Sexual Abuse in Cameroon: A Four-Year-Old Girl Victim of Rape in Buea Case Study

A young girl was brought to the emergency unit after suffering sexual abuse by an older male. Additional abuses against women and girls include physical beating, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, breast ironing, widow’s rites, psychological abuse, and discrimination in education, finance, employment, and legal access. Cameroon has adopted strategies aimed at eliminating violence against women, including ratification of international policies, penal codes, and support of local and international efforts that promote women; however, many of the laws remain in name only and are rarely enforced, given women’s lack of financial access to quality lawyers and an unsympathetic male-dominated police force. Underreporting and culturally accepted abuses remain a challenge, too, as the country seeks to understand the extent of abuses and how to effectively fight against them. A complete paradigm shift in cultural attitude toward the female gender is required for abuses to cease.     

简论职务犯罪控制的几种模式

一些国家在反腐败和惩治职务犯罪的实践中积累了各具特色的成功经验。如道德教化、高薪养廉、法律严密、赋权惩治、政治透明、正本“浚源”等模式。注意多种措施的综合运用 ,正在成为当今世界反贪浪潮中引人注目的一种有效对策而受到越来越多的国家的青睐 ,只有对职务犯罪进行综合治理 ,才能达到标本兼治的目的。     

Homicide in eighteenth-century Cheshire

This article provides an analysis of indictments and coroners’ inquests dealing with homicide coming before the Court of Great Sessions at Chester during the eighteenth century, with a special focus on the better documented second half of that century. The Court of Great Sessions was the equivalent of the assize court for the County of Chester, which was a Palatinate enjoying its own legal institutions. Initially the social status of offenders and the method of killing are analysed, and the results compared with patterns extant for the early seventeenth century, Cheshire being one of the few English counties whose records survive sufficiently to permit such long-term comparisons. The main features are a retreat by the gentry from homicidal violence by the late eighteenth century, and the preponderance of killing by simple kicking or beating in contrast to an earlier emphasis on the use of weapons. This latter feature is reinforced by the discovery of numerous cases, normally categorized as manslaughter by the court, in which death followed what appears to be a formalized form of fighting, obviously based on contemporary boxing practices. The findings are then placed in the broader context of cultural change in the eighteenth century, and it is argued that Cheshire materials relating to homicide and violence more generally provide a local perspective on the general shift towards ‘polite’ values which has been seen as characterizing the upper and middling social strata of eighteenth-century England.     

Rural Luddism and the makeshift economy of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters

This article explores the geography and culture of machine breaking in Nottinghamshire, home to the Luddite framework knitters. Earlier accounts have shed some light on why Luddism broke out in 1811 to 1812; but they have had much less to say about why it assumed the form and the geography that it did. By situating Luddism in a longer chronological and broader historiographical context, the article suggests that it makes more sense when viewed as one of the last episodes in an older style of traditional and largely rural popular protest. Luddism in the region was a lot less moderate than previous accounts have argued, a reflection of the ‘rough’ culture of the knitters that thrived in the villages, a culture that has remained largely unexplored by historians. By utilizing a range of sources that have been neglected in previous studies, notably parish and court records, and through a careful re-combing of the Home Office and Treasury Solicitors’ files, this article recreates aspects of the day-to-day lives of the knitters, paying attention to poverty, life-cycle and crime. Luddism was about more than wages and working conditions; it was also a response to contractions in the ‘makeshift economy’.     

Predicting bias homicide across victim groups: A county-level analysis

Outside several notable exceptions, few studies have examined variations in bias crime occurrences across American communities, and how community-level factors may differentially shape violent and non-violent bias crimes across victim groups. Drawing from ecological theories of crime, this study asks, (1) what are the structural predictors of the likelihood of bias homicide occurrences? and (2) how do structural predictors differ across bias victim groups? To answer these questions, data on bias homicide are derived from the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) for the years 1990 through 2014 and paired with socio- structural variables from the United States Census Bureau. Results are discussed relative to the goals of understanding where fatal bias crimes are more likely to occur as a means of informing law enforcement and policymakers interested in preventing and responding to this specific form of crime.     

