Client privilege,compliance and the rule of law: Swedish lawyers and money laundering prevention

Can, and will, lawyers police their clients? This article aims to shed light on the private front-line workers of the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering (FATF). The analysis is based on a study of how Swedish lawyers perceive and handle obligations to police clients within FATF style risk-based anti-money laundering/counter terrorism (AML/CTF) regulation. We find that the lawyers were reluctant to taking on the responsibility for AML/CTF, and that their front-line work was directed towards being compliant enough. Relatedly, we identify several practices of separation that serve to mediate between the conflicting aims and interests in the everyday of this form of private policing. Another finding is that the lawyers by and large position themselves as knowledgeable actors, and view risks of AML/CTF as knowable. Nevertheless, lawyers experienced a principle clash between being ‘not banks’, and being front-line workers for FATF. In particular, the lawyers perceived their role as front-line workers to be more complex due to their professional norms and ethics on client privilege, and what they saw as the proper role of lawyers, being in conflict with the obligation to report clients and their transactions. In concluding, we suggest that paying more attention to the everyday experience of front-line workers when devising regulatory tools may be a way to promote engagement in ‘true’ crime prevention on their part.     

Violence Prevention and Targeting the Elusive Gang Member

Who do violence preventers target to achieve violence prevention? This fundamental question of selection is typically associated with law enforcement, yet gang labeling is critical in another context: nonprofit violence prevention. Eighteen months of fieldwork in a gang outreach organization find that (a) workers operationalize gang violence prevention as social service provision, but (b) services are only offered to those deemed “ready” for life changes. Readiness is an unwritten eligibility criteria leveraged as a rhetorical tool to focus recruitment on clients who demonstrate complicity. It is reaffirmed through external pressures to document program effectiveness; organizational‐level concerns for efficient resource allocation; the subpopulation of clients who actually want services; and workers’ own fears of “getting played”—losing face from free‐riding clients interested in street worker perks, but not formal services. While core gang members may be most at‐risk, their very centrality may deter, rather than justify, providing them services.     

The impact of vendorship legislation and interprofessional competition in the market for social workers' services.

The results of this article suggest that, in the short run, vendorship legislation will not result in a large shift of social workers from organized settings into private practice. However, vendorship legislation appears to increase the number of social workers in private practice in areas that have not attracted as many psychiatrists. Thus, vendorship may have a favorable impact on the geographic distribution of mental health providers. Vendorship legislation may result in increases in private practice social workers in underserved areas. The results also suggest that social workers and psychiatrists compete in the market for mental health services. In counties with higher psychiatrist-to-population ratios, fees for social workers' services are lower. Further, in counties with higher psychiatrist-to-population ratios, the number of social workers in private practice decreased after vendorship. Finally, there is a large range of optimal practice size for social workers. Social workers with 20 or more clients per month can provide mental health services at the lowest average cost per client. Thus social workers operating either full-time or part-time practices with more than 20 clients per month can provide mental health services efficiently.     

Assessing the Domestic Violence Training Needs of Benefits Workers

Domestic violence victims often have economic and employment needs that either directly or indirectly stem from their victimization. In their efforts to seek services, victims may turn to benefits workers who are given the task of providing clients with short-term financial help, job training, access to health care, and assistance in obtaining a job. It is not clear whether benefits workers are adequately prepared to help domestic violence victims. In this study, 189 social services workers from the Commonwealth of Virginia were surveyed to assess the training needs of all social services workers. This article focuses on the specific training needs of benefits workers and draws comparisons between benefits workers’ training needs and other workers’ needs. The findings suggest that benefits workers are perceived as knowing less about domestic violence than other social services workers. Implications are discussed. This research was supported by a contract from the Virginia Institute of Social Services Training Activities     

Violence during Pregnancy: Investigating Infanticidal Motives

This study aimed to investigate whether potentially infanticidal violence by men toward their pregnant partners’ is motivated by jealousy, and hence paternity uncertainty. It was predicted that men who used potentially infanticidal violence (directing their physical aggression towards their pregnant partners’ abdominal region) would have younger partners as this is associated with greater reproductive value; would be in relationships of shorter duration as this may indicate less stable relationships; and would be more jealous and restrictive of their partner’s movements and friendships than violent men who directed their aggression to other regions of their pregnant partners’ body. Relationship behaviors were provided from 43 women in domestic violence shelters (n?=?43), using measures of the following: (1) partner physical aggression (2) victim fear and injury, (3) areas of bodily assault (when pregnant and when not pregnant), (4) controlling behaviors, and (5) topics of disagreement. Violence directed towards the fetus was associated with shorter relationships where both partners were younger. In such relationships, there was more physical aggression from the male partner, he used more controlling behaviors to isolate his partner, and the partners had more disagreements arising from his jealousy, compared with when physical aggression was not directed towards the fetus. These findings are consistent with an infanticidal motive for men’s aggression directed towards their pregnant partners. If paternity uncertainty is a primary cause of this dangerous form of domestic violence, it should form an important element in any screening instrument.     

