Coercive Processes Research Articles

Impact of an 8-Week, Intensive Summer Treatment Program on Improving Coercive Caregiver-Child Interactions Among Children With and Without Callous Unemotional Traits

The coercive process is the primary explanatory mechanism implicated in the maintenance of disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs), and understanding the coercive cycle may be especially important for caregivers with children with elevated callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The purpose of the current pilot study is twofold. First, we assessed whether the Summer Treatment Program (STP), an established intensive behavioral intervention for children with DBDs, reduced coercive caregiver-child interactions using a novel parent-report measure of coercive interactions. We then sought to assess whether the STP improved coercive caregiver-child interactions among children with elevated CU traits (i.e., moderated the effect). Thirty-three caregivers and their children who had been diagnosed with DBDs participated in the STP, which involved the children receiving behavior modification for 9 hours per day and caregivers attending a weekly behavioral parent training group session over the course of 8 weeks. Children (Mage = 8.51 years old, SD = 1.70, range 6–12) were primarily male (78.5%) and Hispanic/Latine (84.8%). A linear multilevel model revealed a statistically significant improvement in caregiver-child coercive interactions from pre- to posttreatment. However, child pretreatment CU traits moderated this effect such that families with children with elevated CU traits did not show improvement in caregiver-child coercive cycles following treatment. Results suggest the benefits of intensive behavioral treatment on the caregiver-child coercive cycle for many families, but the need to modify the intensity or dose of treatments for those with children with DBDs and elevated CU traits.

Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don't: The Assurance Dilemma in International Coercion

Abstract Why do some coercive demands succeed but others fail? A dominant paradigm explains coercive outcomes by pointing to the credibility and severity of threats. The concept of coercive assurance is an understudied type of commitment problem in the coercion literature. It suggests that a coercer must assure its target that its threats are conditional on the target's behavior. Many scholars overlook coercive assurance, in part because they assume it is automatic. But assurance is a crucial component of any coercive process. Even highly credible and severe threats can fail when the coercer's assurance is not credible. A novel theory, the assurance dilemma, helps to answer the following questions: Why do targets of coercion fear unconditional pain? Why do coercers punish after receiving compliance? What is the relationship between threats and assurances in coercion? The actions that a coercer can take to bolster the credibility of a threat undermine the credibility of its assurance that it will not punish the target. Targets fear that punishment may be unavoidable and thus look for assuring signals before ceding to the coercer's demands. The case of coercive bargaining over the Iranian nuclear program demonstrates the logic and effectiveness of the use of assurance.

The role of psychological flexibility in the relationship between ACEs and coercive family processes for Justice-Involved individuals

High rates of adversity in the lives of justice-involved individuals often co-occur with social and family dysfunction. Psychological flexibility is a construct that describes an individual’s ability to respond adaptively to emotions, thoughts, and environmental demands. This study aimed to explore the role of psychological flexibility in the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and coercive family processes in a sample of justice-involved individuals. The sample comprised 715 men and women who are currently on probation or parole. Participants completed questionnaires assessing adverse childhood experiences, psychological flexibility, coercive couple interactions, and coercive parent-child interactions. Direct and indirect effects were found, with ACEs affecting couple coercive processes directly, and indirectly, through psychological flexibility. In the subset of participants with children, lower levels of psychological flexibility were also related to more coercive parent-child interactions. The results provide further support for correctional programs that target psychological flexibility among justice-involved individuals.

Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba

Reviewed by: Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba Paul Conrad Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands. By Paul Barba. Borderlands and Transcultural Spaces. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 452. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0835-4.) How exceptional is the history of Texas? Historians have examined Texas as a place where Native Americans dominated long after colonialism began, where the West met the South, where the Black/white racial binary was complicated, and more. There is also a long popular tradition of understanding Texas as unique, with an emphasis on the region as a distinctly heroic, freedom-loving place. Paul Barba's new book engages these conversations with deep research, analytical precision, and an impassioned argument. For Barba, the story of Texas history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the story of slavery and the violence that undergirded it. As he concludes, "Texas was a cursed land, with virtually all of its people implicated, as victims or as perpetrators in over a century and a half of slaving violence" (p. 317). The long chronology and multiracial focus of Barba's analysis are noteworthy and key to his historiographical interventions. The chapters in Parts 1 and 2 reframe early colonial Texas history as the story of how Spanish and [End Page 767] Comanche conflicts over power and labor remade the social landscape of the region. Barba's emphasis on the inherent violence of captive taking and captive incorporation is a key contribution here. While some scholars have seen the potential to transition from slave to kin status as a key distinction between slavery in the borderlands and chattel slavery in the South and elsewhere, Barba pushes back on this argument by casting kinship as means of control. "Family making was a coercive process," he writes, "a means to solidifying slaver authority in a violent, unstable place" (p. 176). Part 3 extends the analysis forward through much of the nineteenth century. Here Anglo-Americans and their practices of chattel slavery join those of Comanche and Hispanic peoples. By making clear the dizzying diversity of victims and perpetrators of slavery, Barba's analysis makes for essential reading alongside other recent accounts of slavery in Texas during this period, such as Andrew J. Torget's Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill, 2015) and Alice L. Baumgartner's South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2020). Barba concludes with an epilogue that traces the legacies of slavery in the region after the U.S. Civil War and emancipation. He concludes that it was U.S. state power that finally brought an end to slavery in Texas, noting that "the violence of war and conquest proved to be the only remedy to the malady of borderlands slavery" (p. 317). Barba has crafted a deeply researched account of the importance of slavery in Texas across the longue durée. He convincingly demonstrates how slaving violence influenced all the peoples who encountered each other in the region. Yet I found myself coming back to the question of Texas exceptionalism. Barba notes at the outset that Texas was "rather unique," highlighting the longevity of slave trades, the diversity of slavers and enslaved, and the connections between slaving violence and nations' efforts to dominate others to support this point (p. 2). Yet similar histories of slaving violence unfolded in the borderlands of New England, the Southeast, the Great Basin, California, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, as recent studies have made clear. If Texas was "cursed," it seems so, too, was most every corner of the Americas. It is a grim conclusion that I imagine Barba would not disagree with. His is not primarily an account of survival, redemption, or even resistance. Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands is an unflinching account of the ubiquitous and enduring human capacity for inhumanity. Paul Conrad University of Texas at Arlington Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

"Self-report measures of coercive process in couple and parent-child dyads": Correction.

Reports an error in "Self-report measures of coercive process in couple and parent-child dyads" by Danielle M. Mitnick, Michael F. Lorber, Amy M. Smith Slep, Richard E. Heyman, Shu Xu, Lisanne J. Bulling, Sara R. Nichols and J. Mark Eddy (Journal of Family Psychology, 2021[Apr], Vol 35[3], 388-398). In the original article, the full acknowledgment of funding was missing in the author note and should have read "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Science of Behavior Change Common Fund Program and the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research through an award administered by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research [1UH2DE025980-01]." The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2020-49926-001). One of the most influential behavioral models of family conflict is G. R. Patterson's (1982) coercive family process theory. Self-reports for behaviors related to coercion (e.g., hostility toward a family member) abound; however, there are no self-report measures for coercive process itself, which is, by definition, a dyadic process. Operationalizations of coercive process are measured with behavioral observation, typically including sequential analyzed, microcoded behaviors. Despite its objectivity and rigor, coding of behavior observation is not always feasible in research and applied settings because of the high training, personnel, and time costs the observation requires. Because coercive process has been shown to predict a host of maladaptive outcomes (e.g., parent-child conflict, aggression, negative health outcomes) and given the complete absence of self-report measures of coercive process, we recently designed brief questionnaires to assess coercive process in couple (Couple Coercive Process Scale [CCPS]) and parent-child interactions (Parent-Child Coercive Process Scale [PCCPS]) and tested them via Qualtrics participant panels in samples recruited to mirror socioeconomic generalizability to U.S. Census data. The CCPS and PCCPS exhibited initial evidence of psychometric quality in measuring coercive process in couple and parent-child dyads: Both measures are unifactorial; have evidence of reliability, especially at higher levels of coercive process; and demonstrate concurrent validity with constructs in their nomological networks, with medium to large effect sizes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

