Gender difference or indifference? Detective decision making in sexual assault cases

Prior research examining sexual assault case decision making has failed to account for the demographic characteristics of the criminal justice practitioners charged with making case decisions. Inclusion of such information is important because it provides researchers with a greater understanding of how criminal justice practitioners' own gender, race, age, and past experiences affect their judgments. This study seeks to examine whether gender differences exist in detectives' arrest decisions in sexual assault cases. Victim, suspect, incident, and detective characteristics are collected from police case and investigatory files on 328 criminal sexual assault cases involving adult female victims reported to a large Midwestern police department in 2003. Logistic regression is used to determine whether detective gender predicted the odds of arrest after controlling for incident, victim, and suspect characteristics. It is hypothesized that cases involving female detectives would be more likely to result in arrest after controlling for other incident, victim, and suspect characteristics. However, contrary to expectations, female detectives are significantly less likely than male detectives to arrest suspects in sexual assault cases even after controlling for the influence of other factors shown to predict arrest. The findings support prior research that suggests female practitioners may not necessarily be more sensitive toward female victims despite previous assumptions that this would hold true. The findings suggest that efforts to hire female police officers for the purposes of dealing with female-related victimization may ultimately undermine efforts to improve victim experiences with the criminal justice system. They further suggest that both researchers and police administrators need to rethink the best ways to serve female victims beyond hiring mandates.     

Cold‐blooded lie catchers? An investigation of psychopathy,emotional processing,and deception detection

Purpose. The process of catching liars is challenging, though evidence suggests that deception detection abilities are influenced by the characteristics of the judge. This study examined individual differences in emotional processing and levels of psychopathic traits on the ability to judge the veracity of written narratives varying in emotional valence. Methods. Undergraduate participants (N= 251) judged the veracity of 12 written narratives (truthful/deceptive) across three emotional categories: positive, negative, and neutral events. Levels of psychopathy were assessed to investigate its relation to accuracy and cue use. Results. Overall accuracy was close to chance, although participants were more accurate in determining the veracity of truthful relative to deceptive narratives. Accuracy was impaired for emotional (positive and negative) relative to neutral narratives. Psychopathy was not associated with levels of overall accuracy, but related to discriminative ability, and differential use of cues in decision making. Reported cue use also differed across emotional narrative conditions. Conclusions. We speculated that an emotive truth bias may have detracted judges from attending to valid cues that are indicative of the deceptive nature of stimuli because they were distracted by the emotional content of the report. Implications for deception detection in forensic settings are discussed.     

Depoliticising development: The uses and abuses of participation

Participation must be seen as political. There are always tensions underlying issues such as who is involved, how, and on whose terms. While participation has the potential to challenge patterns of dominance, it may also be the means through which existing power relations are entrenched and reproduced. The arenas in which people perceive their interests and judge whether they can express them are not neutral. Participation may take place for a whole range of unfree reasons. It is important to see participation as a dynamic process, and to understand that its own form and function can become a focus for struggle.     

Women Arrested for IPV Offenses: Abuse Experiences Yet Low Trauma Pathology

The purpose of this study is to explore how abuse experienced from a current partner and history of childhood abuse perpetrated by a parent are related to trauma symptomalogy in a sample of 82 women adjudicated for Intimate Partner Violence related offenses. Findings are mixed. Although a majority of the participants report some abuse from their partner and/or parent, both the degree of this violence and the presence of trauma pathology are lower than expected. Additionally, correlations between the three scales of partner abuse and the degree of posttraumatic sequelae are either low or did not meet significance. However, level of childhood abuse perpetrated by a mother is highly correlated with traumatic sequelae while childhood abuse from father is not. A number of reasons for these findings, which have implications for practice and future research, are discussed.     

Reviews

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Peter J. Boettke, Why Perestroika Failed: The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transition. London: Routledge, 1993, viii + 199 pp., £35.00

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Robert Service, ed. Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution. New York: St Martin's Press, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992. Published in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, in their series Studies in Russia and East Europe. 199 pp., + index. £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.     

Uninterested Youth? Young People's Attitudes towards Party Politics in Britain

Following the outcome of the 2001 and 2005 general elections, when the numbers of abstainers outweighed the numbers of Labour voters on both occasions, much attention has focused upon the state of British democracy and how to enthuse the electorate, especially young people. Whilst the government is exploring ways to make the whole process of voting easier, it may be failing to tackle the real problem – that youth appear to find the business of politics uninviting and irrelevant. This paper examines data derived from a nationwide survey of more than 700 young people in order to shed light on what lies at the heart of young people's apparent disengagement from formal politics in Britain – political apathy or a sense of political alienation. The findings reveal that they support the democratic process, but are sceptical of the way the British political system is organised and led and are turned off by politicians and the political parties. However, there is no uniform youth orientation to politics, and the data indicate that views differ according to social class, educational history and also gender. However both ethnicity and region of the country in which young people live seem to have little influence in structuring political attitudes and behaviour.