Is Partner Aggression Related to Appraisals of Coercive Control by a Partner?

Research and clinical reports on men who are aggressive towards their intimate partners find that these men tend to behave in highly controlling ways towards such partners (e.g., restricting their social interactions, monitoring of activities, and reducing decision-making power). This study tests the hypothesis that men and women in violent dating relationships appraise such behaviors differently than individuals in nonviolent relationships. Based on clinical and empirical partner abuse literature, 119 college students rated the extent to which they perceived hypothetical behaviors towards a partner as controlling. Results suggest that individuals who had either engaged in or received partner aggression appraised restrictive, domineering, and coercive behaviors from a male to a female partner, and from a female to a male partner as less controlling than individuals who had neither perpetrated nor received partner aggression. Men also viewed those behaviors as less controlling than did women. Generalizability, clinical implications, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Crime Victims and the Social Services: Social Workers' Viewpoint

The aim of this article is to analyse how social workers in the social services describe crime victims and their role in supporting these victims. Based on focus groups with social workers in the social services, it is established that social workers discriminate between a categorical understanding of crime victims and an assessment of individuals in need. The categorical understanding of crime victims is connected to weakness and innocence, and the discussions are constructed with a focus on women and children. However, when the social workers move beyond this idea and describe individual victims of crime they have met, they attribute a more complicated picture and acknowledge the complexity of crime and victimization. The social workers give themselves a vague role regarding support to victims of crime. They consider themselves as able to connect individuals in need with helping resources, but they do not regard themselves as resources in this area. According to the social workers, an individual should not receive support from the social services just because he or she is categorized by them as a victim of crime. One conclusion is that the category ‘crime victims’ has not gained acceptance among the social workers.     

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.     

How pedophilic men think about adult-child sex: effects of child gender and physical maturity

To date, very little research has tackled whether pedophilic men’s attitude towards adult–child sex depends on characteristics of the adult or the child involved in such acts. This study examines the effect of the child’s gender (male vs. female) and physical maturity (pre-pubescent vs. early pubescent) on the moral evaluation of apparently noncoercive adult–child sex in a 2?×?2 factorial online vignette experiment. One hundred eighty-three English-speaking pedophilic men rated their agreement with moral arguments on the Immoral Sex Scale, as well as whether they believed this behavior to be typical for a child. The results revealed considerable inter-individual differences, with about one third showing restrictive moral attitudes. Contrary to our expectations, gender and physical maturity neither affected the perceived morality of the sexual act, nor beliefs about the representativeness of the child’s behavior. However, when controlling for confounds, pedophilic men believed that boys were more likely to willingly engage in adult–child sex. Furthermore, participants with stronger liberal attitudes were found to be more likely to defend the sexual act, as were participants with a preferential interest in pre-pubescents. There was no link between attitudes towards adult–child sex and sexual offending, replicating the non-associations reported in previous community surveys.     

Drug Globalization: Eventual Legalization of Beer in Iceland and Marihuana Decriminalization in the USA

This article discusses whether different motivations for and perceptions of the police role, either as ‘law and order‐oriented thrill‐seekers’ or as ‘social workers’ lead officers to adopt different approaches towards the public. The first category police rank‐and‐file officers' desire for action and excitement, causing them to perceive policing as a mission, also causes them to have a distorted view of reality whereby they perceive members of the public either as significant adversaries or as insignificant ones. For them, ‘real police work’ means chasing and catching villains, and this delusional picture of what policing is may lead them to enlarge and redefine ‘insignificant criminals’ and thus perceive them as ‘villains’ who merit and justify police targeting. However, as these insignificant criminals—beggars, drug addicts, vagrants, ethnic minority youths, and drunks—are not perceived as actually ‘significant adversaries’, the targeting of and encounters with them also produce fatigue in police officers as these activities fail to comply with many police officers' desire to ‘catch the villain’, and the encounters are repetitive and tedious. Police fatigue and stereotyping may entail cynicism due to the ways in which some groups respond to police targeting, such as accusing the police of racism or threatening them with complaints. It is argued that the first type of police officers to a larger degree will experience fatigue and cynicism than the second type of officers—‘the social workers’—who are motivated by a will to ‘help others’, and who receive more rewarding responses from the public.     

