Child Sexual Abuse Perpetrated by Women: Case Series and Review of the Literature

The literature on child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrated by female sexual offenders (FSOs) is exiguous, and many studies have focused on judicial databases. The present retrospective study, instead, analyzed clinical and judicial data of a group of both victims and alleged FSOs, to additionally include women who have not been convicted by the criminal justice system, but who hold strong clinical suspicions of being perpetrators of CSA. The medical records and the Court files of 11 children and their eight suspected FSOs have been collected and critically reviewed in light of the literature to date. This approach allowed for a deeper understanding of the relationship between child and FSO. The authors hypothesize that the victims’ severe psychopathological outcomes were a result of a failure to develop appropriate attachments with their prospective caregivers, which could have been damaged by the pathological relationship with FSOs, who were the victims’ caregivers.     

Whose terrorists?

Conclusion The government of Muammar Qaddafi has certainly engaged in state criminality in acts of terrorism sponsored by official agencies of the Libyan state. However, these acts are nothing like as frequent or as systematic as has been suggested by Western critics. It is Qaddafi's weakness which leads to his stigmatization, rather than the true seriousness of his nation's crimes.In the last decade, there has been a dramatic growth of scholarly and journalistic work on terrorism, much of which uses the concept of state terrorism. That such a thing exists is clear. However, each case must be examined very closely before the motives and rationale for such a policy can be understood; and only then can we begin to address questions such as etiology. There could be a criminology of states which would be a valuable addition both to criminology and political science. At present, though, our primary need is to understand that the facts in each case are often far different from the political rhetoric.     

Narcotics trafficking and the American mafia: The myth of internal prohibition

Numerous books assert that the Mafia long had a prohibition against engaging in narcotics trafficking, either for reasons of morality, or else because of the public stigma attached to drugs. In reality, there are many problems with the belief in voluntary abstention. The mythical nature of internal prohibition, and the far different reality, will be illustrated from the case of Philadelphia, supposedly the base for one of the most powerful and traditional-minded of all the American Mafia groups, the family headed from 1959 to 1980 by don Angelo Bruno. We will attempt to explain the roots of the prohibition myth, both for writers and for the wider public that appears so endlessly enthusiastic about sagas of organized crime. Finally, the paper examines the implications of this myth for policy makers in successive wars on crime.     

The C.T.A. case: A study in political corruption

Between 1984 and 1987, a wide-ranging corruption scandal in Pennsylvania resulted in the conviction and disgrace of a number of high-ranking elected officials, as well as the much publicized suicide of state Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. This C.T.A. case initially appeared to be a straightforward and almost commonplace affair involving bribes and kickbacks to secure state contracts; but on further examination, this seemingly uncomplicated case can be shown to have involved elaborate conflicts at both state and federal level, and the direction and outcome of the prosecution were heavily influenced by political factors and bureaucratic self-interest.This paper will provide a narrative of the C.T.A. case and related incidents, and also describe the external factors which shaped the investigation. Particular emphasis will be placed on the complex relationship between state-level political interests and the activities of federal prosecutors. The C.T.A. affair offers an excellent illustration of the difficulty of gaining an accurate understanding of even an apparently simple case of political corruption, and the implication is that more elaborate incidents are even less amenable to any kind of academic or social scientific observation. The case can only be understood if full account is taken of the prosecutorial and investigative process which turned the original illegal transactions into a full-blown public scandal, factors which are often insufficiently emphasized in research on political corruption.     

Minority women and the experiences of migration

This article addresses the theme of minority relations and the intensification of gender oppression. We adopt a comparative perspective to examine women’s experiences of migration in two diverse locations. The recent focus on difference in feminist writing renders problematic such comparative enterprises through the contemporary concern with questioning the universality of the category “woman.” However, we suggest that the concept has been deconstructed to the point that it raises the possibility that feminism becomes an inadequate theory and methodology for explaining the status of women. Through a comparative analysis of minority women in different social and cultural contexts, we explore this dilemma for feminism. We examine how gender relations reconfigure in reconstituted relations of class, race, and ethnicity and emphasize the necessity of recognizing both the dynamics of migrating feminisms and the centrality of gender in structuring power relations in diverse contexts.     

Research note: Rand's research on terrorism

Repeatedly, during the last few years, small groups of extremists have demonstrated that by using terrorist tactics they can achieve disproportionate effects. They attract worldwide attention to themselves and their causes; they arouse worldwide alarm, and can create international incidents that national governments are compelled to deal with, often before a worldwide audience. To protect against their attacks or to respond to crisis situations they create, they force governments to expend resources—manpower, money, the attention of senior officials—vastly out of scale with the magnitude of the actual threat they pose.¹