Marathon Bombing Research Articles

Teachers’ Reports of Outreach to School-Based Providers of Mental Health Services following the 2013 Boston Marathon Attack

Teachers’ Reports of Outreach to School-Based Providers of Mental Health Services following the 2013 Boston Marathon Attack

Media Use and Exposure to Graphic Content in the Week Following the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Traditional and new media inform and expose the public to potentially distressing graphic content following disasters, but predictors of media use have received limited attention. We examine media-use patterns after the Boston Marathon bombings (BMB) in a representative national U.S. sample (n=2888), with representative oversamples from metropolitan Boston (n=845) and New York City (n=941). Respondents completed an Internet-based survey 2-4weeks post-BMB. Use of traditional media was correlated with older age, prior indirect media-based exposure to collective traumas, and direct BMB exposure. New media use was correlated with younger age and prior direct exposure to collective traumas. Increased television and online news viewing were associated with exposure to more graphic content. The relationship between traditional and new media was stronger for young adults than all other age groups. We offer insights about the relationship between prior collective trauma exposures and media use following subsequent disasters and identify media sources likely to expose people to graphic content.

Mental health after the Boston marathon bombing

Mental health after the Boston marathon bombing

The medical response to the Boston Marathon bombings: an analysis of social media commentary and professional opinion.

To explore the differences in perception of the medical response to the victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings between laypeople and healthcare professionals. Commentary accessible and available on Internet discussion websites by non-medically trained persons and in the academic literature by healthcare professionals was analysed qualitatively. Major themes were found relating to both the pre-hospital and hospital-based phases of the medical response to the disaster. Laypeople focused more on pre-hospital care and the actions of specific bystanders, while healthcare professionals focused on hospital care, the importance of a disaster plan, and frequent training for the success of the response. Laypeople and healthcare professionals have positive but differing perceptions of the medical response to the victims of the bombings. This may have implications for future funding and implementation of disaster preparedness.

Examining Services Provided by a Japanese Organisation during and after the Boston Marathon Bombing

A diverse society requires culturally and linguistically appropriate support for all populations, especially in emergencies, which warrants contribution from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD)-specific organisations. JB Line, Inc., a local nonprofit organisation serving Japanese, provided online information and in-person support to those affected by the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. Descriptive statistics of access to its social media combined with qualitative content analysis of its posts suggested CALD communities’ need for reliable and timely information in their native language, specifically regarding safety and mental health. Practical lessons for CALD-specific organisations included a need for cooperating with authoritative organisations, improving their visibility for wider distribution, and proactively reaching out to isolated populations.

Disqualified qualifiers: evaluating the utility of the revised DSM-5 definition of potentially traumatic events among area youth following the Boston marathon bombing.

The DSM-5 includes a revised definition of the experiences that qualify as potentially traumatic events. This revised definition now offers a clearer and more exclusive definition of what qualifies as a traumatic exposure, but little is known about the revision's applicability to youth populations. The present study evaluated the predictive utility of the revised DSM definitional boundaries of traumatic exposure in a sample of youth exposed to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and related events METHODS: Caregivers (N = 460) completed surveys 2 to 6 months postbombing about youth experiences during the events and youth posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms RESULTS: Experiencing DSM-5 qualifying traumatic events (DSM-5 QTEs) significantly predicted child PTS symptoms (PTSS), whereas DSM-5 nonqualifying stressful experiences (DSM-5 non-QSEs) did not after accounting for DSM-5 QTEs. Importantly, child age moderated the relationship between DSM-5 QTEs and PTSS such that children 7 and older who experienced DSM-5 QTEs showed greater postbombing PTSS, whereas there was no such relationship in children ages 6 and below CONCLUSIONS: Data largely support the revised posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) definition of QTEs in older youth, and also highlight the need for further refinement of the QTE definition for children ages 6 and below.

