The population is ageing and the needs of older adults may not be being met in the field of forensic psychiatry. This survey gathered information about the number and the needs of older adult patients in a special secure forensic psychiatry care in Scotland. Inpatients of The State Hospital, Carstairs aged 55 or over throughout a 10-year period were included. This population has heterogeneous and complex needs. The most common diagnoses are of psychotic illnesses. Most patients are admitted from other secure psychiatric facilities or prison and the duration of admission is long. There are high rates of physical illness, mobility impairment, sensory impairment and polypharmacy. Offences tend to be at the severe end of the spectrum, including homicide, sexual offences and other violent offences. Most patients are single males and socioeconomic classes IV and V are over-represented. Further research will inform development of services for this population.
Both police and courts are well aware of the inappropriateness of custody for acutely ill people and efforts are made to divert such people out of the CJS. Persistent petty offenders are often being recycled from the street to police station to court and back to the street without the benefit of care. A dedicated facility is recommended in central London to meet this need.
This article explores the interplay between language and intercultural communication within refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, using material taken from ethnographic research that involved a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis in both countries over a two-year period (2007)(2008)(2009). It is concerned, in particular, to examine the role played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the different administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims. The first section provides an overview of refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, introducing the main administrative and legal contexts of the asylum process within which interpreters operate in the two countries. The second section compares the organisation of interpreting services, codes of conduct for interpreters and institutional expectations about the nature of interpreters' activity on the part of the relevant UK and French authorities. The third section then explores some of the practical dilemmas for interpreters and barriers to communication that exist in refugee status determination procedures in the two countries. The article concludes by emphasising the complex and active nature of the interpreter's role in UK and French refugee status determination procedures.
Ethnographic research is often multilingual, requiring the researcher to work in two or more different languages, if necessary with the assistance of an interpreter. Given this, surprisingly few ethnographers have attempted to discuss in detail how their own knowledge of different languages and their decisions to use interpreters and/or translators during fieldwork have affected the research they have conducted. Drawing on material from our own research, as well as from published accounts by other ethnographers, we aim in this article to dispel some of the 'silence' or 'mystique' surrounding such matters. More specifically, we argue for the importance of documenting and analysing not only the process of language learning in ethnographic research but also the ways in which levels of fluency in a second or additional language can affect the research process, including the writing of ethnographic fieldnotes and forms of self and other identification. We suggest that a heightened awareness of these issues can help researchers make more informed choices when carrying out and writing up ethnographic research using different languages.
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