“My journey map”: Developing a qualitative approach to mapping young people’s progress in residential rehabilitation

Young people with substance misuse issues are at risk of harm from significant negative health and life events. Contemporary research notes both a historical failure to recognize the unique needs of adolescents, and the ongoing need for dedicated adolescent treatment programs and outcome measures. It is concerning that there is so little literature assessing the quality, availability, and effectiveness of adolescent-focused treatment programs, and no adolescent-specific measurement tools centered on a young person’s progress in residential treatment. This article reports on the process of developing a qualitative approach to mapping progress in treatment over time. The research seeks to develop an approach that captures, at three points in time and from multiple viewpoints, the progress of young people in four residential rehabilitation services located in New South Wales and Western Australia, across several dimensions of the personal and social aspects of life. Our aim is to develop an approach that is accessible to the alcohol and other drug workforce, and that informs the development of a psychometrically robust quantitative measure of progress that is meaningful and useful both to practitioners and to the young people themselves

Wangkiny Yirra “Speaking Up” project: First Nations women and children with disability and their experiences of family and domestic violence

First Nations women and children with disability are at greater risk of family and domestic violence (FDV) and its consequences than their non-Indigenous peers. A recent report (Ringland et al., 2022) found that First Nations women with disability had the highest rates of victimisation of any group, with 34.4% recorded as being victims of crime. Despite this, the voices of First Nations people are largely missing from disability research in Australia (Dew et al., 2019). The purpose of this research was to engage with First Nations women and children and key stakeholders in Western Australia to: gain an understanding of their experiences of FDV, identify factors they believe open them up to the risk of harm, document their observations and experiences of barriers and/or enablers to seeking assistance and support, obtain their views on what works in currently available programs, and make recommendations for future culturally safe prevention and protection programs. Key findings: Research focus on experiences of FDV of First Nations women and children with disability appears to be growing, but is still limited within the broader body of research focused on First Nations women and children and FDV. First Nations people, wherever located, are significantly more likely than non-Indigenous people to be confronted with a range of barriers to service access, diagnosis and service delivery. Current strategies for prevention and support for First Nations women and children involved with the justice and child protection systems are demonstrably inadequate and harmful and must be reformed

The 'Vampires in the Sacristy': Feminist body theory and (socio)biological reductionism into the 21st century

What happens when feminist body theory and reductionist theories of biological sex difference are brought together? In this work I take as my starting point the increasing ubiquity of appeals to biology as an explanation for ‘human’ and ‘woman’s’ nature on the one hand, and the reactive and reflexive distancing of biology within feminist body theory on the other, to begin to question the middle ground. I aim to constructively dissent from taking up either of these positions in order to confront the question: what if the reductionists prove to be, even partially, right? In acknowledging that possibility, I am interested in whether/where there is potential for feminist theory to be more relaxed about biologically sex differentiated attributes. I position myself as a women’s studies scholar taking a walk across the campus to see what evidence is being produced by ‘the opposition’. To place my walk in context, I first briefly explore various feminist approaches to the problem of biological sex differences, and the continuing difficulties surrounding binaries and binary thinking. Next, in the main part of the thesis, I review the historical and contemporary reasoning and claims made within three areas of reductionist science that are aligning at this time, and which have been reproached for promoting a return to a more biologically determinist social environment. I then take a brief excursion off campus to demonstrate the dangerous aspects of these scientific enterprises when their interpretation into popular culture is not carefully monitored. Finally, I return again to my own side of the campus to look at some of the ways feminists have already begun the work of overturning outworn and contested conventional theories about biology and human nature in conversation with reductionist theory. Having done this, was it worth the walk? My assessment is that while, in some cases, feminism’s defensive antiessentialism is warranted, there is work being undertaken within these reductionist sciences that is less rigid and reactionary than some critical interpretation would suggest. I conclude that there is a certain futility in feminist body theory’s oppositional stance to biology, and that its utility is put at risk by a continued investment in one side of a binary. Further, my walk across the campus leads me to believe that, while perhaps not imminent, there is every reason to expect that the scientific pursuit of an unequivocal genetic basis for specific sex differentiated behaviours will succeed. That being so, there are spaces where the insights of both sides might be productively brought together so as to avoid the worst excesses of biological determinism and, at the same time, loosen the grip of binary thinking on approaches to biology and the body