‘Our wetland is our mother, you cannot take her away from us’: Reconstructing the political space of reclaiming a coastal wetland in Sompeta, Andhra Pradesh, India

ABSTRACT The article is a case study of state-mediated wetland grabbing and dispossession and the people’s struggle to reclaim a coastal wetland at Sompeta in India. It examines the nature and mechanisms of dispossession as well as the resistance to wetland grabbing. The study shows that the apparatuses used by the state to capture the wetland, unleash a coercive process of land dispossession from above. It also uncovers a composite dispossessory politics, which is a convergence of the physical loss of wetland used as commons, loss of livelihoods and exclusion based on socio-cultural identities of gender, caste and class. Resistance from below counteracted both the coercive process and the dimensions of dispossession. We find that wetland commons is a geography of social embeddedness and ecological sustainability which has to be protected from commercial exploitation. Moreover, wetland conversion implies water scarcity and loss of social safety net for the disadvantaged communities dependent on the wetland. As long as the state continues to neglect this social reality, the rural communities will resist. To break the impasse, it is imperative to have ‘a dialogue’ among resource users with competing claims encompassing equity and sustainability.

Self-report measures of coercive process in couple and parent-child dyads.

One of the most influential behavioral models of family conflict is G. R. Patterson's (1982) coercive family process theory. Self-reports for behaviors related to coercion (e.g., hostility toward a family member) abound; however, there are no self-report measures for coercive process itself, which is, by definition, a dyadic process. Operationalizations of coercive process are measured with behavioral observation, typically including sequential analyzed, microcoded behaviors. Despite its objectivity and rigor, coding of behavior observation is not always feasible in research and applied settings because of the high training, personnel, and time costs the observation requires. Because coercive process has been shown to predict a host of maladaptive outcomes (e.g., parent-child conflict, aggression, negative health outcomes) and given the complete absence of self-report measures of coercive process, we recently designed brief questionnaires to assess coercive process in couple (Couple Coercive Process Scale [CCPS]) and parent-child interactions (Parent-Child Coercive Process Scale [PCCPS]) and tested them via Qualtrics participant panels in samples recruited to mirror socioeconomic generalizability to U.S. Census data. The CCPS and PCCPS exhibited initial evidence of psychometric quality in measuring coercive process in couple and parent-child dyads: Both measures are unifactorial; have evidence of reliability, especially at higher levels of coercive process; and demonstrate concurrent validity with constructs in their nomological networks, with medium to large effect sizes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Organisational mission and the involvement of academic research units in knowledge sharing with private companies

ABSTRACT We still do not have a full understanding of how the different missions of academic organisations relate to their performance in knowledge sharing. This paper addresses this gap with a data set of more than 900 Swiss academic institutions and distinguishes between mechanisms of knowledge sharing, different levels and types of missions, and the strength of isomorphic processes. We find that the missions of organisations and fields are more important than the missions of institutes for knowledge exchange through commercialisation and teaching. The opposite is true for industrial PhD students, a research-based mechanism of knowledge exchange. Coercive and mimetic isomorphic processes in organisations and normative isomorphic processes in research areas have different effects: since commercialisation of knowledge is not the main activity in any discipline, low normative isomorphism leaves more freedom for institutes to decide how and by which mechanisms they share knowledge, which correlates positively with commercialisation performance.

Family Dynamic and Antisocial Adolescents in Macau

The present study aims to delineate the effects of family violence and parent–adolescent conflict on antisocial behavior exhibited by adolescents in the Chinese casino city of Macau. The social interaction perspective indicates the significance of coercive family processes in relation to adolescents’ antisocial behavior, and the related moderating role of positive parenting behavior. How this process is experienced by Chinese Macau adolescents, who are influenced by traditional Chinese culture, is explored. This article examines the relationship of family violence and parent–adolescent conflict with adolescents’ antisocial behavior in Macau. It also examines the possible moderating role of parental support in this relationship. Using a stratified proportional approach, a random sample of 1889 Grade 7 to Grade 12 students was taken from Macau high schools. The young people reported their neutral/positive behavior and delinquent behavior, family conflict, and emotional and instrumental support they received from parents. Multiple regression analyses suggest that family violence and parent–adolescent conflict are correlated with adolescent antisocial behavior. Moreover, both instrumental and emotional support from parents can moderate the effect of family conflict on adolescents’ antisocial behavior. Parents providing instrumental and emotional support to Macau Chinese adolescents is negatively correlated with adolescent antisocial behavior in Macau. In view of the long and unstable working hours of parents working in a gambling city, social workers in Macau could develop more innovative programs to support parents in Macau.

