Sexual assault response teams' responses to alcohol-using victims

The purpose of this study was to examine sexual assault response team (SART) professionals' understanding of team protocols and procedures for responding to victims who report alcohol intoxication prior to the sexual assault, while highlighting important considerations that factor into medical, criminal justice, and victim advocacy professionals' decision making about responding to victims' alcohol use. Telephone surveys with 79 medical, criminal justice, and victim advocacy professionals involved with each of the three active SARTs in the state were conducted. The results show that most commonly mentioned responses of professionals to a victim's use of alcohol in a hypothetical case were to establish the facts of the case and validate that the victim's intoxication did not excuse the perpetrator's actions. However, professionals largely did not believe that there were systematic responses to victims reporting alcohol use at the time of the sexual assault, and risks associated with substance use or abuse were, for the most part, not addressed during the first response of SARTs to victims. Implications for practice and research are discussed within the context of study limitations.

Legal medicine and the medical establishment

Formal medical discipline-based regulation and professional support for legal medicine practitioners have been a long time coming. While informal associations and societies of like-minded doctors and dentists have existed for some time, they have not had the sort of "establishment credibility" that is required to influence policy-makers and drive formal processes for professional training and regulation in this area. The recent creation of formal medical College status for medico-legal specialists within the medical establishment is described and the advantages discussed. The creation of formal career pathways, organised training structures and policy advisory systems in legal medicine for government has the potential to support recruitment to this difficult and challenging area of medical practice. This can only be of benefit to the legal profession who rely on these medical practitioners in so many areas. The standards setting, recertification, revalidation and accreditation activities of a formal Royal Medical College are likely to have significant influence on the work of health and legal policy regulators at a time of considerable change.

The teaching of legal medicine in Australasia

The interface of medicine and law highlights the difference between doctors and lawyers. It is the doctor's role to determine his or her adversary (diagnosing an illness) and to decide the optimal means for overcoming same, such that the doctor assumes the role which is analogous to not only the lawyer but also the judge and jury when dealing with illness and it is the doctor who prescribes the appropriate remedy. Conversely, the lawyer only represents the objectives of his/her client, thereby only representing a single focus within the complexity of the problem. It is the duty of the system to reach the proper conclusion and prescribe the appropriate remedy. It follows that doctors and lawyers operate under a different set of standard operating procedures and expectations. This paper describes the evolution of the Australian College of Legal Medicine (ACLM) and its contribution to the teaching of legal medicine in Australasia. The ACLM was formed in 1995 and in its first decade of existence has established a range of programs, including the expert witness program, basic law intensive, the advanced law intensive, annual scientific meetings and further educative programs in forensic medicine. The Australian & New Zealand Forensic Medicine Society has been incorporated into the ACLM and the College has formed a partnership with Griffith University to provide the first Master of Legal Medicine course provided from within a School of Medicine, at university level, rather than offering health law from within a legal program. The College has been approached by other medical colleges within Australia to offer training for their Fellows and organised its first offshore training program in 2006.

Nicephor[e]: a web-based solution for teaching forensic and scientific photography

Nicephor[e] is a project funded by "Swiss Virtual Campus" and aims at creating a distant or mixed web-based learning system in forensic and scientific photography and microscopy. The practical goal is to organize series of on-line modular courses corresponding to the educational requirements of undergraduate academic programs. Additionally, this program could be used in the context of continuing educational programs. The architecture of the project is designed to guarantee a high level of knowledge in forensic and scientific photographic techniques, and to have an easy content production and the ability to create a number of different courses sharing the same content. The e-learning system Nicephor[e] consists of three different parts. The first one is a repository of learning objects that gathers all theoretical subject matter of the project such as texts, animations, images, and films. This repository is a web content management system (Typo3) that permits creating, publishing, and administrating dynamic content via a web browser as well as storing it into a database. The flexibility of the system's architecture allows for an easy updating of the content to follow the development of photographic technology. The instructor of a course can decide which modular contents need to be included in the course, and in which order they will be accessed by students. All the modular courses are developed in a learning management system (WebCT or Moodle) that can deal with complex learning scenarios, content distribution, students, tests, and interaction with instructor. Each course has its own learning scenario based on the goals of the course and the student's profile. The content of each course is taken from the content management system. It is then structured in the learning management system according to the pedagogical goals defined by the instructor. The modular courses are created in a highly interactive setting and offer autoevaluating tests to the students. The last part of the system is a digital assets management system (Extensis Portfolio). The practical portion of each course is to produce images of different marks or objects. The collection of all this material produced, indexed by the students and corrected by the instructor is essential to the development of a knowledge base of photographic techniques applied to a specific forensic subject. It represents also an extensible collection of different marks from known sources obtained under various conditions. It allows to reuse these images for creating image-based case files.

