Supervised, Supported and Indirect Contact Orders: Research Findings

Child contact with non-resident parents has become a key issuein family law and policy. Within the substantial and growingbody of research into how legal systems deal with child contactdisputes, there is little empirical data on the use courts makeof orders for supervised, supported or indirect contact. Thisarticle presents empirical research findings focusing on theuse of these sorts of contact orders in England and Wales. Theresearch involved an examination of 343 court records, 60 follow-upinterviews with parents and ten interviews with judges responsiblefor making the orders. Use of orders for supervised or supportedcontact was relatively common as a short-term measure, whileorders for indirect contact were made only as a matter of lastresort. On the basis of the post-court developments in contactwithin the families in the sample and the parents' largely negativeexperiences of the court system, we conclude that future policydevelopments ought to focus on finding alternatives to court,which would aim to provide assistance rather than adjudicationto the families in dispute.     

Domestic Violence and Children’s Presence: A Population-based Study of Law Enforcement Surveillance of Domestic Violence

The purpose of the present study was twofold: (1) to test whether law enforcement officers could reliably use a standard protocol to collect data on domestic violence events (DVEs) across a large municipality, and (2) to use these data to examine prevalence and nature of the violence and children’s presence. Reliability checks indicated that data were collected reliably on over 5,000 substantiated DVEs. Findings showed that 48% of all assaults in the municipality were DVEs. Victims were predominantly females in their early thirties, and injuries were predominantly minor and resulted from body contact. Children were present in nearly 50% of the DVEs. They were disproportionately present in domestic violence households compared to all other households in the municipality. Domestic violence households with children were more likely to have mothers and fathers involved in the violence and were disproportionately minority households headed by single females in relatively poor neighborhoods.     

Toxicologic studies in a fatal overdose of 2,4-D, mecoprop, and dicamba

A suicidal poisoning committed by a 61-year-old woman, who ingested an unknown quantity of Killex, containing in aqueous solution 100 g/L of (2,4-dichlorophenox)acetic acid (2,4-D), 50 g/L of mecoprop, and 9 g/L of dicamba as amine salts is described. Quantitation of chlorophenoxy acids was performed by extraction from an acidified mixture and concentration before high performance liquid chromatography analysis. All three herbicides were separated in a phosphate buffer/acetonitrile mixture at 280 nm on a RP-8 column. Concentrations of herbicides found were: in blood--520-mg/L 2,4-D, 530-mg/L mecoprop, and 170-mg/L dicamba; in urine--670-mg/L 2,4-D and 520-mg/L mecoprop; in bile--340-mg/L 2,4-D, 530-mg/L mecoprop, and 140-mg/L dicamba; and in liver--540-mg/Kg 2,4-D, 500-mg/Kg mecoprop, and less than 100-mg/Kg dicamba. Liquid chromatography was found to be a reliable method for herbicide quantitation in biological tissues and fluids. The technique offered definite advantages over ultraviolet spectrophotometry and avoids the derivatization requirement for gas chromatography.     

Overcoming the benchmark problem in estimating bias in traffic enforcement: the use of automatic traffic enforcement cameras

Objectives

The existence of bias in law enforcement can be difficult to verify or disprove, in part because of the difficulty of finding a benchmark—an objective estimate of actual offenses committed by the studied population—that can be compared with police enforcement. In the current study, we propose and test a method for examining bias in enforcement of speeding offenses.

Method

Using all speeding tickets issued in Israel in 2013–2015, we compare speeding tickets generated by stationary automatic traffic cameras, which provide an objective estimate of speed offenses, with speeding tickets issued manually by police officers, based on drivers’ ethnicity with further distribution by gender and age.

Results

Initial findings indicate that, overall, speeding tickets issued by police officers in Israel are not biased based on drivers’ ethnicity.

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of distinguishing between overrepresentation and bias in law enforcement, which sometimes seem to be blurred in the literature.

     

Depression and substance use in two divergent high school cultures: A quantitative and qualitative analysis

Research has generally concluded that adolescent depression and substance use are strongly interrelated, but has rarely considered how this relationship may vary across diverse populations. In this study, we used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the relationships among depression and cigarette, alcohol, marijuana, and harder drug use across two culturally disparate environments: a suburban and an inner-city high school. Our sample included 164 suburban and 242 inner-city high school students. The students completed Kovacs' Children's Depression Inventory of 1985 and substance use measures derived from various sources. In-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with subjects who scored in the top 10% of the CDI (N=19) from both schools. Our quantitative findings indicated a positive association between depression and cigarette, marijuana, and harder drug use among the suburban students, and no association between depression and the use of any substances for the urban students. There were no significant differences in levels of reported depression across samples. However, with the exception of marijuana use, suburban students reported greater involvement in substance use than urban students. Our qualitative analyses suggest that across-school differences in the relationships among depression and substance use may be related to the varied meanings of depression and substance use that are informed by cultural context.The research was funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), Grant No. 1 R01 DA-06844, Perry London, principal investigator. The views, opinions, and findings contained in their article are not to be construed as NIDA's position or policy.B.A. from University of California, Berkeley, and Ed.D. from the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. Research interests include the phenomenology of high-risk behavior and social development among urban adolescents.B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and Ed.M. from the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University. Research interests include the relationships among high-risk behavior, personality variables, and cultural context.B.A. from Michigan State University, M.A. from University of Minnesota-Duluth, and Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Research interests include integrating quantitative and qualitative methods in social science research and the phenomenology of high-risk behavior.Research interests included adolescent high-risk behavior and ethnic and religious identity development. Deceased June 1992.