In order to improve responses to sexual assaults so that fewer cases drop out of the criminal justice funnel, it is important to understand the decision-making processes of the police and prosecutors in these cases. The focal concerns perspective posits that legal and extralegal variables factor into the police and prosecutors' decisions about how to proceed with sexual assault cases. Although decisions made at the prosecutorial stage are largely reliant on the actions of the police, the prosecutors' charging decisions often differ from how the police classify the incidents. This study examined 11 years of adult sexual assault incidents reported to the police in a Midwestern city to determine the level of congruence in the charging decisions made by the police and prosecutors. Unique from past research, this study used a mixed methods approach to analyze the data from police reports and court documents. Quantitative data examined the extent to which charging decisions were congruent between the police and prosecutors and assessed which factors in sexual assault cases predict the agreement in police and prosecutors' charging decisions. Qualitative data was used to determine which factors were cited most frequently within sexual assault case documents in congruent and incongruent cases. The quantitative analysis revealed that the police and prosecutors' decisions were in agreement in 34% of the cases, and distinct from prior research, the only statistically significant predictors of congruent charges were legally-relevant variables. Findings from the qualitative analysis mirrored those from the quantitative analysis, as legally-relevant characteristics such as the amount of evidence collected and the use of physical force were cited more frequently in congruent cases than incongruent cases. Overall, the results suggest that the focal concerns of the police and prosecutors in this study revolve primarily around the level of evidence available in sexual assault cases. Implications resulting from these findings are discussed.

In an effort to establish a clearer understanding of the sentencing of sexual assault offenders, this study analyzes data generated from a content analysis of sexual assault cases, using feminist theory as a backdrop for the analysis. The sample consists of ninety-seven sexual assault cases from across Canada for the period of August 15, 1992 through August 15, 1993. Using a statistical analysis, the data were analyzed for evidence of whether certain factors aggravated or mitigated sentence length. The findings indicate that factors not affecting sentence length include breach of trust, sex of the judge, sex of the complainant, plea and show of remorse. Factors that work to mitigate sentence length include the youth or old age of an offender. Finally, variables that, when present, aggravate an offender's sentence length are prior offences, force, sexual intercourse and psychiatric considerations. These findings indicate that while there has been some response to feminist concerns regarding criminal justice processing of sexual assault, some of the myths that have been traditionally associated with its victims and offenders are still influencing the judiciary.

No description available.

In an attempt to eradicate biases in substantive law and evidentiary procedures, legislative changes were implemented for sexual offences in 1983. Historically, biases in rape law had resulted in high attrition of cases at each stage of criminal justice processing, low conviction rates, and poor treatment of victims. The new legislation, which included the introduction of the offence 'sexual assault', was designed to emphasize the violent nature of sexual aggression rather than the sexual nature.<p> Law reform, however, is influenced by the response of the criminal justice personnel who must implement the new legislation. Judges are critical personnel within this framework because they both implement the reform in individual court cases and interpret the meaning of the new law. It is critical, therefore, to examine judicial understanding of the social, political, and economic meaning of the law, and more specifically, to examine their understanding of the nature of sexual violence.<p> Using a content analysis of 109 'remarks at sentencing', this study examines the impact of the 1983 reform on judicial definitions of sexual violence. The sentencing 'transcripts' are drawn from 66 sexual offence cases heard at the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan between 1975-1988. Transcripts are analyzed for the absence or presence of references to each of 9 themes (violence, coercion, physical impact of the offence on the victim, psychological impact of the offence on the victim, breach of trust, the significance of penetration, the accused's criminal history, the role of alcohol or drug abuse, and the accused's control over his sexual drive). Each theme reflects an influential variable in judicial decision-making concerning sexual offences.<p> The results of the study indicated that since 1983,frequently and suggest that judges are attempting to reflect the 3 tier classification of sexual assault outlined in the new legislation. At the same time, however, judicial definitions of these variables continue to reflect stereotypes and myths associated with sexual violence. Judicial responses to sexual violence tend to minimize the culpability of sexual offenders and to minimize the seriousness of the offence. One of the most significant findings was that the 'sexual' element continues to dominate judicial definitions of sexual aggression rather than the 'violent' element. This emphasis implies that 'coercive' sexual acts have the same sexual character as 'consensual' sexual acts.<p> It appears, therefore, that the reform has been unsuccessful in meeting its objectives at the judicial level. However, the small change which has occurred may lay the groundwork for further change in the future.

