Editorial

Citation

Pearce, S. (2012), "Editorial", Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Vol. 33 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/tc.2012.62033aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Volume 33, Issue 1

Welcome to the new Therapeutic Communities Journal. After much hard work, the journal has now transferred to a new publisher, Emerald, with a new cover and some new author guidelines. These can be accessed at: www.emeraldinsight.com/tc.htm

There is a new journal homepage, and in the near future all submissions will be electronic via the ScholarOne system. This will speed up the submission process and make it possible to track the progress of your submission online. Future authors will need to assign copyright to Emerald, and The Consortium of Therapeutic Community staff will be approaching past authors for copyright permission to digitise and make available past papers.

Emerald will make all papers available online, and have undertaken gradually to digitise the back catalogue. Therapeutic Communities past articles are notoriously difficult to find and have not been easily obtainable online. Although some of us may feel nostalgic for the old system of tracking down a paper copy at a local TC, or phoning a friend for a photocopy, serious research now moves at a different pace and TC research deserves to be available to a worldwide audience.

Having Emerald publish the Journal brings a number of advantages, one of which is a strategic plan aimed at getting Therapeutic Communities listed by Thomson Reuters and assigned an impact factor – something which is highly favoured by authors. Authors will receive a complimentary copy of the journal in which their article appears, and three months free online access to the entire Emerald collection for authors.

This issue presents five very different papers. Lia Ahonen and colleagues compare CBT and milieu therapy, concluding that a focus on therapeutic techniques without paying attention to the nature and quality of the interactions – in other words the relationships – impairs progress; and highlighting the need to promote moral development, an often overlooked area. Michael Brookes and colleagues examine the problem of low numbers of black men in Grendon TCs, and suggest some reasons for this, and solutions. Emma Colley and Julie Blackwell-Young report on a detailed qualitative study of five female members of a drug free prison TC, and makes suggestions for service organisation based on her findings, while Richard Cross proposes placing a variety of interpersonal traumas at the centre of therapeutic work in children based on two decades of clinical practice.

Stephen Wilson’s paper was originally written in 1973. We publish it in the belief that many of the themes remain relevant today, and Rex Haigh provides a characteristically provocative preface, insisting that this is so. We hope that Rex’s belief that 1973 was only two decades ago is a sign purely of nostalgia.

Finally, the journal now also has a new Editor-in-Chief. I and the editorial board would like to extend our appreciation to Mark Freestone for his steady hand in stewarding the journal for the last half a decade, and bringing it to the point where we have a new publisher, with all the exciting possibilities that entails.

Steve Pearce