The reporting and help‐seeking behaviors of domestic violence victims with criminal backgrounds

The decision to report domestic violence is often conditional on whether victims were satisfied with their prior treatment by the criminal justice system. One issue in reporting victimization is that victims of domestic violence may also be involved with the system as offenders. The current paper systematically reviews research on this overlap, finding that most research supports that victims who also have criminal backgrounds are significantly less likely to report subsequent experiences of domestic violence, and are less likely and able to seek out social services, particularly when they report prior negative experiences. The paper then identifies theoretical and policy‐based implications of the review findings.     

Victimization at school and attitides toward violence among early adolescents (1)

Previous research and theory on the impact of criminal victimization upon attitudes toward defensive violence are inconsistent, both within the school context and in society at large. While theory suggests that victims may become more positive toward defensive violence because of their victimization experiences, the data are inconclusive. One flaw in prior research is its cross‐sectional nature. This research utilizes a longitudinal design in which change in attitudes toward violence from 6th to 7th grade is compared to victims and non‐victims of robbery and theft at school. There is no difference in the pattern of change for victims and non‐victims, although both groups become more approving of interpersonal violence as they move from the 6th to the 7th grades.     

Fashioning Futures: Life Coaching and the Self‐Made Identity Paradox

Contemporary processes of individualization push people to construct single‐handedly their own identities. This urge runs counter to a fundament of sociology, which proposes that identities are social products that must be validated through social relations. Based on participant observation and in‐depth interviews with life coaches and their clients, I investigate life coaching as a social institution that aims to resolve the paradoxical nature of the desire for self‐creation. Locating life coaching in the larger identity‐fashioning market, this article illustrates how the artificial nature of outsourced social relations reconciles two apparently contradictory desires: the “need for help” and “wanting to find it on my own.” Three mechanisms are involved: creating an independent social space where identities can be crafted away from significant others; deliberately deemphasizing the coach and intentionally underwriting personal authorship; and encouraging clients to root identities in the social world while promoting an instrumental view of sociality. The article discusses the blurring of boundaries between intimate social relations and utilitarian market logic, and the implications of the ongoing outsourcing of identity support that reinforces the privileged ideal of self‐made identities.     

Perpetrator or Victim? Relationships Between Intimate Partner Violence and Well‐Being

In national surveys, around half of intimate partner violence perpetrators are also victims of partner assaults. However, data on intimate partner violence victimization and perpetration are rarely examined together. This study examines the relationships between perpetration, victimization, and three psychosocial variables—depression, self‐esteem, and substance abuse—that have been constructed in prior research as both causes and consequences of partner violence. Results indicate that associations between substance abuse and self‐esteem and partner violence perpetration are mediated by controlling for victimization, but depression is associated with both victimization and perpetration. Associations between mutual violence and depression and substance abuse are greater among women than men, supporting the position that gender symmetry in reported violence perpetration does not imply symmetry in outcomes.     

The experience and meaning of same‐sex sexuality among heterosexually identified men and women: An analytic review

The components of sexual orientation, including but not limited to sexual desires, attractions, behaviors, and identities, are generally assumed to align in predictable ways. However, ample research from sociology and other social and behavioral science disciplines shows that for many people, these components do not align as expected. In this article, we focus on individuals who identify as heterosexual and experience same‐sex sexual desires, attractions, and/or behaviors. First, we briefly review the available quantitative data on the prevalence of such experiences and use data from one high‐quality national survey—the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG)—to show that self‐identified heterosexuals account for as much as one‐half of the same‐sex sexuality that is reported. Then, we turn to recent qualitative literature and draw attention to the contexts within which heterosexually identified men and women experience same‐sex sexuality, how they make sense of these experiences, and the interpretive strategies they use to reconcile their same‐sex sexuality with their heterosexual identities and their gendered presentations of self. Finally, we conclude by discussing the significance of this research and pointing to several paths forward for sociologists and other researchers.     

