Search results

Victim resistance has been shown to have an important impact on the outcome of sexual assaults. Thus, the factors that affect a victim’s likelihood of various levels of resistance are relevant to consider, given the possibly detrimental effect these actions can have on crime outcome. While not intended to blame the victim in any way, it is important to examine the role the victim plays within a sexually coercive interchange in order to completely understand the sex crime event and, thus, be able to inform potential victims as to the patterns that increase resistance and, potentially, overall violence. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Sequential logistic regression analyses were conducted on a sample of 613 sex offenses (incorporating both adult and child victims) to examine the individual and combined effects of offender lifestyle, disinhibitors, victim vulnerability, situational impediments and offender modus operandi on victim resistance levels.

Results suggest that indicators of offender mindset are significant, particularly the use of pornography prior to the crime, and affect victim interpretation and response to the offender’s actions during the course of the assault. Other relevant factors include the victim’s age and the degree of violence present in the offender’s approach and subsequent offending strategies.

This information would be helpful to incorporate into victim education programs so that past and future potential victims can better understand the criminal event and the causes and effects of their own actions within that event.

This study investigates the impact that perpetrator coercion type, victim resistance type and respondent gender have on attributions of blame in a hypothetical child sexual abuse case. A total of 366 respondents read a hypothetical scenario describing the sexual assault of a 14‐year‐old girl by a 39‐year‐old man, before completing 21 attribution items relating to victim blame, perpetrator blame, the blaming of the victim's (non‐offending) parents, and assault severity. Overall, men judged the assault more serious when the perpetrator used physical force as opposed to verbal threat or misrepresented play as a coercive act. Men also deemed the victim's non‐offending parents more culpable when the victim offered no resistance, rather than physical or verbal resistance. Women judged the assault equally severe regardless of coercion type, although they did rate the victim's family more culpable when the victim offered verbal rather than physical resistance. Implications and ideas for future work are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact victim symptomology, victim resistance and respondent gender have on attributions of blame, credibility and perceived assault severity in a hypothetical child sexual abuse case.

In total, 356 respondents read a hypothetical child sexual abuse scenario in which victim symptomology (negative vs none vs positive) and victim resistance (resistant vs non-resistant) were manipulated before completing six childhood sexual abuse (CSA) attribution items. The impact these manipulations plus respondent gender differences had on attributions ratings was explored via a series of AN(C)OVA.

Overall, respondents judged the victim more truthful if she displayed negative – as opposed to either no or positive (i.e. life affirming) – symptomology and a resistant victim to be more truthful than one who offered no resistance. Finally, men deemed a 14-year-old female victim of sexual assault less reliable and more culpable for her own abuse than women. Men were particularly mistrustful of the girl if she was non-resistant and later failed to display negative, post-abuse symptomology.

Findings highlight the need for greater awareness of the fact that not all CSA survivors display stereotypically negative post-abuse symptoms. The current study also extends knowledge of the role victim resistant and respondent gender play in this growing research field.

The current study is the first to explore attributions of CSA blame and credibility across negative (i.e. typical) verses no or positive/life affirming (i.e. atypical) post-abuse symptomology.

The purpose of this study is to identify factors in sex offenders that act to facilitate or inhibit confession to police. Moreover, it aims to assess possible interactions and differences among factors related to confession specifically for child molesters and those who attack adult victims (rapists).

The authors use a combination of CHAID and conjunctive analysis to analyze interactions and factors significantly associated with confession to police in a sample of 624 sex offenders.

The study identifies several factors, as well as interactions among those factors, related to confession to the police. Moreover, rapists and child molesters present different factors related to confession, the former being more related to the criminal event as to the latter being more related to the offender characteristics.

The findings point to the conclusion that investigators need to pay careful attention to the type of victim when preparing the interrogation. Moreover, these crime event characteristics are readily observable factors that can improve the estimation of the likelihood of obtaining a confession. Finally, the several interactions identified confirm the complexity of the decision making leading to confession to police as well as the need to look at the factors in combination as opposed to individually.

This paper is the first attempt to apply a combination of innovative multivariate statistics (CHAID) and a qualitative technique (conjunctive analysis) to investigate factors leading to confession for two specific types of sex offenders.

Although offender profiling has been cited as an effective tool to interview suspects, empirical profiling methods have completely excluded interviewing suggestions when testing the validity of this technique. The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of empirically derived profiles of offender- and victim-related sexual assault case characteristics (n=624) in the preparation of the interrogation strategies in sexual assault investigations.

Latent class analysis was used to extract profiles of offender- and victim-related sexual assault case characteristics in a sample of 624 incarcerated sex offenders. Moreover, relationships between offender and victim profiles were conducted using χ² analyses.

Findings show that specific offender-victim profiles are related to greater likelihood of confession during the interrogation. Possible interrogation strategies for each profile are suggested and implications for the practice of interviewing suspects are discussed.

The study is the first to examine both victim and offender profiles in order to assess the significant victim-offender profile combinations and their associated probabilities of resulting in confession.

Traditional crime linkage studies on serial sexual assaults have relied predominantly on a binary crime linkage approach that has yielded successful results in terms of linkage accuracy. Such an approach is a coarse reflection of reality by focussing mainly on the outcome of an offence, neglecting the forceful differences due to the intricate offender-victim interaction. Only few researchers have examined sexual assaults through the lens of a sequence analysis framework. This paper aims to present the first empirical test of offence sequence-based crime linkage, moving beyond exploratory analyses.

