The research undertaken during the course of this thesis is an exploratory study of the characteristics of individuals convicted for human trafficking offences between 2003 and 2008 in the UK. This thesis provides a unique contribution to criminology by developing the understanding of those convicted for these offences and the policy procedures that operate to process these cases. The data comprises documentary sources in the form of pre-sentence reports and assessments, interview data from interviews with experts involved in processing human trafficking cases through the criminal justice system and quantitative data in the form of actuarial assessments of this group of offenders. The data is analysed within an interpretative policy framework which views the data not just as a social construction but as a result of particular features of policy-making in this area. The argument developed in this thesis is that there is a globally reinforced paradigm which focuses on a certain type of trafficking and has resulted in the conviction of a group of individuals with some collective characteristics. The primary contributions of this research can be drawn together under three themes; developing the knowledge regarding people convicted for human trafficking offences, understanding the role of the migration journey in terms of pathways into this offending and the implications of this for policy and the historical continuity of these themes. The use of the terms manager and worker, as opposed to trafficker and victim, allow for a more nuanced understanding of these findings and permit a degree of flexibility between the actors involved. This research demonstrates that failing to understand those people convicted for these offences results in a distorted understanding of the activity as a whole and how the involvement fits within wider issues of migration, structural inequality and gender. The findings indicate that migration processes and the status of the migrant operate to limit opportunity. Within this process migrants make a series of decisions and links with others through their networks which forms part of their pathway into this offending. Accounting for the pathways into these offences must build on the push/pull factors in order to fully appreciate the mechanisms behind individual migration. These findings confirm a historical continuity of the dominant themes in this field. The findings and future work in this area must be understood outside of the dichotomies imposed by the historical paradigms by considering the impact of the global reinforcement of policy issues and the complex interplays of power operating between all actors involved in this activity.

Domestic violence and abuse is a significant problem in the UK. Eight million people in the UK have been victims and 25% of young people have witnessed at least one episode by the age of 18. The costs to society were calculated at £22.9 billion in 2001/2 (Walby, 2009). Despite the severity of the problem of domestic abuse, there is an absence of research from a leadership and management perspective. This doctoral case study research examines the police and partnership leadership response to domestic abuse in a large city in the UK. The argument is that domestic abuse is a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber, 1973), whereas the police adopt a critical or tame response (Grint, 2005). The research framework is Realistic Evaluation, and includes an examination of frontline, senior and partnership leadership approaches to tackling domestic abuse, and the implementation of the Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Harassment, and Honour-Based Violence risk assessment tool (DASH) (Richards, Letchford and Stratton, 2008). The findings are that little importance is placed on leadership in policing domestic abuse. Police and partners continue to adopt tame leadership responses, and the strategic work to identify the adaptive challenge and create public value has not been recognised. It is argued that the police are an authoritarian organisation with a coercive, response to problems (Grint, 2005), associated with a command or critical leadership approach. The introduction of the DASH has curtailed frontline officers' discretion, and there is a disconnect at the frontline delivery of domestic abuse policy (Lipsky, 2010). It is suggested that a 'one size fits all' model of leadership, where a command or tame leadership style is usually adopted, is insufficient to meet the complexity of this problem, and there is a discussion about the difficulties of finding a model to evaluate the effectiveness of new public leadership. A new model to analyse leadership and domestic abuse is proposed, and a potential model to analyse frontline leadership of domestic abuse is introduced. The study aims to make a unique contribution to knowledge about the leadership of domestic abuse.

Supervision of sexual offenders can only work to reduce risk when it monitors and addresses factors related to both general and sexual recidivism. It is well known that many sexual offenders commit other types of offences, such as violent and general offending, but other types of offenders rarely commit sexual offences (Hanson & Bussiere, 1998). It is therefore necessary to distinguish sexual offenders from other offenders when we study the different recidivism types, and the key risk factors for the prediction of any reoffending. This study assessed the predictive utility of several commonly used psychometrics in Northern Ireland, namely the Stable and Acute 2007, Risk Matrix 2000, and the STEP battery. Risk assessments were collected from a sample of 325 participants each of whom had been convicted of a sexual offence in Northern Ireland. The data is archival, sourced from risk assessments and psychometrics conducted on offenders subject to supervision under the Public Protection Arrangements for Northern Ireland (PPANI) between 2008 and 2010. Overall levels of risk and individual risk factors as measured by these instruments were compared to rates of reoffending. A number of salient individual factors were identified from the sample, such as capacity for relationship stability, sexual deviancy, rejection of supervision and victim access, which links to distinguishing typologies of offending in sexual offenders supervised within the Public Protection Arrangements for N. Ireland (PPANI). While it was not possible to statistically link individual factors 9 to re-offending rates, results indicated that overall risk levels obtained by all three assessment tools have predictive utility in relation to non-sexual offending and breaches of probation conditions or licensing. Statistical analysis of sexual re-offending was not possible due to the small number of such offences within this sample. Findings from this study have both strategic and practical implications for the management of sexual offenders in N. Ireland. The main findings were that all three instruments predicted offending behaviour, breaches of probation, or breaches of licence. Recommendations and directions to inform future policy and practice are outlined in the Discussion Section.

