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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 examines the interviewees' concerns and concludes that to properly protect children, it is crucial that child protection workers have a clear understanding of the dynamics of and issues related to domestic violence.

Reproductive coercion is any interference with a person’s reproductive autonomy that seeks to control if and when they become pregnant, and whether the pregnancy is maintained or terminated. It includes sabotage of contraceptive methods and intervention in a woman’s access to health care. Our study sought to explore the prevalence and associations with reproductive coercion within Queensland, Australia, where legislation addressing domestic violence and abortion are largely state based and undergoing a period of law reform. The study was a retrospective analysis of 3,117 Queensland women who contacted a telephone counseling and information service regarding an unplanned pregnancy. All data were collected by experienced counselors regarding circumstances within a current pregnancy between January 2015 and July 2017. Overall, experience of current domestic violence was significantly more likely to co-occur with reproductive coercion (21.1%) compared with reproductive coercion identified in the absence of other domestic violence (3.1%). Furthermore, significantly more mental health issues were reported by 36.6% of women affected by reproductive coercion, compared with 14.1% of women with no reproductive coercion present. Disclosure for reproductive coercion, violence, and mental health issues was much higher among women who made a repeat contact to the counselors about their pregnancy (17.8%) compared with those who disclosed at first contact (5.9%). These findings demonstrate the importance for health services to ensure that appropriate screening (and re-screening) for reproductive coercion is completed as a distinct part of screening for violence during a health care relationship.

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 legal processes provide an opportunity for perpetrators to continue and even expand their repertoire of coercive and controlling behaviours post-separation. I refer to this as legal systems abuse. This article explores women’s reported experiences and considers how expectations of equality of access to justice and fair hearing; concepts that underpin legal processes, can be reconciled with legal engagements that seek to end coercive and controlling behaviours. The article concludes that improved understanding of domestic and family violence as coercive control by legal actors may help to circumvent the opportunities for legal systems abuse.

Recurring waves of peri-infarct depolarizations (PIDs) propagate across gray matter in the hours and days following stroke, expanding the primary site of injury. Ischemic depolarization (termed anoxic depolarization or AD in live brain slices) is PID-like but immediately arises in the more metabolically compromised ischemic core. This causes dramatic neuronal and astrocyte swelling and dendritic beading with spine loss within minutes, resulting in acute cell death. AD is evoked in rodent neocortical slices by suppressing the Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase pump with either oxygen/glucose deprivation (OGD) or exposure to ouabain. The process driving AD and PIDs remains poorly understood. Here we show that dibucaine is a potent drug inhibiting AD because of its high binding affinity to the Na(+) channel. Field recording reveals that, when superfused with ouabain (5 min), neocortical slices pretreated with 1 μM dibucaine for 45 min display either no AD or delayed AD onset compared with untreated controls. If ouabain exposure is extended to 10 min, 1 μM dibucaine is still able to delay AD onset by ∼ 60%. Likewise, it delays OGD-evoked AD onset by ∼ 54% but does not depress action potentials (APs) or evoked orthodromic field potentials. Increasing dibucaine to 10 μM inhibits AP firing, gradually putting the slice into a stasis that inhibits AD onset but also renders the slice functionally quiescent. Two-photon microscopy reveals that 10 μM dibucaine pretreatment prevents or helps reverse ouabain-induced structural neuronal damage. Although the therapeutic range of dibucaine is quite narrow, dibucaine-like drugs could prove therapeutically useful in inhibiting PIDs and their resultant neuronal damage.