The Intergenerational Impact of Intimate Partner Violence against Mothers on Child Functioning over four Years

Intimate partner violence affects one in three U.S. women. Children often witness the violence. Methods: A 4-year cohort analysis of 300 mother-child dyads used latent growth curve techniques to examine the impact of partner violence on mothers’ and children’s mental health and function over time. The dyads entered the study when the mother sought safe shelter or justice services. Data was collected every four months, 13 times. Results: Four models were derived, each with good fit. Maternal age, Adverse Childhood Events, and ethnicity determined the level of maternal PTSD, depression, and anxiety at baseline. Mothers’ self-efficacy and marginalization determined if maternal mental health symptoms decreased or increased over 4-years. Maternal symptom levels determined if child dysfunctions persisted over time. Conclusion: This analysis provides longitudinal evidence that maternal mental health determines children’s recovery from or persistence of behavioral dysfunctions. Primary prevention and informed referral has the potential to improve child outcomes.     

Assessing the Risk of Future Psychological Abuse: Predicting the Accuracy of Battered Women’s Predictions

Building on a handful of studies demonstrating battered women’s accuracy in assessing their risk of being physically reabused, this study examined how accurately victims assess their risk of future psychological abuse. Participants’ ratings of the likelihood that their partner would engage in controlling/dominance behaviors or efforts to humiliate/degrade them in the coming year and their reports 18 months later of whether this had actually occurred were used to create a four category version of accuracy (true positive, false positive, true negative, false negative). Victims were more likely to be right than wrong in their assessments of risk; PTSD symptoms, the recency of physical violence, and the degree of stalking and psychological abuse in the relationship predicted membership in the four accuracy categories. These findings overlap considerably with those examining victim accuracy in predicting physical abuse and inform ongoing debates about the value of incorporating victims’ insights into risk assessment efforts.

The Dynamics of Staying and Leaving: Implications for Battered Women’s Emotional Well-Being and Experiences of Violence at the End of a Year

Much of the discourse on intimate partner violence assumes that women must end their relationship with their abusive partner to increase their safety and emotional well-being. Few studies, however, exist to support this assumption. Equally problematic, those studies that do exist have failed to distinguish women who leave and stay out from those who leave only to later return. Comparing emotional well-being and experiences of violence for 206 low-income, primarily Black battered women following different relationship trajectories, this longitudinal study found that women both separated from and together with their partner for the entire year of the study fared best at the end of that year compared to women “in” and “out” of the relationship over time. Beyond challenging common assumptions, these findings highlight the importance of considering the larger context within which an individual instance of leaving occurs.

Policing the Chinese household: a comparison of modern and ancient forms

Chinese systems of household registration have long been regarded as marginal areas of interest in Chinese studies. Using recent theoretical work on community, family, policing, and power as the conceptual basis, this study, however, questions such marginalization. We have attempted to plot the role of the household register in the classical and contemporary periods. In the classical period, we suggest, it functioned as a mechanism to police and make visible the order of the family. It did this by renegotiating family relations away from anti-State alliances and by constructing a hierarchy of mutual control which valorized the privileged status of the family. The contemporary system has however moved away from the moral concerns of earlier systems, and centers instead upon questions of population and organization. It forms the basic statistical material of both the welfare system and state planning. It is no longer regarded as a defence of the moral order, rather it constructs itself not unlike domains that once claimed to be Proletarian Sciences.     

THREATENING HISTORIES

This article contributes to recent scholarship on modern Vietnamese historiography by examining the ways in which twentieth-century historians have manipulated their representations of collective actions during the French colonial period. Following studies by Patricia Pelley, Christoph Giebel, Peter Zinoman, and others, the author offers a critical reading of narrative accounts of the period between the late nineteenth century and the late 1930s. The article is inspired by Prasenjit Duara's work on modern Chinese historiography, in which he showed how early twentieth-century Chinese historians viewed their history through the simplifying lens of the nation-state. Here the author argues that most post–1954 communist historians in Viet Nam were influenced by similar impulses, leading them to construct a highly teleological account of this period, obscuring its true complexity. The author uses case studies of the representations of secret societies, ethnic minority groups, and new religious movements to demonstrate how this obscuring has worked, while suggesting alternate readings of the collective actions by these groups that place them outside of a convenient teleology leading directly to the triumph of the Communist Party. The author argues that the complex histories of these groups were a challenge to the Marxist dialectic and were thus regarded as a threat to the narrative. As such, modern historians had to reimagine or even erase these complexities for political purposes. The author concludes by suggesting that historians must continue to probe these types of collectivities as complex actors in a complicated historical landscape, rather than accepting them as part of a linear narrative.     

International Law and the November 2004 “Han Incident”

Abstract

The Ishigaki Strait is an international strait by the terms of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention, but for national security reasons it is not recognized as such by the Japanese government, which advocates a narrower definition of what constitutes an international strait in which the right of transit passage applies. China, as a traditional land power with tradinationally weak maritime forces, has historically agreed with Japan's limitations on access through such straits. As China's maritime strength grows, it has increasingly greater interest in access to ocean spaces. However, because of tension and poor coordination between its military and foreign policy bureaucracies, China missed an opportunity during the diplomatic crisis in November 2004 to align its position on maritime law with its strategic interests.     

Disciplinary projects and carceral spread: Foucauldian theory and Chinese practice

This paper has a dual object: Fist, utilizing Foucault;s definiation of ‘disciplinary power’, the paper demon-strates the disciplinary nature of China's Reform through labour (laogai) system. It is suggested that laogai is an extension, deepening and modification of certain nineteeenth-century Western utilitarian penal themes designed to ‘reform the criminal mind’ and produce 'obedient subjects'. Second, having established the disciplinary nature of the laogai project, the paper then goes on to examine the (neo-Foucauldian) 'disciplinary dispersal thesis'. This thesis suggestes a gradual spread of carceral technologies which led to the formation of a disciplinary society. this paper suggests that there are a number of theoretical problems in this thesis, not the least of which is its rather ambiguous relationship to the work of Foucault.