Criminal Child Research Articles

Medical evidence in child sexual assault cases

PurposePrevious studies suggest that the presence of medical evidence is rare in child sexual assault (CSA) cases, and if present at all, such evidence is unlikely to identify a specific assailant. This study aims to examine the role medical evidence plays in criminal cases of CSA. Specifically, the prevalence of medical evidence in CSA cases, its impact on decisions to prosecute CSA cases, as well as its effect on conviction rates are examined.Design/methodology/approachA systematic literature review was conducted on the impact of medical evidence in criminal child sexual abuse (CSA) cases.FindingsThe results of the review suggest medical evidence increases the likelihood of prosecution; however the impact of medical evidence on conviction rate is equivocal.Research limitations/implicationsThe implications of these findings for legal and psychological practice, government policy and future areas for academic research are discussed.Originality/valueTo the authors' knowledge, no other review has systematically examined the role of medical evidence on the prosecution and conviction of CSA cases.

Targeting, labelling and stigma: challenging the criminalisation of children and young people

By creating ‘outsiders’ … labelling invariably gives rise to repeat interventions of increasing intensity that … ultimately establish, consolidate, and/or confirm offender ‘identities’. Such ‘identities’ attract further intervention and/or negative reaction and so the process continues. (Goldson, 2010) As the above quote attests, labelling theorists recognise the harmful impact of formal system contact on the individual and contend that problems occur when members of society become intolerant towards the individual's offending, forming a ‘negative social reaction’, invoking damaging consequences for the ‘offender’ (ibid).

Assessing children's competency to take the oath in court: The influence of question type on children's accuracy.

This study examined children's accuracy in response to truth-lie competency questions asked in court. The participants included 164 child witnesses in criminal child sexual abuse cases tried in Los Angeles County over a 5-year period (1997-2001) and 154 child witnesses quoted in the U.S. state and federal appellate cases over a 35-year period (1974-2008). The results revealed that judges virtually never found children incompetent to testify, but children exhibited substantial variability in their performance based on question-type. Definition questions, about the meaning of the truth and lies, were the most difficult largely due to errors in response to "Do you know" questions. Questions about the consequences of lying were more difficult than questions evaluating the morality of lying. Children exhibited high rates of error in response to questions about whether they had ever told a lie. Attorneys rarely asked children hypothetical questions in a form that has been found to facilitate performance. Defense attorneys asked a higher proportion of the more difficult question types than prosecutors. The findings suggest that children's truth-lie competency is underestimated by courtroom questioning and support growing doubts about the utility of the competency requirements.

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MIGRANT CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN CANADA

<p>As borders become increasingly porous to the flow of global capital, human beings entering countries like Canada are routinely criminalized. On August 13, 2010, the Canadian Navy escorted the MV Sun Sea, a ship carrying 492 men, women, and children from Sri Lanka, to a Canadian Forces Base on Vancouver Island. Many months later, people remained imprisoned. The racialization, criminalization, and detention of migrant children and families in Canada poses a direct challenge to the notion of Canadian multiculturalism, as well as purported commitments to the rights of children. This paper seeks to critically engage with dominant narratives surrounding the arrival and treatment of the 492 men, women, and children aboard the MV Sun Sea in order to unmask and explore the multitude of discourses required to normalize the criminalization of people’s bodies.</p>

Does Subsequent Criminal Justice Involvement Predict Foster Care and Termination of Parental Rights for Children Born to Incarcerated Women?

This longitudinal study of 83 incarcerated women, who gave birth during incarceration and retained their parental rights through brief sentences, examines the intersection between subsequent criminal justice involvement postrelease and child welfare outcomes. Ten years of multiple state-level administrative data sets are used to determine if arrest or conviction predict foster care and/or termination of parental rights. Findings indicate that only felony arrest is a significant predictor of foster care involvement. Additionally, 69% of mothers retained legal custody, despite subsequent criminal involvement for many, suggesting supportive parenting programs and resources need to be available to these women throughout and after incarceration.

CRIMINAL CHILD NEGLECT AND THE "FREE RANGE KID": IS OVERPROTECTIVE PARENTING THE NEW STANDARD OF CARE?

