Abuse Claims Research Articles

The Filipino comfort women on YouTube: Emotions, advocacy, and war memories in a transnational digital space

In this article, we examine the representation and contestation of Filipino comfort women’s memories on YouTube and assess the platform’s role in public discourse and transnational activism. Our content analysis of visual and narrative elements, alongside user commentary on selected videos, reveals that YouTube acts as a crucial transnational medium, linking advocacy networks and contextualizing historical narratives. However, the videos often sensationalize the victims’ experiences, undermining the seriousness of sexual violence, which could potentially weaken advocacy efforts. Moreover, user commentary on the videos can promote counter-narratives, rumors, and hostile comments. Despite these challenges, we underscore YouTube’s significance in fostering public discourse on war memories and justice in the Philippines in light of the government’s efforts to suppress the history of Filipino comfort women. The platform encourages the sharing of corroborative postmemory, enhancing war memorialization and audience engagement, and supporting the women’s claims of abuse. Ultimately, YouTube’s role as an open forum for discussion is vital in fostering dialogues for peace and justice and countering propaganda and hate.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard: How Language and Societal Influences Shape Power and Discourses

The current paper aims to analyze the case of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s claims of domestic abuse, in the context of Foucault’s concepts of a socially constructed society, power, subject positions and discourses. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis goes against the westernized concept of structures such as gender, sexuality morality and norm, as it disregards the notion that these concepts are immutable and mainly biological, and suggests that society is fluid, placing the wider sociocultural and historical context of a society as the basic foundations of creating discourses, placing individual concepts and groups in hierarchies, with knowledge and power granting access to higher places in the societal hierarchy and therefore facilitating the production of discourses. In light of that, the introduction includes three qualitative studies that depict the fluidity of gender concepts regarding domestic abuse, and analyzing in the analysis section the power dynamics, subject positions and discourses created regarding the two actors, based on theoretical background around FDA analysis and social constructionism, qualitative studies, as well as recordings of the live trial in 2022 and two articles out of the four that were chosen, analyzing themes of gender differences, court environment and the media. The use of 6 analytic tools were used in order to identify the discourses, as well as explain the social constructionist perspective around gender and language. Keywords: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, FDA, Gender, Discourse, Social constructionism

Repressed Memories (of Sexual Abuse Against Minors) and Statutes of Limitations in Europe: Status Quo and Possible Alternatives.

One of the most heated debates in psychological science concerns the concept of repressed memory. We discuss how the debate on repressed memories continues to surface in legal settings, sometimes even to suggest avenues of legal reform. In the past years, several European countries have extended or abolished the statute of limitations for the prosecution of sexual crimes. Such statutes force legal actions (e.g., prosecution of sexual abuse) to be applied within a certain period of time. One of the reasons for the changes in statutes of limitations concerns the idea of repressed memory. We argue that from a psychological standpoint, these law reforms can be detrimental, particularly when they are done to endorse unfounded psychological theories. The validity of testimonies is compromised many years after the alleged facts, and abolishing the statute of limitations increases the chance that even more (false) recovered memories of abuse might enter the courtroom. We propose solutions to these changes such as establishing an independent expert committee evaluating claims of sexual abuse.

Gender and child custody outcomes across 16 years of judicial decisions regarding abuse and parental alienation

There have been legislative efforts to control how child custody decisions are handled in family courts where allegations of abuse and of parental alienation (PA) are levied. The “findings” reported to support such legislation have been based on one unreviewed study with identified methodological issues (Harman & Lorandos, 2021). We tested six pre-registered hypotheses to determine whether there is empirical support for the “research findings” used to support these laws. Five-hundred PA cases were sequentially selected from 4,889 Canadian trial court decisions. Independent coders who were blind to the hypotheses coded all cases for details about custody and allegations of abuse. We failed to find support for the “findings” that have been used to support legislative changes. For example, this study focused only upon cases where PA was determined to actually have occurred in at least one of the children in the family. It differs from Harman & Lorandos (2021) in that this study found that alienating mothers’ claims of abuse against known “abusive” alienated fathers were not being discredited more often than they were for alienating fathers. The negative impact of failing to base legislation on a comprehensive consideration of the full scope of scientific evidence available (e.g., Kayden’s Law in the reauthorized Violence Against Women’s Act, 2022) is discussed.