Encountering the stranger: Ontological security and the Boston Marathon bombing

Since 9/11, the rise of Islamist extremism has taken hold of the national imagination as the greatest threat facing the USA. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing seemed to add a new chapter to the War on Terror with the ‘introduction’ of homegrown terrorists who wantonly kill innocent Americans, just as the 19 hijackers did. They are evil. Yet, the narrative of the Tsarnaevs that emerged shortly after the attack crafted a far more ambiguous relationship to these threatening bodies. What allows for such ambiguity, given the Tsarnaevs’ murderous acts? In this article, I look at how identity demarcation was used directly after the bombing as a form of securitization, paying particular attention to the role of the stranger. Contributing to both identity and ontological security theory, I argue that analyzing the discursive (re)presentation of the liminal and its mediation between inclusion and exclusion best captures the multifaceted nature of security, which includes both ontological and material well-being. I show that the particular manner in which the stranger shows up in the portrayal of the Boston attack helps steer American identity practice(s) down specific paths of meaning-making that are not as clear-cut as ‘righteous Self’ versus ‘evil Other.’

Terrorism, governmentality and the simulated city: the Boston Marathon bombing and the search for suspect two

This article examines the online circulation of a photograph of the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings taken by David Green, a Boston Marathon runner. The photograph fortuitously captured an image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger Tsarnaev brother, running from the scene. Initially, Tsarnaev went unnoticed by online message board users and FBI investigators – he was just another face in the urban crowd. However, after he was identified as suspect two, he emerged in the photograph as the figure of terror, the condensed embodiment of the spectacular attack, and thus as a spectre, a figure whose appearance in the archive of the past haunts the future. The author examines how this spectral emergence simultaneously reveals the attack terrorism launches against everyday mediations and how everyday mediations respond to terrorist spectacle. He argues that photography sustains vernacular practices that also support the practices of urban governmentality. Understanding urban governmentality thus requires attending to the urban archive of visual mediation in which the relationships between past and present, image and reality, and surveillance and spectacle are always contingent and open to revision.

Caregiver-Reports of Internet Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress Among Boston-Area Youth Following the 2013 Marathon Bombing

ABSTRACTAlthough practitioners and researchers have considered children’s television-based terrorism exposure, Internet-based exposure has not been sufficiently examined. We examined the scope and correlates of children’s Internet-based exposure following the Boston Marathon bombing among Boston-area youth (N = 460; 4–19 years), and the potential moderating role of age. Further exploratory analyses examined patterns of caregiver attempts to regulate child Internet exposure. Caregivers reported on child Internet-based and direct exposure to traumatic bombing-related events, and youth posttraumatic stress. Online youth consumed on average more than 2 daily hr of Internet coverage, and roughly one third consumed more than 3 daily hr of coverage. Internet exposure was particularly high among children older than 12. Greater Internet-based exposure was associated with posttraumatic stress, and 12- to 15-year-olds were particularly vulnerable. Further exploratory analyses found that although most caregivers reported believing media exposure can cause children further trauma, a considerable proportion of caregivers made no attempt to restrict or regulate their child’s Internet-based exposure. These findings help practitioners clarify forms of indirect exposure that can place youth at risk following terrorism. Future work is needed to examine the important roles that caregivers play as media regulators and as promoters of child coping and media literacy following terrorism.

Face Search at Scale.

Given the prevalence of social media websites, one challenge facing computer vision researchers is to devise methods to search for persons of interest among the billions of shared photos on these websites. Despite significant progress in face recognition, searching a large collection of unconstrained face images remains a difficult problem. To address this challenge, we propose a face search system which combines a fast search procedure, coupled with a state-of-the-art commercial off the shelf (COTS) matcher, in a cascaded framework. Given a probe face, we first filter the large gallery of photos to find the top- k most similar faces using features learned by a convolutional neural network. The k retrieved candidates are re-ranked by combining similarities based on deep features and those output by the COTS matcher. We evaluate the proposed face search system on a gallery containing 80 million web-downloaded face images. Experimental results demonstrate that while the deep features perform worse than the COTS matcher on a mugshot dataset (93.7 percent versus 98.6 percent TAR@FAR of 0.01 percent), fusing the deep features with the COTS matcher improves the overall performance ( 99.5 percent TAR@FAR of 0.01 percent). This shows that the learned deep features provide complementary information over representations used in state-of-the-art face matchers. On the unconstrained face image benchmarks, the performance of the learned deep features is competitive with reported accuracies. LFW database: 98.20 percent accuracy under the standard protocol and 88.03 percent TAR@FAR of 0.1 percent under the BLUFR protocol; IJB-A benchmark: 51.0 percent TAR@FAR of 0.1 percent (verification), rank 1 retrieval of 82.2 percent (closed-set search), 61.5 percent FNIR@FAR of 1 percent (open-set search). The proposed face search system offers an excellent trade-off between accuracy and scalability on galleries with millions of images. Additionally, in a face search experiment involving photos of the Tsarnaev brothers, convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing, the proposed cascade face search system could find the younger brother's (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) photo at rank 1 in 1 second on a 5 M gallery and at rank 8 in 7 seconds on an 80 M gallery.

