Fracture Characteristics of Entrapped Head Impacts Versus Controlled Head Drops in Infant Porcine Specimens,,

In many forensic cases, the job of forensic pathologists and anthropologists is to determine whether pediatric death is due to an abusive act or an accidental fall. The goal of this study was to compare the cranial fracture patterns generated on the parietal bone of a developing, infant porcine (pig, Sus scrofa) model by a controlled energy head drop onto a plate versus previous data generated by blunt force impact at the same energy onto the head constrained to a plate. The results showed that blunt force impacts on a head constrained to a rigid plate produces more fracture, but the same general pattern, as that for a head dropped onto the plate with the same level of impact energy. The study suggests that head constraint may be an important factor to consider in the evaluation of death causation for blunt force impacts to the pediatric skull.     

“She’s Mlungu but she looks like me!”: disrupting insider/outsider dichotomies in ethnographic fieldwork

What happens when the biologically and socially visible (and invisible) boundaries used to maintain differences between the researcher (outsider) and the researched (insiders) are broken down or denied acknowledgment? This article explores one challenge of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in regards to race and the unintentional blurring of the insider–outsider dichotomies within the field. As an English-speaking African American attempting to penetrate Langa, a black South African, predominantly isiXhosa-speaking township, it became apparent that my physical appearance automatically relegated me to an ‘insider,’ awarding me a certain and perhaps undeserved membership in the field. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2011 to 2012, this article is a reflection of my experience of balancing my role as a black-American researcher – and by default an outsider – in an environment where my “outsider-ness” was visibly non-existent. This both mitigated an exacerbated my ethnographic data collection.     

International sex offender registration laws: research and evaluation issues based on a review of current scientific literature

In many jurisdictions, anyone convicted of a sexual offense is required to register with police, often for life. Nine different countries have now implemented sex offender registries in an attempt to protect the public from the perceived threat posed by sexual offenders. Yet such laws have been criticized as being overly inclusive, tying up limited law enforcement resources to track many offenders who pose little risk of sexual reoffending. This paper considers the available research evidence relevant to the effectiveness of such laws for the deterrence of sexual offending and the investigation of sex crimes. It is concluded that significant gaps persist in our knowledge of whether existing laws effectively reduce sexual offending or reoffending and that large-scale, well-designed studies of the impact of sex offender registration on rates of offending, the collateral consequences to offenders and their families, and the costs of such laws are needed.