Discrepancies Between Retrospective and Actual Self‐Reports of Peer Victimization Six Years Earlier

Retrospective peer victimization reports may be inaccurate. With an ethnically and sexually diverse sample, this study compared adolescents’ self‐reported peer victimization in 6th grade to their own retrospective reports of 6th‐grade victimization when they were in the 12th grade, controlling for past and current adjustment. Overall, 12th graders’ retrospective victimization reports correlated with their own earlier 6th‐grade self‐reports and there was a general tendency to underreport retrospectively. Underreporters were distinguished by worse past 6th‐grade adjustment, whereas overreporters were distinguished by worse current (12th‐grade) adjustment. Higher current depressive symptoms and social anxiety, and lower current self‐worth may be important control variables when collecting retrospective reports of victimization because current adjustment may augment participants’ recollection of past experiences.     

Secondary victimization of rape victims: insights from mental health professionals who treat survivors of violence

Rape victims may turn to the legal, medical, and mental health systems for assistance, but there is a growing body of literature indicating that many survivors are denied help by these agencies. What help victims do receive often leaves them feeling revictimized. These negative experiences have been termed "the second rape" or "secondary victimization." If indeed secondary victimization occurs, then these issues may be raised in rape survivors' mental health treatment. In the current study, probability sampling was used to survey a representative sample of licensed mental health professionals about the extent to which they believe rape victims are "re-raped" in their interactions with social system personnel. Most therapists believed that some community professionals engage in harmful behaviors that are detrimental to rape survivors' psychological well-being. Implications for future research on secondary victimization are discussed.     

Bullying and Negotiated Identities: Perspectives of 7th and 8th Grade Girls

The aim of this study is to explore 40 Swedish 7th and 8th grade girls’ perspectives on bullying by listening to how they discuss and understand bullying. Pair and group interviews were conducted and analysed using grounded theory. Symbolic interactionism was used as a theoretical perspective focusing on social processes and interaction. The participants constructed bullying as an identity process involving gendered identities, victim identities and socially‐valuable identities where bullying was located within a gendered order. These identities were negotiated with the concept of self‐confidence, where the girls both aligned with and distanced themselves from the gendered order.     

Confronting “Victim” Discourses: The Identity Work of Battered Women

In this article I explore how battered women both draw from and reject victim discourses in their processes of self‐construction and self‐representation. Data gathered from semistructured interviews with forty women who experienced violence from an intimate partner in a heterosexual relationship demonstrate that available “victim” discourses are both enabling and constraining. Four common representations of a victim emerged as most influential to women's identity work: as someone who suffers a harm she cannot control; as someone who deserves sympathy and/or requires some type of action be taken against the victimizer; as someone who is culpable for her experiences; and as someone who is powerless and weak. “Victim empowerment” and “survivor” discourses also played a role in how women understood and made sense of their experiences. In their attempts to construct identities for themselves, battered women become caught between notions of victimization, agency, and responsibility.     

Emotions and the Self: Depression and Identity Change

Emotions hold a central place in sociological understandings of the self, both as a facet of identity management and as an outcome of self‐processes. We extend identity theory and research on emotions by suggesting that emotion may be another source of identity change and examine this using a longitudinal sample of newly married couples, focusing on person identities and depression. We find that individuals' identities change to become consistent with others' views. We also find that the more depressive symptoms that individuals experience, the more negative their identities. The identity meanings that change, however, are different for men and women.     

Self‐Esteem,the Fear of Crime,and the Decision to Protect Oneself From Victimization

This research extends prior work that examines self‐esteem as an outcome of protective behaviors against crime victimization by focusing instead on the moderating influence of self‐esteem on the relationship between the fear of crime and the decision to protect oneself from victimization. The fear of crime is conceptualized as two separate components (fear of victimization and perceived risk) in accordance with prior work. Self‐esteem is conceptualized as three separate components (worth, efficacy, and authenticity), and measured with a recently designed instrument for capturing each aspect of self‐esteem separately. Data are collected through surveys of a population at high risk for victimization (undergraduate college students). Logistic regression analyses demonstrate that self‐esteem does play a role for deciding whether to engage in protective behaviors, and that the specific components of self‐esteem moderate defensive behavioral outcomes differently. Specifically, the self‐worth, self‐efficacy, and authenticity components of self‐esteem influence the decision to carry protection, but not the decision to take a self‐defense class. Implications for both the fear of crime and self‐esteem literatures are addressed.     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

Embodied Fluidity and the Commitment to Movement: Constructing the Moral Self through Arthritis Narratives

