Selling stolen goods on the online markets: an explorative study

Historically, criminologists studied theft from different perspectives, but only a few focused their attention on the reselling of stolen items. The advent of the Internet has boosted stolen good markets by facilitating interactions between vendors (thieves and receivers) and buyers. This study, based on 227 cases reported by news sites in 2015 and 2016, focuses on the markets and methods used to sell stolen goods online. The results suggest that the online selling methods are quite independent from existing offline methods. The findings innovate with respect to the typology provided by Sutton. The online markets for stolen goods are rather a new environment where perpetrators may choose among several methods of disposal. The results reflect a preference for resale through classified ads sites (44.24%), auction sale sites (28.11%) and social media (19.35%). In the light of this study, more research is needed to understand online stolen goods markets and their mechanisms.     

Psychological models of mental disorder, human rights, and compulsory mental health care in the community

Recent amendments to the 1983 Mental Health Act in the UK (Mental Health Act 2007) include the controversial provision for: “supervised treatment in the community for suitable patients following an initial period of detention and treatment in hospital”. This provision is widespread, and more formal, in other English-speaking jurisdictions. Reviews of the international literature, human rights considerations and the perspective of psychological approaches to mental health care suggest that proposed ‘supervised community treatment orders’ are valuable, lawful, and compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights if certain specific conditions are met. Provisions for ‘supervised community treatment orders’ in the UK should be supported, but with the provisos that: the powers of the Mental Health Act are limited as in Scotland, to persons whose “ability to make decisions about the provision of [care] is significantly impaired”, that each order is time-limited and subject to review by a properly constituted Tribunal, and that the use of such orders should represent a benefit to people in terms of more appropriate treatment, or be a least restrictive alternative, or better preserve the person's private and family life.     

Dealing with cryopreserved embryos upon divorce: a contractual approach aimed at preserving party expectations

The development of assisted reproductive technologies, including cryopreservation, or freezing, of embryos created through in vitro fertilization, has given rise to complex legal questions. Because cryopreservation permits indefinite storage of embryos, if couples fail to specify disposition directions, they may disagree regarding embryo treatment upon the occurrence of contingencies such as divorce. Few courts have resolved such disputes, and those that have appear to uphold the rights of the party seeking to prevent implantation in the absence of a written agreement specifying otherwise. In this Comment, Sara Petersen proposes that courts should draw upon contract law principles in determining whether the parties to such conflicts actually reached agreements regarding embryo disposition in the event of divorce. After analyzing existing precedent, the author assesses proposed approaches for deciding which party's interests should prevail and concludes that these methods are inherently ineffective. She then argues that, in an effort to preserve party expectations and to provide fair results, courts instead should examine whether the parties executed binding contracts or achieved mutual assent. Furthermore, she suggests that couples undergoing cryopreservation will be more likely to contemplate and to provide for various outcomes if they know that courts will look at evidence of their conversations and thought processes prior to cryopreserving their excess embryos.     

Lifetime prevalence and socioemotional effects of hearing about community violence

This study extends findings on community violence (CV) exposure in young adults by examining the prevalence, characteristics, and socioemotional effects related to hearing about violence. Surveys of lifetime CV exposure and socioemotional outcomes were completed by 518 male and female undergraduates completed and were divided into groups with high, moderate, or low scores on hearing. Of respondents, 97.8% reported hearing about violence at least once, with a substantial proportion hearing about different types of acts. Reportedly, the most frequent perpetrators were non-family members, the most frequent location was near home, and most incidents occurred within the past year. The high-scoring group reported significantly greater levels of depressed mood, posttraumatic stress symptoms, aggressive behavior, and interpersonal problems associated with personality disorders. Results extend previous findings on the unfortunate prevalence of violence exposure and its negative psychological effects in today's young adults and suggest that chronic exposure to hearing about violence can have deleterious repercussions.     

Not all the time … But Mostly…

Not all the time … but mostly … is the outcome of collaboration across the genres of ethnographic research, and visual and performing arts. In exploring renewed methodologies for social research Maggie sought to develop a methodological model (ethno-mimesis) rooted in feminist thought and practice, that represented in visual artistic forms the multiple standpoints of women working in prostitution. Ethno-mimesis is a combination of ethnographic research and the representation of this work in visual/artistic form. Introduced by a mutual friend in 1997 our collaborative work began with Sara reading and interpreting the ethnographic work with a view to developing a performance text, as an exemplar of ethno-mimesis. In the collaborative work presented here the hybrid texts that emerge are an outcome of the inter-relationship between ethnographic research and the re-presentation of women's life stories through live art forms – video, and two movement based performances. Through this work we hope to reach a wider audience, beyond academic communities, facilitating understanding, interpretation and maybe even action/praxis in relation to prostitution as a social issue. In representing ethnographic data in artistic form it is hoped that we can access a richer understanding of the complexities of women's lived experiences that can throw light on broader social structures and processes. Such hybrid work may also help audiences to see that women working in prostitution are ordinary women; and that ‘prostitutes’ are indices for all women.     

Estimating policy positions using political texts: An evaluation of the Wordscores approach

This paper evaluates a recently developed method for extracting policy positions from political texts, known as Wordscores. This computerized content analysis technique is a potentially powerful tool for scholars interested in the study of political elites, since it promises an easy and efficient way of inferring policy position from texts and speeches. In this article, we provide a systematic evaluation of this promising method. Using Danish manifestos and government speeches from 1945 to 2005, we compare the policy positions extracted using Wordscores with measures of positions from the well-known Comparative Manifesto Project and cross-validate these with party expert surveys. Our analysis shows that the word scoring technique arrives at largely similar estimates to independently derived position measures and produces time series of government positions with high face validity.     

Techniques of Citizenship: Health and Subjectivity in a New and Predominantly Inuit Territory

The lives and citizenship struggles of migrant workers, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and others shape current thinking about citizenship, suggesting that it is an ongoing process of engagement. These struggles are often framed in citizenship terms because they are struggles for particular kinds of membership and participation within and beyond nation-states. They are, however, collective struggles for new space and suggest that treating citizenship simply as membership is inadequate. They demand, rather, recognition of both individual and collective subjectivities that emerge through efforts to shape and govern their own communities. This paper explores the relationship between the Inuit of the Central and Eastern Arctic and mechanisms of Canadian citizenship—those of national and territorial health institutions and discourse. In April 1999, the establishment of the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, with a population that is 85% Inuit, marked an important moment in both Inuit and Canadian histories. Through a qualitative exploration of the unfolding of health governance in this new territory, the paper examines how Nunavummiut (people of Nunavut) take up and challenge notions of health, governance, Canadian, Inuit, and Nunavummiut. It considers two discourses of health through which Nunavummiut, and others, employ “techniques of citizenship”, shaping both hybrid subjectivity and conceptions of health, giving rise to both constraint and resistance as Inuit Nunavummiut envision their engagement in health governance and in the collective Inuit struggle for self-determination.