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

Data Sets: Word Embeddings Learned from Tweets and General Data

A word embedding is a low-dimensional, dense and real- valued vector representation of a word. Word embeddings have been used in many NLP tasks. They are usually gener- ated from a large text corpus. The embedding of a word cap- tures both its syntactic and semantic aspects. Tweets are short, noisy and have unique lexical and semantic features that are different from other types of text. Therefore, it is necessary to have word embeddings learned specifically from tweets. In this paper, we present ten word embedding data sets. In addition to the data sets learned from just tweet data, we also built embedding sets from the general data and the combination of tweets with the general data. The general data consist of news articles, Wikipedia data and other web data. These ten embedding models were learned from about 400 million tweets and 7 billion words from the general text. In this paper, we also present two experiments demonstrating how to use the data sets in some NLP tasks, such as tweet sentiment analysis and tweet topic classification tasks

C5: Assessment of Stress level among Dental Students who have Clinical Duties: A Questionnaire Based Survey

Assessment of Stress level among Dental Students performing Clinical Duties: A Questionnaire Based Surve

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

Intervention par le mouvement pour les victimes de violence conjugale : création inspirée de l'expérience de trois femmes de l'Asie du sud

Malgré les progrès que la pensée féministe a apportés au statut des femmes, la violence posée envers elles, violence physique et psychologique, reste un problème présent à travers le monde. Même si plusieurs femmes vivent leurs souffrances en silence, elles communiquent, bien souvent malgré elles, les conséquences de leurs douloureuses expériences à travers un langage non verbal. Je suis intéressée par cet aspect non-verbal de la communication. Mon projet de mémoire de création, en deux étapes, consiste premièrement en l'analyse des mouvements des femmes d'Asie du Sud victimes de violence, puis en la création d'un essai chorégraphique basé sur cette même analyse. Pour faire l'étude du mouvement, j'ai dirigé, à New York, des sessions d'exploration des émotions par le mouvement dans un centre d'hébergement de femmes violentées d'Asie du Sud. Trois femmes ont participé à ces ateliers. Ces ateliers d'expression par le mouvement ont permis à ces dernières de se remettre en contact avec leur identité physique, en explorant le mouvement et l'espace. Pour permettre également de sensibiliser la population à la problématique de la violence faite aux femmes, je conclus mon mémoire par cette présentation de REturn, chorégraphie inspirée de l'expérience de vie de ces femmes en hébergement. Le vocabulaire chorégraphique, chargé de signification, est basé sur la gestuelle de celles-ci. De plus, l'usage de la vidéo amplifie le côté humain et touchant de la création. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Danse création, Femmes violentées, Femmes de l'Asie du Sud