Corruption experiences and attitudes to political,interpersonal, and domestic violence

It is understood that corruption can change the incentives to engage in political violence. However, the scope for corruption to change attitudes toward the permissibility of violence has received less attention. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory, we argue that experiences of corruption in the social environment are likely to shape individual attitudes toward violent behavior. Using Afrobarometer data, we document a statistically significant and sizable relationship between an individual's experience of paying bribes and their attitudes to political, interpersonal, and domestic violence. These relationships are evident, and not significantly different, for men and women and are robust to the inclusion of variables capturing the local incidence of corruption, local norms regarding violence, and a proxy for the local incidence of violence with the community. Corruption is associated with permissive attitudes to violence even after controlling for the perceived legitimacy of the police and courts.     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.     

Gender in the Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper considers the three main ways in which social scientists are concerned with gender—as a field of study, as an analytical tool and as a social phenomenon structuring the social sciences themselves. It begins with a reconsideration of a report I wrote for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1998 on gender in the social sciences, and moves on to consider what has changed since then, emphasising the substantial internationalisation of Australian scholarship in thinking, method, focus, collaboration and communication. With the growing alliance of gender studies with cultural studies and the transformation of the latter from an interdisciplinary project into a new discipline, I suggest, feminist scholarship has become much more disciplinary in focus. For this reason, it has become important to understand why it is that women have found it much harder to achieve parity with men in some disciplines than others, and why it is that within disciplines, there remain strong gender differences. It concludes by observing that the vitality of gender scholarship depends significantly on its continuing engagement with public concerns and issues.     

Sex differences in the likelihood of arrest

Using data from the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), this study analyzed the impact of a criminal offender's sex on the likelihood of arrest for 555,752 incidents of kidnapping, forcible rape, forcible fondling, robbery, aggravated assault, simple assault, and intimidation in nineteen states and the District of Columbia during 2000. The data used in this study advanced the literature by enabling the authors to determine the likelihood of arrest for males and females based on sex-specific offending as reported by crime victims. Controlling for offense seriousness and a variety of other factors, logistic regression results showed that the probability of arrest for females was 28 percent lower for kidnapping, 48 percent lower for forcible fondling, 9 percent lower for simple assault, and 27 percent lower for intimidation than for males. A supplemental analysis also revealed that Black females had a higher probability of arrest than did White females for aggravated and simple assault. No discernable impact of an offender's sex on the prospect of arrest was noted for the crimes of forcible rape and robbery. Overall, these findings suggest that the lower arrest rate for females is partly the result of leniency shown women by law enforcement personnel.     

“He said,she said”: Sexual harassment in the fractured criminal justice work place

This article addresses the critical problem of sexual harassment in criminal justice agencies. The authors assess empirically the incidents of sexual harassment in criminal justice organizations, and discuss why sexual harassment is more prevalent in criminal justice agencies than in other public agencies.