Unsafe World Research Articles

Predicting Psychopathology in Jewish Ultra-Orthodox IPV Survivors: A Machine Learning Approach

The nature of the abuse, cultural and religious values, trauma-related cognitions, and recovery actions are considered factors that shape intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors’ recovery and pathology. However, less is known about their specific impact on women’s psychopathology and wellbeing. Concomitantly, there is scant information about IPV survivors from collectivistic societies such as the Israeli Jewish Ultra-orthodox (JUO) community. The present study was designed to identify predictors of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) symptoms and wellbeing in women from the JUO community who have experienced IPV. Women (N = 261) provided information about their demographics, the nature of the violence, attitudes with respect to cultural and religious norms that normalize violence, trauma-related cognitions, the coping constructs of disengagement, faith, and engaging in help-seeking and recovery actions, and the PTSD symptoms that affect their wellbeing. A Random Forest machine learning (ML) algorithm was used to identify the strongest predictors of psychopathology and wellbeing. Regression trees were developed to identify individuals at greater risk of PTSD symptoms but also of greater wellbeing. Higher self-stigma and the perception of an unsafe world were associated with PTSD symptoms, whereas lower self-stigma, greater faith, and engagement in steps toward recovery were associated with greater wellbeing. These findings highlight the importance of treating women’s self-stigma and perceptions of an unsafe world while also encouraging faith and active engagement in recovery to promote survivors’ wellbeing and lessen their PTSD symptoms.

Evincing

Witnessing some of the most horrific scenes of terror, hate, and harassment, this work is about “evincing” 1 —evincing in and with the stories, voices, screams, hurt, and pain of the victims, the racially and culturally marginalized scholars who are harassed for their research. My reflections, while they led to a poetic art piece, are about the critical “ongoingness” of continuously revealing the evidence and truth of the unsafe world of doing, being, and sitting with online research. In the evincing, we censure and condemn hate and harassment while vituperating and execrating the perpetrators, cyberspaces, systems, and institutions that target, abuse, mistreat, and malign women; Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC); queer; disabled; and other marginalized scholars. Evincing is the ways in which their research work and lives remain present and alive through this art and those to come. In this evincing, their experiences of racism, misogyny, violence, isolation, powerlessness, helplessness, frustration, and fear are not simply spectacles for awareness. Rather, they are the grounds from which our methodologies for witnessing these scenes become our vocabularies in resistance, solidarities, and solutions. Evincing, then, is how we mobilize against these encounters of hate and harassment in celebration of safe, brave, healthy, and continuous academic journeys for all scholars.

REBECCA WEST'İN ASKERİN DÖNÜŞÜ ROMANINDA SAVAŞ TRAVMASI

This paper aims particularly at discussing how the trauma of twentieth-century warfare challenge the metanarratives that construct and instruct the idea of nation, and how trauma connects individuals with this ideology in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918). The novel successfully portrays different levels of disturbances caused by the trauma of war one of which is Chris’ rejection of recalling his wife to find a kind of internal unity in an unsafe world. In the novel, shell-shocked Chris’ trauma strikingly leads to the narrative exploration of female subjectivity in states of psychological crisis. The story suggests many similarities between surviving at the battlefront and homefront while exploring the effects of war on men as well as women. In the novel, Chris’s war trauma makes other major characters of the novel question their social and gender roles framed by the Edwardian society compelling them to re-evaluate the nature of institutional systems in relation to gender conflict; thus, The Return of the Soldier successfully places men’s and women’s traumas in conjunction with one another in a more puzzling connection.

