Violence against women as conveyed by surveys – the Finnish case

The methodological choices made in a survey may partly shape the picture a survey conveys of partnership violence. This article considers some of the choices made in the Finnish survey on violence against women, such as the way the violence was defined and how the definition tried to take into account the special characteristics of this kind of violence, in order to help the respondents to identify and recall different events of it. The empirical analyses showed that the used definition of violence had not reached all the respondents representing different population groups. The experiences of partner violence among older, less educated women, and the experiences of those who felt embarrassed or ashamed to speak about issues concerning their partner or partnership, were more probably under-represented in the survey.     

Qualification and Disqualification in Rape Cases

Between 1946 and 1950, the police in Stockholm interrogated almost 150 men about their involvement in alleged rapes and attempted rapes. The results of these investigations eventually led to seventeen prosecutions and eleven convictions. It was not easy to convict someone of rape. However, a consequence of the way the court operated was also that only certain men could be convicted, only certain women regarded as reliable witness, and only certain kinds of attack regarded as plausible. The question of whether the alleged crime was considered possible to prove was dependent upon who reported whom for what. For the complainants it was a matter of qualifying for inclusion within the protection of the law. But what appeared as a rejection of someone's credibility, was in actual fact a result of a prior rejection of the individual's person and character. From the point of view of the legal system, some individuals were more fitted than others for the role of credible victim or likely offender. The sexually immoral woman and the man at the mercy of his sexuality were both in danger of having their credibility questioned: the former a poor victim and the latter all too suitable an offender.     

Criminal Violence and Youth in Sweden: A Long-term Perspective

Since the mid-1980s, the Swedish public has become increasingly concerned about juvenile violence. This article confronts the public belief of increasing juvenile violence with systematic criminological data from crime statistics and other sources. Based on police and court statistics, as well as data from victimization studies and cause-of-death statistics, it is concluded that there is good reason to believe that Sweden is currently experiencing an 'enforcement wave' with regard to juvenile violence (particularly in the youngest age brackets), which reinforces the image of dramatic increases in the level of juvenile violence. The reasons why juvenile violence is thought to be on the increase even in the face of a lack of hard empirical evidence are discussed. Four long- and short-term trends are proposed as possible explanations: (i) the well-ordered modern society; (ii) the role of the mass media; (iii) the growth of feminine values; and (iv) the application of an offensive model of crime policy.     

Poly-Victimization as a Life Condition: Correlates of Poly-Victimization among Finnish Children

According to criminological literature, victimization tends to cluster among the same adolescents. Recent American studies have shown that the poly-victimized youth are different in terms of their whole victimization profile than those children with fewer or no victimization experiences. In this article poly-victimization is studied among Finnish sixth and ninth graders (n = 13,459) based on the Finnish Child Victim Survey 2008. The article will answer questions with regard to accumulation of victimization and its associations with children's psycho-social well-being. The study examines the individual and family level background characteristics which are related to poly-victimization. The accumulations of these risk factors are analysed with poly-victimized children compared with less or non-victimized children. According to the analysis, poly-victimization exists among Finnish children and adolescents. In addition, the characteristics indicated as risk factors of victimization seem to accumulate among poly-victims. With cross-sectional data, no causal conclusions can be made, but poly-victimization is related to higher levels of psycho-social problems. The results confirm earlier findings of poly-victimization as a life condition.     

Is It a Fight or Are They Just Drunk? Attributions about Drunken Behaviour in a Hypothetical Male‐to‐Male Aggression Scenario1

Objective. This paper examines the excuse‐value of alcohol in a hypothetical provoked male‐to‐male violence scenario. There are two main questions. Does intoxication result in decreased blame? Does intoxication lessen the propensity to call the police?

Methods. 1004 random digit dialing (RDD) quantitative telephone surveys were completed with Swedes aged 16–25. The response rate was 73.8%. Besides the aggressor's intoxication, severity of the outcome, the victim's intoxication and the respondent's hypothetical relationship to the aggressor or to the victim were also randomly manipulated. Whether the police should be called and the attribution of blame to the aggressor have been analysed using ANOVA in SAS.

Results. Analyses were stratified by sex. For male respondents, the aggressor's intoxication interacted (four‐way) with all the manipulated variables in predicting the attribution of blame. In the more severe act, intoxication tended to reduce blame; the least amount of blame was assigned when both the aggressor and the victim were intoxicated. For female respondents, the aggressor's intoxication was involved in a three‐way interaction. For them also, intoxication decreases the blame for the severe acts but not for the less severe acts. The aggressor's intoxication had very little effect on whether the police should be called or not.

Discussion. Intoxication provides some excuse from blame but only for certain acts and under certain circumstances. It also changes the way people perceive acts of violence.     

Violence and Silencing: A Philosophical Investigation of Apartheid

Abstract

With reference to examples of violence during Apartheid, I argue that the socio-political contexts in which violence occurs significantly shape agents' ideas about and responses to violence. As such, philosophers can only make sense of why perpetrators and bystanders alike may have judged violent acts morally justifiable or failed to challenge instances of violence against the backdrop of the particular characteristics of the socio-political context in which it occurs.     

Fanon

Abstract

I argue that Franz Fanon can usefully be situated in the tradition of German Idealism in the sense that he takes from Kant and especially Hegel the conception of agency as something to be achieved through struggle for the ideal of humanity as self-determining. Fanon sees the suffering cased by colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as deriving from the systematic deprivation of agency by the colonial power. Using the work of Hegel, Fanon seeks to reconstruct the emancipatory project of the black man in close analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The violence which Fanon sees as unavoidable in such a struggle is not violence for the sake of violence but, following Hegel, the violence that constitutes the subject in the first place.     

高校高学历女教师角色压力及疏解

作为“传统的现代女人”,高校高学历女教师有着强烈的自我发展需求、主体意识和成就动机,但在沉重的学术压力面前她们更容易出现职业倦怠;作为“现代的传统女人”,未婚的高学历女教师往往面临“结构性剩余”的境地,已婚的高学历女教师则在事业与家庭之间做着“鱼与熊掌”的艰难选择。多种角色压力归根到底是由于传统社会期待与现代价值追求的冲突,疏解这些压力要全社会共同努力,推进社会性别文化的良性发展,高学历女教师也要对自我作理性认知,提高对不同角色的适应能力。