Banking on Social Change: Grameen Bank Lending to Women

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has become an international model for microcredit as a poverty alleviation strategy. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to evaluate the Grameen Bank as a strategy for empowering and improving the socioeconomic status of women in Bangladesh, and to identify lessons from the Grameen Bank experience that can inform development policy more generally. Arguments for and against Grameen Bank are evaluated in the light of evidence from studies of the Bank and knowledge of women and development. The conclusions that are drawn from this evaluation are that Grameen Bank is not a panacea for poverty alleviation and improving women's lives, that it has increased the income of borrowers, has led to improvements in specific aspects of their lives, and that it has potential if used in conjunction with other progressive social and economic policies to contribute to long-term, sustainable, progressive social change.     

The use of children's religious ideas in their psychiatric evaluation

Children's religious ideas provide a source of projective material that can be relevant clinically in a child's psychiatric evaluation. Areas that are sometimes revealed include (1) information about the child's parental introjects; (2) level of superego formation; (3) level of defense formation; (4) areas that are most anxiety provoking for the child. This religious material is frequently ignored, but can be a particularly useful adjunct when the usual child-evaluative techniques do not reveal a complete picture.Her psychiatric training included an adult psychiatry residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, and a child psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital, Belmont. Presently a candidate in the psychoanalytic institute, and in private practice.Her psychiatric training included an adult psychiatry residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, and a child psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital, Belmont. She is also a candidate in the psychoanalytic institute and in private practice.     

Surrogacy,Identity, Parentage and Childrenʼs Rights – Through the Eyes of a Child

In this article I will focus on two important aspects of children's rights which are impacted by artificial reproductive technology (particularly surrogacy); being the rights to identity and the rights to legal parentage. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child acknowledges the importance of a child's right to identity, to be protected from discrimination on the basis of the status or beliefs of the child's parents, legal guardians or family members. For many children born through surrogacy arrangements, they may have only one or no legally recognized parent. The adults caring for them may have parental responsibility orders but this falls well short of providing children with the benefits and protections that legal parentage does. The issue of identity can be complex. Increasingly, states have recognized the importance of children knowing the circumstances of their birth and being able to access biological and genetic information including medical information. From a child's perspective the issues of identity and parenthood are intertwined. Given the importance of identity, more needs to be done to ensure that identifying information about children born as a result of artificial reproductive technology is properly stored and readily accessible for these children. Denying a child legal parentage when there are no concerns about the care being provided by their parents cannot be justified when considered from a children's rights perspective.     

Multimethod Resolution of a Small‐Scale Case of Commingling

This study highlights the use of multiple methods for resolving a case of commingled human remains. Skeletal remains were located in a marijuana field in rural northern California by law enforcement. Although initially buried in shallow graves, the remains of two decedents were disturbed by large carnivores and scattered over a wide area. The remains were submitted by law enforcement for forensic anthropological analysis and resolution of commingling. To segregate the remains of the two individuals, a number of methods were employed, including: (i) physical matching of fragmented remains; (ii) articulation to evaluate joint congruence; (iii) visual pair‐matching of bilateral elements; (iv) osteometric pair‐matching; (v) evaluation of taphonomic patterns; (vi) DNA analysis; and (vii) portable X‐ray spectrometry (pXRF). This multimethod approach resulted in accurate resolution of the commingling and facilitated reconstruction of the biological profiles, taphonomic patterns, and trauma analysis for each individual.     

The Optimized Summed Scored Attributes Method for the Classification of U.S. Blacks and Whites: A Validation Study

Recently, Hefner and Ousley (2014) introduced the optimized summed scored attributes (OSSA) method that maximizes between‐group differences in U.S. black and white populations by dichotomizing six cranial morphoscopic trait scores. This study tests OSSA using an independent skeletal sample (Hamann‐Todd, n = 208) and positively identified forensic cases (Mercyhurst University, n = 28, and New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, n = 38). An evaluation of trait frequencies suggests shifting the heuristically selected sectioning point separating U.S. black and white populations from ≤ 3 to ≤ 4. We found a total correct classification of 73.0% (B = 50.9%, W = 89.2%) using the originally suggested sectioning point of ≤3, while the total correct classification increases to 79.2% (B = 80.2%, W = 78.5%) with a modified sectioning point of ≤4. With the increased total correct classification and reduced classification bias between ancestry groups, we suggest the modified sectioning point of ≤4 be used when assessing ancestry in forensic unknowns.     

Illicit pharmaceutical networks in Europe: organising the illicit medicine market in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

It has been widely suggested that the global market in counterfeit, falsified and illegally traded medicines has expanded at a tremendous rate in recent years, offering lucrative opportunities for criminal entrepreneurs with little legal risk. However, with a few exceptions, there has been little criminological research conducted on the trade’s actors and organisation. Of the few studies that are available, most position the supply of these products in the context of ‘transnational organised crime’, often presupposing the overwhelming presence of large-scale, hierarchical structures in the trade. This article, based on two extensive research projects in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, offers an account of the illicit supply of medicines in two European jurisdictions. The research outlines the nature and dynamics of the trade including the roles played by each national context as nodes in the global supply chain. The focus then shifts to the modus operandi, actors, online trade and social organisation in both countries. In contradistinction to the ‘transnational organised crime’ narrative, the empirical data outlined in this paper demonstrates that actors and networks involved in the trade are highly flexible and complex structures that straddle the categories of licit and illicit, online and offline, and global and local. This suggests that operations supplying illicit medicines vary largely in terms of size, reach, organisation and legality.