Beyond Voice: Conceptualizing Children’s Agency in Domestic Violence Research Through a Dialogical Lens

Children who live in households where domestic violence is occurring have been variously described in the literature over time as silent witnesses, witnesses, a cohort who is “exposed” to the violence, and more recently, as individual victim survivors and active agents in their own right, each with their own lived experience of violence. Research methodologies in this arena have shifted from adult-focused measurements of the impacts of domestic violence on children to more qualitative attempts to understand the experience from the child’s perspective. In doing so, there have been notions of giving “voice to the voiceless” and doing no further harm through a desire to protect children from exposure. However, the relational framing of children’s voices and recognition and enabling of children’s agency is less evolved in research and professional interventions. A study undertaken in Australia researched with a primary care population of 23 children and 18 mothers, children’s experiences of safety and resiliency in the context of domestic violence. The findings of the research were realized using qualitative research methods with children and the analytical framing of hermeneutical phenomenology, ethics of care and in particular dialogical ethics, to draw practical understanding and application in health care settings. This article aims to demonstrate how the analytical methodology chosen was applied in the research process and reveals the elements required for children to experience agency in navigating their relationships in an unsafe world, while learning about themselves. It draws upon understandings of the child’s relational context and introduces a model of children’s agency, which may have applicability for domestic violence policy and practice settings.

Education: 15. The Principles of Artistry in Musical Education

Abstract The phenomenon is related to the unsafe world of feelings and brings together all meanings and cultural values. The performance of an artistic phenomenon is not possible without object-subjective relations, only in the frame of such kind of relations there can be established a cultural and spiritual communication, edification of the receptor. In the artistic phenomenon study, are known several approaches, which generate its understanding in several stages. The musical and artistic activity of the human being, as well as the product of this activity, can become determinant causes in education. The production of musical education depends on human skills and their degree of development. In all artistic activities - creation, interpretation, and reception - the "ordinary human being" valorises his own spiritual and artistic skills in order to contact directly with art. This article explores the conception of Tudor Vianu on the artistry, especially the analysis of the factors that determine the appearance of artistic phenomena and features of an artist The principles of artistry are deduced in education from the features of the artistic structure: the intuitiveness, the psychic depth of the empathies, the creative fantasy and the expressive power In the process of musical education, in pupil's personality that experience is formed that empathy, which cannot be acquired via contact with other phenomena / things. The understanding of the musical and artistic phenomena, in its totality, depends mostly on respecting a set of conditions. Applying the principles of artistry in musical education can ensure the joining of art with other human activities and the pre-eminence of art in everyone’s culture and life.

An unsafe world that must learn from conflict.

An unsafe world that must learn from conflict.

The Ashes of Art

The Ashes of Art Sheila Hattangdi (bio) The Firebird Saikat Majumdar Hachette India www.hachetteindia.com 240 Pages; Print, $7.55 Saikat Majumdar’s novel pulls you in and sets you on a family’s travails in India in the mid to late-1980’s, revealing the beating pulse of a culture often at odds with itself. Set in north Calcutta, it is the story of Ori, a small boy growing up in the midst of a once-affluent family trying to maintain its “class” in a time when reputations are lost largely through rumor and innuendo. The book is primarily about Ori, but also tells the story of his mother, a stage actress. In fact, The Firebird refers to a play, the Bengali version of Joan of Arc, in which she plays the lead. The author launches directly into the story: “Disaster came early in Ori’s life, at the age of five, the first time he saw his mother die.” Ori’s father brings him to see his mother act on stage, but the terrified child thinks his mother is really dead. Ori’s life continues to be a series of traumatizing experiences from that point onward. His parents occupy central pillars in the narrative, figures of an occasionally bitter nostalgia and somewhat self-absorbed and very dysfunctional. His mother, the remote goddess-like beauty that he longs to be close to, is a tragic victim of ancient family values that build a wall of judgment between her and her son, who is forced to internalize this judgment. Even though he wants to protect her against gossip, he still thinks he is sweeping under the rug her dirty secrets— mainly that she is a free-spirited woman who will not compromise her career choice for the sake of appearances. She passionately loves the theatre, and with all the gossip and frowning of family and neighbors, she still finds no good reason to give up acting. This causes a deep schism in the family. She cares for Ori, as suggested in her habit of laying out his ironed clothes and preparing lunch for school, but she feels isolated due to her family’s misguided sense of values, as she fails to express the love that Ori craves, and in the end he begins to resent her. Ori’s father, on the other hand, has a poet’s heart, and even that does not stop him from succumbing to the general viciousness with which the community surrounds his wife, and he slowly replaces his love for her with hate. Granted, as he comes from a prominent family, at first he enjoys the fact that his wife is an admired actress, but he gradually becomes disillusioned as the social stigma becomes unbearable. Instead of joining forces with his wife against the others, he lets the community shatter his image of his wife, and he retreats into himself when neighbors and those in his own household begin to criticize her for not staying at home: “The more his wife spent her evenings away from home, the easier it was for him to sleep away his own evenings. The more she found him lost, the more she was gone.” Giving up on love for the sake of social currency, he also abandons his role as a father. Gradually, Ori’s father sinks into a pattern of going to sleep earlier and earlier, leaving Ori increasingly lonely. Naturally, Ori turns to anyone who will give him affection. He becomes closer to his grandmother, Mummum. In his affection-less world, Ori feels happiest when he is with her: “Ori treasured his nights in his grandmother’s room…far from the hot vapour of anger in his parents’ bedroom as they locked themselves in after dinner. Only with Mummum was he safe. No one else.” That need to feel safe in an unsafe world is paramount for Ori, and the author conveys this through the boy’s joy in being with his grandmother who tells him stories in which he can get lost, while he finds unusual ways to comb and braid her hair. This bond is also permeated by sadness, since the grandmother...

