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Cases of emotional abuse involving children have been previously associated with long lasting physical and psychological issues among those who experience it. Previous research has linked the significant underreporting of emotional abuse cases with the use of vague and unclear definitions of emotional abuse as it involves minors. Creating a concise and inclusive definition has proven to be difficult because of a lack in physical evidence to support claims, thus each of the 50 US states have a different definition for what constitutes emotional abuse. Yet, why do definitions vary in the first place? Here, I hypothesize that states with more interest groups focused on child welfare will lead to clearer, more strict definitions of emotional abuse. Using counts of these interest groups in each of the 50 states, I find no statistical connection between the number of interest groups in a state and a more inclusive legal definition of child emotional abuse. Other factors, such as state income and political ideology, also cannot explain these differences. Given the results of the research, questions of whether a federal definition would be necessary are proposed, but left unexplored for future research.

The paper analyzes the normative regulation of the procedural administrative decision institute, which was introduced into the Serbian administrative process as a novelty by the General Administrative Procedure Act (GAPA) in 2016. The paper aims to addresses three research questions: to determine the legislator's goal in regulating this insitute, to identify in which situations such a decision has to be made, and to establish how effective that type of decision is. At the beginning of the paper, the author focuses on the concept of effectiveness, including different, mutually opposed, approaches to defining that notion. The author points out the conceptual misunderstanding between efficiency and effectiveness, and their unjustified equalization. The main goal of introducing the institute of procedural administrative decision is the aspiration for greater protection of parties' procedural rights. The analysis of the text of the General Administrative Procedure Act has yielded seventeen basic types of procedural administrative decisions: a decision on rejecting the party's request, a decision not to allow alteration of the party's request, a decision on suspending the procedure, a decision on termination of the procedure, a decision on imposing a fine, decision on request, a decision on execution, a decision on securing the execution, a decision on appointing a temporary representative, a decision on denying representation to a quack lawyer for unlicenced practice of law, a decision on proposal for restitution, a decision on bearing preliminary procedure costs, a decision on exemption from procedure costs, a decision on payment of costs resulting from the absence or unjustified denial of testimony, a decision on compensation for damage to the holder, a decision on the proposal for providing evidence, and a decision on ordering an interim measure. The author concludes that the institute of procedural administrative decision can negatively affect the effectiveness of administrative proceedings due to the possibility of its unnecessary extension.

The last year of the previous Millennium saw the publication of the latest government document on mandatory reporting of child abuse titled the National Guidelines for the Protection and Welfare of Children. This issue has come to dominate the minds of social care workers and child protection and welfare professionals. This editorial is an edited version of research conducted for a conference on child abuse and sexual offences held in Waterford, Ireland. Mandatory reporting has become a mantra and is now part of a highly politicised debate in this country. It seems to me that mandatory reporting should not be seen as a cure for child abuse but is, in principle, something to which I subscribe. Nonetheless: we require a fundamental shift in the way we understand childhood and treat children in this country if it has any chance of being effective. We also need more accurate and consistent statistics covering a wide range of data on child abuse, the victims of child abuse and the perpetrators of child abuse.

The Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic (1988) developed a 10-year plan in 1987 that recommended: "Expanded drug abuse treatment programs sufficient to admit all IV drug users who desired services and, until that occurred, short-term detoxification and low-dose methadone for those on waiting lists." This study presents data collected from a sample of 2,613 out-of-treatment and non-incarcerated injection drug users in 21 U.S. cities to examine their drug-treatment access during the past year. Analyses on injectors who tried but were unable to enter treatment revealed that program-based reasons (e.g., no room, too costly, or stringent admission criteria) are the most commonly given barriers to drug treatment (72%). However, a notable number of injectors (20%) also reported that individual-based reasons are important for not accessing drug treatment. Injectors giving program- and individual-based reasons for not entering treatment are profiled using logistic regression.

Scholars of administrative ethics have recently been attentive to the problem of so-called administrative evil. The authors argue that evil can be understood as a socially constructed category of agents and acts specific to particular circumstances and moral communities, and the authors apply a framework of accountability to reflect the dynamics of that constructed reality. Selected examples of efforts to hold evil actors accountable or otherwise to account for evil acts illustrate a paradox: Responses to so-called evil may themselves be labeled evil in hindsight or by members of other contemporaneous communities. In light of this paradox and attendant ethical dilemmas, the authors argue that conventional ethical and behavioral prescriptions are necessary but insufficient protections against catastrophic mis-, mal-, or nonfeasance in and by organizations.