Supplemental Material for Self-Report Measures of Coercive Process in Couple and Parent–Child Dyads

Supplemental Material for Self-Report Measures of Coercive Process in Couple and Parent–Child Dyads

Transforming Coercive Processes in Family Routines: Family Functioning Outcomes for Families of Children with Developmental Disabilities

Single case design research on family centered positive behavior support (PBS) over the past 20 years has provided evidence of the approaches acceptability, effectiveness and durability when implemented with families of children with developmental disabilities and problem behavior. Although quality of life is a key tenet of PBS, only a few studies of PBS with families have measured quality of life outcomes. The purpose of this study is to present family functioning results from the second half of a longitudinal study that investigated the consequential validity of an ecological approach to family centered PBS. The approach aimed to transform coercive into constructive family processes in family routines during a process of comprehensive assessment, multicomponent plan design and implementation support in collaboration with families. Ten families of children with developmental disabilities participated. Settings were 32 family routines, with two to four routines per family. Family functioning measures were family quality of life, parental stress, parental locus of control and social support. A repeated measures, quasi-experimental group design across mothers and fathers evaluated the statistical significance of changes in family functioning when comparing baseline to intervention and follow-up phases. Results evidenced significant improvements for mothers in family quality of life and parental stress during intervention and follow-up, and in parental locus of control during follow-up. Results evidenced significant improvements for fathers in parental stress during intervention and follow-up, but no significant improvements in family quality of life or parental locus of control. Results are discussed in terms of contributions to the literature, implications for practice, limitations, and future research.

How to mess with PISA: Learning from Japanese kokugo curriculum experts

ABSTRACTTo remove cultural bias is critical for the legitimacy of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as an internationally reliable academic assessment. Since its inception, PISA has made extensive effort to address this issue by putting in place a range of methodological and procedural measures to ensure its test fairness. This study attempts to disrupt the clean and reassuring accounts of PISA's technical solutions to cultural bias and exposes the irrationalities, tensions and messes that get muted in the rational and scientific discourse of test fairness. To this end, this article turns to Japanese kokugo (national language) curriculum experts as a source of critical insights. In particular, it looks at the way they responded to PISA's notion of reading literacy and then how those who were tasked to develop test items for reading literacy in PISA 2009 made sense of their item development experience. Their experience highlights the inherent cultural bias in the PISA's framework for reading literacy itself as well as the highly messy and coercive processes of PISA item development. In conclusion, I call for broadening the sources of critical insights beyond Anglo-American and select European countries to denaturalize the underpinning premises of PISA that remain unproblematized by Anglo-European critical education policy scholars.

Maltreatment and Affective and Behavioral Problems in Emerging Adults With and Without Oppositional Defiant Disorder Symptoms: Mediation by Parent–Child Relationship Quality

The current study examined the indirect effect of maternal and paternal emotional and physical maltreatment on affective and behavioral symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) through parent-child relationship quality; gender and overall ODD symptoms were examined as moderators. Participants included 2,362 emerging adults who completed questionnaires about parental emotional and physical maltreatment, parent-child relationship quality, and affective and behavioral ODD symptoms. These characteristics were compared across parent and child gender (i.e., maternal and paternal effects as well as male and female differences) as well as participants reporting high and low ODD symptoms. In the low ODD group, indirect effects of emotional maltreatment occurred in all parent-child dyads except the mother-son dyad, whereas in the high ODD group, indirect effects occurred only in the father-son dyad. Indirect effects of physical maltreatment occurred only in the father-son dyad in the low ODD group, and only in the mother-daughter dyad on behavioral ODD symptoms in the high ODD group. The results suggest that specific parent-child gender dyads respond differently, warranting further investigation of gender effects. Moreover, emerging adults in the low ODD symptoms group demonstrated a positive association between parental maltreatment and ODD symptoms and a negative association between parent-child relationship quality and ODD symptoms, whereas those high in the high ODD symptoms group did not demonstrate these associations. That is, emerging adults reporting high ODD symptoms demonstrated no relationship between their ODD symptoms and harsh parenting, suggesting an ineffective coercive process.

