Corinne May-Chahal

Supporting Law Enforcement in Digital Communities through Natural Language Analysis

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number and scale of digital communities (e.g. peer-to-peer file sharing systems, chat applications and social networking sites). Unfortunately, digital communities are host to significant criminal activity including copyright infringement, identity theft and child sexual abuse. Combating this growing level of crime is problematic due to the ever increasing scale of todays digital communities. This paper presents an approach to provide automated support for the detection of child sexual abuse related activities in digital communities. Specifically, we analyze the characteristics of child sexual abuse media distribution in P2P file sharing networks and carry out an exploratory study to show that corpus-based natural language analysis may be used to automate the detection of this activity. We then give an overview of how this approach can be extended to police chat and social networking communities.

Who Am I? Analyzing Digital Personas in Cybercrime Investigations

The Isis toolkit offers the sophisticated capabilities required to analyze digital personas and provide investigators with clues to the identity of the individual or group hiding behind one or more personas.

Child maltreatment in the family: a European perspective

Child maltreatment is generally referred to under the global categories of physical, sexual, emotional/psychological abuse and neglect. The Concerted Action on the Prevention of Child Abuse in Europe (CAPCAE) reports on the specific forms of harm and injury, actions and persons believed responsible in eight European countries. The most common actions across all participating countries responsible for harm were those of violent parenting or absent parenting. A review of prevention strategies found that few programmes focused on specific behaviours or included measures to indicate whether their actions were successful in preventing further harm to children. It is recommended that fathers need to be targeted in prevention as well as mothers and that specific data collection of actual harms, actions, persons responsible and outcomes needs to be implemented as a priority in all European countries. Such specificity avoids a focus on risk which is unacceptable in some countries, over inclusive of parents and resource intensive.

Overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape

The study provides an overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape. It reviews the international literature and offers selected examples of promising practices. It addresses the comprehensive range of policies in the fields of gender equality; law and justice; economy, development and social inclusion; culture, education and media; and health. It presents a wide-ranging set of examples of best practice. It concludes with a series of recommendations, based on the social scientific evidence presented in the study.

Glocal social work

Debates have been ongoing about what constitutes international or European social work, relative to social work as practised and understood in national contexts, for many years. More recently there has also been a shift to use of the term ‘transnational’ to describe social work carried out across national borders – which some might previously have included in international social work. The identification of social work as an activity carried out in many countries around the world dates from the early twentieth century and was formalised in the establishment of international organisations (and later the regional bodies associated with them) representing different aspects and interests of the social work community. However, international social work is not simply concerned with comparing social work in different countries but may involve aspects of social work within one’s own country as well as activities that transcend national boundaries. Healy (2001) identified four aspects of international social work: internationally related domestic practice and advocacy; professional exchange; international policy development; advocacy and international practice. A striking theme through all the papers in this volume is the constant interplay between global issues and their local relevance, and between transnational topics, technologies of practice and their local application. We suggest this might be more aptly described as glocal social work. The concept glocalisation (Swyngedouw, 1992) sets an agenda that does not seek to find commonality that can be transferred and applied across countries; rather it asks us to consider how social work can be practised in a global context; including that of global institutions, systems and social divisions, politics, economies, ecologies, technologies and the mobilities between them. Each of the contributions in this volume speaks to this agenda in some way. With the exception of Flem and colleagues, contributors do not use the term, but the shared objects of glocal social work are in evidence throughout, including migration and asylum seeking, environmental disaster and climate change, violence and abuse, mental distress and social exclusion.

Breaching Private Life with Authority : Finding a necessary feature of social work

In the context of debates about social works knowledge base and its essential role this article focuses on how core social work activity might be identified and offers some preliminary suggestions as to what may constitute it. Drawing on a naturally occurring conversation between a social worker and two service users two claims are made. First, that despite concerns with uncertainty in late modernity, some features of interaction remain inherently certain. These include (1) Materiality, the setting and its participants are taken as real; (2) Identity, participants engage on the basis that they are who they say they are; (3) Taken for granted aspects of social organization; for example, that all participants can hold a conversation until shown otherwise; and, (4) Historicity, referring to a preexisting set of accounts, justifications, reasons and communicative orderings. Second, these ‘background expectancies’ provide the resource for topic seeking and non-routine practices that may be necessary to social work such as ‘authorized breaching’ of the domestic sphere and private life.