POLICY FOR THE'DESERVING,'BUT POLITICALLY WEAK: THE 1996 WELFARE REFORM ACT AND BATTERED WOMEN

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Public Law #104–193) is perhaps the most visible national legislation since the sweeping Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. For social policy so well entrenched into the American social fabric, the rapidity with which reforms swept through the welfare system was unprecedented and confound conventional theoretical pronouncements on bureaucracy and policy change. The swiftness of reform, and the political rhetoric that surrounded the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, have prompted criticism that reformers responded more to the social construction of welfare recipients than they did to the dictates of sound public policy (Magusson and Dunham, 1996). This article discusses the ramifications of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for battered women and concludes that battered women's social construction as deserving of public assistance, but politically weak, precipitated welfare reform policy, targeted to battered women, that has been largely rhetorical rather than substantive.     

Latent Print Proficiency Testing: An Examination of Test Respondents,Test-Taking Procedures,and Test Characteristics

Proficiency testing is a key component of quality assurance programs within crime laboratories and can help improve laboratory practices. However, current proficiency testing procedures contain significant limitations and can be misinterpreted by examiners and court personnel (Garrett & Mitchell, 2018). To evaluate some of these limitations, we surveyed latent print examiners (n = 198) after they completed a Collaborative Testing Services, Inc. proficiency test. Additionally, we evaluated test performance and used a quality metric algorithm to evaluate the quality of test prints. Results do not suggest that respondents are dissimilar to the broader examiner population, although they may engage in different behaviors when completing tests versus casework. Findings show that proficiency testing contains prints of high quality and is perceived as both relatively easy and representative of casework. The test discriminated between inexperienced and experienced respondents, and verification procedures were largely ineffective in reducing errors. Objective quality metrics may provide a path forward to improving proficiency testing in a measurable manner.     

Privadentiality: Developing a Coherent Framework for Establishing Communication Protections in Family and Child Protection Dispute Resolution Methods

The emergence of innovative family and child protection dispute resolution (DR) methods has resulted in a varying array of communication protections. Review of these communication protections in the United States reveals a lack of consistency and clarity within each form of DR, and no clear policy to guide the development of the different communication protections across the spectrum of DR methods. This article proposes a new term, privadentiality, to describe communication protections which may be provided for a wide range of DR methods and a framework for categorizing DR methods in order to develop more consistent and appropriate communication protections across the spectrum of DR. This article concludes with recommendations to improve party and professional understanding of DR communication protections; protect families from escalating conflict; promote the integrity of DR methods; and enable courts to appropriately review and, where appropriate, approve DR outcomes.     

Psychological Symptoms Linking Exposure to Community Violence and Academic Functioning in African American Adolescents

African American adolescents are exposed disproportionately to community violence, increasing their risk for emotional and behavioral symptoms that can detract from learning and undermine academic outcomes. The present study examined whether aggressive behavior and depressive and anxious symptoms mediated the association between exposure to community violence and academic functioning, and if the indirect effects of community violence on academic functioning differed for boys and girls, in a community sample of urban African American adolescents (N = 491; 46.6 % female). Structural equation modeling was used to examine the indirect effect of exposure to community violence in grade 6 on grade 8 academic functioning. Results revealed that aggression in grade 7 mediated the association between grade 6 exposure to community violence and grade 8 academic functioning. There were no indirect effects through depressive and anxious symptoms, and gender did not moderate the indirect effect. Findings highlight the importance of targeting aggressive behavior for youth exposed to community violence to not only improve their behavioral adjustment but also their academic functioning. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman's Film beyond Psychoanalysis

The Gothic woman's film, as a particular 1940s phenomenon, responded to the social changes caused by the upheavals of the Second World War. It featured female protagonists, expressed anxieties about marriage and complicated the classic realist premises of narrative and heterosexual closures. As the Gothic narrative trajectory revolved around the heroine's pursuit of marital happiness, these films are often theorized in the sexually differentiated terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As a result, they are interpreted as cinematic manifestations of paranoia, primal scenes, passive female desires and the impossibility of female subjectivity. Tay considers how the Gothic woman's film may resist such psychoanalytic codifications by considering critiques of psychoanalysis and investigating the ways in which Gilles Deleuze's cinematic topography may apply to the genre. This engagement with Deleuze reveals how 1940s Gothic films--such as Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), Gaslight (Cukor, 1944), and Sleep, My Love (Sirk, 1948)--breach the narrative normativity of classic realist love stories like Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942). Culminating in a detailed analysis of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) as a film that sustains female transgression in its textual operation, Tay posits possibilities for furthering a feminist cinematic discourse beyond psychoanalytic codifications.     

Life Events and Depressive Symptoms in African American Adolescents: Do Ecological Domains and Timing of Life Events Matter?

Considerable research has documented associations between adverse life events and internalizing symptoms in adolescents, but much of this research has focused on the number of events experienced, with less attention to the ecological context or timing of events. This study examined life events in three ecological domains relevant to adolescents (i.e., family, peers, themselves) as predictors of the course of depressive symptoms among a community epidemiologically defined sample of 419 (47.2% females) urban African American adolescents. Given that youth depressive symptoms change over time, grade level was examined as a moderator. For males, the strength of associations between life events happening to participants, family life events, and peer life events and depressive symptoms did not change from grades 6–9. For females, the strength of the association between peer life events and depressive symptoms did not change over time, but the strength of associations between life events happening to participants and family life events and females’ depressive symptoms decreased over time. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.