Britain's Invisible Dividends

This article argues that the left is generally right in its claim that Britain is important and should be valued. However, it fails to consider two important arguments. The first is theoretical and draws broadly on discourse theory. It argues that Britain's value lies in the fact that it is an artificial and contingent entity. It is this that allows it to accommodate such a broad range of ethnicities and identities. This is related to my second argument. This proposes that the benefits of English regional authorities – citizenship, democratisation and greater economic prosperity – can only be realised fully in the context of a unified British state committed to the principles of inclusion and tolerance.     

The Cost of Majority‐Party Bias: Amending Activity under Structured Rules

All major legislation in the House necessitates a special rule from the Rules Committee before it can be brought to the chamber floor. These rules often strictly limit floor amendments to bills considered by the House. Scholars of political parties have argued that the House majority party can bias policy output away from the floor median through its usage of restrictive rules. In this article, we argue that in order to secure the passage of restrictive rules, the majority often makes concessions to centrist legislators through the amending process. We examine this theory using a newly collected data set that includes all amendments considered by the Rules Committee during the construction of structured rules in the 109th, 110th, and 111th Congresses (2005–2010). Our results are mixed, but they do suggest that moderate members of the majority party often receive concessions via amendments for their support of the majority party's agenda‐setting regime.     

Human Rights, “Orientation,” and ASEAN

This article will first look at the recent promulgation by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) of its ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). This development follows on from ASEAN's official attempts since the development of the 2007 ASEAN Charter to promote a “people-oriented” ASEAN. This article explores the various criticisms that have arrived of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, and, in particular, considers the criticisms concerned with or relevant to sexual orientation and gender identity rights. Second, the article uses the context of the arrival of the AHRD and, indeed, the arrival of its auspicing institution, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), to ask broader and deeper questions about the cultural politics of making rights claims and the manner in which these claims may contribute to the development of a more democratic politics.     

Obscuring sexual crime: examining media representations of sexual violence in Megan’s law

Sexual violence remains a pervasive and persistent social problem. In 1996, Congress enacted Megan’s Law, dictating mandatory community notification and potential civil commitment for those deemed by the State to be dangerous sexual offenders. In 2013, Megan’s Law continues to influence the treatment of sexual offenders under law and the social construction of a highly publicized, yet statistically rare, sexual crime – the rape and murder of a young female child by a depraved male stranger. This influence highlights the extent to which this personalized crime bill shapes the social construction of sexual violence in terms of sex and gender systems. This paper examines how sex and gender shape media discourses of the sexual offender and victim that are mobilized in the legislative debate on Megan’s Law. Drawing on theoretical ideas from cultural studies and feminist legal scholarship, we employ discourse analysis to analyze the legislative debate on Megan’s Law. We find that high-profile media images of sex offenders and victims are relied on to construct a singular image of sexual violence, whereby a child is victimized by an adult sexual predator. These images draw on traditional, conservative notions of gender and sexuality.     

Serious Youth Violence and Innovative Prevention: On the Emerging Link Between Public Health and Criminology

It was not so long ago that scholarly writings pointed to the vast chasm that existed between criminal justice and public health approaches to understanding and controlling interpersonal violence. Other scholarship of the day examined how criminal justice and criminology could benefit from adopting elements of the public health approach. For sure, there still exist many differences in how the two disciplines approach the violence problem, but over the years there have been some promising developments at the intersection of public health and criminology. This paper surveys the evolving link between public health and criminology, with a special focus on serious youth violence. It is concerned with both research and practice and how these efforts—across primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies—are contributing to improved public health-criminology collaborations or public health-influenced programs that have a discernable impact on youth violence.     

Avoiding Audience Costs: Domestic Political Accountability and Concessions in Crisis Diplomacy

We challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic leaders are more accountable than autocratic leaders. We argue that a winning coalition's abilities to monitor and sanction a leader increase as its size decreases. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that autocratic leaders are more accountable than democratic leaders due to the monitoring and sanctioning advantages of smaller coalitions relative to larger coalitions. Many international relations scholars hold that the conventional wisdom explains important variation in leaders’ behavior during crisis bargaining and in the outcomes of international disputes. We evaluate our theory and the conventional perspective by examining rival predictions regarding leaders’ ability to avoid incurring audience costs by conducting crisis negotiations and making concessions outside their coalitions’ view. A reassessment of us-ussr diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a favored case of the conventional wisdom, indicates the plausibility of our theory in the context of security crises.     

The effectiveness of relapse prevention training in a group of incarcerated child molesters

Abstract

A sample of child molesters participating in the U.K. prison sex offender treatment programme (SOTP) were required to complete a relapse prevention questionnaire before and after treatment. Results indicated that there were significant improvements in both awareness of risk situations and coping strategies, as measured by this instrument, through treatment. Nine months after the end of treatment most agreed to complete the questionnaire again. Those who had shown significant changes in terms of reduction of pro-offending attitudes through treatment maintained their RP skills. Men whose attitudes had not changed, although evidencing good RP skills at the end of treatment, were found to have lost these. This was most noticeable among men who had been released into the community and who had undergone a relatively short amount of therapy on the original SOTP (80 hours). These results indicate that RP training is only really useful where individuals have genuinely changed through treatment; and that the RP training should only be undertaken as part of an extensive treatment programme covering all areas of offending behaviour.     

The relationship between risk,deviance, treatment outcome and sexual reconviction in a sample of child sexual abusers completing residential treatment for their offending

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between static and dynamic risk and reconviction in a sample of child sexual abusers who had completed a long-term residential treatment programme for their sexual behaviour problems. Results found that only High/Very High risk men as measured by a static risk assessment schedule (Risk Matrix 2000) were reconvicted for sexual offences (17% over a 2-year period, 42% over a 5-year period). Results also showed that it was generally men who were rated as a high level of dynamic risk that were reconvicted for a sexual offence (13% versus 5% over a 2-year period; 44% versus 10% over a 5-year period). The study also indicated the benefits of residential treatment for such High risk/High Deviance men in that no men who left the programme having responded to treatment had been reconvicted for sexual offences at either follow-up period.