Unworthy of Grief: Enduring Urban Violence in Northeast Brazil

Pervasive urban violence has taken its toll on daily life in the northern part of Recife. Taking an ethnographic approach, and tracing recent developments of violent crime and homicide in Recife, this article explores the implications of the normalisation of violence. By thinking through how residents tried to protect themselves and endure the violence in practical and moral terms, the article seeks to elucidate why some members of the community – victims of violent crime and their mothers – were not deemed worthy of grief.     

Visualization of gunshot residue patterns on dark clothing

ABSTRACT: Determination of the muzzle‐to‐target distance is often a critical factor in criminal and civil investigations involving firearms. However, seeing and recording gunshot residue patterns can be difficult if the victim's clothing is dark and/or bloodstained. Trostle reported the use of infrared film for the detection of burn patterns. However, only after the film is developed are the results visible and multiple exposures at different settings may be needed. The Video Spectral Comparator^? 2000 (Foster & Freeman Ltd., Evesham, Worcestershire, U.K.) is an imaging instrument routinely used by forensic document examiners. Without use of specialized film could the VSC 2000 (at appropriate instrument settings) quickly, easily, and reliably provide instantaneous viewing, saving, and printing of gunshot residue patterns on dark and/or blood soaked clothing? At muzzle‐to‐target distances of 6, 12, and 18 in., test fires were made into five different types of dark clothing using eight different handguns of different calibers. Gunshot residues were detected for all eight calibers, and powder burn patterns were seen on dark clothing for all three target distances and calibers except 0.22 long rifle and 0.25 ACP. Bloodstains did not preclude the viewing of these patterns.     

Helene Stöcker and the Bund fuer Mutterschutz (The Society for the Protection of Motherhood)

The Society for the Protection of Motherhood (BfM) was the first organization in Germany to concern itself with a reform of sexual ethics and the transformation of the relationship between women and men—not only on a theoretical level but by actually providing support for single mothers and their children and initiating counselling centres to deal with sexual problems. At the same time, the BfM demanded legal equality for illegitimate children, the decriminalization of abortion and the right of women to sue for divorce. In raising these issues, the BfM trod on difficult ground since they were not ‘popular’ topics of discussion within German society around the turn-of-the-century. The chairwoman of the BfM, Helene Stöcker, who was among the first women to study and obtain a doctorate in Germany, put the Society's ideas into practice in her relationship of ‘free love and marriage’ with her partner, the lawyer Bruno Springer. Indeed, it was the policy of the BfM to encourage progressive men to join the organization and work in partnership with the women, while most of the other groups on the radical wing of the bourgeois women's movement chose to work autonomously from men. Over the years, the BfM's priorities changed and its members moved in different directions: while the ‘moderates’ wanted to retain the family as the nucleus of the state, the more radical members went in search of new forms of relationship, attempting thereby to expose society's double standard of morality.