Women accused of killing with others: Experiences of the Scottish criminal justice system

AbstractThis article examines homicide cases in which women have been accused of killing alongside another person or persons – an area which until now has not been examined in a Scottish context. The findings presented demonstrate that being accused of killing with another person or persons can have particularly adverse effects for women: claims of domestic abuse are more likely to be rejected and ultimately, existing tendencies to construct women as deviant within the criminal justice system will be exacerbated, resulting in more severe punishment when they are convicted under the doctrine of art and part liability. It is concluded that closer attention must be paid to the criminalisation of women who are accused of offending alongside another person or persons, particularly in Scotland where less attention has been paid to how doctrines of derivative liability operate in practice.

Articulating the Church's story as legal defendant in abuse claims: Can the Magisterium help?

Catholic entities are being sued for personal injury compensation arising from sexual abuse perpetrated by church personnel. In some jurisdictions, the situation has deteriorated because of changes to the statute of limitations, the naming of an entity to sue, the setting aside of previous settlements, and abuse compensation law firms. Oftentimes there are overstated, doubtful or apparently false claims, and disturbing decisions. There is a feeling of being cornered with minimal prospects for change. How and what does the Church communicate when its predicament is frequently not ‘right and just?’ This article scrutinizes such powerlessness using the Magisterium of the Catholic Church on the truth of social communications. The Church insists on a proper understanding of truth and its uses. Despite the new adverse realities, the Church’s responses should communicate the truth in love. The article begins an analysis of various factors and recent changes causing the Church to find itself in a no-win situation. Next, several significant yet alternative perspectives are presented. Finally, there is an investigation of the magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church on the truth of social communications which offer a theological context to rethink the Church’s current circumstances.

Extending the duty of care to achieve justice for abused match officials

The welfare of participants in sport has historically been treated with lesser significance than other, largely commercial, considerations. In recent years, the wellbeing and treatment of athletes has come under the glare of the media and the public, due to a number of high-profile and deeply troubling claims of mistreatment and abuse whilst participating in sport. As result, there has been much support from stakeholders for the plight and well-being of athletes, indeed such concerns led to the commissioning of a “Duty of Care” report in the United Kingdom by former Paralympic athlete, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson. Her report was published in April 2017 and covered a number of important areas, including safeguarding and mental welfare. Although the focus was on athletes, there are a number of other participants in sport to whom a duty of care is, or should arguably, be owed. This article contextualizes the position in the UK and elsewhere in world when it comes to participants, the law and duty of care, focussing the analysis to a group of participants who do not garner the same attention: match officials. The author himself is a former football and current rugby union referee. The article shall consider how recent developments in national laws and sporting regulations may well extend the legal duty of care to protect match officials from what has become widespread and unacceptable levels of abuse and ill treatment by athletes and other stakeholders, as well as the options for remedy and redress.

Adjudicating the spiritual world in Israeli courts: dilemmas of equality of justice

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how the Israeli legal system grapples with cases involving the spiritual world. Many Israelis do not separate the natural from the supernatural in their understanding of causation or in their attribution of responsibility and culpability, and as a result, they expect the legal system to regulate social life in the spiritual world as well as the natural one. This article examines the ways in which the Israeli legal system confronts three cases culled from the lives of religious Israeli Jews: claims of domestic abuse; ceremonial curses conducted in public; and political parties' appeals to voters with promises of religious salvation and/or threats of damnation. This article raises significant questions regarding legal equality for those citizens whose understandings of justice extend into the spiritual world, when the law fails to follow.

