When a Child Rejects a Parent: Working With the Intractable Resist/Refuse Dynamic

A subgroup of intractable families, in which a child refuses postseparation contact with a parent, perplexes and frustrates professionals who work with them. This article discusses the underlying forces that drive the family's intractability, as well as guidelines for working with the family. The guidelines include specific court orders developed from the very beginning of the case that elaborate the court's stance about goals and expectations for the family, along with specialized individual and family therapies that are undertaken within a framework of planned collaboration with the court. The collaborative team of legal and mental health professionals works in an innovative and active way to structure, support, and monitor the family's progress in resolving the resist/refuse dynamic.     

Heterogeneity in the Intrahousehold Allocation of International Remittances: Evidence from Philippine Households

This article shows that heterogeneity in the intrahousehold allocation of remittances sent by temporary international migrant workers exists among households in the Philippines, and may be attributable to the absence of the spouse, suggesting moral hazard, and to the gender and educational attainment of the household head, indicating differences in preferences. GLM estimates and post-estimation tests reveal that male heads spend more on alcohol and tobacco, that the presence of a female decision-maker in a household increases allocations to goods that improve the welfare of the children, and that household heads with less formal education allocate more to education.     

Suicide reporting content analysis: abstract development and reliability

Despite substantial research on media influences and the development of media guidelines on suicide reporting, research on the specifics of media stories that facilitate suicide contagion has been limited. The goal of the present study was to develop a content analytic strategy to code features in media suicide reports presumed to be influential in suicide contagion and determine the interrater reliability of the qualitative characteristics abstracted from newspaper stories. A random subset of 151 articles from a database of 1851 newspaper suicide stories published during 1988 through 1996, which were collected as part of a national study in the United States to identify factors associated with the initiation of youth suicide clusters, were evaluated. Using a well-defined content-analysis procedure, the agreement between raters in scoring key concepts of suicide reports from the headline, the pictorial presentation, and the text were evaluated. The results show that while the majority of variables in the content analysis were very reliable, assessed using the kappa statistic, and obtained excellent percentages of agreement, the reliability of complicated constructs, such as sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing the suicide, was comparatively low. The data emphasize that before effective guidelines and responsible suicide reporting can ensue, further explication of suicide story constructs is necessary to ensure the implementation and compliance of responsible reporting on behalf of the media.     

The Compatibility of Fingerprint Visualization Techniques with Immunolabeling

The chemical composition of a fingermark potentially holds a wealth of information about the fingermark donor, which can be extracted by immunolabeling. Immunolabeling can be used to detect specific components in fingermarks; however, to be applicable in the forensic field, it should be compatible with commonly used fingerprint visualization techniques. In this study, the compatibility of immunolabeling with two different fingerprint visualization techniques, magnetic powdering and ninhydrin staining, was investigated on fingermarks deposited on glass and on nitrocellulose membranes. With dermcidin as antigen of interest, immunolabeling was performed successfully on all developed fingermarks. We can conclude that immunolabeling is compatible with magnetic powdering and ninhydrin staining, which can be of great forensic value.     

Nato Bombing of Kosovo: Humanitarian Intervention or Crime against Humanity?

For 78 days in 1999, NATO forces led by theUnited States bombed Yugoslavia, killinghundreds of its civilians and devastating itsinfrastructure. NATO spokesmen justified thebombardment as ``humanitarian intervention'aimed at halting President Slobodan Milosevic's``ethnic cleansing' of non-Serbs in Yugoslavia. This essay deconstructs NATO's rationalizationsand analyzes other more sinister motives forthe bombing. By containing Yugoslavia, andmaintaining a permanent presence in Kosovo, theUnited States seeks to ensure its access toCaspian Sea oil, and to maintain economichegemony over Europe. U.S. activities inother countries, such as Turkey, corroboratethe non-``humanitarian' motives for the bombingof Yugoslavia. Finally, the essay analyzes whyNATO's so-called ``humanitarian' bombardment ofYugoslavia was rather a ``crime againsthumanity' undertaken in violation ofinternational law.