Child safety in policy: Who is being kept safe and from what?

Keeping children safe from harm is a national policy priority in Australia. Extensive inquiries and reviews have highlighted institutions' persistent failures to respond ethically and appropriately to child abuse and its life-long impacts on survivors. Policy efforts now reflect considerable emphasis on safeguarding children, including through the development of ‘child safe’ organisations. The realisation of these policy aspirations requires close attention to how ‘child safe’ is conceptualised and operationalised in different organisational contexts. Drawing on an analysis of policy in Australia and other international jurisdictions, namely New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland, this article engages critically with the notion of ‘child safe’ in policy, to explore who is to be safe, from what and how, in organisational settings. The findings suggest emergent discourses of ‘child safe’ are bound up with particular constructions of both children and safety, reflect current social and political understandings and agendas, and have implications for organisations' approaches to safety. Ensuring the safety of children in Australia and other jurisdictions requires continuing scrutiny of policy implementation to make sure current policy efforts are not reduced to compliance-based imperatives that protect organisations, but fail to create the cultural conditions that enhance children's wellbeing and safety.     

Disabled people and disaster management in New Zealand: examining online media messages

This article explores how disability and disabled people were portrayed in New Zealand online media between 2006 and 2016, with specific reference to disasters. Following a process of content analysis, the findings indicated that post disaster, persistent advocacy was required and ensuring accessibility, immediately following a disaster as well as in the recovery phase, was a significant issue. Disabled people were also primarily presented as a vulnerable cohort and the wide-ranging issues highlighted in the media suggest they currently have minimal voice in the four disaster management stages of risk reduction, readiness, response and recovery. This article emphasises the utilisation of relationships, skills and knowledge between individuals and Disabled People’s Organisations to strengthen the disability and disaster management discourse and activity. Increased inclusion of disabled people across all phases of disaster management will assist with the New Zealand government meeting its aspiration of a non-disabling society, especially during future disaster events.     

Public relations channel “repertoires”: Exploring patterns of channel use in practice

While public relations practitioners may use any number of channels to accomplish organizational objectives, research has focused on the use of single communication channels in isolation from other available channels. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify the common combinations of channels or “channel repertoires” that practitioners use to reach their publics. Analyses of survey data (N = 504) of practitioners from five countries revealed four distinct patterns or repertoires of channels. The results also indicated that many public relations functions predict the use of certain repertoires, and explained which functions of public relations use more channels than others. The findings have implications for theory building, practice, and pedagogy on planning and engagement with publics.     

Longitudinal Patterns of Material Hardship Among US Families

Material hardship has emerged as a direct measure of deprivation in the United States and an important complement to income poverty, providing different evidence about the ways in which deprivation may affect wellbeing. This study addresses gaps in our knowledge about deprivation as the first to examine patterns of material hardship over time. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, this study examined five material hardship types (food, housing, medical, utility, and bill-paying) experienced at five timepoints over 15 years. Employing latent class analysis and latent transition analysis, this study identified six longitudinal patterns of material hardship experience, characterized by trajectories of stability or movement and relative severity of material hardship experience over time. These findings improve our conceptual understanding of deprivation and move us towards understanding the impacts of material hardship on wellbeing and identifying policy approaches to prevent deprivation or mitigate negative consequences.

     

Validating protein structure using kernel density estimates

Measuring the quality of determined protein structures is a very important problem in bioinformatics. Kernel density estimation is a well-known nonparametric method which is often used for exploratory data analysis. Recent advances, which have extended previous linear methods to multi-dimensional circular data, give a sound basis for the analysis of conformational angles of protein backbones, which lie on the torus. By using an energy test, which is based on interpoint distances, we initially investigate the dependence of the angles on the amino acid type. Then, by computing tail probabilities which are based on amino-acid conditional density estimates, a method is proposed which permits inference on a test set of data. This can be used, for example, to validate protein structures, choose between possible protein predictions and highlight unusual residue angles.     

Evidence for significant polydrug use among ecstasy-using college students

Ecstasy (MDMA) has been added to the spectrum of illicit drugs used by college students. In this study, the authors estimated the prevalence of ecstasy use within a large college student sample and investigated the polydrug-use history of those ecstasy users. They administered an anonymous questionnaire to college students (N = 1,206) in classrooms at a large university in the mid-Atlantic United States. The overall student response rate was 91%. Nine percent of the sample reported lifetime ecstasy use. Because 98% of ecstasy users had used marijuana, the authors compared polydrug use between ecstasy users and individuals who had used marijuana but not ecstasy. Ecstasy users, as compared with these marijuana users, were significantly more likely to have used inhalants (38% vs. 10%), LSD (38% vs. 5%), cocaine (46% vs 2%), and heroin (17% vs 1%) in the past year. Significant polydrug use among college student ecstasy users has important implications for their substance abuse treatment.