Gender and cultural patterns of suicidal behavior: young Hindustani immigrant women in the Netherlands

Patterns of suicidal behavior vary among cultures and along gender. Young Hindustani immigrant women attempt suicide four times more often than young Dutch women. This article explores multi-disciplinary explanations for suicidal behavior in this group. The interconnection of Durkheimian concepts of social integration and regulation with ecological insights into family relations and psychological and psychiatric theories on individual distress are relevant. It is suggested that young Hindustani women who display suicidal behavior possess certain personality and cognitive constellations that are interlocked with specific parenting styles in stressful family environments. These families are embedded in a context of moral transformations resulting from migration to a Western culture and may be facing difficulties accompanying the transitional processes encountered in the West, particularly those regarding gender roles. Durkheimian fatalistic and anomic suicides elucidate this. The Hindustani women who appear most at risk are those facing contradictory norms and overregulation, which prevent them from developing autonomy.     

Childhood Abusive and Supportive Experiences, Inter-Parental Violence, and Parental Alcohol Use: Prediction of Young Adult Depressive Symptoms and Aggression

Issues in both the children of alcoholics and child abuse literatures were addressed in an attempt to disentangle the effects on young adults of growing up in alcoholic homes versus abusive homes. Using multiple regression, retrospective reports of parental abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual) and parental support (love/support, independence, and fairness), witnessing violence between parents, and parental alcohol use were used as predictor variables for outcomes noted by both literatures. When the effects of all other predictors were statistically controlled, parental alcohol use was not significantly related to depressive symptoms or aggression. Different abusive and supportive behaviors, depending on sex of parent and sex of participant, were significant predictors of both depression and aggression. Results underscore the importance of including and controlling for inter-parental violence and for different types of child abuse (especially emotional abuse) and parental supportive behaviors in investigations of outcomes related to abusive and alcoholic families. Implications for treatment of individuals from these families are discussed.     

Association of sexual revictimization with sexuality and psychological function

This study explores the associations of sexual revictimization (experiencing sexual abuse in childhood and adulthood) in a sample of 230 African American women who are low-income. Data indicate that women who experience sexual revictimization are more at risk for emotional stress and psychological pathology than women with no history of abuse. In addition, women who are revictimized appear to be at greater risk for emotional problems than women sexually abused only as a child or sexually assaulted only as adults. Revictimization also appears to be associated with an increased probability of engaging in prostitution, even higher than women with childhood- or adult-only victimization, who showed increased probability when compared to women never abused. Finally, women who are revictimized showed increased HIV risk, in that they were 4 times less likely than other women to consistently use condoms, but no more likely to be in monogamous relationships or less likely to have multiple partners.     

Bonded labor characteristics of U.S. postgraduate medical training

Abuses in labor practices affecting hospital housestaff (residents) have become better understood with the 2002 filing of a federal lawsuit challenging U.S. resident hiring practices. Other initiatives to redress residency employment abuses have included labor action (unionization) and legislative initiatives at both the state and federal levels. This Article suggests that all such initiatives are fated to have limited success because they fail to take into account the economics of the residency system. The author argues that, in several key respects, the U.S. residency employment system resembles the self-perpetrating bonded labor systems of rural Asia. Consequently the Article proposes a radical restructuring of U.S. housestaff employment.     

The Problem of Self-Representation at International Criminal Tribunals: Striking a Balance between Fairness and Effectiveness

The principle that the right to self-representation is not absolute,as established by international criminal tribunals, raises difficultquestions of application that are still being worked out inthe jurisprudence. There has been a recent shift in focus, fromestablishing the modalities for the exercise of the right inthe early stages of the Miloevi trial to establishing the circumstancesin which the right may be qualified. This article examines recentdevelopments and considers where the threshold for revokingor qualifying the right to self-representation lies, how thevarious modes of court imposed representation may be synthesizedand what the standard is for counsel who is representing anuncooperative accused.     

Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

Connecting the Congress: A Study of Cosponsorship Networks

e-mail: jhfowler{at}ucdavis.edu Using large-scale network analysis I map the cosponsorship networksof all 280,000 pieces of legislation proposed in the U.S. Houseand Senate from 1973 to 2004. In these networks, a directionallink can be drawn from each cosponsor of a piece of legislationto its sponsor. I use a number of statistics to describe thesenetworks such as the quantity of legislation sponsored and cosponsoredby each legislator, the number of legislators cosponsoring eachpiece of legislation, the total number of legislators who havecosponsored bills written by a given legislator, and networkmeasures of closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality.I then introduce a new measure I call "connectedness" whichuses information about the frequency of cosponsorship and thenumber of cosponsors on each bill to make inferences about thesocial distance between legislators. Connectedness predictswhich members will pass more amendments on the floor, a measurethat is commonly used as a proxy for legislative influence.It also predicts roll call vote choice even after controllingfor ideology and partisanship.     

Color separation in forensic image processing

In forensic image processing, it is often important to be able to separate a feature from an interfering background or foreground, or to demonstrate colors within an image to be different from each other. In this study, a color deconvolution algorithm that could accomplish this task is described, and it is applied to color separation problems in document and fingerprint examination. Subtle color differences (sometimes invisible to the naked eye) are found to be sufficient, which is demonstrated successfully for several cases where color differences were shown to exist, or where colors were removed from the foreground or background. The software is available for free in the form of an Adobe Photoshop-compatible plug-in.     

Probability of exclusion in paternity testing: time to reassess

The average exclusion probability is a measure of efficiency in paternity testing; it refers to the a priori ability of a battery of tests to detect paternity inconsistencies. This parameter measures the capacity of the system to detect a false accusation of paternity. Traditionally, this average exclusion probability has been estimated as the probability of excluding a man who is not the father by an inconsistency in at least one of the studied loci. We suggest that this criterion should be corrected, as currently the presumed father is excluded when at least three genetic inconsistencies are found with the child being tested, not just one. This change of criterion has occurred because of the use of microsatellite loci, whose mutation rates are much greater than those of the coding genes used previously in paternity studies. We propose the use of the average probability of exclusion for at least three loci (not only one), as an honest measure of the combined probability of exclusion of several loci, and we propose an algebraic expression to calculate it.