Ethical Advocacy for Immigrant Survivors of Family Crisis

The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration‐related issues. Informed and effective advocacy on these issues in family court can make life‐changing, and even life‐saving, differences for immigrants. More specifically, immigration issues are germane to family court because certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings. After describing these forms of relief, and the family court's role in immigrants’ access to them, this essay analyzes how ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings.

Key Points for Family Court Community:
• The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration‐related issues
• Certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings
• The substance of immigration‐related findings in family court, and their ultimate affect on family stability, are consistent with the core family court goal of supporting safety, well‐being, and permanency for children and families
• Ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings

     

A material girl in bluebeard's castle

Susan McClary, Feminine Endings ‐ Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 220 pp.     

Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable and constrain meaning-making, may transform social practices. By incorporating Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. London: Oxford University Press] framework for the critical analysis of discourse and social practice, the model extends the social semiotic approach developed in recent critical multimodal studies of software such as PowerPoint to social media, which function primarily to provide platforms for and commodify social practices, rather than to offer rich arrays of semiotic resources for creating multimodal texts and artefacts. Using the academic social network site ResearchGate and the practice of research peer review, we illustrate the model’s capacity to account for the ways the design of social media platforms – through the semiotic resources they make available and the ways these are presented – enables and constrains their users’ ability to perform key social practices and has the potential to transform these practices.     

On the Development of Harmony,Turbulence, and Independence in Parent–Adolescent Relationships: A Five-Wave Longitudinal Study

The separation-individuation, evolutionary, maturational, and expectancy violation-realignment perspectives propose that the relationship between parents and adolescents deteriorate as adolescents become independent. This study examines the extent to which the development of adolescents’ perceived relationship with their parents is consistent with the four perspectives. A latent transition analysis was performed in a two-cohort five-wave longitudinal study design covering ages 12–16 (n?=?919, 49.2% female) and 16–20 (n?=?392, 56.6% female). Generally, from 12 to 16 year adolescents moved away from parental authority and perceived increasing conflicts with their parents, whereas from 16 to 20 years adolescents perceived independence and improved their relationships with parents. Hereby, we also identified substantial patterns of individual differences. Together, these general and individual patterns provide fine-grained insights in relationship quality development.     

Homophobic Name-Calling Among Secondary School Students and Its Implications for Mental Health

Although homophobic verbal victimization has been associated with negative mental health outcomes, little actually is known about its general prevalence and relationship to mental health among adolescents. In addition, the relationship of homophobic name-calling to mental health in gender non-conforming adolescents is not well understood. This study examined the relationship between homophobic verbal victimization and mental health in adolescents, accounting for their sexual orientation and level of gender non-conformity. Survey data was collected from 513 adolescents (ages 11–17) who attended eight schools in and around Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 56.7 % of the participating adolescents were female and 11.1 % reported same-sex attractions. As hypothesized, male adolescents and those with same-sex attractions were more likely to report victimization from homophobic name-calling than were their female and non-same-sex attracted peers. Contrary to expectations, homophobic name-calling was not independently associated with psychological distress after controlling for gender, sexual attractions, gender non-conformity, and other negative treatment by peers. The hypothesis that homophobic name-calling would be more strongly associated with psychological distress in male, same-sex attracted, and gender non-conforming adolescents was also not supported. The results suggest that same-sex attracted and gender non-conforming youth are particularly vulnerable to homophobic name-calling, in the Netherlands as in other contexts, but also that other forms of peer victimization may be more strongly related to mental health.     