Abuse detection in healthcare insurance with disease-treatment network embedding

Abuse in healthcare insurance refers to a medical service or practice inconsistent with the generally accepted sound fiscal practices, such as overtreatment or overcharging. These types of abuses may lead to prescriptions that do not meet the criteria for medical stability. On the other hand, abuse may incur unnecessary costs by deliberately executing gratuitous treatments. In efforts to detect and prevent abuse, insurance companies hire medical professionals to manually examine the legitimacy of claim filings. It is, however, very costly in terms of labor and time to review all of the claims given the exploding amount of filings. In this light, there are growing interests for employing data mining techniques to automatically detect abusive claims or providers showing an abnormal billing pattern. Unfortunately, most of these models do not consider the disease-treatment information explicitly. In order for detection models to properly address the issues rising from individual drugs with similar efficacy, it is absolutely essential to account for the relationship between diseases and treatments during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a network-based approach which assesses the relationship between the diseases and treatments when detecting abuse from claim filings. Our proposed model consists of three stages. During the first stage, a disease-treatment network is constructed based on information extracted from the claim filings. Since the association between diseases and treatments is not explicitly expressed on these filings, we infer the disease-treatment relationship by computing the relative risk (RR). Second stage involves selecting the best graph embedding method from several candidates. We select the best method by comparing performances on link prediction. At the final stage, we solve a link prediction problem as a vehicle to detecting overtreatments. If our link prediction model predicts links to be nonexistent for all of the diseases and treatments listed in a given claim, then the claim is classified as an overtreatment case. We test the proposed model using the real-world claim data and showed that the proposed method classifies the treatment well which does not explicitly exist in the training network.

Undermining Justice: The Political Framing of Actors in the Independent Assessment Process

This article presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of House of Commons debates about the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), an out-of-court compensatory adjudication process intended to resolve claims of sexual and physical abuse that occurred at Indian Residential Schools and one of five key elements of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Our analysis is guided by the question: What do elected officials’ discussions about the IAP reveal about the implementation of compensatory transitional justice mechanisms in settler colonial states, and about colonial relations (specifically attempts at reconciliation) more generally? Our study focuses on debates that took place between 2004 and 2019. We explored elected officials’ framing of both Survivors and the Canadian State in their discussions about the IAP. Our analysis reveals the limited reach of dialogue based in a partisan and antagonistic context and supports those scholars who assert that transitional justice is incompatible with reconciliation and decolonization. By way of contributing to the larger interdisciplinary study entitled Reconciling Perspectives and Building Public Memory: Learning from the Independent Assessment Process, of which this article is part, we reflect on what our findings mean not only for public memory but also for studying the IAP moving forward.

The experience of domestic violence survivors in the US family courts: gender bias in the court

There is a significant body of research on gender bias against women in the family courts. During the Covid-19 pandemic, battered women's vulnerability to domestic violence increased on a global level as women experienced a significant increase in the severity of abuse. The problems of gender bias and the treatment of battered women and their children have a long history of human rights' abuses. In particular, battered mothers have been the focus of gender-biased theories of parental alienation, used as a defence against claims of abuse and child maltreatment, despite a lack of empirical validity and acceptance. Additionally, the family courts in the United States are closed to the public and as a result there is a lack of transparency and accountability. A large-scale national study revealed that many supporting mental health professionals who provide custody evaluations lack a formal graduate education in domestic violence and child maltreatment. Furthermore, legislative presumptions that favour joint legal custody in custody decisions and requirements of co-parenting, fail to take into consideration the long-term public health risks of such chronic traumatic exposure. Finally, this article will address needed systemic reforms that include increased transparency, longterm court-monitoring, and supporting mental health professionals with formal graduate education in trauma, child development, and abuse, to promote resilience in vulnerable families.

