Family violence and depressive symptomatology among incarcerated women

This study examines the potential association between witnessing parental violence as a child and later adult depressive symptomatology within a population that has received limited attention in the scientific literature, namely, incarcerated women. The Conflict Tactics Scale and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale were administered to 60 women incarcerated in a maximum security prison in North Carolina. A majority of the women reported that they had witnessed verbally aggressive or physically violent interactions among the adult members in their families. Seventy percent of these women suffered from clinically relevant levels of depressive symptomatology. Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis revealed that increasing levels of reasoning conflict resolution strategies used in the women's families of origin were associated with decreasing levels of depressive symptomatology of the women, whereas increasing levels of physically violent conflict resolution strategies were associated with increasing levels of depressive symptomatology.     

Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: The Effects of Gender,Legal Standard,and Ambivalent Sexism

This research tests the possibility that the reasonable woman as compared to the reasonable person test of hostile work environment sexual harassment interacts with hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs and under some conditions triggers protectionist attitudes toward women who complain of sexual harassment, We administered to a sample of undergraduates the ambivalent sexism inventory along with the fact patterns in two harassment cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. We found that those high in hostile sexism, and women, found more evidence of harassment. However, those high in benevolent sexism did not exhibit the hostile sexism effects. Although men were less sensitive to the reasonable woman standard than women, under some conditions the reasonable woman standard enabled both genders to find greater evidence of harassment. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.     

Affect Regulation and the Cycle of Violence Against Women: New Directions for Understanding the Process

The process of the intergenerational transmission of violence is not well understood. A risk and resilience model of criminal violence against women was investigated using secondary data. The sample was composed of adolescent male juvenile delinquents who had been physically abused by their parents, and who were followed up at ages 25 and 31. A series of structural equation models were fit to investigate whether dysregulated affect mediated the effects of attachment and family chaos on the adult perpetration of violence against women. These models support the hypothesis that affect dysregulation may act as a mediator. Results raise new ideas about the mechanisms by which violence may be transmitted across generations.     

Counting the costs of HIV and AIDS to civil-society organisations

HIV threatens the survival of many civil-society organisations (CSOs) in Africa. While we know the range of potential costs to such groups, we lack a detailed picture of the extent of the impact. This article highlights important findings from exploratory research in Malawi. Respondents perceived that overall performance in the four CSOs studied declined by an average 20 per cent because they were working in a context of high HIV prevalence. Yet the CSOs' workplace response to this threat was very limited, and they remain highly vulnerable to future impact. We consider why the CSOs have not been more proactive, and we recommend that donor policy should help partners to respond to the epidemic and enable them to remain effective.     

Globalization,risk-taking and violence: too much too soon in the late Roman Republic and pre-Renaissance Italian cities

Past research has found that globalization and political violence have been linked in both modern and less modern times. Normally, groups that have been disadvantaged or displaced by globalization are seen as responsible for these outbreaks of violence. In the case of the Late Republic of Rome and medieval Italy before the Renaissance, violence was actually prompted by major increases in wealth among those who benefited when control of the political system became much more valuable. The increased value raised the stakes of political control and underlay the resulting higher levels of violence.     

Social ecology, individual risk, and recidivism: A multilevel examination of main and moderating influences

Purpose

Despite a longstanding tradition in criminology to consider the impact of neighborhood context on crime-related outcomes, criminologists have largely ignored the influence of social ecology on recidivism until recently. The purpose of the present study was to examine the main and moderating influences of social ecology on recidivism.

Materials and Methods

The present study used hierarchical nonlinear modeling to estimate the effects of concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability on recidivism for a sample of offenders released from custody/supervision in 2006 and nested within Iowa counties. We controlled for individual-level risk for recidivism using the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R), a validated risk assessment instrument. We also examined whether the relationship between LSI-R score and recidivism varied across counties, and if so, whether this variation can be explained by social structural characteristics.

Results

Results indicate that residential stability was the only contextual variable significantly related to recidivism. The relationship between individual-level risk and recidivism did not vary across contexts.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the social structural context has limited influence on recidivism, while the LSI-R is a robust predictor of recidivism across contexts. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, practice, and future research.