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This article examines the value of the concept of significant harm some 20 years after its introduction in the Children Act 1989. It introduces the concept of significant harm and then discusses the profile of children and families in care proceedings, the decision‐making process, the interpretation of significant harm in case law, ‘panic’ and its impact on patterns of referrals for case proceedings, and the issue of resources. An alternative model of the problem‐solving court is outlined. It is suggested that ‘significant harm’ has largely stood the test of time. However, the absence of a clear operational definition is both its strength and its weakness. It allows necessary professional discretion but is vulnerable to external pressures affecting its interpretation. A more confident workforce and sufficient resources are required, but the future role of the court and compulsory care is more contentious. The problem‐solving court model may offer a helpful way forward for the scrutiny of significant harm.

Strong versions of the Precautionary Principle (PP) require regulators to prohibit or impose technology controls on activities that pose uncertain risks of possibly significant environmental harm. This decision rule is conceptually unsound and would diminish social welfare. Uncertainty as such does not justify regulatory precaution. While they should reject PP, regulators should take appropriate account of societal aversion to risks of large harm and the value of obtaining additional information before allowing environmentally risky activities to proceed.

Adverse childhood experiences that are consistently experienced over a sustained period of time throughout childhood result in an accumulation of childhood adversity, which is often referred to in the literature as cumulative harm. This paper aims to closely examine statutory child protection practice, which favours an episodic and incident-focused approach to assessing risk and harm, failing to account for the evaluation of the accumulation of adversity and harm, commonly experienced by children exposed to maltreatment. The paper defines an existing gap in practice frameworks to adequately identify and respond to the accumulation of adversity.

Drawing on practice experiences in Queensland Australia, the paper examines service delivery responses to cumulative harm in the context of the Intensive Family Support model of service delivery.

Within current frameworks for child protection service delivery, there is no method of assessing the diverse and cumulative effects of ongoing chronic child maltreatment and adversity, despite research confirming that cumulative harm very often co-occurs with other child protection concerns. To effectively and collaboratively intervene in matters of chronic and cumulative abuse and neglect, practitioners and stakeholders must be guided by frameworks and assessments that accurately recognise and acknowledge the impact of ongoing exposure to adverse experiences and maltreatment.

The need for a valid and reliable assessment method that draws together all elements contributing to the chronic maltreatment experience for a child and family: multiplicity, diversity and severity.

Practice solutions tailored to each child’s specific cumulative experiences of adversity and maltreatment will promote better social, emotional and health outcomes across the lifespan.

This paper highlights a significant gap in assessment and practice frameworks and advances the impetus for cumulative harm to be proactively integrated into social care and service delivery.

This study uses several business situations to explore the impact of moral intensity on the identification of an ethical problem and reasons for making moral judgments for questionable ethical business dilemmas. This study asks 173 accounting students, those who will become our future professional accountants, to evaluate four situations involving product safety, sharing software, expensing personal items as business expenses, and manipulating earnings. The results of this study confirm beliefs that Jones’ (1991) model of moral intensity affects ethical evaluations and moral judgments. Accounting students appear to use the overall harm and societal pressure components of moral intensity when evaluating ethical dilemmas and making moral judgments.

The objectives of this study are to (a) identify spatial and temporal crime concentrations, (b) supplement the traditional place-based analysis that defines hot spots based on counted incidents with an analysis of crime severity and (c) add to the research of hot spots with an analysis of offender data.

This study explores crime concentration in mass transit settings, focusing on Edmonton’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) stations in 2017–2022. Pareto curves are used to observe the degree of concentration of crime in certain locations using multiple estimates; trajectory analysis is then used to observe crime patterns in the data on both places and offenders.

A total of 16.3% of stations accounted for 50% of recorded incidents. Train stations with high or low crime counts and severity remained as such consistently over time. Additionally, 3.6% of offenders accounted for 50% of incident count, while 5% accounted for 50% of harm. We did not observe differences in the patterns and distributions of crime concentrations when comparing crime counts and harm.

Hot spots and harm spots are synonymous in low-crime-harm environments: high-harm incidents are outliers, and their weight in the average crime severity score is limited. More sensitive severity measures are needed for high-frequenty, low-harm enviornments.

The findings underscore the benefits of integrating offender data in place-based applied research.