For survivors of child abuse, college isn’t just school – it’s a sanctuary

Though child abuse and neglect are an epidemic in the United States, experts estimate that they are grossly underreported, leaving hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children and adolescents at risk for short- and long-term physical and mental health sequelae. Abuse victims may be able to find eventual relief in college, but costs can be prohibitive when colleges expect abusive parents to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to their children’s education. The current piece examines current policies in place for students to request dependency overrides in financial aid and barriers to appealing on the claim of abuse. This piece ends with a summary of recommendations intended to make the appeal process more equitable and favorable for victims.

Civil justice and redress scheme outcomes for child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church

ABSTRACT Procedural differences between civil justice and redress schemes are well known, but knowledge gaps stymie an ability to compare monetary outcomes. This paper advances the field of institutional abuse of children by analysing outcomes for 4563 civil justice and redress scheme claims of sexual abuse of children received by 36 Australian Catholic Church authorities (CCAs) over 35 years. The authorities are archdioceses, dioceses and male and female religious institutes. As expected, average civil justice payments are higher than those for redress schemes. However, there is huge payment variation and a good deal of overlap between the two, especially at the lower end of the payment spectrum. We explain payment variation by a generally lower, average or higher paying orientation of the CCAs, coupled with a strong lower paying orientation of the female religious institutes. Victims and survivors of institutional child abuse require information on outcomes of civil justice and redress scheme claims, rather than the siren song of large civil payments. We join others in calling upon all relevant actors to ‘show the data’ on settled claims.

Dr James Ost’s contributions to the work of the British false memory society

ABSTRACT The British False Memory Society (BFMS) is a registered charity founded in 1993 in response to an epidemic of false claims of past childhood sexual abuse by adults in therapy. The accusers believe they have recovered unconscious memories of a hidden past, but scientific and other evidence raise the possibility of false memories or retrospective reappraisal. The BFMS aims to raise awareness about false memory and to reduce the impact of the resulting false accusations. Dr James Ost was an active member of the BFMS’s Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. Three lines of his research were particularly relevant to the work of the BFMS. The first of these was his investigations of retractors. His insights provided a deeper understanding of processes involved in the formation and subsequent rejection of false memories and beliefs relating to such allegations. He also carried out experimental studies providing empirical proof that false memories can be implanted under well controlled conditions. Finally, he carried out, and produced reviews of, surveys of misconceptions about the nature of memory, thus highlighting issues that have major implications for the working of the legal system. Dr Ost also served as an expert defence witness on a number of occasions.

Challenges of Clerical Sexual Abuse

Though the heroic strides, accomplishments and sacrifices of many clerics who have led exemplary lives in the Catholic priesthood remain indelible, we are faced today with a preponderance of allegations and claims of clerical sexual abuse suggesting that both the Catholic Church and priesthood are experiencing crises of different kinds. Clerical sexual abuse is a contradiction of the life of chastity, one of the evangelical virtues which are corollaries of responding to the call to the Roman Catholic priesthood. How those evangelical virtues concern us and the needed critical family roles for addressing the challenges of clergy sexual abuse are often overlooked; but our lives are inter-connected. This article has been prompted by the need to see the other side of the problem, which is general huge family failures, and to awaken our consciences to assume our own responsibilities that would, by collective action, help to bring about positive and peaceful change.

State-aligned misogynistic disinformation on Arabic Twitter: The attempted silencing of an Al Jazeera journalist