Escaping the World: Linguistic Indicators of Suicide Attempts in Poets

The purpose of this study was to determine features of language use in the texts of poets who committed suicide and to identify psychological factors contributing to depression and suicide. Texts of suicidal and non-suicidal poets were analyzed via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. ANOVA and logistic regression analysis revealed predictors of suicide: higher percentage of words self-oriented, expressed negative emotions, ambiguity, exclusion attitude toward reality, and lower percentages of words related to others, world entitativity, and experiencing the world. The data support hypotheses that suicide is facilitated by weak social bonds, egocentrism, helplessness, and visions of an unordered, uncertain, and unsafe world.

The Lack of Collective Memory and Identity Construction in Cyberspace

According to Maurice Halbswachs memory depend upons social conditions. Social framework is the sine qua non of the existence of memory. A lonely person can neither has an individual nor a social memory. However social amnesia and forgetting is a problem in contemporary world wherein social life and the society is fragmented; in addition, the identity is the result of this fragmented world. The frantically identity-seeking is a side effect of the repression and tension rooted in globalization and individualization. Identity in today’s world is unstable, multible, fluctuating and fragmentary. If the identity is a seeking of escaping from uncertainity, one of the reasons of this uncertainity is the lack of collective memory. The problem in producing and transfering the common past in today’s world, in other words the loss of collective memory is lead to the individualization of the society; identity means for a man -who is imprisoned in a permanent “now”- a kind of a safety home in an unsafe world. As Barbara A. Mitsztal asserts “memory and identity depend upon each other since not only is identity rooted in memory but also what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity.” John Locke sees memory as the criterion of personal identity and equates it with a collection of experiences. He says that “I am what I remember.” The essence strategy of postmodern life is not the construction of identity, avoiding to make it immobilized. Digital world and cyberspace fulfil this need through the cheapest and easiest way. Digital world offers us a lot of opportunities in having different identities. On the internet an individual identity becomes so fluid. Cyberspace allows people to construct their self-presentation and to play with online identity. The user become the author of their life.

