Police officers’ perceptions of false allegations of rape

Abstract

The idea that women lie about rape is a long standing rape myth with little or no supporting evidence. Previous research has demonstrated a belief in high levels of false allegations among police officers, despite no evidence to suggest rape is falsely reported more than other crimes. This has implications for complainants’ willingness to report sexual violations, for the treatment of complainants within the justice system, and wider societal understandings about what constitutes rape. The data that informs this paper comes from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study that focussed on rape attrition and the institutional response to rape. Forty in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with serving police officers in a UK force who regularly deal with reported cases of rape, and explored perceptions, practices and processes around rape. The research found police officers’ estimate of false allegations varies widely from 5 to 90%. The paper will discuss how police officers make judgements about perceived veracity of complainants in rape cases. This will demonstrate that whilst significant progress has been made in how police officers and police forces respond to rape, gender stereotypes about women as deceitful, vengeful and ultimately regretful of sexual encounters, continue to pervade the thinking of some officers. It will show that police officers differentiate between ‘types’ of reports they consider to be false, and operate with a notional ‘hierarchy’ of presumed false allegations that ranges from vengeful/malicious to mistaken/confused, with a corresponding reducing level of culpability attributed to women for the supposedly false allegation. It concludes that this serves to reinforce a culture that both supports and reproduces gender inequality and its manifestation in the form of sexual violence, and that intervention, training and institutional and policy frameworks are not wholly successful in addressing sexual violence in this context.     

Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

Love of My LXe

如果只是下雨就好了如果只是吵架就好了今天才吻了我的你是否曾经把我当成一个普通的男人看待过我们分手的地方到现在还下着雨我没有伤心只是那个红色跳个不停的东西还留在那里一直淋雨     

The Threat or Promise of Popular Therapy? A Feminist Reading of Narratives of “the Good Couple”

Popular therapeutic culture—such as self-help books, TV programmes, and Internet resources—is growing rapidly and posing important questions for feminist research and politics. On the one hand, it can be seen as a challenge to the public sphere in terms of what can be shown and said and by whom, with the emancipatory potential of giving political credentials to the personal. On the other, it can be seen as exploiting, and thereby reproducing, stereotypes and inequalities, such as those related to gender. In this article, the discussion is advanced by the use of Swedish popular therapy for couples as a point of departure. It is argued that a cultural narrative of the “good couple” is constructed in self-help books and TV programmes on relationship issues, a narrative that seems to keep the unequal nature of this heterosexual institution from being challenged. However, in the individual narratives of consumers of this culture, apparent on web discussion boards, the cultural narrative of the “good couple” is being challenged, not least with reference to gender and gender inequality.     

Fragments of Lives—The Use of Private Letters in Historical Research

When reading and interpreting private letters the historian needs constantly to be aware of the personal nature of her sources, asking herself to what extent she can use the information revealed in these letters and how far she can go in interpreting another persons' words and deeds—a life. The author argues that the small size of Icelandic society makes this especially important, because descendants or relatives of the people who are being explored and represented in the historian's work are often very sensitive to biographical work of this nature. Furthermore, the historian has to be aware of the ambiguous nature of private letters, as they are not necessarily a “true” narrative of what happened, and the meaning of the sentiments expressed can be unclear to the modern reader. Moreover, what is written in private letters can easily affect the historian emotionally. The author argues that historians must treat private letters with care and do justice to the people that once were alive and left these personal sources for posterity. However, historians must not hesitate to ask new and challenging questions—to reach as far as possible when interpreting a life. This leads the author to reflect on her own disposition in her research, to acknowledge that the boundaries between herself and her subject could become blurred. She does not, however, consider this to be a hindrance for her research but rather sees it as an opportunity to explore and discuss the nature of her sources and to reflect on how knowledge is being produced.     

Chinese American Adolescents’ Perceptions of the Language Brokering Experience as a Sense of Burden and Sense of Efficacy

Children of immigrants who do translations and who interpret for others using their heritage language and English are known as language brokers. Although prior research suggests that children of immigrants’ perceptions of the language brokering experience vary greatly—from feeling a sense of efficacy to feeling a sense of burden—what remains unanswered in the literature is identification of the antecedents and processes that help to explain the varying psychological experience of language brokers. Using data from a two-wave prospective longitudinal study of 256 Chinese American adolescents, the present study tested potential mechanisms that may be responsible for adolescents’ perceptions of the language brokering experience as a sense or burden or sense of efficacy. The results demonstrate that adolescents’ Chinese orientation sets in motion a family process that is linked to variations in the perceptions of adolescents’ language brokering experience. Adolescents who are more Chinese oriented have a stronger sense of familial obligation, and these adolescents are more likely to perceive that they matter to their parents. Adolescents’ perceived sense of mattering to parents, in turn, is associated positively with a sense efficacy, and negatively with a sense of burden as language brokers. Those adolescents who are less Chinese oriented have a weaker sense of familial obligation, and these adolescents are more likely to feel a sense of alienation from their parents. Adolescents’ sense of perceived alienation from parents, in turn, is associated with a sense of burden as language brokers. Implications for developing interventions for children who act as language brokers for their parents are discussed.

