Search

The ‘justice gap’ for cases of rape and sexual assault is well-documented. Despite our rich understanding of the problem, its visibility in the public sphere, and state commitments to increasing charge and conviction rates, the justice gap is getting larger in the Western World. On a practical level, police are gatekeepers of outcome justice – arrests, charges, and convictions. As representatives of the state and society, police also wield significant symbolic power in defining the faultline between behaviour that is deemed ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In this article we propose a theory-based and practice-oriented framework for transforming the police response to rape and sexual assault that draws on the large body of feminist literature on sexual violence and criminal justice responses, in combination with policing literature. This framework comprises five pillars: 1) suspect-focused investigations; 2) disrupting repeat offenders; 3) a procedural justice approach to victim-survivor engagement; 4) officer learning, wellbeing, and organisational change; and 5) the use of data. We conclude with a discussion of its practical implementation and empirical validation.

Innovative and timely, this collection of essays holds broad appeal to academics and practitioners, as well as students of criminology, criminal justice and law, and all those with an interest in feminism, justice, and inequality.

This article presents a comparative study of public perceptions of food risk across 25 European member states. A secondary data analysis is conducted on a Eurobarometer survey fielded to nationally representative samples in 2005. The survey included closed questions as well as free associations to map risk perceptions. Taking a quantitative approach, we find that people in a majority of European countries express similar levels of concern about food risks. However, outside this majority a North-South divide is evident, with the Northern countries worrying less than the Southern countries. Multilevel modeling shows that cross-national differences in individual respondents' level of worry are in part attributable to shared country effects and to generalized risk sensitivity about a range of personal risks. On the underlying structure of food risk concerns, factor analysis points to three dimensions described by groupings of risks related to adulteration and contamination, health effects, and production and hygiene. A qualitative analysis of respondents' free associations about problems and risks with food identifies three major themes that are consistent with the quantitative results. However, the free associations also point toward greater cross-national diversity and to striking variations in the range and importance of food risks. Overall, the picture is of a public that frames food risks in a wider context of beliefs about the links between diet and health. We conclude with some implications for research on food risk perceptions in particular and risk perception studies in general.