Me,myself and I: the sociology of policing male rape,the gaze of the ‘Other’

In this paper, the bodies of male rape victims as the ‘other’ are problematized. The social and cultural constructions of male rape within a policing context are examined since the police play a major role in impeding the progress of male rape cases. The author draws on police data, generated from interviews and qualitative questionnaires with the police, to illustrate the problems with policing male rape in England, UK. While the author provides empirical data, sociological, cultural, and post-structural theoretical frameworks largely inform it. It is argued that the bodies of male rape victims are positioned in inferior positions, whereby their bodies are metaphorically and symbolically marked as ‘abnormal’, ‘deviant’, and the ‘other’. Through social and power relations, their bodies are tainted, which reinforces gender and social norms.     

Empathy and Expertise: Case Workers and Immigration/Asylum Applicants in London

Under recent reforms, the UK government has eroded state funding for civil legal aid. Funding cuts affect asylum and immigration law as produced, practiced, and mediated in the course of interactions between case workers and their clients in legal‐aid‐funded Law Centers in South London. The article explores the contradictory character of one‐on‐one relationships between case workers and clients. Despite pressure to quantify their work in “value for money” terms, the empathy that often motivates case workers drives them to provide exceptional levels of aid to their clients in facing an arbitrary bureaucracy. Such personalized commitment may persuade applicants to accept the decisions of that bureaucracy, thus reinforcing a hegemonic understanding of the power of the law. The article, however, challenges the assumption that, in attempting to shape immigrant/refugees as model—albeit second‐class—citizens, case worker/client interactions necessarily subscribe to the categories and assumptions that underpin UK immigration and asylum law.     

Negotiating a Victim Identity: Young Men as Victims of Violence

This article is based on an interview study of how 10 young male crime victims talk about violent events and actors involved. It focuses on how the young men present their identities as ‘young men’ who have been victims of violent crimes. In their narrations the men struggle with a cultural understanding that ‘masculinity’ is associated with strength and power, while ‘victim’ is associated with weakness and impotence. During the interviews the young men actualize several balancing acts in their presentation of themselves as men and victims in a delicate manner by use of specific word choice, manner of speaking, laughter, etc. The young men are negotiating a victim identity; they portray themselves by careful positioning as both victims and strong, active young men. By this discursive balancing of identities the young men present themselves as manly at the same time as they present themselves as victims. In collaboration with the interviewer the participants negotiate how they want to be known: as ‘victim-worthy’ young men, with associations to a ‘hegemonic manliness’.     

Asian Male Domestic Violence Victims: Services Exclusive for Men

The main reasons abused men do not seek social services include their strong endorsement of social/cultural values and avoidance of gender role conflict. Through internet-based service connections, we did not find sources in Asia, Australia, or New Zealand that advertised programs exclusively for male victims of domestic violence (DV). Nine social services in Hong Kong and Singapore describe their work with men in DV situations, but the main focus is “men as perpetrators.” Targeting men as victims, 32 sources in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom describe services designed especially for male DV victims. Findings demonstrate that services for male victims must address such factors as secretiveness, cultural values, masculine identity, tolerance, shame, and loss of face.     

Spousal Violence against Working Women in India

Violence against women, especially spousal violence is a common phenomenon in India which is significantly increasing over the years. In the name of socialization, male dominated orthodox Indian society raises girls to endure male aggression without protest. Indian social norms within this conservative environment discourage women’s employment; consequently, employed women are subjected to more abuse compared to their unemployed counterparts. The current study, based on the National Family Health Survey data, documents the nature and extent of spousal violence against married employed women across job categories. The study reveals that the majority of employed women are skilled or unskilled manual workers, and most of them are subjected to spousal violence. Furthermore, higher category jobs do not protect women from spousal violence. Women’s empowerment, higher education and/or occupation compared to their partner, and partner’s alcoholism further induce cruelty on employed women. However, standard of living and a husband having a comparatively better job are found to reduce spousal violence.     

From the kitchen to the bedroom: frequency rates and consequences of sexual harassment among female domestic workers in Brazil

Sexual harassment has been investigated mostly in developed countries. The authors examined frequency rates and consequences of sexual harassment among female domestic workers in Brazil. Twenty-six percent had been sexually harassed at work during the past year. Live-in workers were at significantly greater risk for experiencing sexual harassment than those residing in their own homes, when controlling for participants' age, race, and social class. Women residing in their employers' residences used more alcohol and drugs than their counterparts. Harassed women had significantly higher self-esteem impairment and anxiety and depression than nonharassed women. Nonharassed women residing in their own homes had the best physical well-being. Concerning participants' worst sexually harassing experiences, the perpetrators were likely to be men (75%), who also engaged in more severe types of sexual harassment than female perpetrators. The emotional reactions to such incidents were significantly more negative when perpetrated by men than by women. Implications for foreign in-home workers employed by Europeans and North Americans are discussed.