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Resume Introduction La presente etude s’attache a comparer la prevalence des violences subies a l’âge adulte d’un echantillon de 91 femmes criminelles en comparaison a la population generale feminine afin d’offrir une meilleure comprehension de la criminalite feminine. Materiel A partir de dossier d’expertises penales de femmes âgees de plus de 15 ans, d’un expert pres la cour d’appel de Rennes, entre 2014 et 2019, il a ete recueilli les donnees concernant les violences subies par ces femmes selon les criteres OMS. Resultats Quatre-vingt-onze dossiers d’expertise penale ont ete inclus. La prevalence des violences subies a l’âge adulte etait de 57,1 %, prevalence significativement superieure a la population generale feminine. Par ailleurs, ces femmes rapportaient des vecus de violences independamment de l’âge dans 76,1 % des cas. Conclusion Notre etude met en evidence une preponderance des violences dans le parcours de vie de ces femmes criminelles en comparaison a la population generale feminine. Cette victimisation semble etre etroitement liee a la criminalite feminine et semble etre un point cle dans la comprehension de cette derniere. Par ailleurs, les troubles psychiatriques sont frequents et sont surrepresentes par les dependances aux substances et les troubles de la personnalite. Ces deux troubles associes a la criminalite semblent accroitre le risque de passage a l’acte violent et etre conditionnes par les experiences de violences vecues. Dans ce contexte, les vecus de violences semblent donc etre un facteur d’evolution defavorable de risque medico-legal.

Domestic violence is an important public health issue, and there is limited research to date that examines community-level influences on this serious form of violence. This article investigates the neighborhood characteristics of domestic violence incidents in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina. US Census block group boundaries and corresponding tables were used as proxies for neighborhoods. The article addresses an important gap in domestic violence research by combining geographic and statistical analyses at the block group level. Geographic data were analyzed using an Optimized Hot Spot Analysis (OHA) along with features selected by penalized Poisson regression model. The OHA was used to identify spatial clusters of high and low values while the penalized Poisson regression model was used to select the important variables from over 7000 candidates. The results of high-dimensional analysis produced six categories and 20 variables that were used to examine the characteristics of spatial clusters.

Drawing on a qualitative study with former federal prisoners in Ontario and key medical and community professionals from across the country, this commentary aims to build dialogue with the Correctional Service Canada on an essential harm reduction measure in prison, namely, prison needle and syringe programs (PNSPs). Research participants elucidated the main issues and challenges related to the implementation of PNSPs, listing correctional officers and the union that represents them as a central barrier. As the primary front-line workers in the prison setting and the staff with whom prisoners have the most frequent contact, correctional officers play a significant role in the success or failure of these indispensable programs. Yet despite the more than two decades of international evaluations that have demonstrated PNSP effectiveness in improving staff occupational safety, correctional officers and prison services remain resistant.

Canada has engaged in a range of efforts to stop human trafficking within and across it borders. Federal and provincial governments have spent considerable funds in this regard, and have studied the issue to come up with perceived solutions. In this article, we explore Canada’s two national House of Commons standing committee consultations on trafficking, in 2006 and 2018. Using critical discourse analysis to examine the consultation transcripts and written briefs, we identified several significant shifts in both the language used and the areas of focus advanced by witnesses, in particular: the modified emphasis from international to domestic trafficking; the changing nature of vulnerability and victimhood; and an increased focus on youth sexual exploitation. We propose that what is being expressed is an iteration of Canadian sexualized nationalism and national sexual morality. These results have policy implications, especially with respect to promoting just, peaceful, and inclusive societies at a time when there are mounting pressures to restrict migration that often dovetail with concerns over human trafficking. Indeed, the way concerns over trafficking are expressed in Canada appears as a fear over women’s sexual agency and vulnerability as well as a need protect “our” boundaries from incursion, whether territorial or moral.

In recent years, some Canadian provinces have followed the federal government’s intensification of anti-trafficking measures. Ontario is perhaps the most significant in this respect, especially with its introduction of the 2017 Anti-Human Trafficking Act. We set out to investigate debates in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario regarding the then proposed law. Our aim was to understand how politicians and others who presented at the debates mobilized knowledge, and to offer opportunities of resistance to discursive injustice for future policymaking. We engaged in a critical discourse analysis approach to examine how different types of knowledge were applied and reproduced, with a particular focus on explicit and implicit knowledge statements. Through analysis of the debate transcripts, we found a near unified front against a perceived humanitarian crisis that required an urgent punitive and securitized response, based largely in individualistic, moralistic, and colonial notions of “risk” and vulnerability. Our findings uncovered a reliance on strong beliefs and willful silences to narrate a trafficking story that displaced social conditions onto a purportedly immoral sex trade. This conceptualization was advanced through repeated invalidation of sexual labor, with invocations of childhood innocence, thereby hindering the promotion of just and inclusive societies.