In the last generation, American parenting norms have shifted strongly in favor of Intensive Parenting, placing particular emphasis on protecting children from risks of harm. Recently, a backlash to this trend has emerged. “Free Range” parenting is based on the concern that coddling children through overprotection inhibits the development of their independence and responsibility. Indeed, a growing body of literature suggests that parental overreaction to remote and even illusory risks of physical harm is exposing children to far more serious risks to their well-being and development. But the powerful influence of media has sensationalized the risks to children, skewing popular perceptions of the genuine risks children face and of what constitutes a reasonable or appropriate response to such risks. Consequently, individuals who do not buy into Intensive Parenting norms, including those from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, may be subjecting themselves to criminal prosecution for child neglect and endangerment. The criminal statutes are, for the most part, very vague, leaving these prosecutions—which amount to little more than one person’s second-guessing the parenting choices of another—in the discretion of prosecutors, who bring the charges, and of juries, who render verdicts. If prosecutors and jurors share the media-fed misperceptions of risk, overprotective parenting becomes the de facto legal standard of care. To counter this possibility, it is necessary to define criminal child neglect with far greater specificity and to allow defendants to introduce expert testimony to put the actual risks to children, as well as the downside risk of the precautions themselves, in perspective. Absent such changes, fear of prosecution may effectively force parents to conform to the overprotective parenting norm, to the detriment of society, families, and the children themselves.

Assessing the Influence of Familial Paternalism on Child Neglect Sentencing Decisions

Familial responsibilities have been found to significantly reduce the severity of sentencing outcomes of defendants in the criminal court. Additional research also has suggested that this leniency might be contingent on the type of offense, with defendants who commit crimes which imply that they are unfit parents (e.g., drug offenses) not receiving a significant reduction in their likelihood of incarceration. Utilizing familial paternalism as the theoretical basis, the current study examines whether having children influences the sentences of defendants charged with forms of criminal child neglect. The findings indicate that having children does result in significantly reduced odds of incarceration for defendants charged with child neglect. These findings support the arguments set forth by familial paternalism. However, they do not support the inference that defendants convicted of child neglect are presumed to be unfit parents. Implication of these results and directions for future research are discussed.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Examination of the personalities and anxiety levels of children in prison: a sample of crime in Muğla, Turkey

Child crime and their feelings of guilt have special importance because of their impact on children's development and future life. In the last few years, the number of young and child criminals has increased in Turkey. The sample for this study is from Düğerek prison in Muğla, one of the cities of the Aegean region of Turkey, from 18 February 2007 to 22 February 2007. The sampling group was randomly chosen and consisted of 41 boys aged 15-18 from the child section of the prison. There were no girls in that section. After a one-to-one oral interview with the children, a questionnaire containing the Cornell Index, Inertial Anxiety Inventory and demographic questions was administered. There was a highly positive, meaningful relationship (r: 0.771, P < 0.05) between state anxiety and trait anxiety levels. Our recommendation is that juvenile delinquents need more psychological support than their peers with normal lives, so in order to rehabilitate them, the number of the psychologists should be increased in this prison.

Characteristics of the Internet for criminal child sexual abuse by online groomers

This paper presents a number of characteristics of the Internet that makes it attractive to online groomers. Relevant Internet characteristics include disconnected personal communication, mediating technology, universality, network externalities, distribution channel, time moderator, low‐cost standard, electronic double, electronic double manipulation, information asymmetry, infinite virtual capacity, independence in time and space, cyberspace, and dynamic social network. Potential sex offenders join virtual communities, where they meet other persons who have the same interest. A virtual community provides an online meeting place where people with similar interests can communicate and find useful information. Communication between members may be via email, bulletin boards, online chat, web‐based conferencing or other computer‐based media.

Explaining Youth Custody in Scotland: The New Crisis of Containment and Convergence

Abstract: Custody in its broadest sense means safe-keeping, guarding and containment, the inference being that the individual offender is to be protected. However, in the UK, as elsewhere, custody now has wider political and public protection connotations. In England and Wales, the focus of youth custody is on public protection through punishment and offender management. In Scotland, the focus has traditionally been on offender protection, through addressing the young person's broader welfare needs, but recent trends and drivers in youth custody rates in Scotland now paint a different picture (Barry forthcoming; McAra and McVie 2010). This article describes the different approach taken in Scotland compared with England and Wales, at least up until recently, regarding the custody and care of children and young people who offend. The article identifies four key drivers to expanding youth custody rates in Scotland: (i) the earlier criminalisation of children and young people; (ii) increasingly stringent requirements imposed on children and young people who offend; (iii) the increased use of remand; and (iv) the use of shorter prison sentences with little scope for rehabilitation. The article concludes that these drivers are themselves driven by the politicisation of youth crime in Scotland and the abandonment of traditional Scottish values of minimal intervention and the paramountcy of the child's best interests.

From Rapists to Superpredators: what the practice of capital punishment says about race, rights and the American child

AbstractAt the turn of the 20th century, the United States was widely considered to be a world leader in matters of child protection and welfare, a reputation lost by the century's end. This paper suggests that the United States' loss of international esteem concerning child welfare was directly related to its practice of executing juvenile off enders. The paper analyzes why the United States continued to carry out the juvenile death penalty after the establishment of juvenile courts and other protections for child criminals. Two factors allowed the United States to continue the juvenile death penalty after most states in the international system had ended the practice: the politics of American federalism and a system of racial subordination that excluded some juvenile off enders from the umbrella of child protection measures, a conclusion suggesting that racial prejudice has interfered with U.S. compliance with international norms of child welfare and juvenile justice.

