued, detective fiction expresses a desire both to see and to evade seeing the dead body. Plain explores this as an expression of post-First World War cultural anxieties but, in the wake of the widespread circulation in Britain of images of the opening up of the concentration and death camps, such ambivalence takes on a particular significance. Examining two quite different examples, Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced (1950) and Ellis Peters’s Fallen into the Pit (1951), Stewart’s article reveals contrasting early engagements with the Holocaust. Both novels feature peripheral characters who are refugees from Europe, and whose stories, although told only in fragments, nevertheless destabilize the process of reinstating order that is the usual narrative trajectory of the detective novel. Stewart will argue that such glimpses of the Holocaust are as telling about contemporary attitudes as more concerted, explicit and direct engagements might be.     

Analysis of histomorphometric variables: Proposal and validation of osteon definitions

Histological analysis of bone tissue has been used to explore a variety of questions relating to age-at-death, habitual behaviors, health, and nutritional stress. Identification of intact and fragmentary osteons is of key interest to many researchers in these studies, yet the definitions of these features vary between researchers making cross-study comparisons problematic. Furthermore, histological variable definitions are often ambiguous or require subjective classifications by the observer. As a result, and as indicated by previous studies, observer error and misclassification of certain variables, namely intact and fragmentary osteons, can be significant. This study proposes new definitions for intact and fragmentary osteons that are designed to limit observer subjectivity and also explore efficacy of combining osteon types into one variable. A sample of 30 6th rib cross-sections from a modern forensic population was used to test the validity of the proposed definitions. Observations of intact osteon population density (OPD(I)) and fragmentary osteon population density (OPD(F)) were made by three observers for each cross-section. These observations were used to explore the interobserver error associated with the proposed definitions and determine if combining variables into one variable (OPD) mitigates persisting classification difficulties. Results indicate that the proposed definitions significantly reduce interobserver error and misclassification of intact and fragmentary osteons. However, the interobserver error associated with fragmentary osteons is still high. Evaluation of the variables independently indicates that combining variables has potential to reduce the predictive strength of an age estimation model and the ability to interpret age-related bone remodeling.     

Preparing individuals for leadership in Australasia,the United States,and the UK

ABSTRACT

Much is said about the importance of leadership in policing. In policing leadership is a key variable in organisational effectiveness, public confidence and employee well-being. We demand that our police leaders are ethical, decisive, skilled, and have the internal and external legitimacy needed to exert influence inside and outside the workplace. There are many advantages to such a pipeline approach to organisational leadership, and it presents organisations with an unparalleled opportunity to develop leaders and leadership talent over an extended period. There are questions, of course, about how much advantage our police organisations really take of this opportunity; how coherently leader development is planned and organised; and how effective our development models are. In this paper, we explore leader development in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on data collected through semi-structured interviews with established senior police leaders in each country we explore development journeys, opportunities for learning inside and outside of policing, the impact of leader development on leadership-style and decision-making, and how well-prepared leaders feel for their roles having transited their organisational pipelines. Drawing on these data we present a model for leadership development that calls for individual and organisational work. By seeing leadership in terms of organisation capacity, rather than individual capacity, the model encourages a comprehensive and more cohesive approach through police education and other initiatives to developing our organisational leaders, and recognises too that preparing individuals is only part of the story.     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

Blind lineup administration as a prophylactic against the postidentification feedback effect

Confidence and other testimony-relevant judgments may be distorted when witnesses are given confirming postidentification feedback, and double-blind procedures-wherein the lineup administrator does not know the identity of the suspect-are a commonly proposed, but untested, remedy for this effect. In the current study, mock witnesses viewed a staged crime video followed by a target-present or target-absent lineup where the administrator was or was not presumed to know the identity of the suspect. After making an identification decision, witnesses were or were not given realistic, but nonidentification-specific, feedback, and then confidence and other judgments were assessed. A significant interaction was found between blind condition and feedback such that feedback inflated confidence and other judgments in presumed nonblind conditions only; feedback had no effect on participants in presumed blind conditions. As predicted by the selective cue integration framework-a theoretical model suggested to explain the interaction between presumed blind administration and feedback-this interaction was significant only for inaccurate participants. These results suggest that blind administration may serve as a prophylactic against the negative effects of postidentification feedback. In addition, the effectiveness of our subtle feedback in influencing judgments suggests that lineup administrators should take care not to provide any feedback to eyewitnesses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

China's provincial diplomacy to Africa: applications to health cooperation

There is a prevailing view of China as a unitary actor in its relationships with African countries. This view is incomplete: on the contrary, China is a collection of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities with myriad strategic ties to African countries, with decentralization shaping the current form of Chinese government and its level of efficiency. In this paper, factors have been explored for why Chinese provinces have played a role in foreign cooperation in health of African countries, in addition to trade and foreign direct investment. Incentives and disincentives for Chinese provinces to engage internationally in foreign cooperation and health assistance have been identified. The concept of paradiplomacy for health has been presented and this typology has been applied to the example of Chinese medical teams. Finally, we draw linkages between China and other members of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.     

How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on women,peace and security

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is a landmark pronouncement on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Not only does this resolution highlight the important role of the involvement of women in peace processes, but it also stresses the importance of their equal participation in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace. Furthermore, it also triggers the approval of some other resolutions, which are all further elaborations on that first document. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, the way in which women are actually narrated in these pronouncements by means of the two conceptual metaphors that are most often repeated: WOMEN ARE VICTIMS, typically found in earlier resolutions, and WOMEN ARE AGENTS OF CHANGE, as the metaphor that has gained more strength and visibility as new resolutions have continued to appear. As metaphors are the cognitive lenses we use to make sense of abstract concepts, it is important that we look closely at each of those metaphors to see how they shape the characterization of women in times of armed conflict and post-conflict and, in doing so, how they guide our understanding and behaviour towards them.