There is limited research on the gendered impacts of drug policies in Canada, despite the fact that women, Indigenous women in particular, are the country’s fastest growing prisoner population, with many incarcerated for drug-related crimes. This article highlights the results of a larger qualitative study with former prisoners in Ontario and community and medical experts from across the country. Focusing on the women research participants, we consider the lack of adequate and culturally-relevant substance use and harm reduction programming in federal prisons, and suggest a reformulation of Canada’s punitive drug policies toward a health and social welfare approach.

While Canada has long criminalized aspects of sex work, the specific act of purchasing sexual services was not against the lawper se.In 2014, however, the then Conservative government implemented new legislation targeting sex work clients. Given the criminalization and persistent stigmatization of their activities, assessing clients’ changing actions, perceptions, and knowledge of the new legislation is challenging. We thus turned to a major Canadian online sex work review forum to examine postings on forum threads. This paper examines the risk knowledge practices in which clients engage as they try to make sense of the modified legal regime and avoid new legal risks. Our findings illuminate clients’ varied understandings of their own criminalization.

Web advertising related to Human Trafficking (HT) activity has been on the rise in recent years. Answering entity-centric questions over crawled HT Web corpora to assist investigators in the real world is an important social problem, involving many technical challenges. This paper describes a recent entity-centric knowledge graph effort that resulted in a semantic search engine to assist analysts and investigative experts in the HT domain. The overall approach takes as input a large corpus of advertisements crawled from the Web, structures it into an indexed knowledge graph, and enables investigators to satisfy their information needs by posing investigative search queries to a special-purpose semantic execution engine. We evaluated the search engine on real-world data collected from over 90,000 webpages, a significant fraction of which correlates with HT activity. Performance on four relevant categories of questions on a mean average precision metric were found to be promising, outperforming a learning-to-rank approach on three of the four categories. The prototype uses open-source components and scales to terabyte-scale corpora. Principles of the prototype have also been independently replicated, with similarly successful results.

In both casual conversations and interview settings, people may be required to provide details of instances that were similar to other experiences. When this happens repeatedly, consistency across reports is often taken as a proxy for credibility. However, processes of schema formation and interference due to similarity make recall and accurate source attribution of details to specific instances challenging. We investigated the accuracy and consistency of recall in these contexts in a re-analysis of five studies. Confusions of details were widespread (1) across instances—participants frequently attributed the origin of details to incorrect instances, but also (2) across repeated retrieval attempts—participants frequently changed parts of their reports. There was, however, a clear pattern of primacy and recency effects: Recall of the first and final instances was more accurate and consistent than recall of the middle instances. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these effects as well as their practical implications.

The majority of the ancient rock art sites of the American Southwest are located in rural locations which are difficult to monitor or police. These sites seem to exert a pull upon humans, an attraction which not only provokes curiosity and wonder, but also what can be classed as destructive responses or vandalism. Many crime control methods for reducing vandalism are based on such traditional theories as defensible space and broken window theory. However, in the case of rock art these methods do not yield expected results and in some cases are even detrimental. Rural crime, including rural vandalism, as a whole is marginalised in criminology, which has been dominated by urban-focused approaches and theories. In the case of rock art, considering how security is approached and maintained ultimately leads to questions about human/object relationships with regards to crime, and about object agency. By focusing on the policing challenges of one particular type of rural vandalism, we hope to contribute to the discussion of vandalism in rural spaces.

The Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), which is widely used to measure the similarity between two distributions, plays an important role in many applications. In this article, we address the KLD metric-learning task, which aims at learning the best KLD-type metric from the distributions of datasets. Concretely, first, we extend the conventional KLD by introducing a linear mapping and obtain the best KLD to well express the similarity of data distributions by optimizing such a linear mapping. It improves the expressivity of data distribution, which means it makes the distributions in the same class close and those in different classes far away. Then, the KLD metric learning is modeled by a minimization problem on the manifold of all positive-definite matrices. To deal with this optimization task, we develop an intrinsic steepest descent method, which preserves the manifold structure of the metric in the iteration. Finally, we apply the proposed method along with ten popular metric-learning approaches on the tasks of 3-D object classification and document classification. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method outperforms all other methods.

