Question Of Consent Research Articles

Who gets the money? A qualitative analysis of fintech lending and credit scoring through the adoption of AI and alternative data

Credit scoring plays an important role in determining the accessibility of credit in the financial sector. This in turn has a significant impact on how economic opportunities are distributed. Our study examines the use of AI and alternative data in fintech lending through the lens of Information Asymmetry Theory. By employing a qualitative research design using the Gioia method, we extract, analyze, and synthesize insights from a diverse group of 26 experts in fintech lending, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and academia. Our results reveal several important findings: the enhancement of predictive proficiency and risk management, the decrease in default rates, the extension of credit access by including previously ‘unbanked populations’, the introduction of real-time creditworthiness assessment and new business models for entrepreneurs, the enhancement of credit market efficiencies and positive effects on the stability of financial markets. In addition, our study highlights the necessity for rigorous and critical ethical considerations of important challenges such as the question of consent, algorithmic transparency, data quality, data misuse, representativeness, traceability, responsibility, bias and discrimination. The reasonable goal of a more fair, resilient, sustainable and accessible credit system will require a joint effort to balance leveraging technological innovations with respecting peoples' right to privacy.

Holding the harasser responsible: Implications of identifying sexual harassment that includes abuse of power and quid pro quo elements as sexual corruption

AbstractThis article argues that a perpetrator‐based definition of sexual harassment that highlights corrupt aspects of sexual harassment may contribute to a shift in focus from the experience of the harassed, to the actions of the harasser. This argument is based on an analysis of testimonies of sexual harassment from the #metoo call by the Swedish police in 2017, which reference abuse of power and quid pro quo elements. By introducing the recently developed analytical framework of ‘sexual corruption’, we show how a perpetrator‐based definition of sexual harassment may contribute to attributing responsibility to harassers. Identifying sexual harassment that includes the abuse of power and quid pro quo elements as corruption centers on the role of the abuse of power and, thus, the responsibility of the person abusing their position of power. Moreover, this shift bypasses discussions of whether or not the situation was experienced as ‘unwelcome’ by the harassed, the severity of the act, and questions of coercion and consent. Identifying instances of sexual harassment that include the abuse of power and quid pro quo elements as corruption also closes off attempts to portray it in terms of ‘jokes’ or banter, which is common in the police context. The article contributes with analytical tools that enable a shift from tracing the experience of the harassed to centering on the actions and responsibility of the harasser.

Domestic Violence, Sex, Strangulation and the ‘Blurry’ Question of Consent

A stand-alone strangulation offence was introduced in Queensland, Australia in 2016. One of the elements of the Queensland strangulation offence is that the victim did not consent to the strangulation. This paper reviews the harms and dangers associated with strangulation before overviewing the debates about the use of strangulation during sex. Drawing on focus group discussions conducted with domestic violence support workers and men's behaviour change workers, we discuss four overlapping themes identified in the discussions. These were perceptions that: strangulation during sex is normalised; consent is not informed; it happens in the context of coercive control; and the requirement of consent opens a loophole in the strangulation offence. Considering the issues raised, and the clear risks and harms, we suggest that consideration should be given to whether it is ever possible to consent to strangulation and we consider possible reforms such as following the two-tiered approaches to consent used in the England and Wales law and elsewhere in Australia. We also conclude that law reforms such as these are partial solutions and there is significant need for more community education about the risks and harms of strangulation.

Tools of imperialism or sources of international law? Treaties and diplomatic relations in early modern and colonial Southeast Asia

AbstractThe history of treaty‐making, diplomacy, and international law has traditionally been written from Eurocentric perspectives, but since the middle of the 20th century, Southeast Asia has attracted relatively much attention because of the region's importance for the 17th‐century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. More recently, however, the interest in Southeast Asia's role in the history of international law and diplomacy in the early modern period has become more oriented toward understanding the dynamics of international relations and cross‐cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia itself, rather than focusing on the region's role in European legal and intellectual history. The prolific treaty‐making and other diplomatic activities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the 17th and 18th centuries have been the object of several studies, highlighting how the company adopted Asian practices of statecraft and at times functioned as a traditional ruler, tributary or stranger‐king, rather than as an omnipotent colonial power. Moreover, several recent studies have expanded the study of diplomacy and treaty‐making in Southeast Asia to imperial powers other than the VOC and into the 19th century. With regard to the practice of treaty‐making during the colonial era, three main themes in the current state‐of‐the‐art are identified: 1) Southeast Asian and inter‐cultural perspectives on treaties and treaty‐making; 2) the question of mutual consent or coercion and violence in treaty‐making; and 3) discrepancies between Asian and European treaty texts and biases in printed and digitised compilations of treaties.

