Heather Douglas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3730874 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heather Douglas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heather |
| FAMILY NAME | Douglas |
| SIGNATURE | DOUGLAS H |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0420-3820 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 80 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 469 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 80 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Recommendations From Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations to Mainstream Inquiries on Family Violence: It's Time to Act
This article examines recommendations from Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) in submissions to Australian federal parliamentary inquiries that considered family violence. Our findings outline commonalities in what these organisations recommended under four themes, and show how these themes all centre self-determination. In so doing, we explore how ACCOs craft demands for structural change that emphasise the inseparability of F…
Ageism, rape myths, and disgust: Australian news media, older women, and sexual violence
News media narrowly shapes how we understand and respond to sexual violence. Yet scholarship has focused on representations of younger women victims with limited attention given to older women. This omission is concerning considering the invisibilisation and underreporting of older women’s experiences of sexual violence within both community and institutional settings. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of 298 Australian news articles, utili…
Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds
In Australia, strangulation has been explicitly criminalized in all states and territories. However, it continues to be a “normalized” sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short and long-term sequelae. This research aimed to establish the prevalence of strangulation during sex and examine predictors of positive perceptions toward sexual strangulation in Australia. Confidential, cross-sectional online surveys w…
Domestic violence and the role of imprisonment as a response: Men’s post-conviction talk about strangling women
Choking/Strangulation During Sex: Understanding and Negotiating “Safety” Among 18-35 Year Old Australians
Despite its potentially fatal consequences, sexual choking/strangulation is an increasingly common sexual practice. Existing research suggests that its growing prevalence is partly a consequence of its popular construction as “risky yet safe.” Few studies have directly examined how people frame and engage in choking/strangulation in terms of “safety”—what people think it means for strangulation to be (or not be) “safe” and how people think safety…
Still Falling Short: Aboriginal Children’s Rights and Victoria’s Child Protection System
The child protection system in colonised countries like Australia has long been a site of systemic injustice and harm for Indigenous children. In Victoria, Australia, despite multiple reports and legislative change, Aboriginal children continue to be removed into out-of-home care at alarming and increasing numbers. In this article we draw on the findings of the Yoorrook Justice Commission Report, released in 2023, to argue that Victoria’s child p…
Vale the Honourable Sally Brown AM
Engaging publics in science: A practical typology
Public engagement with science has become a prominent area of research and effort for democratizing science. In the fall of 2020, we held an online conference, Public Engagement with Science: Defining and Measuring Success, to address questions of how to do public engagement well. The conference was organized around conceptualizations of the publics engaged, with attendant epistemic, ethical, and political valences. We present here the typology o…
Prosecuting strangulation offences: Understanding complainant withdrawal using a social entrapment lens
In many countries, one of the central challenges to the successful prosecution of domestic violence offences is the complainant's disengagement from the prosecution process.Withdrawal is particularly likely in cases of serious domestic violence with limited physical evidence, such as strangulation.Recently countries including England and Wales and Australian jurisdictions have introduced discrete offences of strangulation, a behaviour commonly as…
The social contract for science and the value-free ideal
While the Value-Free Ideal (VFI) had many precursors, it became a solidified bulwark of normative claims about scientific reasoning and practice in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, it has played a central role in the philosophy of science, first as a basic presupposition of how science should work, then as a target for critique, and now as a target for replacement. In this paper, we will argue that a narrow focus on the VFI is misguided, be…
Structuring Institutions for Responsible and Accountable Science
Oversight institutions that hold science and scientists accountable for responsible science have thus far not focused on the general societal impact of science. Responsibility for societal impact is now a pervasive aspect of scientific practice, but accountability remains elusive. I argue here that we should proceed cautiously, and that only clear and precise floors for responsibility should have accountability mechanisms. For the remainder of so…
Rethinking the Conceptual Space for Science in Society after the VFI
Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI th…
A Qualitative Exploration of the Impact of Increasing Criminalization on Domestic Violence Support Workers: Nonfatal Strangulation as a Case Study
