Mothers' AdvocateS In the Community (MOSAIC)- non-professional mentor support to reduce intimate partner violence and depression in mothers: a cluster randomised trial in primary care

Background : Effective interventions to increase safety and wellbeing of mothers experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) are scarce. As much attention is focussed on professional intervention, this study aimed to determine the effectiveness of non-professional mentor support in reducing IPV and depression among pregnant and recent mothers experiencing, or at risk of IPV.

Methods : MOSAIC was a cluster randomised trial in 106 primary care (maternal and child health nurse and general practitioner) clinics in Melbourne, Australia. 63/106 clinics referred 215 eligible culturally and linguistically diverse women between January 2006 and December 2007. 167 in the intervention (I) arm, and 91 in the comparison (C) arm. 174 (80.9%) were recruited. 133 (76.4%) women (90 I and 43 C) completed follow-up at 12 months.

Intervention: 12 months of weekly home visiting from trained and supervised local mothers, (English & Vietnamese speaking) offering non-professional befriending, advocacy, parenting support and referrals.

Main outcome measures: Primary outcomes; IPV (Composite Abuse Scale CAS) and depression (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale EPDS); secondary measures included wellbeing (SF-36), parenting stress (PSI-SF) and social support (MOS-SF) at baseline and follow-up.

Analysis: Intention-to-treat using multivariable logistic regression and propensity scoring.

Results : There was evidence of a true difference in mean abuse scores at follow-up in the intervention compared with the comparison arm (15.9 vs 21.8, AdjDiff -8.67, CI -16.2 to -1.15). There was weak evidence for other outcomes, but a trend was evident favouring the intervention: proportions of women with CAS scores ≥7, 51/88 (58.4%) vs 27/42 (64.3%) AdjOR 0.47, CI 0.21 to 1.05); depression (EPDS score ≥13) (19/85, 22% (I) vs 14/43, 33% (C); AdjOR 0.42, CI 0.17 to 1.06); physical wellbeing mean scores (PCS-SF36: AdjDiff 2.79; CI -0.40 to 5.99); mental wellbeing mean scores (MCS-SF36: AdjDiff 2.26; CI -1.48 to 6.00). There was no observed effect on parenting stress. 82% of women mentored would recommend mentors to friends in similar situations.

Conclusion : Non-professional mentor mother support appears promising for improving safety and enhancing physical and mental wellbeing among mothers experiencing intimate partner violence referred from primary care.

Murder, self defence, defensive homicide?

Research focussed on recent amendments to Victorian homicide defence legislation, investigating community decisions in cases where a fatality followed an alleged sexual assualt. Findings suggest that legislation may not match community sentiment and jurors require comprehensive instructions. Further, relationship history, accused, deceased and juror gender have an impact on verdict.

Captured by the game : might a focus on the ‘therapeutic relationship’ diminish the attention we give to the client’s intimate network?

A recent project sought to clarify how psychotherapists and mental health workers understand psychosocial health and pathology. In this enquiry, I paid particular attention to the client’s interpersonal networks: did the professionals actively consider, and if so to what extent, ‘intimate social and family relationships’ in constructing their understanding of the presenting problem and in the process they used for goal setting. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were undertaken, eleven with psychotherapists and eleven with mental health workers. Across both groups, interviewees tended not to see their clients as embedded, relational entities, but primarily, often quite exclusively, as autonomous beings. Second, interviewees accorded a high value to the importance of ‘the therapeutic relationship’. Is it possible that the emphasis practitioners place on ‘the therapeutic relationship’ has the effect of marginalising the attention that is given to the client’s significant-other network

The honeymoon killer : plea bargaining and intimate femicide : a response to Watson

In October 2003, US citizen Christina Thomas died while scuba diving on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. Following over five years of delays, her husband David Watson accepted a plea bargain to which he pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of criminal negligence. Watson was initially sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment, suspended after 12 months, however this was later increased on appeal to suspension after 18 months. Using Watson as a framework for analysis, this article examines some of the limitations of an inefficient justice system, with a particular focus on the private nature of the plea bargaining process, and the potentially favourable representations and sentencing of men who kill a female intimate partner. The authors argue that the need to respond to court inefficiency and under-resourcing in the criminal courts creates pressures that can result in a desire for increased efficiency being prioritised above other justice concerns, and this allows for existing flaws within the operation of the criminal justice system to be exacerbated, and excused.

The aftermath of provocation : homicide law reform in Victoria, New South Wales and England.

Over the past decade, homicide law reform surrounding the partial defences to murder has animated debate among criminological scholars and legal stakeholders in Australia and the United Kingdom. In response to these debates, criminal jurisdictions have conducted reviews of the partial defences to murder and implemented reforms targeted at reducing gender bias in the law which has played out through the operation of the partial defence of provocation. This research examines the different approaches taken to addressing the problem posed by provocation in Victoria, New South Wales and England. In doing so, it explores questions around the need for reform to the law of homicide, the effects of these reforms in practice, and the influential role of sentencing in questions surrounding homicide law reform. Throughout the analysis key frameworks of criminological thought in relation to feminist engagements with the law, the conceptualisation of denial and the influence of law and order politics upon the development of criminal justice policy are applied. By drawing on 81 in-depth interviews conducted with legal stakeholders across the three jurisdictions under study, and an analysis of relevant case law, this research concludes that reforms implemented to counter gender bias in the operation of homicide law have produced mixed results in practice, particularly in connection to the law’s response to three key categories of person in the courtroom: the jealous man, the female victim of homicide, and the battered woman.

Provocation in New South Wales : the need for abolition

Over the past two decades significant debate has emerged surrounding the operation of the partial defence of provocation. Such debates have led to its abolition in several Australian and international jurisdictions where Government and Law Commission bodies have argued that provocation has operated in a gender biased way that is no longer reflective of community values and expectations of justice. In contrast to the Australian states of Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia, who have transferred consideration of provocation to sentencing, New South Wales (NSW) has retained provocation as a partial defence to murder. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted with legal stakeholders and an analysis of recent case law, this article considers whether the operation of provocation in NSW is still in the best interests of justice, and, specifically, whether in practice it privileges one gender above the other. This research concludes that the continued operation of provocation in NSW raises key issues surrounding the legitimisation of male violence against women, the denial and minimisation of the harm caused by lethal domestic violence, and the continued inability of the law to appropriately respond to women who kill in the context of prolonged family violence.

The intimate archive

This articles examines the issues involved in using archival material to research the personal lives of the Australian writers Marjorie Barnard (1897-1987), Aileen Palmer (1915-1988) and Lesbia Harford (1891-1927). the articles provides an introduction into the romantic experiences of the three women, based on their private letters, diaries and notebooks held in public institutions, including the National Library of Australia's Manuscript Collection.

Incredibly close encounters : magical realism and the intimate elegies of Jonathan Safran Foer’s everything is illuminated and extremely loud and incredibly close

This paper will investigate the relationship between prose elegy and magical realism in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It will propose that absence is generative, and that the state of melancholia—or unsuccessful, unresolved grief—is conducive to creativity.

Time to act - provocation must be rejected as an excuse for murder

This opinion piece provides an argument for why the Select Committee of the New South Wales Parliamentary Inquiry into the partial defence of provocation should reccomend abolition of this controversial partial defene to murder.