12-Month Prevalence,Trends, Gender Differences,and the Impact of Mental Health Services on Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration Among Discharged Psychiatric Inpatients

Minimal research has examined partner violence committed by individuals with severe mental illness. This study examined rates of IPV in the first year post-discharge from psychiatric hospitalization, trends over time, gender differences, and the impact of follow-up mental health services. One in five (20.3 %) patients committed at least one act of IPV in the first year. Whereas women were more than twice as likely to perpetrate IPV, men were nearly twice as likely to be violent toward non-family members. Risk of IPV was highest immediately post-discharge and decreased over time, with the sharpest decline after 20 weeks in the community. Mental health treatment was associated with a 40 % decrease and medication non-adherence a 50 % increase in risk for IPV. Partner violence is a prevalent concern among discharged psychiatric patients, and these findings suggest that coordinated risk management efforts should focus on the time immediately following hospital discharge.     

Young and armed: a cross-sectional study on weapon carrying among adolescents

The purpose of this study was to identify empirically, for the first time in France, the prevalence of adolescent weapon carrying with particular focus on the contribution of a broad range of social bonding, strain, social learning, and sociodemographic predictors. A multivariate logistic regression model was conducted using a backward elimination procedure to identify the significant predictors of weapon carrying controlling for age, gender, and SES in a sample of 12,706 French youth aged 11–19 years. Results revealed that the odds of weapon carrying increased among adolescents who suffered from past victimization, who had a negative relationship with their mother, and who repeated a grade at school. Moreover, holding pro-delinquent beliefs and having delinquent peers also increased the odds of weapon carrying. Our findings highlight the importance of the interpersonal and social context when examining the determinants of weapon carrying and showed a unique contribution of components of social bonding, strain, and social learning in weapon carrying among adolescents.     

Presidential address— Seeing through the fog

All public policies have two things in common. They deal with the future and, as a result, they are based on forecasts or projections. The forecasts or projections may be implicit or based on naive extrapolation or ad hoc assumptions. They may be explicit and based on elaborate extrapolations or on behavioral models. In either case, unfortunately, they are notoriously unreliable. In fact, they almost always are wrong—sometimes just a bit wrong, but often massively wrong. Nonetheless, forecasts are what distinguishes reasoned planning from blind action. Without forecasts, we would be totally at sea. That we have to use forecasts or projections, that we know they will be wrong, and that they usually are wrong raise some difficult questions for policy analysis and policymaking. Regrettably, in my view, they receive too little attention.2 My purpose today is to urge that they receive more. My comments are intended to make four points. First, it is important for policymakers to appreciate how errorprone forecasts and projections actually are. Second, it is important not to permit the availability of projections or forecasts to obscure fundamental policy questions that are important in any plausible scenario. Third, uncertainty means that, where possible, it is prudent to design policies with builtin flexibility that respond automatically to diverse possible outcomes. Fourth, where builtin flexibility is impossible, complete analyses should take into account the consequences if forecasts prove wrong, and weigh those consequences against the results of postponing action until information improves or against other policies under the plausible range of possible outcomes. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Amr Khaled: From Da‘wa to Political and Religious Leadership

Amr Khaled, a Muslim-Egyptian televangelist, illustrates the ways in which satellite television and the Internet provide a new form for challenging political and religious authority. This article examines the manner in which Khaled constructs this authority by examining his flagship programme, Sunaa' al-Hayah (‘Lifemakers’).     

Marriage,Cohabitation, and Crime: Differentiating Associations by Partnership Stage

A wealth of scholarship generally finds that marriage protects against crime, but there is less consistent evidence for cohabitation. In this article, we contribute to scholarship on marriage and put forward new evidence about cohabitation by examining marital and cohabiting partnerships as transitions with distinct stages of entry, stability, and dissolution. We use within-person change models with contemporary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze these stages for the full sample and separately for men and women. The findings show differential protective associations of marriage and cohabitation depending on the stage of the partnership. Both recently formed cohabiting partnerships and stable cohabiting partnerships are associated with reductions in the level of offending, although to a lesser degree than marital relationships. Cohabiting partnerships that are stable, in that they have lasted at least a year, are associated with larger decreases in offending, particularly among women.