Maytree: A respite center for the suicidal: an evaluation

This paper evaluates the contribution to suicide prevention made by an innovative project, Maytree, a respite center for the suicidal. Maytree offers a distinctive brief period of sanctuary for four nights for suicidal people; within this limited time it aims to provide opportunities through talking, reflecting, and relaxing for reducing the intense feelings that lead to suicidal behavior. The focus of this paper is on evaluating the first 3 years of Maytree's operation, exploring how Maytree works, and its effects on the people who stay there as "guests". This shows that Maytree reaches people who are at significant risk of suicide. Guests report both short term relief and longer term benefits. These changes are understood, through applying crisis intervention theory, as being generated by the opportunities for change in the Maytree approach. Thus, there is the potential for a benign cycle to be established. Maytree's model is different from that of mainstream, statutory services; we conclude that Maytree complements these services and also challenges the values and frameworks of statutory provision in the field of suicide prevention.     

Rural democratisation in Mexico's deep south: grassroots right-to-know campaigns in Guerrero

In Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, rural social and civic movements are increasingly claiming their right to information as a tool to hold the state publicly accountable, as part of their ongoing issue-specific social, economic, and civic struggles. This study reviews the historical, social and political landscape that grounds campaigns for rural democratisation in Guerrero, including Mexico's recent information access reforms and then compares two different regional social movements that have claimed the ‘right to know’. For some movements, the demand for information rights is part of a sustained strategy, for others it is a tactic, but the claim bridges both more resistance-oriented and more negotiation-oriented social and civic movements.     

Introduction: New directions in agrarian political economy

For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livelihoods. This introductory essay highlights the four classic themes represented in Volume 1 of the JPS anniversary collection: land and resource dispossession, the financialization of food and agriculture, vulnerability and marginalization, and the blurring of the rural-urban relations through hybrid livelihoods. Contributors show both how new iterations of long-evident processes continue to catch peasants and smallholders in the crosshairs of crises and how many manage to face these challenges, developing new sources and sites of livelihood production.     

An Analysis of Hounsfield Unit Values and Volumetrics from Computerized Tomography of the Proximal Femur for Sex and Age Estimation

Sex and age are two elements in the establishment of a biological profile for forensic identification. While the pelvic bones are the most ideal structures for sex estimation, the condition of a body is not always ideal due to the nature of death, such as in mass disasters, or postmortem processes. This study utilized CT scans and resultant 3D models of 100 male and 100 female adults of known ages ranging from 18 to 98 years old to collect volumetric and Hounsfield unit measurements of the proximal femur. Equations were created to establish logistic regression models for sex estimation and linear regression models for age estimation. The resultant sex estimation method had an accuracy of 93.5% and utilized the volume of the proximal femur. This study provides three linear regression models for age with an accuracy range of 86%–92% ±12 years. As imaging technologies are increasingly adopted for forensic purposes, the power of 3D data will provide the opportunity for more quantitative and reproducible analyses. The proposed method for sex and age estimation provides a reliable tool that can be utilized in both day-to-day casework and disaster victim identification.     

Partisan Attachment and Democracy in Mexico: Some Cautionary Observations

Party identification is a central concept in studies of parties and elections. Drawing from an extensive literature linking the concept of party identification to the understanding of Mexico's electoral politics, this article explores how the Mexican experience informs the understanding of party identification in general, especially in emerging democracies. There, voters' attachments to political parties are usually seen both as essential to and a positive sign of democratic development. This study finds evidence consistent with these arguments in the Mexican case but also identifies aspects of Mexican party identification that are not so clearly supportive of democratic politics; that indeed may delay or even undermine democratization. These findings illustrate the relevance of the Mexican experience to the wider literature on parties and elections, particularly the well-documented relationship between party identifications and democratization.     

When a corporation rapes: perceptions of rape in civil court for corporate defendants

In recent years, the coupling of poor outcomes for rape victims in criminal court and the widening scope of legal responsibility for sexual assault has prompted plaintiffs to file civil suits for rape against corporations. Unfortunately, we know little about juror perception of civilly litigated rape against corporate defendants and most jury research involving corporate defendants concerns non-sexual injury cases (e.g. premises liability, automobile accidents). With the increasing number of corporations being sued civilly for rape, we need to understand how civil juries perceive these cases. The present study investigated mock jurors’ perceptions of a fictional civil rape trial against a hotel. Community members (N?=?155) read one of three trial summaries: Civil rape trial against the alleged perpetrator, civil rape trial against a hotel, or criminal rape trial. Results indicate females have higher pro-plaintiff judgments than males in civil court, perceptions of greed typically associated with civil litigation apply to rape, and favorable plaintiff decisions are most likely against a corporate defendant. Also, mental models suggest mock jurors conceptualize criminal and civil rape cases against an individual similarly. We discuss our results in terms of psychological, legal and practical expectations when suing for rape.     

The World Bank and social capital: Lessons from ten rural development projects in the Philippines and Mexico

Social capital is widely recognized as one of the few sources of capital available to the poor, yet the processes by which development policies affect the accumulation of that social capital are not well understood. The World Bank, through its funding of development projects, affects the institutional environments for the accumulation of such social capital. The question is how to determine whether that institutional context is enabling, and to what degree. This paper compares ten recent World Bank-funded rural development projects in Mexico and the Philippines to explore how the processes of project design and implementation influence the institutional environments for the accumulation of horizontal, vertical, and intersectoral forms of pro-poor social capital. The findings have conceptual and policy implications for understanding the political dynamics of creating enabling environments for social capital accumulation by the poor.     

Megan's Law: Crime and Democracy in Late Modern America

To an unprecedented degree American society at the turn of the twentieth century is governed through crime. Nearly three percent of adults are in the custody of the correctional system. Crime and fear of crime enter into a large part of the fundamental decisions in life: where to live, how to raise your family, where to locate your business, where and when to shop, and so on. The crime victim has become the veritable outline of a new form of political subjectivity. This essay explores the complex entanglements of democracy and governing through crime. The effort to build democratic governance after the American Revolution was carried out in part through the problem of crime and punishment. Today, however, the enormous expansion of governing through crime endangers the effort to reinvent democracy for the twenty-first century.