A 12‐item scale, derived from the Conflict Tactics Scale, was administered to a representative sample of 1,978 heterosexual men and women in Great Britain in mid November 1994. Men and women were asked to identify conflict tactics sustained or inflicted in all past and present relationships and those sustained in current relationships. This paper reports results for physical victimization and also reports on two further questions asked to discern context and meaning ascribed to such sustained or inflicted victimization. Both sexes reported having experienced physical victimization with a higher percentage of men sustaining victimization, mainly as a result of minor acts of assault. Almost equal percentages of men and women reported inflicting victimization against partners. Additionally, incidence of physical victimization is presented according to relationship status, age, socioeconomic category, and by regional distribution. Both sexes reported a range of reasons or contexts ascribed to their sustained or inflicted victimization. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

This study explores the confluence of victimization and incarceration to contribute to the understanding of battered women's experience of the criminal justice system. Building on previous qualitative research investigating pathways to incarceration for battered women, this study utilizes qualitative data from 10 focus-group interviews to investigate and compare battered women's experiences with victimization, help-seeking, and perceptions of incarceration across four different site types: jails, prisons, shelters, and post-release support groups. The study makes comparisons across these sites and identifies site-specific service needs and perceived barriers to meeting these needs. These data also reveal three ways battered women perceive incarceration to operate with respect to their service needs: as a symbolic barrier, as a potential opportunity, and as a structural barrier. The association of these divergent perspectives on incarceration with specific locations in the criminal justice system and the implications for targeted interventions based on these findings are discussed.

Gentle teaching and visual screenii^ procedures have been used to control severe behaviour problems in persons with mental retardation. An alternating treatments design was used to compare gentle teaching, visual screening and a tasktraining condition in the reduction of high levelsof self-injury of an adult with profound mental retardation. Following baseline, a task-training condition using standard behavioural techniques was implemented to establish the effects of training the subject on age-appropriate tasks. Results showed a modest reduction in self-injury. This was followed by an alternating treatments phase in which visual screening, gentle teaching and no-treatment control conditions were compared. Both procedures were superior to the control condition in reducing self-injury, with visual screening being more effective than gentle teaching. When visual screening was implemented across two and then all three daily conditions, self-injury was further reduced to near-zero levels. Bonding occurred at the same low levels under both treatments, contrary to the predictions of gentle teaching's proponents. 1