Victim's Decision Research Articles

Self-Disclosure in Interpersonal Communication on Victims of the Domestic Violence (KDRT) in Medan

This study aims to analyze self-disclosure in interpersonal communication and the causes of the victim's decision to self-disclose, so that the victim filed a complaint against the violence she experienced to the KOMNAS Perempuan Partner Service Institute. The research method used descriptive analysis with a qualitative approach. Data were collected through interviews with eight main informants and six triangulation informants. The results showed that self-disclosure in interpersonal communication was carried out to the people closest to the victim, namely friends, biological mothers, adoptive mothers, nephews, and lawyers who handled the case, by conveying messages in the form of domestic events aimed at getting a way out of solving the problem, through direct and indirect communication channels (WhatsApp), causing effects, namely awareness of the right to protection from the state, the courage to sue and report the perpetrator, get help with case fees, the willingness of the communicant to become a trial witness, and the acceptance of the victim to return to live with the communicant. Two informants were in the open window because they realized the violence they experienced and intended to disclose it, two informants were in the blind window because they did not realize the violence they experienced, and four informants were in the hidden window because they realized the violence they experienced but had hidden it. Self-disclosure was done by four informants openly and four informants covertly

Animal abuse in the context of adult intimate partner violence: A systematic review

This systematic review focused on animal cruelty in abusive adult intimate partner relationships with a specific focus on the prevalence, motivations, and impact of animal abuse on victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and the pets involved. Peer-reviewed research articles were sourced from online databases PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus and PsycInfo in July 2020. Overall, 427 records were retrieved, of which 35 articles from 30 studies were included in this review. Relevant data were extracted, with results presented as a narrative summary. The findings showed that the prevalence of animal abuse is high in households with intimate partner violence (range: 21%–89%) and there is a significant relationship between intimate partner violence and animal abuse. Both are often perpetrated concurrently, with animal abuse used as a mechanism to control the partner and facilitate intimate partner violence. Animal abuse affected a victim's decision to leave the abusive relationship and seek support and had an ongoing psychological impact on both animal and human victims. The findings have practical implications for organizations, professionals and researchers working in the field of intimate partner violence and animal abuse.

Who Are You to Me? Relational Distance to Victims and Perpetrators Affects Advising to Report Rape.

The victim's decision to report a crime is generally dependent on the advice received from a confidant. The effects of a confidant's relationship to victims and perpetrators on the advice given to report rape were investigated. Indian participants (N = 418) read one of the seven scenarios of acquaintance rape as a confidant; the scenarios depicted different relationships between the victim and perpetrator (family vs. friend vs. stranger). Confidants closer to victims were more likely to advise reporting, whereas confidants closer to the perpetrator were less likely to advise reporting. Rape myth acceptance and victim blaming negatively predicted reporting to agencies.

Resilient Dynamic Channel Access via Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning

As the applications of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in wireless communications grow, sensitivity of DRL based wireless communication strategies against adversarial attacks has started to draw increasing attention. In order to address such sensitivity and alleviate the resulting security concerns, we in this paper consider a victim user that performs DRL-based dynamic channel access, and an attacker that executes DRLbased jamming attacks to disrupt the victim. Hence, both the victim and attacker are DRL agents and can interact with each other, retrain their models, and adapt to opponents' policies. In this setting, we initially develop an adversarial jamming attack policy that aims at minimizing the accuracy of victim's decision making on dynamic channel access. Subsequently, we devise defense strategies against such an attacker, and propose three defense strategies, namely diversified defense with proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control, diversified defense with an imitation attacker, and defense via orthogonal policies. We design these strategies to maximize the attacked victim's accuracy and evaluate their performances.

Lies, Harm, And Practical Interests

This paper outlines an account of the ethics of lying, which accommodates two main ideas about lying. The first of these, Anti‐Deceptionalism, is the view that lying does not necessarily involve intentions to deceive. The second, Anti‐Absolutism, is the view that lying is not always morally wrong. It is argued that lying is not wrong in itself, but rather the wrong in lying is explained by different factors in different cases. In some cases such factors may include deceptive intentions on the part of the liar. In other cases, where such intentions are not found, the wrong in lying may be explained by other factors. Moreover, it is argued that the interaction between considerations against lying and considerations against telling the truth are sensitive to the practical interests of those lied to. When the topic of the lie in question matters little to the victim's rational decision making, the threshold for when considerations against telling the truth can outweigh considerations against lying are lowered. This account is seen to explain why lying to avoid little harm is sometimes permissible, and sometimes not.

Reporting Crimes to the Police Depends on Relationship Networks: Effects of Ties Among Victims, Advisors, and Offenders.

