The Future of Children, a collaboration of The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and The Brookings Institution has an archived webcast of a panel presentation on preventing child maltreatment given last fall. The webcast is about 35 minutes long. They also produced a journal issue on this topic (Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall 2009)–details after the jump.
The Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape will be hosting a webinar on the links between sexual abuse and online sexual behaviors of adolescents, May 13th, 10:00-12:00 ET. Participation is free, but preregistration is required. Jennifer Lee from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children will be the featured presenter.
Time for April’s Articles of Note. All of these are from the late March/April/May issues and electronic previews. As always, please keep in mind this in no way a comprehensive list; simply items that have caught my attention from a selection of peer-reviewed journals. Links lead to PubMed abstracts; from there you can choose what’s worth a.) paying for; b.) a pilgrimage to your nearest medical library; or c.) downloading via the full-text access you possibly have at your disposal.
Check out your page for new info…Thanks, Sheila!
I received an email from a reader asking me to please post information about the financial cost of child abuse in the US. I’m happy to be able to post some relatively recent publications on the topic, the most specific being Prevent Child Abuse America’s 2007 report, Total Estimated Cost of Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States: An Economic Impact Study (PDF). (UPDATE: Click through for more current resources)
I cannot believe it’s already mid-March and I am *just* getting to this post. Between CCAW in Dallas (fantastic and more than 700 attendees) and a court martial that had me sequestered without internet, last week was a wash in terms of getting much done. Finally, though, it’s time for March’s Articles of Note. All of these are from the late February/March/April issues and electronic previews. As always, please keep in mind this in no way a comprehensive list; simply items that have caught my attention from a selection of peer-reviewed journals. Links lead to PubMed abstracts; from there you can choose what’s worth a.) paying for; b.) a pilgrimage to your nearest medical library; or c.) downloading via the full-text access you possibly have at your disposal.
IAFN is hosting a webinar on investigating infant deaths April 6th at 2pm ET. This will be the 1st webinar of the 2010 IAFN Webinar Series, and it’s being presented by Bobbi Jo O’Neal, BSN, RN, F-ABMDI, Deputy Coroner for Charleston County, South Carolina.
I’m on my way to Dallas for the Conference on Crimes Against Women, but before I go, I wanted to post a very powerful TED presentation by Sunitha Krishnan on fighting sex slavery. It’s tough to watch some portions, but it’s powerful and under 15 minutes. She talks bluntly about the realities of trafficking, but also has some important prevention messages, as well.
Last week, the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law held hearings on child prostitution and sex trafficking in the US. Among the speakers was Rachel Lloyd from GEMS, Anita Alvarez, the elected state’s attorney from Cook County, IL (the 2nd largest prosecutor’s office in the country, FYI), and Senator Ron Widen (OR).
It looks like IAFN just made 12 sessions available from the ATL Annual Scientific Assembly as webcasts. The audio plus PowerPoint can be reviewed for CEUs, and if you attended the Assembly, it’s free. Not to worry–if you couldn’t make it, it’s still available to you for $19.99 if you’re an IAFN member ($29.99, non-members). Sessions are 90 minutes a piece, so that’s a pretty good deal, CEU-wise.
The National Child Protection Training Center has a slate of webinars coming up that might be of interest. Usually I wait to post individual sessions as they get closer on the calendar, but a couple of the NCPTC webinars have filled already so best not to wait. Several of the sessions are heavy on the legal, but with topics like Hearsay and Suggestibility, there’s certainly some clinical overlap.
In my continuing quest to provide better access to free CME/CEUs for FHO readers, I decided to trawl through Medscape tonight and round up 20 offerings that can be completed quickly and easily. A couple caveats, though: 1.) not all of them are for RNs–physician and midlevel only CEs are marked accordingly; 2.) these things expire, and some more quickly than others [a few of them have about a 45 day shelf life], so check the dates to make sure you’ll get the credit you’ve earned; 3.) not all of these will be relevant to everyone’s practice–I’ve listed a pretty broad cross-section of topics that touch forensic practice in one capacity or another; and 4.) a few of these will look familiar as I’ve posted them on FHO before–apologies to the daily readers. Remember, Medscape requires registration to access these activities–it’s free, no worries.
Time once again for a run down of some of the new and noteworthy articles in the current literature (something I almost forgot to do this month!). All of these are from the late January/February/March issues and electronic previews. As always, please keep in mind this in no way a comprehensive list; simply items that have caught my attention from a selection of peer-reviewed journals. Links lead to PubMed abstracts; from there you can choose what’s worth a.) paying for; b.) a pilgrimage to your nearest medical library; or c.) downloading via the full-text access you possibly have at your disposal.
