Skin Lesions and Other Associated Findings in Children with Abusive Head Trauma

When Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) is suspected, the presence of extracranial lesions can be a decisive factor in confirming the diagnosis. In this article, we briefly review and illustrate some of the skin lesions and other extracranial injuries frequently associated with AHT.     

Optimal liability for optimistic tortfeasors

As Alicke and Govorun (The self in social judgment, Psychology Press, New York, 2005, p. 85) observed, “most people are average, but few people believe it.” Optimism and other forms of inflated perception of the self lead parties to exercise suboptimal precautions when undertaking risky activities and often undermine the incentive effects of tort rules. In this paper, we show that the presence of optimism undermines several critical assumptions, upon which law and economics scholars have relied when modeling the incentive effects of tort law. We construct a model representing the incentives of “optimistic” tortfeasors and victims, and consider mechanisms for mitigating the effects of biased decision-making. We show that in the presence of optimism, comparative negligence rules are preferable to contributory negligence rules (i.e., the traditional equivalence between contributory and comparative negligence does not hold). Further, we discover the surprising conclusion that the most effective way to correct optimism may often simply be to “forgive” it, shielding optimistic individuals from liability, rather than holding them liable for the harms they cause.     

DIVORCING FAMILIES WITH YOUNG CHILDREN IN THE COURT'S FAMILY SERVICES UNIT Profiles and Impact of Services

Little is known about the families being served by court support services, or the effectiveness of the services provided. This study investigates 137 higher conflict, divorcing families with young children, who received services from the Family Services division. The study utilizes questionnaire data filled out by family services clinicians. The families presented with multiple mental health needs, including allegations of substance use and physical, emotional and sexual abuses of spouses and, to a lesser extent, children. Results detailed evaluation outcomes pertaining to joint legal and physical custody, showing an increase in joint legal custody, with little difference in physical custody arrangements. Evaluators did encourage less parental dropout. The data also profiled parents least likely to attend mandatory parenting education, accept evaluators' recommendations, and settle their case with mediation assistance. Identifying these families early can help family services clinicians track families into individualized service plans as needed.     

Transferring Health Technology to South Africa: The Importance of Traditional African Culture

The transfer of new health technology to South Africa is occurring despite the fact that North American and European health care planners and entrepreneurs have a very limited understanding of traditional Black South African cultures which condition the health-related behaviors of the majority of the population. Consequently, relatively few people of African descent in this very diverse nation are, at least initially, benefiting from the new imported medical technology. This study gives an overview of traditional Black medicine in South Africa and, through the presentation of several case studies, discusses its implications for the societal adoption of new health technology received from the United States and other industrialized nations. The example of the successful application of cervical cancer exams in rural and urban clinics of the Eastern Cape is analyzed and institutional mechanisms that support successful transfer are identified.     

Relationship to Perpetrator and Posttraumatic Symptomatology Among Sexual Abuse Survivors

This study investigated the association of several dimensions of relationship to perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse to posttraumatic symptomatology in adulthood. A structured clinical interview, the Impact of Event Scale, and the TSC-40 were administered to 67 women survivors seeking psychotherapy. The t-tests for significant differences indicated that subjects whose perpetrators were not caretakers experienced higher levels of posttraumatic symptomatology (PTS) in adulthood than those abused by caretakers. No significant differences were found in traumatic symptomatology between those whose perpetrators were family members and those whose perpetrators were not or between those abused by someone in the home and those abused by someone outside the household. Implications for future research and clinical practice are explored.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.     

The Mystery Man Can Increase the Reliability of Eyewitness Identifications for Older Adult Witnesses

Some groups of eyewitnesses, such as older adults and children, are less likely to correctly reject a target-absent (TA) line-up, as compared to younger adults. Previous research reports that using a silhouette in a video line-up called the ‘mystery man’ could increase correct rejections for TA lineups for child eyewitnesses, without reducing correct identifications for target-present (TP) line-ups (Havard and Memon in Appl Cogn Psychol 27:50–59, 2013). The current study, using older and younger adults, investigated whether using the mystery man would also increase the identification accuracy for older adults, without impairing younger adults’ identification accuracy. The results found that older adults in the ‘mystery man’ condition rejected TA line-ups significantly more often than those in the control condition (52 vs. 24 %), with no significant effect upon the TP line-ups. For the younger adults, the mystery man had no influence on identification responses for the TA or TP line-ups. Our findings suggest the mystery man technique may be beneficial for older adults, without detrimentally affecting the accuracy for younger adults, and thus could increase the reliability of eyewitness evidence, where video line-ups are employed.