Imaging of lower extremity trauma from Boston Marathon bombing.

The goal of this study is to describe the imaging features of lower extremity blast injuries in patients encountered in the radiology departments from the Boston Marathon bombings. A total of 115 patients presented to four acute care hospitals on April 15, 2013, 43 of whom presented with lower extremity injuries and were included in this study. The imaging findings of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary blast injuries were evaluated. Forty-one of 43 patients sustained secondary blast injuries to the lower extremities with 31 patients (70%) having retained shrapnel, seven patients (16%) having soft tissue lacerations without retained shrapnel, and ten patients (23%) having lower extremity amputation (7% double amputees). Eight of these patients (20%) had lower extremity fractures, and five patients (12%) had vascular injuries. Two of the 43 patients (5%) had only tertiary injuries, and five of 43 patients (12%) were noted to have lower extremity burns, consistent with quaternary blast injury. No primary blast injury occurred in the lower extremities. A vast majority of lower extremity injuries were from secondary blast injury, most commonly from retained shrapnel in 70% of patients and 23% of patients sustaining lower extremity amputation. Retained shrapnel in the lower extremity was most commonly ball bearings and pressure cooker fragments, and most injuries affected the leg, followed by the thigh and foot.

The Impact of the Boston Marathon Bombings on Public Willingness to Cooperate with Police

While a key to law enforcement success is the willingness of the public to cooperate with police, we have limited understanding of how terrorist attacks affect this public readiness. Prior research suggests that terrorist attacks might increase citizen cooperation with police through both prevention efforts and rally effects. We test these assertions with three nationally representative surveys on respondents’ willingness to help police combat terrorism: one before the Boston Marathon bombings and two after. As predicted, public willingness to report suspicious behavior to police increases significantly following the bombings and there is evidence that these increases generalize to ordinary crime. We also find that knowledge of key counter terrorism programs increases after the bombings, effects are somewhat stronger for the New England area than other regions, and the strength of the results are greatly diminished 16 months after the attacks. Conclusions are similar for both panel and cross-sectional analyses.

The state of the union: Nationwide absence of uniform guidelines for the prehospital use of tourniquets to control extremity exsanguination.

After the Sandy Hook shootings and the resulting Hartford Consensus, as well as the recent Boston Marathon bombing, the need for a uniform, detailed, and aggressive prehospital extremity exsanguination control protocol became clear. We hypothesized that most states within the United States lack a detailed uniform protocol. We performed a systematic nationwide assessment of emergency medical services (EMS) prehospital extremity exsanguination control protocols. An online search (updated February 7, 2015) identified state-, region-, or county-specific EMS protocols in all 50 states. If unavailable online, protocols were retrieved directly by contacting each state's Department of Public Health (or other appropriate agency). Two investigators independently screened each extremity exsanguination control protocol. Protocols were first grouped into three categories: I, tourniquet not mentioned; II, tourniquet mentioned, without specific guidance; III, tourniquet mentioned, with specific guidance related to type, indications, application technique, and safety concerns. Each protocol was then scored on a five-point scale for comparison. Forty-two states (84%) had statewide and 14 (28%) had at least one county-specific protocol. Seven states (16%) had no statewide protocol but at least one county-specific protocol (range, 1-10). Mississippi had neither statewide nor county-specific protocols. Of statewide protocols, 4 (9.5%) were in Category I, 23 (54.8%) in Category II, and 15 (35.7%) in Category III. The mean score for statewide tourniquets was 2.4/5 (SD, 1.25; range, 0-5). Thirteen (31%) statewide protocols referred to "commercial" or "approved" tourniquets; only three (7%) recommended a particular commercial device. The mean score for the county-specific protocols of states with no statewide protocol was 3.10 (SD, 1.56; range, 0-5) CONCLUSIONS: Throughout the United States, there is considerable variability in EMS protocols addressing the management of extremity exsanguination and an alarming absence of specific guidance for tourniquet use. Most states do not have a uniform, detailed, and aggressive prehospital extremity exsanguination control protocol. Epidemiologic and prognostic study, level III.

