Rape law reform and the effect of victim characteristics on case processing

Rape law reforms enacted during the past 20 years were designed to shift the focus of a rape case from the victim to the offender. Reformers and criminal justice officials speculated that changes in the rules of evidence and enactment of rape shield laws would result in less suspicion of the claims of rape victims and would make it less likely that the character, reputation, and behavior of the victim would affect decision making about the case. In this paper we examine the impact of rape law reform on the factors affecting the outcome of sexual assault cases bound over for trial in Detroit. We find little support for our hypothesis that the effect of victim characteristics on case processing decisions declined in the postreform period. Most of the victim characteristics did not have the expected effects on the likelihood of case dismissal, charge reduction, conviction, or incarceration. We did, on the other hand, find that the proportion of cases involving evidence of risk-taking behavior on the part of the victim or questions about the victim's credibility increased in the postreform period.     

Gender bias in courtroom dynamics

Respondents to numerous surveys about courtroom interaction have identified gender bias as a serious problem in the courts. Consistently, women perceive more bias than do men. To explore the importance of gender, role (judge vs. attorney), experience with bias, and age in predicting perceptions of gender bias in the courtroom, we conducted secondary analyses of data from a survey of judges and attorneys in Illinois. Three dimensions of bias were identified:Presence of Bias, Optimism (belief that bias is decreasing), andInstrumental Bias (use of biased behavior as a trial tactic). Although role, age, and experience had some importance in explaining the scores on these three factors, gender offered the greatest predictive power. Implications for future research and for ending bias in courtroom interaction are discussed.This research was completed with support from the Office of Social Science Research, University of Illinois at Chicago.     

“We need more clips about Putin,and lots of them:” Russia’s state-commissioned online visual culture

In this article, we examine how the Putin government is attempting to respond and adapt to the YouTube phenomenon and the vibrant oppositional online visual culture on Runet. We show how these processes are giving rise to new forms of state propaganda, shaped and driven above all by the quest for high-ranking search-engine results and the concomitant desire to appeal to the perceived new sensibilities of the Internet generation through the commissioning and production of “viral videos.” We focus in particular on the videos created by Iurii Degtiarev, a pioneer in the development of this genre, whose works we explore in light of the “Kremlingate” email leaks, which offer inside information on the strategies and aims being pursued on the online visual front of the campaign to manage the Russian mediascape, and Degtiarev’s own reflections on this subject. Examining the output of young creatives patronized by the Kremlin offers a “bottom-up” view to supplement studies of the Russian ideological and media landscape as shaped by “political technologists” such as Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovskii.     

Boxed In: Human Cargo and the Technics of Comfort

Since the 1990s, public outcries over the “return” of human cargo commonly point to the physical horrors of travel as a key sign of the inhuman and the unfree in contemporary social life. Whether in debates over migrant shipwrecks across the Mediterranean or over air rage battles on budget American flights, the moving vehicle and its uncomfortably tight quarters often serve as the space par excellence for grappling with questions of proper stranger sociality and the limits of “fellow feeling” or moral sympathy in a globalizing world. This paper examines how a relatively novel problem of “comfort” came to inform and shape the politics of mobility starting in the late eigteenth century when abolitionists first successfully argued for distinguishing the human/izing rights of passengers from the movement of nonhuman goods through sensory invocations of the techno-rational and embodied terrors of the slave ship. Through both the historical and contemporary cases discussed, this paper suggests that the problem of comfort was never just a technical one of cramped transport resolvable through mere material and instrumentalist means. Rather, comfort is better described as a form of technics in so far as its technical-material dimensions are always already entangled with an existing social repertoire of ideas, habits, and aspirations, that is, it has aesthetic and affective capacities as part of moral imaginaries of how to deal with Others and, in turn, how to live the good life.