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This paper explores absconding from a new perspective. Literature has tended to focus on the risk factors linked with absconding. This paper aims to consider desistance factors for absconding for prisoners at higher risk of absconding in open prisons.

Stage 1 used logistic regression to identify factors associated with increased risk of absconding. Stage 2 identified new receptions with increased risk and used thematic analysis to analyse interviews with prisoners that did not abscond after three months.

Stage 1 found that the total number of previous offences predicted absconding. Stage 2 found three themes linked to desistance in absconding: “support”, “ownership” and “sense of self”.

This study highlights the importance of ensuring prisoners in open prisons are offered the appropriate emotional and practical support. It also identifies the importance of hope amongst prisoners in open conditions. Future research should further explore this idea in more depth.

Previous literature has looked at absconding from a risk factor perspective. This research identifies the desistance factors associated with absconding for individuals who have been identified as high risk of absconding. Improvements in factors associated with desistance from absconding may support a reduction in absconding from open prisons.

Leave is an important part of life for both patients and clinicians in secure mental health and learning disability settings. Patients breaching leave conditions (i.e. absconding or failing to return) represent a small percentage of leave episodes; however when incidents occur there can be far reaching negative outcomes for potential victims, the patient and the service. The purpose of this paper is to devise a risk assessment specifically for leave decision making based on the literature available.

Using the approach followed in the violence risk assessment field, a literature review was carried out of papers relating to absconding. The results were used to develop the leave/abscond risk assessment (LARA).

There are a number of problems with the available literature: there is a dearth of research, definitions for absconding are varied (often including escape) making comparisons difficult and much of the literature focuses on psychiatric acute wards making it difficult to translate into secure environments. Characteristics of absconders vary and are not idiosyncratic enough from which to develop a risk assessment. Socio‐environmental factors are perhaps more important and so the LARA was devised around assessment of these.

The limitations of this paper are clear: a risk assessment tool is proposed that has not been evaluated or validated in any way. The authors feel that the process warrants publication and invite readers to use the tool for clinical and/or research purposes.

The LARA is proposed as a specific leave‐decision‐making risk assessment tool for teams working in secure environments.

In the present climate of risk assessment and management, the risk posed by the mentally disordered offender might be considered central to the role of mental health professionals working with this population. To discipline risk is a challenge that involves making something uncertain somehow quantifiable, so that decisions about the short‐longer‐term future of another individual can be made and justified (Rose, 1998). Although unauthorised patient absence from secure hospitals in the UK is an infrequent phenomenon, there are often prominent repercussions, perpetuated by negative media coverage, often resulting in responses from the highest political level. This article will attempt to highlight known statistics on absconsion from secure hospitals, including frequency and consequences, and impact of negative media coverage and various reviews, inquiries and proposed recommendations, which have resulted in the proposed reforms of the Mental Health Act 1983. Finally, the article will outline the work conducted by the social work department at Chadwick Lodge and Eaglestone View (medium secure hospitals) in the development of an 'absconsion pack'. This development provides an example of safe practice through its use of collaborative inter‐professional and multidisciplinary team working, resulting in a procedure that should reduce the risks in the event of an absconsion from a medium secure hospital. The wider implications of this work will be discussed.

The purpose of this mixed methods rapid study was to identify the barriers and facilitators to implement relational and environmental risk management approaches to manage suicidality in inpatient services.

To achieve this within a short timeframe, a rapid review approach was chosen. Both research (qualitative and quantitative studies) and non-research material (policies, guidance and reports) were retrieved. The review was conducted across five databases: MEDLINE, EMBASE, EMCARE, PsycINFO and CINAHL for English language citations within the last ten years (2009 –2019).

A total of 17 primary research papers and a further 73 reviews and grey literature were included. There was evidence that the removal of anti-ligature equipment, by which regular checks of the environment to identify and remove ligature points and increased levels of observation are carried out well, reduces suicide in hospital.

There is a gap in research investigating “engagement activities” eliciting exactly what they are and determining how they might be effective. There is a need for new innovative ways for managing risk of suicide in hospitals that bring together meaningful engagement and maintaining safety.

Keeping people safe during an inpatient stay in a mental health service is a core function of mental health practitioners. This paper brings together what is already known about risk management and highlights areas for further investigation.

This chapter conceptualizes forms and processes of erasure and visibility of migrant domestic workers through the analysis of interview data, media coverage, and public policy. This chapter builds on the existing literature on foreign domestic labor by synthesizing a framework to better represent the mechanisms that produce instances of visibility and erasure; these include transnational forces of erasure like sexism, xenophobia, and domestic labor stigma that interact with country-specific policies and norms. Within this framework of visibility and erasure, we also delineate different aspects of each, such as spatial erasure, erasure in the media, and self-erasure. Finally, this chapter explores how each of these components interconnect into a system of erasure, each aspect enabling another aspect in dampening the individuality of migrant domestic workers. This chapter is intended to illuminate the realities of erasure with careful specificity, while still crediting domestic workers for their resilience and creativity in promoting their own visibility.

This paper draws on the archival records of the Victorian Education Department, literature produced by the governing authority of Tally Ho (the Central Mission), and newspaper reports produced in the mid-20th century about school and education at Tally Ho. This paper also draws on material from the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board and the Northern Territory Department of Welfare, as well as two historical key government inquiries into the institutionalisation of children.

This paper uses Tally Ho Boys’ Training Farm as a case study to examine the intersection of welfare systems, justice systems and schooling and education for Aboriginal children in institutions like Tally Ho in the mid-20th century. Further, it provides perspectives on how institutions such as Tally Ho were utilised by governments in Victoria and the Northern Territory to pursue different agendas – sometimes educational – particular to Aboriginal children. This paper also explores how histories can be reconstructed when archives are missing or silent about histories of Aboriginal childhood.

This paper demonstrates how governments used Tally Ho to control and govern the lives of Aboriginal children. By drawing together archives from a range of bodies and authorities who controlled legislation and policies, this paper contributes new understandings about the role of institutions in Victoria to the assimilation policies of Victoria and the Northern Territory in the mid-20th century.

Scholarship on the institutionalisation of children in the post-war era in Victoria, including the ways that schooling and justice systems were experienced by children living in care, has failed to fully engage with the experiences of Aboriginal children. Historians have given limited attention to the experiences of Aboriginal children living in institutions off Aboriginal reserves in Victoria. There has been limited historical scholarship examining the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at Tally Ho. This paper broadens our understandings about how Aboriginal children encountered institutionalisation in Victoria.

The purpose of this paper is to appraise local absent without leave/missing persons policy in use across the nine NHS mental health trusts providing services across the Greater London region.

A review of the literature on best practice management was conducted, evidence collated and an appraisal tool produced. This tool was used to systematically appraise individual policies.

Despite some core consistency in policy, there was some notable variability in guidance. Novel and unique approaches to management were also identified.

It is recognised that policies often arise from pragmatic approaches using local multi-agency agreements and therefore some variability across London was expected. It is also recognised that the audit tool produced is unvalidated but does reflect the best available evidence.

The authors have shown policy variability in the management of what is a common psychiatric problem across a relatively homogenous population. Standardisation of policy is likely to improve the efficiency in managing these incidents as well as encourage sharing of innovative practice. The authors also illustrate practical implications for local policy benchmarking in the absence of clearly defined national standards.

This study has shown the variability of policy in managing a common problem faced on psychiatric wards. It also highlights issues related to policy development on a local and regional level.

There is not only an absence of guidelines for the development of medium and low secure units but also confusion over the definitions of these types of provision.