In an attempt to eradicate biases in substantive law and evidentiary procedures, legislative changes were implemented for sexual offences in 1983. Historically, biases in rape law had resulted in high attrition of cases at each stage of criminal justice processing, low conviction rates, and poor treatment of victims. The new legislation, which included the introduction of the offence 'sexual assault', was designed to emphasize the violent nature of sexual aggression rather than the sexual nature.<p> Law reform, however, is influenced by the response of the criminal justice personnel who must implement the new legislation. Judges are critical personnel within this framework because they both implement the reform in individual court cases and interpret the meaning of the new law. It is critical, therefore, to examine judicial understanding of the social, political, and economic meaning of the law, and more specifically, to examine their understanding of the nature of sexual violence.<p> Using a content analysis of 109 'remarks at sentencing', this study examines the impact of the 1983 reform on judicial definitions of sexual violence. The sentencing 'transcripts' are drawn from 66 sexual offence cases heard at the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan between 1975-1988. Transcripts are analyzed for the absence or presence of references to each of 9 themes (violence, coercion, physical impact of the offence on the victim, psychological impact of the offence on the victim, breach of trust, the significance of penetration, the accused's criminal history, the role of alcohol or drug abuse, and the accused's control over his sexual drive). Each theme reflects an influential variable in judicial decision-making concerning sexual offences.<p> The results of the study indicated that since 1983,frequently and suggest that judges are attempting to reflect the 3 tier classification of sexual assault outlined in the new legislation. At the same time, however, judicial definitions of these variables continue to reflect stereotypes and myths associated with sexual violence. Judicial responses to sexual violence tend to minimize the culpability of sexual offenders and to minimize the seriousness of the offence. One of the most significant findings was that the 'sexual' element continues to dominate judicial definitions of sexual aggression rather than the 'violent' element. This emphasis implies that 'coercive' sexual acts have the same sexual character as 'consensual' sexual acts.<p> It appears, therefore, that the reform has been unsuccessful in meeting its objectives at the judicial level. However, the small change which has occurred may lay the groundwork for further change in the future.

No description available.

Using archival and oral history sources, my dissertation examines the emergence of what is now known as “sexual violence” and responses to it on American college campuses in the post-World War II period. This history has yet to receive a full account of its own. It demands one, national in scope but with campus-specific detail. Bridging historiographies of rape, higher education, and postwar feminisms, among others, my analysis features cases of sexual violence, activism, and institutional and legal developments throughout the US. These cases include early responses to campus sexual violence at the University of Chicago; anti-rape organizing at the University of Michigan, Barnard College, and Columbia University; Title IX litigation in the case of Alexander v. Yale (2d Cir., 1980); and the proliferation of a national campus anti-harassment movement through the advocacy work of the Project on the Status and Education of Women and student organizing at the University of California, Berkeley. Across cases, I show how student activists leveraged feminist and sometimes anti-racist analyses to fundamentally shift understandings of sexual violence and force universities and the state to address the problem. I argue that unprecedented growth in women’s college enrollment and entry into previously closed-off professions, the new feminist movements, and emerging anti-discrimination regulations provided women a context and tools to mold the American university. After World War II, when Black Americans moved in record numbers from the South to Northern cities, campus sexual violence was understood in thinly veiled racist terms as part of a broader crime problem. The perceived crime problem and specter of interracial rape sparked calls for universities to ensure safer campuses. In response, urban universities advanced robust neighborhood renewal and campus security programs. Shortly thereafter, feminists of the 1960s and 1970s developed an anti-rape consciousness and new theories of sexual violence. Students used feminist analyses of gendered power and new knowledge about experiences of sexual violence to shift who was perceived as a threat to campus women, from Black and brown strangers to university faculty and peers. By changing how campus sexual violence was understood, from a threat outside the university to a threat within, activists placed responsibility for rape and sexual harassment with university administrators. Students leveraged anti-discrimination law – namely Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 – to force university administrators and the state to recognize and address campus sexual violence as illegal sex discrimination. In response to student demands, the state began to grapple with the full regulatory implications of Title IX. And universities established policies prohibiting harassment, grievance procedures, and institutions to serve people who experienced sexual violence.

