Long-Term Physical and Mental Health Effects of Domestic Violence

Domestic violence is an issue affecting people of all ages, races, genders, and sexual orientations. Violence against men and same-sex domestic violence are often considered less of a threat to society and to the people involved, but it is important to understand that male-on-female violence, female-on-male violence, and same-sex violence all involve serious consequences to the victim’s and batterer’s short- and long-term health. This paper determines whether men or women suffer from more long-term health problems caused by domestic violence by comparing the currently published statistics on the prevalence of domestic violence in heterosexual and homosexual relationships, and analyzing the results of existing studies on the short- and long-term health effects of domestic violence. The findings indicate that although men and women sustain many of the same injuries, women suffer from more long-term health problems caused by domestic violence

The CSI Effect: Fact or Fiction?

The CSI effect has been a subject undergoing intense scrutiny in recent years. With the ever-increasing number of television shows, such as CSI and all of its spinoffs, that poorly represent the field of forensic science, there has also been a growing concern over the effects that media has on the legal system. Prosecutors argue that the CSI effect raises their burden of proof and makes jurors more likely to acquit in cases involving little or no forensic evidence, while defense lawyers claim that jurors are more inclined to wrongfully convict based on their unrealistic perceptions of forensic evidence. This paper aims to determine if the CSI effect exists by exploring the effects that crime-show-related media has on the community, analyzing jurors’ perceptions of forensic evidence, and comparing the currently published statistics on pre- and post-CSI acquittal rates

The Role of Women?s Empowerment and Domestic Violence in Child Growth and Undernutrition in a Tribal and Rural Community in South India

Moderate undernutrition continues to affect 46 per cent of children under 5 years of age and 47 per cent of rural women in India. Women?s lack of empowerment is believed to be an important factor in the persistent prevalence of undernutrition. In India, women?s empowerment often varies by community, with tribes sometimes being the most progressive. This paper explores the relationship between women?s empowerment, domestic violence, maternal nutritional status, and the nutritional status and growth over six months in children aged 6 to 24 months in a rural and tribal community. This longitudinal observational study undertaken in rural Karnataka, India included tribal and rural subjects. Structured interviews with mothers were conducted and anthropometric measurements were obtained for 820 mother-child pairs, the follow-up rate after 6 months was 82 per cent. The data were analysed by multivariate regression. Some degree of undernutrition was seen in 83.5 per cent of children and 72.4 per cent of mothers in the sample, moreover the prevalence of undernutrition increased among children at follow-up. Domestic violence was experienced by 34 per cent of mothers in the sample. In multivariate analysis, biological variables explained most of the variance in nutritional status and child growth, followed by health-care seeking and women?s empowerment variables; socio-economic variables explained the least variance. Women?s empowerment variables were significantly associated with child nutrition on enrolment and child growth at follow-up. At follow-up, mother?s prior lifetime experience of physical violence significantly undermined child growth in terms of weight-for-age, and older age at marriage and high mobility of mothers predicted less stunting in their children. In addition to the known investments needed to reduce undernutrition, improving women?s nutrition, promoting gender equality, empowering women, and ending violence against women could further reduce the prevalence of undernutrition in this segment of the Indian population.child nutrition, child growth, domestic violence, nutritional status, women?s empowerment, maternal nutritional status

Asymptotic approximations for stationary distributions of many-server queues with abandonment

A many-server queueing system is considered in which customers arrive according to a renewal process and have service and patience times that are drawn from two independent sequences of independent, identically distributed random variables. Customers enter service in the order of arrival and are assumed to abandon the queue if the waiting time in queue exceeds the patience time. The state of the system with $N$ servers is represented by a four-component process that consists of the forward recurrence time of the arrival process, a pair of measure-valued processes, one that keeps track of the waiting times of customers in queue and the other that keeps track of the amounts of time customers present in the system have been in service and a real-valued process that represents the total number of customers in the system. Under general assumptions, it is shown that the state process is a Feller process, admits a stationary distribution and is ergodic. It is also shown that the associated sequence of scaled stationary distributions is tight, and that any subsequence converges to an invariant state for the fluid limit. In particular, this implies that when the associated fluid limit has a unique invariant state, then the sequence of stationary distributions converges, as $N\rightarrow \infty$, to the invariant state. In addition, a simple example is given to illustrate that, both in the presence and absence of abandonments, the $N\rightarrow \infty$ and $t\rightarrow \infty$ limits cannot always be interchanged.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AAP738 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Deletion-restriction in toric arrangements

Deletion-restriction is a fundamental tool in the theory of hyperplane arrangements. Various important results in this field have been proved using deletion-restriction. In this paper we use deletion-restriction to identify a class of toric arrangements for which the cohomology algebra of the complement is generated in degree $1$. We also show that for these arrangements the complement is formal in the sense of Sullivan.Comment: v2: typos fixed, 11 pages. Accepted for publication in Journal of Ramanujan Mathematical Societ