Terror

Prevent is a UK-wide programme within the government's anti-terrorism strategy aimed at stopping individuals from supporting or taking part in terrorist activities. NHS England's Prevent Training and Competencies Framework requires health professionals to understand the concept of pre-criminal space. This article examines pre-criminal space, a new term which refers to a period of time during which a person is referred to a specific Prevent-related safeguarding panel, Channel. It is unclear what the concept of pre-criminal space adds to the Prevent programme...

This study employed a mixed method approach to examine the effects of participant sex, perpetrator sex, and severity ofviolence on perceptions of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrators. Quantitative participants (n = 449) completed a survey and qualitative participants (n = 31) participated in a focus group or an interview. Participants believed that it was more likely male perpetrators had prior involvement in IPV. Participants rated stories of female perpetrators as more abnormal than stories of male perpetrators...

The declaration of a caliphate by Islamic State in June 2014 witnessed the recruitment of increasing numbers of foreign terrorist fighters drawn from a diverse range of nations across the globe. This paper seeks to explore the appeal of extreme groups and how recruiters persuade young people to risk either their lives or lengthy terms of imprisonment. The processes of radicalization and recruitment are differentiated and compared with conventional means of encouraging individuals to enlist in state-sanctioned armed forces...

The police, social services, and psychiatry (PSP) is a structured cooperation between the police, social services, and the psychiatric system in Denmark. The aim of PSP is to ensure that relevant information is shared and supportive measures enhanced concerning citizens at risk, and it involves PSP representatives from each sector meeting frequently. PSP is implemented nationwide by law. In recent years, dealing with radicalization and the threat of terrorism have become key issues in society. The PSP cooperation already facilitates the identification of citizens at many kinds of risk (e...

Preliminary evidence suggests that exposure to lifetime cumulative adversity is related to faster increase in physical impairment with time, especially when depressive symptoms are present. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether different adversity categories accelerate impairment. The current study capitalized on the unique accounts of adversity available in the Israeli component of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel) by focusing on different categories of adversity, while accounting for their interaction with depressive symptoms in predicting trajectories of physical impairment (i...

A large proportion of the persons who join terrorist groups as well as lone-acting terrorists have a history of violent behavior or mental disorder that predated their becoming terrorists. This suggests that brain alterations found to occur in violent perpetrators may also be present in a significant percentage of terrorists. After a short delineation of phylogenetically old neuronal networks that are important for the generation of aggressive behavior in inconspicuous brains, this review summarizes structural and functional brain-imaging studies in violent offenders published over the last 10 years...

Death awareness leads to aversion from bodily processes such as breastfeeding and sex, especially among low body-esteem individuals. Using a Modality Bias Task we examined whether primes of death reduced attention to bodily sensations. We subliminally primed 72 undergraduates with either the word death or failed, and assessed their attention to tactile and visual stimuli as a function of their body esteem. Results indicated that death primes significantly reduced attention to tactile stimuli relative to visual stimuli in low body-esteem individuals...

OBJECTIVES: To report the incidence, socio-demographic characteristics, otorhinolaryngological presentations and outcomes of management of patients at the Jos University Teaching Hospital following terror attacks. METHODS: A prospective descriptive hospital based study of consecutive patients presenting with ear, nose and throat injuries as a result of bomb blasts and ethno-religious crises within a six-year period and managed at the Jos University Teaching Hospital were studied for age, gender, ear, nose and throat presentations, injury mechanism, interventions and outcome of interventions...

For counter-terrorism purposes, a selective nano liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (nanoLC-MS) platform was developed for detecting the highly lethal protein ricin from castor bean extract. Manual sample preparation steps were omitted by implementing a trypsin/Lys C enzyme-immobilized multi-channel reactor (MCR) consisting of 126 channels (8 µm inner diameter in all channels) that performed on-line digestion of proteins (5 minute reaction time, instead of 4-16 hours in previous in-solution methods). Reduction and alkylation steps were not required...

Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) are Category A agents on the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) priority pathogen list owing to their extreme toxicity and the relative ease of production. These deadly toxins, in minute quantities (estimated human i.v. lethal dose LD50 of 1-2 ng/kg body weight), cause fatal flaccid paralysis by blocking neurotransmitter release. The current gold standard detection method, the mouse-bioassay, often takes days to confirm botulism. Furthermore, there are no effective antidotes known to reverse the symptoms of botulism, and as a result, patients with severe botulism often require meticulous care during the prolonged paralytic illness...

