There Is No Place Like Home: The Body as the Scene of the Crime in Sexual Assault Intervention

The body is the scene of the crime, is an oft-repeated phrase among nurses conducting sexual assault forensic examinations. This instruction reminds nurses that the object under scrutiny, the sexually violated body, is the location and source of establishing legal evidence. The nurses\u27 interest lies in recovering evidentiary materials towards deriving a future juridical truth and providing a means for remedy or restitution. The constitution of truth obscures how the subject comes to be at home and dwell in a world where rape occurs. This article argues that regarding the body as a crime scene is more than a rhetorical or pedagogical move made by forensic practitioners. Rather, forensic examination is constituted through rigorous and meticulous techniques that scrutinize the body of the sexually violated subject in such a way that the harming and healing capacities of the domestic are disarticulated from one another. What is at stake is the state\u27s reliance on a notion of the domestic as a sphere to which one might return and heal, even in instances where the domestic itself is the source or site of injury, such as incest and domestic violence

Compelling Intimacies: Domesticity, Sexuality, and Agency

This introduction highlights what we call Compelling Intimacies —the multiple desires, affects, and affinities that arise at the intersection of institutions, actors, technologies, and ethical discourses to exert persuasive pressures on subjects. Each article animates different facets of the intensities born of intimacy as they operate across social and relational fields. The authors separate agency from intention in their efforts to identify the vitality of human and non-human relations. Together, the articles demonstrate how domesticities arise through diverse sets of circumstances, emerging in multiple incarnations—often in the same household—in such a way as to generate a wide range of affects and affinities. Finally, each author turns attention to the so-called small events that come to affirm or deny life as given form in everyday household arrangements, kin relations, friendships, and institutional settings, thereby suggesting the political stakes evoked by differing forms of care

Gendered Violence and the Ethics of Social Science Research

The issue of ethical conduct in research settings is important and complex. As tenure-track researchers who study gendered violence, we found Clark and Walker’s discussion provocative, thoughtful, and interesting. They urge researchers to attend both to the structural dynamics of research carried out under the pressures of tenure and promotion while advocating an ethical frame that draws attention to the limited definition of risk or harm that animates typical human subjects research. Victims of violence, they argue, should not be subjected to a standardized understanding of risk. A broader framework is needed, one that brings into conversation virtue ethics with consequentialist and ontological frameworks. Given the impossible task of responding to the many points discussed by Clark and Walker, we chose to focus on four areas. In all likelihood, these areas of discussion reflect our own interests rather than Clark and Walker’s, but challenged to think seriously about research ethics in victimization studies, we attend to the following points. First, we seek to put virtue ethics in conversation with care ethics, in part because care ethics formed an important component of feminist discourse during the historical period in which institutional review boards came into being. Although virtue ethics may have lost its masculinist inflection after shedding its etymological roots,1 care ethics was explicitly seen as suited for the feminist subject. Following our discussion of care ethics, we address the question of setting victims of violence apart as a special class of vulnerable human research subjects. We argue that such a designation may yield more problems than it does solutions. Next, we turn to the violence of epistemology as a concern in research ethics. How do we come to an ethical definition of the research object, and to whom are we accountable? Finally, we turn to the relation of care when carrying out ethically and methodologically sound research

Data Sets: Word Embeddings Learned from Tweets and General Data

A word embedding is a low-dimensional, dense and real- valued vector representation of a word. Word embeddings have been used in many NLP tasks. They are usually gener- ated from a large text corpus. The embedding of a word cap- tures both its syntactic and semantic aspects. Tweets are short, noisy and have unique lexical and semantic features that are different from other types of text. Therefore, it is necessary to have word embeddings learned specifically from tweets. In this paper, we present ten word embedding data sets. In addition to the data sets learned from just tweet data, we also built embedding sets from the general data and the combination of tweets with the general data. The general data consist of news articles, Wikipedia data and other web data. These ten embedding models were learned from about 400 million tweets and 7 billion words from the general text. In this paper, we also present two experiments demonstrating how to use the data sets in some NLP tasks, such as tweet sentiment analysis and tweet topic classification tasks

Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials

Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneys’ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshaw’s focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of children’s experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the child’s unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status

Binding of Oxovanadium(IV) Complexes to Blood Serum Albumins

In this work the binding of VIVO2+ and VIVO-complexes to serum albumins {human serum albumin (HSA), bovine serum albumin (BSA) and porcine serum albumin (PSA)} are studied using circular dichroism (CD), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and visible absorption spectroscopy. The results confirm previous findings that VIVO2+ occupies at least two types of binding sites on albumin: ‘the strong vanadium binding site’ (designated by VBS1) and ‘the weak vanadium binding sites’ (designated by VBS2). VBS1 binds 1 mol equivalent of VIVO2+. On the other hand VBS2 correspond to binding of several mol equivalents of VIVO, and studies done with PSA in the presence of excess ZnII ions indicate that VSB2 corresponds to two distinct types of sites. The hyperfine coupling constant Az for VIVO2+ binding at VBS2 on HSA and BSA are all very similar (~168 × 10-4 cm-1) but differ slightly on PSA (~166 × 10-4 cm-1) due to differences in the binding sets. When (VIVO)-HSA systems are titrated with maltol ternary species of (maltol)m(VIVO)mHSA and (maltol)2m(VIVO)mHSA stoichiometry form which are clearly distinguishable from the binary (VIVO)-HSA system by the type and intensity of the CD spectra recorded. Changes are also observable in the intensity of the X-band EPR spectra, but not much in the hyperfine coupling constants Az, which are all in the range 166-167 × 10-4 cm-1. The results further demonstrate that the presence of maltol may enhance the binding of VIVO to albumin

Is Chaalia/Pan Masala harmful for health? practices and knowledge of children of schools in Mahmoodabad and Chanesar Goth, Karachi

OBJECTIVE: To determine the practices and knowledge of harmful effects regarding use of Chaalia and Pan Masala in three schools of Mahmoodabad and Chanesar Goth, Jamshed Town, Karachi, Pakistan. METHODS: To achieve the objective a cross-sectional design was used in three government schools of Mahmoodabad and Chanesar Goth, Jamshed Town, Karachi. Students of either gender drawn from these schools fulfilling the inclusion and exclusion criteria were interviewed using a pre-coded structured questionnaire. Along with demographic data, questions regarding frequency of Chaalia and Pan Masala use, practices of this habit in friends and family and place of procurement of these substances, were inquired. Knowledge was assessed about harmful effects and its source of information. In addition, practices in relation to that knowledge were assessed. RESULTS: A total of 370 students were interviewed over a period of six weeks, of which 205 (55.4%) were boys. The ages of the students were between 10 and 15 years. Thirty one percent of the fathers and 62% of the mothers were uneducated. The frequency of use of any brand of Chaalia was found to be 94% and that of Pan Masala was 73.8%. Eighty five percent of them were regular users. A large majority (88%) procured the substances themselves from near their homes. Ninety five percent of the children had friends with the same habits. Eighty four percent were using the substances in full knowledge of their families. Chaalia was considered harmful for health by 96% and Pan Masala by 60%. Good taste was cited as a reason for continuing the habit by 88.5% of the children and use by friends by 57%. Knowledge about established harmful effects was variable. Knowledge about harmful effects was high in both daily and less than daily users . CONCLUSION: The frequency of habits of Chaalia and Pan Masala chewing, by school children in lower socio-economic areas is extremely high. The probable reasons for this high frequency are taste, the widespread use of these substances by family members and friends, low cost and easy availability