Understanding Complainant Credibility in Rape Appeals: A Case Study of High Court Judgments and Judges’ Perspectives in India
Ravinder Barn and Ved Kumari
Despite the growing number of reported cases of rape and sexual assault against women in India, there is an insufficient understanding of the perspectives and responses of the Indian Criminal Justice System in general and the judiciary in particular. By employing a framework of ‘complainant credibility’, this paper examines High Court judgments and judges’ perspectives in rape appeals. In placing a robust and systematic focus on one aspect of the Indian jurisdiction, this paper sheds light on how competing realities are understood by the judiciary to inform decision making about complainant credibility and suspect’s guilt in affirming or overturning trial court decisions.
Gender, Pressure, Coercion and Pleasure: Untangling Motivations for Sexting Between Young People
Murray Lee and Thomas Crofts
What has been problematically termed ‘sexting’ has attracted considerable legal, political, public, media and academic attention. Concern has focused on sexting between young people who may experience emotional and reputational damage and are at risk of being charged with child abuse or pornography offences in many jurisdictions. Recent research has rightly highlighted sexting’s gendered dynamics. Accordingly, a discourse has developed that imagines the common sexting scenario involves girls feeling pressured into sending boys sexual images. This article develops an analytic framework of pressure and critically reviews research into sexting. It suggests that while such scenarios occur, they do not reflect the experiences expressed by the majority of girls who actually engage in sexting, who are more likely to express motivations associated with pleasure or desire.
State-directed Sterilizations in North Carolina: Victim-centredness and Reparations
Sarah Brightman, Emily Lenning, and Karen McElrath
Thirty-three states in the United States implemented eugenic sterilization laws during the 20th century, and an estimated 65,000 US residents underwent coerced sterilization via state policies. In North Carolina, 7,528 individuals were targeted for state-led sterilization between 1929 and 1974. The majority of these individuals were women, impoverished and officially classified as ‘feeble-minded’. We argue that the sterilizations constituted serious violations of human rights largely due to state exploitation of already marginalized people, lack of consent and limited due process that accompanied sterilization orders. In this article, we analyze textual data from state proceedings that focused on reparations, and find considerable power differentials that placed sterilization victims at the margins rather than at the centre of the reparation process.
Disjointed Service: An English Case Study of Multi-agency Provision in Tackling Child Trafficking
Jackie H. Harvey, Rob A. Hornsby, and Zeibeda Sattar
This article examines the issue of child trafficking in the United Kingdom and of multi-agency responses in tackling it. The United Kingdom, as a signatory to the recent trafficking protocols, is required to implement measures to identify and support potential victims of trafficking—via the National Referral Mechanism. Effective support for child victims is reliant on cooperation between agencies. Our regional case study contends that fragmented agency understandings of protocols and disjointed partnership approaches in service delivery means the trafficking of vulnerable children continues across the region. This article asserts that child trafficking in the United Kingdom, previously viewed as an isolated localized phenomenon, maybe far more widespread, revealing deficiencies in child protection services for vulnerable children.
Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion
Travis Linnemann
In 1959, on the Kansas high plains, two ex-convict drifters fell upon a defenseless farm family, slaying them ‘in cold blood’. As the subject of a book widely regarded as the first of the modern true crime genre—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood— the murdered and murderers live on in the spectral, haunting the minds of the public as the horrors of random crimes and senseless violence. Paying close attention to the cultural production of both the present and absent, this paper considers how violence haunts commonplace geographies and the imaginations of everyday actors, through the lens of banal crime reporting and celebrated true crime novels. Doing so, it offers unique context and insight into the production of suspect identities and the social insecurities that underpin everyday life.
Earning a Score: An Exploration of the Nature and Roles of Heroin and Crack Cocaine ‘User-dealers’
Leah Moyle and Ross Coomber
Research consistently shows a strong correlation between heroin/crack cocaine use, acquisitive crime and income generation, through activities such as sex work and theft. Less is known however about alternative choices of income generation such as small-scale drug supply. Drawing on data from interviews with 30 heroin and crack cocaine user-dealers in a city in South West England, this article explores the motivations, practices and roles undertaken by small-scale addicted suppliers who distribute drugs to other addicted users for the purpose of reproducing their own supply. Findings suggest that addicted user-dealers’ motivations are commonly different to those of commercially motivated suppliers, while their activities are perceived as a less harmful and a more convenient way of funding their drug dependency than other acquisitive crimes.
Social Structure and Bonhomie: Emotions in the Youth Street Gang
Kevin Moran
Scholars have overlooked the significance of emotion in motivating participation in deviant subcultures. Youth subcultures, particularly those of lower or working class provenance, emerge as an ongoing attempt to manage and mitigate structurally produced feelings of shame, by converting this sense of devaluation into pride. Using the youth street gang as a case study, this article gives greater precision to this emotional conversionary process, arguing that gangs transpose ambient parent culture of solidarity into subcultural emphasis on self and group affirming loyalty. Thus, espirit de corps, a central and vivifying value within youth street gangs, is magnified and maintained via group symbolic praxis and expressive violence. Moreover, youth street gang culture protects this emotional conversionary process from iatrogenic threats, i.e. injury, prison, the death of others, by subsuming potentially negative consequences within this subcultural system.
From Cybercrime to Cyborg Crime: Botnets as Hybrid Criminal Actor-Networks
Wytske van der Wagen and Wolter Pieters
Botnets, networks of infected computers controlled by a commander, increasingly play a role in a broad range of cybercrimes. Although often studied from technological perspectives, a criminological perspective could elucidate the organizational structure of botnets and how to counteract them. Botnets, however, pose new challenges for the rather anthropocentric theoretical repertoire of criminology, as they are neither fully human nor completely machine driven. We use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to provide a symmetrical perspective on human and non-human agency in hybrid cybercriminal networks and analyze a botnet case from this perspective. We conclude that an ANT lens is particularly suitable for shedding light on the hybrid and intertwined offending, victimization and defending processes, leading to the new concept of ‘cyborg crime’.
A Crime Script Analysis of the Online Stolen Data Market
Alice Hutchings and Thomas J. Holt
The purpose of this study is to better understand the online black market economy, specifically relating to stolen data, using crime script analysis. Content analysis of 13 English- and Russian-speaking stolen data forums found that the different products and services offered enabled the commodification of stolen data. The marketplace offers a range of complementary products, from the supply of hardware and software to steal data, the sale of the stolen data itself, to the provision of services to turn data into money, such as drops, cashiers and money laundering. The crime script analysis provides some insight into how the actors in these forums interact, and the actions they perform, from setting up software to finalizing transactions and exiting the marketplace.
On the Relevance of Spatial and Temporal Dimensions in Assessing Computer Susceptibility to System Trespassing Incidents
David Maimon, Theodore Wilson, Wuling Ren, and Tamar Berenblum
We employ knowledge regarding the early phases of system trespassing events and develop a context-related, theoretically driven study that explores computer networks’ social vulnerabilities to remote system trespassing events. Drawing on the routine activities perspective, we raise hypotheses regarding the role of victim client computers in determining the geographical origins and temporal trends of (1) successful password cracking attempts and (2) system trespassing incidents. We test our hypotheses by analyzing data collected from large sets of target computers, built for the sole purpose of being attacked, that were deployed in two independent research sites (China and Israel). Our findings have significant implications for cyber-criminological theory and research.
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