COVID-19 lockdowns and children's access to justice

This is a journal article that I published in 2024 with Ang Li and Natalia Maystorovich Chulio in Child Protection and Practice. Here is the abstract:

Morocco's national lockdown was enforced between March 21st and June 10th 2020 in response to the spread of coronavirus. Restriction of civil space was not fully extended to the judiciary which had to transition to virtual sessions. To prepare for future pandemics and disasters, it is crucial to understand how well court systems across jurisdictions especially in low- and middle-income countries managed to function and protect children's access to justice under the constraints of stay-at-home orders. To investigate the effect of the national lockdown on children's access to justice in Morocco, this study employed interrupted time series analysis of publicly available court filings (N = 77,335) pertaining to child protection from January 1st to December 31st 2020 spanning the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown periods. Results showed that lockdown measures hampered children's access to justice and is associated with statistically significant and substantial decreases in the number of cases heard by the courts across all filing types. The interrupted time series model estimates that average cases per week dropped by 199.5 for penal filings, 1180.3 for civil filings, 942.5 for complaint filings, and 358.1 for report fillings during the lockdown relative to the pre-lockdown period. While the percentage of cases with recorded delays mostly increased, the average case length decreased except for civil filings which saw a significant increase. The substantial susceptibility of civil cases to lockdowns might be precipitated by the need of individuals to petition the court for a hearing. Evidence suggests that the courts adjudicating child protection cases struggled to maintain operations during the national lockdown, and indicates the need for stronger disaster preparedness and an integrated child protection system to increase the judiciaries' resilience and children's access to justice in future emergency and disaster events.

Photography and Narrative

Newpost on my substack blog, What is the narrative potential of a photograph?. A quote from the post:

I am driven to click the shutter not out of some recognition of an idea in objective form, but from a gesture, movement, or a sense of visual rhythm. Photographs have narrative potential but do not offer narrative closure. Just resources that enable possible interpretations. The viewer is not compelled to find anything there.

Climate Change, Housing, and Health

New paper, with Ang Li and others, offering a framework for thinking how climate change, housing, and health intersect. The abstract:

Anthropogenic climate change is causing rapid shifts in temperature and weather patterns, both in location and intensity, making living conditions increasingly hazardous. This complicates housing's frontline role in protecting human health. When housing systems fail to provide universal access to secure, affordable, and suitable housing, social and health inequalities related to climate change are amplified. The location, construction, and operation of homes influence greenhouse gas emissions and must be improved to reduce their environmental impacts. This paper, the second in a Series on housing as a social determinant of health, builds a framework for conceptualising the interactions between housing, climate, and health. It identifies the pathways through which climate change affects housing and exacerbates health risks, and reflects on policy responses for climate resilience in housing and health.

Reference: Li, A., Toll, M., Chapman, R., Howden-Chapman, P., Hernández, D., Samuelson, H., Woodward, A. and Bentley, R., 2025. Housing at the intersection of health and climate change. The Lancet Public Health, 10(10), pp.e865-e873.

New Blog: Musings on the Dérive

I have started a new blog, the intention is to focus on street photography and more personal reflective pieces, here it is: Musings on the Dérive. 

From the first post: 

Initially, I intended this to be a street photography blog. The title playing on the idea of street photographers as modern flaneurs drifting through the city and recording a vision of how it feels to be alive and situated in a particular time and place. Yet, as I start to write, I think this is going to be a drift through myself and whatever occurs to me. Perhaps focused on candid photography of life in public spaces but not limited to it.

Climate Change and Energy Hardship

New paper out in Communications Earth & Envrionment with Ang Li and Rebecca Bentley that looks at climate change and energy hardship. Here is the abstract: 

Climate change is shifting the experience of energy hardship. Here we examine the effect of the intensity, frequency, and duration of temperature extremes on energy hardship, and how this risk is shaped by individual, housing and neighbourhood resiliencies across Australia, using nationally representative data (269,500 observations) on energy hardship linked to temperature records between 2005 and 2021. Findings suggest that the risk of energy hardship increases with more intense extreme heat and cold, with greater risks for older individuals, lone-person or single-parent households, and rental tenants. These vulnerabilities can be offset by quality housing and renewable energy installations. Energy hardship risks under moderate and high emissions global warming scenarios are projected to increase by 0.1%−2.6% and 0.6%−3.3% respectively in the long run. Energy hardship will remain a concern despite raising temperatures, especially for colder regions less prepared for heat and populations with individual vulnerabilities and lacking housing and neighbourhood adaptations.

Here is the full paper: open access.

