There Is No Place Like Home: The Body as the Scene of the Crime in Sexual Assault Intervention

The body is the scene of the crime, is an oft-repeated phrase among nurses conducting sexual assault forensic examinations. This instruction reminds nurses that the object under scrutiny, the sexually violated body, is the location and source of establishing legal evidence. The nurses\u27 interest lies in recovering evidentiary materials towards deriving a future juridical truth and providing a means for remedy or restitution. The constitution of truth obscures how the subject comes to be at home and dwell in a world where rape occurs. This article argues that regarding the body as a crime scene is more than a rhetorical or pedagogical move made by forensic practitioners. Rather, forensic examination is constituted through rigorous and meticulous techniques that scrutinize the body of the sexually violated subject in such a way that the harming and healing capacities of the domestic are disarticulated from one another. What is at stake is the state\u27s reliance on a notion of the domestic as a sphere to which one might return and heal, even in instances where the domestic itself is the source or site of injury, such as incest and domestic violence

Compelling Intimacies: Domesticity, Sexuality, and Agency

This introduction highlights what we call Compelling Intimacies —the multiple desires, affects, and affinities that arise at the intersection of institutions, actors, technologies, and ethical discourses to exert persuasive pressures on subjects. Each article animates different facets of the intensities born of intimacy as they operate across social and relational fields. The authors separate agency from intention in their efforts to identify the vitality of human and non-human relations. Together, the articles demonstrate how domesticities arise through diverse sets of circumstances, emerging in multiple incarnations—often in the same household—in such a way as to generate a wide range of affects and affinities. Finally, each author turns attention to the so-called small events that come to affirm or deny life as given form in everyday household arrangements, kin relations, friendships, and institutional settings, thereby suggesting the political stakes evoked by differing forms of care

Gendered Violence and the Ethics of Social Science Research

The issue of ethical conduct in research settings is important and complex. As tenure-track researchers who study gendered violence, we found Clark and Walker’s discussion provocative, thoughtful, and interesting. They urge researchers to attend both to the structural dynamics of research carried out under the pressures of tenure and promotion while advocating an ethical frame that draws attention to the limited definition of risk or harm that animates typical human subjects research. Victims of violence, they argue, should not be subjected to a standardized understanding of risk. A broader framework is needed, one that brings into conversation virtue ethics with consequentialist and ontological frameworks. Given the impossible task of responding to the many points discussed by Clark and Walker, we chose to focus on four areas. In all likelihood, these areas of discussion reflect our own interests rather than Clark and Walker’s, but challenged to think seriously about research ethics in victimization studies, we attend to the following points. First, we seek to put virtue ethics in conversation with care ethics, in part because care ethics formed an important component of feminist discourse during the historical period in which institutional review boards came into being. Although virtue ethics may have lost its masculinist inflection after shedding its etymological roots,1 care ethics was explicitly seen as suited for the feminist subject. Following our discussion of care ethics, we address the question of setting victims of violence apart as a special class of vulnerable human research subjects. We argue that such a designation may yield more problems than it does solutions. Next, we turn to the violence of epistemology as a concern in research ethics. How do we come to an ethical definition of the research object, and to whom are we accountable? Finally, we turn to the relation of care when carrying out ethically and methodologically sound research

Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials

Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneys’ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshaw’s focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of children’s experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the child’s unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status

Role of vitreous humor biochemistry in forensic pathology

Vitreous humor is a fluid that is relatively well protected from postmortem degradation and contamination. Due to its postmortem stability, vitreous humor has high utility in forensic pathology. Vitreous humor biochemical constituents, especially potassium, have been widely used in the postmortem interval (PMI) estimations. The time dependant rise of vitreous potassium levels in the postmortem period has been considered to be helpful in PMI determinations. The relative stability of vitreous biochemistry is useful in assessing the antemortem metabolic status and in predicting the antemortem serum biochemistry of an individual. However, the validity of vitreous biochemistry in forensic applications has been questioned in light of the reported concentration differences of various biochemical constituents in the same pair of eyes at identical PMI. This study hypothesized that the concentration of vitreous biochemical constituents in the same pair of eyes change at the same rate and this change that occurs in a time dependent fashion may be utilized in accurately estimating the PMI. It was further hypothesized that postmortem vitreous humor biochemistry closely mimics antemortem serum biochemistry and may be a useful aid in establishing a postmortem diagnoses of hyperglycemia. To test these hypotheses, vitreous humor samples were collected from a total of 103 autopsies (Female, 35 and Male, 68; Mean Age ± SD, 60.6 ± 17.6) conducted at Royal University Hospital morgue between January 2003 to February 2005. In 61 of these subjects, the precise time of death was known. Right and left eye vitreous humor samples were collected separately through a scleral puncture at the lateral canthus. Most of the biochemical analyses were carried out immediately post-extraction. After centrifugation, the supernatant of the fluid were analyzed for sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, urea, creatinine, glucose and lactate on an LX-20 Analyzer (Beckman-Coulter). Osmolality was measured on an Osmometer model 3900 (Advanced Instruments Inc.). Vitreous humor hypoxanthine and xanthine were analyzed using a colorimetric method (Amplex® Red Xanthine/ Xanthine Oxidase Assay Kit, Molecular Probes Inc.). Vitreous humor lipid hydroperoxides were measured using the Ferrous Oxidation in Xylenol Orange assay version 2 (FOX 2). The data was statistically analyzed by paired t-test, linear regression analysis and Mann-Whitney test using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows™ version 13.0. The results of this study indicated that there were no significant between-eye differences for all of the vitreous biochemical constituents that were studied. It was observed that there was a significant correlation between vitreous potassium (R, 0.731; P

The Use of Clustering and Classification Methods in Machine Learning and Comparison of Some Algorithms of the Methods

In this article, two machine learning methods such as classification and clustering are used for decision tree (DT), artificial neural network (ANN), and K-nearest neighbors algorithms. The datasets were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the clustering method and the data mining tool. Weather data were used to compare algorithms and methods in the study. This study showed that the best model was DT according to accuracy and precision measures but the best model according to F-measure and receiver operating characteristic curve area measures was ANN. Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis, a data mining tool, is utilized in this paper to carry out the clustering