Journalism in a new democracy: The ethics of listening

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure the recent massacre of striking miners at the Lonmin mine at Marikana in North-West Province, South Africa. The shooting, in which 36 mine workers were killed, was an attack on civilians by state forces unprecedented in the democratic era. The incident received wide local and international coverage. In this article the author argues that the reporting of the event demonstrated how the professional routines of journalism and the orientation towards audiences are related to the position of the mainstream news media within social and political discourses in the country. The author goes on to explore the normative questions raised by the reporting of the event, against the background of the role of the news media in a new democracy. The concept of ‘listening’ is proposed as an ethical alternative to the current dominant normative frameworks for journalism in the country.     

Deixis and space in drama

This article seeks to explore some of the functions of deixis in the delineation of space in drama. The dramatic text addresses a context of performance and, therefore, space depiction is generally regarded as within the province of theatre since the transformation of the hare boards of the stage into other spaces and places calls forth the skills of scenographers, lighting experts, etc. Verbal depictions of space are seen to be best employed in referring to off‐stage space or restricted to reference to objects onstage, when they need to be particularly foregrounded as significant for the onstage action in its relation to the whole. The, basically, onstage/off‐stage division is mapped on to the visual/verbal one so that the visual, onstage space is the main business with verbal references to offstage space backgrounded as a consequence. Deictic phenomena, however, cut across such divisions. Deixis uses the body of participants in speech events as the primary point for calculations of space. The body has access to different channels—visual, auditory, tactile, etc. which deictic usages mobilise. Moreover, from a linguist's point of view, the mode of discourse appropriate to drama is speech since the dialogue presupposes actors on stage interacting with each other, via speech, and not reading texts silently. The voice is the medium of communication, and hence, the body is installed back into the page of the text. Deixis presupposes a corporeal context of utterance with corporeal bodies and channels of communication open for use. This article explores some of the consequences for delineating dramatic space, when the visual/verbal division and its progeny are undercut by the use of deixis.     

The Arrest of Ships in Private International Law

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations

When mental health, medical, and social work professionals and paraprofessionals make false positive or false negative errors in their judgments about the validity of allegations of child sexual abuse, the consequences can be catastrophic for the affected children and adults. Because of the high stakes, practitioners, legal decision makers, and policy makers should have some idea of the magnitude and variability of error rates in this domain. A novel approach was used to estimate individual error rates for 110 professionals (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and others) who conduct or participate in forensic child sexual abuse evaluations. The median estimated false positive and false negative error rates were 0.18 and 0.36, respectively. Estimated error rates varied markedly from one participant to the next. For example, the false positive error rate estimates ranged from 0.00 to 0.83. These estimates are based on participants’ self-reported substantiation rates and on their subjective frequency distributions for the probability of truth for the abuse allegations they evaluate.     

Violent crime in the Netherlands. A historical-sociological analysis

Long term trends in violent crime in the Netherlands are analysed on the basis of crime rates, medical statistics and victim-surveys. After having pointed out problems of interpretation and the influence of theoretical presuppositions, the author concludes that from the middle of the 19th century until the 1970s the level of violent crime remained rather stable. In the interpretation of the recent rise of violent crime rates a distinction is made between instrumental and impulsive (affectional) violence. It seems that especially instrumental violence (in order to gain material goods) was practised more often while, on the contrary, impulsive violence met with more resistance.     

What is procedural justice: Criteria used by Dutch victims to assess the fairness of criminal justice procedures

The study examines the meaning of procedural justice to Dutch victims of crime. Using victimological research and the group-value or relational model or procedural justice developed by Lind and Tyler, a model for procedural justice judgments is developed and tested using the structural equation model. Data used for the analysis consist of 221 interviews with victims regarding their experience with the public prosecution. Although the emerging model differs from that of Lind and Tyler, results support Lind and Tyler's assertion that procedural justice judgments are normative and not instrumental. Victims are particularly concerned about being treated with dignity and respect and are not interested in influencing the outcome of their case.