We examine the spiral structure of the thinking and the work of Marshall McLuhan, which we believe will provide a new way of viewing McLuhan’s work. In particular, we believe that the way he reversed figure and ground, reversed content and medium, reversed cause and effect, and the relationship he established between the content of a new medium and the older media it obsolesced all contain a spiral structure going back and forth in time. Finally, the time structure of his Laws of Media in which a new medium obsolesced an older medium, while retrieving an even older medium and then when pushed far enough flipped into a still newer medium has the feeling of a spiral. We will also examine the spiral structure of the thinking and work of those thinkers and artists that most influenced McLuhan such as Vico, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Joyce, TS Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticism movement. Keywords: spiral; McLuhan; reversal; figure/ground; Laws of Media; media; environment/anti-environment; cause; effect

Previous studies have established that individual characteristics such as violent behavior, substance use, and high-risk sexual behavior, as well as negative relationships with parents and friends, are all risk factors for intimate partner violence (IPV). In this longitudinal prospective study, we investigated whether violent behavior, substance use, and high-risk sexual behavior in early adulthood (ages 22–23 years) mediated the link between family conflict and coercive relationship talk with friends in adolescence (ages 16–17 years) and dyadic IPV in adulthood (ages 28–30 years). A total of 998 individuals participated in multimethod assessments, including observations of interactions with parents and friends. Data from multiple reporters were used for variables of interest including court records, parental and self-reports of violence, self-reports of high-sexual-risk behaviors and substance use, and self- and romantic partner-reports of IPV. Longitudinal mediation analyses showed that violent behavior during early adulthood mediated the link between coercive relationship talk with friends in adolescence and dyadic IPV in adulthood. No other mediation paths were found and there was no evidence of gender differences. Results are discussed with attention to the interpersonal socialization processes by which IPV emerges relative to individual risk factors.

The ambition of living ‘a normal life’ appears to be common among prisoners prior to release. Besides portraying for the life desired upon release, the notion of a normal life can say something about what the persons aspiring to it thinks of their present life, what they want their life to be like in future, and what they consider attainable. This article explores the subjective and social considerations of prisoners’ desires for normality. Qualitative interviews with prisoners at low-security open prisons in Finland ( N = 45) revealed three narratives of normality: (1) nostalgic normality, balancing the disruption caused by imprisonment; (2) imagined normality, envisioning a future life script; (3) challenging views of normality, which is still desired, but whose legal and conventional norms are contested. While prison authorities and prisoners generally idealize normality in terms of conduct, prisoners’ stories reveal that they utilize the notion for a number of reasons. The personal narratives of normality can function as genuine and strategic expressions of conformity or resistance. In their narratives, the prisoners disclose the obstacles to normality that they anticipate, showing the uncertainty behind their simple wish to “just live a normal life.”

In this research note, we present results from a review of research on local resilience in relation to radicalization in public health, social work, crisis management, and community policing using terrorism studies as a point of departure. In order to identify agreements between literatures, we focus on how local resilience is understood, how it is said to be promoted, and how this knowledge could be synthesized. We show that resilience by and large is understood as both a process and a capacity underpinned by cooperation, social networks, and community resources and that an initial mapping of existing strengths and resources is pivotal for local resilience-building.

Despite little evidence of an immigration-crime nexus, many American jurisdictions have adopted a punitive approach to undocumented immigrants and an increasingly restrictive and exclusive system of immigration control. The extensive deployment of criminal justice measures to address the immigration “problem” led to the growth of a crimmigration apparatus—a mesh of immigration and criminal justice systems. Drawing on extant literature and applying the framework of the penal field, the article examines the social dynamics, processes, and consequences of crimmigration. It is argued that the portrayal of immigrants as “symbolic assailants” has facilitated the creation and operation of crimmigration under the guise of crime prevention rather than for addressing terrorism and national security—the presumed purpose of utilizing crimmigration practices. The current configuration of crimmigration across the United States is the interactive product of minority threat, partisan politics, and federalism of the American government system, which have jointly formed a “multilayered patchwork” of immigration control. The article first outlines the analytical framework; reviews the social construction of immigrant “criminality”; and describes the punitive and exclusive laws, policies, and enforcement practices established as responses to this “threat.” The dilemmas, contradictions, and contestations associated with crimmigration, including collateral impacts on immigrants, their families and communities, and the criminal justice system, are analyzed; and policy implications are drawn and discussed.

Forensic psychiatry is an exciting specialty of psychiatry. It takes care of chronic, highly complicated psychiatric patients with problems in various domains, e.g., diagnostic comorbidity, and circumstantial risks. In this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of the most important issues in forensic psychiatry. First, we define forensic psychiatry. Next, key themes in the practice of forensic psychiatry are described. Important data about the relationship between psychiatric disorders and offending are shown. Several steps in the assessment of forensic psychiatry are highlighted: the process, information gathering, diagnosis, formulation, identification of risk factors, and risk assessment and risk management. Psychological and biological treatment, therapeutic milieu, therapeutic use of security, and multidisciplinary and multiagency working are also briefly reviewed. Principles of treatment in various settings, such as community treatment, secure forensic psychiatric hospitals, and prison treatment, are mentioned as well. Finally, some special populations are described, such as sex offenders, female offenders, intellectually disabled offenders, stalkers, older offenders, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender inmates. The issue of cultural competence and the situation in low- and middle-income countries are also considered.