Children and adolescents with bipolar disorder are at increased risk for suicide. Sleep disturbances are common among youth with bipolar disorder and are also independently implicated in suicide risk; thus, comorbid sleep disorders may amplify suicide risk in this clinical population. This study examined the effects of comorbid sleep disorders on suicide risk among youth with bipolar disorder. We conducted secondary analyses of baseline data from the Treatment of Early Age Mania (TEAM) study, a randomized controlled trial of individuals aged 6-15 years (mean ± SD = 10...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This article reviews the spectrum of non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep parasomnias, including sleepwalking, confusional arousals, and sleep terrors, which represent the range of phenotypic disorders of arousal from non-REM sleep that occurs in children and adults. RECENT FINDINGS: The International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Third Edition (ICSD-3) classifies parasomnias according to the sleep stage they emerge from: REM, non-REM, or other...

OBJECTIVE: It is well established that direct exposure to terrorism can result in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, individuals indirectly exposed to terrorism may also develop symptoms of PTSD. This study examined the prevalence and course of symptom-defined PTSD in employees who were present and not present at the site of a workplace terror attack. METHODS: Survey data from ministerial employees were collected 10, 22, and 34 months after the 2011 bombing in the government district of Oslo...

Terrorism, whether it is group-related or performed as lone actor terrorism, is a predominantly male phenomenon. Generally and throughout history, young males have been the main protagonists of criminal and political violence. This article aims to contribute, from different perspecives, to the question of what makes young men violent. These include neurobiological aspects, such as sex differences in the brain that predispose males to physical aggression and violence; gender role aspects, with regard to aggression and violence being basic components for demonstrating and reconstructing masculinity; demographic aspects of male youth bulges as potential breeding grounds for terrorism; aspects of group dynamics and identity fusion in the process of radicalization; and psychosocial characteristics of lone actor terrorists, which differ from group-related terrorists...

Essential facts Four terror attacks and the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in the space of four months have sadly demonstrated the dangers posed to all involved in unexpected events or emergencies.

OBJECTIVE: Disasters occur without warning and can have devastating consequences. Emergency preparedness can reduce negative effects. It is especially important that parents prepare, as children are particularly vulnerable after disasters. This study tested 2 hypotheses: (1) adults with more children are likely to be better prepared than those with fewer or no children because greater caretaking is linked to greater perceived threat of disaster leading to greater preparedness and (2) the strength of this mediational link varies as a function of parental self-efficacy...

Although men typically hold favorable views of advertisements featuring female sexuality, from a Terror Management Theory perspective, this should be less the case when thoughts of human mortality are salient. Two experiments conducted in South Korea supported this hypothesis across a variety of products (e.g., perfume and vodka). Men became more negative towards advertisements featuring female sexuality, and had reduced purchase intentions for those products, after thinking about their own mortality. Study 2 found that these effects were mediated by heightened disgust...

This paper examines existing research on the impact of terrorism on expatriate coping strategies. We consider pre-assignment fear of terrorism, in-country coping strategies, and anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with repatriation. The extant research is small but growing. Our model for expatriate coping at the pre-departure, in-country, and repatriation stages includes strategies specific to each stage. Preparation using proactive coping, systematic desensitization, problem and emotion focused coping, social support, and virtual reality explorations are recommended...

Most risk analysis models systematically underestimate the probability and impact of catastrophic events (e.g., economic crises, natural disasters, and terrorism) by not taking into account interconnectivity and interdependence of risks. To address this weakness, we propose the Cascading Alternating Renewal Process (CARP) to forecast interconnected global risks. However, assessments of the model's prediction precision are limited by lack of sufficient ground truth data. Here, we establish prediction precision as a function of input data size by using alternative long ground truth data generated by simulations of the CARP model with known parameters...

The marked increase in international terror in recent years requires the development of highly efficient methods to detect trace amounts of explosives at airports, border crossings and check points. The preferred analytical method worldwide is the ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) that is capable of detecting most explosives at the nano-gram level. Sample collection for the IMS analysis is based on swabbing of a passenger's belongings to collect possible explosive residues. The present study examines a wide range of issues related to swab-based particle collection and analysis, in the hope of gaining deeper understanding into this technique that will serve to improve the detection process...