‘The Body on the Threshold: Histories of Rape in Colonial North India’ analyzes political, judicial, and diplomatic records of sexual violence in the modern Indian provinces of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh from roughly 1820 onward. I explore these colonial archives to reappraise the problem of rape in modern India and how it has come to be conceived and misconceived spatially. With the colonial emergence of India’s contemporary legal and penal system, I argue, a new criminal law of rape transformed public space—local roads, forests, village fields and pastures, railway carriages, and town streets—into constitutively dangerous and exclusionary space, about which a perverse cultural and political consensus prevailed that nothing could be done except that women and girls fear and avoid such space when possible. This notorious and longstanding exclusionary injunction upon mobilities and freedoms in modern Indian social life is a gendered common-sense, and structuring of the commons, that I aim to defamiliarize. As a new, ostensibly ‘decolonized’ criminal code with a restructured rape law comes into force in India this year, I offer a cautionary obituary for the law it replaced, and the past India seeks to leave behind.Bringing a combination of spatial, socio-legal, and micro-historical approaches to bear upon colonial judicial archives, I work tangentially to their central object: the criminal court proceeding. To explore how the jurispathic incentives of colonial criminal law engendered unsafe public environments, I work to pull the concept of rape out of the silo imposed by these court proceedings, which reflect the epistemic distortions of a regime that narrowly prioritized punishing only brutally violent rape upon victims below the age of consent—setting evidentiary precedents that affected the governing of rape in much of the British Empire. Employing sources such as crime reports, police handbooks, diplomatic letters, and native newspapers, I focus on instances of what might be referred to today as ‘stranger rape’: rape committed in ‘public’, often brazenly, at the margins of political conflicts over sovereign power and direct rule, such as border wars, princely revolts, and cattle-smuggling feuds. I recruit histories of short-distance migration and the public/private circulation of women within the marriage system, among others, to counter assumptions about South Asian women’s inherent immobility and seclusion. I also index emerging procedural and forensic technologies of the colonized Indian body politic—which reinforced an understanding of rape survivors as unreliable, and of most rape accusations as fabricated—to local ideas about public safety and state responsibility, which were often premised on caste-differentiated and retributive ethics of justice. I trace how pre-colonial practices of social exclusion, scapegoating, and outcasting—and the complex dispute-resolution systems that mandated such punishments—were absorbed into an ecology of colonial violence and territorial occupation, attempting to emplace the evolving meaning of rape within broader transformations in politics and social life under colonialism. I argue that the authority to sanction rape—to both punish and prescribe—became foundational to jurisdictional and territorial conflicts between propertied castes, local power-holders, and functionaries of the British Indian colonial state.

Thesis (LLM)--Stellenbosch University, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 2002 the South African Law Commission published a report in which amendments to the existing rules of criminal procedure and evidence were proposed. A number of these recommendations have since been included in a Bill that was tabled before Parliament in 2003. The proposed amendments largely reflect values which underlie the "Victims' Rights" movement. The aim of this thesis is to consider the possible influence of these amendments on the constitutionally guaranteed fair trial rights of the accused. The study focuses on those amendments that play a role in the prosecution of alleged sexual offences against children, and shows that although the recognition of victims' rights is important, it should not be done at the expense of a fair trial. Dangers inherent to the proposed amendments are therefore highlighted. The rights of the accused are used to test the desirability or not of the proposed amendments. Foreign authority is used to support the argument made in the thesis. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In 2002 het die Suid-Afrikaanse Regskommissie 'n verslag gepubliseer waann veranderings aan die huidige strafprosesreg- en bewysregreëls voorgestel word. 'n Aantal van hierdie voorgestelde wysigings is intussen opgeneem in 'n Wetsontwerp wat in Augustus 2003 voor die Parlement gedien het. Die voorgestelde wysigings reflekteer tot 'n groot mate waardes wat die "Victims' rights" beweging onderlê. Die doel van hierdie tesis is om die moontlike invloed van hierdie wysigings op die grondwetlik verskanste billike verhoor regte van die beskuldigde te ondersoek. Die ondersoek fokus op daardie veranderinge wat 'n rol speel in die vervolging van beweerde geslagsmisdade teen kinders. Daar word aangetoon dat alhoewel die erkenning van regte vir slagoffers belangrik is, dit nie ten koste van 'n regverdige verhoor gedoen kan word nie. Gevare verbonde aan die voorgestelde wysigings word dus uitgewys. Die regte van die beskuldigde word deurgaans gebruik om die wenslikheid al dan nie van die voorgestelde wysigings aan te toon. Buitelandse gesag word aangewend om die betoog te ondersteun.