Adolescents’ Experiences of Sexual Assault by Peers: Prevalence and Nature of Victimization Occurring Within and Outside of School

This study examined adolescent peer-on-peer sexual assault victimization occurring within and outside school. The sample consisted of 1,086 7th through 12th grade students, with a mean age of 15. Most of the respondents were White (54%) or Black (45%), and approximately half of respondents were female (54%). A modified version of the Sexual Experiences Survey was used to assess opposite sex sexual victimization in 7th through 12th grade students. Rates of peer sexual assault were high, ranging from 26% of high school boys to 51% of high school girls. School was the most common location of peer sexual victimization. Characteristics of assault varied by location, including type of victimization, victims’ grade level, relationship to the perpetrator, type of coercion, and how upsetting the assault was. Distinctions between sexual assault occurring in and out of school are conceptualized with literature on developmental changes in heterosexual relationships and aggression.

the gift of gametes – unconscious motivation,commodification and problematics of genealogy

Three-way baby making is not new: genetic surrogacy existed in Biblical times and donor insemination was recorded in Britain over 200 years ago. However, the gift of gametes between women breaks all social conventions. This paper examines the phenomenon of gamete-donation questioning whether a ‘gift’ of such magnitude can ever be ‘free’ (as the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority advocates), or a ‘true’ gift (in Derridian terms). Exploration of this unprecedented ‘gift’ from a psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an interdisciplinary one, drawing on the gift literature in philosophy, anthropology, ethnography and socioeconomics, as well as neonatal research and reproductive medicine. Critics note the dearth of analyses that take seriously the psychological ramifications of contemporary treatments, protocols and expectations in reproductive medicine. Based on psychoanalytic therapy within a clinical practice devoted to reproductive issues, the author argues that institutionalised asexual reproduction alters unconscious conceptualisations of the act of procreation – converting the passionate intimacy of primal scene into a clinical coupling of gametes in a mechanised arena. The author argues that, too charged to contemplate, the gamete's transcendent quality and blurring of elementary personae/res distinctions leads protagonists, including professionals, to defensive commodification. Multiple emotional meanings are ascribed to gifted gametes by each in the triangle of donor, recipient and offspring, illustrated here with verbatim material. This article addresses some of the far-reaching socio-political consequences for class, race, age, gender and sexuality of asexual reproduction, related to selection procedures and uneven global and local distribution of fertility treatment and its cost in financial, physical, practical and emotional terms. Similarly, feminist unease over (patriarchal) reproductive control and gatekeeping policies are considered, as well as ethical concerns over genetic manipulation, pre-implantation screening, sex selection, selective foetocide and potential exploitation of transnational donors and surrogates.     

‘Vials,ampoules and a bucketful of syringes’: the experience of the self-administration of hormonal drugs in IVF

During the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), hormonal drugs are used to stimulate the woman's ovaries to produce multiple eggs. The injecting of the drugs is often performed by the women themselves outside of the clinical context, constituting a gendered burden of work that is rendered invisible by the dominant representations of treatment as undergone by couples and performed by doctors. Based on a series of interviews with women and couples who have undergone IVF unsuccessfully and who have ended treatment at least two years previously, this paper focuses on two aspects of the self-injection of hormonal drugs that emerged from the participants accounts: firstly, the gendered ways in which the drug regimen was experienced as compromising privacy and secondly, the strategic use of images of both illicit and medical drug use in the accounts. The paper argues that in spite of the dominant representation of IVF as a couples' technology, the IVF process is profoundly gendered, both in terms of bodily intervention and in the distribution of labour in the implementation of treatment; that the invisibility of the drug regimens from dominant representations of IVF can leave those undergoing treatment unprepared for some of the problems that the self-administration of the drugs can raise, particularly in terms of maintaining privacy; and finally, that images of the drug injection are mobilized strategically in the accounts to locate themselves within normative social reproductive standards. This highlights the extent to which the enduring ideological construction of proper womanhood as defined by motherhood continues to pose a dilemma for those who are involuntarily childless.     

