Relationships between Agency-Specific Contact,Victimization Type,and Trust and Confidence in the Police and Courts

While the extant research on trust and confidence in the criminal justice system is broad in scope, its individual studies are more limited, leaving much unknown about these relationships. Building on prior research, the current study investigates the relationships between prior contact, victimization, and seven measures of trust and confidence in the police and courts. This study responds to calls for the relationships between trust and confidence in the criminal justice system, race/ethnicity, prior contact, and victimization to be investigated within a single study. Although rare in prior research, outcomes of trust and confidence in local police and courts are individually investigated within the same sample simultaneously. As a first, the current study also separates prior contact by police, courts, community corrections, and institutional corrections and examines four types of victimization (direct violent, vicarious violent, direct non-violent, vicarious non-violent). The latter allows for an examination of potentially more nuanced relationships between victimization and trust and confidence in the police and in the courts.     

Law and Family Formation Among LGBQ‐Parent Families

This article addresses how the law affects family formation among families with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) parents in the United States. Our discussion draws on a socio‐legal approach to law that focuses not only on the law on the books (what we refer to as “legal barriers”) but also on issues like how the law is practiced, how people experience the law in everyday life, and how the law serves as an interpretive framework through which people understand themselves and their families (what we refer to as “social barriers”). In our review, we highlight how attorneys can play a role in valuing and advancing rights for LGBQ‐parent families and LGBTQ prospective parents.     

“Give me some space”: exploring youth to parent aggression and violence

A small scale qualitative project, undertaken by an interdisciplinary domestic violence research group involving academic researchers and research assistants, with colleagues from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), investigated youth aggression and violence against parents. Following the literature review, data was generated through several research conversations with young people (n = 2), through semi-structured interviews with mothers (n = 3) and practitioners (n = 5), and through a practitioner focus group (n = 8). Thematic analysis and triangulation of the data from parents, practitioners and young people, elicited interconnected and complex overarching themes. Young people could be both victim and perpetrator. The witnessing or experiencing of domestic aggression and violence raised the concept of ‘bystander children’. The impact of young people experiencing familial violence was underestimated by parents. For practitioners, the effects of working with domestic violence was shown to be significant - both positively and negatively.     

UNFCCC negotiations (pre-Kyoto to COP-9): what the process says about the politics of CDM-sinks

One of the most contentious issues in the negotiations aimed at operationalizing the Kyoto Protocol was the treatment of sinks and, particularly, the eligibility of sinks projects in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This paper attempts to analyse the politics underlying these negotiations, drawing on methods of process tracing, key informant interviews, negotiating texts and secondary literature. Tracing the sinks debate and highlighting key lessons about the nature of global environmental agreements and their institutional arrangements is the first step to recounting the history of the politics of one of the major contemporary international environmental debates. The paper shows that the Kyoto Protocol negotiations on sinks and CDM-sinks were multilaterally supported as a practical solution, but went ‘off track’ due to actors’ interests and tradeoffs. As regards future negotiations on forest sinks in developing countries under the framework of the UNFCCC, the paper argues that these are likely to be influenced by similar constraints, and also by the conservation and development agenda of its supporters; as well as the experience gathered on the CDM and the interests and concerns of developing countries. We broadly frame the paper within the literature on global environmental politics.

Clientelism: factionalism in the allocation of public resources in Iraq after 2003

This article examines clientelism in Iraq as a case study of one form of corruption. Iraq is an unusual case of corruption, because a key feature of Iraq's corrupt environment is an institutionalised factional political system based on sectarian quotas. The article explores the many links between clientelism and political factionalism, discussing whether clientelism arose because of factionalism, or whether factionalism merely determines the ways that clientelism currently operates in Iraq. Using fieldwork data, the findings show there are two distinct levels of clientelism in Iraq, both of which are linked to political factions: the individual level and the organisational level. First, clientelism at the individual level entails the elites of many political factions regarding ‘money politics’ as a means of influence in Iraq/Kurdistan by buying people's affiliations and thereby governing people. Second, clientelism at the organisational level entails that the spoils of political office are shared out among the elites of the political factions in a proportionate fashion. The article concludes that clientelism is a form of political rather than economic corruption; and that while there may be some immediate value in clientelism, its long-term harm outweighs its short-term value.     

A Within-Individual Examination of the Predictors of Gun Carrying During Adolescence and Young Adulthood Among Young Men

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Although prior studies have identified several risk factors for gun carrying, no prior longitudinal studies have examined a comprehensive set of explanatory...     

Bystanders to Prevent Peer Sexual Violence: Understanding Patterns of Prosocial Behavior Over Time from Early to Later Adolescence

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Programs to prevent peer sexual violence that encourage positive bystander intervention are proliferating. Yet, little is known about how these prosocial...