Specialized nongovernmental domestic violence (DV) services provide critical support to victim/survivors. This research draws on 14 semistructured focus groups with 27 DV support workers to examine how expanded criminalization impacts support workers’ roles using a case study of a 2016 nonfatal strangulation offense legislated in Queensland, Australia. Our results describe a lack of governmental support intersecting with increased complexity and …
Strangulation During Sex Among Undergraduate Students in Australia: Toward Understanding Participation, Harms, and Education
Background Strangulation is becoming a more common sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short- and long-term sequelae. This research provides a preliminary examination of participation and perception toward strangulation during sex among Australian undergraduates. Methods This study utilized a confidential, cross-sectional online survey collected in 2022–2023. Analysis included 168 undergraduate students at an…
Differentiating Scientific Inquiry and Politics
Protecting science from politicization is an ongoing concern in contemporary society. Yet some political influences on science (e.g., setting public funding amounts) are fully legitimate. We need to have a clear account of when a political influence is politicization (an illegitimate political influence) in order to properly detect and address the problem. I argue in this paper that understanding how the space of scientific inquiry is distinctive…
The importance of values for science
This essay examines the important roles for values in science, from deciding which research projects are worth pursuing, to shaping good methodological approaches (including ethical concerns), to assessing the sufficiency of evidence for scientific claims. I highlight the necessity of social and ethical value judgements in science, particularly for producing properly responsible research. I then examine the implications of the need for values to …
Policing Technology-Facilitated Domestic Abuse (TFDA): Views of Service Providers in Australia and the United Kingdom
Purpose Technology-facilitated domestic abuse (TFDA) is a prevalent form of domestic abuse. While police are recognized as critical first responders to intimate partner violence, there is limited research about what the challenges to policing TFDA are perceived to be and how they might be addressed. This article speaks to this issue. Methods Between April 2020 and June 2022, n = 196 Australian and n = 256 United Kingdom representatives of service…
Relations between the Home Learning Environment and the Literacy and Mathematics Skills of Eight-Year-Old Canadian Children
The home learning environment includes parental activities, attitudes, affect, knowledge, and resources devoted to supporting children’s development, including literacy and mathematics skills. These factors are related to the academic performance of preschool children (aged 3 to 6 years), before formal schooling and possibly beyond. In the present research, we examined the home learning environment of Canadian families as reported by either the m…
Addressing the Reproducibility Crisis: A Response to Hudson
The role of mathematical language skills in arithmetic fluency and word-problem solving for first- and second-language learners
Language skills play an important role in mathematics development. Students (7 to 10 years of age) learning school mathematics either in the same language used at home (first-language learners; n = 103) or in a different language (second-language learners; n = 57) participated in the study. Relations among cognitive skills (i.e., receptive vocabulary, working memory, quantitative skills), domain-specific language skills (i.e., mathematical vocabu…
Pathways to learning mathematics for students in French-immersion and English-instruction programs
Canadian students enrolled in either French-immersion or English-instruction programs were followed from Grades 2 to 3 (Mage = 7.8 years to 8.9 years; N = 244; 55% girls). In each grade, students completed two mathematical tasks that required oral language processing (i.e., word-problem solving and number transcoding from dictation) and two that did not (i.e., arithmetic fluency and number line estimation). Students in both English-instruction (n…
The use of fire and threats to burn in the context of domestic and family violence and coercive control
Fire can be harnessed by abusive partners or ex-partners in their efforts to maintain and regain control in an abusive relationship. Reports about the use of fire in the context of domestic and family violence are not uncommon in the media, with incidents of house fires, burning cars and using fire to kill or cause harm and threats to burn ex-partners and children being regularly reported. This article analyses 49 reported legal cases where the o…
Reproductive coercion and abuse against women from minority ethnic backgrounds: Views of service providers in Australia
Reproductive coercion and abuse is defined as behaviour that deliberately interferes with a person's reproductive autonomy. It is typically perpetrated by men against women in a context of fear and control and includes forcing a woman to become pregnant or to terminate a pregnancy. There is a dearth of qualitative research investigating experiences of reproductive coercion and abuse, particularly for women from minority ethnic backgrounds. In thi…
Communicating Reproductive Coercion in the Context of Domestic and Family Violence: Perspectives of Service Providers Supporting Migrant and Refugee Women
The current study explored the language barriers to help-seeking in the context of reproductive coercion and abuse (RCA), domestic and family violence (DFV), and sexual violence (SV), drawing on observations by key informants supporting women from migrant and refugee communities. A lack of shared language has been identified as a key barrier to help seeking for migrant and refugee women experiencing DFV more broadly, though how language intersect…
