Treating sexual offenders with learning disabilities in the community: a critical review

This study offers a critical review of a treatment group for sexual offenders with learning disabilities. The participants were diverted from criminal proceedings due to their level of cognitive functioning and attended a 7-month treatment program comprising of four main components: sex education, cognitive distortions, offending cycle, and relapse prevention. A number of psychometric assessments were administered immediately before and after intervention. Although no significant differences were found in attitudes toward sexual offending following treatment, the trend was for improvements in sex knowledge and honesty of sexual interest. Improvements in socialization skills (leisure time and interpersonal skills) were significant. No further incidents of sexual offending have been reported during a 12-month follow-up. A number of explanations for the nonsignificant improvement in attitudes are considered and recommendations for future treatment evaluation studies are made. The development of specific questionnaires and treatment programs for sexual offenders with learning disabilities is discussed.     

The contribution of DNA to the disaster victim identification (DVI) effort

As part of the disaster victim identification (DVI) response to the 2009 Victorian bushfires disaster, a number of scientific disciplines contributed to the human identification process--forensic pathology, anthropology and odontology, as well as fingerprinting and DNA profiling. The DNA laboratory received 182 post-mortem (PM) samples from 120 DVI cases and 236 reference samples corresponding to 163 missing persons (and two non-DVI cases). DNA analysis yielded full DNA profiles for 102 DVI cases and 190 ante-mortem (AM) samples (relating to all 163 missing persons), respectively. Subsequent comparison of DNA profiles, through direct and kinship matching, resulted in the submission of 76 DNA reports to the DVI Reconciliation Centre which assisted in the identification of 67 deceased. This paper describes the contribution of DNA analysis towards the DVI response to the 2009 Victorian bushfires disaster.     

The Im/Possibility of Abandonment in New Materialist Ontologies

Organising prominent critiques of new materialism is the suggestion that it contains a gesture of abandonment. New materialism abandons the past to enable its self-promotion as a novel brand and generation of feminist intervention wedded to a particular vision of matter's transformative possibilities. Or it abandons questions of race in advancing a grand ontology, while simultaneously enacting a particular politics of perspective—one that is racialised. In this article we acknowledge the importance of these critiques as we engage them through an interrogation and opening of the nature of abandonment itself. From within a new materialist frame, we ask who or what abandons, and what assumptions about matter, race, the human and the iterative act of abandonment are at work in critiques of this field? We question how a new materialist approach enacts and recasts the positionality and privilege of ‘whiteness-as-humanness’ at the same time it is considered to elide these. Taking up with discussions from within critical race theory and approaches to human exceptionalism, we ask from this whether we can conceive of new materialism in terms of a perverse ontology that renders abandonment im/possible.     

‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location

Abstract

Playing a pivotal role in foregrounding a feminist politics of difference, a politics of location embodies what can be termed second-wave concerns that continue to inform contemporary feminist modes of inquiry and research. However, the attention to material specificity that locatability performs has emphasized the identity of the speaking subject at the same time as it has acknowledged materiality's entangled engagements as suggestive of the complicated production of any identity. In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, Donna Haraway both raises and responds to the challenge of a feminist politics of location in a way that anticipates a convoluted politics of the subject, in particular where she is not satisfied to relinquish universality and objectivity, or the ‘non-local’, in her provocative thinking through of situated knowledge production. The partial perspective she uncovers insists that the capacity for identity is addressed as a political gesture, with a reminder that any appeal to perspective is a non-innocent participation in what it helps to produce. In taking up Haraway's essay, the author engages with the problematic nature of a politics of location that is confounded by the direction of its critical interventions, and in such a way anticipates and performs new (feminist) materialist concerns. Questioning the nature of non-locatability and its political imperatives, the author suggests an ‘annunciative politics’ through which to consider some of the implications of Haraway's figuring of the partial perspective, to ask after feminism's political impetus with the tensions raised in Haraway's argument kept alive.     

Yubbi Yarning Circle Model: Collective Narratives and Cultural Expression in the Journey of Trauma

This article describes a “working model” that started as a culturally appropriate workshop created by students and staff involved in the Certificate III in Visual Arts at Goulburn Ovens Institute of TAFE, Shepparton Campus, Victoria in 2018. The Yubbi Yarning Circle Model (YYCM) sees First Nations Artists, as both Facilitators and Storytellers, expressing the ongoing effects of Aboriginal Exemption using visual storytelling. We explore how the model of a visual narrative can be utilised in further cultural activities planned for research into Aboriginal Exemption and how this art resource may effectively be disseminated to Storytellers who not only have a history of Aboriginal Exemption, but also more broadly in the wider community. The YYCM approach is multi-disciplinary and combines the cultural healing practices of the Yarning Circle, the Mariku knowledge of symbology, participatory action research using decolonised methodologies and findings on behavioral research from Northern Ireland about how the narrative can heal trauma.     

Characterization of Digital Cameras for Reflected Ultraviolet Photography; Implications for Qualitative and Quantitative Image Analysis During Forensic Examination

Reflected ultraviolet imaging techniques allow for the visualization of evidence normally outside the human visible spectrum. Specialized digital cameras possessing extended sensitivity can be used for recording reflected ultraviolet radiation. Currently, there is a lack of standardized methods for ultraviolet image recording and processing using digital cameras, potentially limiting the implementation and interpretation. A methodology is presented for processing ultraviolet images based on linear responses and the sensitivity of the respective color channels. The methodology is applied to a FujiS3 UVIR camera, and a modified Nikon D70s camera, to reconstruct their respective spectral sensitivity curves between 320 and 400 nm. This method results in images with low noise and high contrast, suitable for qualitative and/or quantitative analysis. The application of this methodology is demonstrated in the recording of latent fingerprints.     

Psychosexual characteristics of sexual offenders and the relationship to sexual reconviction

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if the Multiphasic Sex Inventory (MSI) could be used to predict sexual reconviction. The MSI was administered to 119 convicted male sex offenders. Reconviction data were analysed using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) over 2-, 5- and 10-year follow-up periods. The MSI scales Sexual Obsession and Paraphilia (Atypical Sexual Outlet) obtained good accuracy in predicting sexual reconviction over 2- and 5-year follow-up periods. A confirmatory factor analysis of the MSI scales yielded a four-factor solution: Sexual Deviance, Sexual Desirability, Dysfunctional/Justification, and Normal. The Sexual Deviance factor demonstrated good accuracy in predicting sexual reconviction at 2-year follow-up while the Normal factor was a poor predictor of sexual reconviction. Compared against an actuarial risk assessment measure for sexual offenders, the Sexual Obsession, Sexual/Social Desirability, and Sexual Dysfunction scales, and Sexual Deviance factor made a statistically significant contribution independent of the risk scale in predicting sexual reconviction. It is argued that rather than using the MSI solely as an assessment measure of psychosexual characteristics of sexual offenders in treatment programmes, it can be used to provide additional information as part of an assessment of risk of sexual reconviction.     

French administration: Sanctified or demystified?∗

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