"Treat me with respect". A systematic review and thematic analysis of psychiatric patients' reported perceptions of the situations associated with the process of coercion.

Introduction There is a lack of research into psychiatric patients' perceptions of coercion that discriminates between different types of coercive measures, while also investigating patients' perceptions of undergoing coercion as a process. This knowledge is required to improve our understanding and provide a foundation for improving clinical practice. Aims To review existing research literature in order to investigate adult psychiatric patients' reported perceptions of situations before, during and after specific and defined types of coercive measures, and to investigate what patients perceive as moderating factors, in regard to the use of these coercive measures. Method A systematic review and thematic analysis of 26 peer-reviewed studies was undertaken. Results The analysis identified six themes and additional subthemes, where "interactions with professionals" and "communication" were predominant themes across the timeline of coercion. Altogether, themes were associated with either "positive or negative patient-perceived impact." Implications for practice Increased sensitivity to patients' views of the situation at each point in the process is desirable in order to respond to the patients' individual needs. Professionals also need to articulate concern and empathy towards the patient and to improve communication skills before, during and after a coercive incident. Use of de-escalation and noncoercive strategies is required. Relevance statement Coercion within psychiatric/mental health care remains controversial, and repeated international calls have recommended a reduction of their use. This review indicates that greater attention to how patients perceive the use of coercive measures (before, during, and after incidents) needs to be considered in order to improve the evidence-based and clinical practice.

The least worst option: user experiences of antipsychotic medication and lack of involvement in medication decisions in a UK community sample

Background: Treatment decision-making that fully involves service users is an aim across medicine, including mental health.Aim: To explore service users experiences of taking antipsychotic medication for psychotic disorders and their perceptions of decision-making about this.Method: Semi-structured interviews with 20 users of community mental health services, conducted by service user researchers and analysed using thematic analysis.Results: Antipsychotic medication was perceived to have beneficial effects on symptoms and relapse risk, but adverse effects were prominent, including a global state of lethargy and demotivation. Weighing these up, the majority viewed antipsychotics as the least worst option. Participants were split between positions of “willing acceptance”, “resigned acceptance” and “non-acceptance” of taking antipsychotics. Many felt their choices about medication were limited, due to the nature of their illness or pressure from other people. They commonly experienced their prescribing psychiatrist as not sufficiently acknowledging the negative impacts of medication on life quality and physical health concerns and described feeling powerless to influence decisions about their medication.Conclusion: The study highlights the complexity of agendas surrounding antipsychotic medication, including the pervasive influence of coercive processes and the challenges of implementing collaborative decision-making for people with serious mental health problems.

Switching of Coercivity Process in MnBi Alloys

MnBi-based alloys represent an interesting choice for developing rare earth-free permanent magnets due to the high magnetocrystalline anisotropy of their characteristic low-temperature intermetallic phase (LTIP) with hexagonal structure. In this work, we discuss the switching of coercivity mechanism in MnBi alloys by modulation of their phase distribution and microstructure. As-cast MnBi alloys obtained by suction-casting technique exhibited LTIP interspersed within Bi- and Mn-rich areas. A noticeable coercivity field of 282 kA/m was observed. The coercivity mechanism for this alloy was explained in terms of the nucleation of reverse domains after saturation, by means of the Kronmuller equation, which incorporates the detrimental effect of microstructure defects through fitting parameters associated to reduced intrinsic magnetic properties at grain size boundaries, interfaces, and local demagnetizing fields. Subsequent annealing at 583 K for 24 h produced a marked reduction of coercivity (down to 16 kA/m), reflecting a switching of coercivity process from nucleation to pinning of domain walls. The key microstructural feature determining this variation is the formation/suppression of Bi-rich areas, which promotes the nucleation and growth of the initial MnBi intermetallic phase.