The article presents the political, economic, and sociocultural factors that make Turkey an attractive destination for foreign sex workers, and reviews trends in official statistics of arrested traffickers, rescued victims, and deportation of migrant illegal sex workers. In-depth interviews of 20 law enforcement and nongovernmental organizations staff members, who in the course of their work come into close contact with foreign sex workers, shed light on the statistics. The interview data provide insights into the structure of the Turkish sex market, the factors that bring foreign women to work in this market, and the impact of legal reforms on the circumstances of foreign sex workers. The article concludes with the implications of the findings for public policy.

Numbers of older prisoners have been increasing in recent years and there is no national strategy addressing their care. Older prisoners have more physical health needs, complex social care needs and high rates of mental disorder compared with younger prisoners. These needs are often not identified or addressed. We developed the Older prisoner Health and Social Care Assessment and Plan (OHSCAP), a structured approach for identifying and managing the health and social care needs of older prisoners. It consists of an assessment, care plan and review of needs. The current study aims to establish the fidelity of implementation of the OHSCAP as part of a larger RCT. Compliance, context and competence fidelity were audited to assess compliance with training and the manual, adequacy of completion and identification of needs and quality of care planning. Results showed that the OHSCAP was not implemented as intended with needs identified not being consistently translated into care plan actions, little evidence to suggest that prisoner involvement in the care planning process and difficulties in collaborative working. Implications with respect to effectively embedding complex interventions within prisons, along with wider policy-related issues affecting the entire prison estate are discussed.

How can Community Managed Water Supply (CMWS) become more sustainable? Recent studies in several countries indicate that the sustainability of many CMWS is poor. As a result, their long term impact on village lives is limited. This paper presents the findings of research on the sustainability and long-term impact of a group of CMWS created by the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project (RWSSP) in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. This project adopted a Community-Based Approach to maximize the sustainability and long-term impact of its CMWS. The research assessed the sustainability of these CMWS a decade after their completion. It used six measures to assess sustainability and examined four long-term impacts. The results are compared with studies from other countries. The influence of Community-Based Approach (CBA) on the results is discussed. Recommendations are made for changes in policies and strategies to improve the sustainability and long term impact of future CMWS in Central Asia and elsewhere.

Summary Background Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the leading cause of women's homelessness. However, what works best to respond to the needs of women experiencing IPV and homelessness remains unclear. We aimed to systematically review the effects of housing interventions on the physical, psychosocial, and economic wellbeing of women experiencing IPV. Methods In this systematic review, we searched 15 electronic databases and conducted an extensive grey literature and hand reference search between Jan 29, 2020, and May 31, 2021. We included controlled quantitative studies of housing interventions (from emergency shelter to permanent supportive housing) that were reported in English, without time restrictions, and examined any physical, psychosocial, or economic outcomes among women experiencing IPV. We critically appraised included studies using the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care criteria and extracted data using a piloted extraction form. We synthesised our results using harvest plots to summarise whether the weight of the evidence suggested benefits, disadvantages, or null effects; patterns by study quality; and evidence gaps. This study is registered with PROSPERO, CRD42020176705. Findings We screened 23 902 unique records and identified 34 eligible studies with quantitative data on the outcomes of housing interventions among women experiencing IPV. Most studies evaluated the outcomes of either shelter interventions (18 studies [53%]) or shelter plus some other programming (eight [24%]). The remaining eight studies evaluated longer-term housing solutions, including supportive housing (five studies [15%]), critical time interventions (one [3%]), transitional housing (one [3%]), and stay-at-home models (one [3%]). There was no cumulative evidence of disadvantages following any IPV-housing intervention. Evidence of benefits was strongest for mental health outcomes, intent to leave partner, perceived safety, and housing and partner-related stress. Included studies were at high risk of bias across most domains (eg, confounding). Interpretation There is promising evidence on the continuum of IPV-housing services for women, especially in terms of proximal outcomes, such as mental health, intent to leave partner, safety, and housing stress. However, more research of higher quality is needed, particularly on long-term housing solutions and from outside of the USA. Funding The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (430-2021-01176) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (HSI-166388).

In today’s highly competitive business market, the issue of sustainable supplier selection attracts great attention due to increased awareness of both social and environmental issues. The power of companies in the supply chain is determined not only by their own performance, but also by the power of other actors in the chain. As a field of study, the selection of sustainable suppliers remains its popularity because it requires developing a systematic procedure that addresses conflicting quantifiable and non-quantifiable factors simultaneously. In this study, one of the advanced fuzzy approaches called Spherical Fuzzy Sets (SFS) has been used to prioritize criteria that affect sustainable supplier selection. The proposed methodology combines the Spherical Fuzzy Sets and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and takes into account four main criteria: economic, quality, social and environmental criteria. In order to prioritize the main and sub criteria, questionnaires were conducted with three experts who have valuable experience in this field of study. After then, for the selection of the best sustainable supplier, a real selection problem in an international company was handled. The figured out ranking of the criteria and supplier alternatives can be used as a guide by the researchers and industrial experts who are responsible for sustainable supplier selection. To measure how much unit increase in weights assigned to key criteria affects supplier selection, a sensitivity analysis was carried out. It was noticed that the selection procedure for the selected company is not highly sensitive to changes.

