Thesis (doctoral)--Universiẗat Passau, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-253).

Abstract   The aim of this study was to reach a deeper understanding of how social workers and police officers collaborate and what perceptions they have of young victims of crime and their needs. The study is based on a qualitative approach consisting of three group interviews and four individual interviews with police officers and social workers from the social service’s victim support center, Stödcentrum. The study's empirical data has been analyzed by using Danermark’s collaboration theory and social constructivism and has been discussed in relation to previous research. The results showed that social workers and police officers generally have a positive attitude towards collaboration with each other. The respondents felt that engaged managers, co-location and personal relationships had a positive impact on collaboration. Insufficient routines, employee turnover, privacy laws and limited insight contribute to negative experiences. It also emerged that, while both groups had shared perceptions of victims of crime, the police chosed in their response to distinguish between the roles of victims and perpetrator in their contact.

<p>Human trafficking has emerged over the past three decades as an issue of considerable concern for the international community, and governments around the world have committed themselves to enacting legislation to combat the trade in humans. This has resulted in the adoption of international standards and important obligations of governments, to address the trafficking in persons (TIP) and in particular child trafficking which appears as a worldwide form of modern-day slavery, and a facet of transnational organized crime. This study investigated the potential causes of this state of affairs, which could be the inadequacy of legal texts and absence of implementation mechanisms, lack of co-ordination amongst the actors implicated, the insufficiency of political will to respond to the problem, the permeability of borders, or the lack of information in the accounts of victims and their parents. The principle objective aimed to address and ensure safety, special protection and security to child victims of trafficking. In so doing this study identified the existing legal framework in the international and regional environment.</p>

Contrasting approaches to explaining the social-cognitive contributors to bullying in schools have stressed the importance of a child‘s social goals in determining whether he or she will bully. In spite of this, the social goals of bullies and victims have not been adequately investigated in empirical research. This thesis aimed to address this issue by investigating the social goals associated with bullying/victimisation, determining whether these goals were able to predict bullying/victimisation even after other social processing biases and theory of mind had been taken into account, and considering the influence social goals have on children‘s response to provocation. In a series of six studies, 583 children from Primary schools in the UK completed several measures aimed at assessing their engagement in behaviours related to bullying and being victimised, their social goals (both as general interpersonal goals and also specific to hypothetical social scenarios), and other social-cognitive factors (including theory of mind). Although the pattern of results across studies was not always uniform, there was a general trend for bullying in boys to be associated with situation-specific goals that protected their physical dominance within their peer group, while bullying in girls was better predicted by an overall concern for maintaining an image of popularity. Interestingly, victimisation in boys was predicted by an inappropriate concern for others‘ feelings in certain scenarios, while victimisation in girls was associated with a low level of concern for behaving prosocially. Importantly, these kinds of social goals remained predictive of bullying and victimisation even after controlling for variance accounted for by theory of mind and other social information processing biases. Finally, social goals were found to mediate the relationship between bullying/victimisation and aggressive/submissive response strategies. Findings are discussed in relation to the existing literature as well as to their potential impact on intervention strategies.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is an extremely prevalent and concerning social issue, with limited current intervention and prevention strategies. Batterer intervention programs (BIPs) have demonstrated some small effects of programs in reducing offender recidivism, however there is a growing understanding that not all offenders respond similarly to batterer intervention and the problem of IPV persists. Restorative justice programs including impact panels may be an important addition to BIPs, but research is extremely limited on impact panel effectiveness and whether panels are appropriate for IPV or pose additional safety risks to survivors. The current study consists of a naturalistic mixed-methods evaluation of the use of IPV impact panels in the context of batterer intervention. Data collection methods include an ethnographic inquiry of the program setting and participant experiences, archival data analysis of offender responses to the panel (N = 287), and focus groups (k = 4) with survivors, offenders, and BIP providers to investigate the panel's impact on survivors and offenders and generate potential indicators of panel outcomes for survivors and offenders. Findings suggest that panel impacts on survivors include reaching new understandings, healing, and empowerment; panel impacts on offenders include connection with survivor speakers, reaching new understandings, and healing. Implications, limitations, and future aims of this program of research are discussed.

This thesis considers how ‘restorative justice’ has emerged as a legitimate response to crime. It presents the beginnings of a genealogical analysis of ‘restorative justice’ as it applies to criminal justice contexts. It comprises a ‘backwards-looking’ component, in which accepted historical accounts of ‘restorative justice’ are problematised, and a ‘forwards-looking’ component, in which a partial history of discourse of ‘restorative justice’ is presented. I conclude that these silenced discourses might be read as an incomplete and partial history of discourse of ‘restorative justice’. That is, ‘restorative justice’ ‘makes sense’ as an approach to criminal justice partly because of the credence of these discourses, upon which it relies, to some extent, for discursive legitimacy. These diverse and divergent discourses cast the ‘restorative justice’ project not as the unified and stable ‘movement’ as which it is usually portrayed, but as a fragmented and shifting phenomenon, comprised of a loose and heterogeneous assemblage of practices with variegated historical antecedents. Additionally, I conclude that some concerns raised by various scholars in the field – particularly in relation to the potential of ‘restorative practices’ to impact negatively on already marginalised and disadvantaged populations – are validated by this genealogy. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.W.S.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Bibliography: p. 232-245.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves : [97]-99).

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I began my inquiry into women's lawbreaking from a disquiet between what I "knew" from academic feminist accounts and what I "saw" as a worker. My understanding of women's lawbreaking came from a distorted representation of women lawbreakers as victims produced by academic feminist scholarship. This distorted representation came from a feminist practice of emphasizing women's victimhood as an explanatory framework. As a result, women have been rendered 'victims' - a representation that relies on women's object, rather than subject, status. Further, this distorted 'victim' representation fails to examine the way women can, and do, negotiate 'structures' to shape their own lives. As a result of my disquiet, I began to ask what is it about victimization that contributes to women's lawbreaking? I adapted Dorothy Smith's method of inquiry to develop a method which includes women's agency and yet retains feminist insights into economic and cultural gender inequities. This method allows one to understand agency in the context of victimization and its entanglement with lawbreaking by understanding the dialectic nature of social interaction. This dialectic understanding of action is important because we can examine not only what things come into view as structural or institutional processes, but also see more clearly the undercurrent of resistance and survival so relevant to feminism. Further, this method looks at women's lawbreaking differently - it captures women's agency as a counter-discourse to existing feminist discourses of victimization. A small research study was conducted for this thesis. Nine women were interviewed about their lives growing up and their experiences with lawbreaking. From this data, three areas were explored: "invalidation", "addiction" and "negotiation". The analysis of these themes explores, and then maps out, courses of women's lawbreaking action and how those courses are coordinated by the ruling relations. This project aims to contribute to feminist scholarship on women's courses of lawbreaking action by offering Smith's method of inquiry as a way to capture both women's agency and how that is coordinated by the organizational and social relations of ruling.