While biomedical research reifies bodily movement in the lives of people with chronic illness as “functional mobility,” our analysis of biographical osteoarthritis narratives uncovers a moral commitment to movement as both a moral imperative and a technique to preserve a self threatened by the limits arthritis places on daily life. A content analysis of twelve interviews with arthritis sufferers shows that, in addition to the practical and emotional challenges of living with arthritis, these actors face the daily challenge of displaying their understanding of embodied fluidity—the timely and fluid movement through time and space—as a virtuous practice. Our informants use the movement mandate—the commitment to move despite the pain it may cause—to produce themselves as competent social and moral actors sacrificing the demands of their bodies to meet social expectations, and they conduct this performance in front of several audiences: the self and specific and generalized others. For these informants, in both private and public realms, the experience and the management of pain and physical limitation are profoundly social and accountable matters, as they affect interactions with others, their own social identities and moral integrity, and their relations with self as they seek to balance their arthritis pain with their past, present, and future self‐concepts.     

Social Movement Strategy,Tactics, and Collective Identity1

Tactical choices and their execution are closely related to the construction of collective identities in social movements. Studying collective identity has helped scholars understand why people participate in collective action, but the array of tactics that constitute action has not been fully explored. An emerging interest in culture and strategy that situates social movement actors in a field of contention with opponents, allies, and bystanding publics raises questions about the tactics that are used and the construction of collective identity, which is formed in interaction with others. Strategies and tactics reflect collective identities but also provide opportunities for reaffirming or challenging them. Innovative methods can create tension as activists work to resolve what they do with who they feel they are. Conflict studies, nonviolent action studies, and sociological research using concepts such as framing, discourse, protest events, and tactical repertoires offer tools with which to bridge tactics and collective identity.     

Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency,Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality

This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women’s movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing ‘pure victims’, and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.     

Violence in the Transition to Adulthood: Adolescent Victimization,Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment in Later Life

There is increasing speculation about links between violent victimization in childhood and adolescence and socioeconomic disadvantage in later adulthood, yet little work, either theoretical or empirical, has examined this issue. This paper integrates research on social and psychological consequences of victimization with theory and research on socioeconomic attainment to propose a theoretical model that situates adolescent victimization in the socioeconomic life course. Examination of data from a national sample of American adolescents (ages 11–17 in 1976) indicates a chain‐like sequence in which victimization diminishes educational self‐efficacy, which subsequently undermines educational performance and attainment. Through diminished educational attainment, adolescent victimization has substantial and wide‐ranging effects on socioeconomic attainment in early adulthood. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Managing Threat: Do Social‐Cognitive Processes Mediate the Link Between Peer Victimization and Adjustment Problems in Early Adolescence?

Peer victimization has been linked concurrently and over time with multiple adjustment problems. However, the reasons for this multi‐finality in victimization are not well understood. The current study examines social‐cognitive processes (hostile attributions, social perspective awareness, and interpersonal skills) as mediators of the relations between subtypes of peer victimization (relational, physical) and depression and anxiety, social withdrawal, and physical aggression in early adolescence. The overall pattern of associations among subtypes of victimization, social‐cognitive processes, and adjustment converged with expectations that victimization biases adolescents' cognitions about peers in conflict situations and skills relating to peers. In turn, these cognitions and skills differentially compromised their ability to regulate diverse emotions or limit reticent behaviors in response to peer threats. Modest gender differences in these associations were found.     

Negotiating Sustainability: Climate Change Framing in the Communications,Energy and Paperworkers Union

Environmental problems are often reduced to a catch‐22 that portrays sustainability‐oriented policies as disastrous for resource sector workers. Despite efforts by many industry leaders to frame climate change in “jobs versus environment” terms, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has supported ambitious greenhouse gas reduction policies. Using interviews with union members and staff, this study examines CEP's climate change framing. It finds that CEP extended the environmental justice master frame to define its response to climate change, neutralize anti‐Kyoto rhetoric, and work with the environmental movement. CEP's framing was accomplished through negotiation processes that continue to unfold as members work out the union's positions relative to their own values, experiences, and interpretations of what is possible. These findings suggest sustainability can be understood as an emergent, localized, and contested social order, and point to “self‐negotiation” in longer‐term social change struggles as a potential area of further study.