Several empirical studies have shown that women who experience violence in intimate personal relationships (IPV) commonly experience more than one form of violence. While it is recognized that individual trajectories of IPV vary over time, little is known about the temporal dynamics of this co-occurrence or its consequences. This study describes the different forms of violence experienced by women and looks at whether it is possible to predict when severe violence (physical and sexual) is most likely to occur. Data in the study comes from interviews with 70 women who had been victims of intimate partner violence. The life history calendar method was used to facilitate identifying kinds and levels of violence and the month in which violence took place. Individual victimization trajectories were found to be heterogenous and likely to change in the short term. The women in our sample experienced more than one form of intimate partner violence and co-occurrence of different forms of violence was common in individual trajectories. The characteristics of the kind of violence experienced were important in understanding the temporal aspects of acts of severe violence. The increased knowledge about patterns of violence provided by these results should help to develop better ways to intervene to prevent such events.

The fallible nature of the criminal justice system continues to see judicial errors—that is, wrongful convictions and erroneous acquittals—undermine its integrity, efficacy, and legitimacy. Public perceptions of judicial errors are important contributors to criminal justice policy and reforms. The current study utilizes the 2016 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) dataset to examine public attitudes toward judicial errors. It applies Herbert Packer’s crime control and due process models to understand how concerns around procedural safeguards and public safety are associated with public perceptions toward judicial errors. Packer’s model has been challenged by studies, which theorize that the models are not mutually exclusive. Yet, they have not been empirically tested in this context, which is a gap this study seeks to fill. Findings show that due process and crime control concerns shape public attitudes toward wrongful convictions and challenge the notion that Packer’s models be applied on a continuum.

The issues related to the analysis of technological methods for the formation of architectural objects are considered. The purpose of the research is to identify the scale and prospects for the use of traditional and innovative technologies. Solving problems associated with the development of technological methods and processes is accompanied by the development of general theoretical knowledge of architectural science and building materials science as ways to improve the functional quality of architectural systems and their display in the formats of buildings and structures. The real need to develop a systematic approach and the development of a methodology for integrating the technological component (more precisely, non-traditional or innovative methods and techniques) into the algorithm for the formation of architectural objects predetermined and determined the goal and objectives of this study. The theoretical base of research includes both scientifi c and philosophical works devoted to the object and subject of research in a global aspect, and scientifi c and technical literature, in relation to a specifi c area of architectural activity.

Maltreated and child welfare-involved youth are over-represented in juvenile justice systems. These youth are at a greater risk of serious offending and justice system entrenchment relative to their non-maltreated peers. Understanding gender differences in the pathways to justice involvement and the nature of offending among maltreated children is critical for informing policy and practice. Yet, this body of evidence is fragmented. This scoping review identified and narratively synthesized evidence from studies reporting on gender differences in the individual characteristics, maltreatment experiences, child protection involvement and offending profiles of maltreated youth who offend. A comprehensive search of four databases generated 11,568 publications, from which 180 met the review’s inclusion criteria. These primary studies included participants aged 8–21 years with a history of childhood maltreatment and youth offending and reported at least one gendered analysis. Some consistent findings were reported across studies. A greater level of child welfare involvement and maltreatment exposure (particularly sexual abuse and multi-type maltreatment) was found for justice involved girls, relative to boys. Maltreated and child welfare-involved boys appear more likely to offend than girls, but findings about how gender moderates the maltreatment-offending relationship were inconsistent. Child welfare systems involvement (particularly foster care and residential care) appeared to be an important moderator for girls, and school performance mediated outcomes for boys. Across this body of evidence, few studies accounted for under-reporting of abuse and neglect when using youth self-report measures of maltreatment. Future research is needed which explicitly explores how gender moderates the maltreatment-offending relationship.

A distinctive feature of waste water of fi sh processing enterprises is the high content of organic substances: COD - 620-3500 mg/L, BOD-220-2860 mg/L. The ratio of BOD:COD=0.68-0.83 in the waste water of fi sh processing enterprises shows a high potential for the use of biological treatment methods. Further study requires the removal of biogenic elements, because, for example, for a fi sh cannery, the ratio of BOD:N:P=100:3.79:1.08 and 100:4.77:0.57. This article presents the experience of design, construction, start-up and adjustment of sewage treatment facilities of a fi sh processing enterprise. For wastewater treatment, the following scheme was developed and manufactured by the ECOLOS company: a receiving well with a basket, a drum grate, a horizontal grease trap, an homogenizer, a reagent pressure fl otation unit, a membrane bioreactor, and ultraviolet disinfection. The quality of waste water at the outlet of the treatment facilities meets the requirements of the Normative- permissible discharge provided by LLC «Russkaya Treska».

