Lying About Terrorism

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is committed for strategic reasons as a form of costly signaling to an audience. However, since over half of terrorist attacks are not credibly claimed, conventional wisdom does not explain many acts of terrorism. This article suggests that there are four lies about terrorism that can be incorporated in a rationalist framework: false claiming, false flag, the hot-potato problem, and the lie of omission. Each of these lies about terrorism can be strategically employed to help a group achieve its desired goal(s) without necessitating that an attack be truthfully claimed.     

The Nature of Circuit Court Gatekeeping Decisions

This article provides an analysis of the nature of circuit court threshold decisions. Specifically, a model sensitive to the institutional context of the circuits is developed and tested across all threshold decisions in the sample and in more limited samples of proper party and proper forum votes. The results suggest that circuit court gatekeeping is a function of multiple factors, including circuit court law, litigant status, the lower court decision, and, at times, the ideological preferences of the circuit judge or that of his or her circuit.     

from pillar to post: understanding the victimisation of women and children who experience domestic violence in an age of austerity

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women’s equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women’s services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.     

Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one‐sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.     

The Effect of Mandatory Seat Belt Laws on Seat Belt Use by Socioeconomic Position

We investigated the differential effect of mandatory seat belt laws on seat belt use among socioeconomic subgroups. We identified the differential effect of legislation across higher versus lower education individuals using a difference‐in‐differences model based on state variations in the timing of the passage of laws. We find strong effects of mandatory seat belt laws for all education groups, but the effect is stronger for those with fewer years of education. In addition, we find that the differential effect by education is larger for mandatory seat belt laws with primary rather than secondary enforcement. Our results imply that existing socioeconomic differences in seat belt use would be further mitigated if all states upgraded to primary enforcement.     

Sexual dimorphism in America: geometric morphometric analysis of the craniofacial region

One of the four pillars of the anthropological protocol is the estimation of sex. The protocol generally consists of linear metric analysis or visually assessing individual skeletal traits on the skull and pelvis based on an ordinal scale of 1-5, ranging from very masculine to very feminine. The morphologic traits are then some how averaged by the investigator to estimate sex. Some skulls may be misclassified because of apparent morphologic features that appear more or less robust due to size differences among individuals. The question of misclassification may be further exemplified in light of comparisons across populations that may differ not only in cranial robusticity but also in stature and general physique. The purpose of this study is to further examine the effect of size and sex on craniofacial shape among American populations to better understand the allometric foundation of skeletal traits currently used for sex estimation. Three-dimensional coordinates of 16 standard craniofacial landmarks were collected using a Microscribe-3DX digitizer. Data were collected for 118 American White and Black males and females from the W.M. Bass Donated Collection and the Forensic Data Bank. The MANCOVA procedure tested shape differences as a function of sex and size. Sex had a significant influence on shape for both American Whites (F = 2.90; d.f. = 19, 39; p > F = 0.0024) and Blacks (F = 2.81; d.f. = 19, 37; p > F = 0.0035), whereas size did not have a significant influence on shape in either Whites (F = 1.69; d.f. = 19, 39; p > F = 0.08) or Blacks (F = 1.09; d.f. = 19, 37; p > F = 0.40). Therefore, for each sex, individuals of various sizes were statistically the same shape. In other words, while significant differences were present between the size of males and females (males on average were larger), there was no size effect beyond that accounted for by sex differences in size. Moreover, the consistency between American groups is interesting as it suggests that population differences in sexual dimorphism may result more from human variation in size than allometric variation in craniofacial morphology.     

Predictors of sexually coercive behavior in a nationally representative sample of adolescent males

Data from male participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health are used to examine childhood predictors of late adolescent and early adulthood sexually coercive behavior and adolescent mediators of these relationships. A path analysis shows that experiencing sexual abuse as a child has a direct effect on perpetrating subsequent coercion that is partially mediated by early sexual initiation. Involvement in delinquent activities in adolescence was the only additional significant predictor of sexually coercive behavior and completely mediated the relationship between physical abuse in childhood and later sexual coercion. Of note, more than half of men reporting sexually aggressive acts had no history of childhood victimization, so pathways to sexually coercive behavior for this group remain unidentified. In addition to the universal prevention approaches currently in use in the field, these findings suggest that targeted prevention programs need to be formulated for youth with histories of childhood sexual or physical abuse.