News out of Africa

Major Patrick Wall, M.C., VJLD., Member of Parliament for Haltemprice,Chairman of the Conservative Parliamentary East and CentralAfrica Committee, and Mr. Brian F. Macdona, Vice-Chairman ofCouncil and a general manager of Barclays Bank D.C.O., spokeon different aspects of the African scene at a joint meetingof the Royal African Society and the Royal Commonwealth Societyon May 5, 1960. Sir John Macpherson, G.C.M.G., Permanent Under-Secretaryfor the Colonies, took the chair.     

OFFENDER–VICTIM INTERACTION AND CRIME EVENT OUTCOMES: MODUS OPERANDI AND VICTIM EFFECTS ON THE RISK OF INTRUSIVE SEXUAL OFFENSES AGAINST CHILDREN*

Criminological research has shown the relevance of examining offender–victim interaction and related factors to understand crime event outcomes. In sexual offenses against children, an obvious lack of knowledge exists regarding this issue. From a criminological perspective, we seek to improve our understanding of the offender–victim interaction in sexual offenses against children and, in particular, what factors might increase the risk of a more intrusive offense. We argue that modus operandi strategies play a central role in crime event outcomes and examine this hypothesis with data obtained from a semistructured interview conducted with offenders. As expected, modus operandi was found to have a strong effect on crime event outcomes, especially victim participation during sexual episodes. Victim effects also emerged from the analyses. Specifically, a strong interaction effect between age and gender of the victim was found for victim participation, which suggests that as the victim gets older, offenders are more likely to make their victim participate in sexual episodes when abusing a male victim but are less likely to do so when abusing a female victim.     

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE BRITISH CENTRAL STATE, PART I: FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

In the bureau-shaping model of bureaucracy rationally self-interested officials are primarily concerned to maximize their agencies' core budgets, equivalent to their running costs. They are much less interested in those parts of their overall budget which are allocated as transfer payments to the private sector or passed on to other public sector bodies. The varying importance of core budgets and other spending yields a typology of public sector organizations into delivery, transfer, contracts, regulatory and control agencies. In addition, the bureau-shaping model is developed in this article to provide an exhaustive classification of government agencies, and to refine the analysis of spending over and above core budgets.
The methodological issues involved in applying this typology empirically to the central state apparatus in Britain are explored. Previous attempts at 'bureaumetrics' have failed to mesh with 'ordinary knowledge' views of Whitehall. By contrast, the bureau-shaping model provides a framework which is theoretically sophisticated, easily operationalizable, and intuitively understandable. The scale of prospective hiving off from the UK civil service organization over the next decade indicates the value of adopting a framework which can respond methodologically to such changes, and offers a powerful theoretical account of their dynamic. Part II of the paper [next issue] presents the empirical data demonstrating that the bureau-shaping model is highly effective in systematizing and extending our knowledge of how Whitehall and its attached agencies are structured.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.