Professionals' attributions and referral decisions in cases of domestic violence

This thesis is the first national study of workers who have contact with victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. It highlights that the victim and perpetrator's gender, as well as the relevant professional's agency type and experience, all influenced their attitudes to, and service delivery decisions with, domestic violence-related clients. The portfolio utilises four case studies to examine the way that two Victorian sex offender programs attempt to balance risk-need and good lives principles in the assessment and treatment of sex offenders.

Homophobic bullying and human rights : non-deficit approaches in queer youth wellbeing policy and practice

This chapter is concerned with ways for improving the capacity of school communities to provide queer young people with stimulating educational experiences that productively engage with the realities of their lives and which promote and enhance their wellbeing. By "queer" or "LBGTI" I mean to refer to all of those young people who do not conform to prevailing expectations regarding gender and sexual identity and behaviours, those young people who may be lesbian,gay, bisexual, transgender or intersexual (lGBTI), as well as all of those young people who have an association with gender and sexual diversity (for example, the straight fey boy who gets called a poofta; the teenage girl with lesbian parents, etc.). Methodologically, this chapter draws on a tradition of Foucauldian cultural analysis which acknowledges that gender and sexual identities are not stable or fixed, but that they are generated by influential discourses (e.g. my identity as a "man" in Melbourne today is mediated by contemporary discourses of masculinity, of Australianness, of class and so on) (for example, see Foucault 1984, 1990, 1992 and 1998).

This chapter argues that conventional approaches to school improvement for queer students normally focus on strategies for reducing the victimisation of teenage homosexuals, and that such strategies rely on dominant discourses of safety and bullying. I examine a recent example of this policy approach and use it as a starting point for considering the benefits and the constraints of a victim-based approach to queer youth wellbeing policy. The chapter then moves into a discussion about the recent introduction of human rights legislation in Victoria and how this can assist a move in policy and practice towards a more positive and diffuse engagement with gender and sexual diversity.

Chaos theory based detection against network mimicking DDoS attacks

DDoS attack traffic is difficult to differentiate from legitimate network traffic during transit from the attacker, or zombies, to the victim. In this paper, we use the theory of network self-similarity to differentiate DDoS flooding attack traffic from legitimate self-similar traffic in the network. We observed that DDoS traffic causes a strange attractor to develop in the pattern of network traffic. From this observation, we developed a neural network detector trained by our DDoS prediction algorithm. Our preliminary experiments and analysis indicate that our proposed chaotic model can accurately and effectively detect DDoS attack traffic. Our approach has the potential to not only detect attack traffic during transit, but to also filter it.

An empirical investigation of women's affective responses to filmed violence

This thesis examined the subjective emotional responses of women to depictions of violent and sexually violent film. Findings highlighted the significance of contextual factors, such as the gender of the perpetrator and victim upon viewers, and found that exposure to sexual violence in the media has important implications for women. The portfolio's four case studies demonstrate the complexities involved in making risk judgements and treatment planning given the diversity of offences and needs, as well as the implications these decisions can have when determining the amenability of offenders to specific sex offender treatment.

Examination of the consistency of interviewer performance across three distinct interview contexts

The current study examined the consistency of investigative interviewers' performance (n=31) across three distinct interview paradigms: (a) a mock interview where an adult actor played the role of a child recalling abuse, (b) a mock interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event that was staged at the child's school, and (c) a field interview where the interviewer elicited a statement of abuse from a child. Performance was measured by calculating the proportion of open-ended and leading questions, and by eliciting expert ratings of the presence of a range of problem behaviours commonly exhibited by interviewers. Overall, the performance of individual interviewers was relatively stable across the tasks. Heterogeneity in stability, however, differed according to the type of question and the nature of the event being examined. In particular, the mock interview paradigm where the adult acted the role of an alleged child abuse victim produced a measure of performance that was more similar to the field interview than the interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event. The implications of the findings for trainers, and directions for future research, are discussed.

An examination of the association between interviewer question type and story-grammar detail in child witness interviews about abuse

Objective : This study compared the effects of open-ended versus specific questions, and various types of open-ended questions, in eliciting story-grammar detail in child abuse interviews.
Methods : The sample included 34 police interviews with child witnesses aged 5–15 years (M age = 9 years, 9 months). The interviewers’ questions and their relative sub-types were classified according to definitions reported in the child interview training literature. The children's responses were classified according to the proportion of story grammar and the prevalence of individual story grammar elements as defined by Stein and Glenn (1979).
Results : Open-ended questions were more effective at eliciting story grammar than specific questions. This finding was revealed across three age groups, two interview phases and irrespective of how question effectiveness was measured. However, not all types of open-ended questions were equally effective. Open-ended questions that encouraged a broad response, or asked the child to elaborate on a part of their account, elicited more story-grammar detail compared to open-ended questions that requested clarification of concepts or descriptions of the next (or another) activity or detail within a sequence.
Conclusions : This study demonstrates that children's ability to provide story-grammar detail is maximised when there is minimal prompting from the interviewer.
Practical implications : Given the association between story grammar production and victim credibility, greater guidance is warranted in interviewer training programs in relation to the effects and administration of different types of open-ended questions.