Citation: Li, A., Toll, M. & Bentley, R. The risk of energy hardship increases with extreme heat and cold in Australia. Commun Earth Environ 5, 595 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01729-5 

Social Vulnerability, Climate Change and Health: Scoping review.

 Very happy to see this new scoping review published in The Lancet Plenatary Health.

The recent IPCC assessment report argued that lack of ability to identify social vulnerability at a local and urban level was a critical barrier to climate adaptation planning.

We conducted a scoping review of 230 studies that examined social vulnerability to the health effects of climate change in order to understand the main foci of the literature and potential gaps.

We found that the main share of the research focused on high-income settings – the United States, Western Europe, Australia, Japan etc. China was the exception to that rule being the most researched country after the United States. The most vulnerable countries are lest studied. This is an issue for climate justice.

We found that most research focuses on a narrow set of socio-demographic variables. Age, sex, ethnicity, education, income being amongst the most used indicators of social vulnerability.

We found a relative paucity in the number of studies that address or measure broader structural dimensions of social vulnerability – issues of housing, access to community facilities beyond health services, governance are less researched.

We argued that a lot of the research is very descriptive rather than explanatory. Drawing on more social science understandings of vulnerability and a broader range of indicators could help explain how group membership/social category translates to vulnerability and help identify leverage points for interventions.

Here is the abstract for the paper: 

The need to assess and measure how social vulnerability influences the health impacts of climate change has resulted in a rapidly growing body of research literature. To date, there has been no overarching, systematic examination of where this evidence is concentrated and what inferences can be made. This scoping review provides an overview of studies published between 2012 and 2022 on social vulnerability to the negative health effects of climate change. Of the 2115 studies identified from four bibliographic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and CAB Direct), 230 that considered indicators of social vulnerability to climate change impacts on health outcomes were selected for review. Frequency and thematic analyses were conducted to establish the scope of the social vulnerability indicators, climate change impacts, and health conditions studied, and the substantive themes and findings of this research. 113 indicators of social vulnerability covering 15 themes were identified, with a small set of indicators receiving most of the research attention, including age, sex, ethnicity, education, income, poverty, unemployment, access to green and blue spaces, access to health services, social isolation, and population density. The results reveal an undertheorisation and few indicators that conceptualise and operationalise social vulnerability beyond individual sociodemographic characteristics by identifying structural and institutional dimensions of vulnerability, and a preponderance of social vulnerability research in high-income countries. This Review highlights the need for future research, data infrastructure, and policy attention to address structural, institutional, and sociopolitical conditions, which will better support climate resilience and adaptation planning.  

Do Vaccine Mandates on Childcare Services Work?

Here is the latest paper I have published with Ang Li that provides an evaluation of No Jab No Play policies that have been enacted in a series of Australian states.  Here is the title and abstract: 

 Title:  

Vaccine mandates on childcare entry without conscientious objection exemptions: A quasi-experimental panel study

 Abstract: 

Objectives

Examine the effect of No Jab No Play policies, which linked vaccine status to childcare service entry without allowing for personal belief exemptions, on immunisation coverage.

Study design

Immunisation coverage rates from the Australian Immunisation Register were linked to regional level covariates from the Australian Bureau of Statistics between January 2016 and December 2019. Differential timings of policy rollouts across states were used to assess changes in coverage with the implementation of policies with generalised linear models. Quantile regression and subgroup analysis were also conducted to explore the variation in policy responses.

Results

Baseline mean vaccination rates in 2016 were 93.4% for one-year-olds, 91.2% for two-year-olds and 93.2% for five-year-olds. Increases in coverage post-policy were significant but small, at around 1% across age groups, with larger increases in two and five-year-olds. Accounting for aggregate time trends and regional characteristics, implementation of the policies was associated with improved full immunisation coverage rates for age one (post-year 1: 0.15% [95 %CI–0.23; 0.52]; post-year 2: 0.56% [95 %CI 0.05; 1.07]), age two (post-year 1: 0.49 [95 %CI: 0.00; 0.97]; post-year 2: 1.15% [95 %CI: 0.53; 1.77], and age five (post-year 1: 0.38% [95 %CI 0.08; 0.67]; post-year 2: 0.71% [95 %CI 0.25; 1.16]. The policy effect was dispersed and insignificant at the lowest quantiles of the distribution of immunisation coverage, and smaller and insignificant in the highest socioeconomic areas.

Conclusion

Findings suggest that No Jab No Play policies had a small positive impact on immunisation coverage. This policy effect varied according to prior distribution of coverage and socio-economic status. Childcare access equity and unresponsiveness in high socioeconomic areas remain concerns.