Patterns of Intimate Partner Violence in Mothers At-Risk for Child Maltreatment

Using three interviews spanning 3 years, we identified intimate partner violence (IPV) classes and determined how class membership changed over time amongst a sample of 217 mothers at-risk for child maltreatment that were enrolled in an early childhood home visitation evaluation study. Data on perpetration/victimization, IPV type (verbal, physical, and sexual abuse and injury) and severity were used to conduct latent class analyses at each time point. Latent transition analyses established the proportion of mothers who changed classes over time. A three-class solution (minimal, moderate, and high IPV) was indicated at each time point. All classes included mutual IPV. Partners used minor verbal abuse in the minimal class, minor and severe verbal abuse and minor physical abuse in the moderate class, and all IPV categories in the high class. At each transition, 40 % or more women moved from minimal to moderate or high IPV. This movement emphasizes the need to screen women frequently and develop interventions recognizing the dynamic nature of IPV.     

Testing the impact of group offending on behavioural similarity in serial robbery

Behavioural case linkage assumes that offenders behave in a similar way across their crimes. However, group offending could impact on behavioural similarity. This study uses robbery data from two police forces to test this by comparing the behavioural similarity of pairs of lone offences (LL), pairs of group offences (GG) and pairs of offences where one crime was committed alone and the other in a group (GL). Behavioural similarity was measured using Jaccard's coefficients. Kruskal–Wallis tests were used to examine differences between the three categories within the linked samples. No statistically significant differences were found for linked GG compared to linked LL pairs. However, differences emerged between GL and the other categories for some behaviours (especially control) suggesting caution should be applied when linking group and lone offences committed by the same perpetrator. Differences between linked and unlinked pairs were assessed using receiver operating characteristic. The results suggest it is possible to distinguish between linked and unlinked pairs based on behaviour especially within the GG and LL categories. There were, however, fewer significant findings for the GL sample, suggesting there may be issues linking crimes where the offender commits one crime as part of a group and the other alone.     

Copyright Reform in the Early Twentieth Century: the View from Australia

The passage of the Copyright Act 1911 marked a key moment in the development of modern copyright law throughout the British empire. This article seeks to further what we know about the origins of the 1911 Act by examining the attitude of the newly-formed Commonwealth government of Australia towards imperial copyright reform. It seeks to explain why the Commonwealth government became an enthusiastic advocate of imperial unity in copyright matters at a time when Anglo–Australian relations were often strained. It argues that the Australian Copyright Act 1905 fed into a broader process of copyright reform that helped ease Australian acceptance of the 1911 Act. This insight challenges the image of Australia as a passive recipient of British law and lends support to the argument that we need to develop a new model of the flow of legal ideas within the empire.     

CHILD-CENTERED, VERTICALLY STRUCTURED, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY

This paper will describe the genesis and philosophy of the Center for Children's Policy. Practice and Research at the University of Pennsylvania (CCPPR), a joint project of the Schools of Law, Medicine and Social Work. The mission of CCPPR was to mobilize the resources of all disciplines engaged in childhood issues across the campus to seek innovative solutions for the crises facing America's children. CCPPR seeks to combine clinical practice, research, and policy in a vertical structure that would maintain linkages at all stages of scholarship, practice, and reform. Five essential structural factors were that the project must be: (a) vertically integrated; (b) interdisciplinary; (c) team-based; (d) child-centered and (e) developmentally informed. This paper can serve as a template for developing similar centers or projects, and will describe our methods, the projects we have undertaken, as well as the pitfalls and challenges of this highly demanding integrative approach.