Birkbeck, University of London

This article examines how nature is mediated by law in climate cases. In the Federal Court of Australia decision in Minister for the Environment v. Sharma (2022), the court applied a narrow definition of ‘matter of law’ (justiciability), and thereby negated ‘matter in law’ (such as carbon dioxide and ecological destruction). Climate destruction demands the extension of legal categories and obligations such as tort and nuisance. However, rendering matter through law manifests the classical opposition between nomos and physis (law and nature). By considering the treatment of matter in climate cases, I open a wider discussion about the potentials and limitations of legal technique as a means of mediating nature. Turning to Theodor Adorno's ‘negative dialectics’, I consider how the negation of nature might be redeemed through the extension of legal concepts. Such legal mediation shows the potential for reorienting the dialectic of law and nature – an urgent means of pursuing planetary justice in the current moment.

This study aims to evaluate the efficiency of education in the EU using an optimisation approach based on a directional distance function and stochastic nonparametric data envelopment analysis. In the second stage, it explores how GDP per capita responds to education efficiency through a panel VAR model. The results show that education efficiency is lower than previously reported in the literature but remains higher than the efficiency of general government expenditure. On average, the EU's education efficiency score is 0.6, indicating a notable inefficiency of 0.4. Increasing government spending and lowering student‐to‐teacher ratios across EU countries could enhance education efficiency. Furthermore, the response of GDP per capita to improvements in education efficiency is positive. These findings have important policy implications under the new EU economic governance framework, suggesting that EU countries should prioritise education spending within the scope of the new multi‐year government expenditure targets.

The ‘financial feminism’ movement invites us to fight patriarchy by ‘believing in the financial equality of women’, increasing our financial literacy, and investing according to principles of sustainability and impact. As author and podcaster Tori Dunlap puts it, ‘the best way to fight the patriarchy? Get rich!’. This article investigates the financial feminist refrain that financial feminism is ‘just feminism applied to finance’. We interrogate its normative ends – financial equality for women – and evaluate its proposed means: targeted investing and increasing financial literacy by and for women. We suggest that, in contrast to neoliberal feminism, as studied by Rottenberg, which represented a neoliberalisation of feminism, the aspiration here is to create a feminised form of neoliberalism. In this model of feminism, the only sphere of action, let alone activism, is the market. It is a feminism that operates within the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to our current system of financial capital. We problematise these assumptions by arguing that in constraining itself within this logic, financial feminism cannot fulfil its normative goals. The only way to bring feminism to the economic sphere is to insist on the ongoing relevance of collective politics. In other words, rather than eliding the political entirely, any feminism interested in financial equality must eschew economic individualism and include a horizon of the economic as political.

Procedural justice considerations have long justified both the instrumental and intrinsic value of effective participation among court users, where ideals of impartiality, dignity and fairness remain pre-eminent. However, recent developments in socio-legal research as well as legal policy and practice point to an inchoate normative reframing of the law beyond procedural justice grounds, based on what we call the humanising imperative for effective participation. We utilise the philosophy of Hume to elucidate its distinctive features, namely the significance of partiality and the virtues of humanity. The paper further explores the putative enactment of the humanising imperative in three court settings in England and Wales – the Court of Protection, criminal courts and inquests – that indicates the precarity of this orientation in relation to procedural justice principles.

This chapter critically reviews existing socio-psychological literature on prosocial behaviour, with a focus on helping in response to humanitarian communications, including giving to charity, as a case study. The author shows how mainstream social psychology’s conceptualisation of the individual as self-contained and separate from their socio-historical context, its neglect of ideological and societal factors, and the restrictive impact of cognitive-experimental methods lead to a problematic disregard of crucial aspects of complex, conflicted and ambivalent prosocial behaviour in the humanitarian contexts. The chapter shows the benefits of a critical psychological approach to prosocial behaviour through the discussion of several studies on public responses to humanitarian and human rights communications.

