Peer violence in foster care: a review of the research evidence

Whilst a small amount of research has been undertaken on peer violence in residential settings, very little is known about peer violence in foster care. This paper reviews the published research since 1995 about the nature and extent of peer violence in foster care and interventions for preventing and managing these negative peer interactions. The evidence indicates that young people in foster care can be the instigators and recipients of peer violence, but the limited number of studies found means that conclusions cannot be drawn about the extent of the problem. There is some evidence about the impact of this type of violence on young people and fostering households. However, there remain gaps in the evidence about the full extent of all forms of exploitation and violence that are experienced and instigated by young people in foster care, the circumstances in which it takes place, the young people affected and its co‐occurrence with other difficulties. Critically, young people's views were largely absent from included studies, an important area that requires further research.     

Mortality among elder abuse victims in rural Malaysia: A two-year population-based descriptive study

Our study aims at describing mortality among reported elder abuse experiences in rural Malaysia. This is a population-based cohort study with a multistage cluster sampling method. Older adults in Kuala Pilah (n = 1,927) were interviewed from November 2013 to May 2014. Mortality was traced after 2 years using the National Registration Department database. Overall, 139 (7.2%) respondents died. Fifteen (9.6%) abuse victims died compared to 124 (7.0%) not abused. Mortality was highest with financial abuse (13%), followed by psychological abuse (10.8%). There was a dose-response relationship between mortality and clustering of abuse: 7%, 7.7%, and 14.0% for no abuse, one type, and two types or more, respectively. Among abuse victims, 40% of deaths had ill-defined causes, 33% were respiratory-related, and 27% had cardiovascular and metabolic origin. Results suggest a link between abuse and mortality. Death proportions varied according to abuse subtypes and gender.     

Schools must include faculty and staff in sexual violence prevention efforts

Creating a normative campus environment intolerant to sexual violence is important for prevention. While prevention initiatives focusing on students are vital, faculty and staff have a central role in supporting and sustaining a comprehensive strategy for preventing campus sexual violence. Nationwide, colleges and universities recently implemented campus climate surveys. At Emory, we decided to survey faculty and staff as well as students, motivated by our use of an ecological framing of campus sexual violence. Faculty and staff are long-term members of the community, and can provide stability and continuity that reinforces prevention efforts prioritized for students. We recommend that schools use a trauma-informed approach to guide the involvement of faculty and staff in prevention. We encourage colleges and universities to consider the experiences and needs of their faculty and staff, as professionals who serve as leaders on campus and as those who guide students through their academic experiences.     

On deaf ears: anti-black police terror,multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state

In this essay, we explore the racialised dimensions of policing practices in Brazil. To do so, we look not at the police, their administrative organisation, and practices, but rather we examine the modes of sociality reflected in and produced by police violence. Drawing from a statistics-based analysis of the social and political outcomes produced by the state in its preparation of mega-sports events – evictions, incarceration, and police violence, for example – we identify a nexus between, on the one hand, racialised violence against black bodies and, on the other hand, white loyalty to the state, despite, or precisely because of, a specific type of violence perpetrated by the state on white bodies. Our primary contention is that we cannot understand white victimisation by the police – and the outrage it produces – without taking into consideration two foundational, dialectical aspects of the regime of rights: complicity and disavowal. White vulnerability to this specific form of state violence – a form of violence that is contingent and produces collective horror – reflects not only the disavowal of black suffering, but also the strengthening of the white public sphere.     

Responding to teen dating violence: Perspectives from mothers who have been abused and seeking services in domestic violence shelters

ABSTRACT

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a significant public health problem, but we know little about how mothers who have been abused respond to TDV. This article analyzes qualitative data from three focus groups conducted with 17 mothers who had experienced abuse. Mothers responded to four hypothetical scenarios of their child reporting TDV to them. Mothers reported that their approach to children’s reports of TDV would entail engaging in varying levels of authoritarianism, considering the gender of the child, and exercising caution in their responses. In response to the scenarios, mothers stated that they would ask questions, educate their teens, contact the perpetrator and/or parents, share their own experiences, and call for outside help. The study’s findings may assist prevention educators working with mothers who experienced abuse in responding to their children’s disclosures of incidents of TDV.     

Symbolic violence and the Olympic Games: low-income youth,social legacy commitments,and urban exclusion in Olympic host cities

Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline.     

Performance anxiety: women’s sexed bodies in Pakistan

The nexus of Islam, gender, race and violence has been keenly revisited in some post-9/11 scholarship. The concern over the racialized Muslim male body is justifiable in cases of rendition, torture and the kind of battlefields that mark the War on Terror. However, the sympathetic analysis of the tortured Muslim male body as a permanent and universally vulnerable imaginary has necessarily challenged the framing of sexual politics for Muslim contexts. This bid to shield the vulnerable Muslim male body from Islamophobia and imperialist violence forecloses the notion that Islamist patriarchy and politics can themselves be fundamentally violent in the post-9/11 moment and within the Muslim community. This obscures the range of routine, domestic and normative violent expressions observed by men in Muslim societies. This essay discusses two cases that illustrate the means and methods by which female bodies have been sexed by the narrative of the War on Terror in Pakistan. These cases highlight how the academic efforts that seek to rescue the racialized Muslim male body complicate the struggle of resisting (lay) female bodies.     

Effects of Africentric Socialization on Psychosocial Outcomes in Black Girls: The Critical Role of Gender

African American social work scholars recommend rigorous research and evaluation of Africentric interventions as one approach to building culturally appropriate, evidence-based treatments for the Black community. Following this approach, this pilot study evaluates the Imani Rites of Passage program, a 15-week Africentric curriculum with 10 Black adolescent females (mean age = 12.40), comparing their pre- and post-intervention data to that of a no-intervention group of 13 Black males (mean age = 12.08). The program evaluation is based on the degree of correspondence between theory and the measurement model spelled out by the cognitive-cultural view of African-American identity. The findings for Black females were consistent with the cognitive-cultural model in some ways but not in others, and they were more complex than the predictions. Future Africentric interventions guided by the cognitive-cultural model must consider gender differences in the outcomes. Implications for social work research and practice are discussed.