Consent in Modern Criminal Law

This article considers the law, of New Zealand and England and Wales, relating to determinations whether P consented in various kinds of interaction with D. (The interactions considered are between persons old enough to validly consent to the conduct at issue and who are capable of evaluating and reflecting upon the consequences of their actions.) In the context of sexual interactions, the law in both jurisdictions is in a process of fitful change—from a regime in which consent could be vitiated only by threatened or actual force, impersonation, or radical misunderstanding, towards a position where the question of consent is less categorical and at large. A contrast is drawn between sexual and other interactions, including offences against the person and, especially, commercial misconduct. In the former cases, the central concern is justice between the parties. By contrast, in delineating the boundaries of what amounts to lawful commerce, it is permissible to consider what a ruling about consent may entail for the commercial system as a whole: something that can lead to a very thin conception of what makes for valid consent. The most general lesson that goes with this argument is that consent in law is not a pre-legal phenomenon.

Elizabeth T. Hurren. Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research.

When we think of the relationship of the dead body to British medical research, we might imagine the work of the “resurrection men” who turned a profit by grave robbing and selling corpses to medical schools in the early nineteenth century, or perhaps the Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare, whose victims were bought and dissected by Robert Knox. Maybe we think of the numerous “unclaimed” poor, who died alone in hospitals, workhouses, and prisons, their bodies used by medical science following the 1832 Anatomy Act. But as Elizabeth T. Hurren, whose previous research has focused on death and dissection in nineteenth-century Britain, shows in Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research, the relationship between the world of medical and scientific research and the bodies of the dead remains both complex and contentious in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Hidden Histories of the Dead traces the contested relationship between the individual body and British Medical Research in postwar Britain, showing how the belief that the bodies of the dead were the property of medical science did not die with the creation of the National Health Service. Its scope is wide, encompassing issues of consent, organ donation, developments in medical technology, changing understandings of death, and the increased medicalization of death as the process of dying moved from the home to the hospital (or sometimes the hospice). The book examines medical ethics and their relationship to both scientific developments and social mores, considering issues such as the harvesting of human tissue and organs and questions of consent. At its heart, though, is the question of who “owns” the dead body. In a time of rapid medical developments, as we uncover the secrets of the genome with its ability to predict, and thus to prevent or control, a range of health conditions, and as transplant surgery becomes more reliable, the ethical questions around usage of the dead body become more important and more widely debated.

From slogans to frameworks: Embedded values or postdigital positionality?

This article explores ways in which higher education (HE) slogans, together with related frameworks and policies, increasingly invade the personal, cultural and positional values of individual staff and students. After a quick exploration of examples of embedded university values that are expected to be ‘lived’, the article outlines some epistemic implications in areas including epistemic positioning, epistemic injustice, epistemic space, data epistemologies, epistemic dominance and epistemic violence. Concluding that epistemologies are always lived, the article explores slogans at the intersections of biology, information and society using the case of excellence. Finally, the article briefly opens up the question of consent. Slogans, frameworks and policy texts exist as all other data assemblages that are subject to regulation. Should they also need to conform to such, or similar, regulations?

Klein, Ula Lukszo. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Klein, Ula Lukszo. <i>Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>

Trafficking, Rape, or Deceptive Sex? A Historical Examination of Procurement Offences in England

This article examines the origins of procurement offences and their historical development in England. Procurement offences were created in 1885 to tackle so-called white slavery, as trafficking in women was then sensationally called. Through an analysis of a series of lower-level and appeal cases heard between the years of 1885 and 1925 and their social context, this article dispels myths about procurement for prostitution as an international, organised crime, showing instead how it was localised and poverty driven. The article also shows how procurement transformed from a narrowly defined trafficking-related offence into a broadly applied sexual offence. It came to be used as a ‘catch-all’ sexual offence that had the potential to encompass various distinct offences, from trafficking, rape and child sex abuse to deceptive sex. The legal history of the procurement is of particular importance as deception and questions of conditional consent remain deeply contested in modern criminal law.

