This article examines 110 reported incidents from an online survey of 26 women from each of the eight universities in New Zealand. They responded to questions asking them to describe times when work and non-work situations have helped or hindered their advancement in university leadership roles. Five key themes, incorporating a range of factors, emerged as making a difference to advancement as leaders. These themes are: work relationships; university environment; invisible rules; proactivity; and personal circumstances. This research is part of the L-SHIP (LeadershipSupporting Higher Intent & Practice) project and has two main aims. First, to identify factors in universities that help and hinder women's advancement as leaders, as reported by women; second, to provide useful evidence to underpin the development of programmes supporting women's advancement in university leadership roles. This research is a first step in the development of the L-SHIP Toolkit for good practice in leadership development in higher education.

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Children and young people who kill do not always act with the mental acuity expected of someone who has reached full maturity, yet when they are charged with murder or manslaughter they are often tried as adults. This contradicts the basic principle of criminal responsibility that criminalisation is based upon moral blameworthiness. A conviction for murder requires at least a conscious appreciation of a real risk of death.Recent research by developmental neuroscientists shows that adolescence is a developmental stage and that the adolescent brain is not capable of the same level of reasoning expected in the average adult. This article suggests that the criminal justice system can adapt to these recent advances in knowledge via specific defences of a diminished capacity class, or by allowing evidence of general adolescent brain development to support defence arguments that a young accused did not form the mens rea required for murder.

There are few societies in which child abuse is not a serious issue, with homicide being the extreme form of such victimisation. Child homicide occurs in a wide array of circumstances but there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that many offenders who kill children are suffering from sometimes quite acute mental distress. There may also be other factors impacting on an offender’s ability to think rationally, which may not amount to any recognised disorder. While it is imperative that we prosecute and prevent child homicide, in doing so we must avoid overlooking the realities of other vulnerable people. In rejecting a binary approach to victims and offenders, this article argues that sometimes offenders may also be vulnerable due to an impaired ability to reason or to act in a truly voluntary way. New Zealand has repealed the defence of provocation and, apart from infanticide, offers no mitigation by way of diminished responsibility. Offenders who commit child homicide, but who do not meet the legal definition of insanity, will be liable for murder even though their capacity may have been impaired or overborne by circumstances. While, in this regard, New Zealand law is particularly deficient, there is an argument that other jurisdictions also fail to adequately respond to vulnerable offenders who kill children. This article seeks to outline the failures in existing legal frameworks to assign legal responsibility for these vulnerable offenders in a way that corresponds with their moral culpability. The article will then identify and evaluate proposals for reform. As Ulbrick and others observe, in the context of arguments about defensive homicide and mentally impaired defendants, it is critical that we ‘advocate for a greater range of legal responses to cover the nuance and complexities of lethal violence’ (Madeleine Ulbrick, Asher Flynn and Danielle Tyson ‘The Abolition of Defensive Homicide: A Step Towards Populist Punitivism at the Expense of Mentally Impaired Offenders’ (2016) 40 Melb Univ Law Rev 324, 330).

In a number of jurisdictions failure to protect a child from violence renders a person liable if a duty is owed to the child. This duty presumes the defendant has the capacity to act positively to protect the victim, which has implications for defendants who are also subjected to violence or coercion. In the understandable haste to prosecute and prevent child abuse, there is a risk of neglecting the realities of other vulnerable people. Consequently the criminal justice system ought to reject a binary approach to victims and offenders, recognising that defendants may also be victims and that mothers, due to the coercive control exerted by intimate partners, may also be vulnerable. In New Zealand there are no statutory or common law defences that operate to exculpate a mother charged with failing to protect her child from the violence of another. This article argues for the creation of an affirmative defence that takes into account the totality of a coerced mother's circumstances in considering whether she has, in fact, failed her child.