When planes fall out of the sky : the war body on screen

I can’t keep my eyes off the war body, even though in the repeated seeing of it I feel nauseous: implicated in, and affected by, its painful coming into being. In this age of the War on Terror, wherever I look, wherever I am directed to look by the all-seeing “vision machines” that “illuminate” our identities (Virilio 1994, 70), the body of the soldier, terrorist, hostage, and victim come into troubling view. These war bodies are real in the ontological and phenomenological sense; they are also metaphoric, simulated, and discursive. In this chapter I will define and explore the complex ways in which these three articulating axis—war, in its militaristic and ideological sense; the screen, in all its multifaceted forms and contexts; and the body, individual and social—conjoin and synthesize, disintegrate and dislocate, in a phantasmagoric but simultaneously desperately real collision of power, desire, and control. My main contention will be that the war body on screen is a “sickening” creation that we have desired into being, so that we may feel, better understand, and be taken over by its terror. This terror of living ultimately helps ensure our docility, a docility required by the late capitalist nation-state; it also reconnect us to our bodies in profoundly moving and potentially challenging ways.

CALD : surviving various application-layer DDoS attacks that mimic flash crowd

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a continuous critical threat to the Internet. Derived from the low layers, new application-layer-based DDoS attacks utilizing legitimate HTTP requests to overwhelm victim resources are more undetectable. The case may be more serious when suchattacks mimic or occur during the flash crowd event of a popular Website. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of CALD, an architectural extension to protect Web servers against various DDoS attacks that masquerade as flash crowds. CALD provides real-time detection using mess tests but is different from other systems that use resembling methods. First, CALD uses a front-end sensor to monitor thetraffic that may contain various DDoS attacks or flash crowds. Intense pulse in the traffic means possible existence of anomalies because this is the basic property of DDoS attacks and flash crowds. Once abnormal traffic is identified, the sensor sends ATTENTION signal to activate the attack detection module. Second, CALD dynamically records the average frequency of each source IP and check the total mess extent. Theoretically, the mess extent of DDoS attacks is larger than the one of flash crowds. Thus, with some parameters from the attack detection module, the filter is capable of letting the legitimate requests through but the attack traffic stopped. Third, CALD may divide the security modules away from the Web servers. As a result, it keeps maximum performance on the kernel web services, regardless of the harassment from DDoS. In the experiments, the records from www.sina.com and www.taobao.com have proved the value of CALD.

A multidiscipline approach to governing virtual property theft in virtual worlds

The crime of virtual property theft has become a serious problem in virtual worlds in recent years. Players of these games are repeatedly falling victim to this crime, with little or no repercussion for the offender. Virtual property often has a substantial real world monetary value and the theft of such items impacts greatly on victims. The problem of virtual property theft is complex, involving many legal, regulatory and technological factors. As such, trying to address this problem in a single dimension is not sufficient, each factor need to be addressed with a multidisciplinary approach. In addressing this problem, this paper provides a model for describing the issue of virtual property trading and the issues associated with virtual property theft. The paper also proposes an approach for handling virtual property theft based on improvements to laws related to virtual property and theft, improvements to the virtual world software components and better regulation from governments.

Assessing female sexual offenders' motivations and cognitions : an exploratory study

Semi-structured interviews eliciting cognitions and motivations were carried out with 15 incarcerated female child sexual abusers (nearly 50% of the current UK female sexual offender prison population). Qualitative analysis indicated that four of the five motivational schemas (implicit theories) suggested by Ward (Ward, 2000; Ward & Keenan, 1999) to underlie male sexual offenders' cognitions could be clearly identified in women, these were: Uncontrollability (UN, identified in 87% of participants), Dangerous world (DW, 53%), Children as sexual objects (CSO, 47%) and Nature of harm (NH, 20%). Entitlement, the final implicit theory (IT), commonly found in males, was not identified in any participants in the sample. Further analysis indicated that there were four main motivational types of offender based on combinations of these ITs. These were: (1) presence of DW/CSO, indicating sexual motivation and cognitions with fear of violence; (2) presence of DW/no CSO, indicating fear of violence with no sexual cognition or motivation; (3) presence of CSO/no DW, indicating sexual motivation and cognition; the NH IT also strongly featured in this group; and (4) presence of UN/no DW or CSO, indicating lack of control, sometimes with sense of protection for the victim. Suggestions are made on how the results can inform theoretical developments in the field as well as policy and practice.