Will the European Health Data Space change data sharing rules?

Questions of consent and public interest research loom large.

The collapse of dialogue, consent, and the controversy over Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”

Abstract This paper provides a Bakhtinian reading of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” in order to register the status of dialogue pertaining to questions of sexual coercion and consent in the wake of the #metoo movement. I identify two prominent discourses in the short story: feminist critiques of domination (perspectives that account for structural imbalances that tend to put men in a hierarchy above women) and sex-positive feminism (a worldview that promotes female sexual agency). These two discourses, this paper argues, are relevant to understanding why a collapse of dialogue ensues in the narrative. I then use “Cat Person” to propose a way of contemplating the contemporary media landscape as a generator of failed dialogue.

‘Pay close attention to what my eyes are saying without having to spell it out’: Heterosexual relations and discourses of sexual communication in #MeToo commentaries

This paper explores how concepts of sexual communication and sex are discussed in #MeToo commentaries. Previous research has focused primarily on questions of consent, gendered power relations and sexual violence against women. Drawing from work that has called for more reflexive considerations of desire and pleasure in #MeToo, I undertake a critical feminist discourse analysis of over 163 traditional news, online magazine and social news articles commenting on #MeToo, sexual communication, dating and heterosexual relations between men and women. The findings of this analysis note discourses underpinning tensions between what constitutes ideal or appropriate forms of sexual communication, uncertainties as to what effectively makes sex ‘good’ or ‘bad’, moralisations regarding how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex are possible, and contradicting accounts of women’s capacity for sexual empowerment. Through highlighting the incongruities in expectations as to how individuals should proceed sexually and romantically in a #MeToo era, I conclude with a discussion on how we can think about such relations within a consideration of a ‘self-in-process’ and ‘subject-act-ivity’ framework.

Mass claims in international investment arbitration

Following the economic crisis in Argentina international investment tribunals faced a new challenge: mass claims characterized with multiple claimants bringing the significant amount of homogeneous investment protection claims against the host state. Neither the 1965 Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States, nor applicable bilateral investment treaties cover the tribunals’ power to resolve mass claims. They are silent on crucial questions of jurisdiction and consent and do not address important procedural issues either. In these circumstances arbitral tribunals face the inevitablegap-filling process, which boils down to the critically important question of legal nature of mass claims. If mass claims are nothing more than a mere variety of “ordinary” claims, than the issues of special or “secondary” consent are irrelevant, since the general consent for arbitration will suffice for the tribunal to find itself competent to resolve the dispute. By contrast, if mass claims are different in their legal nature from “ordinary” bi- or multiparty arbitration, they cannot “fit” into the scope of parties’ general consent. In controversial Abaclat decision the majority ruled that the questions of tribunal’s powers to decide on mass claim brought by Italian investors against Argentina pertain to the sphere of admissibility rather than jurisdiction. This analysis was not accepted by dissenting arbitrator G. Abi-Saab. Interestingly, other multi-party “Argentinian” awards followed the line of argument which significantly differed from both the majority opinion in Abaclat and G. Abi-Saab’s dissent. This only highlights the controversial nature of mass claims in international investment arbitration. This article is dedicated to analysis of jurisdictional issues raised in the course of “Argentinian” arbitrations. Since this analysis is strongly intertwined with two other systems of resolution of mass claims, namely American class arbitration and public international law mechanisms dealing with the compensations for states’ international wrongdoings, these two mechanisms are also explored to provide better context and understanding.

Incidental Jurisdiction in Investment Treaty Arbitration and the Question of Party Consent

Arbitral tribunals in investment treaty arbitration have not contributed much to the theoretical development of the concept of incidental jurisdiction, even though they have occasionally exercised it in practice. One possible explanation for their apparent reluctance to make explicit and greater use of the concept of incidental jurisdiction is the tendency to adopt a strict approach to jurisdiction governed by party consent. In this essay, I argue that incidental jurisdiction is not in tension with the consensual foundations of international jurisdiction when it is viewed as one inherent power of international courts and tribunals. Key to this argument is that incidental determinations are not binding, and therefore do not need to fall within party-defined jurisdictional limits.

Virgin Territories

AbstractIn this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (University of California, San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.

The ethical-legal requirements for adolescent self-consent to research in sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review.

