The image of child protection social workers in the news and amongst children's professionals : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

This research examines portrayals of child protection social workers in New Zealand news reporting and explores how child protection social workers are perceived by their colleagues in the children’s workforce. The research set out not only to assess perceptions, but also to gain insight into how they are formed and to consider their implications. To this end, the research also examined children’s professionals’ perceptions of news coverage and sought to better understand the factors that influence professionals’ attitudes towards child protection social workers. Finally, professionals from the children’s workforce were asked how helpful they believed referrals to child protection social workers would be for a range of problems. The study is positioned within a critical realist outlook and uses mixed methodology. The data was sourced using two instruments. Firstly, professionals from the children’s workforce in New Zealand were invited to participate in an online survey. Secondly, two years of New Zealand news articles were analysed to assess how child protection social workers were portrayed. The principle findings of the research have been presented as they relate to five research questions. They underscore the importance of personal and professional relationships, and of academic and professional publications, in influencing children’s professionals’ perceptions of child protection social workers. They suggest children’s professionals tend to view child protection social workers somewhat favourably. On the other hand, news reporting was found to depict child protection social workers more negatively, although only marginally so. Children’s professionals appear to largely understand this. Alongside the more encouraging findings, negative perceptions of specific characteristics of child protection social workers were found to prevail in both news reporting and amongst children’s professionals. Perhaps of most concern, the findings identified a troubling lack of confidence in the potential helpfulness of referrals to child protection social workers. An analysis of these findings and themes from the literature indicates that the key perceptions of concern are unlikely to be divorced from substantive issues. Improving the image of child protection social workers in New Zealand will almost certainly require addressing some of the underlying causes of unfavourable perceptions

Validating a dynamic population microsimulation model: Recent experience in Australia

Available published research on microsimulation tends to focus on the results of policy simulations rather than upon validation of the models and their outputs. Dynamic population microsimulation models, which age an entire population through time for some decades, create particular validation challenges. This article outlines some of the issues that arise when attempting to validate dynamic population models, including changing behaviour, the need to align results with other aggregate ‘official’ projections, data quality and useability. Drawing on recent experience with the construction of the new Australian Population and Policy Simulation Model (APPSIM), the article discusses the techniques being used to validate this new dynamic population microsimulation model.Dynamic microsimulation, validation, model output, usability

From ‘little flowers of the motherland’ into ‘carnivorous plants’: the changing face of youth crime in contemporary China

This chapter considers youth offending and youth justice in contemporary China noting significant changes due to the rapid economic transformation. Once famous for its low crime rates, the apparent rapid rise in Chinese juvenile delinquency has left the media ‘wondering what transformed these little “flowers of the motherland” into “carnivorous plants”. The chapter charts changes from the yanda (hard strikes) crackdown in 1983 to the highly publicised anti-crime crackdown in Chongqing. Despite limited data, a picture is emerging of changing influence of triads and altered relationships between organised crime and street gangs, noting street gangs are increasing due to an influx of rural migrants to the mega-cities. The chapter touches upon the risk factors and emergent arguments of this contemporary phenomenon, noting that Zhang et al (1997:299) has suggested that ‘China is in an early stage of gang development’ possibly equivalent to the USA from 1930s to the 1960s

Getting to the point? Reframing narratives on knife crime

Knife-enabled crime has emerged as the most significant national debate on UK youth crime for several years with public debates mostly exploring offenders’ motivations which then center on commonly recognised tropes of protection, safety, ubiquity and normativity. Recent academic research continues to widen these motivational debates acknowledging perceptional insecurity, (Traynor 2016), engagement in deviant lifestyles (Harcourt 2006), and lack of trust in police (Brennan 2018) as key variables. Building upon these perspectives this article seeks to re-frame the dominant narrative by examining how knife-carrying and knife-enabled crime is also a signifier of street ‘authenticity’ and thus for some, an agentic route to advancement within the social field of the street gang

The role and significance of street capital in the social field of the violent youth gang in Lambeth

