Young People, Peer-to-Peer Grooming and Sexual Offending: Understanding and Responding to Harmful Sexual Behaviour within a Social Media Society

There is ample evidence that young people engage in grooming and harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) using social media with enough frequency to make those behaviours important con-cerns for both society and care providers. This article provides a critical overview of the con-ceptual and empirical foundations of peer-to-peer grooming and the use of social media with-in the context of HSB. Based on this learning, it ultimately introduces a new model of inter-vention and of professional practice, which provides the standards for micro-level decision-making about goals, methods and assessment tailored to this specific offending context.

Copyright & Risk: Scoping the Wellcome Digital Library Project (peer reviewed)

Copyright & Risk: Scoping the Wellcome Digital Library is a comprehensive case study which assesses the merits of the risk-managed approach to copyright clearance adopted by the Wellcome Library in the course of their pilot digitisation project Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics (http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/makers-of-modern-genetics/#).

Moving Out of Conflict: Negotiating Social Identity in Response to Segregation in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the impact of territoriality on young people’s everyday experiences in Northern Ireland’s segregated communities. It shows how urban encounters are reproduced through negotiating differences and the ways in which living in divided communities escalates moods of social inequality and spatial imbalances. The empirical study undertaken in the city of Derry shows how individuals and community groups position and identify themselves under the impact of social segregation. Building on Gordon Allport’s (1954) theories of contact, I explain how people in Derry have established their own sense of belonging, of who they are, based on their group memberships which eventually became an important source of pride and selfesteem. They also presented their own intertextual references as a cause of routine survival and belonging, allowing them to be more constructive about their future. Under deeply rooted segregation in Northern Ireland, the young generations are sought to provide lasting change to foster peace and integration between the two communities.

Scene From a Different Angle: Attempts to Internationalize Northern Ireland’s Conflict Experience

Reviews the books, Lessons From the Northern Ireland Peace Process edited by Timothy J. White (2013) and Human Rights as War by Other Means by Jennifer Curtis (2014). Edited by a U.S.-based academic with an enduring interest in Ireland, the first book draws together an interdisciplinary group of academics from across North America and the U.K. (though notably not Northern Ireland itself) to cover such topics as third party intervention, nationalism, grassroots change, and community development. The second text to be reviewed may be seen as a thorough analysis of this particular point: what is the role played by human rights in Northern Ireland’s peace process?

EU Cross-Border Cooperation and Conflict Transformation in the Basque and Irish Border Regions

Comparative research on violent conflict in the Basque Country and Ireland has yielded a sizable body of published academic work. Less well explored is the relationship between conflict transformation and cross-border cooperation in that specific comparative context. This paper provides a comparative examination of Third (not for profit) sector cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation in the Basque (France/Spain) and Irish (UK/Ireland) border regions. To what extent does cross-border cooperation contribute to peacebuilding in the two last violent ethnonationalist conflicts in Western Europe? The comparison is based on the premise that the EU played a different role in both cases. In the Irish case, the EU contributed to the institutionalization of a peace process that included cross-border cooperation between third sector organizations among the policy instruments contributing to conflict transformation. In the Basque case, the unilateral renunciation of violence by ETA (Euskadi eta Askatasuna) in 2010 did not generate the consistent involvement of the EU in a comparable institutional peace process. However, some third sector organizations used EU instruments for cross-border economic, social and cultural cooperation between France and Spain in order to reinforce their cross-border networks, which indirectly impacted on conflict transformation. The effectiveness of this cross-border cooperation for conflict transformation is assessed comparatively. To what extent does this increase in cross-border cooperation “from below” connect to wider institutional and social processes of conflict transformation in Ireland and the Basque Country? Crucially, does the strengthening of cross-border relations on shared issues mollify or sharpen existing identity cleavages? Also considered is the sustainability of such cooperation in these regions in light of the less favourable post-2004 EU funding environment, and the post-2008 economic and political turmoil affecting the relevant EU member states, especially Ireland and Spain.

European Union Cross-Border Cooperation as Conflict Transformation:Potential and Limits

Cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation provides a potential strategy for the European Union (EU) to help realise its founding peacebuilding objective. A wealth of cross-border cooperation activity sponsored by the EU spans a quarter of a century. Although the conflict transformation capacity of that cooperation is questionable in some border regions there is evidence to suggest that it has delivered peacebuilding dividends in other border regions. However, EU cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation faces a number of significant twenty-first century challenges including: ghost borders of the communal imagination; EU external border securitization; perceptions of EU and Russian empire-building; and the Mediterranean transmigrant/refugee crisis. It is argued that these challenges pose significant obstacles to EU cross-border cooperation as conflict transformation and undermine the peacebuilding objective of European integration.

Signal Reception Characteristics in the Proximity of Alice and Bob for Secure Indoor Peer-to-Peer Communications At 2.45 GHz

Mutual variation of the received signal which occurs as a consequence of the channel reciprocity property has recently been proposed as a viable method for secret key generation. However, this cannot be strictly maintained in practice as the property is applicable only in the absence of interference. To ensure the propagation defined key remains secret, one requirement is that there remain high degrees of uncertainty between the legitimate users channel response and that of any eavesdropper's. In this paper, we investigate whether such de-correlation occurs for an indoor point-to-point link at 2.45 GHz. This is achieved by computing the localized correlation coefficient between the simultaneous channel response measured by the legitimate users and that of multiple distributed eavesdroppers for static and dynamic scenarios.

