Worker responses to workplace hazards

Recent policy initiatives in occupational safety and health have emphasized strategies that provide workers with information about workplace exposures. It is not clear, however, what effect this new information has had or will have on worker self-help initiatives. This paper analyzes individual and collective worker responses to information on job hazards using five sources of data on workers and industries in the United States. Levels of expressed dissatisfaction, discharges for cause, and strike frequencies are found to be significantly higher in hazardous jobs than in safe jobs. Individual quit strategies are not consistently found to be associated with higher hazard levels. These findings have potentially important implications for the design of future information-oriented health and safety policies.     

From Victim to Offender: Female Offenders of Child Sexual Abuse

Historically, women have been seen to have a much lower recorded rate of crime than men. In the area of child sexual abuse, women have figured prominently in official statistics as victims but have had virtually no official recognition as offenders. It is difficult for many people to accept that women do sexually abuse children and this can result in discounting by personnel in child protection services and police. This article discusses female offenders of child sexual abuse and the way in which these cases are processed by the criminal justice system.     

Mass terror and the court: The Military Collegium of the USSR

Apart from its role in the Moscow show trials during 1936 – 38, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court under V.V. Ul'rikh also tried some 40,000 ‘enemies of the people’ behind closed doors, sentencing most of them to death. These pseudo-trials of no more than a few minutes took place in prisons or NKVD offices in Moscow or (through the Collegium's assizes) provincial centres. There was no serious investigation of the evidence, and the court turned a blind eye to apparent cases of torture. The judges personally attended executions, occasionally even participating in them. The punishments had been determined beforehand by the political leadership under Stalin by way of lists, with the Military Collegium only ‘legalising’ the sentences. The defendants originated from the Soviet elite. The aim of this article is to throw more light on this side of the Collegium's activities, mainly based on archival sources. The article suggests that this quasi-legal procedure was adopted by the leadership under Stalin, in preference to purely administrative measures, because it was considered to be less likely to endanger the elite's loyalty.

We did not break the law, did not sign just like that. These are lies. Ul'rikh gave reports. There was a court, an indictment, there were sentences: everything as it should be, everything according to the law (Lazar' Kaganovich interviewed by G.A. Kumanev in Kumanev 1999 Kumanev, G. A. 1999. ‘Dve besedy s L.M. Kaganovichem’. Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, 2: 101–122.  [Google Scholar], p. 116).     

A validation study for duct tape end matches

Fracture matches are considered to be the strongest association achievable in forensic examinations of glass, metal, wood, plastic, paint, tape, and other trace evidence. Despite being fairly routine examinations, few publications exist to support their admissibility in court. This study was designed, using duct tape as the fractured medium, to determine the validity and error rate associated with conducting end match (fracture match) examinations on this material. Five test designs, which varied either the source roll of tape or manner of separation (torn or cut) from the roll, were administered to four analysts with instructions to examine the assigned test sets for end matches. If an end match was not identified by the initial analyst, the entire test set was independently evaluated by the remaining three analysts. Results indicated that while tape grade did not hinder end match identification, the manner of separation could affect results.     

Adult Hirschsprung's disease diagnosed during forensic autopsy

We report a case of fatal Hirschsprung's disease (HD) discovered at autopsy. A 20-year-old man collapsed at home. Emergency medical personnel found him in cardiac arrest and all resuscitative efforts failed. He had a past history of chronic constipation since infancy. Forensic autopsy revealed a megacolon full of gas and stools. Microscopic examination showed absence of ganglion cells in a short segment of the rectum and enterocolitis in the left and transverse colon. HD is rarely described in adults. In many cases, patients complained of constipation since infancy but the affection remained misdiagnosed. The relative good tolerance of the disease is usually due to a short aganglionic bowel segment. Enterocolitis is a frequent and severe complication of HD in children but is rarely described in adults. This case suggests the importance of HD diagnosis in childhood in order to avoid fatal complications with forensic consequences.