Profiles of Adolescents’ Perceptions of Democratic Classroom Climate and Students’ Influence: The Effect of School and Community Contexts

Students’ learning experiences and outcomes are shaped by school and classroom contexts. Many studies have shown how an open, democratic classroom climate relates to learning in the citizenship domain and helps nurture active and engaged citizens. However, little research has been undertaken to look at how such a favorable classroom climate may work together with broader school factors. The current study examines data from 14,292 Nordic eighth graders (51% female) who had participated in the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study in 2009, as well as contextual data from 5,657 teachers and 618 principals. Latent class analysis identifies profiles of students’ perceptions of school context, which are further examined with respect to the contextual correlates at the school level using two-level fixed effects multinomial regression analyses. Five distinct student profiles are identified and labeled “alienated”, “indifferent”, “activist”, “debater”, and “communitarian”. Compared to indifferent students, debaters and activists appear more frequently at schools with relatively few social problems; being in the communitarian group is associated with aspects of the wider community. Furthermore, being in one of these three groups (and not in the indifferent group) is more likely when teachers act as role models by engaging in school governance. The results are discussed within the framework of ecological assets and developmental niches for emergent participatory citizenship. The implications are that adults at school could enhance multiple contexts that shape adolescents’ developmental niches to nurture active and informed citizens for democracies.     

Stories of life Stories of living: Women’ narratives and feminist biography

Narrative structure in biographical accounts is currently a much debated theme. This article brings together methodological debates in life story research and discussions within feminism about women's narratives and feminist biography. Connections between gendered conceptions of time and structures in narrative accounts are explored, and seen in relation to the context of interviewing. The latter is problematized as a setting that affects both the form and content of the biographical accounts given by informants. From this approach the opportunity arises for illuminating connections between “private troubles” in people's lives and “public issues” in society. An empirical discussion based on biographical interviews with white, Norwegian, middle‐class women, is carried out to illustrate the points made.     

the contradictory simultaneity of being with others: exploring concepts of time and community in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality.     

The Role of Youth’s Ratings of the Importance of Socially Supportive Behaviors in the Relationship Between Social Support and Self-Concept

The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between the perceived frequency and perceived importance of social support with youth’s self-concept. Data from a large representative sample of 921 children and adolescents in grades 3 through 12 were analyzed. Results indicated that the relationships between the frequency of social support from parents, teachers, classmates, and close friends with self-concept were significant. However, only the perceived importance of social support from teachers was significantly related to self-concept. Finally, an interaction was found between the frequency of social support and the importance of social support from classmates and close friends on self-concept. These results suggest that self-evaluations of the importance of teacher support may be especially influential for youths’ self-concept, and that the ability to discount the value of support from classmates and friends, when it is lacking, may be protective to the self-concept of children and adolescents.

The Impact of Collective Efficacy on Risks for Adolescents’ Perpetration of Dating Violence

Given prevalence rates and negative consequences that adolescents’ perpetration of dating violence may have on an individual’s well-being and future relationships, it is imperative to explore factors that may increase or reduce its occurrence. Thus, we aimed to identify how multiple contextual risk factors (individual, family, schools, and neighborhoods) were related to adolescents’ perpetration of dating violence over a 6 year period. Then, we assessed how neighborhood collective efficacy, an important predictor of urban youths’ well-being, buffered the relationship between each of the risk factors and adolescents’ perpetration of dating violence. Three waves of data from the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study were used (N = 765; Ages 16–20 at Wave 3). The sample is 53 % female, 42 % African-American, and 53 % Hispanic. For the total sample, drug and alcohol use, low parental monitoring, academic difficulties, and involvement with antisocial peers were significant early risk factors for perpetration of dating violence in late adolescence. Risk factors also varied by adolescents’ race and sex. Finally, perceived neighborhood collective efficacy buffered the relationship between early academic difficulties and later perpetration of dating violence for Hispanic males. These results imply that multiple systems should be addressed in dating violence prevention programs.     

networks of violence in the production of young women’s trajectories and subjectivities

This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women’s lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations of the interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women’s lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed.     

Rosa Vogelstein and her work: in search of the sources of success of the Stettin Women’s Association (Stettiner Frauenverein) at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century, Stettin, the major city of the Prussian Province of Pomerania, was the home of the Stettin Women’s Association (Stettiner Frauenverein). It engaged in welfare work as well as educational activity using modern forms of social work focused mostly on supporting lower-class women and children. This article presents the results of research into the sources of success of this organisation. It is worth attention because the organisation was established in a city where, similarly to the entire province, women’s movement demanding changes to behaviour patterns attributed to sex and background did not attract much support. In the light of preserved archives, it was Rosa Vogelstein, the wife of a local rabbi, who wielded decisive influence on this and who with full awareness resigned from exposing her role in the establishment and operations of the association which led to the memory of her achievements gradually fading.