Adolescent Family and Dating Violence and the Criminal Law Response
The criminal law response to adolescent family and dating violence is understudied in Australia. The aim of the present study was to examine the charges and sentences adolescents face when they perpetrate acts of violence against family members or intimate partners, and to better understand the personal circumstances of these adolescents, including whether they have been diagnosed with a mental illness, whether they have a criminal history and wh…
Inductive Risk and Values in Science
Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the “external” parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I u…
The Value of Cognitive Values
Traditionally, cognitive values have been thought of as a collective pool of considerations in science that frequently trade against each other. I argue here that a finer-grained account of the value of cognitive values can help reduce such tensions. I separate the values into groups, minimal epistemic criteria, pragmatic considerations, and genuine epistemic assurance, based in part on the distinction between values that describe theories per se…
The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity
Mothers, Domestic Violence, and Child Protection
This article explores the relationship between understandings of domestic violence and the child protection response drawing on material gathered in focus groups with workers who support mothers dealing with both domestic violence and child protection issues. The interviewees expressed concern that the dynamics of domestic violence are often misunderstood and inappropriately responded to by child protection workers. This article critically examin…
Expanding the Home Numeracy Model to Chilean children: Relations among parental expectations, attitudes, activities, and children’s mathematical outcomes
Pure science and the problem of progress
State of the Field: Why novel prediction matters
Strangulation During Sex Among Undergraduate Students in Australia: Toward Understanding Participation, Harms, and Education
Background Strangulation is becoming a more common sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short- and long-term sequelae. This research provides a preliminary examination of participation and perception toward strangulation during sex among Australian undergraduates. Methods This study utilized a confidential, cross-sectional online survey collected in 2022–2023. Analysis included 168 undergraduate students at an…
Technology-facilitated Domestic and Family Violence: Women’s Experiences
The use of technology, including smartphones, cameras, Internet-connected devices, computers and platforms such as Facebook, is now an essential part of everyday life. Such technology is used to maintain social networks and carry out daily tasks. However, this technology can also be employed to facilitate domestic and family violence. Drawing on interviews undertaken with 55 domestic and family violence survivors in Brisbane, Australia, this arti…
Mothers and the Child Protection System
Child protection intervention has increased dramatically in Australia and elsewhere over recent years. The increased intervention has left many parents, especially mothers, feeling bewildered, confused, and distrustful of the legal system. There has been limited research conducted about the experience of mothers involved in legal processes associated with child protection intervention. Drawing on information gathered from focus group discussions …
Legal Responses to Non-Consensual Smartphone Recordings in the Context of Domestic and Family Violence
The increasingly ubiquitous use of smartphones is further complicating the legal response to domestic and family violence (‘DFV’). Perpetrators can now use smartphone recording facilities to record private conversations and activities of their (ex-)partners. Such behaviour may be a criminal offence of breach of a domestic and family violence protection order or stalking. On the other hand, those who have experienced DFV can record perpetrators an…
Legal systems abuse and coercive control
This article considers how legal engagement can be an opportunity to exercise coercive control over a former intimate partner. Drawing on interviews with 65 women who engaged with the legal system as a result of violence in their intimate relationships, this article explores how women’s engagement with the legal system is frequently experienced as an extension of an intimate partner’s coercive control. It builds on existing research showing how l…
Intellectual disabilities, domestic violence and legal engagement
There is increasing recognition that legal responses to domestic violence can only be effective if those who implement the law – for example, child protection workers, police and magistrates – are also effective. This article draws on the narratives of women with intellectual disabilities to analyse their experiences of engaging with the legal system as a response to domestic violence. In particular, the article considers whether they have access…
Engagement for progress: Applied philosophy of science in context
Beyond the Victim-offender Binary: Legal and Anti-violence Intervention Considerations With Women Who Have Used Force in the U.S. and Australia
In the United States (U.S.) and Australian contexts, the fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of cisgender men's violence against cisgender women operated according to an incident-based victim-offender binary. Those held accountable for the violence were seen as offenders, those who survived the violence were seen as victims. This binary persists across police, court, corrections, intervention, and child protection settings. However, w…