A victim's decision to report a crime to the police is typically made after talking with someone else, usually a friend or relative, but sometimes a stranger. The advice this person gives depends primarily on the seriousness of the crime, and to some extent on the gender and age of the victim. The present research, which used experimental vignettes, examined the role of social networks in reporting: How do the relationships among a victim, the advisor, and the offender affect the advice to report or not to report a violent or nonviolent crime? Results from Study 1 indicated that relationships matter: Crimes are least likely to be reported if the offender is part of the same triad as the victim and the advisor, and crimes are most likely to be reported if the victim, the advisor, and the offender are all strangers. Study 1 also found that males are more likely to protect friends who are offenders (by advising against reporting), while females are more likely to protect friends who are victims (by advising them to report). Study 2 found that the effect of these relationships on reporting is conditioned by the nature of the organization to which the offender belongs, such that males are particularly likely to protect their friends in athletic organizations and fraternities when accused of minor property crimes. Both studies found that gender differences in the advice to report are moderated by characteristics of the crime and triad structure.

Analyzing the Impact of Coercion on Domestic Violence Victims: How Much is Too Much

This article critiques the methods used by judges and prosecutors to determine if a victim of domestic violence is being coerced by her batterer. It argues that, while the intention of domestic violence and civil protection order statutes is to promote and restore victim autonomy, freedom, and choice, the presumption that a victim's decision not to cooperate with prosecutors or to vacate a protection order is involuntary and coerced may produce the opposite effect. In fact, courts' attempts to analyze the impact of coercion on victim decision-making may deny victims the same fundamental rights that domestic violence laws are intended to restore.The article begins by acknowledging that an analysis of the role of coercion is essential to any effective response to domestic violence. However, it argues that such an analysis must go beyond the assumption that if a victim is uncooperative in her batterer's prosecution or seeks to vacate a protection order, the only reason for her actions is that her batterer has coerced her. Such an analysis presumes she has no other reason to do so. Coercion occurs along a continuum, and the experience of coercion is subjective. Not all pressure experienced by victims should be viewed as coercion for legal purposes. It is only when that pressure is additional, unfair, or improper that judges should balance it against a victim's right to make her own choices. This balancing can only be done on a case-by-case basis, as no two victims are alike and what may be coercive in one situation may not be in another. While legal standards used to measure coercion must take into account objective components of coercion, they must specifically value the victim's subjective experience.The article argues that victims choose their actions for a variety of reasons aside from coercion, many of which never come to light in the courtroom. Victims' decisions are influenced by external sources including the state, child protective services, concerns about qualifying for welfare, immigration issues, and pressure from landlords, employers, friends and family, and more. Pressure from these sources is also a factor in victims' decision-making. Her decision to vacate the protection order may well be a result of one (or several) of these factors rather than, or in addition to, being the result of coercion by the batterer. The article highlights the fact that current judicial guidelines advise judges to consider whether a woman was coerced before deciding whether to grant a victim's request to vacate a protection order. However, this guideline lacks a definition of coercion and leaves judges with only two options - to decide her choice is coerced, or that it is voluntary - failing to account for the continuum in between. The article concludes that victims' decisions, even when they appear to comply with batterers' demands, are not necessarily involuntary. The conceptualization of coercion must be narrowed, providing victims with more freedom to choose what they believe is best for them, and allowing victims' decisions to be invalidated by the court only when absolutely necessary. Failure to do so may replicate within the justice system itself the power dynamics of victims' abusive relationships, ignore victims' voices and deny victim autonomy.

The stalking victim's decision to contact the police: A test of Gottfredson and Gottfredson's theory of criminal justice decision making

There is a significant body of research exploring the reporting behaviors of crime victims. Much of this literature has focused on specific types of victimization (e.g., sexual assault) and the correlates of victim reporting. Recently, the crimes of stalking and cyberstalking have received empirical attention; however, few studies have examined the reporting behaviors of victims of these crimes. Using the theoretical framework proposed by Gottfredson and Gottfredson (1988), the current study explored how offense seriousness, the victim-offender relationship, and the prior record of the offender influenced a victim's decision to contact the police. Data were drawn from the 2006 stalking supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which examined stalking in the United States. Results offered support to Gottfredson and Gottfredson (1988) and highlighted the significance of understanding the reporting behaviors for this sample of crime victims. Differences in reporting for victims of stalking and cyberstalking were also examined.

