Rape Violence Research Articles

Racist inferences and flawed data: drill rap lyrics as criminal evidence in group prosecutions

Drill rap lyrics are used regularly by police and prosecutors as evidence against young Black working-class defendants in UK criminal cases. Though this practice is of mounting public concern, its discursive mechanisms remain poorly understood, shrouded by the police and courts. This article exposes and explains state interpretations of drill lyrics in the preparation of serious crime cases. It considers how the state uses violent rap lyrics to build secondary liability in group prosecutions by exploiting drill’s power to invoke stereotypes and mislead the court. The author focuses on a 2020 joint enterprise murder case in London, in which she served as a rap expert, to give a concrete illustration of how the state tries to use rap lyrics of little or no relevance to incriminate. This article contends that rap-facilitated group prosecutions encapsulate processes of racist carcerality – targeting young Black people through their expressive culture – which are in need of concerted challenge and transformational change.

Amulo, the Adulterata and Bodo

Amulo, one of the earliest western witnesses for the Toledot Yeshu, uses ‘adulterata’ to describe the mother of Jesus. Some scholars have claimed that the word ‘adulterata’ implies that she was raped either by force or by deception. Forcible rape is questionable based on a linguistic argument: Latin usage of ‘adultero’, both classical and Christian, normally refers to a woman with the accusative case or the passive voice and distinguishes clearly between adultery and violent rape. It is possible that narratives such as the one about Jesus’ mother played a role in the conversion of the palace deacon Bodo to Judaism.

DOUBLINGS AND DISSOCIATION IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING AND HELEN OYEYEMI’S BOY, SNOW, BIRD

In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929) and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (2014). Oyeyemi claims Larsen’s novel as an influential forbear. When the protagonist of Larsen’s Passing, Irene, is in the presence of her friend Clare, she acts, speaks, and expresses her feelings in a far different mode from her usual rigid conformity to ladylike propriety. She seems, indeed, to be a different person. Although critics have long seen Clare as an alter ego for Irene, I argue instead that it is Clare’s presence that brings out in Irene an alter ego, a new personality structure. Using as a theoretical framework Philip Bromberg’s model of subjectivity as a series of alternating self-states – each distinct and discontinuous with the others – I argue that Larsen is giving the nineteenth-century alter ego of literary tradition a new depth by dramatizing the way a subject changes personality to a different self as a result of a close relationship with a particular other. Irene’s subjectivity is further complicated by her enactment of upper-class “lady” in her every gesture, tone, and word. The performed identity of (white) “lady” is at odds with the everyday reality of Irene’s social position as middle-class black wife and mother. Attention to the multiplicity of Irene’s competing self-states, and her growing loss of control over them, can help us to understand the ambiguous final scene in which Irene (apparently) pushes Clare out of a sixth-floor window to her death. In Boy, Snow, Bird alter egos proliferate. To manage the relentless physical and mental abuse that the character narrator Boy endures from her father, Boy finds escape in colloquies with her mirror image. The mirror image is separate from Boy (she does not recognize it as her own reflection) and has its own agenda, sometimes replacing Boy’s subjectivity with its own. Later in the novel, we learn that Frances, Boy’s mother, after suffering a violent rape, saw in her mirror a male figure and transformed herself into that male identity. [The novel seems to ask readers to think of both instances of wounded identity and the adoption of alter egos in relationship to each other.] This is not Bromberg’s “normal” dissociation as an alternation of self-states, but a lasting and severe dissociation as a last defense against trauma. Boy and Frances are using the mirror double as an escape from unbearable reality. When, to her surprise, Boy gives birth to an African American baby, the intense anxiety about her child’s future in the racist United States causes a different kind of splitting: she feels herself transforming into the wicked stepmother of the fairy tale “Snow White.” She indeed becomes cruel, unfeeling, and damaging to her innocent stepdaughter Snow. In both novels, the complex depiction of alter egos reflects the psychic complications of subjects trying to survive in the racist social order of the United States.

Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance by Lucy M. Allen-Goss

Reviewed by: Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance by Lucy M. Allen-Goss Holly A. Crocker lucy m. allen-goss, Female Desire in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Middle English Romance. Gender in the Middle Ages, Volume 15. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. ix, 225. isbn: 978–1843845706. $99. With this study's focus on feminine desire, Lucy M. Allen-Goss asks what I believe will be the most crucial question in premodern literary studies: what will emerge if we change the standpoint from which we begin our scholarly enquiries into gender, sexuality, and other literary representations of embodiment? Allen-Goss focuses welcome attention on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women as a hermeneutic locus where the absences that might create a 'lesbian-like erotic' potentially emerge. Allen-Goss pairs this consideration with analysis of Middle English romance, or 'a mode of writing about female desire and bodily agency that is innovative and contemporary rather than isolated and retrograde' (pp. 28–29). In thinking through the tradition Chaucer and romance writers inherited, where women's desire is equated with deviance or treated as an absence, this book pursues a model of sexuality that is not constructed in relation to masculine desire. That kind of sexuality is almost always thwarted in Chaucer. While Chaucer might seek to represent a form of desire that emerges outside or beyond masculine domination or violence, in Chapter One Allen-Goss suggests that the 'Legend of Philomela' shows how a feminine hermeneutic is ultimately silenced in keeping with Jerome's famous model of reading as the rape of a conquered woman. Chapter Two, which turns to the Alliterative Morte, reads the giant's violent rape of the duchess at Mont St Michel as a traumatic hermeneutic that subtends the knights' attempts to establish their martial prowess. By thinking through this narrative's hyper-masculine suppression of feminine agency and desire, Allen-Goss offers a completely persuasive reconsideration of this poem as 'not anti-war but anti-rape' (p. 71). In Chapter Three, it becomes clear, there needs to be more than a foregrounding of women to render a plot revisionist. With his rethinking of the relicta motif in the 'Legend of Hipsiphyle and Medea,' Chaucer potentially queers Jason's faithlessness—unmooring him from conventional masculinity—in order to make space for women's desire. Despite the fact that Chaucer's 'Legend of Dido' expresses a more fluid form of feminine desire, Chaucer's poem codes her non-binarized attraction to Aeneas as deviant, and tumbles together Hipsiphyle's and Medea's betrayed expressions of desire for Jason in a way that diminishes the potential of the female masculinity it explores. Chapter Four, which analyzes the 'stony femininity' of Floripas in the Sowdone of Babylon, argues that this romance imagines the possibility of a woman whose desire is [End Page 95] not constituted in relation to masculine fantasies or demands. Rather than nightmares of women's affective and embodied fluidity, this romance instead charts the ways that an impenetrable feminine body produces desires that cannot be contained by masculinist fantasies of penetration or manipulation. It is only with his Thisbe, whom Allen-Goss considers alongside Ariadne in Chapter Five, that Chaucer creates a narrative of feminine innocence that might exceed the phallic logic that a masculinist hermeneutic demands. By reading these women's relation to veiling and reading, Chaucer's legends entertain the possibility of lesbian-like erotic that admits feminine desire through gaps and openings in edifices conventionally drawn to render women's bodies as available to men's sexual domination. By circumscribing the desire Chaucer associates with these women, these legends mark feminine eroticism as deviant in a way that assures Chaucer's own gendered authority. In Chapter Six, Allen-Goss turns to the late fifteenth-century romance, Undo Your Door, to argue that 'female sexuality [is] represented as a transgressive yet creative force, which . . . assembles its own objects of desire from inanimate materials and from mechanisms disturbingly reminiscent of the objects medieval writers associated with same-sex desire and female autoerotic satisfaction' (p. 166). By showing how women's desire is associated with inanimacy...

KETIDAKADILAN GENDER DALAM NASKAH DRAMA MATA ADIL MATA TAKDIR KARYA TOTENK MT RUSMAWAN

The purpose of this study is to describe gender injustice in the drama script Mata Adil Mata Takdir by Totenk MT Rusmawan. The theory used in this research is Fakih's theory which refers to gender injustice towards women as a support in his study. The method used in this study is a qualitative research method. Data collection techniques use words, sentences, and paragraphs. The technical analysis of the data used is reading, interpreting and concluding. The results of the research found in the drama script Mata Adil Mata Takdir there are gender injustices experienced by female characters by men contained in the drama script. Women leaders experience gender injustice by men in the form of job impoverishment, women 's numbering, and violence against women in terms of physical, psychological and rape violence. Conclusions in this study the forms of gender injustice in the lives of women leaders Gender differences have given birth to various injustices, both men and especially against women. injustice is a system and structure of both men and women become victims of the system. Suggestions in this research can be useful for the development of teaching Indonesian language and literature in understanding gender injustice contained in literary works, especially drama scripts.

The Scope of Rape Victimization and Perpetration Among National Samples of College Students Across 30 years.