Last spring, I published a piece examining alternate light sources as a tool for semen and other bodily fluid detection. I promised I would come back with a piece on using ALS to identify and photograph injury not obvious or visible to the naked eye. Coincidentally I’ve been asked for some predicate questions by a prosecutor on this very issue, so in the spirit of bang for buck and all that, here you go:
Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a ton written on this subject. I am including several links here, but unfortunately, they’re not all full-text. Some of these links don’t provide a guide for using ALS, so much as they support the use of ALS in the context of a broader approach to identifying injury. However, keep in mind: there is little research that supports using ALS for this purpose, so from an evidence-based standpoint you are out in the weeds. Be prepared to discuss this if one of your cases goes to court. (This is the kind of science I’m looking for on this subject, for those of you who have asked me.)
{My editorial here. Of note: “There is no evidence base, therefore, to support the use of an alternate light source as an independent tool to definitively interpret fluorescence as a sub- clinical bruise (i.e., bruising that is not visible to the naked eye). Given the high false-positive rate in detecting subclinical bruising, it is essential for medical and legal professionals to understand the resulting implications of promoting the use of ALS in a forensic setting.” (p. 5)}
Advances in Clinical Forensic Medicine
Alternative light source (polilight®) illumination with digital image analysis does not assist in determining the age of bruises
Enhancing the Visibility of Injuries with Narrow-Banded Beams of Light within the Visible Light Spectrum
Experience With Wood Lamp Illumination and Digital Photography in the Documentation of Bruises on Human Skin (full text)
Forensic Photography. Ultraviolet Imaging of Wounds on Skin
Forensic Ultraviolet Light in Clinical Practice: Evidence for the Evidence (full-text)
Marked Women (full-text)
Routine use of ultraviolet light in medicolegal examinations to evaluate stains and skin trauma
Soft Tissue Injuries in Victims of Color (Poster)
Spectrophotometric evaluation of the age of bruises in children: measuring changes in bruise color as an indicator of child physical abuse.
The Police Report Says He Choked Her–How Do I Prove It? (full text)
Use of an Alternate Light Source to Assess Strangulation Victims (full text for IAFN members and JFN subscribers)
Bite wound viewed under ultraviolet light (Photo: Color Atlas of Domestic Violence)
I’ve been meaning to get a new clinical guide up, but this one has been a challenge. See, injury photography hasn’t been written up extensively in the literature. What is out there is by and large pretty old (you’ll see several Polaroid references in the resources I share). Still, all of these have something to offer forensic practice. As with everything I post, due diligence, please. Read through the materials and decide for yourself whether these are useful and relevant to your work. And if you have other resources and tools you like not already listed here, by all means send them on and I’ll be happy to include them with attribution.
I had an email yesterday about finding CEUs for forensic nurses, which made me think that it’s probably a good time to remind people about the free CEUs available online from IAFN. If you haven’t yet checked them, I encourage you to do so, because, did I mention they’re free (unless you’re not a member, then they’re $10 each)? And they’re specific to forensic nursing, which is tough to find. As you know, a lot of the CEs out there are either too simple or too tangential to our work, so offerings like these are invaluable.
Nest Foundation has produced an incredibly powerful film on child sex trafficking in America. Playground is being used to raise awareness of child commercial sexual exploitation. The foundation’s website promises other art-driven media campaigns and an educational curriculum for high school students to follow.
THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
Once again, our friends at GW Medical Publishing have picked out a title for one lucky FHO reader to receive. As with the previous giveaways, all you need to do to enter the giveaway is answer a simple question in the comment section of this post. Readers have until Friday, January 29th, noon ET to respond. I will choose a winner via random number generator and post the winner’s name here on the site on Monday, February 1st. Click through for a message from GW Medical about the details of this month’s giveaway:
I had the privilege of attending a focus group on victim intimidation with predominantly law enforcement professionals yesterday. As the only healthcare provider in the room, I was trying to impress upon the group that clinicians have a stake in victim intimidation, and that the healthcare implications are significant. Although people most often think of victim intimidation in organized crime and gang cases, we see it more often in DV, sexual assault, child abuse, and even elder abuse cases. Which leads us to this post, because I’m interested in a couple things:
Time once again for a run down of some of the new and noteworthy articles in the current literature. All of these (but one) are from the December/January issues. As always, please keep in mind this in no way a comprehensive list; simply items that have caught my attention from a selection of peer-reviewed journals. Links lead to PubMed or publisher abstracts; from there you can choose what’s worth a.) paying for; b.) a pilgrimage to your nearest medical library; or c.) downloading via the full-text access you possibly have at your disposal.