Sexual violence is ubiquitous throughout the Anglophone West and shows no sign of abating. Feminist analysis has long demonstrated that this is a problem grounded in gender relations, patterns of masculine socialisation, and patriarchal social organisation. However, this thesis proposes that the roots of the Anglophone West’s rape culture also extend far beyond matters of gender and sexuality, deep into the core of the dominant culture itself. Setting feminist theory in dialogue with wider socio-cultural analysis, the research explores the complex relationships between the prevailing ideologies, ethics, systems, structures and practices of the dominant culture and the Anglophone West’s high incidence of sexual violence. In so doing, it reveals that, contrary to popular misconceptions, rape is neither a ‘natural’ nor a ‘savage’ act but a highly ‘civilised’ one which expresses the foundational philosophies of Anglophone Western culture in a sexualised, gendered form. Specifically, it shows that sexual objectification, which presents women as little more than ‘rapable bodies’, is part of a far wider pattern of normalised objectification developing from the Anglophone West’s underlying belief that some lives are worth less than others and so may be legitimately used and ‘consumed’ for personal gain. Expanding this to include analysis of men who commit sexual violence, it also establishes that perpetrators’ ‘rapist mentalities’, or the modes of thought and relation that enable and motivate rapists to commit rape, function as interpersonal, gendered expressions of the Anglophone West’s celebration of and reliance upon exploitation, conquest and coercive rule. Through these arguments, the thesis ultimately demonstrates that rape is not only an act of gender violence but also an inevitable manifestation of the dominant culture of the Anglophone West at large which can be fully addressed and challenged only by expanding analytical frameworks to include broad socio-cultural critiques and diverse social justice activism. In taking this position, the thesis expands understanding of rape beyond the limits of existing research and raises significant issues for both future scholarship and the ongoing struggle against sexual violence.

No description available.

Background: Risk assessment of sexual violence involves evidence based evaluation of the risks posed by sexual offenders. It informs risk management; the provision of treatment that reduces the risk of future sexual violence. Previous research has focused on assessment of the predictive accuracy of different risk assessment tools, as well as the identification of risk factors that are associated with recidivism. In contrast, the clinical practice of risk assessment is a research area that has been neglected. The aim of this thesis was to explore the practice of risk assessment in a specialist sex offender liaison service (SOLS). Particular attention was paid to the structured professional judgement method of risk assessment. Method: A systematic review of the literature identified psychological factors associated with sexual recidivism in adult male offenders. Study 1 employed a cohort quantitative design and aimed to ascertain whether risk judgements made by the SOLS were predicted by factors that were identified by the systematic review (and previously existing meta-analyses) as being evidence based. Ordinal logistic regression and linear regression analyses (N = 96) were used to investigate the hypothesised predictive associations between variables. Study 2 utilised a qualitative framework analysis (N = 31) and aimed to explore the views of users of SOLS risk assessments with respect to their practical utility. Results: The systematic review suggested that psychopathy and sexual deviance were supported as risk factors for sexual recidivism. Inconsistent results were found with respect to denial. Study 1 found that psychopathy, denial, and sexual preoccupation were significantly associated with risk judgement scores made by the SOLS, while sexual deviance, and problems with intimate relationships, were not. The best explanatory model accounted for only 40 per cent of the variance in risk judgement score. Study 2 revealed five major themes: informing risk management; confirming what was known and giving weight; understanding personality; treatment; and the usefulness and limitations of risk assessment.

No description available.

