“Walking in her shoes”: The Impact of Victim Impact Panels on Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence

Restorative justice models have had success with some issues within the criminal justice system; however, advocates and researchers within the intimate partner violence practice community have been reluctant to embrace this model. Criminal justice responses for intimate partner violence continue to be founded on a blend of retributive and rehabilitative justice models. Despite this reluctance, use of the restorative justice intervention of victim impact panels, may have targeted utility for increasing perpetrators’ empathy for their victims. The author 2examined responses from perpetrators who were mandated to participate in a victim impact panel experience as part of the coordinated community system response to intimate partner violence.     

Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases regarding the street culture and ethnic minorities where Hip Hop emerged, ignored how some of the genre’s main elements – particularly freestyle rap, breakin’ or breakdancing and graffiti tagging – initially served the purpose of providing at-risk youths with real alternatives to direct physical violence in their day-to-day lives, and continue do so today. It has also ignored broader analogies with other cross-cultural and cross-species manifestations of similar practices that have served for millennia as effective mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of potentially lethal violence. By presenting these manifestations – namely song dueling and mark making – in comparative terms with Hip Hop’s freestyle song and dance battles and tagging territorial contests, this article seeks to highlight the relevance and potential of Hip Hop for preventing violence while also suggesting a common evolutionary backdrop within the context of strategies aimed at minimizing intraspecific aggression.     

Similarities and Differences in Victimization Risk Factors for Nonoffending and Offending Substance Users

In this cross-sectional study of substance users in Norway, the authors describe the patterns of victimization and investigate the factors associated with victimization, for nonoffenders and offenders separately. Recent victimization was reported by 59%, and the victimization rate was higher among offenders compared with nonoffenders (69% and 43%, p < .001). Women, regardless of offender status, experienced more victimization. Unstable housing was associated with victimization among nonoffenders, whereas markers for more severe substance use and indicators for poor mental health were associated with victimization in both groups. Addressing these factors may be important in reducing victimization and its negative outcomes among substance users.     

The everyday peace project: an innovative approach to peace pedagogy

A critical task for peace pedagogy is to challenge views of peace as primarily responses to declared war. Crisis-based politics tend to focus on exceptional situations and fail to capture the entire spectrum of violence. Premised on the idea that peace cannot be understood in isolation of larger structural problems, this paper proposes the concept of ‘everyday peace’ as a framework for peace education. Drawing from a pedagogical initiative, we examine how students engage with the concept of everyday peace and present our findings in three related domains: (1) definition of everyday peace, (2) application of everyday peace principles and (3) role of collaboration in everyday peace approaches. Our analysis underscored two important themes in participants’ definitions of everyday peace: (1) peace as a value-based praxis and (2) individual-level and systemic components of everyday peace. Applying these principles to a violent event in the local community, participant responses emphasized compassion, cultures of peace and the need to draw reflexive, meaningful connections between local and global contexts. The participants also outlined the synergistic role of collaboration in everyday peacebuilding. We discuss our findings in relation to extant research and consider implications of an everyday peace framework for holistic peace education.     

Sharp Force Homicide in Denmark 1992–2016

Sharp force trauma is a common homicide method. The weapon is typically a knife, which is easily accessible and does not require special skills. We have analyzed all 471 sharp force homicides in Denmark during 1992–2016 with special focus on aspects that are relevant to forensic pathologists, including the distribution of wounds and organ injuries. Most homicides were committed inside with a kitchen knife. The front left thorax was the most common area to be affected by sharp force trauma. In 18.9% of the victims, there was only one sharp injury, the majority on the thorax. The most common trajectory for stab wounds was directly posterior with no deviation to the sides or up/down followed by directly anterior. The heart (including pericardium) and lungs (including hemo- and pneumothorax) had injuries in more than 75% of the victims. 67% of victims were males. Female victims had more sharp force injuries and defense wounds than male victims. Most females were killed in domestic homicides (73.7%), most commonly in partner killings (56.4%). In contrast, many male victims were killed in a setting of nightlife/intoxication (34.0%) most by a friend/acquaintance delivering a few stab wounds. The results clearly show strong sex differences in both victims and offenders. This could be useful for shaping policies and public opinion, and as a route for understanding the developments in interpersonal violence. In the narrow setting of death investigation, our results will provide an evidence-based approach to understanding the injury patterns in sharp force homicide.     

Terrorist violence and the enrollment of psychology in predicting Muslim extremism: critical terrorism studies meets critical algorithm studies

Discourse on terrorist violence has long facilitated an especially liberal form of securitisation. Originally evoked in reference to anarchists and communists, a rational consideration of terrorist violence, inaugurated by the concept, asks for deferred judgement about the nature of, or reasons behind, violence related to terror on the premise that state and international legal norms governing the legitimate use of violence fail to circumscribe the proper capacities of the state to regulate and explain terrorism. Where sovereign powers along with their military and civilian instruments of coercion are deemed unable to regulate violence effectively, analysts of terrorist violence and their readership are invited to consider and cultivate new sensibilities. Beginning in the 1980s, studies by psychologists found renewed urgency among a growing cadre of interdisciplinary terror experts who found religion, Islam especially, a key variable of analysis. I situate their contributions in a longer history of secular and racialising discourse about terrorist violence. Central to this history are practices of reading, translating, interpreting and archiving texts. Evidence for the argument is based on the analysis of an algorithm that allegedly predicts the likelihood of terrorist strikes by counting words spoken by al-Qa?ida leaders and correlating their frequency with over 30 psychological categories.     

Women’s experiences of peacebuilding in violence-affected communities in Kenya

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women’s understandings and lived experiences of peacebuilding are not necessarily well accounted for. This article, drawing on interviews, focus groups and observation research with 57 female victims/survivors of post-election violence in Kenya, provides an ethnographic study of women’s largely informal peacebuilding activities, ranging from mediation and dialogue to economic empowerment. It analyses women’s constructions and ways of making sense of being peacebuilders, demonstrating that, while participants employed dominant gender frames, they exerted considerable transformative agency in their communities. It argues that their ‘gendered responsibility for peace’ at community level is simultaneously empowering and disempowering. The research aims to increase understanding of the gendered nature of peacebuilding and the ways in which women exercise peacebuilding agency through a focus on their own voices and lived experiences.     

A Model for Female-Perpetrated Domestic Violence

Child abuse often coexists with intimate partner violence. However, limited studies incorporate both phenomena in a single study. Moreover, the examination of female-on-male violence is an important development. Hence, an intrinsic case study of domestic violence is presented to provide insights regarding the nature and impact of female-perpetrated violence. The research approach was qualitative and demonstrated that a model for abusive behavior seems to be similar for both sexes. The data revealed theoretical trends such as the reality of an intergenerational transmission of violence into adulthood, as well as abusive partners presenting with borderline traits.