Rates of intimate partner violence (IPV) and substance use have risen during the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially enduring effects on women’s health. A rapid review was conducted on IPV and women’s substance use in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid review explored two separate research questions with a view to integrate the literature related to: (1) containment, social isolation, pandemics, disasters, lockdowns, and IPV; and (2) the relationships between substance use and IPV. Two different searches for each question were conducted between May and October 2020 and n = 47 articles were included. Women experience multiple physical and mental health consequences related to IPV that can be exacerbated by public health crises such as pandemics and disasters. Perpetrators may use these events as a tactic to threaten, isolate, or use coercive control. Similar tactics are reported in the complex relationship between IPV and substance use, where substance use can accompany IPV and/or be used as a coping mechanism for survivors. The findings highlight long standing women’s health concerns made further visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional research is needed to identify actions required to reduce gender inequities and harms associated with IPV and substance use, and to adequately tailor and prepare effective responses in the context of future public health crises.

While sexual violence against women has gained attention in sub-Saharan Africa, research examining help-seeking remains limited. Scholarship on barriers to help-seeking among sexually abused married or cohabiting women is particularly lacking. We used the barriers model and held 15 in-depth interviews with sexually abused Ghanaian married or cohabiting women to examine help-seeking behaviors. Participants identified multiple barriers to help-seeking, including financial difficulties, lack of social support, and stigma. The results corroborate the barriers model's formulation of the challenges faced by female survivors in reporting violence. They indicate the need to improve laws to promote help-seeking among women with experiences of sexual violence.

Objective: Most studies that examine psychiatric illness in people who offend have focused on incarcerated samples, with little known about the larger population of individuals with criminal justice system contact. We examine the overlap between proven offences and psychiatric diagnoses with an emphasis on experiences for Indigenous Australians. Methods: In a population-based birth cohort of 45,141 individuals born in Queensland, Australia, in 1990 (6.3% Indigenous), psychiatric diagnoses were identified from hospital admissions between ages 4/5 and 23/24 years and proven offences were identified from court records (spanning ages 10–24 years). Prevalence rates for offending, psychiatric diagnoses and their overlap were examined for Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals. Associations between specific psychiatric diagnoses and types of offending were examined using logistic regressions. Results: There were 11,134 (24.7%) individuals with a finalised court appearance, 2937 (6.5%) with a diagnosed psychiatric disorder and 1556 (3.4%) with a proven offence and diagnosed psychiatric disorder, with Indigenous Australians significantly overrepresented across all outcomes. Compared with non-Indigenous Australians, Indigenous Australians were younger at their first court finalisation (Cohen’s d = −0.62, 95% confidence interval = [−0.67, −0.57]), experienced a higher number of finalisations ( d = 0.94, 95% confidence interval = [0.89, 1.00]) and offences ( d = 0.64, 95% confidence interval = [0.59, 0.69]) and were more likely to receive custodial ( d = 0.41, 95% confidence interval = [0.36, 0.46]) or supervised ( d = 0.55, 95% confidence interval = [0.50, 0.60]) sentences. The overlap between offending and psychiatric illness was more pronounced for Indigenous Australians compared with non-Indigenous Australians (14.8% vs 2.7%). Substance use disorders were the most prevalent psychiatric diagnosis among individuals with a court finalisation (9.2%). Conclusions: Indigenous Australians were significantly overrepresented in court finalisations and psychiatric diagnoses. Indigenous Australians with a psychiatric diagnosis were at highest risk of experiencing a court appearance, emphasising the importance of culturally appropriate mental health responses being embedded into the criminal justice system.

Deepfake and digitally altered nude and sexual imagery is a serious and harmful emerging form of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA). This article reports on a multi-methods and cross-country study of IBSA across the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, with a specific focus on the creation, distribution and threat to distribute deepfake and digitally altered imagery. Our findings suggest this abuse involves poly-victimization and poly-perpetration, and is disproportionately experienced and engaged in by those with mobility and/or communication assistance needs, members of the LGB+ community, males, young people and racial minorities (perpetration only). In this article, we discuss the pervasiveness and harms of deepfake and digitally altered imagery abuse, as well as challenges in legal responses, policing and prevention.

Los delitos sexuales son frecuentes en el segmento de mayor edad de la población delincuente. Frecuentemente la agresión sexual se ha cometido con una edad avanzada y es el primer delito conocido que han llevado a cabo estas personas. Estos hombres se denominan en la literatura “agresores sexuales mayores primarios”. Su existencia es difícil de explicar desde las teorías vigentes en el campo de la violencia sexual, que asumen que los factores de riesgo aparecen a edades más tempranas. En este artículo se revisa la investigación sobre los agresores sexuales mayores y sus implicaciones en el fenómeno de los agresores primarios. Estos trabajos se han centrado en variables psicopatológicas y neuropsicológicas. Otras variables relacionadas con el afrontamiento de los cambios psicosociales y sexuales asociados al envejecimiento normal no han sido consideradas en la literatura. Se analizan también las limitaciones a la hora de valorar el riesgo de reincidencia de esta población.

