1,721,027 research outputs found
Jealous Men but Evil Women: The Double Standard in Cases of Domestic Homicide
No full textIn 1989, Sarah Thornton killed her abusive husband with a knife, after years of abuse and threats to her daughter. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Also in 1989, Kiranjit Ahluwalia soaked her husband’s bedclothes with petrol and set them alight. He died from burns 10 days later, and she was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In 1991, Joseph McGrail kicked his alcoholic common-law wife to death whilst she lay unconscious. He walked free from court, the judge telling him that “this lady would have tried the patience of a saint”. In 1992, Les Humes told a court that he “saw a red mist” after his wife admitted loving someone else. He fatally stabbed her whilst their teenage children struggled with him. He was convicted of manslaughter due to provocation and was imprisoned for 7 years.
Double standards in judicial processes are notorious. Chivalric justice is the case in which women are given lighter sentences for similar offences to men. This does not apply in the case of domestic homicide, where women are seen as evil and calculating when killing a spouse, men are seen as provoked beyond reason. Women who kill husbands do so with weapons that they need to acquire, men do it with their hands or weapons that are immediately available. So it is seems the defence of crime passionnel is reserved for men; women, it is implied, premeditate the murder of abusive husbands, and are justifiably punished. This paper explores the double standard in uxoricide vs. mariticide, and why it appears that killing a wife is justified and killing a husband is evi
Evil or Insane? The Female Serial Killer and Her Doubly Deviant Femininity
No full textIt is 16th century Hungary, and young peasant girls are going missing. They have been offered well paid work in the Castle Czejte, Transylvania and then never seen again. The king sends an army to the castle where they report finding mayhem and bloodshed. There are witnesses aplenty to testify against the Countess Elizabeta Bathory; the villagers certainly thought she was evil. Describing atrocities over a twenty-five year period, it sounds like the peasants were happy to get their own back on a woman who was probably medically and legally insane, and just possibly the nobles were happy to accept this testimony as fact, because she was the heir to the throne. Leap forward a few hundred years, and modern cinema sees us depicting Elizabeta and her modern day sisters-in-blood as truly evil or as monsters. These women are not monsters, but people who have done monstrous things. The evil epithet is the result of being members of a very rare class, one of history’s least understood but perpetually fascinating creatures, the female serial killer. Women who kill multiple times are guilty not just of serial murder, but of being women who step outside of the persona that society creates for them. This doubly deviant position makes exploring the minds of these women important, not just because they have killed, but also in order to understand the ways in which aberrant femininity is constructed as evil. This paper examines women who kill, then kill again
The Maids, Mother and 'The Other One' of the Discworld
No full textFantasy novelist Terry Pratchetts Discworld is inhabited by a very diverse group of characters ranging from Death and his horse Binky, Cut-Me-Own-Throat-Dibbler, purveyor of the pork pie, the Wizard faculty of the Unseen University and an unofficial coven of three witches. Because three was the right number for witches providing they are the right sort of type, according to Nanny Ogg.1 Magic features prominently on the Discworld; so much so that there are a host of long term side effects the inhabitants of the Discworld have come to expect from being in proximity to this powerful force. Phenomena that to others might seem strange or unusual are typical, even expected on the Discworld. The use of magic, for good or ill, is often a prominent theme in Pratchetts Discworld novels. This chapter focuses on the Pratchetts portrayal of magic as used by resident witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat Garlick and eventually Agnes Nitt who replaces Magrat when she assumes the title of queen. This will include the role each witch assumes as the Maiden, Mother and Crone, as well as the unique relationship each witch has forged with magic. The witches use of headology, which bears a striking similarity to the magic we know as psychology, will similarly be explored. Finally, the consequences of magic use are discussed.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Evil and Superstition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Religious Infanticide and Filicide
No full textA distinct category of women has been identified in different parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, those who commit extreme forms of violence and murder against their children in order to fulfil their religious obligations or to protect themselves from perceived magico-spiritual harms from their children. The whole of Africa is currently witnessing a heightened level of witch-hunting. Historically, some African witch-hunting incidents are triggered by witch-doctors who are keen to protect their clients from any perceived diabolical effects of witches while others are triggered by mere gossips or rumours from neighbours. However, dramatized preaching on witchcraft by revivalist Christian prophets and prophetesses whose major occupations are the ‘sale’ of exorcisms to the bewitched has become the latest trend in the region. These prophets and prophetesses are keen to teach their followers the importance of the ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ biblical passage in their lives as well as how ‘the Kingdom of God suffereth violence’. By means of case study analysis, this paper presents a new pattern of evil that is perpetrated in the form of abandonment, torture, mutilation and murders of children by their mothers, those women who should protect their children from such evils. It also presents the cases of another group of women (prophetesses) who preach and deliver prophecies purportedly from God about particular children who are the alleged witches. This latter category also decides the nature of evil to be committed against such children – all in the name of fulfilling their religious obligations
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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