Wife-battering — An Australian perspective

This article examines the leading definitions of wife-battering and questions the emphasis on physical rather than nonphysical abuse. All dimensions of these definitions are analyzed, namely the form of abuse, severity, frequency, intention, and meaning. The final definition formulated is derived from these dimensions and from the accounts and experiences of battered women themselves. The incidence and etiology of wife-battering is then examined from an Australian perspective. Theories which concentrate either specifically on the profiles of the victim and perpetrator or on the family unit or external factors are discussed. Finally, women do remain in violent relationships and their reasons for doing so are considered.     

Post-mortem changes in skeletal muscle protease and creatine phosphokinase activity — A possible marker for determination of time of death

The pattern of change in activity of two enzymes in rat skeletal muscle during body storage after death has been determined. Myofibrillar protease activity was found to increase linearly with time of storage post mortem at room temperature but not at 4 °C. In contrast, creatine phosphokinase activity declines linearly with time, and again storage at 4 °C prevented the change in enzyme activity. Starvation of animals for 5 days or forced exercise prior to death did not markedly alter the rate of change in activity of the two enzymes, although creatine phosphokinase specific activity at time of death was higher in the starved and exercised rats as compared to control animals. A plot of the logarithm of protease/creatine phosphokinase specific activities ratio versus time post mortem yields a linear curve at room temperature. These observations offer a potential method for estimating time of death.     

Political Liberalism, Ethos Justice, and Gender Equality

Susan Okin criticizes John Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ because it does not apply principles of justice directly to gender relations within households. We explain how one can be a ‘political liberal feminist’ by distinguishing between two kinds of justice: the first we call ‘legitimacy justice’, conceptions of which apply to the ‘legally coercive structure’ of society; the second we call ‘ethos justice’, conceptions of which apply to citizens’ ‘non-coercive’ relations. We agree with Okin that a society in which most persons act in accordance with ‘gender equal’ ethos justice is morally superior to one in which most persons do not. A shared commitment to a particular conception of ethos justice, however, cannot be required by a conception of legitimacy justice. A political liberal feminist is committed to promoting gender equality with respect to both legitimacy justice and ethos justice, but recognizes that different means are necessary to do so.     

Application of capillary electrophoresis to examination of color inkjet printing inks for forensic purposes

In the process of questioned document examination, the discrimination of inkjet printing inks is becoming more necessary due to increasingly frequent counterfeiting of documents printed by inkjet printers. Therefore, a method based on micellar electrophoretic capillary chromatography (MECC) has been developed and applied to analysis of such inks extracted from paper. With the use of an optimized and validated analytical procedure, multielectropherograms of inks taken from various models of printers made by various producers (Hewlett-Packard, Epson, Brother, Lexmark and Canon) were created. It was shown that effective differentiation of individual inks was possible in terms of migration time, order and specific shapes of characteristic peaks. By comparison of recorded UV-Vis spectra, the identification of main dyes was also achievable. The usefulness of the method was confirmed by an intralaboratory test of utility, in which several forged printouts were successfully examined. The obtained results proved that the proposed procedure is a useful tool that could be applied to ink discrimination and group identification of dyes originating from inkjet printing inks. Consequently, the developed method can be applied in the forensic field, including investigation of the authenticity of documents.