The time course of conflict on the Cognitive Reflection Test

Reasoning that is deliberative and reflective often requires the inhibition of intuitive responses. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is designed to assess people’s ability to suppress incorrect heuristic responses in favour of deliberation. Correct responding on the CRT predicts performance on a range of tasks in which intuitive processes lead to incorrect responses, suggesting indirectly that CRT performance is related to cognitive control. Yet little is known about the cognitive processes underlying performance on the CRT. In the current research, we employed a novel mouse tracking mjavascript:void(0);ethodology to capture the time-course of reasoning on the CRT. Analysis of mouse cursor trajectories revealed that participants were initially drawn towards the incorrect (i.e., intuitive) option even when the correct (deliberative) option was ultimately chosen. Conversely, participants were not attracted to the correct option when they ultimately chose the incorrect intuitive one. We conclude that intuitive processes are activated automatically on the CRT and must be inhibited in order to respond correctly. When participants responded intuitively, there was no evidence that deliberative reasoning had become engaged.

Peer Effects in Adolescent Cannabis Use: It's the Friends, Stupid

This paper examines peer effects in adolescent cannabis use from several different reference groups, exploiting survey data that have many desirable properties and have not previously been used for this purpose. Treating the school grade as the reference group, and using both neighbourhood fixed effects and IV for identification, we find evidence of large, positive, and statistically significant peer effects. Treating nominated friends as the reference group, and using both school fixed effects and IV for identification, we again find evidence of large, positive, and generally statistically significant peer effects. Our preferred IV approach exploits information about friends of friends – ‘friends once removed’, who are not themselves friends – to instrument for friends’ cannabis use. Finally, we examine whether the cannabis use of schoolmates who are not nominated as friends – ‘non-friends’ – influences
own cannabis use. Once again using neighbourhood fixed effects and IV for identification, the evidence suggests zero impact. In our data, schoolmates who are not also friends have no influence on adolescent cannabis use.

Precarious spaces and urban change in post-conflict Belfast

The Northern Ireland conflict is shaped by an ethno-national contest between a minority Catholic/Nationalist/Republican population who broadly want to see the reunification of Ireland; and a majority Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist one, who mainly wish to maintain the sovereign connection with Britain. After nearly three decades of violence, which intensified segregation in schooling, labour markets and especially housing, a Peace Agreement was signed on Good Friday 1998. This paper is concerned with the peace process after the Agreement, not so much for the ambiguous political compromise, but for the way in which the city is constitutive of transformation and how Belfast in particular, is now embedded with a range of social instabilities and spatial contradictions. The Agreement encouraged rapid economic expansion, inward investment, especially in knowledge–intensive sectors and a short-lived optimism that markets and the neo-liberal fix would drive the post-conflict, post-industrial and post-political city. Capital would trump ethnicity and the economic uplift would bind citizens to a new expression of hope based on property speculation, tourism and global corporate investment.

Psychological interventions for children and young people affected by armed conflict or political violence: a systematic literature review.

Youths exposed to armed conflict have a higher prevalence of mental health and psychosocial difficulties. Diverse interventions exist that aim to ameliorate the effect of armed conflict on the psychological and psychosocial wellbeing of conflict affected youths. However, the evidence base for the effectiveness of these interventions is limited. Using standard review methodology, this review aims to address the effectiveness of psychological interventions employed among this population. The search was performed across four databases and grey literature. Article quality was assessed using the Downs and Black Quality Checklist (1998). Where possible, studies were subjected to meta-analyses. The remaining studies were included in a narrative synthesis. Eight studies concerned non clinical populations, while nine concerned clinical populations. Review findings conclude that Group Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is effective for reducing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and improving prosocial behaviour among clinical cohorts. The evidence does not suggest that interventions aimed at non clinical groups within this population are effective. Despite high quality studies, further robust trials are required to strengthen the evidence base, as a lack of replication has resulted in a limited evidence base to inform practice.

Peer tutoring in a medical school: perceptions of tutors and tutees

Background: Peer tutoring has been described as “people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers helping each other to learn and learning themselves by teaching”. Peer tutoring is well accepted as a source of support in many medical curricula, where participation and learning involve a process of socialisation.
Peer tutoring can ease the transition of the junior students from the university class environment to the hospital workplace. In this paper, we apply the Experienced Based Learning (ExBL) model to explore medical students’ perceptions of their experience of taking part in a newly established peer tutoring program at a hospital based
clinical school.
Methods: In 2014, all students at Sydney Medical School – Central, located at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital were invited to voluntarily participate in the peer tutoring program. Year 3 students (n = 46) were invited to act as tutors for Year 1 students (n = 50), and Year 4 students (n = 60) were invited to act as tutors for Year 2 students (n = 51). Similarly, the ‘tutees’ were invited to take part on a voluntary basis. Students were invited to attend focus groups, which were held at the end of the program. Framework analysis was used to code and categorise data into themes.
Results: In total, 108/207 (52 %) students participated in the program. A total of 42/106 (40 %) of Year 3 and 4 students took part as tutors; and of 66/101 (65 %) of Year 1 and 2 students took part as tutees. Five focus groups were held, with 50/108 (46 %) of students voluntarily participating. Senior students (tutors) valued the opportunity to practice and improve their medical knowledge and teaching skills. Junior students (tutees) valued the opportunity for additional practice and patient interaction, within a relaxed, small group learning environment.
Conclusion: Students perceived the peer tutoring program as affording opportunities not otherwise available within the curriculum. The peer teaching program provided a framework within the medical curriculum for senior students to practice and improve their medical knowledge and teaching skills. Concurrently, junior students were provided with a valuable learning experience that they reported as being qualitatively different to traditional teaching by faculty.