Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations

When mental health, medical, and social work professionals and paraprofessionals make false positive or false negative errors in their judgments about the validity of allegations of child sexual abuse, the consequences can be catastrophic for the affected children and adults. Because of the high stakes, practitioners, legal decision makers, and policy makers should have some idea of the magnitude and variability of error rates in this domain. A novel approach was used to estimate individual error rates for 110 professionals (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and others) who conduct or participate in forensic child sexual abuse evaluations. The median estimated false positive and false negative error rates were 0.18 and 0.36, respectively. Estimated error rates varied markedly from one participant to the next. For example, the false positive error rate estimates ranged from 0.00 to 0.83. These estimates are based on participants’ self-reported substantiation rates and on their subjective frequency distributions for the probability of truth for the abuse allegations they evaluate.     

Understanding (Mis)classification Trends of Latin Americans in Fordisc 3.1: Incorporating Cranial Morphology,Microgeographic Origin,and Admixture Proportions for Interpretation

Assigning correct population affinity to a skeleton can contribute important information to an investigation—yet recent work highlights high error rates when classifying Latinos with a traditional tool, Fordisc 3.1 (FD3). Our study examines whether misclassification trends exist, and whether these can be used to infer population affinity. We examine the relationships among ancestry, geography, and FD3 misclassifications of Latinos using canonical variate analysis and unsupervised model‐based clustering of craniometrics. Northern Mexicans appear more strongly associated with FD3 references samples with elevated amounts of European ancestry (e.g., American Blacks and Whites), while Southern Mexicans are more strongly associated with FD3 reference samples with reduced amounts of European ancestry (e.g., Guatemalans and Native Americans). FD3 classifications revealed that Latinos exhibited lower posterior probabilities when compared to other common case demographics (Whites and African Americas), even when the classification was “correct.” We make recommendations for practitioner interpretation of FD3 reports for casework.     

Divergence in Community Participation Policy: Analysing Localism and Community Empowerment Using a Theory of Change Approach

The last two decades have witnessed a significant turn towards community participation in public policy around the globe, raising concerns that states are resorting to ‘government through community’, shifting responsibilities onto communities. In order to unpack the ambiguous rhetoric of policy statements, this article employs ideas from evaluation methodology to develop a generic theory of change for community participation policy. The model is then utilised to analyse and compare the UK Coalition Government’s Big Society/Localism agenda and the Scottish Government’s Community Empowerment approach, demonstrating the ways in which these represent a clear example of policy divergence, and potentially significant alternatives to state–community relations in the context of austerity. The article also demonstrates the potential wider applicability of ‘theories of change’ methodology for policy analysis.     

Comparison of Abuse Alleged by Same- and Opposite-Gender Litigants as Cited in Requests for Abuse Prevention Orders

Domestic violence is commonly portrayed as something male batterers do to their female victims. Much research excludes study of female-perpetrated violence. This study develops a two-gender measure of abuse as documented by requests for protection. All nonimpounded Abuse Prevention Orders (M.G.L. c. 209A) issued in Massachusetts' Gardner District Court in the year 1997 were analyzed by gender to examine the level and types of violence alleged by plaintiffs. The level and types of violence were categorized and measured by examining Abuse Claimed Checkboxes found on each Complaint for Protection and by applying quantitative scales to affidavits, or plaintiff statements, filed as part of each request for protection. Despite widespread misconceptions that tend to minimize female abuse, examination of these court documents shows that male and female defendants, who were the subject of a complaint in domestic relation cases, while sometimes exhibiting different aggressive tendencies, measured almost equally abusive in terms of the overall level of psychological and physical aggression.