The findings provide additional evidence on the utility of place-based criminology and potentially cost-effective interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the PRIME for Life risk reduction program in reducing alcohol consumption and improving knowledge and attitudes towards alcohol use in male Swedish military conscripts, aged 18 to 22 years.

A quasi‐experimental design was used in which 1,371 military conscripts from ten regimens were assigned to either a control or program intervention group. Changes in alcohol consumption, knowledge and attitudes towards alcohol use were assessed with self‐report questionnaires at baseline, and again 5 months and 20 months after the program.

Pre to post program reductions in total alcohol consumption and “high risk” consumption were reported in both the control and intervention group. There were no statistically significant group interactions over time, indicating that factors beyond the intervention alone were responsible for the reductions in alcohol consumption. Attitudes towards consumption improved significantly in both groups at five months before returning to baseline levels at 20 month follow‐up.

PRIME for Life is one of the most widely used alcohol and drug risk reduction programs in the United States and has recently been implemented in parts of Sweden to reduce alcohol consumption and related harm. To our knowledge, this is the first peer‐reviewed evaluation of the effectiveness of the PRIME for Life program.

This article explores the neglected issue of the overrepresentation in the child protection system of children from ethnic, cultural, religious, racial, and linguistic minorities. It focuses on the accommodation of children’s diverse backgrounds within the s 31(2) threshold and s1 “best interests” stages of intervention under the Children Act 1989. First, it introduces the ethnic child protection penalty as a new tool for capturing the complex nature of overrepresentation of these children. Second, it proposes a framework for understanding the judicial approach in higher court decisions on the current extent and nature of accommodation. Third, it employs the penalty concept to help explain why case law analysis reveals difficulties with the current factor-based approach, whereas empirical research suggests generally satisfactory accommodation in practice. It concludes by proposing a contextualized framework for decision-making in relation to child protection.

The purpose of this article is to examine the regime to remediate contaminated land in the UK set out in Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and to analyse the UK Government's intent and objectives in introducing the regime. The legislative provisions and the statutory guidance that accompanies that legislation are then analysed to determine whether those objectives could have been met.

A research approach was taken to trace the legislative history of Part 2A and to analyse the statutory provisions and the statutory guidance. The approach included researching Parliamentary debates on the statute, consultations on the statutory guidance, other information published by the UK Government, commentaries on the regime, and contaminated land regimes in other jurisdictions.

The paper found that the introduction of a contaminated land regime that delegates primary implementation and enforcement authority to local authorities, and that severely limits their discretion in doing so, has resulted in a regime that has proven to be unworkable in practice and that has failed to meet its objectives.

The article is the first paper to examine the legislative intent and objectives behind Part 2A and to analyse their effect on the provisions in the statute and the statutory guidance and their implementation and enforcement.

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to share our thoughts and observations about some of the ethical issues that arise when researching sport-drinking cultures. In particular, the chapter focuses on what researchers should do when they witness potentially harmful and risky drinking behaviour.

Approach – The chapter is written mainly from an ethics disciplinary background. We use philosophical methods to analyse, evaluate and interrogate certain claims, assumptions and judgements about moral action and inaction in the research context. We employ ethical concepts in general and research ethics concepts in particular to make and defend value judgements about what is reasonable or unreasonable, right or wrong, and good or bad in relation to witnessing risky and harmful behaviour.

Findings – The chapter argues that in some situations there are good and perhaps compelling moral reasons for researchers to take action when they observe certain problematic drinking behaviour. Researchers who fail to notice and/or act may be morally blameworthy and culpable in other ways, e.g. in breach of contract or code of conduct.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the remediation of contaminated land has been damaged, perhaps immeasurably, in a period of devastating and crushing austerity.

A legal doctrinal and regulatory analysis of the contaminated land regime under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1990 was used to investigate the extent to which austerity changes have affected future contaminated land identification and remediation.

Austerity changes have impacted upon Part 2A of the EPA 1990, the planning system and development incentives. The recent changes are going to contribute to the problem of the under-resourcing of local authorities and are likely to reduce voluntary remediation by developers. As a result, future contaminated land clean-up is going to decrease.

Originality/value is assured because, as far as the author is aware, there is no other literature in this research area dealing specifically with the coalition’s adverse impact on Part 2A; this paper fills the knowledge gap that existed in the research field.