Empathy and adolescent sexual offenders : a review of the literature

A significant proportion of sexual offenses has been found to be committed by adolescent offenders. Although there is overlap in the backgrounds of adolescent sexual offenders and juvenile delinquents, in recent times there has been an increased effort to identify and treat adolescent sexual offenders as a distinct population. Adolescent sexual offenders are thought to be empathy deficient, with empathy development a commonly defined treatment goal. There is confusion, however, as to whether such empathy deficits are general in nature, are towards certain groups of people, or are own victim-specific. This article provides a review of the literature concerning empathy and adolescent sexual offenders and, based on this assessment, recommendations are made for future research.

A haptic training environment for the heart myoblast cell injection procedure

The heart muscle of a cardiac arrest victim continues to accumulate damage throughout its lifetime. This reduces the heart's ability to pump sufficient oxygen and nutrient blood to meet the body's needs. Medical researchers have shown that direct injection of pre-harvested skeletal myoblast cells into the heart can restore some muscle function [1]. This operative procedure usually necessitates the surgeon to open a patient's chest. The open chest procedure is usually a lengthy process and often extends the recovery time of the patient. Alternatively, a high accuracy surgical aid robotic system can be used to assist the thoracoscopic surgery [2][3]. While the robotic surgical method aids faster patient recovery, a less experienced surgeon can potentially cause damage to surrounding tissue.

This paper presents a study into the development of a virtual haptically-enabled heart myoblast injection simulation environment, which can be used to train new surgeons to get hands on experience with the process. The paper also discusses the development of a generic constraint motion technique for needle insertion. Experiments on human performance measures and efficacy, while interacting with haptic feedback training models, are also presented. The experiment involved 10 operators, with each person repeating the needle insertion and injection 10 times. A notable improvement in the task execution time with the number of repetitions was observed. Operators improved their time by up to 300% compared to their first training attempt for a static heart scenario. Under a dynamic heart motion, operator's performance was slightly lower, with the successful rate of completing the experiment reduced from 84% to 75%.

Attacking anonymous web browsing at local area networks through browsing dynamics

The majority of current anonymous systems focus on improving anonymity at the network and website level in order to defend against traffic analysis attacks. However, the vulnerability of the connections between end users and the anonymous network do not attract any attention yet. For the first time, we reveal an end user browsing dynamics based attack on anonymous browsing systems at the LAN where the victim locates. This new attack method is fundamentally different from existing attack methodologies. In general, web surfers browse the web following certain patterns, such as requesting a web page, viewing it and requesting another page. The browsing pattern of a victim can be clearly observed by a local adversary when the victim is viewing the web without protection. Unfortunately, browsing dynamics releases rich information for attacking even though the web page content is encrypted. In order to show how a local eavesdropper can decipher which pages have been viewed with the knowledge of user browsing dynamics and the public information of a given website, we established a specific hidden Markov model to represent browsing dynamics for the website. By using this model, we can then identify the optimal of the accessed pages using the Viterbi algorithm. In order to confirm the effectiveness of the revealed attack method, we have conducted extensive experiments on a real data set. The results demonstrated that the attack accuracy can be more than 80%. A few possible counter-attack strategies are discussed at the end of the paper.

Improving the legal aspects of police interviewing of suspects

The purpose of this paper is to provide some guidance to police interviewers and trainers in relation to improving the legal aspects of police questioning of suspects. The paper is written with reference to Victorian legislation. Sixteen professionals (defence barristers, academics, prosecutors, and detectives), all with extensive knowledge of the law and experience evaluating police interviews with suspects, took part in individual indepth interviews (M ¼ 100 minutes). The aim of the interviews was to discuss the limitations of police interviews with suspects and to provide exemplars of concerns from a set of de-identified transcripts that had been provided to the professionals prior to their interviews with us. Overall, four key limitations were raised: (a) inadequate particularisation of offences, (b) inappropriate phrasing of questions, (c) poor introduction of allegations, and (d) questions that unfairly ask the suspect to comment on the victim’s perspective. These concerns and their practical implications are discussed.

Adolescent victims with an intellectual disability : perceived credibility in cases of sexual abuse

The study aimed to assess perceptions of the credibility of adolescent victims with intellectual disability. Results revealed that victim and participant characteristics influenced perceptions of the credibility of the victim and verdict responses. Findings related to the level of ID, type of offence, perceptions of competency, honesty, suggestibility, and gender of victim and participant.