Psychiatric nurse practitioners’ experiences of working with mental health care users presenting with acute symptoms

Psychiatric nurse practitioners (PNPs) working with mental health care users presenting with acute symptoms work in a complex environment. This environment is characterised by mental health care users who may present with a history of violence, sexual assault and substance misuse. The objectives of this study were twofold: firstly, to explore and describe the experiences of PNPs working with mental health care users (MHCUs) presenting with acute symptoms; and secondly, to make recommendations for the advanced PNPs to facilitate promotion of the mental health of PNPs with reference to nursing practice, research and education. A qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual design was used. The target population was PNPs working with MHCUs presenting with acute symptoms in a public mental health care institution in Gauteng. Data were collected by means of four focus group interviews involving 21 PNPs. The researcher made use of drawings, naïve sketches and field notes for the purpose of data triangulation. Data were analysed in accordance with Tesch's method of open coding. The three themes that emerged were: PNPs experienced working with these MHCUs as entering an unsafe world where care became a burden; they experienced negative emotional reactions and attitudes towards these MHCUs that compromised quality nursing care; and they made a plea for a nurturing environment that would enhance quality nursing care. The PNPs suggest skills and competency development, organisational support, and a need for external resources. Creation of a positive environment and mobilisation of resources as well as the identification and bridging of obstacles are essential in the promotion of the overall wellbeing and mental health of PNPs.

Needle exchange as a safe haven in an unsafe world

The purpose of this paper is to describe the meaning of needle exchange programs from the perspectives of users who access such programs. We conducted observations, 33 semistructured interviews and two focus groups with users at four needle exchange sites. Qualitative description was used to analyse the data. Participants described experiences of trauma, abuse, violence and physical injuries that had damaged their lives and led to the use of drugs to numb the pain. Respect for persons and the development of trust with outreach staff for clients who use injecting drugs supported clients to feel safe in what for many was an unsafe world. Participants described the important role that needle exchange services play in reducing and countering negative stigma, as well as in providing access to clean supplies and to other services. The findings attest to the benefits of having trusted, safe needle exchange services that not only reduce risk behaviours that prevent infections, such as HIV and hepatitis C, but also open the door to other services. This finding is particularly important given that the majority of those interviewed were homeless and living in poverty. The need for both fixed sites and the integration of harm reduction services as part of a broader network of primary health-care services was reinforced.

There's (Always) Something about Cuba: Security and States of Exception in a Fundamentally Unsafe World

Recent events have led critics to speculate about whether “everything changed” in the wake of 9/11. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this essay examines current rhetoric and practices in both the United States and Cuba. The U.S.-Cuban relationship, especially as manifested in popular depictions of the contested terrain of Guantánamo Bay, provides a curious case study of how state power is exercised at the margins, in nonspaces that lie beyond the national imaginary. These depictions point to a larger history of disenfranchisement, displacement, and suppression. In the end, I argue that the case of Guantánamo constitutes an example of the underlying interdependence between the state and the suspension of the rule of law. It points to how the rhetoric of safety has been deployed by the current administration in the United States to justify an expansion and intensification of established practices that are fundamentally undemocratic.

A reflection on PostModernism and the transformation of failure in learning disability services within the independent public sector at the beginning of the 21st Century

