Nowhere Else to Turn: Key Findings from an Evaluation of the National Offenders’ Families Helpline

Children and families of offenders have been described as the ‘forgotten victims’ of the Criminal Justice System (CJS), and advocacy groups argue that criminal justice agencies pay insufficient attention to the impact of their processes on families, meaning that their best interests can be overlooked or actively damaged.1 This paper presents findings from an evaluation of the Offenders’ Families Helpline — a free and confidential service providing information, emotional support and signposting to families and friends of offenders involved in any stage of the CJS. In 2013, the Helpline received almost 10,000 telephone calls and over 145,000 unique visitors to its website. The Helpline is funded by the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), and at the time of the evaluation was delivered by Partners of Prisoners and Families Support Group (POPS), a voluntary sector organisation based in Manchester. The aims of the evaluation were to assess the extent to which the Helpline meets families’ support needs, and to evidence the impact and outcomes of the Helpline for family member

Reform of the Global Financial Architecture

This paper examines the implications of the global financial crisis of 2007-10 for reform of the global financial architecture, in particular the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board and their interaction. These two institutions are not fully comparable, but they must work more closely in the future to help prevent global financial crises. To this end, the paper identifies institutional and substantive reforms separately and in their joint work that would be desirable and appropriate.International Monetary Fund, Financial Stability Board, Bank for International Settlements, Group of Twenty, banking supervision and regulation, financial crises, financial stability, financial reform

Potentially Morally Injurious Experiences (PMIEs) in the Humanitarian Sector: The Role of Moral Expectations.

There is growing evidence that Moral Injury (MI), which is commonly understood to be the result of failing to prevent, witnessing, or participating in an event which transgresses peoples’ moral beliefs, may affect those working in inherently stressful contexts, such as the humanitarian field. Humanitarian work frequently involves challenges of an ethically or morally distressing nature. Research which aimed to determine whether unpaid humanitarian aid workers supporting displaced people in Calais and Dunkirk, Northern France, were exposed to Potentially Morally Injurious Experiences (PMIEs), is presented. Thematic Analysis (TA) was used to examine the narratives of 7 participants who discussed experiences that transgressed their moral beliefs while volunteering, as well as the emotional effects of those experiences. The data suggested that the participants may have been exposed to PMIEs. This finding has important implications for the mental health and psychosocial support needs of both paid and unpaid humanitarian aid workers, and could inform interventions by international and national Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working in similar, contexts. The data was re-examined with a focus on feelings of guilt and shame and questions of identity and morality, sometimes called existential crises, which are understood to adversely affect mental health wellbeing

Optical propagation through a homogeneous turbulent shear flow

Effects of organized turbulent structures on the propagation of an optical beam in a homogeneous shear flow were studied. A passive-scalar field in a computed turbulent shear flow is used to represent index-of-refraction fluctuations, and phase errors induced in a coherent optical beam by turbulent fluctuations are computed. The organized vortical structures produce a scalar distribution with elongated regions of intense fluctuations which have an inclination with respect to the mean flow similar to that of the characteristic hairpin eddies. It is found that r.m.s. phase error is minimized by propagating approximately normal to the inclined vortical structures. Two-point correlations of vorticity and scalar fluctuation suggest that the regions of intense scalar fluctuation are produced primarily by the hairpin eddies

Initial success of native grasses is contingent on multiple interactions among exotic grass competition, temporal priority, rainfall and site effects.

Ecological communities are increasingly being recognized as the products of contemporary drivers and historical legacies that are both biotic and abiotic. In an attempt to unravel multiple layers of ecological contingency, we manipulated (i) competition with exotic annual grasses, (ii) the timing of this competition (temporal priority in arrival/seeding times) and (iii) watering (simulated rainfall) in a restoration-style planting of native perennial grasses. In addition, we replicated this experiment simultaneously at three sites in north-central California. Native perennial grasses had 73-99 % less cover when planted with exotic annuals than when planted alone, but this reduction was greatly ameliorated by planting the natives 2 weeks prior to the exotics. In a drought year, irrigation significantly reduced benefits of early planting so that these benefits resembled those observed in a non-drought year. There were significant differences across the three sites (site effects and interactions) in (i) overall native cover, (ii) the response of natives to competition, (iii) the strength of the temporal priority effect and (iv) the degree to which supplemental watering reduced priority effects. These results reveal the strong multi-layered contingency that underlies even relatively simple communities