A Comparison of Victimization and Perpetration of Intimate Partner Violence Among Drug Abusing Heterosexual and Lesbian Women

The study describes types and rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) reported by active drug using women enrolled in a street outreach HIV prevention research study located in Tucson, Arizona. IPV data were collected on 434 women at the baseline assessment who reported being in a current intimate partner relationship. The data collected included types of violence as well as rates of victimization and perpetration of IPV. Using profile analysis, we examined similarities and differences in patterns of incidence rates of both victimization and perpetration of IPV across different IPV behaviors experienced by heterosexual and lesbian women. Results indicate substantial rates of IPV among both heterosexual and lesbian women with both similarities and differences in IPV behaviors reported. Results suggest that type of relationship and type of IPV behavior are important factors in identifying and preventing IPV, and improving interventions aimed at addressing IPV.     

Dialoguing with the Divided Self as the Outline of a Becoming-Woman in Music

For more than 30 years, I have been researching contemporary women's classical music and have concluded that in the current time, it is difficult to believe in the utopian world for women in music that had once been imagined in the decade of the 1990s. According to Roffe, however, in Deleuzian thought utopia is not really about hope or an ideal society, but about who we are, and what we are capable of, here and now. In this paper, through a dialogue with the divided self, or what Deleuze refers to as the ‘dividual’, I will generate some thoughts about the kinds of actions that a dividual is able to produce at different stages of her work as a musician and an activist feminist. Specifically, the paper will aim to develop a new conception of subjectivity in order to sow the seeds for new ways of thinking about women in music. It will ask two questions: who acts, and who is the subject of that action?; and, how do new ways of thinking transform real world situations? The first question leads to the theme in Deleuze and Guattari's work of ‘a people to come’ or ‘becoming-woman’, the latter a concept that disrupts the male form of subjectivity, challenging the emphasis on ‘man’ as the standard by which all beings and things are measured. The paper will map the question leads to a demonstration of how the self, conceived as a dividual, is able to make an intervention into the nature of subjectivity while at the same time gesturing towards the ways in which the practices of musicology and feminist studies might be transformed.     

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

Abstract

Nearly 80 years after they gained entry to the legal profession in England women remain greatly underrepresented in the judiciary. This article examines the career of Sybil Campbell, England's first full-time woman judge. It explores the criticisms of her appointment as stipendiary magistrate at Tower Bridge in 1945 and the press campaign against her severe sentences which followed. It concludes that, while she was not esteemed a success by the authorities, the main reason for the long gap before the appointment of the next female judge (in 1962) was the control of practically all appointments     

Student Drug Testing in the Context of Positive and Negative School Climates: Results from a National Survey

Positive school climates and student drug testing have been separately proposed as strategies to reduce student substance use in high schools. However, the effects of drug testing programs may depend on the favorability of school climates. This study examined the association between school drug testing programs and student substance use in schools with different climates. The analysis was based on a nationally representative sample of 943 high school students (48% female) ranging from 14 to 19 years of age (62% identifying as white, 18% Hispanic, 13% African American, and 7% in other categories). Results showed that both male and female students in schools with positive climates reported lower levels of personal substance use. Drug testing was associated with lower levels of personal substance use in positive school climates, but only for female students. There was no relationship between drug testing and male students’ substance use. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of considering school climates before implementing drug-testing programs in high schools.     

Histopathological,histochemical and biochemical postmortem changes in induced fatal hypothermia in rats

Reaching a postmortem diagnosis of hypothermia is challenging in forensic practice. Therefore, this study was conducted to detect the histopathological, histochemical and biochemical changes that occur in adult albino rats following exposure to induced fatal hypothermia. Twenty-four adult albino rats were divided into the negative control, moderate hypothermia, severe hypothermia and hypoxia groups. Rats in the control group were euthanized when those in the moderate hypothermic group died. Blood samples were collected via heart puncture, and the cerebrum, heart, suprarenal gland, kidney, liver and skeletal muscle were removed to investigate the biochemical, histochemical and histopathological changes. Postmortem assessment depicted significant changes in lipid peroxidation, represented by increased malondialdehyde levels in the studied organs of the rats in hypothermic and hypoxia groups. Histopathological examination of the rats’ organs revealed degeneration and necrosis in the hypothermia and hypoxia groups. Sections taken from the severe hypothermic rats revealed a loss of normal cardiac tissue architecture, necrotic changes in the pyramidal cells in the cerebral cortex, and massive necrosis, mainly in the tubules of the renal cortex and medulla. These findings suggest that histological changes might be used as biochemical markers for postmortem diagnosing of fatal hypothermia, particularly in severe hypothermic conditions.

Key points

• Death by hypothermia is a serious public health problem worldwide.
• Confirming a diagnosis and determining the cause of death in cases of hypothermia are among the most difficult practices in forensic medicine.
• Death by hypothermia might be associated with structural abnormalities in various organs.
• Studies using different tissue staining techniques will enable an overall illustration of the role of histopathological changes in body organs as indicators of hypothermia.

     

The National Polity and the formation of the modern national subject in Japan

This article analyses how the concept of Kokutai, or the National Polity, emerged and developed in the course of Japanese modernisation. The National Polity was the central principle that underpinned the mystic and divine authority and sovereignty of the Japanese Emperor (Tennō), and played an ideological role during the Asia Pacific War. Nevertheless, the definition of the National Polity was highly ambiguous and there was no dominant interpretation of the National Polity even in the wartime period from the 1930s to 1940s. In this article, I shall put forward the view that the 1930s and 1940s discourse of the National Polity involved logical or rational ideas that have commonly been thought to be antagonistic to the National Polity; therefore the discourse became complex, ambiguous and paradoxical. This article will elucidate how the discourse of Taishō Democracy, which has been perceived as a major critique of the National Polity, also contributed to the mass-based ideology of the National Polity. In order to examine this problem comprehensively, I will explore various strands of the National Polity debates from the early Meiji period to the 1940s, such as the thought of Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Tetsujirō, Hozumi Yatsuka, Uesugi Shinkichi, Minobe Tatsukichi, Yoshino Sakuzō and Miki Kiyoshi.     

Ethics in the workplace

The right to request flexible working has been introduced into the UK employment laws against a background of post-fordist work practices, which already allow for employer rather than employee flexibility. This paper posits the idea that for the individual employee to benefit from these new rights what is required is the situation of dialogues within the workplace that take place in an ethical frame that recognises the employee as an individual.