Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations

When mental health, medical, and social work professionals and paraprofessionals make false positive or false negative errors in their judgments about the validity of allegations of child sexual abuse, the consequences can be catastrophic for the affected children and adults. Because of the high stakes, practitioners, legal decision makers, and policy makers should have some idea of the magnitude and variability of error rates in this domain. A novel approach was used to estimate individual error rates for 110 professionals (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and others) who conduct or participate in forensic child sexual abuse evaluations. The median estimated false positive and false negative error rates were 0.18 and 0.36, respectively. Estimated error rates varied markedly from one participant to the next. For example, the false positive error rate estimates ranged from 0.00 to 0.83. These estimates are based on participants’ self-reported substantiation rates and on their subjective frequency distributions for the probability of truth for the abuse allegations they evaluate.     

Conceptualizing Interagency Coordination as Metagovernance: Complexity,Dynamism, and Learning in Australian and British Statistical Administration

Top-down methods of interagency coordination are inadequate in contemporary public administration, where multiple departments and agencies interact across loosely coupled networks to solve complex problems. The concept of metagovernance suggests governments can employ combinations of coordination instruments to steer dispersed actors toward common goals. This article asks how officials in Australian and British statistical administration addressed problems with traditional coordination methods. Interviews with senior official statisticians show a transition from traditional interagency coordination to metagovernance, driven by failures and learning. Metagovernance captures how interagency coordination is increasingly practiced, though existing theories should give more attention to learning and adaptation.     

Violent crime in the Netherlands. A historical-sociological analysis

Long term trends in violent crime in the Netherlands are analysed on the basis of crime rates, medical statistics and victim-surveys. After having pointed out problems of interpretation and the influence of theoretical presuppositions, the author concludes that from the middle of the 19th century until the 1970s the level of violent crime remained rather stable. In the interpretation of the recent rise of violent crime rates a distinction is made between instrumental and impulsive (affectional) violence. It seems that especially instrumental violence (in order to gain material goods) was practised more often while, on the contrary, impulsive violence met with more resistance.     

What is procedural justice: Criteria used by Dutch victims to assess the fairness of criminal justice procedures

The study examines the meaning of procedural justice to Dutch victims of crime. Using victimological research and the group-value or relational model or procedural justice developed by Lind and Tyler, a model for procedural justice judgments is developed and tested using the structural equation model. Data used for the analysis consist of 221 interviews with victims regarding their experience with the public prosecution. Although the emerging model differs from that of Lind and Tyler, results support Lind and Tyler's assertion that procedural justice judgments are normative and not instrumental. Victims are particularly concerned about being treated with dignity and respect and are not interested in influencing the outcome of their case.     

A technique to capture, analyze, and quantify anterior teeth rotations for application in court cases involving tooth marks

Anterior teeth within the human dentition have a specific numerical rotation value. Bite marks show an array of angled indentations, abrasions, microlacerations, and contusions. These marks generally represent the incisal surfaces of the suspect's dentition reflecting the rotation values of the teeth in the dental arch. This study described a method for capturing and analyzing anterior dental rotations. The rotations of individual anterior teeth within the study population were categorized as common, uncommon, and very uncommon according to Allen's classification. In the absence of a large number of incisal patterns present in a bite mark, a single but heavily weighted tooth rotation could be of equal discriminatory potential to several common rotation values. No prevalence studies quantifying individual tooth rotations are available. The measurement of each individual tooth rotation together with its individual discrimination potential will enhance the evaluation of the concordant features observed in bite marks.     

Fatal thyrotoxic crisis

Graves' disease is a form of hyperthyroidism. A rare complication of Graves' disease is thyrotoxic crisis. Although the crisis is frequently fatal, it is a distinctly unusual cause of sudden death. We investigated the case of a young woman with Graves' disease who died suddenly. Radioimmunoassay tests of thyroid function were used to establish the diagnosis.