The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.

Drawing on interview data with over 50 male former prisoners in Ontario, Canada, we examine male ex-prisoners’ narratives of change within prison settings. Specifically, we focus on how ex-prisoners talk about change to self and their persona, as they reflect back on both their pre-prison selves and the ways they believe prison changed them. We find that these ex-prisoners described prison as a time where they developed a more general sense of positive change. Ex-prisoners described how prison living made them “calmer,” “stronger,” and more “patient” overall. These descriptions stand in tension with the overall hostility of prison environments where prisoners are forced to focus on survival and basic well-being as they navigate the risks and threats of prison living. Overall, in this article, we seek to contribute to emerging discussions on positivity within prison settings, acknowledging that studying the more positive impacts of prison is a delicate yet important endeavor necessary to help better understand the experiential complexities of punishment.

Peer reviewed: True, Funder: Isaac Newton Trust; FundRef: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100004815, The so-called ‘wall of silence’ presents a threat to successful police investigations and criminal trials. Explanations for it have focused on cultural narratives, including distrust in the police, a ‘no snitching’ culture and manipulative ‘professional criminals’. Drawing on a study of serious multi-handed violence and ‘joint enterprise’ as a legal response, this article highlights the role of the law, and its agents, in generating silence among young suspects, whose primary concern is the legal risks of talking. Yet, these young people face a precarious trap, as their silence is interpreted as guilt by the police, propelling them towards charge. This article concludes that to avoid over-charging and to encourage young people with knowledge of serious violence to talk, structural change is needed. The system must reverse the legal rules regarding silence and reform the law on secondary liability to reduce the legal risks of talking.

The Transgression Related Interpersonal Motivations (TRIM) scale measures revenge, avoidance, and benevolence in response to social transgressions that, typically, comprise acts of indirect aggression. We tailored the TRIM for use in forensic psychiatric and victimological settings by slightly altering the instruction to include transgressions that comprise direct as well as indirect aggression. In this study, we examined the factor structure and psychometric qualities of this adapted Dutch version of the TRIM. Data was collected in adolescents from three different educational levels (N = 455) and in (ex)detainees (N = 65). Three unambiguous and internally consistent factors corroborated a priori conceptualizations. Associations with social desirability, dispositional anger, dispositional vengeance, accomplished revenge, and accomplished forgiveness supported construct validity. Mean scores from (ex)detainees did not differ from the student participants, although the former reported more incidents of physical and sexual violence. Hence, the TRIM appears useful as an aid in risk assessment of known offenders, threat assessment of as yet unknown offenders, and efforts to support victims of violence.

Objectives The Police Districting Problem concerns the definition of patrol districts that distribute police resources in a territory in such a way that high-risk areas receive more patrolling time than low-risk areas, according to a principle of territorial fairness. This results in patrolling configurations that are efficient and effective at controlling crime but that, at the same time, might exacerbate racial disparity in police stops and arrests. In this paper, an Equitable Police Districting Problem that combines crime-reduction effectiveness with racial fairness is proposed. The capability of this model in designing patrolling configurations that find a balance between territorial and racial fairness is assessed. Also, the trade-off between these two criteria is analyzed. Methods The Equitable Police Districting Problem is defined as a mixed-integer program. The objective function is formulated using Compromise Programming and Goal Programming. The model is validated on a real-world case study on the Central District of Madrid, Spain, and its solutions are compared to standard patrolling configurations currently used by the police. Results A trade-off between racial fairness and crime control is detected. However, the experiments show that including the proposed racial criterion in the optimization of patrol districts greatly improves racial fairness with limited detriment to the policing effectiveness. Also, the model produces solutions that dominate the patrolling configurations currently in use by the police. Conclusions The results show that the model successfully provides a quantitative evaluation of the trade-off between the criteria and is capable of defining patrolling configurations that are efficient in terms of both racial and territorial fairness.

Objectives: Few studies have examined the consequences of neighborhoods for job prospects for people on parole. Specifically, networks between neighborhoods in where people commute to work and their spatial distributions may provide insight into patterns of joblessness because they represent the economic structure between neighborhoods. We argue that the network of neighborhoods provides insight into the competition people on parole face in the labor market, their spatial mismatch from jobs, as well as their structural support. Methods: We use data from people on parole released in Texas from 2006 to 2010 and create a network between all census tracts in Texas based on commuting ties from home to work. We estimate a series of multilevel models examining how network structures are related to joblessness. Results: The findings indicate that the structural position of neighborhoods has consequences for people on parole’s joblessness. Higher outdegree, reflecting neighborhoods with more outgoing ties to other neighborhoods, was consistently associated with less joblessness, while higher indegree, reflecting neighborhoods with more incoming ties into the neighborhood, was associated with more joblessness, particularly for Black and Latino people on parole. There was also some evidence of differences depending on geographic scale. Conclusions: Structural neighborhood-to-neighborhood networks are another component to understanding joblessness while people are on parole. The most consistent support was shown for the competition and structural support mechanisms, rather than spatial mismatch.

