The Relationship Between Religious and Spiritual Factors and the Perpetration of Intimate Personal Violence

Despite some understanding of general correlates and possible antecedents to intimate partner violence (IPV) within the Christian community, the impact of religious and spiritual factors tends to be confounded by other factors and is often misjudged. Archival data from Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) were used to examine the impact of nine religious and spiritual factors on the probability of IPV perpetration by males, aged 18 to 26, who nominally classified themselves as Catholic, Protestant, or Christian. Logistic regression results indicated that IPV perpetration could not be adequately predicted from the religious and spiritual factors. Given the geographic breadth and the size of the Add Health sample, no finding of a predictive model for Christian male-perpetrated IPV challenges the paradigm that religious and spiritual factors should be overtly addressed in faith-based batterers’ programs targeting young adult males.     

Anticorruption agencies: expressive,constructivist and strategic uses

This article explores the reasons for the introduction of anticorruption agencies of a specific type in Eastern Europe. It is argued that one of the important functions of these agencies—which are stronger on information gathering, coordination and strategy rather than on investigation of concrete cases—is to give to the government some leverage over the anticorruption discourse. Presenting the anticorruption commissions and agencies as (discourse-controlling) instruments gives an answer to the troubling question why governing parties are at all interested in the introduction of such bodies. Apart from instrumentalization in political discourse, anticorruption bodies in Eastern Europe have had other effects as well. As shown in the Baltic case, institutional engineering provides for a brief window of opportunity during which political forces committed to integrity could gain the upper hand. The problem in Eastern Europe, however, is not the lack of such windows of opportunities—it is more the lack of really committed political forces capable of continuous and consistent anticorruption effort.     

Using the state to change society: The example of ‘domestic violence’

North American research on the policing of ‘domestic violence’ has been very influential among policy makers in Great Britain. In particular, research which purports to verify the deterrence value of arrest has prompted the establishment of over thirty domestic violence units in London and similar initiatives elsewhere in Britain. The paper will outline the nature of the traditional police response to ‘family violence’ in London and the nature of the experimental innovations. Changes in police practice with regard to this type of violence will be put in the context of the organizational constraints and possibilities of policing. Finally, changing police responses to domestic violence will be evaluated in terms of the debate over the possibility of using the state or its organs to achieve social change.