Déjà vu All Over Again: Investigating Temporal Continuity of Adolescent Victimization

An important theoretical issue in the study of criminal victimization focuses on state dependence or the extent to which prior victimization causally affects subsequent victimization. Framing this issue are two conceptual arguments that posit divergent predictions regarding the impact of past victimization. While “victim labeling” suggests that the experience of prior victimization increases victimization in the future, “victim rationality” suggests that past victimization decreases subsequent victimization. To date there has been little longitudinal research that explicitly evaluates these competing viewpoints. In response, the current study uses panel data from a sample of adolescents to assess the merit of these opposing theoretical frameworks. Against this theoretical backdrop, it is shown that prevailing strategies for the analysis of panel data—random-effects and fixed-effects—produce erroneous results that add confusion to the debate regarding the nature of state dependence processes in criminal victimization. Drawing from advances in econometrics, two estimators that can overcome the problems that plague more traditional panel data models are used to provide a test of the competing victimization perspectives. Results from those analyses suggest support for the thesis that past victimization increases subsequent victimization, but the magnitude of this positive relationship is more modest than is indicated by analytic models that have been utilized in prior longitudinal victimization research.

The Organisation of Hate

In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’ as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition - that it comes from within a psyche and then moves out to others - the paper suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such alignments are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, object or body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects that it does. Furthermore, although hate does not reside positively in a subject, body or sign, this does not mean that hate does have effects that are structural and mediated. This paper shows that hate becomes attached or ‘stuck’ to particular bodies, often through violence, force and harm. The paper dramatizes its arguments by a reflection on racism as hate crime, looking at the circulation of figures of hate in discourses of nationhood, from both extreme right wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doing can precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designated as the hated, an affective life that is crucial to the injustice of hate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

INITIATING A COMPARABLE WORTH WAGE POLICY IN MINNESOTA: NOTES FROM THE FIELD

As of January 1986, Minnesota has progressed farther than any other state in implementing acomparable worth (pay equity) wage policy, with two laws requiring pay equity, one covering state employees and a second covering employees of all types of jurisdictions. This article presents a discussion of Minnesota's importance as a case study, a definition of comparable worth, the history and politics o f pay equity policy in Minnesota, and an analysis of Minnesota's role in a national campaign to change wage policy. The article shows that implementation has been more straight-forward in state government than for the 1,583 local jurisdictions, many of which had less-developed personnel systems than did the state. The passage of the local pay equity law ushered in a new stage in this policy, where the issue Is no longer controlled by a small number of legislators, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.     

Engendering organisational practice in NGOs: The case of Utthan

In the late 1970s, feminist social scientists began to challenge some of the assumptions underlying the dominant paradigms on organisations, arguing that they reflect and are structured by the values articulated within the larger institutional arenas in which they are embedded, thus reproducing gender-discriminatory outcomes. This paper unpacks the 'deep structure' of one NGO, Utthan, based in Gujarat, India, to understand the extent to which it is an engendering organisation. It suggests that, while gender-sensitive leadership, training, and resources play a critical role in addressing gender equity in development practice, organisational transformation is a much harder and longer process requiring sustained commitment from the leadership, staff, and funding partners.