Continuing the Stolen Generations: Child Protection Interventions and Indigenous People
Indigenous Australian children are significantly over-represented in out of home care. Figures evidencing this over-representation continue to increase at a startling rate. Similar experiences have been identified among native peoples in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with lawyers who work with Indigenous parents in child protection matters in Queensland, Australia, this article examines how historical factors, d…
Battered Women’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: Decentring the Law
Customary Law, Sentencing and the Limits of the State
La question de la punition coutumière, particulièrement de la rétribution (« payback »), a étiré les limites du droit pénal dans une série de décisions sentencielles dans le Territoire du Nord de l'Australie. Des arrêts australiens successifs ont établi que le droit pénal aborigène ne s'applique plus au-delà de l'établissement britannique. Cependant, la jurisprudence dans le Territoire du Nord ne reflète pas cette position. La réponse judiciaire …
Indigenous Legal Judgments: Bringing Indigenous Voices into Judicial Decision Making
This book is a collection of key legal decisions affecting Indigenous Australians, which have been re-imagined so as to be inclusive of Indigenous people’s stories, historical experience, perspectives and worldviews. \n \n In this groundbreaking work, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have collaborated to rewrite 16 key decisions. Spanning from 1889 to 2017, the judgments reflect the trajectory of Indigenous people’s engagements with Austral…
Politics and Science: Untangling Values, Ideologies, and Reasons
This commentary argues that we need a more nuanced account than we have now of the sources of disagreement among experts and the sources of distrust in scientific claims among the public. Such nuance requires an understanding of the nature of science (an empirical, uncertain, and yet reliable source of knowledge) and of how that differs from faith as a basis for knowledge claims. It also requires an understanding of how values can legitimately fu…
Malicious Reports of Child Maltreatment as Coercive Control: Mothers and Domestic and Family Violence
Responsive home numeracy as children progress from kindergarten through Grade 1
Understanding processes of criminalisation: Insights from an Australian study of criminal law-making
Criminalisation theory scholars have examined important questions regarding what behaviours should be criminalised and why. More recently, greater attention has been paid to linking normative accounts with empirical and historicised analyses of criminalisation practices. Building on recent work on modalities of criminalisation as a methodological tool for contextual criminalisation research, this article introduces a second analytical approach fo…
Legal responses to child protection, poverty and homelessness: Research Article
Removal of children from the care of their parents is one of the most fundamental forms of intrusion the state may have in the lives of families. Those experiencing poverty are disproportionately targeted for intervention by child protection departments. This article reports on the results of two research studies that provide empirical evidence regarding the relationship between child protection and poverty. The links between child protection and…
Their ultimate absorption’: Assimilation in 1930s Australia
This is a post-print of an article published in Journal of Australian Studies 2004 published by API Network and Curtin University of Technology. This version is reproduced with permission from API Network. http://www.api-network.com/scgi-bin/jas/jas.cgi
How values are in science
Inductive Risk and Values in Science
Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the “external” parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I u…
Their ultimate absorption’: Assimilation in 1930s Australia
This is a post-print of an article published in Journal of Australian Studies 2004 published by API Network and Curtin University of Technology. This version is reproduced with permission from API Network. http://www.api-network.com/scgi-bin/jas/jas.cgi
The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity
She Knew What was Expected of Her’: The White Legal System’s Encounter with Traditional Marriage
Customary Law, Sentencing and the Limits of the State
La question de la punition coutumière, particulièrement de la rétribution (« payback »), a étiré les limites du droit pénal dans une série de décisions sentencielles dans le Territoire du Nord de l'Australie. Des arrêts australiens successifs ont établi que le droit pénal aborigène ne s'applique plus au-delà de l'établissement britannique. Cependant, la jurisprudence dans le Territoire du Nord ne reflète pas cette position. La réponse judiciaire …
Creating a legal identity: Aboriginal people and the assimilation census1
The Commonwealth government of Australia introduced the policy of ‘assimilation’ in the early 1950s. This policy aimed to merge Aboriginal people with other Australians. In 1953 the government drafted legislation that would cease to discriminate against Aboriginal people on the basis of their race, but would instead discriminate against Aboriginal people whose social status rendered them ‘wards’. This reclassification process ultimately affected …
Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal
Mothers and the Child Protection System
Child protection intervention has increased dramatically in Australia and elsewhere over recent years. The increased intervention has left many parents, especially mothers, feeling bewildered, confused, and distrustful of the legal system. There has been limited research conducted about the experience of mothers involved in legal processes associated with child protection intervention. Drawing on information gathered from focus group discussions …
