This article considers the touching, or rather, not touching, of children and young people in professional settings. Some have argued that many schools and other childcare environments are becoming ‘no touch’ zones. Formal guidelines in the UK are centrally concerned with ‘child protection’ issues, and ‘force and control’, and as such appear more reactive than proactive. From the authors' exploratory studies it has emerged that this is an area where fear and confusion (resulting from a moral panic) have tended to replace a response that is primarily concerned with the caring needs of children. The authors regard this as an area that can no longer be left to chance and suggest that future policy should be informed by research that takes account of the complexities as discussed throughout.

IntroductionOur aim is to re-present and reflect educational researchers' lived experiences of ethical review committees and procedures. We decided to put together this collection as a result of what happened to us when we sought clearance for an undoubtedly sensitive study of the perceptions and experiences of male schoolteachers (and those of members of their families, their friends and colleagues) accused of sexual misconduct with female students which they said they had not committed and of which they were eventually cleared or where the case was dismissed (Sikes and Piper 2008, 2010). We had a difficult time and consequently became curious about how it was for others. However, with notable exceptions such as Burgess (1984), Nind et al. (2005) and Simons and Usher (2000) the available literature concerning educational research ethics largely took a meta-ethical overview, or was negatively critical about the ethics review process per se, or came from America and focused specifically on the workings of the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in that country. We, therefore, decided to investigate whether and to what extent Mark Israel and Iain Hay's claim that:

This text introduces recently completed research on 'no touch' sports coaching, by placing it in a broader social context which problematises the way child abuse and child protection (or safeguarding) are conceived and discussed in terms of policy and practice. It also provides a brief indicative summary of the research findings and offers a discussion of moral panic, risk society and worst case thinking, before drawing on Foucault's work on governmentality to offer an explanation of how the current situation arose. The authors suggest that the approach to discussing child abuse, and the guidelines and training stemming from the dominant discourse, for the most part initiated by the NSPCC's Child Protection in Sport Unit, together create an environment in which many coaches and PE teachers are confused and fearful, and consequently unsure of how to be around the children and young people they teach and coach.

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This article addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as "picturing," drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account of reflexivity, offering the notion of "signature," and drawing on the work of Gell and also Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the inherently specific nature of "concepts" situated in space and time.

This paper is informed by a UK based Economic and Social Research Council funded research project which developed and deployed a case-study approach to issues of touch between children and professionals in schools and childcare. Outcomes from these settings are referred to, but the focus here is shifted to touch in sports coaching and its distinctive contextual and institutional characteristics. We consider the broader context of no touch coaching practice, including relevant theoretical accounts, review policy which impacts on coaching activity and report on preliminary enquiries. 1 We argue that the disembodiment of practice has undermined the conception and experience of sports coaching and its contribution to educating and socialising young people.

It has been suggested that acts of violence against human and nonhuman animals share commonalities, and that animal abuse is a sentinel for current or future violence toward people. The popular and professional acceptance of strong connections between types of violence is beginning to be used to justify social work interventions and to influence legal decision making, and so requires greater scrutiny. Examination of the limited pool of empirical data suggests that animal abuse is relatively common among men, with violent offenders having an increased probability of reporting prior animal abuse-with the majority of violent offenders not reporting any animal abuse. Causal explanations for "the link," such as empathy impairment or conduct disorder, suffer from a lack of validating research and, based on research into interhuman violence, the assumption that violence has a predominant, single underlying cause must be questioned. An (over)emphasis on the danger that animal abusers pose to humans serves to assist in achieving a consensus that animal abuse is a serious issue, but potentially at the cost of failing to focus on the most common types of abuse, and the most effective strategies for reducing its occurrence. Nothing in this review and discussion should be taken as minimizing the importance of animals as frequent victims of violence, or the co-occurrence of abuse types in "at-risk" households. However, given the weakness of the underlying data, emphasizing the indiscriminate dangerousness of all animal abusers may have unforeseen and unwanted consequences.Historically it has been suggested that acts of violence against human and nonhuman animals share commonalities, and that animal abuse by children is a

The ways in which the media searches out, depicts, and writes about teacher-pupil sex-related topics have implications both for researchers working in the area and, sometimes more seriously, for the people who participate in and contribute to that research as respondents. In this article, the authors discuss, and provide an example of, the composite fiction strategy they developed and decided to adopt primarily for purposes of protection when writing up a project that investigated the perceptions and experiences of teachers (and those of members of their families, their friends, and colleagues) who had been accused of sexual abuse of pupils, which they said they had not committed and of which they were eventually cleared.