Assault Investigations Research Articles

The Institutional Betrayal and Bureaucratic Violence of Higher Education

Teachers navigate funding cuts, political machination, sexual harassment and assault investigations, racism and White supremacy amid various locally constructed crises. Using bureaucratic violence and institutional betrayal – two interlinked, yet distinct, theoretical frameworks – in this brief commentary I propose that academic working conditions constrain pedagogical choice, with significant implications for teaching and learning.

Characteristics of Repeatedly Assaultive Psychiatric Inpatients

Investigations of assaults in psychiatric hospitals have found that a small proportion of inpatients are responsible for a large percentage of the violence that occurs. In a large state hospital patients who were repeatedly violent (recidivists) were compared with patients who were violent only once or twice (nonrecidivists), and the relationships between repeatedly violent behavior and gender, age, and diagnosis were examined. All reports of violent incidents over a six-month period for a population of 1,552 inpatients--a total of 497 incidents involving 313 patients--were reviewed. Seventy patients were involved in three or more incidents each and were responsible for 53 percent of all violence. Recidivist men inflicted serious injuries at a rate ten times higher than that for all the other violent patients. Recidivist women were significantly younger than nonrecidivist assaultive women and were about the same mean age as the assaultive men. Recidivist women were also more likely to have organic brain disorder or personality disorder.