Towards a common framework for assessing the activity and associations of groups who sexually abuse children

Abstract

Extensive social psychological research emphasises the importance of groups in shaping individuals' thoughts and actions. Within the child sexual abuse (CSA) literature criminal organisation has been largely overlooked, with some key exceptions. This research was a novel collaboration between academia and the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). Starting from the premise that the group is, in itself, a form of social situation affecting abuse, it offers the first systematic situational analysis of CSA groups. In-depth behavioural data from a small sample of convicted CSA group-offenders (n =3) were analysed qualitatively to identify factors and processes underpinning CSA groups' activities and associations: group formation, evolution, identity and resources. The results emphasise CSA groups' variability, fluidity and dynamism. The foundations of a general framework are proposed for researching and assessing CSA groups and designing effective interventions. It is hoped that this work will stimulate discussion and development in this long-neglected area of CSA, helping to build a coherent knowledge-base.     

The Japanese worker

Abstract

Robert Cole points out in his introduction to Japanese Blue Collar that there are two dominant but conflicting views of the social relations of production in the Japanese economy, views which Cole conveniently sums up under the rubrics of “uniqueness” and “convergence.”     

Making Things More Public: On the Political Responsibility of the Media Intellectual

Rosen, Jay. (1994). Making Things More Public: On the Political Responsibility of the Media Intellectual. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 11(4), 363–388.     

Same-Sex Marriage,Korean Christians,and the Challenge of Democratic Engagement

The contest over gay rights (e.g., same-sex marriage) dramatizes the clash between increasingly nonwhite (“majority-world”), religious conservatives and mostly white, progressives. It renews longstanding debate about the compatibility of religious conservatism and liberal, pluralistic democracy. A study of one influential group, Korean Christians, shows that the younger, western-educated generation generally combines religious conservatism and political liberalism; they are much more likely to espouse liberal-democratic principles and to participate in the larger, plural society than the older, immigrant generation. However, the polarizing politics of gay rights partly reverses the generational pattern: the historically insular, first generation participate more in mainstream politics, while some western-educated, second-generation Korean Christians become intolerant and isolated from elite-educated circles. Ideological minorities self-segregate themselves in the face of hostile, energized majorities, whether progressives in Korean Christian circles or conservatives in secular, educated ones. Public deliberation on same-sex marriage depends on whether it becomes viewed like the clear-cut issue of interracial marriage or the more ambiguous one of abortion.     

To Live Outside the Law: Frank O'Hara

This essay reflects on the New York School poet Frank O'Hara in terms of the idea of law. I suggest that art depends on a notion of an immanent law: that for language to become artistic is to become a meaningful part of an order which announces its autonomy from the surrounding world. O'Hara exploits this fact by making the most unlikely pieces of language into poetry, and thus giving the law to the life from which his words are taken. But he is also constantly improvising his own rules of art, drawing the law of poetry from the whim of the moment in radically individualist fashion. The gamble of O'Hara's writing is that the reader will submit to this profoundly personal law for the duration of a poem. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.