The Scared, the Outraged, and the Anxious: How Crisis Emotions, Involvement, and Demographics Predict Publics’ Conative Coping

ABSTRACTThrough a nationally representative survey of 1,840 U.S. adults, this study examined fright, anger, and anxiety as emotional predictors of how publics respond to organizational crisis communication and communicate with each other during a hypothetical terrorist attack. The study also examined the influences of age, gender, and publics’ involvement with prior media coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings through hierarchical regression analyses. Crisis emotions, involvement, and demographics are significant predictors of different communication behavioral outcomes. Insights and implications for practice and theory development are discussed.

Negotiating Community Literacy Practice: Public Memory Work and the Boston Marathon Bombing Digital Archive

Abstract This study examines Our Marathon http://marathon.neu.edu >, which is a digital historiography website created in response to the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15th, 2013. As a participatory archive, Our Marathon is an example of community literacy practice. I explore the construction of community through the public memory work of the archive by examining two collections of archival artifacts: public submissions and the Boston City Archives content. This examination reveals the complexity of community construction, but also the influence of Our Marathon as a material support for the work of public memory. Highlighting the archive's negotiation between an intimate space for community participation in the wake of trauma, and its role as an open, digital archive with global reach, I demonstrate that tensions of this negotiation are useful to highlight the power of the archive as a location of public memory construction, and can suggest ways Our Marathon and other digital historiographic projects can better foster community participation and formation through the reflexive collection, preservation, and display of archival content.

Strange Bedfellows: How Expanding the Public Safety Exception to Miranda Benefits Counterterrorism Suspects

Introduction I. Miranda, Public Safety, and the Terrorism Interrogation Dilemma II. Miranda and Quarles. Why Public Safety Does Not Always Mean Protecting the Public III. The Indefinite Detention/Military Commission Alternative A. Authorization for Use of Military Force B. National Defense Authorization Act [section] 1021 IV. Reconciling an Expanded Quarles Exception with Miranda A. The Evolution of the Miranda Rule: Focusing on the Core Concern of the Risk of Police Calculation B. Other Indicators of the Valid Influence of the Terrorism Threat: The Special Needs Doctrine Analogy V. Tailoring a Terrorism Expansion of Public Safety to a Narrow Range of Cases Where the Confession Is Case Dispositive VI. How Expanding the Quarles Exception Is a Net Gain for Terror Suspects: Incentivizing the Article III Prosecution Option Conclusion The last thing we may want to do is read Boston [Marathon bombing] suspect Miranda Rights telling him to remain silent.' ... It captured, I hope [the] Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes. (1) [The Boston Marathon Bombing] is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield. (2) INTRODUCTION The Boston Marathon bombing, along with the prior shoe (3) underwear (4) and Times Square (5) bombers, has prompted debate (6) on the applicability of traditional criminal procedure principles to counterterrorism investigations and prosecutions. Much of the discussion focuses on the efficacy and even appropriateness of applying the public safety exception to the Miranda rights warning requirement. What is missing is underscored by Senator Graham's comments--the possibility of indefinite detention and trial by military commission fundamentally alters the implicit balance within the public safety exception. In New York v. Quarles, the Supreme Court created what has come to be known as the Public Safety Exception (PSE) to the Miranda warning and waiver requirement: when a police questions a suspect in custody in response to an imminent threat of danger to the officer or the public, the confession will be admissible even if the officer failed to provide Miranda warnings and obtained a waiver. (7) In her opinion in Quarles, concurring in part and dissenting in part, Justice O'Connor reminds us that Miranda does not prohibit public safety questioning; Miranda simply restricts using the statement as evidence. (8) In essence, Miranda requires the government to make a choice--question a suspect without first advising them of the Miranda rights and obtaining a waiver of those rights in order to protect the public, or advise the subject and seek a waiver to protect a future prosecution. This Article challenges whether that choice remains valid. Implicit in that formulation is that failing to advise a suspect questioned in a custodial setting of their Miranda rights may result in the government foregoing the opportunity to incapacitate the individual. (9) This Article posits that the alternative remedies of indefinite detention and trial by military commission fundamentally alter the equation Justice O'Connor laid out in Quarles. This alternative option for incapacitating a suspected terrorist operative may, in certain situations (potentially even involving a U.S. citizen), eliminate the binary and risk imminent danger, or don't warn and risk the ability to choice equation that was central to the Quarles decision. Instead, the burden of risk associated with counter-terrorism questioning has substantially shifted to the terrorism suspect. Unlike the response options available to government law enforcement and prosecution agents prior to September 11, 2001, the government does not necessarily risk the ability to successfully prosecute (due to inadmissibility of the confession)--and thereby incapacitate--the terrorist suspect if a violation of Miranda results in inadmissibility of the suspect's confession. …