AbstractA product of the global rise of right-wing populism has been a seeming normalisation of gendered public disinformation, which portrays female public figures as unintelligent, untrustworthy, irrational, and libidinous. Social media has also allowed gendered disinformation to be used in targeted harassment campaigns that seek to intimidate and shame women, reducing their public visibility through psychological violence. Despite this, very few studies on social media involving the Arabic language have explored in detail this phenomenon in the Persian Gulf, despite numerous examples of harassment against women public figures. Since 2017, women journalists critical of regional governments have been subjected to increased attacks online, but none as intense as the attack on Al Jazeera anchor Ghada Oueiss in June 2020. Through keyword analysis, network analysis, and open-source intelligence techniques (OSINT), this paper highlights the intensity and scale of one such attack, identifying the increasing role of malinformation and disinformation in attempting to silence journalists. Such documentation can be useful in demonstrating the volume, velocity, and discursive nature of the attacks threatening women’s visibility online. This research also accounts for a potential mechanism of such attacks, which follow a playbook of: 1) leaking information through anonymous accounts, 2) co-opted or loyalist influencers amplifying the attacks, and 3) uncritical local media jumping on the attacks (breakout). From a transformative perspective, it is increasingly important that such attacks are documented, exposed, and analysed to provide evidentiary claims of such abuse. It also highlights the issues of such abuse in authoritarian regimes, who clamp down on online debate, except appear not to do so when the messaging reflects state propaganda.

The Witchraft Reader ed. by Darren Oldridge

Reviewed by: The Witchraft Readered. by Darren Oldridge Michael Ostling witchcraft, Paganism, witch hunts, Satanic Panic, Satanic Ritual Abuse, spirits, popular culture, iconography, sabbat darren oldridge, ed. The Witchraft Reader, 3rdedition. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. xix + 470. When the first edition of Darren Oldridge's Witchcraft Readerappeared in 2002, it was almost the right book at exactly the right time (I'll get back to that "almost" below). Witches were everywhere in popular culture, from Willow and Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer(1997–2003) to Hermione Granger in the Harry Potterseries (1997–2007). Partly inspired by such pop-cultural depictions, various strands of modern Pagan Witchcraft enjoyed an upsurge in interest, especially among young people. 1In addition, the 1990s had seen an unprecedented flourishing of scholarship in witchcraft studies, culminating in the six volumes of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe(1999–2002). 2Concurrently, undergraduate courses on medieval and early modern witchcraft exploded in popularity. Instructors for such courses had some good source-books of primary documents at their disposal, 3but no convenient collection of the fast-changing and expanding secondary scholarship. Oldridge presumably intended The Witchcraft Readerto fill that need. That first addition fulfilled its role imperfectly. Carefully abridged selections traced our emerging understanding of early modern witchcraft since the 1970s (Norman Cohn on the derivation of witchcraft stereotypes from slanders directed at medieval heretics, Christina Larner's invaluable exploration of the question whether witch-hunting constituted woman-hunting, Carlo Ginzburg on folkloric motifs in the witches' sabbath, Stuart Clark on inversion, misrule, and the imagined witch). Oldridge also chose well among a rich selection of the best new scholarship (Éva Pócs on the sabbath as alternate world, Lyndal Roper on how to read the confessions of accused witches, Gary K. Waite on the complex overlap between witch trials and the persecution of religious dissidents during the Reformation, Louise Jackson on the imagined witch as inversionary wife and mother). Other selections were less advised: especially the final two chapters, which lent unearned (and indeed dangerous) credence to the claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) that motivated the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s and early 1990s. [End Page 128] The second edition of The Witchcraft Reader(2008) repaired most of the first edition's shortcomings. In place of the apologies for Satanic Panic, we get a short but powerful excerpt from Jean la Fontaine's ground-breaking demonstration that the allegations of SRA, not unlike allegations of witchcraft centuries earlier, destroyed innocent lives in the name of a false but terrifying threat of evil: in each case, the real evil is perpetrated by the accusers and by the legal system. This second edition also features several new entries of great use to the teacher of undergraduate courses on witchcraft: Jane P. Davidson on the myth of the persecuted female healer, Jacqueline Simpson on Margaret Murray's counterfactual reconstruction of the "old religion" of the witches, Diane Purkiss on modern Pagan (mis)use of the mythologized history described by Davidson and Simpson. But this second edition has its problems as well: with seven more chapters but forty fewerpages than the first edition, its abridgements of some articles are so severe as to teeter on the edge of incomprehensibility. Twenty years on, the fevered pace of witchcraft scholarship has slackened slightly, but this scholarship continues to produce new interpretations of great sophistication across an expanded temporal and spatial geography. Journals that had just begun or were in the planning stages when the first and second editions of The Witchcraft Readerfirst appeared— The Pomegranate(1997), Preternature(2012), and of course Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft(2006)—are now established and respectable. Ever-ramifying versions of Pagan Witchcraft remain popular, including new and troubling white nationalist versions. Buffyand Harry Potterhave been replaced with The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina(2018–present) and the Brooklyn Brujas(2018–2020). Powerful white men have tried to paint themselves as innocent victims by labelling investigations into their wrongdoing (the #MeToo movement, the Mueller Report) as "witch hunts," and undergraduate courses on witchcraft continue to fill. Darren Oldridge has brought out a third edition of The Witchcraft...