Legal responses to child protection, poverty and homelessness: Research Article
Removal of children from the care of their parents is one of the most fundamental forms of intrusion the state may have in the lives of families. Those experiencing poverty are disproportionately targeted for intervention by child protection departments. This article reports on the results of two research studies that provide empirical evidence regarding the relationship between child protection and poverty. The links between child protection and…
Law on Australia's Northern Frontier: The Fall and Rise of Race
Cet article compare les deux changements de paradigme les plus importants survenus dans l'administration des Affaires autochtones du Territoire du Nord de l'Australie. En premier lieu, l'Ordonnance de Protection de 1953 représentait, à l'époque, une tentative unique, quoique fondamentalement maladroite, de réinterpréter le statut juridique inférieur des statuts légaux des aborigènes du Territoire du Nord comme étant causé non seulement par leur h…
Civil Society Theory: Smith
Community, Types of
Khat and Islamic Legal Perspectives: Issues for Consideration
The leaves of the Khat plant are chewed for their stimulatory effect by many people who live around the Red Sea. People from this area have migrated throughout the world, bringing the practice with them. Consequently many countries have needed to address the question whether khat should be regulated. We argue here that, because khat use is mainly associated with Muslim people, the Islamic law about khat is also an important consideration in this …
Mothers, Domestic Violence, and Child Protection: Toward Collaboration and Engagement
We appreciate the opportunity to consider the responses from the four commentators to our discussion in the main article in this symposium. The workers we interviewed for the main article identified a disconnect between the domestic violence and child protections fields, and similarly the commentators, from four diverse professional backgrounds and from different jurisdictions and using different languages and metaphors, also accepted this was th…
Mothers, Domestic Violence, and Child Protection
This article explores the relationship between understandings of domestic violence and the child protection response drawing on material gathered in focus groups with workers who support mothers dealing with both domestic violence and child protection issues. The interviewees expressed concern that the dynamics of domestic violence are often misunderstood and inappropriately responded to by child protection workers. This article critically examin…
A Tragedy of Monumental Proportions’: Indigenous Australians and the Sentencing Process
This article explores the tensions between the principles of rehabilitation and community protection in the sentencing of Aboriginal people, especially in the context of dysfunctional and remote Aboriginal communities. In order to explore these tensions, the article draws on the issues raised in a recent Australian case involving the sentencing of nine young Aboriginal men and boys who pleaded guilty to the rape of a 10-year-old girl in a remote …
Engagement for progress: Applied philosophy of science in context
Facts, Values, and Objectivity
The shifting moral compass: Post-sentence detention of sex offenders in Australia
In April 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) handed down its decision in relation to complaints lodged by Robert Fardon and Kenneth Tillman. Fardon and Tillman complained that their continuing detention in a prison cell pursuant to legislation allowing preventive detention for serious sexual offenders in Queensland and New South Wales was punitive, and thus offended the principle of double jeopardy. In making its decision in f…
Battered Women’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System: Decentring the Law
A Consideration of the Legitimacy and Equity of Queensland's Offender Levy
In 2012 the Queensland Government introduced an offender levy. The levy is applied to every offender, other than a child, who is sentenced in a Queensland court. Queensland's offender levy does not form part of the sentence imposed by the court and applies regardless of the offender's circumstances. The levy cannot be waived or reduced. Revenue raised from the levy is directed to consolidated revenue and will help pay for the cost of law enforcem…
Continuing the Stolen Generations: Child Protection Interventions and Indigenous People
Indigenous Australian children are significantly over-represented in out of home care. Figures evidencing this over-representation continue to increase at a startling rate. Similar experiences have been identified among native peoples in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Drawing on interviews with lawyers who work with Indigenous parents in child protection matters in Queensland, Australia, this article examines how historical factors, d…
State of the Field: Why novel prediction matters
The Value of Cognitive Values
Traditionally, cognitive values have been thought of as a collective pool of considerations in science that frequently trade against each other. I argue here that a finer-grained account of the value of cognitive values can help reduce such tensions. I separate the values into groups, minimal epistemic criteria, pragmatic considerations, and genuine epistemic assurance, based in part on the distinction between values that describe theories per se…
Political science (52 works) · Law (38 works) · Psychology (37 works) · Medicine (34 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Law (29 works) · Criminology (27 works) · Poison control (27 works) · Intimate Partner and Family Violence (25 works) · Suicide prevention (25 works)