Environmental Considerations for Trauma‐Responsive Juvenile and Family Courts: A Review of the Literature with Recommendations for Practice

Juvenile and family courts serve some of our most vulnerable populations, many of whom have experienced some traumatic event. People suffering with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are known to be more sensitive to environmental stimuli, and many of the environmental conditions within courts can be challenging for those suffering traumatic stress. Trauma‐responsive practices help foster conditions of healing, which can benefit both the court user and those who work within the court. Research reviewed in this article demonstrates the likelihood of negative behavioral and emotional responses to specific environmental factors for people suffering PTSD and other stress reactions, and offers recommendations to minimize environmental stressors.     

Parents’ Perspectives on Family‐centered Care in Juvenile Justice Institutions

Family‐centered care during adolescent detention aims to increase parental participation in an attempt to optimize treatment outcomes. However, little is known about parents’ needs in family‐centered care. To fill this gap, we interviewed 19 purposefully selected parents of detained adolescents using a semi‐structured topic list. Although needs differed between parents, they were generally interested in activities that included spending time with their child. It is important for parents to receive timely information about their child's condition and treatment, detention procedures, and activities in the facility. The outcomes demonstrated that parents expected a two‐way communication based on respect and reliability.     

Family Support Groups for family members of mentally ill offenders: a pilot study

To date, there is a lack of family interventions for family members of persons with a mental illness who offended (PMIO). With the aim of addressing this issue, a Family Support Group (FSG) has been developed. The current pilot study investigated the impact of two pilot FSGs for family members of PMIO in relation to quality of life, burden, coping strategies, and resilience. Family members completed several questionnaires (i.e. WHOQOL-BREF, ZBI-22, CERQ, RS-nl) both before and after the group intervention. A total of 20 family members participated in both FSGs. The results indicated that participants experienced less self-blame, a decrease in loss of control over their lives, and improved emotional well-being. The findings showed that attending an FSG can be empowering for family members as it offers support in the management of emotional experiences and coping strategies.     

DOES INCREASING WOMEN'S EDUCATION REDUCE THEIR RISK OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE? EVIDENCE FROM AN EDUCATION POLICY REFORM

Although scholars have employed rigorous causal methods to examine the relationship between education and crime, few of them have taken a causal approach to the study of education and intimate partner violence (IPV) specifically. From a social causation perspective, improving women's education should protect them from violence, yet from a social selection perspective, education could proxy for unobserved factors that explain negative associations between education and IPV. In this study, I adjudicate between the two possibilities using an exogenous source of variation in education—a 1990s compulsory schooling reform in Peru. Specifically, I conduct an instrumented regression discontinuity that implicitly controls for women's unobserved endowments by comparing women who were aged slightly younger (N = 8,195) and slightly older (N = 6,645) than the school‐age cutoff at the time of the reform. Consistent with the social causation perspective, increasing women's schooling reduced both their recent and longer term probabilities of psychological, physical, and sexual IPV, as well as their recent and longer term probabilities of experiencing any IPV and polyvictimization. The results of supplemental mediation analyses provide support for three interrelated causal pathways—improvements in women's personal resources, delayed family formation, and changes in partner selection. These findings confirm the protective effects of women's education and further illuminate the mechanistic processes by which this occurs.     

Body- and movement-based interventions with male offenders – a narrative review

Therapeutic and psychosocial accompaniment of offenders is increasingly being understood as a communal responsibility. Apart from recognised treatment batteries, an increasing amount of body- and movement-based interventions is carried out within the prison environment. Extensive literature searches were performed for this review. From a total of 2908, 23 publications were included. An increase in research interest in body- and movement-based interventions during the past 5 years was observed. Such interventions are being flexibly applied in detention contexts across western countries, transnationally. Effects of emotional nature as well as competence are being described. Body- and movement-based interventions may contribute substantially in the supervision within the prison regime and can be applied in different modalities as well as low- and high-threshold treatments. Scientific development in this field still is rudimentary and thus further research is necessary in order to provide more evidence for modification processes and efficacy from validated studies.     

Enhancing judicial skills in domestic violence cases: the development,implementation, and preliminary evaluation of a model US programme

ABSTRACT

The overwhelming number and complexity of domestic violence cases in criminal and family courts has resulted in the development of education programmes to assist judges. There is limited research on judicial education in this area. This paper reviews one such initiative entitled ‘Enhancing Judicial Skills in Domestic Violence Cases’ (EJS) that has been developed and implemented over the last 20 years by the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence, a partnership of the US Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and Futures Without Violence. We present findings of a preliminary evaluation of the programme based on the self-reports of 480 judges who had taken the four-day workshop between 2006 and 2010. Overall, judges reported the programme to be engaging and effective. At a six-month follow‐up, most of the judges identified specific benefits and behavior changes in the areas of access to justice, judicial leadership, victim safety, and abuser accountability as a result of participating in the programme. Critical issues in judicial education are highlighted based on the authors’ experiences in the development and implementation of this programme.     

Rambling through the fields of justice in search of well-being for all

The article looks at basic questions of what constitutes a justice that takes into account the needs of all people. Thus an attempt is made to outline some of the basic tenets of a needs-based justice.     

Delivering effective therapeutic interventions for men with severe personality disorder within a high secure prison

Abstract

The Fens Unit is a government-initiated facility for male prisoners reaching criteria for Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD). Prisoners are assessed using a standardised process; those meeting criteria engage in a five-year treatment programme using a cognitive interpersonal model. Personality disorder is seen as a combination of coping strategies, developed in response to experience, which results in dysfunctions of thinking, feeling, behaviour and interpersonal relationships. These dysfunctions are linked to offending. Therefore, in order to reduce risk, multiphasic interventions – individual and group therapies – specifically target each dysfunction area, focusing on the developmental experiences that generated them. Each man's individual risk factors become treatment targets that are addressed in every aspect of the programme. All staff on the unit, clinical and operational, attempt to improve the quality of interpersonal relationships the prisoner has access to in order to create remedial experiences that are necessary to attain the capacity to develop socially adaptive cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses. This paper describes the treatment provided to these prisoners and the outcomes for the first cohort to have completed treatment (n=18). Results indicate that there is a reduction in violent behaviour, a higher than expected attendance at therapy, a decrease in actuarial risk measures and the majority of men are successfully managed in lower security after programme completion.     

Power and inheritance

A widespread inheritance pattern in eastern and southeastern Europe was based on equally partible male inheritance and excluded women from inheritance and dowry. The western transition zone to the other predominant European inheritance systems coincided with the Hajnal line, which divides the distribution of European marriage patterns in historical times. New evidence is added to the historical depth of the cultural–historical transition zone already postulated by Mitterauer. Since the early Middle Ages, this zone also marked the border region of two basic European agrarian systems: the western Grundherrschafts system, which led to the intervention of landlords into inheritance patterns and family structures of the serfs and the non-interventionist tributary systems, which left inheritance practices based on customary laws untouched until the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The above-mentioned inheritance pattern, which was also widespread in Asia, allocated a huge amount of power to the agnatic core of the family and was part of a patriarchal system shaped by patrilineality, patrilocality, low age at marriage, complex family forms, and fragmentation of the soil when demographic transition set in.