The current study used moderated mediation models to investigate the direct and indirect effects of Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA), Foreign Language Peace of Mind (FLPOM), and Foreign Language Boredom (FLB), as well as the moderating effects of skill level, academic achievement, and age on the Attitude/Motivation of 502 Moroccan English Foreign Language learners aged between 14 and 60 years old. FLE and FLPOM were found to have a positive direct effect on attitude/motivation while FLCA and FLB were negative predictors. The moderation analysis revealed that the effects of the four emotions on Attitudes/Motivation were partially moderated by skill level and academic achievement. Moderated mediation analyses showed that age affected the relationships between FLE, FLPOM, and FLCA (but not FLB) and Attitudes/Motivation. We conclude that FL learners’ emotions, skill level, academic achievement, and age form a highly dynamic system where variables interact differently according to the age of participants.

Purpose Parents describe knowing instinctively when there is something wrong with their child, but they experience challenges convincing healthcare professionals of these concerns, which could prohibit timely escalation of care. Our purpose was to develop a phenomenological description of parental intuition from parents’ lived experience. Methods We interviewed 12 parents remotely using a semi-structured schedule. Interviews were analysed using descriptive phenomenology. Results We developed a phenomenological description of parental intuition with essential elements including: parental intuition as pre-reflective and pre-linguistic, as corporeal, affective, instinctive, hysteria, and phronesis. Parental intuition was expressed as prior to consciousness and felt within the body. It manifests as heightened arousal and emotion. Parental intuition was defined as ever-present, yet questionable, potentially gendered, requiring validation. Finally, parental intuition was defined as practical wisdom built up over years of exposure to one’s child, enabling a reciprocal, unspoken and intimate bond. Conclusions Our work has demonstrated the significance of parental intuition in early detection of health deterioration. We discuss philosophical conceptualizations of knowledge and evidence relating to healthcare professionals’ resistance to accept parental intuition as a valid source of knowledge in healthcare. We argue that parental intuition demands integration into practice guidance on paediatric shared decision-making.

A series of experiments conducted in Central Europe (Hungary, Austria) and East Asia (Japan) probed whether 5- to 10-year-old children (n = 436, 213 female) and adults (n = 71, 43 female; all data collected between July 2020 and May 2023) would infer traits and choose partners accordingly, in a novel touchscreen game. The participants observed third-party actions and interactions of animated agents whose behavior varied in prosociality and skill, and subsequently selected whom to play with in potentially cooperative endeavors. Overall, the results indicate (1) that trait inference may not naturally follow from action understanding but relies on learning and experimental task framing, and (2) that by 7 years of age, children begin to capitalize on such inferences in partner choice.

Bring it out from the shadows’ examines the messages about ‘baby battering’ and child sexual abuse that were directed at GPs and health visitors about their role in early intervention in the 1970s and 1980s. It complicates the idea of a neat linear progression through ‘stages of awareness,’ culminating in widespread recognition of sexual abuse in the 1980s that apparently developed into professional hypervigilance to possible cases of ‘incest’ and to fears that practitioners would ‘see it everywhere.’ Although the influence of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and US paediatricians led by C. Henry Kempe is undeniable, an analysis of coverage in the medical and trade press demonstrates that child abuse was just one problem that these professionals were urged to tackle under the banner of ‘social medicine.’ Messages about the prevalence of sexual abuse and its negative effects on children were broadcast only gradually and unevenly to these professional groups. Meanwhile, GPs and health visitors were enmeshed in wider debates about disciplinary boundaries, status and authority. Swiftly changing gender relations affected not only their perceptions of child sexual abuse but their perceptions of each other’s professional expertise and judgement.

Colonising the field’: feminism vs psychiatry explores the schism that existed between feminist/survivor activists and clinicians (doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists) in 1980s Britain. The chapter opens with a report by a member of the Incest Survivors’ Campaign of her experience at a national child abuse conference in 1982, which encapsulates the tensions between the two separate factions in this period. Each laid claim to special expertise in the area of child sexual abuse; but these were built on contrasting beliefs about gender relations, family functioning, the causes and dynamics of child sexual abuse and what action should be taken to combat it. Medics and psychiatrists believed that their efforts were progressive in shifting the emphasis away from a criminal justice approach to a model that offered each family member a chance to heal and repair their relationships. Survivors objected to ‘expert’ psychiatric models that portrayed women and girls as complicit or partially responsible for sexual abuse. They were critical of doctors and psychiatrists who ‘colonised the field,’ attracting financial, political and media support for their preferred models of practice. While the ‘experts’ built successful careers, feminist organisations struggled to get unbiased media coverage and access to financial resources for survivor-led services.