The contradictions of juvenile crime &amp; punishment

This essay explores the contradictions and puzzles of modern juvenile justice, and illustrates the enduring power of the child-saving philosophy of the juvenile court in an era of punitiveness toward offenders both young and old. The exponential growth in incarceration in the U.S. since the 1970s has been more restrained for juveniles than adults, even in the face of a youth violence epidemic that lasted for nearly a decade. Rhetoric has grown harsher in the wake of moral panics about youth crime, juvenile codes now express the language of retribution and incapacitation, yet the growth in incarceration of juveniles was attenuated and declined more responsively to declining crime rates. Almost no states have lowered the age of majority, even in the face of wholesale removal of juveniles to the criminal court. States have embraced the ideals and practice of small institutions, yet conditions in juvenile corrections often remain harsh and are common targets of litigation. Racial disparity still pervades juvenile incarceration, despite Congressional support of a collaborative project to reduce racial inequalities in juvenile detention and corrections. These conflicting trends portray an institutional and normative landscape that at once fears child criminals and seeks to punish them harshly, but at the same time pulls its punches as it adheres to the transcendent and enduring philosophy of child-saving.

When the Cold Wind Blows: Legal Strategies against Ghettoization in Denmark

The paper will present and analyze the Danish government’s strategy against “ghettoization.” This strategy includes a wide range of legal initiatives aiming to prevent certain social housing estates from developing into what the government defined as “ghettos.” The government’s strategy mainly promotes initiatives to control the access to socially exposed neighborhoods. The issue of controlling who should be removed from the neighborhoods is left to the discretion of the social housing organizations. These organizations have started a practice that involves evicting families with criminal children living at home. The right to housing is accordingly challenged within different frameworks. The right to access to housing is challenged in the light of government regulation which prohibits people on social welfare to move into the areas. The right to stay in housing is challenged in the light of social housing organizations initiating court procedures to evict unwanted tenants. Taking a rights-based approach t...

‘The More Things Change …’: Bail and the Incarceration of Homeless Young People

Homeless young people are being held in remand despite being granted bail because the Department of Community Services cannot or will not find the young person accommodation, and there is no legally enforceable obligation on the Department to so. This practice is not new. Two rounds of amendments to the Bail Act 1978 (NSW) sought to steer young homeless people away from remand yet they have failed to have their intended effect. By failing to provide young homeless people with an alternative to detention the NSW Government is in breach of a number of fundamental principles of the criminal law, juvenile justice and child protection, as recognised in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and other international human rights instruments. In its much anticipated report, the Special Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection Services in NSW recommends the establishment of bail support schemes similar to those in Victoria and Queensland, but misses the opportunity to recommend law reform which would squarely place the obligation on the state to provide accommodation for these young people.

Family Dissolution and Children's Criminal Careers

This study examines the relationship between family dissolution and children's crimes. The study uses a total population sample of a Norwegian birth cohort born in 1982 ( N = 49,975) and follows them through the crime statistics from ages 10 to 22 years, applying growth curve modelling. Both married and cohabiting parents are considered. There is a large and significant effect from family dissolution that persists after controlling for important economic confounders, even though these also show a high and significant effect. This suggests that, although some of the effect of parental break-up is explained by socioeconomic conditions, there also seems to be an independent and strong effect of family dissolution.

Facial and Prosodic Affect Recognition Among Pedophilic and Nonpedophilic Criminal Child Molesters

The present study compared facial and prosodic affect recognition abilities among pedophilic and nonpedophilic child molesters and community-dwelling controls. Pedophilic child molesters are characterized by primary sexual interest in prepubescent children, whereas nonpedophilic child molesters are characterized by offending against children despite being primarily sexually attracted to adults. The results showed that nonpedophilic child molesters made more errors in recognizing both facial and prosodic affect, performing more poorly than both controls and pedophilic child molesters. These findings are consistent with greater psychopathic tendencies among nonpedophilic molesters as well as with prior findings of smaller amygdala volume among child molesters.

‘Target practice’: sanction detection and the criminalisation of children

Abstract In the tick-box culture that has come to dominate the criminal justice world, some performance measures appear to have more influence on outcomes than others. The Youth Justice Board's (YJB's) target to effect a 10% reduction in the number of children in custody, in the three years from April 2005, remains unmet. At the end of March 2008, the juvenile secure population had risen by 10% over the relevant period, and – at 2,942 – stood at 22% above the figure of 2,408 required by the measure. By contrast, the Government's target to increase the number of ‘offences brought to justice’ (OBTJ), from 1.025m in 2002 to 1.25m in 2007/08, has proved rather easier to meet. In the year ending June 2007, 1.434m offences were dealt with by way of a recognised ‘sanction detection’ (reprimand, warning, caution, cannabis warning, penalty notice for disorder, charge or summons), a rise of 43% over the 2002 baseline (Home Office, 2007).

