This article presents a study of the experiences of 20 battered Israeli women in the process of reaching the turning point in their experience of abuse—the point at which they refused to live with violence and took active steps to stop it while living with the perpetrators. The process needs to be understood as a series of losses on the personal and interpersonal levels that, taken together, lead to a total change in the women's meaning systems.Feminist theorists and activists have identified woman battering as one of the most dramatic expressions of social inequality and misuse of power in society, as well as an expression of patriarchal attitudes and control of women in the family (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Heam, 1996;Yllo, 1993). One way of perpetuating this inequality has been the use of linear thinking and context stripping, which lead to equalizing the rates of men's and women's violence (Saunders, 1988;Straus, 1993;Yllo, 1988). There have also been systematic attempts to distort battered women's voices and psychosocial characteristics by presenting them as different from those of nonbattered women

The study was conducted in Israel following the 2006 Lebanon war. The purpose was to examine the impact of counseling groups employing an expressive-supportive modality on children and adolescents with war-related or divorce/loss-related trauma symptoms. The 164 children were placed into 18 small groups for 10 weekly sessions. The children were screened for traumatic stress symptoms and then randomly divided into experimental and control (wait-list) conditions. All participants completed the measures of the dependent variables (trauma symptoms, anxiety), a social support measure, and group-process measures (group relationships, group cohesion, and catharsis). Results indicated a significantly sharper reduction in trauma symptoms and anxiety in the experimental group than in the control group, regardless of type of trauma. A reduction in anxiety was predicted by gains in social support and group cohesiveness.

This article argues that there are distinct spheres of justice within education and examines a range of justice norms and distribution rules that characterize the daily life of schools and classrooms. Moving from the macro to micro level, we identify the following five areas: the right to education, the allocation of (or selection into) learning places, teaching-learning practices, teachers' treatment of students, and student evaluations of grade distribution. We discuss the literature on the beliefs by students and teachers about the just distribution of educational goods in these five domains, and on the practices used in the actual allocation of these goods. In line with normative 'spheres of justice' arguments in social theory, we conclude that the ideals of social justice within schools vary strongly according to the particular resource to be distributed. Moreover, these ideals often do not correspond with the practices that actually guide resource distribution in education, which may go some way toward explaining explicit or latent conflicts in this sphere.