Reforming rape laws

Almost all legislative evaluations and impact analyses in the area of rape reform have involved the U.S. This article examines the effects of rape reform legislation introduced in Canada in 1983. In that year the offenses of rape and indecent assault were replaced with three new offenses of sexual assault. As in other jurisdictions in the U.S., the Canadian reforms were designed to achieve several aims. These included increasing the number of victims reporting to the police, reducing the proportion of reports classified by the police as unfounded, and increasing the number of cases in which a charge is laid. This article presents a time-series analysis of reports of crimes of sexual aggression over a 10-year period around passage of the reform legislation. The results indicate that there was a significant increase in the number of reports of these crimes concurrent with the passage of the legislation. Moreover, the increase in sexual assault reports exceeds by a significant margin the increase in reports made of other personal injury offenses (e.g., assault). However, the legislation has had no discernible effect upon the immediate criminal justice response to reports of sexual aggression: Neither the percentage of reports classified as founded, nor the percentage of reported incidents resulting in the laying of a charge has changed.The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the comments made upon an earlier draft of this article by Ed Renner, the editor of the journal, and an anonymous reviewer. This research was supported by the Department of Justice Canada; the authors thank the Department for permission to publish these data. Finally we would like to thank the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics for providing the data.     

Industry as a mechanism for urban technology transfer

This paper is based upon research done under the National Science Foundation sponsored study The Role of Industry in Urban Technology Transfer: A Comparative Profile. The purpose of the research is to investigate specific industries that serve the urban market of local governments. The research aim is to develop an understanding for the barriers and incentives that affect industry's ability and desire to produce and market technological innovations for cities.     

The death of machothink: Feminist research and the transformation of peace studies

When the life of every creature on this planet is in danger, as it is today, we all have a vested interest in peace research. But peace research tends to be male-biased and does not take into account the experiences and interests of women. Because it is skewed, it is weakened. Feminist research offers a badly needed corrective, and a transformative vision. Data on violence against women, on the links between violence against women and male violence in general, on the nature and experience of power and powerlessness, on mothering, and moral development, have significant implications for peace research. A feminist peace researvh would reground discussions of war and violence in the lived experiences of women, men and children. It would speak about and to all of us.     

A Simple Multivariate Test for Asymmetric Hypotheses

Michael J. Gilligan Department of Politics, New York University, 7th Floor, 726 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 Matt Golder Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 531 Bellamy Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230 e-mail: wrclark{at}umich.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: michael.gilligan{at}nyu.edu e-mail: mgolder{at}fsu.edu In this paper, we argue that claims of necessity and sufficiencyinvolve a type of asymmetric causal claim that is useful inmany social scientific contexts. Contrary to some qualitativeresearchers, we maintain that there is nothing about such asymmetriesthat should lead scholars to depart from standard social sciencepractice. We take as given that deterministic and monocausaltests are inappropriate in the social world and demonstratethat standard multiplicative interaction models are up to thetask of handling asymmetric causal claims in a multivariate,probabilistic manner. We illustrate our argument with examplesfrom the empirical literature linking electoral institutionsand party system size.