The Liberals as Managers of the Australian-American Alliance

Only occasionally has the worth of the Australian‐American alliance been questioned in Australian politics — and then it has usually been at the expense of the detractors. More important has been the question of how the alliance has been managed. How have Australian governments of the last fifty‐four years dealt with features such as the asymmetry of the relationship, in terms of power; the potential disruptions to avoid; the growing range of policy issues and ministerial portfolios to consider; the need for good relations at officials' level; and the need to keep the alliance out of party politics as much as possible? If the Menzies Government began well in the 1950s, then involvement in the Vietnam War was a low‐point in the mid‐late 1960s, and it took until the 1990s for the Liberals to recover from this. The Howard Government's efforts since the late 1990s, however, have gone a long way towards restoring the Liberals' reputation as effective managers of the alliance.     

Unpacking Adolescent Masculinity: Relations between Boys’ Sexual Harassment Victimization,Perpetration, and Gender Role Beliefs

Journal of Family Violence - Adherence to rigid masculine gender role beliefs is often a significant predictor of violence perpetration; additionally, there is a consistent link among adolescent...     

Creating Stable Agreements in Marine Policy: Learning from the California South Coast Marine Life Protection Act Initiative

In this article, we examine the California South Coast Marine Life Protection Act Initiative stakeholder process, evaluate its shortcomings, and consider what could have been done differently. Our objective is to make recommendations to improve future multi‐stakeholder marine policy processes. In our view, while the South Coast stakeholder process had many positive outcomes, it failed to reach what we call here a “stable agreement.” Our analysis is based on two of the authors’ involvement (one as a facilitator and the other as a stakeholder representative) in the process and a post‐hoc survey of participants. We find that several ill‐advised process design and management choices significantly destabilized the negotiations, leading to an ultimately unstable agreement. We highlight four major problematic process design and management decisions, including the following: representation on the multi‐stakeholder group was imbalanced, the pre‐meeting caucuses were not paired with training in interest‐based negotiation, adequate incentives to negotiate toward a consensus agreement were not provided, and the use of straw voting at one point in the process was unclear and inconsistent. As a result of these and other process design and management flaws, many stakeholders believed that the process was biased and that their ends would be better achieved by anchoring negotiations and engaging in positional bargaining. Ultimately, this meant that near‐consensus on a single cross‐interest marine protected area proposal was not reached, the scientific guidelines put forth were not fully met, the process was not and is not viewed as fair by the stakeholders directly or indirectly involved, and the marine protected area regulations lack broad‐scale support. These pitfalls of the South Coast stakeholder process could have been avoided had the management and facilitation team consistently followed best practices in dispute resolution. We recommend that future marine planning processes learn from this example, particularly those occurring in highly complex, urban ocean environments.     

Public charge,legal estrangement,and renegotiating situational trust in the US healthcare safety net

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.     

Relative Placement: The Best Answer for Our Foster Care System

This article briefly traces the history of the placement of children out of their homes because of parental abuse or neglect. The preference for relative placement is a recent occurrence. The advantages of relative placement instead of foster or group care are summarized as well as the disadvantages. Relative placement rates across the country are about 32%. Several jurisdictions have much higher placement rates including Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Los Angeles, California, is experimenting with social work practices that have produced over 80% relative placement rates during the past year. How both of these jurisdictions accomplish high relative placement rates is described in detail. Judges should persuade their own social service agencies to adopt these practices.     

CHILD PROTECTION MEDIATION: A 25-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

This article reviews the creation, development, and growth of child protection mediation (CPM) in the United States. Starting with a few pilot projects in the 1970s, CPM has grown throughout the country. The article traces child protection's development through the publication of the Resource Guidelines and Model Courts and then discusses what the necessary ingredients for a mediation program are. Mediation is then discussed from a judicial perspective. Barriers to mediation are listed, followed by a discussion of special issues that arise when developing and maintaining CPM programs. The article concludes with the observation that CPM is now recognized as a best practice by most judges and court improvement professionals and that it continues to grow.     

Community Participation in Restorative Justice: Rituals,Reintegration, and Quasi-Professionalization

Abstract

Community has long been identified as the key third party in restorative justice processes. However, when it comes to both theorizing community in restorative justice and the actual practice of community participation, conceptual clarity is lacking. A careful reading of the sociological literature on restorative justice and community point to two main reasons why we want to encourage community participation: the creation of effective ritual and offender reintegration. In this article, we present findings from an empirical study of conferencing. We explore varieties of community participation and discuss the benefits and tensions that arise when community participation becomes a formalized element of a mainstream restorative justice practice.