When deterrence works - and when it doesn't: a comparison of Sweden's prostitution law and UK's Dangerous Dogs Act

Many pieces of legislation have been implemented with the anticipation - or justification - that they will have a deterrent effect. Deterrence was clearly argued in the debate preceding the Swedish prostitution law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services, but less so regarding the Dangerous Dogs Act, which was a very rapid response to a particular moral panic. As it turned out, the Swedish law has had a deterrent effect on street prostitution in that 'respectable' buyers were deterred. It will be argued that it is this very 'respectability' that makes deterrence work in this case. Regarding the Dangerous Dogs Act, the owners of Pit Bulls and other banned breeds are not considered 'respectable' and the banning might have had the reversed effect - increasing the attraction of these dogs, rather than deterring the ownership. Apart from deterrence and its consequences, the rendering invisible of key actors - buyers and owners respectively - and the use of symbolic legislation to promote moral messages will also be considered. [From the Author]

Fire safety engineering and ship design using advanced fire and evacuation simulation

When designing a new passenger ship or modifying an existing design, how do we ensure that the proposed design and crew emergency procedures are safe from an evacuation resulting from fire or other incident? In the wake of major maritime disasters such as the Scandinavian Star, Herald of Free Enterprise, Estonia and in light of the growth in the number of high density, high-speed ferries and large capacity cruise ships, issues concerning the evacuation of passengers and crew at sea are receiving renewed interest. Fire and evacuation models with features such as the ability to realistically simulate the spread of heat and smoke and the human response to fire as well as the capability to model human performance in heeled orientations linked to a virtual reality environment that produces realistic visualisations of the modelled scenarios are now available and can be used to aid the engineer in assessing ship design and procedures. This paper describes the maritimeEXODUS ship evacuation and the SMARTFIRE fire simulation model and provides an example application demonstrating the use of the models in performing fire and evacuation analysis for a large passenger ship partially based on the requirements of MSC circular 1033