This chapter traces the key themes of the book and its implications for survivors of child sexual abuse, as well as for the different community-based health professions tasked with protecting children. It argues that although early intervention in child sexual abuse was established as a core responsibility for GPs, health visitors and mental health practitioners in the 1980s, their potential in terms of identifying children’s distress and taking effective action to stop sexual abuse in the family was never realised. The history of community health practitioners’ involvement in protecting children between the 1970s and the 2010s cannot be contained within a neat narrative of linear progress. Their effectiveness was affected by context and contingency and changed over time, but was ultimately hampered by a lack of strategic leadership, poor structural and institutional investment in those engaged in frontline practice and the legacy of a misogynistic culture that operated at multiple levels. Finally, this chapter calls for a renewed feminist stance that requires all adults to take responsibility as active protectors of children.

Silenced Voices, Invisible Bodies’ explores what children and young people who have been sexually abused have had to say about their attempts to get help, particularly from community-based health practitioners such as doctors, health visitors and mental health practitioners. While most of this book deliberately centres health professionals’ experiences, exploring why, despite encouragement and training to be vigilant in relation to the physical and behavioural signs of sexual abuse, their rates of identification did not rise over time, this chapter uses a range of sources including memoir, letters to a national Inquiry and published reports to ascertain survivors’ views. What strategies did children take to protect themselves from abuse within the family, did they (or a non-abusing parent) try to seek help from a health professional and what sort of response did they get? The sources coalesce into a picture of deep dissatisfaction from adult survivors about the way health (and other) practitioners ignored their attempts to send out distress signals as children. This chapter therefore serves as the cornerstone for the examination of practitioners’ experiences that is the subject of the remainder of the book.

Turn to the colour plates’: training before and after Cleveland traces the extent to which doctors and health visitors were equipped to recognise the signs of sexual abuse and respond effectively to children. The chapter chronologically traces the development of training and work-place support, demonstrating that at least until the late 1980s, practitioners received little of either. Early training materials aimed to shock practitioners into action and here technology was important, particularly the use of colour photography. However, there was confusion about the extent to which different disciplines should be able to recognise the physical signs. These debates crystallised in Cleveland in 1987 when 125 children were removed from their families on suspicion of sexual abuse and the diagnostic techniques deployed by two paediatricians came under intense scrutiny. Although scholars have argued that publicity about Cleveland increased practitioners’ reluctance to identify sexual abuse, this chapter demonstrates that after Cleveland, there was greater clarity on what could be expected of GPs and what required more specialist input from a paediatrician, although health visitors’ roles remained unclear. The form of training also shifted from the use of graphic photographs to a more textual, procedural and bureaucratised training regime.

Seeing it everywhere” or oblivious to it’ explores how, since the 1980s, mental health services for children and young people have been both heavily involved in responding to child sexual abuse and, at the same time, oblivious to it. The chapter examines this paradox through the experiences of six individuals who trained as clinical psychologists between the 1970s and the 2010s. Clinical child psychology was a nascent profession, operating in an environment where structures of service delivery were shifting, relations between the disciplines were fractious, and clinical approaches were seen as mutually exclusive. There was no specific child protection training, and the ‘scientist-practitioner’ model did not encourage attention to child sexual abuse. Some practitioners did develop a special interest and focused on awareness-raising, training, and developing multiagency services but this was short lived due to external factors, including changes to national policy, restructuring of services, and the move to a specific model of evidence-based practice and cognitive behaviour therapy. Ultimately, the profession was reluctant to accept that child sexual abuse was a psychological phenomenon in which they could play an important role. The consequence is a failure to recognise the impact of abuse and complex trauma on children’s psychological wellbeing that can last throughout adult life.