Support for the enrolment of adolescents in research has been constrained by uncertainties in parental involvement, and the lack of clarity in the ethical and legal frameworks. We conducted a scoping review to examine articles that explored the opinion of scholars on the question of adolescent consent and conditions for parental waivers in research in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) tool, we searched electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASSE, EBSCOHOST) and also reviewed the references of articles identified for additional relevant literature. We included full text English articles focusing on adolescent consent and parental waivers in SSA that were published between 2004 and 2020. We excluded studies focusing on healthcare, theses, and reviews. We reviewed a total of 21 publications from South Africa (n=12), Kenya (n=4) and Botswana, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe (n=1 each). We identified four broad thematic issues: the current position regarding parental waivers and self-consent; parental involvement in the consent process; the role of community approval or consent when adolescent self-consent approaches were used; and complexities and ambiguities in legal requirements and ethical guidelines on adolescent consent. Our findings show inconsistencies and ambiguities in the existing legal and ethical frameworks within and across different countries, and underscore the need for consistent and clearer guidance on parental waivers and adolescent self-consent. Harmonization of the legal and ethical frameworks taking into account varying contexts is critically important to ensure research on adolescents in SSA meets adolescents' specific unmet needs.

Collective self-defence or regional enforcement action: the legality of a SADC intervention in Cabo Delgado and the question of Mozambican consent

ABSTRACT Since the emergence of an ISIS-linked armed group in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, questions of a regional military response by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have arisen. Although the organisation’s existing security framework is elaborate, it remains unclear as to whether any intervention in Mozambique may take place in the absence of its consent. Reliance on the SADC Mutual Defence Pact as a potential legal basis for a military response neglects to consider that collective self-defence can only be taken in response to an armed attack and at the request of the victim state. In the absence of either, a SADC intervention would likely resemble enforcement action and may instead be based on the SADC Protocol on Politics, Defence and Security Co-operation. In addition, for such enforcement action to be legal, it would require the authorisation of the United Nations Security Council.

Feminist In/Visibilities: Questions of Consent when Policing Domestic Violence with Photographic Evidence

US feminist grassroots organising of the 1960s positioned its critique of domestic violence within a social analysis of class, race, sexuality and gender. In subsequent decades, feminist organising largely shifted to service provision which brought collusion with state entities and police in the quest to criminalise domestic violence. Criminalisation introduced a demand for corroborative evidence including the use of photographs to ‘prove’ violence as enacted on victims’ bodies. Through a consideration of the history of domestic violence photography and ethnographic data gathered with women residing in a domestic violence shelter, I explore how domestic violence photographs can reinforce entrenched gendered and racialised inequities and engender new ones. In many states, evidence-based prosecution does not rely on victim testimony and can be used without the consent of the harmed person. Rather than simply a mechanism of state control, however, the meaning and utility of evidentiary photographs remain unstable. Ethnographic data suggest that photographs and videos of domestic violence reverberate within and beyond the logics of state violence. I argue that photographic consent emerges as a vector to consider alternatives to criminal prosecution via policing.

Ethical reflections on filming death in end-of-life documentaries

ABSTRACT The end-of-life documentaries that focus on natural death struggle with the question as to whether cinematic technology is able to express death as an event and whether it should even aspire to do so. In the process of filming dying people, questions of vulnerability, privacy, and empowerment become important, and each filmmaker makes ethical choices about how to approach the topic. By interviewing 14 documentary directors, using one audio commentary, and analysing 14 of their documentary films, I recognised two main approaches to filming death. Most documentaries exclude the moment of death, which becomes a private event outside the public eye. These films narrate the experiences of living people and use metaphorical means to communicate the moment of death. They respect the physical vulnerability of the dying people, and protect the viewer from potentially shocking images. Occasionally, some documentaries include deathbed scenes that confront physical aspects of dying. These films create an affective and embodied connection to death and dying in ways that invite the viewer to co-experience the process. In this article, I discuss the ethical approaches related to these two approaches through questions of consent, the films’ content, and viewer’s responsibility.

Zines beyond a means: crafting new research process - commentary to Valli

In this commentary I engage with Chiara Valli's creative zine-making in Bushwick, NYC. In keeping with the spirit of zines, this piece offers a series of (not always connected!) reactions, questions, feelings which address the key question raised by Chiara: how can research become more inclusive? Chiara provides a wonderful reflection in her commentary and I conclude by engaging on the questions of consent that she got me thinking about.