Offence accounts from 90 serial sexual assault and rape victims from the UK were analysed and sequentially coded. Sequence analysis allowed to compare all offences combinations regarding their underlying sequence of events. The resulting comparison was transformed and plotted in two-dimensional space by multidimensional scaling analysis for a visual inspection of linkage potential. The transformed proximities of all offences were used as predictors in a receiver operating characteristic analysis to actually test their discriminatory accuracy for crime linkage purpose.

Sequence analysis shows significant discriminatory accuracy for crime linkage purpose. However, the method does perform less well than previous binary crime linkage studies.

Several limitations due to the nature of the data will be discussed.

The practical limitations are as follows: the study is a potential practical value for crime analysts; it is a complimentary methodology for statistical crime linkage packages; it requires automated coding to be useful; and it is very dependent on crime recoding standards.

The exploratory part of this study has been published in a book chapter in 2015. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the succinct test of crime linkage accuracy is the first of its kind.

Weapon use is recognised as a key crime concern in England and Wales but has received relatively little focused research. The purpose of this paper is to examine weapon use by sexual offenders to develop new insights relevant for a police audience. Specifically, to examine the prevalence of weapons within sexual offenders and explore the differences between weapon and non-weapon enabled offenders on a range of characteristics.

A sample of 1,618 single, stranger, solved, serious sexual assaults were provided by the Serious Crime Analysis Section of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. In all, 20 per cent of offenders were weapon enabled.

There were almost no demographic differences between weapon enabled and non-weapon enabled offenders. In terms of the offence itself, there were many significant differences between the groups in terms of precautions used, victim involvement, injury, attack behaviours, victim approach and attack location. Further multivariate analysis revealed aspects of the offence that were associated with weapon use; these are broadly discussed within themes of violence and evidence of planning.

The authors argue that an examination of weapon use is valuable in illustrating how offenders differ in their offence and provide insights for the investigation of such crime.

Serial offenders have been described as more forensically aware, better able to control their victim, and ultimately, more adept at eluding detection. Despite these assertions, there is a lack of research examining differences in “criminal expertise” (i.e. offense-related skills and competencies) between serial and non-serial offenders. The purpose of the current study is to address this empirical research gap.

The current study uses binary logistic regression to examine a sample of 83 serial offenses and 322 offenses involving “novices” (i.e. offenders without a previous criminal history) to determine whether criminal expertise is a distinctive feature of the crime-commission process of serial offenders, compared to novices.

Binary logistic regression findings indicated that offenders who did not verbally reassure their victim, who brought a weapon to the offense and who selected a victim who was walking were more likely to be serial. Taken together, these behaviors do not suggest that serial offenders are “experts” at avoiding detection, but rather, indicate some general offense competencies and skills related to violent offending.

The current study offers the first direct application of the criminal expertise framework to serial sexual offending. The findings offer new insights for the treatment and management of offenders who possess offense-related competencies and skills, which can offer a complementary view to more deficit-based models.

Affirmative consent (AC) policies require potential sexual partners to clearly and positively confirm that they want to engage in sexual behavior – in contrast to standard “no means no” policies, which typically define consent through resistance. AC policies might not be effective because they do not align well with typical scripts of how consent is given in practice. This study aims to compare participants’ judgments as to what constitutes sexual assault, using either an AC policy or a standard “no means no” policy.

Participants read 16 scenarios depicting various male-female sexual encounters and applied either an AC or a standard “no means no” policy to determine whether the encounter was consensual.

When an AC policy was used, participants were more likely to judge the scenario as sexual assault. Aspects of the scenario (which reflect AC policy criteria), such as the type of communication (verbal or nonverbal), clarity of communication (clear or unclear) and resistance (high or low) also affected judgments of the scenario. Relationship type (stranger vs acquaintance) did not affect judgments. Students were more likely to perceive the scenarios as sexual assault than community members; they also perceived differences between scenarios based on verbal communication and clarity more than community members. Finally, there was no main effect of participant gender, however, men perceived differences between scenarios based on verbal communication type, whereas women did not.

Findings indicate that participants are generally able to apply AC policies correctly, even though AC criteria do not generally align with common sexual scripts.

This is the first study known to test whether decision-makers can properly apply criteria outlined in AC policies and whether the application of these policies affect decisions-makers judgments as to whether a sexual encounter is consensual or assault.

Canada criminalized the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images in 2014. Lawmakers and commentators noted that this new offense would fill a legislative gap in relation to “revenge pornography,” which entails individuals (typically men) sharing intimate images of their ex-partners (typically women) online in an attempt to seek revenge or cause them harm. Feminist writers and activists categorize revenge pornography as a symptom and consequence of “rape culture,” in which sexual violence is routinely trivialized and viewed as acceptable or entertaining, and women are blamed for their sexual victimization. In this chapter, I analyze Canada's burgeoning revenge pornography case law and find that these cases support an understanding of revenge pornography as a serious form of communal, gendered, intimate partner violence, which is extremely effective at harming victims because of broader rape culture. While Canadian judges are taking revenge pornography seriously, there is some indication from the case law that they are at risk of relying on gendered reasoning and assumptions previously observed by feminists in sexual assault jurisprudence, which may have the result of bolstering rape culture, rather than contesting it.