Domestic Violence in Immigrant Communities: Case Studies (Hindi)

This document contains excerpts from the book Domestic Violence in Immigrant Communities: Case Studies by Dr. Ferzana Chaze, Dr. Bethany Osborne, Ms. Archana Medhekar and Dr. Purnima George that have been translated into Hindi so that a wider audience can access them. The book is a freely accessible educational resource to be used in training with social work and legal practitioners.<div><div>The translated case studies in this document are real life stories of immigrant women who have experienced domestic violence in Canada. The cases emerged from closed legal case files handled by Archana Medhekar Law Office and reflect the stories of racialized immigrant women who experienced domestic violence in Canada and who sought legal help. Permission to carry out this research was received from the Research Ethics Board of both Ryerson University and Sheridan College in June 2019. All cases included in this research took place within the past ten years and were closed for at least one year prior to the start of the research.</div></div><div>In addition to the case studies, included are questions for discussion with community groups on the topic of domestic violence. We hope you will find this tool useful as you engage your communities on issues around domestic violence.<br></div>

Domestic Violence in Immigrant Communities: Case Studies (Hindi)

This document contains excerpts from the book Domestic Violence in Immigrant Communities: Case Studies by Dr. Ferzana Chaze, Dr. Bethany Osborne, Ms. Archana Medhekar and Dr. Purnima George that have been translated into Hindi so that a wider audience can access them. The book is a freely accessible educational resource to be used in training with social work and legal practitioners.<div><div>The translated case studies in this document are real life stories of immigrant women who have experienced domestic violence in Canada. The cases emerged from closed legal case files handled by Archana Medhekar Law Office and reflect the stories of racialized immigrant women who experienced domestic violence in Canada and who sought legal help. Permission to carry out this research was received from the Research Ethics Board of both Ryerson University and Sheridan College in June 2019. All cases included in this research took place within the past ten years and were closed for at least one year prior to the start of the research.</div></div><div>In addition to the case studies, included are questions for discussion with community groups on the topic of domestic violence. We hope you will find this tool useful as you engage your communities on issues around domestic violence.<br></div>

Criminalizing Homelessness: Circumstances Surrounding Criminal Trespassing and People Experiencing Homelessness

Criminal trespassing (CT) is an understudied misdemeanor offense often enforced to maintain control over contested spaces and, in practice, often disproportionately used against disenfranchised populations such as the homeless and mentally ill. This study uses the CT case files of a county criminal district attorney’s office to investigate how cases involving defendants experiencing homelessness are handled compared with other defendants. Results show that homeless defendants make up a substantial portion of all CT cases, are more likely to be repeat CT defendants, and account for most jail sentences. Whereas defendants with mental health issues were often deferred for services, this avenue was not similarly extended to homeless defendants. Qualitative analyses show varied circumstances related to CT arrest for homeless and non-homeless defendants. The findings suggest various policy implications to refocus police resources and promote interagency cooperation to address the underlying causes of CT involvement by people experiencing homelessness.

Exploring Interactions in the Sickness Insurance System in Terms of Power and Trust

Purpose Activation policies and efforts to reduce sick leave rates has influenced sickness insurance systems in Western countries, which has led to social security being more connected with work and attempts to expose malingering among the sickness absent. The aim of this study was to explore how power and trust are expressed by clients and stakeholders within the Swedish sickness insurance system. Methods This was a longitudinal qualitative study based on semi structured interviews and case files from 31 clients on sick leave in Sweden. Data was analyzed using a thematic analysis. Results The main theme ‘Acts of power and distrust’ illustrates how stakeholders’ express suspicions towards each other, and how clients need to demonstrate desire and efforts to return to work which other stakeholders verified. Conclusions The clients desire to prove themselves able to contribute to society was prominent in this study and power relations need to be acknowledged, in particular between client and the SIA. Further, to preserve citizens trust in the system, the system needs to demonstrate trust also in the clients.

The Children

The children’s early experiences provide a context for assessing subsequent outcomes. Data collected from case files and records presented to the courts show that before separation from birth parents, almost all 210 adoptees had experienced serious and often multiple forms of maltreatment; this was the primary reason for removal. Before entering their adoptive homes, 69% of the adoptees had had four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), 32% had experienced failed reunifications and 48% had had three or more foster placements. Adverse childhood experiences before entry to care, harmful experiences in care and repeated exposure to grief and loss are likely to have contributed to the high prevalence of emotional and behavioural difficulties, displayed by 49% of the adoptees. According to our classification, 57% were at high risk of experiencing adverse outcomes in adulthood.

