sexual assault as trauma: a Foucauldian examination of knowledge practices in the field of sexual assault service provision

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. The paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice.     

The Secret of West Indian Success

For nearly a century, black immigrants from the West Indies have enjoyed greater economic success than African Americans. Several explanations have been proposed for this trend, but until now, none of these explanations have been subjected to systematic scrutiny. Recent efforts to adjudicate among them indicate that West Indian success can be attributed entirely to the “selectivity of migration”. This phrase refers to the tendency of people who migrate to be more talented and determined than the compatriots they leave behind. One implication of this discovery is that sympathetic observers should stop exhorting African Americans to behave more like West Indians. Such pleas are inappropriate because West Indian success is a consequence of choosing to move, not a consequence of Caribbean birth. A second implication is that persons of West Indian background remain vulnerable to racism. The new findings provide no evidence that positive selection protects West Indians from the negative stereotypes that Americans associate with black skin.

Reassessing Privatization Strategies 25 Years Later: Revisiting Perry and Babitsky's Comparative Performance Study of Urban Bus Transit Services

Privatization appeals to citizen and politician desires for more cost-effective methods of service delivery. For this reason, it is important for public administrators to know when gains can be made by contracting out or privatizing services and when it is better to keep service provision in house. This article assesses the viability of contracting out and privatization of transit services. Following up on the 1986 work of James Perry and Timlynn Babitsky, which used data from the early 1980s, the authors revisit whether certain service delivery arrangements are more efficient and effective than others in the provision of transit services. Twenty-five years later, they find results similar to those of Perry and Babitsky's original study. Neither the type of government nor whether an agency contracts out has much impact on the efficiency and performance of urban bus services. The main difference between the two studies is that private transit agencies are no longer more efficient or effective than public providers.     

Availability of affordable healthy food in Hillsborough County,Florida

Prior research has indicated that low‐income neighborhoods in urban regions throughout the United States have limited access to healthy food, which partly explains the prevalence of diet‐related diseases. Our study provides new evidence on the relationship between access, prices of healthy food, and key demographic factors in Hillsborough County, Florida. The research team completed 65 surveys of grocery and convenience stores regarding availability and prices of 11 food items included in the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS‐S). Results from the regression analysis indicate that affordable healthy food is more likely to be found in grocery stores than in convenience stores. There is no significant evidence, however, that low‐income neighborhoods have less access to healthy food than the not‐low‐income ones. We also observe significant price differences among types of stores but not in grocery‐to‐convenience store ratios among income groups, suggesting that low‐income families are not exposed to higher food prices.     

Body Idiom in Platform Events: Media Representation and the Hegemony of the Vicarious Conversation

Taking a comparative approach to critical semiotics, I describe reciprocal relations between media representation of body idiom in platform events and the interaction order of social relations among people in Hong Kong. I argue that two conflicting representations of body idiom vie for supremacy in the former colony, in broadcast television as well as in print media, business, government and education. These can be related to monofocal and polyfocal platform formats. The predominant semiotic representation of the postural presentation of self in international media, the monofocal platform format, grows out of what we call the Utilitarian Discourse System, and is in a problematic dialectical relationship with Hong Kong and other societies. This model of the monologue is articulated by Dale Carnegie in his 1937 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which advocates establishing and maintaining eye contact and a friendly manner. On the part of the audience, it requires accepting the fiction of a dialogue that is in fact vicarious. I argue that this acceptance evolved in Europe during the Enlightenment in what Foucault described as the disciplines of panopticism, but did not evolve in Hong Kong or China. I sketch the historical development of Hong Kong media and society in an attempt to explain the disjunction between media representation and interaction order, and conclude that critical social semiotics can make a contribution in disentangling these disparate interaction orders and media representations of body idiom.     

Application of a pyroprobe to simulate smoking and metabolic degradation of abused drugs through analytical pyrolysis

Smoking of illicit drugs can produce unique metabolic biomarkers. Smoking conditions can be partially modeled via pyrolysis, a process that decomposes a chemical compound by extreme heat. Pyrolytic decomposition was found to be useful as a limited metabolic mimic in that analytical pyrolysis can be used to generate some of the same compounds produced by metabolic degradation. This project focused on the pyrolysis of cocaine and methamphetamine using a pyroprobe coupled with a GC/MS and more generally, potential applications of pyrolysis to forensic toxicology. Common diluents including lidocaine, caffeine, and benzocaine were pyrolyzed in mixtures with cocaine and methamphetamine. Correlations between pyrolytic and metabolic degradations revealed that this method has the capability to produce some of the reported metabolites such as norcocaine and cocaethylene for cocaine, and amphetamine for methamphetamine. The results demonstrate that analytical pyrolysis has the potential to identify some metabolic products and to supplement in vivo and enzymatic studies.     

Physical components of soft-tissue ballistic wounding and their involvement in the generation of blood backspatter*

Gunshot backspatter comprises biological material expelled backward through bullet entry holes. Crime scene investigators analyze backspatter patterns to infer wounding circumstances. An understanding of the mechanism of backspatter generation, and the relationship between spatter patterns and bullet and tissue characteristics, would enhance the predictive value of such analysis. We examined soft-tissue ballistic wounding responses to determine the underlying components and how these might be relevant to the generation of backspatter. We identified five mechanistic components to ballistic wounding (elastic, viscous, crushing, cutting, and thermal), each related to mechanical disciplines (respectively, solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, fracture mechanics, rheology, and thermodynamics). We identified potential roles for these five components in backspatter formation and provide a scenario whereby a sequence of events incorporating these components could lead to backspatter generation and expulsion. This research provides a framework for the mathematical representation, and subsequent computational predictive modeling, of backspatter generation and pattern formation.