Attitudes towards sexual offenders have been widely studied in forensic psychology and criminology research over the past 25 years. At present, however, studies examining these views are predominantly descriptive in nature. That is, self-report questionnaire measures are typically distributed to different groups (e.g., general public samples, and members of different occupational categories), with the resultant between-groups differences being reported in research papers. While these studies have provided some interesting findings, the results gained from them fail to inform researchers about the psychological mechanisms that underpin views about this offending population. The overarching aim of this thesis was to begin to fill this knowledge gap. That is, a range of studies were designed to use robust experimental methods, within validated theoretical paradigms, in order to examine some of the potential constructs that influence people’s attitudes towards sexual offenders. Chapter 1 presents a review of the current state of the field in relation to attitudes towards sexual offenders, with gaps in current knowledge being identified. In Chapter 2, the theoretical framework within which the empirical aspects of the thesis operate is set out. Key constructs in this section include dual-process cognition, and our reliance on implicit (i.e., non-conscious) mental processes when making decisions. Chapter 3 builds upon criticisms of one measure of attitudes towards sexual offenders in order to reconceptualise its use into one of an outcome measure. This is then used throughout Chapters 4, 5, and 6 as a measure of sentencing and risk judgements, in order to examine the effects of various experimental manipulations. Studies presented in Chapter 4 found that heuristic-based processes based around the principles of availability appear to influence decision-making about sexual offenders at the macro (political) level, but not at the micro (individual) level. Instead, individual participants’ attitudes and judgements about sexual offenders were dependent on different primes relating to the representativeness (Chapter 5) and affect (Chapter 6) heuristics. Chapter 7 offers a discussion of the empirical findings presented at earlier points of the thesis, and outlines opportunities to develop further work into the heuristic-based nature of attitudes towards sexual offenders. The work contained within this thesis is original, in that well-validated theoretical models are used to begin to examine the psychological mechanisms that may underpin attitudes iii towards sexual offenders. The apparent dual-process nature of such views calls into question some previously-expressed calls within the literature that presenting fact-based information about sexual offenders may lead to improvements in societal attitudes. Instead, it may be that more indirect and emotional methods may be required to achieve such aims. Towards the end of the thesis, clear opportunities for further work are set out, as are some of the potential implications of this research.

This thesis explores responses to rape in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, based on three years of participant observation plus in-­depth interviews with a random sample of 187 women from two villages. The issues examined lie at the intersection of two ongoing discussions in scholarship and practice and contributes to each of them: wrongdoing and justice, and sexual violence and rape. Northern Uganda is at the heart of international justice debates. Fierce controversy followed the 2005 announcement of the International Criminal Court’s intervention in ongoing conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. Two opposing representations of Acholi society emerged: that Acholi were innately forgiving -­ able to deal with mass crime through traditional justice; or that they needed and often supported formal legal justice. But this missed crucial aspects of Acholi realities, which this study illustrates, most basically the profound value of social harmony, and a deep distrust of distanced authorities to dispense justice in their interest. Many scholars and practitioners assume that in the aftermath of crime, justice must be done. Amongst Acholi, I have found, the primary moral imperative in the wake of wrongdoing is not punishment of the perpetrator or individual victim’s rights but the restoration of social harmony. Experience of rape and harm it causes are predicated on understandings of wrongdoing related to challenges posed to social harmony. Similarly, an appropriate remedy depends not only on the act of forced sex itself, but also on the social role of the perpetrator and social context. This thesis adds empirical, locally-­grounded, and culturally-­specific evidence in support of a more complicated and nuanced explanation of rape and its aftermath than is familiar in the analytical/normative frameworks familiar in post-­atrocity justice debates or anti-­rape feminist activist discourse. It suggests reimagining the meanings of these phenomena along lived continuums: before, during and after war; and acknowledging the role of sex, power and politics in all sexual experiences on a spectrum of coercion and enthusiastic consent.

Offence supportive cognition (OSC) is an important theoretical and clinical concept in researching and treating adult sexual offenders. Much less is known about the role, relevance and measurement of OSC with younger sexual offenders, and this thesis aims to address that gap. Chapter 1 presents an introduction to OSC research, highlighting issues with measurement. Chapter 2 presents a systematic review of literature that has examined OSC in younger sexual offenders, with the aim of establishing whether OSC is a treatment need in this group. Chapter 3 examines the psychometric properties of the Children and Sex Questionnaire-Adolescent Version (CASQ-AV; Beckett 1995), a measure of child abuse supportive beliefs that is in widespread use with younger sexual offenders. Chapter 4 aims to establish the reliability and validity of the CASQ-AV using data from a large sample of young adult sexual offenders (aged 18 to 21 years) serving prison sentences. Chapter 5 draws together the findings from previous chapters, highlighting that overall, the role of OSC in younger sexual offender populations is poorly understood, the relevance of this concept as a treatment need may have been overestimated, but psychometric measurement is possible. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.