Prosecuting assaultive psychiatric patients.

For many reasons, inpatient psychiatric units are increasingly faced with treatment and management of violent individuals. This fosters a need to consider potential institutional responses to patient violence. This paper focuses on one response--prosecution of these persons. The existing literature on this topic is reviewed. In addition, the case history of a difficult but successful prosecution of an assaultive patient is presented. This case highlighted the development of guidelines, which are outlined herein, for determining the appropriateness of seeking legal action against patients. The paper concludes with an assessment of the benefits and risks associated with patient prosecution.     

To Manage Is to Govern

Governance structures constrain and enable the actions of public managers. Principal–agent theory has played a dominant role in our understanding of governance structures. This theory suggests that politicians create relatively static governance structures in a top–down fashion and hold managers accountable for mandated results. In other words, public managers are influenced by governance structures but do not affect governance structures. However, we argue that public managers do affect governance structures, and, in order to understand how this influence takes place, we need a new way of thinking about governance structures. We propose thinking about governance structures as relationships created through the interactions of people in different and reciprocal roles that are relatively dynamic. Public managers are an important source of the multiple, reciprocal, and dynamic interactions that produce governance (relationship) structures. As such, managers are accountable not only for policy outcomes, but also for the appropriateness of the relationships they create and support.     

Regulation of Cohabitation, Changing Family Policies and Social Attitudes: A Discussion of Britain Within Europe

This article considers the differing legal and policy responses to the common trends of family restructuring away from marriage within Britain and Europe. Conceding that Europe is in the process of losing heterosexual marriage as a universal epicenter of family law at the very time when legal harmonization within Europe is being promoted, it goes on to explore the best way forward for regulating same- and different-sex cohabiting couples. It concludes that the legal response to these trends should be "de-moralized" but principled. A plurality of legal regulative structures to accommodate the now diverse family forms that are found within our less marriage-centric societies should be put in place providing at least some default protection for all families, yet allowing people to opt out and make their own arrangements.     

'Arming the key battleground': German rearmament, 1950-55

Saki Dockrill, Britain's Policy for West German Rearmament, 1950-1955, Cambridge Studies in International Relations No 13, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, £27.50.

Thomas Alan Schwartz, America's Germany. John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany, Cambridge, USA, Harvard University Press, 1991, £23.95.     

From little monkey to neurotic invalid: Limitation,selection and assumption in Antony Alpers' life of Katherine Mansfield

In lists of the ‘famous’, and especially ‘famous artists’, the only category containing a substantial number of women is that of writers of fiction. The stratagems practised by male gatekeepers in order to exclude women from serious consideration as artists, thinkers and creative human beings do not, however, cease to operate in the field of writing; rather, they operate in a different way. In order to succeed as artists of any kind, women must in some way hold unusual and subversive views, at least of themselves and their place in the world. Frequently (though not always) they also hold a mirror up to the inferior position generally allocated to women, and the many forms taken by sexist oppression.However, the price of being admitted to the canon of those writers acknowledged by the male establishment as ‘great’ has generally been a refusal to acknowledge or recognise, in the work or even in the life, the existence of any subversive content which could challenge the dominance of the androcentric world view. Evidence of subversion is suppressed altogether, denied, discredited, or distorted. Antony Alpers' treatment of Katherine Mansfield's life and work, and in particular of the connections between the two, illustrates this process.     

A comparative reliability analysis of computer-generated bitemark overlays

This study compared the reliability of two methods used to produce computer-generated bitemark overlays with Adobe Photoshop (Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, CA). Scanned images of twelve dental casts were sent to 30 examiners with different experience levels. Examiners were instructed to produce an overlay for each cast image based on the instructions provided for the two techniques. Measurements of the area and the x-y coordinate position of the biting edges of the anterior teeth were obtained using Scion Image software program (Scion Corporation, Frederick, MD) for each overlay. The inter- and intra-reliability assessment of the measurements was performed using an analysis of variance and calculation of reliability coefficients. The assessment of the area measurements showed significant variances seen in the examiner variable for both techniques resulting in low reliability coefficients. Conversely, the results for the positional measurements showed no significant differences in the variances between examiners with exceptionally high reliability coefficients. It was concluded that both techniques were reliable methods to produce bitemark overlays in assessing tooth position.