Assessing the Accuracy of Life Event Calendar Data in an Offender Sample

Criminologists are increasingly interested in the effects of life-course dynamics on criminological development. However, detailed longitudinal data are difficult to obtain and possibly confounded due to recall errors. Life Event Calendars (LECs) are designed to reduce recall errors and are increasingly used as a method for obtaining valid retrospective data in criminological studies. Yet few studies exist that assess the accuracy of LEC data in offender samples. This study aims to fill this void. We compare data regarding the prevalence and timing of marriage, divorce, and childbirth obtained through an LEC to official registry data in a sample of convicted offenders. We examine whether the accuracy of the data vary by event or respondent specific characteristics. We conclude that the LEC data are quite accurate regarding the prevalence of marriage, divorce, and childbirth. The data are less accurate regarding the timing of these life events.     

Ensuring the validity of police use of force training

This research examined the skills and abilities required of officers to effectively manage situations where the use of force may be required. The research also considered the nature of training required to facilitate the development of these skills/abilities. Seventy Western Australia Police officers participated in focus groups. Identified skills/abilities fell into seven categories: Aware, Assess, Approach, Act, Automatic, Appraise and Adapt. With regard to developing proficiency in these skills, officers emphasised the importance of relevant, applied and dynamic training, debriefing and the use of scenarios/role plays. The research highlights the need to change the scope of annual refresher training from the appropriate and effective application of force to the effective management of situations in which the use of force may be required, in their entirety. Findings also highlight the need to change the focus of training from performance and assessment to continued skill development (i.e. practice and learning).     

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.     

Reviews

Feminisms’ Psychoanalysis

Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (eds), The Woman in Question: m/f (Verso) London, 1990; Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1990; John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (Routledge) London, 1990; Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (Routledge), London, 1991.

Feminist Re‐Readings

Sarah Mills, Lynn Pearce, Sue Spaull and Elaine Millard (eds), Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (Harvester Wheatsheaf) Hemel Hempstead, 1989.

Oppositional Interests and Women's Health Centres

Dorothy H. Broom, Damned If We Do: Contradictions in Women's Health Care (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1991.

(Re)Claiming Her Own Words: The Return of Michele Wallace

Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (Verso) London and New York, 1990 [first published (Dial Press), New York, 1978]; Invisibility Blues (Verso) London and New York, 1990.

Australian Lesbian Feminist Studies

The Myth of Superwoman and Feminist Fictions

Ann Cranny‐Francis, Feminist Fictions (Polity Press) Cambridge 1990; Resa L. Dudovitz, The Myth of Superwoman (Routledge) London and New York, 1990.