Child Sexual Abuse Perpetrated by Women: Case Series and Review of the Literature

The literature on child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrated by female sexual offenders (FSOs) is exiguous, and many studies have focused on judicial databases. The present retrospective study, instead, analyzed clinical and judicial data of a group of both victims and alleged FSOs, to additionally include women who have not been convicted by the criminal justice system, but who hold strong clinical suspicions of being perpetrators of CSA. The medical records and the Court files of 11 children and their eight suspected FSOs have been collected and critically reviewed in light of the literature to date. This approach allowed for a deeper understanding of the relationship between child and FSO. The authors hypothesize that the victims’ severe psychopathological outcomes were a result of a failure to develop appropriate attachments with their prospective caregivers, which could have been damaged by the pathological relationship with FSOs, who were the victims’ caregivers.     

Einsteinian practice and Newtonian discourse: An ethical crisis in mediation

Book reviews in this article:
John Haynes and Christine Haynes , Mediating Divorce: Casebook of Strategies for Successful Family Negotiations .
Kenneth Kressel and Dean Pruitt , Mediation Research; The Process and Effectiveness of Third Party Intervention .
Nancy Rogers and Craig McEwen , Mediation: Law, Policy, Practice .     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

Authoritarian Regimes and Their Permitted Oppositions: Election Day Outcomes in Cuba

Electoral opposition to long‐established authoritarian regimes may be loyal or rejectionist. Loyal oppositionists vote to send a selective signal to rulers; rejectionist oppositionists vote blank or void the ballot in full disapproval. In Cuba, the number of candidates equals the number of seats, yet voters may vote blank, void, or selectively (choosing some but not all candidates on the ballot), although the Communist Party has campaigned for all candidates. This article uses a unique dataset for Cuba's 2013 National Assembly elections to study aggregate opposition outcomes. It shows the emergence of a loyal opposition, which sometimes votes for and sometimes against Communist Party candidates. The rejectionist opposition, stable over time, never votes for Communist Party candidates; it is found where the Communist Party behaves monopolistically. This combined opposition has better national‐level political information; it comes from more educated or larger urban areas or areas closer to Havana.     

Bottom-level organizational changes within entrepreneurial and engaged models of university: insights from Italy

We analyze the way in which individual academics and research groups organize their third mission activities before and after the institutionalization of third mission strategies by the university governing body. Drawing on the literature, we put forward an interpretative framework that links central entrepreneurial or engaged strategies with the way academics organize their third mission activities. Then, we propose an application of this frame to the case of the University of Florence (Italy), before and after its transition to more structured entrepreneurial and engaged models. We use a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. A cluster analysis allows identifying different types of academics involved in the third mission based on the way they organize their activities. Furthermore, a set of interviews to academics complements the comparison and the interpretation of the clusters obtained. The following paths of change emerge: (1) increased proportion of academics involved in third mission activities; (2) bottom-level initiatives that are aligned with central strategies; and (3) increased heterogeneity of bottom-level organization forms, with a relative loss of importance of the group dimension with respect to the individual academics and an increased specialization of research groups.