Exploring the Relationship Between Childhood Sexual Abuse and Adult Sexual Perpetration

Empirical findings indicate that many adult sexual offenders experienced sexual abuse during childhood. It has been suggested that characteristics of offenders' sexual perpetrating behaviors may resemble their own victimization experiences, although there has been minimal empirical investigation in this area. The purpose of the present study was to provide preliminary data on the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and characteristics of sexual offending behavior. A sample of adult male sexual offenders with histories of sexual abuse completed the Sexual Victimization Survey as well as a measure on their sexual offenses. Such characteristics as the nature of sexual activities, duration and frequency of experiences, and age and relationship of participants were examined. Results showed trends in the hypothesized direction and revealed a variety of similarities between childhood sexual abuse and adult sexual perpetration. Findings of this exploratory study suggest the importance of addressing the nature of victimization in the treatment of sexually abused boys and offenders with histories of sexual abuse.     

Demands,responsibility, and influence in Malawi’s participatory agricultural extension services

Participatory governance offers the potential to deliver responsive and accountable services. This article tests this expectation by looking at how members of participatory extension platforms in Malawi understand the meaning of “demand-driven” services, and allocate responsibility and influence in service provision. Results show that most respondents agree on bottom-up extension services that respond to expressed farmers’ needs (86% of respondents), and assign responsibility and influence widely across state and non-state actors. While these findings suggest that these participatory mechanisms can promote responsiveness to farmers’ needs and accountability, they also point toward different governance challenges in extension services.     

The Determinants of Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh: The Role of Partner’s Attitudes and Participation in Microcredit Programmes

This paper employs data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (2004) to explore how women’s empowerment is related to partner’s attitudes, participation in microcredit programmes and a set of other socio-economic factors. We use a structural equation model with categorical observed variables. We get that participation in microcredit programmes has a positive impact on both the empowerment’s dimensions considered, while partner’s attitudes effect is weaker, proving that gender community norms are likely to be rooted in women’s minds regardless of the partners’ perceptions of women’s status.     

Ecological Validity of the Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29): an Italian Study of Court-Ordered,Psychological Injury Evaluations Using the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS) as Criterion Variable

The Inventory of Problems-29 (IOP-29; Viglione, Giromini, & Landis, Journal of Personality Assessment, 99(5), 534–544, 2017) is a 29-item, recently published, self-administered test aimed at assessing the credibility of various symptom presentations. Although available research strongly supports the use of this symptom validity test in malingering-related contexts, to date, only few studies have analyzed data from real-life forensic evaluations. To fill this gap and explore ecological and convergent validity, the current study analyzed data from 74 court-ordered evaluations aimed at establishing the possible presence of psychological injury. Such evaluations are high-stakes situations in which exaggeration or malingering occur relatively often. We used a research-supported and popular symptom validity test, i.e., the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS; Smith & Burger, Journal of the American Academy on Psychiatry and Law, 25:180–183, 1997), as our criterion variable. The IOP-29 produced excellent area under the curve (AUC) values of .98 with a recommended SIMS total score cutoff (≥ 17) and .99 when eliminating too-close-to-classify cases (Rogers & Bender, 2018) and very large Cohen’s d effect sizes of 2.98 and 3.59, respectively. Crucially, when implementing established cut scores from previous research, the IOP-29 yielded very high specificity and sensitivity rates, and the predictions from the two tests were strikingly similar. Taken together, these findings support the strong convergent validity of the IOP-29 and its utility in applied clinical and forensic settings.     

The paradoxes of the ‘everyday’: scrutinising the local turn in peace building

With the advent of the local turn in the mid-2000s, critical approaches have attempted to rethink peace building from the bottom up, placing local agents at the centre of the debate, declaring the end of top-down governance and affirming the fragmented, complex and plural nature of the social milieu. While local turn approaches have become popular in peace-building theory, this article invites the reader to question and problematise the local turn’s use of the concept of ‘everyday’, in order to explore paradoxes and contradictions that indicate the need to think more deeply about the impact of the local turn’s project of critique.     

Of ‘Strong’ Leadership,Crisis Communication,and Pooper Scoopers: Change in the Queensland Public Service Under Newman

Governments have historically offered their workforce a public service bargain founded on stable pay and conditions and job security. However, while the Westminster system aims for public service employment to be protected from the whims of government, public servants are nonetheless affected by the political environment in which they operate and changes to this bargain can occur with a new government. This paper focuses on a Queensland public service change process that resulted in large‐scale forced redundancies, non‐renewal of temporary contracts, and legislative changes that nullified the provisions in job security, organisational change, and redundancy policies. Using communication as a lens through which to understand leadership, it examines how the government communicated with the public service about this organisational change, immediately before and after the 2012 election. In particular, through analysis of public and media commentary, speeches and Hansard records, it examines Premier Newman's change leadership and communication by contrasting pre‐election messages to the public service with post‐election messages about the public service and the justifications for change during this period of downsizing. This analysis is used to reflect on political leadership, communication, fair treatment, and trust in public service change.     

The right to commemoration and “ideal victims”: the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration after 9/11 and 3/11

This article explores the puzzle of victim dissatisfaction with State-led commemoration following 9/11 and 3/11 by offering a cross-national case study through which to view key areas of theoretical debate in the sociology of human rights, cultural trauma and collective memory, and the politics of victimhood. Although State-led commemorative processes are often highly contested, we would expect them to be less so in the cases of 9/11 and 3/11, given broad social consensus about the victims’ right to commemoration and the traumatic nature of the events, and especially the “ideal nature” of the victims who as symbolic representatives of the State are conferred with great moral authority. Drawing on primary and secondary data on the commemoration of the attacks of 11th September 2001 and 11th March 2004 we find that despite sharp differences between commemorative processes, three common key areas of contestation and dissatisfaction for victims emerge: political instrumentalisation, hierarchies of worth and exclusion. We show how the status of ideal victimhood for victims of transnational terrorism carries within it an inherent paradox which provides the key to their dissatisfaction, namely the moral authority conferred on them as representatives of the State simultaneously depersonalises them, excluding them as individuals with rights and needs.