Reporting to the Police as a Response to Intimate Partner Violence

Research on police involvement in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) focuses mainly on best intervention strategies and often neglects the key prerequisite of any intervention: the victim's decision to contact the police. This article concentrates on the circumstances that make IPV incidents more likely to be reported to the police, and it also analyses the reasons for victims' not reporting and for their distrust of the police. It makes use of data from the Czech part of the International Violence Against Women Survey, which allows us to analyse the reporting behaviour of 709 female victims of IPV. The reporting rate among them is very low - only 8%. Logistic regression mod- els of reporting confi rmed the high relevance of the features of the particular incident and revealed also several factors related to the history of violence in the relationship; on the other hand, the victim's resources were found to have no infl uence. Distrust of the police proved to be an important factor for not reporting to the police (29% of women), and further analysis of this factor suggested the possible occurrence of learned helplessness syndrome among some victims. An additional substantial outcome of this study is its highlight- ing of the importance of different forms of psychological abuse (threats vs. control) which have diverse effects on victims' reporting behaviour.

The Victim's Decision to Report Offences to the Police in France: Stating Losses or Expressing Attitudes

Drawing upon several sets of victimisation surveys in France, this article examines for the first time for this country the variables associated with victims' reporting behaviour on the one hand, with their decision to file a formal complaint on the other. The seriousness of the effects of the offence — material or physical — is a determining variable which largely confirms previous internationally established knowledge. However, the specific contribution of this study is to highlight the role, a minority role to be sure but one that is clearly distinguishable, of certain attitudes such as punitiveness (among those who file formal complaints) and scepticism with regard to public institutions (among non reporting victims). In this sense, the study of reporting also informs us about the more or less confident relationship between the population and the institutions that bear the responsibility for its security. In order to consider these types of results it is necessary for surveys to include not only questions about the factual elements of victimisation but also to delve into the respondents' opinions, so as to allow the piecing together of attitudes and types of social representation.

Court Congestion and the Decision to Litigate or Settle

This paper analyses the problem of court congestion. We focus on how individual's decision whether to commit an illegal act and victim's decision whether to bring a suit are influenced by the presence of court congestion. We show that the standard results of the perception models may be totally reverse in presence of congestion.

Existe explicação econômica para o sub-registro de crimes contra a propriedade?

O intuito deste estudo foi buscar evidências que permitissem responder a seguinte questão: é possível uma explicação econômica para o sub-registro de crimes contra a propriedade? Especificamente, examinou-se a influência dos fatores socioeconômicos, demográficos e de segurança pública sobre o sub-registro de roubos em quatro capitais brasileiras. Para isso modelou-se, empiricamente, o processo de decisão de uma vítima de crime em registrá-lo ou não às autoridades competentes, fundamentando-se na hipótese da racionalidade econômica da vítima. Utilizando microdados na estimativa de um modelo probit, foram encontradas evidências que sustentam a hipótese de que as vítimas de crimes agem racionalmente, avaliando os custos e benefícios esperados de registrá-lo ou não às autoridades. Observou-se que algumas características pessoais das vítimas, os prejuízos, a eficiência da justiça e o medo de represália são fatores que afetam o resultado da decisão.

The Reporting and Underreporting of Rape

A rape victim possesses a scarce resource: information about the crime. Thus, a victim's decision to report the crime to police, to allocate that resource, becomes an economic choice. A victim cannot receive social support or legal justice without revealing such information, but doing so creates real costs—social recrimination and lost privacy—with no guarantee of offender apprehension. This article explores the economics of the reporting and chronic nonreporting of rape in the context of this information‐allocation problem. The empirical analysis addresses the extent to which social‐support availability and evidentiary factors influence the reporting decision. Dichotomous and multinomial logit results, obtained using National Crime Survey data on a sample of rape victims, reveal how various demographic and crime‐specific factors explain the decision to report and the selection of specific reasons for not reporting. Some of these factors reflect circumstances addressable as matters of procedure or policy.

USE AND NONUSE OF VICTIM SERVICES PROGRAMS: IMPLICATIONS FROM A STATEWIDE SURVEY OF CRIME VICTIMS*

Research Summary: We explored the reasons for use and/or nonuse of victim services programs through a statewide survey of crime victims who did not use services, and a survey of clients of such programs in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The survey instrument included questions about victim characteristics, the crime event, whether victims used services, victims’ use of other social services, and individual coping mechanisms. Only type of crime and age were significant predictors of use of victim services programs, with older victims of violent crimes more likely to report using services than younger victims of nonviolent crimes. Policy Implications: Our findings mirror other studies that indicate very little usage of services by crime victims. Those who did not use services reported getting assistance from friends or family members, not being told about services, or not thinking it was worth the trouble to seek out such services. Also, victims demonstrated very little knowledge about the types of services provided by victim services programs. We conclude that a victim's decision not to seek assistance could be akin to the reason why so many crime victims never report their experience to the police in the first place. To increase the use of services by crime victims, a greater emphasis will need to be placed on educating the public about such services, adequately staffing programs with better trained individuals who can meet the needs of crime victims, and broadening the types of services provided to crime victims.

