Restorative justice and the active victim: Exploring the concept of empowerment

This paper departs from the observation that the victim image leading public discourse has transformed in recent years: increasingly victims reject the traditional victim label implying helplessness and dependency to adopt the image of the emancipated victim that wishes to participate in the criminal proceedings. Restorative justice at first sight provides an answer to these emancipated victims’ wishes, offering them participation in criminal proceedings. Yet, using the concept of empowerment as an example and the community psychology perspective as a theoretical reference, our analysis suggests that restorative justice uses a restricted definition of empowerment: it reduces empowerment to developing self-confidence and new understandings of the offence, neglecting the behavioural component of empowerment. This characteristic of restorative justice seems to deny victims’ capacities to promote social change and inhibit them from reaching true empowerment

Munchausen syndrome in the emergency department mostly difficult, sometimes easy to diagnose: a case report and review of the literature

Munchausen syndrome is a rare psychiatric disorder in which patients inflict on themselves an illness or injury for the primary purpose of assuming the sick role. Because these patients can present with many different complaints and clinical symptoms, diagnosis is often made at a later stage of hospitalisation. In contrast we report a case of a 40-year old woman very easy to diagnose with Munchausen syndrome

Mutant Lrp1 Knock-In Mice Generated by Recombinase-Mediated Cassette Exchange Reveal Differential Importance of the NPXY Motifs in the Intracellular Domain of LRP1 for Normal Fetal Development

Lrp1 knock-in mice carrying either a wild-type allele or three different mutated alleles encoding the multifunctional endocytic receptor LRP1 were generated by recombinase-mediated cassette exchange (RMCE). Reinsertion by RMCE of a wild-type allele led to a normal pattern and level of gene expression and a completely normal phenotype, indicating that the RMCE procedure itself is neutral with respect to the function of the gene locus. In contrast, reinsertion of mutated LRP1 alleles carrying either inactivating mutations in the proximal NPXY motif (NPTY→AATA) of the cytoplasmic domain or in the furin cleavage site (RHRR→AHAA) caused distinctive liver phenotypes: respectively, either a late fetal destruction of the organ causing perinatal death or a selective enlargement of von-Kupffer cell lysosomes reminiscent of a mild lysosomal storage without an apparent negative effect on animal survival. Notably, mutation of the distal NPXY motif overlapping with an YXXL motif (NPVYATL→AAVAATL) did not cause any obvious pathological effect. The mutations showed no effect on the LRP1 expression level; however, as expected, the proteolytic maturation of LRP1 into its two subunits was significantly impaired, although not completely abolished, in the furin cleavage mutant. These data demonstrate that RMCE is a reliable and efficient approach to generate multiple mutant knock-in alleles for in vivo functional analysis of individual domains or motifs of large multidomain proteins. Its application in Lrp1 reveals dramatically variant phenotypes, of which further characterization will definitively contribute to our understanding of the biology of this multifunctional receptor

Simple Algorithm for Identification of Bordetella pertussis Pertactin Gene Variants

Studies performed in several countries have demonstrated the recent emergence and subsequent dominance of circulating Bordetella pertussis strains harboring pertactin and pertussis toxin variants not included in pertussis vaccines. Determination of the pertactin gene variants is commonly performed using a time-consuming and expensive sequence analysis. We developed a simple and reliable pertactin typing algorithm suitable for large-scale screening. The assay correctly identified all pertactin alleles in representative strains. The typing of 231 clinical strains of B. pertussis routinely isolated in Belgium showed that this algorithm was adequate to identify less-frequent prn types like prn9 and prn11

Deficit in phonological processes: a characteristic of the neuropsychological profile of children with NF1

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