Cyber Variants of Traditional Crimes and Criminal Law Responses

传统犯罪网络变异的原因是多方面的,直接诱因是网络空间的技术性代际差异; 传统犯罪的网络变异表现为犯罪构成要件要素的变异、社会危害性的变异和犯罪形态 的变异三个方面。扩张化的司法解释是解决这一问题的首要选择,但其局限性也是明 显的;面对网络空间中传统犯罪的变异态势,将部分预备行为提升、独立化为实行行 为,将部分共犯行为加以正犯化,将会是未来刑事立法无法回避的两个选择。

关键词: 网络犯罪?传统犯罪?社会危害性?刑事立法?变异

The reasons for cyber variants of traditional crimes are many. A direct catalyst is the generation gap caused by the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Such variation takes the following three forms: variation in the elements constituting a crime, in the social harm done and in the form of the crime. Expansion of judicial interpretation is the primary choice for handling cybercrime. However, its limitations are also obvious. In the face of cyber variants of traditional crimes, we argue that raising the status of some acts of preparation to that of independent acts of execution and making some joint offenders into principal offenders offers two important solutions that can no longer be avoided by China's criminal law legislation.     

黑客现象及其法文化意蕴

黑客问题是网络时代的产物 ,是法学研究者急需探讨的新课题。从概念入手 ,对黑客的各种定义予以归纳 ,并得出了自己的基本见解———黑客并不是破坏者 ,而只是闯入者。接着 ,文章从法律的特有视角描述了黑客行为发展的历史轨迹 ,并梳理了中国黑客现象的五大基本特征 ,即 :以网络安全技术为名 ;特别强调遵守法律 ;重视文化建设性向度 ;红客现象引人注目和黑客犯罪的日益突出。在此基础上 ,进而提炼出黑客现象在法律基础观念、法律价值评判及法律规制模式三个方面深刻的法文化意蕴     

Judgments Toward Male and Transgendered Victims in a Depicted Stranger Rape

There has been an increasing amount of research interest into perceptions of male rape in recent years. However, no research has assessed how people react when a transgendered person is raped. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of transgendered status and sexuality on victim blame and perceived severity in a depicted rape scenario. The sexuality of the victim was manipulated to include a heterosexual, homosexual, cross-dresser, female-to-male transsexual, and male-to-female transsexual. It was predicted that the heterosexual victims would be judged the most positively and that heterosexual male participants would make the most anti-victim judgments. One hundred thirty-three lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual members of the general population read a scenario depicting a rape and then completed a questionnaire measuring victim blame and perceived severity of the assault. Results conformed to the predictions. Results are discussed in relation to traditional gender roles and homophobia.     

Situational Factors Related to Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Orthodox Jewish Community Among Adult and Juvenile Offenders

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to situational factors associated with childhood sexual abuse (CSA) to explain incidence of CSA, as well as to provide potential targets for prevention efforts. However, very few studies have examined situational factors associated with juvenile perpetration, despite juveniles composing a substantial proportion of offenders. In addition, no studies to our knowledge have applied a situational framework to CSA research in the Orthodox Jewish community (OJC). In the present study, we obtained data from therapists regarding 80 victims of CSA in the OJC from both the United States and Israel. We hypothesized that (a) more abusers’ first perpetration would be between ages 12 and 17 than between any other age range, which corresponds to increased sexual urges, as well as increased unsupervised access to minors; (b) among juvenile offenders, the time of day of the abuse would depend on the relationship of the offender to the victim; and (c) age of the victim and grooming strategies would be associated with the frequency of abuse. Our first two hypotheses were confirmed, and our third hypothesis was partially confirmed, as younger victims tended to have higher frequency of abuse. Additionally, we discuss possible implications of significant correlations found during exploratory analyses. Our results generally support the importance of considering culturally specific situational factors when studying or developing prevention efforts for CSA.     

Contesting Dominance and Performing Badness: A Micro‐Sociological Analysis of the Forms,Situational Asymmetry,and Severity of Street Violence

This article proposes two ideal types of street violence: contesting dominance and performing badness. These ideal types were used as heuristic devices in qualitative analyses of 159 violent interactions among Dutch youth, taken from judicial case files. These analyses revealed that over half of the interactions resembled the contesting dominance type. Here, opponents engage in sequences of challenges and provocations to aggressively establish a domineering self; attackers purposively looked for or arranged confrontations that revolved around the issue of who is superior per se. The performing badness type was found in 30% of the cases. This is one‐sided violence in which attackers humiliate and toy with their victims to display their power and meanness. The relationships between these forms of violence, situational asymmetry (weak victims and supportive groups) and severity of the violence were analyzed statistically. Contesting dominance was associated with more severe violence, resulting from the greater amount of confrontational tension. Situational asymmetry was the rule in both forms of violence. The difference between the size of the attackers’ supportive group and that of the victims turned out to be especially important. The larger the difference, the more severe the violence in general, but especially in contesting dominance.