Accessible summarySteve Day worked on a project with North Somerset People First for his Masters degree. It was called Cutting Up Sharks. The title comes from the PostModernist artist, Damien Hurst, who once gave an exhibition where he preserved cows which had been cut in half. Mr Hurst did a similar thing with sharks, except they were kept in one piece. As sharks are far more dangerous than cows, we decided to cut up the sharks instead. We live in an unsafe world; nevertheless people with learning disabilities seek inclusion. The Cutting Up Sharks project used people's own individual stories as research. We looked at what people mean by the words success and failure. In today's world, success can begin to look like failure, yet sometimes failures often seem successful. In this sense, the right to take risks can empower individuals, as well as groups of people, to transform their own circumstances. Yet being equal and being included in a dangerous world means that if we are truly citizens we are also truly targets.SummaryIf ever there was a right time to write about Learning Disability Services in the context of a transformation, this is it. I am not writing about the subject as a single entity, divorced from the bigger picture of what is happening to society and the world about us. Whatever ‘transforming’ is going on for people with learning disability, it is doing so in the context of a global market place. The concept of ‘Cutting Up Sharks’ identifies danger as a by‐product of inclusion. On the world's stage the news headlines have the same implications for us all. The change in the construction and administration of both the National Health Service and Social Services has, and is, having a profound effect on the lives of people with learning disabilities. Those changes have come about, in part, due to a recognition of past failures. I have worked in Learning Disability Services for 19 years, I have seen in that time British society slowly, often painfully slowly, begin to recognize people with learning disabilities amongst its population. In a PostModernist world recognition is about visibility, which in turn makes people potential targets. The ‘Inclusion’ championed in ‘Valuing People’ brings with it a right to be recognized and in so doing people with learning disabilities are included in a ‘general loss of confidence within Western democratic culture’. (Butler 2002, p. 110) Inclusion becomes not merely a question of service provision, it is also about bombs on buses, famine and bird flu, global warming and fragile democracies. There is a creaking door opening for people with learning disabilities, providing them recognition within the PostModern construct of fragmented societies. I would contend that against such a backdrop there is a real chance of the failure to meet the needs of people with learning disabilities becoming transformed.

On Feeling Secure in an Unsafe World

Security has always been a loaded word—all the more so since 9/11. Webster’s defines it as “freedom from fear, anxiety, danger, and doubt.” Within Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, meanwhile, we can find it just above our most basic physiological needs, such as food, water, and shelter. So it seems, no matter how you slice it, security comes down to some fundamental sense of well-being or safety. As we all know, that’s no small feat in a world that is not particularly safe.

Bahudhâ and the post-9/11 world

In the post 9/11 world, there is an imperative need to formulate a public policy of harmony that would meet the demands of different peoples and societies. This calls for a certain degree of attitudinal change. Salient in this context is the Bahudha philosophy, which has its origins in the Rig Veda. Bahudha helps us understand another persons point of view about life and religion, science and spirituality, politics and economy, with tolerance and respect. It also calls for-and that is significant-inculcation of a habit in which one person thinks that the other person's point of view may be right. This thought process has found powerful expression at different periods of India's long civilisational history in writings of philosophers and religious reformers, in work of arts and poetry, and in day-to-day social living. The approach has bloomed in other civilizations too. Today, in the age of terrorism and an unsafe world, there is a fresh need to understand the core meaning of our religions, to reshape our education system and to strengthen the UN in a manner that helps us build a better future.

Women's Encounters With the Mental Health Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper Voices of Hope: Conversations With Helen L. Shore Diagnosis: Schizophrenia: A Comprehensive Resource for Patients, Families, and Helping Professionals Children of Jonah: Personal Stories by Survivors of Suicide Attempts Walk With Me Nothing to Hide: Mental Illness in the Family Changing Minds: Our Lives and Mental Illness

Women's Encounters With the Mental Health Establishment: Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper Voices of Hope: Conversations With Helen L. Shore Diagnosis: Schizophrenia: A Comprehensive Resource for Patients, Families, and Helping Professionals Children of Jonah: Personal Stories by Survivors of Suicide Attempts Walk With Me Nothing to Hide: Mental Illness in the Family Changing Minds: Our Lives and Mental Illness

Regulating safety in an unsafe world (risk reduction for and with communities)

Safety regulators and the public they serve often have contrasting views on risk perception and the veracity of institutional estimates of risk and harm. Conflict and distrust between these groups is often a result of a lack of public involvement in decision making on safety related matters. Such concerns also emerge from differences in professional training, authority and experience between the groups. Fire services internationally, carryout fire safety assessments on behalf of communities. This assessment role is unusual in that unlike conventional approaches to regulatory safety assessment, fire fighters are direct end-users of their own regulatory assessment and closer to the people they protect. This paper discusses how fire services are beginning to seek closer links with communities by defining clear regulatory frameworks for conventional safety assessments and conceptual frameworks that allow a redefinition of their role towards establishing partnerships with communities to promote sustained safety.