Child sexual abuse material in child-centred institutions: situational crime prevention approaches

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the potential for child-centred institutions to use situational crime prevention (SCP) strategies to prevent or reduce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) offending as a distinct form of child sexual abuse (CSA). We discuss the failure of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia to address the potential for CSAM offending to occur in child-centred institutions. Our premise is that CSAM offending is markedly shaped by the situation in which it occurs, rather than by any pre-existing preparedness to offend sexually against children. In this context, SCP for CSAM offending must be considered as part of overall strategies to combat CSA in institutional settings. However, we acknowledge that effective implementation of SCP in this area is not straightforward. We consider some of the challenges in implementing SCP at an institutional level.     

The institutionalisation of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the institutional development of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (BCD) from 1826 to the present. Legislature careers, the internal organisation of the BCD, the current system for filling positions within the committees and electoral rules are the objects of this study. The process of development of the BCD should be understood in light of the dynamics of the Brazilian political system, which has undergone significant ruptures of regime, and also in light of the nearly permanent fragility of the democracy, especially of its representative components. It is an institution with legislature career patterns that vary through time, but always point towards opportunities out of the BCD, a stable, hierarchical and complex mode of organisation that currently values parties as distributors of opportunities. It is, above all, an institution that is subject to external influences from other parts of the political system, which diminish its autonomy and self-determination, as shown by the example of the rule for the adjudication of terms. With its 190 years, the BCD has evolved along with Brazilian democracy and today, although boasting a great structure and large resources, it still needs to establish itself as a decisive and permanent actor in driving public policies and communication (parties and government projects) with voters.     

Domestic relations in Brazil: legacies and horizons

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.     

Impunity and Hope

Is there a duty to prosecute grave international crimes? Many have thought so, even if they recognize the obligation to be defeasible. However, the theoretical literature frequently leaves the grounds for such a duty inadequately specified, or unsystematically amalgamated, leaving it unclear which considerations should drive and shape processes of criminal accountability. Further, the circumstance leaves calls to end impunity vulnerable to skeptical worries concerning the risks and costs of punishing perpetrators. I argue that a qualified duty to prosecute can be substantiated on the basis of a single class of reasons, though also that standard justifications of international criminal law (as currently conceived) are not up to the task. The account exploits the expressive dimension of punishment, but locates the central good of criminal accountability in its capacity to appropriately enable an agential stance on the part of subjects in transitional circumstances. It can legitimate, in a way to be specified, hope. The approach also displays the cynicism of an anti‐impunity ethos in the absence of a robust commitment to securing basic human rights in transitional circumstances.     

Can analysis of a small clod of soil help to solve a murder case?

Soil forensics utilizes extensive soil information to answer legal questions and test hypotheses. The main difficulty often is the determination of different variables from a small amount of soil sample collected on the suspect. We developed a sequential mineralogical and chemical analyses to assess a limited quantity of soil vestiges (0.5 g) from a suspect's vehicle (adhered to the outside rear-view mirror and to the left front fender) involved in a murder case and compared them with the surface samples found at the victim's body disposal site at the Graciosa Road, Paraná State, Brazil. All results affirm that the suspect’s vehicle could have been in contact with the edge of the Graciosa Road, approximately the place where the victim’s body was located. As a result of the soil analysis and comparison, the results support the likely contact of the suspect’s vehicle with the crime scene.     

Using Cluster Analysis and ICP‐MS to Identify Groups of Ecstasy Tablets in Sao Paulo State,Brazil

The variations found in the elemental composition in ecstasy samples result in spectral profiles with useful information for data analysis, and cluster analysis of these profiles can help uncover different categories of the drug. We provide a cluster analysis of ecstasy tablets based on their elemental composition. Twenty‐five elements were determined by ICP‐MS in tablets apprehended by Sao Paulo's State Police, Brazil. We employ the K‐means clustering algorithm along with C4.5 decision tree to help us interpret the clustering results. We found a better number of two clusters within the data, which can refer to the approximated number of sources of the drug which supply the cities of seizures. The C4.5 model was capable of differentiating the ecstasy samples from the two clusters with high prediction accuracy using the leave‐one‐out cross‐validation. The model used only Nd, Ni, and Pb concentration values in the classification of the samples.     

The Reliability of Facial Recognition of Deceased Persons on Photographs

In humanitarian emergencies, such as the current deceased migrants in the Mediterranean, antemortem documentation needed for identification may be limited. The use of visual identification has been previously reported in cases of mass disasters such as Thai tsunami. This pilot study explores the ability of observers to match unfamiliar faces of living and dead persons and whether facial morphology can be used for identification. A questionnaire was given to 41 students and five professionals in the field of forensic identification with the task to choose whether a facial photograph corresponds to one of the five photographs in a lineup and to identify the most useful features used for recognition. Although the overall recognition score did not significantly differ between professionals and students, the median scores of 78.1% and 80.0%, respectively, were too low to consider this method as a reliable identification method and thus needs to be supported by other means.