Comment on Bachman (1993)

Bachman (1993) concluded that the prior relationship between the rapist and the victim does not affect the victim's decision to report the crime to the police. The present commentary argues that, for both conceptual and statistical reasons, this conclusion is too strong, although it may simply be premature. Conceptually, the victim-offender relationship is important because it helps both the victim and others define whether or not an action is rape and whether or not reporting the crime to the police would be worthwhile. Statistically, in light of prior findings, Bachman could justifiably have used a one-tailed test of significance. In any case, her results are not significantly different from those of a comparable prior study, which found that the victim-offender relationship was important. Furthermore, Bachman's argument of changing societal standards over time calls for a time-series analysis of victim survey data. A table of reporting percentages for victims of stranger and nonstranger rapists over the past 19 years indicates an increase in reporting of nonstranger rapes over time, although over the entire time period, rapes by strangers were more likely to be reported to the police than were rapes by nonstrangers.

Reported sexual assault in Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee, 1980 to 1982

A review of the experience of 440 women reporting they had been raped was made from their initial contact with the police, through their medical-forensic examination at the county hospital emergency room, by any judicial proceedings, and by their longer term psychological counseling. The data were then compared with those from other municipalities. The assailant's use of a weapon seemed the strongest variable correlated with the victim's decision to press for prosecution. Being raped by a stranger or being physically injured did not correlate with this decision. Women most likely to have been victims of a previous rape were over 40 years old, were black, were assaulted by someone well known to them, or had some sort of mental health problem, and these variables were independent of each other. This implies these victims somehow suffer from an increased vulnerability to repeated rape. The data suggest that use of a county hospital emergency room for the medical management of rape victims discourages their reporting the event to the authorities and their seeking medical treatment.

“Official Documentation” of the Black Suicide Experience

This paper explores methodological limitations confronted by researchers who test theoretical statements using suicide data generated by public officials. A discussion of official reporting procedures observed in one medical examiner's office suggests that investigative standards for assessing equivocal death among blacks may be minimal in comparison to the more uniform evaluations and documentation of questionable death for whites. Data pertaining to socioeconomic characteristics, religious preference, and the influence of interpersonal and intrapersonal factors thought to impact upon the black victim's decision to engage in life-destructive behavior are reported and discussed. The findings suggest that the social worth criterion of the victim may influence the recording of suicide data. Suggestions are offered for increasing the reliability of official suicide data.

The phantom capitalists: The organization and control of long-firm fraud : by Michael Levi. Heinemann Educational Books Inc. (4 Front Street, Exeter, New Hamsphire 03833), 1982, 346 pp., hardcover—$50.00.

There is a significant body of research exploring the reporting behaviors of crime victims. Much of this literature has focused on specific types of victimization (e.g., sexual assault) and the correlates of victim reporting. Recently, the crimes of stalking and cyberstalking have received empirical attention; however, few studies have examined the reporting behaviors of victims of these crimes. Using the theoretical framework proposed by Gottfredson and Gottfredson (1988), the current study explored how offense seriousness, the victim-offender relationship, and the prior record of the offender influenced a victim's decision to contact the police. Data were drawn from the 2006 stalking supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which examined stalking in the United States. Results offered support to Gottfredson and Gottfredson (1988) and highlighted the significance of understanding the reporting behaviors for this sample of crime victims. Differences in reporting for victims of stalking and cyberstalking were also examined.

A Study of the Behavior of Law

In The Behavior of Law, Black (1976) sets forth a theory of law that he argues explains variations in law across societies and among individuals within societies. Black argues that law can be conceived of as a quantitative variable, measured by the number and scope of prohibitions, obligations and other standards to which people are subject. Law varies, according to Black, with other aspects of social life, including stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control. Many of Black's principal propositions regarding the quantity of law are tested in this paper with National Crime Survey data on the victim's decision to report a crime to the police. An alternative model that views the quantity of law as depending largely on the gravity of the infraction against legal norms is posed and tested against Black's theory. The data are generally inconsistent with the propositions derived from The Behavior of Law and strongly suggest that a theory attempting to explain the criminal law cannot ignore the gravity of the infraction against legal norms.

WHY NOTIFY THE POLICE The Victim's Decision to Notify the Police of an Assault

WHY NOTIFY THE POLICE The Victim's Decision to Notify the Police of an Assault