Issues Facing the Birth Parents and Their Implications for Open Adoption

The 210 children in the full cohort came from 142 families. Their birth parents’ circumstances provide a context for evaluating adoption outcomes. The chapter explores data collected from the children’s case files and records presented to the court at the time the order was made. Parents demonstrated a high incidence of factors known to be associated with recurrent child abuse: 31% of mothers had experienced abuse in their own childhoods; 45% were known to statutory child welfare services before their child’s birth, and 29% had already experienced the permanent removal of a child. Almost all parents struggled with complex factors including mental health problems, substance misuse, unstable relationships and domestic abuse that placed their children at risk of harm; for some parents, cognitive impairment was an exacerbating factor. About 10% of birth parents had died, and 23% of mothers and 60% of fathers had already lost contact with children before the adoption placement.

How far do they go?: A spatial examination of missing persons from hospitals

PurposeMissing person cases are a global issue impacting policing. Among these, those who abscond from hospitals are especially concerning because these reports require collaboration across services, often strain already limited police and hospital resources and present an elevated level of possible harm due to high prevalence of mental illness, disability and/or addiction. Despite this, to-date, there has been a lack of scholarly attention on this phenomenon from a policing perspective. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring how far missing hospital patients travel and where they are commonly found.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sample of 731 closed case files (2014–2018) from one police service, we identify spatial behaviour patterns specific to this group of missing persons.FindingsResults suggest that most do not leave the hospital grounds or stay within a 5-km radius. Others were found close to the hospital, within city limits and/or returned of their own volition. By identifying these spatial behaviour patterns associated with missing hospital patients, police can refine probable search areas, allocate resources more efficiently, find the missing faster and develop better-informed responses and collaborative policies.Originality/valueOur research represents the first empirical investigation into missing persons from hospital settings through a spatial perspective. Through descriptive statistical and spatial analyses, we determine the distance between the hospital a given individual was reported missing from and the location of where they were ultimately found.

“If not Mine, She Won't Belong to Another”: Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in a Femicide Perpetrator from Brazil

Case files can show how aggressors use different explanations to reduce the seriousness of their crime. We aimed to identify and categorize a 2016 Brazilian case file from a perpetrator of femicide, based on moral disengagement theory. Content analysis yielded 47 verbalized excerpts, with 70 disengagement occurrences. The most frequently used mechanisms throughout the aggressor's speeches consisted of moral justification and blaming the victim herself. Results indicated that he reduced the seriousness of the femicide and sought reduction of the consequences. We discuss how speeches in criminal cases can serve as a secondary source for producing data on violence.

High Precision Mammography Lesion Identification From Imprecise Medical Annotations

Breast cancer screening using Mammography serves as the earliest defense against breast cancer, revealing anomalous tissue years before it can be detected through physical screening. Despite the use of high resolution radiography, the presence of densely overlapping patterns challenges the consistency of human-driven diagnosis and drives interest in leveraging state-of-art localization ability of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). The growing availability of digitized clinical archives enables the training of deep segmentation models, but training using the most widely available form of coarse hand-drawn annotations works against learning the precise boundary of cancerous tissue in evaluation, while producing results that are more aligned with the annotations rather than the underlying lesions. The expense of collecting high quality pixel-level data in the field of medical science makes this even more difficult. To surmount this fundamental challenge, we propose LatentCADx, a deep learning segmentation model capable of precisely annotating cancer lesions underlying hand-drawn annotations, which we procedurally obtain using joint classification training and a strict segmentation penalty. We demonstrate the capability of LatentCADx on a publicly available dataset of 2,620 Mammogram case files, where LatentCADx obtains classification ROC of 0.97, AP of 0.87, and segmentation AP of 0.75 (IOU = 0.5), giving comparable or better performance than other models. Qualitative and precision evaluation of LatentCADx annotations on validation samples reveals that LatentCADx increases the specificity of segmentations beyond that of existing models trained on hand-drawn annotations, with pixel level specificity reaching a staggering value of 0.90. It also obtains sharp boundary around lesions unlike other methods, reducing the confused pixels in the output by more than 60%.

The Depravity Standard for Violent Crimes

In violent crime cases, aggravating factors in United States criminal codes, such as “heinous,” “atrocious,” or “depraved,” are used to distinguish elements of the crime warranting more severe sentencing. These aggravating terms are vaguely defined and applied arbitrarily in violent cases. This paper details the development of a 25 item Depravity Standard to operationalize an evidence-based approach to distinguishing the worst of violent crimes. The items were applied to 393 detailed case files drawn from several American jurisdictions to develop and refine the item definitions, determine interrater reliability, and mine for the frequency of each item’s occurrence. This information was combined with 1,590 participant responses ranking the relative depravity of each item to develop a straightforward scoring system for measuring depravity in violent cases. The Depravity Standard guide can seamlessly be applied to identify the worst violent crimes, and provide support for those cases that may deserve leniency or early-release.