“Give me some space”: exploring youth to parent aggression and violence

A small scale qualitative project, undertaken by an interdisciplinary domestic violence research group involving academic researchers and research assistants, with colleagues from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), investigated youth aggression and violence against parents. Following the literature review, data was generated through several research conversations with young people (n = 2), through semi-structured interviews with mothers (n = 3) and practitioners (n = 5), and through a practitioner focus group (n = 8). Thematic analysis and triangulation of the data from parents, practitioners and young people, elicited interconnected and complex overarching themes. Young people could be both victim and perpetrator. The witnessing or experiencing of domestic aggression and violence raised the concept of ‘bystander children’. The impact of young people experiencing familial violence was underestimated by parents. For practitioners, the effects of working with domestic violence was shown to be significant - both positively and negatively.     

JUVENILE COURT FOR YOUNG ADULTS? HOW ONGOING COURT INVOLVEMENT CAN ENHANCE FOSTER YOUTHS' CHANCES FOR SUCCESS

States wishing to extend foster care supports to young adults under the Fostering Connections to Success Act are required to meet all the requirements of Title IV‐E, which include regular reviews that have traditionally been conducted in juvenile courts. For some, this requirement of ongoing judicial involvement is a reason to forgo this significant source of new federal dollars. Others are seeking ways to minimize ongoing court involvement while still complying with federal requirements. This article argues that these views are misguided. Designed properly, juvenile court reviews can play a unique and important role in helping young adults begin to take responsibility for their own futures.     

Visible School Security Measures and Student Academic Performance,Attendance, and Postsecondary Aspirations

Many U.S. schools use visible security measures (security cameras, metal detectors, security personnel) in an effort to keep schools safe and promote adolescents’ academic success. This study examined how different patterns of visible security utilization were associated with U.S. middle and high school students’ academic performance, attendance, and postsecondary educational aspirations. The data for this study came from two large national surveys—the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey (N = 38,707 students; 51 % male, 77 % White, M_Age = 14.72) and the School Survey on Crime and Safety (N = 10,340 schools; average student composition of 50 % male, 57 % White). The results provided no evidence that visible security measures had consistent beneficial effects on adolescents’ academic outcomes; some security utilization patterns had modest detrimental effects on adolescents’ academic outcomes, particularly the heavy surveillance patterns observed in a small subset of high schools serving predominantly low socioeconomic students. The findings of this study provide no evidence that visible security measures have any sizeable effects on academic performance, attendance, or postsecondary aspirations among U.S. middle and high school students.     

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments.     

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.     

Identity Profiles in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth: The Role of Family Influences

Sexual identity development is a central task of adolescence and young adulthood and can be especially challenging for sexual minority youth. Recent research has moved from a stage model of identity development in lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth to examining identity in a non-linear, multidimensional manner. In addition, although families have been identified as important to youth’s identity development, limited research has examined the influence of parental responses to youth’s disclosure of their LGB sexual orientation on LGB identity. The current study examined a multidimensional model of LGB identity and its links with parental support and rejection. One hundred and sixty-nine LGB adolescents and young adults (ages 14–24, 56 % male, 48 % gay, 31 % lesbian, 21 % bisexual) described themselves on dimensions of LGB identity and reported on parental rejection, sexuality-specific social support, and non-sexuality-specific social support. Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two profiles were identified, indicating that youth experience both affirmed and struggling identities. Results indicated that parental rejection and sexuality-specific social support from families were salient links to LGB identity profile classification, while non-sexuality specific social support was unrelated. Parental rejection and sexuality-specific social support may be important to target in interventions for families to foster affirmed LGB identity development in youth.     

Norman Lindsay and the ‘Asianisation’ of the German Soldier in Australia during the First World War

Abstract

From the beginning of the First World War, atrocity stories about German depredations against Belgian civilians circulated throughout the Allied world. Caricatures of German soldiers rapidly degenerated into depictions of monstrous ‘Huns’ who were subhuman beasts, prone to acts of rapine and banditry. The most prominent producer of ‘Hun’ cartoons in Australia was artist Norman Lindsay, who published extensively throughout the war. Through an analysis of the antecedents of Lindsay’s monstrous ‘Hun’, this article will demonstrate that the rapid creation of the ‘Hun’ in Australia was made possible by the pre-existing racial caricatures of non-European people that were popular during this period. Chinese and Japanese people who were excluded from Australia by the White Australia policy were the previous targets of Norman Lindsay’s racial caricatures; as stories of German atrocities filtered into Australia, Lindsay transferred traits of Asians on to the German ‘Hun’, thus transforming him into the enemy ‘Other’. These traits were products of British imperial propaganda, and part of an ideology that asserted it was the job of the white man to civilise the barbaric coloured man. By ‘Asianising’ the German, Lindsay used a well understood language of racial caricature to reduce the German to the status of a barbarian. Race was therefore one of the central paradigms through which Australian propaganda operated.