To effectively protect critical infrastructure, it is essential to identify vulnerable areas for priority protection. The use of geographic information systems has increased over the last few decades for crime activity and the identification of delinquency hotspots. This study analyzes the areas of a power grid that are exposed to a higher than the average risk of terrorist attacks. One of the concerns for operation managers and policy makers is that subversive groups may have “inside” information to perform the attacks and create a critical failure that puts more pressure on the operational condition of the power grid. We use exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and information from the Colombian power grid to prompt the question: why hotspots emerge in some parts of the power grid, but not in others? The theoretical framework of attacks in the power grid operation exists but need to be corroborated with historical events that reflect such possible way of action. To this end, we perform a Getis-Ord Gi* hotspot analysis to direct attention to areas that are both under attack and critical in terms of operational risks that could affect the reliability and provision of critical services such as power generation and distribution. This subnational case study of Colombia uses data from XM and InterColombia (managers and operators of the Colombian power grid) to identify the areas of electrical infrastructure that have been most attacked and explain the motivations at the local level that the subversive groups have had to attack these areas.

Group-based norms regarding political participation are not static; they are malleable attributes affected by police–protest dynamics in the social movement context. This study used a comprehensive and authoritative sampling framework to collect the views of Hong Kong residents at the end of the anti-extradition bill movement (n = 1,000; 53.6% female; mean age = 46.4, range 18–86) and evaluated them using the Elaborated Social Identity Model. The results revealed a full mediational pathway from police action perceived as indiscriminate that facilitated the public’s identification with the militant protesters and bolstered public support for the militant protest. Our findings provide an in-depth understanding of why the public supported violent protest and criminal vandalism in the movement by adopting the interactive arena between police and protesters as the entry point and the development of shared identity as the process. Our findings highlight crowd management as a complex issue in relational dynamics rather than a purely logistical challenge.

The starting point for this commentary is the fruitful exchange of ideas on the ethics of victimization research, published in this journal in 2011, sparked by Clark and Walker's article, “Research Ethics in Victimization Studies: Widening the Lens”. This article provoked a flurry of responses that, taken altogether, provide an illuminating cornerstone for the ethical debates and issues surrounding victimization research. It further inspired us to reflect upon and share our experiences on conducting victimization research at that particular intersection of academia and advocacy that we both occupy. What struck us about this exchange was the absence of any discussion about the role of anti-violence against women advocates, service providers, and organizations in victimization research.

Complexity and uncertainty often animate the desire for regulatory approaches seeking to fix, limit and constrain. But what if, instead of doubling down on ‘solid’ regulation, we also make room for ‘liquid’ regulatory approaches? We interrogate this question through deep empirical analysis of the developing regulatory framework around a form of Melanesian cultural property known as water music. We argue that, although both solid and liquid regulatory forms exist in all normative orders, we have recently seen an increasing emphasis on solid forms of regulation (legislation, registers, etc.) with respect to cultural property. As an effort to consider alternative approaches, we identify a range of liquid regulatory strategies drawing from our case-study. We show how attention to temporality, relationality and situatedness can impact upon the degree of liquidity of individual regulatory approaches, and how they can cumulatively impact the solidity or liquidity of the overall regulatory system. Finally, we identify the different ways in which gendered power and forms of accountability emerge in contexts of solid or liquid regulatory strategies.

In 2015, during the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, Finland was among the European countries receiving exceptionally large numbers of asylum applications. As the volume of asylum applications surged, however, the percentage of positive asylum decisions in Finland declined substantially. In this article, we explore reasons for this dramatic drop in recognitions rates and examine Finnish immigration control authorities’ use of discretion in asylum credibility assessment. Our approach is unique in its application of mixed methods to examine asylum decisions in pre- and post-crisis situations. We found that asylum caseworkers’ inconsistent assessment of similar facts and lack of faith in the veracity of applicants’ claims were essential to the mass denial of young Iraqi asylum applicants in Finland. This finding is important because it illustrates how asylum officers are able to “shift the border,” or generate a shift in asylum decision-making on a grand scale, without meaningful changes in law. Asylum officers, we show, are able to bring about such a shift via what we call collectivized discretion, or large-scale use of discretion, in asylum status determinations to control migration. Prior research on discretion in asylum decision-making highlights the individual decision-maker. This article expands discretion research by offering new insights on large-scale, collective discretionary shifts in the application of asylum law. We conclude that it is crucial that asylum status determinations be anchored in the individual assessment of each applicant's case, as collectivized discretion can lead to arbitrary results in the application of asylum law, potentially forcing those in need of refugee protection to face deportation.