Nigeria's #EndSARS movement and its implication on online protests in Africa's most populous country

Modern tools of connectivity have afforded disadvantaged youth across the globe the opportunity to collectively share and curate challenges and build up strategies to protest marginalization. This argument is however sharply divided between tech‐optimists, who argue that social media remove all forms of barrier and empower average members of society and tech‐pessimists who argue that social media discourage people from actively seeking change. This article wades into this discourse by looking at the claims of police abuse by Nigerian youth on social media. For decades, police abuse of powers has remained a subject of interest in academic and human rights circles. This interest has perhaps been amplified by online social movements. In Nigeria, this abuse is well documented in the #EndSARS campaign, which has lasted for three years with little success. In disparity to most academic studies that investigate success of online movement, this study critically inspects the limitation of the #EndSARS campaign by assessing how Nigeria's political environment can serve as a possible hindrance to successful movements. This research therefore answers two questions: What are the dominant themes in Nigeria's #EndSARS campaign? What are the limitations to activism in Nigeria?

The Case of Google ‘Snippets’: An IP Wrong that Competition Law Cannot Fix

Digitization of the news industry has increasingly stressed the revenue generation of publishers. While there is unanimity on the need for policy intervention to ensure the viability of publishers in the digitized world, choosing the correct policy tool is critical. With the objective of ensuring adequate and equitable incentives to publishers, the EU created neighboring rights in ‘snippets’, expecting information society service providers to seek licenses from publishers against monetary remuneration for using their works. Contrary to the expectation, however, Google, the dominant search engine, refused to use ‘snippets’ unless provided for free. This brought claims of abuse of dominance against Google. This paper breaks this scenario into two parts: it first shows, by referring to the design rights in spare parts debate in the EU, that the creation of neighboring rights in ‘snippets’ was unjustified in the absence of any market failure triggered by free-riding; subsequently, by analyzing the contrary stances of the German and the French competition authorities, it shows the limited ability of competition law to hold Google’s behavior illegal. Thus, the paper shows that the choice of policy tool to incentivize publishers by creating a new IP right was flawed.

Nonjudicial Influence on Family Violence Court Cases

Family courts have rarely considered how their decisions are perpetuating domestic violence and child abuse in the many cases where custody disputes are before them. Rather than judges playing King Solomon themselves, they frequently leave the decision making to mental health professionals and lawyers whose credentials rarely include an understanding of what is needed to recognize, stop current abuse and prevent future violence. This article employs a literature review to examine the consequences of this decision making. Research shows that both male and female judges are skeptical of mothers’ claims of abuse and that their opinions contain negative stereotypes of women on which theories of parental alienation are based. More frighteningly, when guardians-ad-Litem or Custody Evaluators were entrusted with these decisions, research shows an intensification of the courts’ skepticism toward mothers’—but not fathers’—claims of abuse. Traditional family court procedures continue the serious risk of harm to women and children by minimizing domestic violence and child abuse, often using unproven and unscientific alienation theories as an excuse not to protect them. The article concludes with a discussion of the role specialty courts that employ therapeutic jurisprudence can play in improving this process for children.