Central Social Media Actors in Disaster Information Networks

Government agencies and media outlets traditionally have played central roles in disaster information networks. However, their hub status has slightly diminished as social media empowers others to communicate more easily. Little systemic research has identified the key actors in these new information networks. This paper examines Twitter hashtag networks during four disasters, the Boston Marathon bombing; the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion; the Midwest spring flooding in Peoria, Illinois; and the Moore, Oklahoma tornado. Findings indicate minimal government and nonprofit involvement. While traditional media outlets still played an important role in some networks, others were more heavily shaped by influential private citizens. We examine those networks by identifying key actors and evaluating their message content and conclude by offering an initial typology for hashtag information networks and discuss directions for future research.

The Boston Game and the ISIS Match

The world is becoming largely interconnected. This notion has thought-provoking implications due to the fact that this interdependence affords terrorist organizations opportunities to perpetrate attacks. It is inevitable that an increased risk of terrorism, especially on the forefront of megasporting events, is on the rise due to the global publicity such attacks receive. This article focuses on the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Islamic State and illustrates how high-profile news coverage and coverage on social media (through user-generated content or “terrorist organization”–generated content) advance terrorist groups’ attempts to use large-scale sporting events to leverage their agenda and ideology.

A Death in the Family: Lessons From a Tragedy.

A Death in the Family: Lessons From a Tragedy.

Blast Injuries: From Improvised Explosive Device Blasts to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Although most trauma centers have experience with the imaging and management of gunshot wounds, in most regions blast wounds such as the ones encountered in terrorist attacks with the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are infrequently encountered outside the battlefield. As global terrorism becomes a greater concern, it is important that radiologists, particularly those working in urban trauma centers, be aware of the mechanisms of injury and the spectrum of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary blast injury patterns. Primary blast injuries are caused by barotrauma from the initial increased pressure of the explosive detonation and the rarefaction of the atmosphere immediately afterward. Secondary blast injuries are caused by debris carried by the blast wind and most often result in penetrating trauma from small shrapnel. Tertiary blast injuries are caused by the physical displacement of the victim and the wide variety of blunt or penetrating trauma sustained as a result of the patient impacting immovable objects such as surrounding cars, walls, or fences. Quaternary blast injuries include all other injuries, such as burns, crush injuries, and inhalational injuries. Radiography is considered the initial imaging modality for assessment of shrapnel and fractures. Computed tomography is the optimal test to assess penetrating chest, abdominal, and head trauma. The mechanism of blast injuries and the imaging experience of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing are detailed, as well as musculoskeletal, neurologic, gastrointestinal, and pulmonary injury patterns from blast injuries.