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Professional Doctorate in Youth JusticeMuch recent UK gang research has failed to adequately answer: do gangs exist and if so, are they organised? internal gang dynamics, criminal behaviours and motivations for joining remain largely unexplored; as does the upsurge in violent crime in gang-affected areas of south London. This research set out to answer these questions by investigating gangs in Lambeth, their activities and the daily experiences of those affiliated to them. The study begins by profiling the case study area, currently prevalent street gangs and links to violent crime. The investigation then examines in detail inter-gang and intragang dynamics and community relationships. A further objective is to establish whether, and if so to what extent, gangs were expanding and becoming more deeply embedded in the neighbourhood. This work situates contemporary UK gang research within the literary arc of classic and contemporary US gang research, from Chicago School to Hagedorn. Current UK studies are categorised into three distinct arguments, then critiqued from a Left Realist perspective. Addressing the question, how do we explain an increase in gang related violence?, the work establishes the gang as a social arena (field) of competition where actors struggle for distinction. But what are the characteristics and boundaries of this social -Field? What motivates young people to enter it, and how do you succeed within it? How significant are personal relationships and networks? What is the role of social capital and how do you become a competent actor in this field? These issues are explored using the theoretical perspectives of social field analysis and habitus from Bourdieu alongside various elements of social capital theory. An inductive ethnometholdogy was adopted. The paper presents findings from 30 qualitative interviews of residents, professionals and gang -affiliated young people in Lambeth. The ethical challenges of gang research, such as access and anonymity are addressed. The findings support the proposition that gangs in south London exist, are active and internally organised into three structural tiers. Success within the field is determined by building and maintaining Street Capital -a tradable asset. To acquire this, members strategise by employing tested techniques from the Gang Repertoire, derived from the habitus. Youngers and Olders employ different Repertoires. All actors within the social field are subject to sanctions with new arrivals at increased risk. The field is highly gendered and girls are central to the gang strategising using information and the gang Network. Importantly the findings support the argument that gangs in Lambeth are evolving and becoming more embedded. Increased gang related violence is an outcome of new dynamics in social field, including the imperative to acquire Street Capital and the role of new technology. Increased tensions and violence have cumulative stressful impacts for young people. To address this, they increasingly risk manage their lives through self exclusion or a fatalistic immersion in the social field

The Baby Boomers Revisited

Population ageing is a major issue in Australia. The sharp fall in fertility allied with lengthening life spans will result in sharp increases in the number of older Australians in coming years. Population ageing is expected to have profound consequences for government, due to the higher health, aged care and pension costs and slower economic growth associated with an ageing population (Treasury, 2002; Productivity Commission, 2005). During the past few years the Federal Government has been encouraging the baby boomers to save harder and work longer, so that they can help finance a comfortable living standard in retirement. But have these messages been heeded?In previous issues of the AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report, we have looked at those approaching retirement — but changing labour force behaviour, changes to government benefits and dramatic changes to superannuation all make it timely to reconsider this pre- and early-retirement group. The release in 2006 of new ABS data on the circumstances, spending and savings behaviour of Australians also provides new insights into this crucial cohort (ABS, 2006a)

Baby Boomers - doing it for themselves

  History, some might say, has been kind to the baby boomers. They have enjoyed affordable housing, access to free education, often generous welfare benefits and frequently favourable employment markets. Now the baby boomers – those people aged between about 45 and 61 years – will have to respond in a very way to the challenges of an aging population, where the consequences of their actions now and throughout their lives will have ramifications for the generations to follow. Their response to the issue of Australia’s rapidly ageing population – in the context of the progressive public policy changes that have occurred over the past two decades – will in many ways determine how our nation copes with changing demographic forces and could set a template how future generations handle their own transition into retirement. But will history continue to favour the boomers? This edition of the AMP.NATSEM Income and Wealth Report takes stock of the baby boomers’ situation – their family structures, their work patterns, their wealth and their spending – to ask: how well placed are they financially answer the challenges of their march to retirement

Cross-tier web programming for curated databases: a case study

Curated databases have become important sources of information across several scientific disciplines, and as the result of manual work of experts, often become important reference works. Features such as provenance tracking, archiving, and data citation are widely regarded as important features for the curated databases, but implementing such features is challenging, and small database projects often lack the resources to do so. A scientific database application is not just the relational database itself, but also an ecosystem of web applications to display the data, and applications which allow data curation. Supporting advanced curation features requires changing all of these components, and there is currently no way to provide such capabilities in a reusable way. Cross-tier programming languages have been proposed to simplify the creation of web applications, where developers can write an application in a single, uniform language. Consequently, database queries and updates can be written in the same language as the rest of the program, and at least in principle, it should be possible to provide curation features reusably via program transformations. As a first step towards this goal, it is important to establish that realistic curated databases can be implemented in a cross-tier programming language. In this paper, we describe such a case study: reimplementing the web front end of a real world scientific database, the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology (GtoPdb), in the Links cross-tier programming language. We show how programming language features such as language-integrated query simplify the development process, and rule out common errors. Through a comparative performance evaluation, we show that the Links implementation performs fewer database queries, while the time needed to handle the queries is comparable to the Java version. Furthermore, while there is some overhead to using Links because of its comparative immaturity compared to Java, the Links version is usable as a proof-of-concept case study of cross-tier programming for curated databases. [ This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review. The most up-to-date version of the paper can be found on arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03845