8 research outputs found

    How does FDAC succeed with parents with substance misuse problems?:Exploring relational practices within the English Family Drug Alcohol Court

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    Parental substance misuse is a significant risk factor for child maltreatment and is frequently involved in care proceedings. Outcomes are often poor and family reunification is prone to breakdown. In this article, the contribution of the English Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC) is examined. Adapted from the US family drug treatment court model, FDAC offers a radically different approach to ordinary care proceedings by treating parents as well as adjudicating. The article draws on a mixed‐methods evaluation of FDAC which reports better recovery and reunification rates than ordinary court. It presents findings from interviews with 42 parents and 154 court observations of 89 cases, focusing on FDAC's relational practices. The article concludes that these relational practices offer hope to substance‐misusing parents and that the approach merits wider attention because of its therapeutic potential and distinctive approach to justice. Key Practitioner Messages FDAC is a helpful approach to care proceedings for substance‐misusing parents. Parents value clear, consistent and honest messages about their progress when delivered in the context of trusted relationships and intensive support. Parents need holistic help that takes into account damaging early‐life experiences

    Leisure, Popular Culture and Memory: The Invention of Dark Age Britain, Wales, England, and Middle-earth in the songs of Led Zeppelin

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    In the period of high modernity, and in the process of establishing the imperial nation-state of Great Britain, historians, archaeologists and enthusiastic amateurs searched high and low for material evidence and primary sources from what was called the Dark Ages. There is a gap in knowledge about this past, and all discussion rests on finding meaning in fading inscriptions, or dark earth, or trusting completely the writings of Bede and Gildas. The search for an identity and history for the nation for Great Britain was based on nationalist beliefs about Englishness, Britishness or Welshness. In the twentieth-century, the problem of Englishness, place and myth led Tolkien to write his Middle-earth stories in his leisure time. At the same time, the problem of Welshness or Britishness saw a growth in interest – in film and books - in Arthurian traditions, and a tourist interest in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In this paper, I show how the songs and album covers of Led Zeppelin, and their film The Song Remains the Same, draw upon both the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian traditions to construct ideas of masculine belonging in some mythological medieval time and place. While this constriction is idiosyncratic to the artists, they are drawing on and justifying the wider problem of England, Wales and Britain in leisure and culture
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