Stalinismus in der ländlichen Provinz. Das Gebiet Voronež 1934-1941 by Youngok Kang-Bohr (review)

REVIEWS 567 make peace with the post-Ottoman leadership as quickly as possible, not least in order to setde outstanding territorial issues in the south Caucasus. The goal of spreading the Communist revolution and undermining nationalists thus took second place to the need to protect Soviet foreign policy interests. On the other hand, from itsearliest days, republican Turkey had a sizeable number of vocal leftistactivists. The Communist Party ofTurkey was found ed in 1920, and its leaders often looked loyally to the Soviet Union for support. Balancing relations between theTurkish state and theTurkish Communists proved to be one of the thorniest challenges for Moscow's 'eastern' ? or 'southern' ? policy for most of the Soviet Union's existence. Gokay clearly illustrates the vicissitudes of relations between Moscow and theTurkish left. There is insufficientspace in a volume of under 200 pages to go into great detail, but any one of the various scenes the author paints might well become the subject of a volume in itsown right ? especially given access to new archival documents, which he uses to good effect. British and Soviet intelligence agents vie for influence in the southCaucasus and across Anatolia. Turkish Communists are assassinated on the Black Sea. Nazim Hikmet, Turkey's unofficial national poet, struggles to place his own patriotism within an internationalist frame. Soviet and American broadcasters seek to woo audiences inTurkey with propaganda programmes launched fromEurope. Gokay describes what was in fact a foreign policy sideshow for most parties concerned. Once the Soviets had effectively made peace with thenew Turkish state ? a state that would also become a NATO ally ? efforts to undermine the Ankara government from within were never pursued in a serious way. Still, there isno more thorough analysis of theways inwhich the liberationist rhetoric of Bolshevism in the 1920s became transformed into the more sober geopolitical calculus of Soviet foreign policy makers later in the century. Despite a few annoying textual mistakes and some unclear choices on usage (why the hypercorrect 'Komintern' rather than the standard Comintern?), this volume provides a useful narrative of one of the lost causes of Soviet foreign policy: the effort to support pro-Soviet leftistsinside the territoryof a solidly Western ally. School ofForeign Service Charles King Georgetown University Kang-Bohr, Youngok. Stalinismus in der landlichen Provinz. Das Gebiet Voronez I934~I94I- Klartext, Essen, 2006. 301 pp. Notes. Tables. Appendices. Bibliography. Glossary. 34.00 (paperback). This book examines two of the darkest facets of Stalinism, the party purges in the terrorof the 1930s and the poor situation, criminalization and repression of homeless children during thisperiod. Based almost exclusively on materi als from the local archives ofVoronezh oblast' (Obkom, NKVD and KPK records, official correspondence of party organs as well as popular appeals and petitions), the book is a regional study on one of the traditionally and, in the 1930s, still largely agricultural areas that had suffered severely from famine, de-kulakization and collectivization. This regional focus is the book's great 568 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 merit. Not only does it call attention to the fact that Soviet territory was vast and Soviet society diverse; Kang-Bohr holds as her main argument through out her book that decision-making and crucial turns in the policies of the centre cannot be explained adequately without a close look at the periphery. If the aim is to grasp the dynamics that led to terror, that forced it in 1937-38 and eventually relieved it,one has to study the interaction of central and lo cal party organs on all levels and in particular that of central and local elites with the party rank-and-file and the local population in general. If one wants to explain what ledMoscow to its excessive liquidation policies, one has to get an idea of how effectiveparty control might have been in the periphery and how reliably provincial society functioned in the eyes of the Soviet lead ers. How popular was the Soviet regime in the countryside? Was the local nomenklatura simply the agent that carried out the centre's plans, or did they defend any interestsof the people? What were themechanisms of repression and the content of accusations? And what about the prosecuted? Who...

Coercive Normalization and Family Policing: The Limits of the ‘Psy-Complex’ in Australian Penal Systems

Much contemporary social and historical research on problem children and families focuses on the different kinds of power deployed in a complex of legal and non-legal settings. This article reviews socio-legal studies in Europe, Australia and the UK, and additional archival evidence in Victoria, Australia, in relation to a shift towards positivist and ‘welfarist’ approaches to the problem of child criminality and family regulation from the turn of the 20th century. The aim is to assess the applicability for Australia of trends in European social theory that emphasize non-coercive, non-legal correction of families, a productive rather than repressive form of power which incites families to seek to align their conduct to social norms. The article argues that ‘coercive normalization’ - systems of knowing and acting upon children and families arising from the penal system and images of threat - is a significant presence in the complex of power relations that make up a genealogy of family and child regulation in Australia.