Psychiatry, Psychology and Law articles from November 2003

Psychiatry, Psychology and Law archives from November 2003

Fear in fear-of-crime.
November 1, 2003... In this article, fear-of-crime research is integrated with multidisciplinary knowledge on fear and phobias. At present, many of the practical applications stemming from criminological research have treated fear-of-crime as a crime phobia and...

Psychiatry, stigma and courts.
November 1, 2003... Stigma causes significant handicap to people with mental illness. The mentally ill in the criminal justice system are an extremely marginalised group. This article examines stigma, mentally ill offenders and the role of court liaison services...

Signed consent forms in criminological research: protection for researchers and ethics committees but a threat to research participants?
November 1, 2003... The use of signed consent forms is mandated by most human research ethics committees and social science ethics codes. In this article we argue that the use of signed consent forms in criminological research provides protection for researchers...

Offending behaviour and mental illness: characteristics of a mental health court liaison service.
November 1, 2003... This paper begins with a brief review of recent literature about relationships between offending behaviour and mental illness, classifying studies by the settings within which they occurred. The establishment and role of a mental health court...

Cultural differences in adolescents' perceptions of the seriousness of delinquent behaviours.
November 1, 2003... In the light of the debate in recent times on crime and ethnicity, this paper examines cultural differences in the perception of the seriousness of delinquent behaviours. A total of 907 adolescents attending high schools in metropolitan NSW...

Risk-need assessment inventories for juvenile offenders in Australia.
November 1, 2003... Assessment of the risks and needs of juvenile offenders is widely accepted as fundamentally important in juvenile justice. We describe two inventories that are being used in Australian settings to systematically undertake such assessment: (a)...

Do simple "groundrules" reduce preschoolers' suggestibility about experienced and nonexperienced events?
November 1, 2003... This study examined whether providing preschool children with simple groundrules (the importance of being complete, saying "I don't know", correcting the interviewer, and not guessing) would reduce false details in their recall of a staged...

Making sense of arson through classification.
November 1, 2003... Arson classification efforts are an attempt to make sense of a complex whole. To a greater or lesser extent typologies offered to date have relied on assumed motive. More recently, systems that combine information about offender characteristics...

Issues surrounding the risk assessment of sexual offenders with an intellectual disability.
November 1, 2003... The assessment and treatment of sex offenders with an intellectual disability has received increasing attention over the last 15 to 20 years but there has been little research conducted on the evaluation of assessment and treatment approaches...

Recidivism among male juvenile sexual offenders in Western Australia.
November 1, 2003... Juvenile sexual offenders form a substantial part of the sexual offender population and a subset of them will continue offending against the person in general, and sexually in particular, into adulthood. Part of a strategy to reduce offending...

Strike a light, this match didn't work! Evaluation of the Victorian community based corrections treatment and testing policy: does matching to treatment improve outcomes?
November 1, 2003... The Victorian Department of Justice, between 1994 and 1996, had a policy of matching offenders sentenced to a community based order, who had problems assessed as arising from drug/alcohol use, to drug and alcohol treatment. In part the policy...

Ideological divarication in civil commitment decision-making.
November 1, 2003... The author argues that fundamental ideological divergence in civil commitment decision-making can be identified by reference to a series of specific points of reference: cases where patients have recently self-harmed, cases where patients have...

Liability of psychiatrists for failure to certify.(Case Note)
November 1, 2003... An area which has long been unclear in medical malpractice law has been the extent of the liability of psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals for releasing a person prematurely with the result that either they or someone else is harmed. In a...

Pure Madness: How Fear Drives the Mental Health System.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... By J Laurance Routledge: London, 2003, pb, 198 pp. incl index, $A33 Jeremy Laurance is the Health Editor of The Independent. To write Pure Madness, he travelled across Britain observing the levels of care provided in the contemporary...

A response to Professor Tatz's rejoinder to "is Aboriginal suicide different? A commentary on the work of Colin Tatz".(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... Professor Tatz's rejoinder to my commentary on his work was unexpected in its brevity and did not address the issues raised, although there was the predictable questioning of my interpretation of words and the purported lack of objectivity of...

A response to "Assessing Financial Competence" by Webber, Reeve, Kershaw and Charlton.(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... We write in reference to the article, "Assessing Financial Competence", by Webber, Reeve, Kershaw and Charlton, that appeared in the November 2002 issue of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. It is of concern that in this article the authors...