Youth,violence, and courtship in late-Victorian Birmingham: The case of James Harper and Emily Pimm

Late-Victorian England witnessed a decline in the recorded level of violence. Recent historical scholarship ascribes this fall to the 19th-century “civilising offensive” and suggests that male violence was effectively targeted by legislators and subject to increasingly stringent punishment by the courts. Yet concern with violence persisted. During the 1890s, it was expressed both in the enduring debate on the problem of male violence against women and in the growing anxieties surrounding youth gangs and “hooliganism.” This paper examines a criminal trial, held in Birmingham in 1898, which effectively fused these apparently disparate phenomena. The conviction of a young metal polisher, an alleged gang member, for the manslaughter of his former “sweetheart” aroused considerable comment in the local press. Both gang membership and violence against women were denounced as problems of the Birmingham “slums.” Close inspection of the trial reports suggests that neither the perpetrator nor the victim in this case conformed fully to the stereotypes of the gang member and his “moll” that were applied to them. Yet these stereotypes performed an important ideological function, distancing the problem of violence from the mainstream of civic life and thus preserving the veneer of English civility, whilst masking the persistence of male violence within courtship as well as marriage.     

The Utility of the Proximal Epiphysis of the Fifth Metatarsal in Age Estimation

Radiographs of 277 living individuals were assessed via a numerical scoring system to determine the timing of appearance and degree of fusion between the proximal epiphysis of the fifth metatarsal and its diaphysis. The epiphysis was observed to first appear in females at 8 years and 10 years in males and fuse by 14 years in females and 15 years in males. When assessing the level of agreement of category assignment, inter‐observer agreement was 78% for females and 64% for males whereas intra‐observer agreement was 77% for females and 86.1% for males. These results suggest that the maturation of the proximal epiphysis of the fifth metatarsal may be of value in age estimation in the child and that the scoring system is sufficiently robust to merit continued investigation. Previously this epiphysis has been considered an inconstant feature, but this research confirmed its presence in all individuals studied.     

This Time,it's for Real: The Health and Social Care Act 2012

This article examines the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and associated reforms to the National Health Service in England. It focuses on the Act's policy of making the NHS market more ‘real’, by both encouraging and compelling NHS bodies to act as ‘market players’. The article considers whether the reforms are compatible with the constitutional requirements of accountability for the provision of a public service such as the NHS. It argues that the reforms threaten accountability for three reasons: they make the Secretary of State for Health's relationship with the NHS more complex, they create opaque networks of non‐statutory bodies which may influence NHS decision‐making, and (especially in relation to competition) they ‘juridify’ policy choices as matters of law. Taken together, these arguments suggest that there is force in the claim that the reforms will contribute to ‘creeping’ – and thus unaccountable – privatisation of the NHS.     

The Swansea Bureau: A model of diversion from the Youth Justice System

The Swansea Bureau is an innovative initiative designed to divert young people out of the formal processes of the Youth Justice System. The Swansea Bureau extends beyond simple diversion grounded in minimal or non-intervention and into tackling the underlying causes of youth crime through mechanisms that normalise youth offending and promote prosocial behaviour, children's rights, youth participation and the engagement of both parents/carers and the local community. Inter-agency working is pursued in a political, strategic and operational context of viewing young people as ‘children first, offenders second’. This article discusses the development of the Bureau and explores how this child-orientated model is beginning to yield positive results in terms of decreases in first time entrants into the Youth Justice System and reductions in reconviction. The Bureau process has also elicited widespread positive qualitative feedback from key stakeholders regarding its engagement with Welsh national policy, parents/carers and the children's rights agenda.     

Facing the challenges of research‐informed knowledge mobilization: ‘Practising what we preach’?

The political imperative to make public services more evidence based has contributed to the growth in the past two decades of both research and practice in the field of knowledge mobilization: the range of approaches to encourage the creation, sharing and use of research‐informed knowledge alongside other forms of knowledge. Paradoxically the growth of the field has made the challenge of encouraging research use much more complex and uncertain, and the roles of knowledge mobilizers much more diverse and demanding. This in‐depth interview study of knowledge mobilization in 51 agencies concerned with knowledge for public services breaks new ground in exploring a paradox at the heart of knowledge mobilization practice: the challenges that research agencies face in practising in research‐informed ways themselves.     

Interparental Aggression and Adolescent Adjustment: The Role of Emotional Insecurity and Adrenocortical Activity

Adolescents exposed to interparental aggression are at increased risk for developing adjustment problems. The present study explored intervening variables in these pathways in a community sample that included 266 adolescents between 12- and 16-years-old (M?=?13.82; 52.5 % boys, 47.5 % girls). A moderated mediation model examined the moderating role of adrenocortical reactivity on the meditational capacity of their emotional insecurity in this context. Information from multiple reporters and adolescents’ adrenocortical response to conflict were obtained during laboratory sessions attended by mothers, fathers and their adolescent child. A direct relationship was found between marital aggression and adolescents’ internalizing behavior problems. Adolescents’ emotional insecurity mediated the relationship between marital aggression and adolescents’ depression and anxiety. Adrenocortical reactivity moderated the pathway between emotional insecurity and adolescent adjustment. The implications for further understanding the psychological and physiological effects of adolescents’ exposure to interparental aggression and violence are discussed.     

Territorial justice and access to knowledge: the distribution of high-level legal skills in the regions of England and Wales

This paper conducts a mapping for the regions of England and Wales of legal specialisms which are explained in terms of spatial forces of gravitation. There are geographic barriers to access to justice arising out of the ‘friction of distance’. There is a filter effect which varies, depending on the type of legal problem which correlates with distance in respect of some categories of legal work which, in turn, raises considerations of territorial justice. Whether the role of law in this respect is thought of as a matter of access to justice or of access to competitive advantage raises important issues as to the effectiveness of the current organisation of the legal profession. Significant questions arise as to the capacity of solicitor firms within the regions of England and Wales to support the development of regional knowledge-based economic strategies. In turn, this has implications for the reform of the court structure in England and Wales and also various policy considerations in respect of nurturing the development of high level legal skills within the regions.     

Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the United States

This article argues for the value of a theory of ‘intelligence culture’ in understanding not only how national intelligence systems work but also how intelligence failures occur in those systems. A model of national intelligence cultures in the governments of the United Kingdom and United States of America is developed combining existing work on organisational culture in the two countries with the author's comparative analysis of different conceptions of intelligence culture in the two systems. This model is used to develop a failure mode analysis of the two systems, which is then tentatively assessed against representative examples from the two countries, culminating in application of the model to the failure of both intelligence systems to correctly estimate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities prior to March 2003.