Criminalising economic and emotional abuse and intimidation: the Tasmanian experience

In 2004 the parliament of Tasmania enacted two new offences in the context of family violence; the first was intended to prohibit economic abuse, and the second sought to prohibit emotional abuse or intimidation. The introduction of these novel provisions constituted a movement away from conceptions of family violence that rely solely upon physical acts and, instead, treated the infliction of psychological harm as a core feature of family violence. The offences have, however, only rarely been prosecuted. This article analyses the offences, identifying difficulties in their construction and exploring the reasons why they have had such little impact. Despite the rarity of prosecutions, the new offences are significant, for they challenge traditional conceptions of the criminal law that rely on the criminalisation of causing, or threatening, physical harm. Consequently, and in the context of recent legislation in England and Wales criminalising controlling or coercive behaviour, a review of the offences that have been operating in Tasmania for more than a decade is timely.

‘It’s like Spiderman… with great power comes great responsibility’: school autonomy, school context and the audit culture

This paper explores issues of school autonomy within the context of the performative demands of the audit culture. The focus is on a case study of Clementine Academy, a large and highly diverse English secondary school. Specific situated, professional, material and external factors at the school were significant in shaping Clementine’s response to and take-up of the policy of academisation (a key reform within broader government mandates to create an increasingly autonomised education system). Factors such as the school’s intake and history, its ethos and values, its access to human and economic resources and its status and power as an outstanding school supported its confident and ‘morally’ focused take-up of this policy. Clementine’s privileged position in relation to these factors enabled the school to mediate and challenge some of the negative effects of the audit culture. This paper highlights the significance of considering these contextual factors in understanding the different ways in which schools are currently engaging their autonomy to cope with the demands of the audit culture.

A method for comprehensively assessing economic trade-offs of new irrigation developments

To meet the anticipated increase in global demand for food and fibre products, large areas of land around the world are being cleared and infrastructure constructed to enable irrigation, referred to herein as ‘greenfield irrigation’. One of the challenges in assessing the profitability of a greenfield irrigation development is understanding the impact of variability in climate and water availability and the trade-offs with scheme size, cost and the sensitivity of crop yield to water stress. For example, is it more profitable to irrigate a small area of land most years or a large area once every few years? And, is it more profitable to partially or fully water the crop? This paper presents a new method for efficiently linking a river system model and an agricultural production model to explore the financial trade-offs of different management choices, thereby enabling the optimal scheme area and most appropriate level of farmer risk to be identified. The method is demonstrated for a hypothetical but plausible greenfield irrigation development based around a large dam in the Flinders catchment, northern Australia. It was found that a dam and irrigation development paid for and operated by the same entity is not, under the conditions examined in this analysis, economically sustainable. The method could also be used to explore the impact of different management strategies on the agricultural production and profitability of existing irrigation schemes within a whole of river system context.

"When I saw walking I just kind of took it as wheeling": interpretations of mobility-related items in generic, preference-based health state instruments in the context of spinal cord injury

Background : In health economic analyses, health states are typically valued using instruments with few items per dimension. Due to the generic (and often reductionist) nature of such instruments, certain groups of respondents may experience challenges in describing their health state. This study is concerned with generic, preference-based health state instruments that provide information for decisions about the allocation of resources in health care. Unlike physical measurement instruments, preference-based health state instruments provide health state values that are dependent on how respondents interpret the items. This study investigates how individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) interpret mobility-related items contained within six preference-based health state instruments.

Methods : Secondary analysis of focus group transcripts originally collected in Vancouver, Canada, explored individuals’ perceptions and interpretations of mobility-related items contained within the 15D, Assessment of Quality of Life 8-dimension (AQoL-8D), EQ-5D-5L, Health Utilities Index (HUI), Quality of Well-Being Scale Self-Administered (QWB-SA), and the 36-item Short Form health survey version 2 (SF-36v2). Ritchie and Spencer’s ‘Framework Approach’ was used to perform thematic analysis that focused on participants’ comments concerning the mobility-related items only.

Results : Fifteen individuals participated in three focus groups (five per focus group). Four themes emerged: wording of mobility (e.g., ‘getting around’ vs ‘walking’), reference to aids and appliances, lack of suitable response options, and reframing of items (e.g., replacing ‘walking’ with ‘wheeling’). These themes reflected item features that respondents perceived as relevant in enabling them to describe their mobility, and response strategies that respondents could use when faced with inaccessible items.

Conclusion : Investigating perceptions to mobility-related items within the context of SCI highlights substantial variation in item interpretation across six preference-based health state instruments. Studying respondents’ interpretations of items can help to understand discrepancies in the health state descriptions and values obtained from different instruments. This line of research warrants closer attention in the health economics and quality of life literature.