On The Receiving End: The Governance of the Police in Britain

Based on direct observation over a five‐year period, the article paints an intimate picture of how the police in Britain are governed. It analyses the complexity of the economic and political environment in which the police have to work: the insecure funding platform; the stream of initiatives, targets and official guidelines; the delicacy of handling community sensitivities; the inherent opaqueness of the national ‘tripartite’ system of governance; and the constant challenge of making balanced judgements under conflicting pressures. The central theme that runs through the article (which follows on logically from two previous articles published in Political Quarterly) is that of a ‘managerialist’ political class, with a distinctive ideology and mode of control, trying to get a policy grip on the real world of service delivery: in this instance, policing. Unlike the previous two articles, which had a top‐down focus, the emphasis here is primarily on how the thicket looks to those who have to navigate their way through it.     

The Odyssey of the Regulatory State: From a “Thin” Monomorphic Concept to a “Thick” and Polymorphic Concept

This article assesses the “odyssey” of the regulatory state from a mere American thin and monomorphic concept to a global, thick and polymorphic concept that captures some of the more important features of the capitalist–democratic state. The burgeoning literature on the regulatory state presents a confusing number of images and characterizations that are increasingly conflicting, and it too often presents a monomorphic conception of the regulatory state. The article suggests that we need to define the regulatory state rather than merely characterizing it. And we need to do so in a manner that will allow us to move beyond the specific institutional features of a certain era, nation, region, or sector. Rather than contrasting regulation with distribution and redistribution, and contrasting the regulatory state with other forms of state, I treat the regulatory state as one morph of the polymorphic capitalist state, a morph that may help constitute other morphs (such as the welfare state and the developmental state) instead of replacing them. This in turn may help remove the artificial walls between the regulatory scholarly community and other social scientists, and promote more fruitful social science.     

Differential Parental Treatment,Sibling Relationships and Delinquency in Adolescence

The present study examined the moderating effect of the quality of the sibling relationship on the longitudinal association of parental treatment with theft, vandalism, and violence in adolescence. Participants were 416 sibling pairs which were studied over a one-year period. The younger siblings were aged 13 to 15, the older siblings 14 to 17 at Time 1. No significant effects were found for mixed-sex dyads. For same-sex dyads, the results suggested that when the relationship was of poor quality, younger boys who felt treated less favorably by their mothers were most likely to show high levels of vandalism and violence, while younger girls who felt treated less favorably were most likely to show high levels of theft. No such effects were found for older siblings. These findings indicate that differential parental treatment and the quality of the sibling relationship have gender-specific effects on adolescents’ delinquency and have a different meaning for younger than for older siblings.

The Future of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), added to the DSM nosology in 1980, has become a widely used and studied psychiatric diagnosis—though it has also been the subject of much criticism and controversy. In this paper, we review and discuss a number of issues related to the future of PTSD within the DSM, including the conceptual basis of the disorder, summary of proposed changes to DSM-V, the empirical basis for or against specific disorder criteria, forensic implications, and conclusions and recommendations regarding the future of the disorder in DSM. Overall, the current proposed changes for DSM-V represent a modest improvement over DSM-IV criteria, though they are incremental and relatively minor in nature. As such, they are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on prevalence rates, treatment approaches, or forensic applications of the disorder—and the disorder, as defined, remains problematic in many ways. The empirical data on latent structure of responses to traumatic and general life stressors seem to indicate that perhaps PTSD should be replaced by a dimensional general stress response disorder within the DSM system.     

Can the AML system be evaluated without better data?

The Anti-Money Laundering regime has been important in harmonizing laws and institutions, and has received global political support. Yet there has been minimal effort at evaluation of how well any AML intervention does in achieving its goals. There are no credible estimates either of the total amount laundered (globally or nationally) nor of most of the specific serious harms that AML aims to avert. Consequently, reduction of these is not a plausible outcome measure. There have been few efforts by country evaluators in the FATF Mutual Evaluation Reports (MERs) to acquire qualitative data or seriously analyze either quantitative or qualitative data. We find that data are relatively unimportant in policy development and implementation. Moreover, the long gaps of about 8 years between evaluations mean that widely used ‘country risk’ models for AML are forced still to rely largely on the 3rd Round evaluations whose use of data was minimal and inconsistent. While the 4th round MERs (2014–2022) have made an effort to be more systematic in the collection and analysis of data, FATF has still not established procedures that provide sufficiently informative evaluations. Our analysis of five recent National Risk Assessments (a major component of the new evaluations) in major countries shows little use of data, though the UK is notably better than the others. In the absence of more consistent and systematic data analysis, claims that countries have less or more effective systems will be open to allegations of ad hoc, impressionistic or politicized judgments. This reduces their perceived legitimacy, though this does not mean that the AML efforts and the evaluation processes themselves have no effects.     

When Internet protocols and legal provisions collide: Unauthorised access and Sierra v. Ritz

This case note article examines the unreported decision of a U.S. court in Sierra Corporate Design Inc. v. David Ritz (2007) District Court, County of Cass, State of North Dakota (File No. op-05-C-01660) which deals with the unauthorised use of a domain name system zone transfer. The court ruled that access was unauthorized given the defendant's intention to obtain and divulge information found in the zone transfer.     

Middle Eastern adolescents' perpetration of school violence against peers and teachers: a cross-cultural and ecological analysis

The current study presents the prevalence of students' reports of perpetration of violence toward peers and teachers among 16,604 7th- through 11th-grade Jewish and Arab students in Israel and examines the individual and school contextual factors that explain students' violence. The study explores how students' reports of violence are influenced by individual factors (gender, age, perception of school climate and intervention) and school contextual factors (cultural affiliation, SES of students' families, school and class size, school climate, intervention). Almost one third of all students reported at least one form of perpetration toward peers, and one in five reported perpetration against teachers. Compared to the school climate characteristics, school organizational factors, and cultural affiliation, students' SES has the highest contribution to explained variance in reports of violence toward others. The discussion highlights the need to allocate more resources to schools in low-SES contexts to protect low-SES students from school violence.