Clothing damage analysis in alleged sexual assaults—The need for a systematic approach

Clothing damage analysis is an integral part of the examinations carried out in sexual assault type cases. This analysis can be used to corroborate different versions of events and is at its most powerful in elucidating false allegation cases and consent cases. The purpose of this study was to determine to what extent people with varying levels of forensic awareness, experience and training could correctly carry out damage analysis. Two participant groups were asked to take part in this study. Group A ('forensic group') comprised participants at a forensic science conference, and Group B ('student group') comprised students undertaking a degree course in Forensic Science. Each group was given a practical workshop consisting of a lecture outlining common fabric types and general features observed in different damage types. Each participant was subsequently shown 25 pieces of 'damage' and asked to identify both the type of fabric construction (knit or weave) and the type of damage (cut, tear, rip, wear and tear). The ability to identify fabric construction and damage types varied within the two groups studied and across the groups. The forensic group performed better both in fabric and damage assessment than the student group. This paper suggests a systematic approach to clothing damage analysis to maximise the benefits that can be obtained from this area of forensic science and to minimise the subjectivity within the field.

The potential (negative) influence of observational biases at the analysis stage of fingermark individualisation

Recent cases of erroneous identification have strengthened critical comments on the reliability of fingerprint identification. This goes hand in hand with recent publications regarding the lack of scientific foundation of the discipline. Combined with "legislative" needs, such as for instance the admissibility criteria under Daubert, or experimental studies revealing potential bias, the call for research on the identification process has become more urgent. That background set the basis of this research project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) which includes, among other parts, experimental tests to study potential observational biases in the analysis stage of fingerprint individualisation. These tests have been submitted to several groups of forensic science students at the University of Lausanne. The aim is to study factors potentially influencing the analysis of fingermarks, more specifically the influence of training/education (test I) as well as the potential impact of case contextual information or known print availability (test II). For all tests students were given 11 or 12 fingermarks of a medium to difficult quality, with a range of 8-15 minutiae. For all tests the task was always the same for the participants but carried out in different contexts: to analyse the marks, to annotate the minutiae observed, to designate them and to decide on the status of the mark in two categories, exploitable and identifiable. The aim was to see how the fingermarks were annotated by different individuals so as to have an idea of the variation in annotation and counting in the analysis stage only. For test I, students were submitted the same 12 fingerprints before and after having followed specific training in fingermark individualisation. The aim was to see how training/education impacts the analysis of fingermarks. For test II, were participants given eleven fingermarks so as to study whether the presence of a comparison print changes the amount of minutiae found and whether low/high-profile background information influences the analysis stage. Results show that for test I the effect of training can be observed, among other, in an increase of minutiae annotated and a higher consensus between participants. For test II no effect of the stimuli used to induce observational biases has been observed by all of the factors studied.

Should medical students be taught about rape? A survey of UK medical schools

Rape and other serious sexual assaults are common and result in long-term morbidity. Increasing numbers are reported but conviction rates are low. Victims of sexual assault present to a wide range of healthcare settings. Good immediate medical care and evidence collection are important in engaging victims with the criminal justice system, avoiding the loss of crucial evidence and minimising long-term morbidity. Of 21 UK medical schools surveyed, only eight provided teaching about sexual assault and ten provided other forensic teaching. Sixteen schools provided guidance about personal safety. As rape is so common and traumatic, medical schools should seriously consider providing teaching about this area.

[The perspectives of improvement of the postgraduation education of specialists working in military forensic-and-medical organizations]

The problem of work organization improvement of military forensic examination concerning the system of preparing specialists for forensic-and-medical organizations of the Russian Ministry of Defense is investigated in the article. The directions of development of the postgraduation education system for specialists in military forensic examination organizations as well as the main targets of the forensic medicine faculty in this sphere are reflected.

Medical student education in emergency medicine: New model from South Africa

Emergency medicine is a new specialty in South Africa. Postgraduate training, degrees and diplomas have been introduced and this should make a significant difference, in due course, to emergency care in the country. The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, like many universities in Australia, embarked upon a Graduate Entry Medical Programme. This implied significant curriculum change and gave opportunity for the development of formal emergency medicine training for students, for the first time. After considerable debate over the needs of the graduate in South Africa a new block was developed, called the Acute and Perioperative Care block. This encompasses forensic medicine, emergency medicine, trauma and anaesthetics. The training is integrated and progressive. No similar programme has been detected elsewhere. At the end of the first year there is considerable satisfaction on the part of both teachers and students and many of the students, finding the module exciting, have indicated a wish to become involved in emergency medicine in the future. The structure of the course is laid out and might be of relevance to colleagues with an interest in medical education.