Media Entrepreneurship Programs: Emerging Isomorphic Patterns

ABSTRACTThis study examines if the area of media entrepreneurship education has developed similarities as a way to build legitimacy. This study uses institutional isomorphism to examine the likelihood, and reasons, that similarities may be emerging from separate media entrepreneurship programs. This study conducts in-depth, open-ended telephone interviews with program heads of media entrepreneurship programs across the United States. Overall, the interviews indicated isomorphic practices are emerging from media entrepreneurship programs, with the programs displaying similar coercive, normative and mimetic processes in the attempt to legitimize the emerging area of media entrepreneurship. The findings indicate that isomorphism has emerged within media entrepreneurship programs, and that media entrepreneurship is becoming a legitimized “industry” within media management and economics and journalism fields.

Qualitative exploration of stakeholders’ perspectives of involuntary admission under the Mental Health Act 2001 in Ireland

There is international interest in, and continued concern about, the potential long-term impact of involuntary admission to psychiatric institutions, and the effect this coercive action has on a person's well-being and human rights. Involuntary detention in hospital remains a controversial process that involves stakeholders with competing concerns and who often describe negative experiences of the process, which can have long-lasting effects on the therapeutic relationship with service users. The aim of the present study was to explore the perspectives of key stakeholders involved in the involuntary admission and detention of people under the Mental Health Act 2001 in Ireland. Focus groups were used to collect data. Stakeholders interviewed were service users, relatives, general practitioners, psychiatrists, mental health nurses, solicitors, tribunal members, and police. Data were analysed using a general inductive approach. Three key categories emerged: (i) getting help; (ii) detention under the Act; and (iii) experiences of the tribunal process. This research highlights gaps in information and uncertainty about the involuntary admission process for stakeholders, but particularly for service users who are most affected by inadequate processes and supports. Mental health law has traditionally focussed on narrower areas of detention and treatment, but human rights law requires a greater refocussing on supporting service users to ensure a truly voluntary approach to care. The recent human rights treaty, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, is to guarantee a broad range of fundamental rights, such as liberty and integrity, which can be affected by coercive processes of involuntary admission and treatment.

Breaking Down the Coercive Cycle: How Parent and Child Risk Factors Influence Real-Time Variability in Parental Responses to Child Misbehavior

SYNOPSISObjective. Parent–child coercive cycles have been associated with both rigidity and inconsistency in parenting behavior. To explain these mixed findings, we examined real-time variability in maternal responses to children’s off-task behavior to determine whether this common trigger of the coercive cycle (responding to child misbehavior) is associated with rigidity or inconsistency in parenting. We also examined the effects of risk factors for coercion (maternal hostility, maternal depressive symptoms, child externalizing problems, and dyadic negativity) on patterns of parenting. Design. Mother–child dyads (N = 96; M child age = 41 months) completed a difficult puzzle task, and observations were coded continuously for parent (e.g., directive, teaching) and child behavior (e.g., on-task, off-task). Results. Multilevel continuous-time survival analyses revealed that parenting behavior is less variable when children are off-task. However, when risk factors are higher, a different profile emerges. Combined maternal and child risk is associated with markedly lower variability in parenting behavior overall (i.e., rigidity) paired with shifts toward higher variability specifically when children are off-task (i.e., inconsistency). Dyadic negativity (i.e., episodes when children are off-task and parents engage in negative behavior) are also associated with higher parenting variability. Conclusions. Risk factors confer rigidity in parenting overall, but in moments when higher-risk parents must respond to child misbehavior, their parenting becomes more variable, suggesting inconsistency and ineffectiveness. This context-dependent shift in parenting behavior may help explain prior mixed findings and offer new directions for family interventions designed to reduce coercive processes.

Perception of fear and coercive management of victims of intercity bus robberies

Drawing on interviews with drivers and passengers, this article discusses the perception of fear and management of victims of intercity bus robberies. It compares the victimization that takes place during bus robberies on highways and where buses are diverted off route. It addresses the relationship between perception of fear, the vehicle characteristics, multiplicity of victims, and duration of robbery. The article highlights important variations in the perception of violence according to the robbers’ victim management style as well as to the roles of and responses by drivers and passengers in the different phases of the coercive process. It concludes by arguing that it is urgent for the state to exercise its regulatory authority over these crimes and to guarantee security in bus transport.