Repositioning Restorative Justice in Europe

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the European Union (EU) has invested considerable amount of resources in supporting policies and legislation that promote mediation and other restorative justice (RJ) practices at the national and regional level. Alongside these developments a series of legal safeguards, standards, and regulations were introduced to mainstream restorative justice in European criminal justice systems. While we are far from claiming that a unified restorative justice model exists across European countries, the standardization of restorative justice through top-down approaches raises serious concerns around its viability as a community-born ethos. This article draws from the findings of an EU-funded research project that focused on the implementation of the restorative justice articles of the. Victims’ Directive. The article argues that if restorative justice is not repositioned in Europe through innovation and bottom-up structures of community, unregulated, unregistered, and localized projects, it will soon face its demise. The mainstreaming, regulation, and state control of restorative justice in Europe must be balanced against what Nils Christie identified as its original intention of returning conflicts re property.     

Personality Traits and Educational Identity Formation in Late Adolescents: Longitudinal Associations and Academic Progress

Changes in personality traits in late adolescence and young adulthood are believed to co-occur with changes in identity, but little research is available that supports this hypothesis. The present study addressed this relatively understudied area of research by examining longitudinal associations of Big Five personality traits (i.e., Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) with dimensions of identity formation (i.e., identification with commitment and exploration in depth) in the domain of education. For this purpose, we used four annual waves of longitudinal data on 485 Belgian late adolescents (87.4% female; mean age at T1 = 18.6 years) covering a 3-year period. Multivariate growth models revealed that changes in Big Five personality traits were related to changes in identification with commitment and exploration in depth. Cross-lagged panel models uncovered that, except for Openness, all Big Five traits predicted educational identity dimensions. Educational identity dimensions only predicted Neuroticism. In addition, adolescents with higher levels on the personality trait of Conscientiousness faced fewer study delays. In sum, the present study adds to the growing literature that explores the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of personality trait development by uncovering the interplay of personality traits, educational identity dimensions, and academic progress in late adolescents.     

The Interplay of Loneliness and Depressive Symptoms Across Adolescence: Exploring the Role of Personality Traits

Based on current theories of depression, reciprocal links between loneliness and depressive symptoms are expected to occur. However, longitudinal studies on adolescent samples are scarce and have yielded conflicting results. The present five-wave longitudinal study from mid- to late adolescence (N=428, M age at T1=15.22 years; 47% female) examined the direction of effect between loneliness and depressive symptoms, using cross-lagged path analysis. In addition, the robustness of these prospective associations was tested by examining the role of the Big Five personality traits (i.e., extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness) as explaining factors and moderators. Results indicated that loneliness and depressive symptoms influenced one another reciprocally, and these reciprocal associations were not attributable to their mutual overlap with personality traits. In addition, neuroticism was found to be a moderator, in that the bidirectional effects between loneliness and depressive symptoms were only found in adolescents high in neuroticism. Practical implications are discussed, and suggestions for future research are outlined.     

Relationship Trajectories and Psychological Well-Being Among Sexual Minority Youth

Dating in adolescence plays an integral part in the development of sexual and social identities. This process is particularly salient for sexual minority youth who face additional obstacles to their identity formation due to their marginalized status. We investigated the influence of participating in a same-sex relationship (SSR) or an opposite-sex relationship (OSR) on sexual minority youths’ psychological well-being (i.e., symptoms of depression, anxiety and internalized homophobia, and self-esteem) in an ethnically-diverse sample of 350 youth (55% male) between the ages of 15–19 years, recruited from three GLBT drop-in centers in the New York City area. Using longitudinal data, we examined youths’ SSR and OSR over time. Multivariate regression analyses suggest that involvement in a SSR was positively associated with changes in self-esteem in males, and negatively correlated with changes in internalized homophobia in females. We discuss the implications for positive development in sexual minority adolescent populations.     

HEAR MY VOICE—PERSPECTIVES OF CURRENT AND FORMER FOSTER YOUTH

The youth participation movement begins with the basic premise that, without hearing and heeding the voices of those affected by the policies and practices we create, our efforts to improve the systems designed to help them are doomed to failure. This article provides accounts by court‐involved youth and emerging adults of their frustrations and successes and firsthand perspectives on the nature of the challenges confronting them. These interviews, narratives, and poems provide the fundamental context for the incisive and thought‐provoking articles that follow.