Stirred,Shaken, or Blended

Abstract

Research documents the variation in levels of offending and the official response to boys' and girls' misbehavior (see Chesney-Lind & Sheldon 2004 for a nice summary of this work). Our research questions develop from this literature. We first expect differences in girls and boys at intake to a residential program for low-to-medium risk offenders, and then we also expect differences in official responses to girls and boys during their aftercare experience. Our findings confirm the literature—girls and boys differ in seriousness of committing offenses. Additionally, girls and boys are treated differently during their time in juvenile justice programming. For example, girls are monitored more closely than boys and receive less serious penalties for similar levels of rule violations. We find no difference between boys and girls in their odds of receiving a serious sanction. While traditional theoretical attempts to explain girls' misbehavior are often described with the expression “add women and stir,” our findings suggest that both behavior of and official response to boys' and girls' activities show that girls are not simply stirred into the male mix but are responded to differently than boys and in ways that illustrate conventional gender socialization.     

A Very Unusual Accidental Mechanical Asphyxia of Choking with a Whole Solea Solea

The case here reported involves a schizophrenic 19‐year‐old girl under treatment with clotiapine, which was well tolerated except for a moderate dry mouth. The woman ingested a whole sole (Solea solea), which caused a very rapid death by choking. A complete autopsy was performed 24 h later, as well as histological and toxicological analysis. At autopsy, the sole was wedged in the esophagus causing a choking ab extrinseco. The fish had a length of 18 cm and a maximum width of 6 cm, weighing 188.7 g. Toxicological analysis detected 0.57 mg/L of clotiapine in blood, which falls within the therapeutic range. The peculiarity of this case is represented by two factors: one is the choking by fish and the second was the adverse affect caused by clotiapine, which induced a condition of dry mouth making the act of swallowing even more difficult, thereby contributing to a very rapid mechanical asphyxia and the death of the young woman.     

Assessment of the Capacity to Express Informed Consent for Organ Donation in Patients with Schizophrenia

Abstract: In Italy, the “silent‐consent” principle of donor’s willingness regulates organ donation for postmortem transplantation, but civil incompetence excludes it. We investigated decisional capacity for organ donation for transplantation of 30 controls and 30 nonincompetent patients with schizophrenia as related to clinical symptoms, cognition, and functioning. Assessments were carried out through the Competence for Donation Assessment Scale (CDAS), Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS), Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms, Life Skills Profile (LSP), Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (RCPM), Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Rey RI, Rey RD, and Visual Search. Patients and controls differed on the CDAS Understanding and Choice Expression areas. Patients showed significant inverse bivariate correlations between CDAS Understanding and scores on total BPRS, LSP self‐care scale, and RCPM cognitive test. Our results show that decisional capacity for participating in research does not predict decisional capacity for postmortem organ donation in patients with schizophrenic or schizoaffective psychosis; hence, before judging consent for donation, patients must be provided with enhanced information to better understand this delicate issue.     

Ideological proximity and valence competition. Negative campaigning through allegation of corruption in the Italian legislative arena from 1946 to 1994

We consider the possibility for the parties to invest in negative campaigning – a behavior that, in our framework, involves blaming alleged insufficiencies of the rival concerning commonly shared values. Within a simple one-dimensional model, we deduce the hypothesis that the parties’ incentive to “attack” each other increases with the parties’ proximity on the left–right space. We test our hypothesis on an Italian case, focusing on the emphasis placed by the Communist Party on political corruption issues during the government investiture debates that spanned from the postwar period until 1994, when the traditional party system abruptly collapsed. The statistical results are largely consistent with our theoretical insights.     

Evidence-Based Policy Research to Inform the ENP: Five Recommendations for Europe and its Neighbours

The September 2014 referendum is a milestone in Scotland’s history. After 307 years of union with England and a 15-year experience with devolution, Scottish nationalism is within reach of its ultimate goal. Independence would be consensual and Scotland and the rest of the UK would retain multiple links. The EU dimension looms large in the debate and is entangled with the UK’s own review of its membership. Scotland’s referendum is part of a wider trend seeing other ‘stateless nations’ in the democratic world pursuing independence. Even if opinion polls indicate voters will likely reject secession, Scotland’s experience holds important lessons for the wider world.     

South–South cooperation and the future of development assistance: mapping actors and options

International development cooperation is undergoing fundamental changes. New – or often re-emerging – actors have gained importance during the past two decades, and are increasingly challenging the traditional approach to development cooperation associated with the members of the Development Assistance Committee of the oecd. Their supposedly alternative paradigm, ‘South–South cooperation’ (ssc), has been recognised as an important cooperation modality, but faces contradictions that are not too different from those of its North–South counterpart. ssc providers are highly heterogeneous in terms of policies, institutional arrangements, and engagement with international forums and initiatives. This article contributes to current debates on ssc by mapping the diversity of its actors – based on illustrative case studies from the first and second ‘wave’ of providers – and by presenting and discussing some possible scenarios for the future of ssc within the international aid system.