Decisions to offend in men who sexually abuse their daughters

Abstract

A group of nine intrafamilial child molesters of daughters and stepdaughters from Canada and the United Kingdom were interviewed about their analysis of opportunities to sexually offend. Questions focused on the evaluation of immediate and life circumstances surrounding the offence, including how the offender defined, created and responded to opportunities for offending. An equally important goal was identifying strengths in resisting opportunities and coping with spoiled attempts. The interviews were transcribed and subjected to grounded theory analysis. Consistent with the rational choice theory of criminal behaviour the majority of offenders identified information and decision-making processes used to evaluate opportunities for offending. Themes related to offender and victim characteristics, as well as situational factors, are identified and discussed with respect to risk and protective factors. Offenders described positive relationships, greater social/community connectedness and successful employment as present in their lives when not offending. These elements are consistent with positive approaches to sexual offender treatment and management.     

‘All the Beautiful Things’: Trauma,Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood

This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian children variously perform and transform the discourse of trauma and the aesthetic of suffering that have come to dominate representations of Palestinian childhood and the Palestinian struggle in general. It is argued that everyday beauty in the lives of Palestinian refugee children, as found in mundane spaces and enacted through interpersonal relationships, constitutes an aesthetic disruption to the dominant representation of trauma as put forward by international humanitarian aid organisations and development agencies. Far from being restricted to the immediacy of everyday spaces and interactions, however, everyday beauty is located within wider national and religious geographical imaginaries, and likewise forms the basis of critiques of social and political injustice, and demands for a more just and equitable future. It is argued that children enact an everyday Islamic ethic of beauty as part of a wider political demand for life itself.     

Women's motives for violent and nonviolent behaviors in conflicts

Drawing from past research on women's motives for intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration, correlates of women's perpetration, and correlates of nonviolent conflict, we created a scale containing 125 possible motives, representing 14 broad domains (e.g., self-defense, retaliation). Participants were an ethnically diverse sample of women who had perpetrated no physical IPV against their current partner (n = 243), threats but not physical IPV (n = 70), nonsevere physical IPV (n = 193), and at least one act of severe (e.g., choke) physical IPV (n = 93). An exploratory factor analysis yielded a seven-factor solution, representing Partners' Negative Behaviors, Increase Intimacy, Personal Problems, Retaliation, Childhood Experiences, Situation/Mood, and Partners' Personal Problems. Differences by women's IPV perpetration and race and/or ethnicity were tested with means representing these seven factors and a computed variable representing self-defense. Although motives differed by perpetration type, main effects for Partners' Negative Behavior, Personal Problems, Retaliation, and Childhood Experiences were modified by interactions, suggesting ethnicity should be considered when developing interventions.     

The Specular Economy

There is an expansion of celebrity culture outward. Through new media forms, greater portions of the populace are now constucting online public personas. The best way to understand this proliferation of the public presentation of the self is through the term specular, a two-way mirror of projection on to the screen and the circulation of and interaction with those images and texts into the wider world. What is now well-developed is a specular economy whose foundations are derived from the much longer tradition of celebrity culture and whose repercussions relate to an emerging comfortability with a society of surveillance.     

Access to justice

Conclusion The central aim of providing access to justice should be to ensure that every citizen receives implementation of his legal rights at the lowest overall cost, not just the cost to litigants, or the courts' budget, or insurers, but to society as a whole. How far the proposals in the Report will achieve that will have to be seen when they are implemented, whether in whole or in part. Although the proposals are radical in many ways, it is certainly possible to argue that on one construction they merely preserve the present distinction between small claims, County Court, and High Court cases, with a variety of significant modifications. If that be so, it is equally arguable that very much the same result could be achieved by modifications to both the County Court and High Court rules without the need for universal sweeping changes. Certainly all practitioners and judiciary are going to find that the next few years are full of challenge and interest. It will be fascinating to observe the changes and the outcome. Q.C., M.A., LL.M. (Cantab), J.D. (Chicago), one of Her Majesty's Circuit Judges since 1987. The opinions expressed in this article are purely personal to the author and should not be attributed to any other member of the judiciary.