Adolescent involvement in anti-social and delinquent behaviours : predicting future injury risk

The purpose of this study was to challenge the broadly based focus of injury prevention strategies towards concern with the needs of young adolescents who engage in multiple anti-social and delinquent behaviours. Five hundred and forty 13-14 year olds reported on injuries and truancy, violence, illegal road behaviours, drug, and alcohol use. Engagement in these behaviours was found to contribute to the likelihood of an injury. Those engaging in the most anti-social and delinquent behaviours were around five times more likely to report medically-treated injuries in the past three months. Their likelihood of future injury was 1.8 times more likely when they were followed up three months later. The engagement in multiple delinquent and illegal behaviours thus significantly increased the likelihood of injury and identifies a particularly vulnerable group. The findings also suggest that reaching these young people represents a key target for change strategies in injury prevention programs.

Disobedient Citizens : Press Depictions of Striking School Teachers in NSW and Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrators in NSW and Victoria in 1968

Across Australia in 1968, students demonstrating against the Vietnam War engaged in confrontational behaviour. The metropolitan daily newspapers,the most important source of news for most people, enthusiastically reported the scenes. The demonstrations were exciting. Sensational headlines and photographs captured the interest of readers and influenced their opinions. But radical opposition to government policies at the time was not limited to university students opposing the Vietnam War. Teachers had become increasingly critical of conditions in schools, with Victorian secondary school teachers having stopped work on a number of occasions since 1965. In October 1968, both primary and secondary school teachers in New South Wales participated in eastern Australia’s first state-wide teachers’ strike. As Sydney’s Sun commented on 1 October 1968, “The teachers’ strike threw the ... education system into chaos ... A huge proportion of the State’s 2764 schools were silent and empty.” Similarities with the anti-war demonstrations were obvious. Although not as confrontational, the New South Wales teachers’ strike was a publicity-seeking action. This examination of the teachers’ more restrained, but more effective, approach to challenging government policies provides a new voice and vision to our understandings of the diverse nature of radicalism in Australia in the 1960s.

Criminology, Crime and Politics Before and After 9/11

Criminologists have mostly followed the criminal law in adopting an apolitical concept of crime. They paid limited attention to both political crime and the political power to criminalise. The article traces efforts to redress this since the 1960s. It nevertheless remained a minority concern, mostly of critical criminology. Yet crime has been politicised in various ways by other developments, also examined in the article. The events of 9/11 have crowned the emergence of crime as a strategic security issue posing a challenge to criminology to engage with politically inspired crime and its control.

Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace?: Britain, Australia and anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive "othering" in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their "war on terror". This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as "evil" and a "fifth column" enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the State's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.

White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Local Spaces

This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusion from local as well as nationally significant public spaces. While access to public space and freedom to move are conventionally seen as fundamental to a democratic state, these are often seen in abstract terms. This article emphasises how movement in public space is a very concrete dimension of our experience of freedom, in showing how incivilities directed against Arab and Muslim Australians have operated pedagogically as a spatialised regulation of national belonging. The article concludes by examining how processes associated with the Cronulla riots of December 2005 have retarded the capacities of Muslim and Arab Australians to negotiate within and across spaces, diminishing their opportunities to invest in local and national spaces, shrinking their resources and opportunities for place-making in public space.

Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other

This book examines public worrying over 'ethnic crime' and what it tells us about Australia today. How, for instance, can the blame for a series of brutal group sexual assaults in Sydney be so widely attributed to whole ethnic communities? How is it that the arrival of a foundering boatload of asylum-seekers mostly seeking refuge from despotic regimes in 'the Middle East' can be manipulated to characterise complete cohorts of applicants for refuge 'and their immigrant compatriots' as dangerous, dishonest, criminally inclined and inhuman? How did the airborne terror attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 exacerbate existing tendencies in Australia to stereotype Arabs and Muslims as backward, inassimilable, without respect for Western laws and values, and complicit with barbarism and terrorism? Bin Laden in the Suburbs argues that we are witnessing the emergence of the 'Arab Other' as the pre-eminent 'folk devil' of our time. This Arab Other functions in the national imaginary to prop up the project of national belonging. It has little to do with the lived experiences of Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim Australians, and everything to do with a host of social anxieties which overlap in a series of moral panics. Bin Laden in the Suburbs analyses a decisive moment in the history of multiculturalism in Australia. 'Unlike most migrants, the Arab migrant is a subversive will ... They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere: Explicit bin Ladens and closet bin Ladens; Conscious bin Ladens and unconscious bin Ladens; bin Ladens on the beach and bin Ladens in the suburbs, as this book is aptly titled. Within this register ... even a single Arab is a threat. Contain the Arab or exterminate the Arab? A 'tolerable' presence in the suburbs, or caged in a concentration camp? ... The politics of the Western post-colonial state is constantly and dangerously oscillating between these tendencies today. It is this dangerous oscillation that is so lucidly exposed in this book'.

The performance and politics of practice for New Graduate Nurses

The change from nursing student to Registered Nurse (RNs) is both a desirable and anticipated event for New Graduate Nurses (NGNs). Having completed their formal education, most NGNs approach the threshold of their professional career with mixed emotions. While excited about the future and eagerly awaiting the commencement of employment, many are aware that this change also signifies a time of personal upheaval, professional insecurity and further personal learning. In the nursing professions’ enthusiasm to facilitate a smooth passage for NGNs a vast literature now addresses preparation-for-practice degrees, as well as the perceived workplace deficits and support needs of NGNs. However, the importance this change from working as a student to working as a NGN is not well conceptualised, theorised or understood as this largely instrumental literature essentially reduces the problematisation of the NGN transition experience to the problematisation of the individual by identifying NGNs as ‘the’ problem. Subsequently it fails to expose or challenge the normative assumptions underpinning processes that have formerly been considered solutions, or, the impact of such processes in a workplace that frames itself as “supportive”. Conspicuously absent is an exploration of how the NGN role is performed by former students, now beginning RNs undergoing the very personal transition of “becoming registered nurses”. Using Goffman’s (1956) theorisation of performance in everyday life exploring how process and meaning in mundane interactions present themselves in the “regular” lives of people at large, and Margaret Archer’s (2000) work emphasising the significance of the inner dialogue for managing the emotions that emerge out of situations that confront us, this paper draws upon data collected during a study of NGNs’ experience of transition to practice (Malouf 2010). It focuses on an emergent understanding of the need to differentiate the performance of ‘student’ from that of ‘NGN’ role. Further, it explores how these roles have become conflated into a conceptual continuum and viewed as a slide from student to NGN performance, rather than a significant moment of change involving roles that need to be distinctly defined as a necessary precursor to enhancing and supporting the professional and personal development of beginning practitioners.