Research Questions: Rape prevention practice and policy have roots in data from 1985. This study uses 2015 national data to project recent prevalence, assesses whether rates now differ from those of 30 years ago, and disaggregates 2015 prevalence into rape of alcohol incapacitated victims, rapes combining both alcohol and physical tactics, and violent rape. Methods: Cross-sectional analyses were conducted comparing two national samples. The first was collected in 1984-85 (Koss, Gidycz, & Wisniewski, 1987); the second was collected 30 years later in 2014-2015. Both surveys used in-person administration and measurement by the most current version at the time of the Sexual Experiences Survey (SES). Prevalence rates were compared using Bayesian binomial tests. Results: In 2015, 33.4% (1 in 3) of women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape and 12.7% of men reported perpetration (1 in 8). Using Jeffreys' label for effect size of the Bayes binomial (1961), both results are "decisively" greater than expected given the 1985 benchmarks of 27.9% for victimization and 7.7% for perpetration. Victimization when incapacitated characterized approximately 75% of incidents in 2015 up from 50% in 1985. Cautions apply as cross-sectional data does not establish causality and the recent data set involved the revised SES. Conclusions: Across 30 years, neither containment nor reduction of rape was demonstrated and the increasingly prominent association with alcohol was apparent. Among the men who disclosed raping, 9 of 10 incidents were alcohol-involved. Prevention focus might profitably be directed to constraining alcohol environments and policies that facilitate rape of incapacitated persons and on misconduct responses that are proportional to the harm caused to rape victims, thereby raising the perceived risks of perpetration.

From Love Jihad to Grooming Gangs: Tracing Flows of the Hypersexual Muslim Male through Far-Right Female Influencers

This article traces the transnational flows of constructions of the hypersexualized Muslim male through a comparative analysis of love jihad in India and the specter of grooming gangs in the UK. While the former is conceived as an act of seduction and conversion, and the latter through violent rape imaginaries, foregrounding both of these narratives are sexual, gender, and family dynamics that are integral to the fear of demographic change. Building upon these narratives, this study analyzes how influential women in Hindu nationalist and European/North American far-right milieus circulate images, videos, and discourses on social media that depict Muslim men as predatory and violent, targeting Hindu and white girls, respectively. By positioning themselves as the daughters, wives, and mothers of the nation, these far-right female influencers invoke a sense of reproductive urgency, as well as advance claims of the perceived threat of, and safety from, hypersexualized Muslim men. This article illustrates how local ideological narratives of Muslim sexuality are embedded into global Islamophobic tropes of gendered nationalist imaginaries.

Does music help regulate depressive symptoms for fans of violently themed music?

Fans of extreme metal and rap music with violent themes, hereafter termed “violently themed music,” predominantly experience positive emotional and psychosocial outcomes in response to this music. However, negative emotional responses to preferred music are reported to a greater extent by such fans than by fans of non-violently themed music. We investigated negative emotional responses to violently themed music among fans by assessing their experience of depressive symptoms, and whether violently themed music functions to regulate negative moods through two common mood regulation strategies: discharge and diversion. Fans of violent rap ( n = 49), violent extreme metal ( n = 46), and non-violent classical music ( n = 50) reported depressive symptoms and use of music to regulate moods. Participants listened to four one-minute excerpts of music in their preferred genres and rated negative emotional responses to each excerpt (sadness, tension, anger, fear). There were no significant differences between ratings of depression between groups, but depressive symptoms predicted negative emotional responses to music across all groups. Furthermore, depression ratings predicted the use of the mood regulation strategy of discharge in all groups. The discharge strategy did not reduce (or exacerbate) fans’ negative emotional responses, but may nevertheless confer other benefits. We discuss implications for the psychosocial well-being of fans of violently themed music.

Sexual violence and rapes' increment during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh.

Sexual violence and rapes' increment during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh.

Female Garment Workers’ Understandings of HIV in Bangladesh

As part of a larger study this study reviewed the current state of knowledge of female garment workers’ (FGWs) experiences and their personal understandings of their human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) experiences in Bangladesh. Relevant literature on FGWs health on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV within Bangladesh published between 1990 and 2020 was carried out through a critical review. Relevant information from the selected articles was extracted and presented to contribute to the existing literature in the form of new findings and also critically interpret existing findings. The themes and keywords were examined in the abstract and title of literature extracted using the aforementioned search engines. Major causes of HIV vulnerability of FGWs are gender inequality, multiple sex partners, drug abuse and rape violence. These poor FGWs are not informed about contraceptive methods, safe sex, menstruation and hygiene and HIV infection due to low literacy rate. Empowering FGWs through formal health education on HIV is essential, including prevention of work place violence (WPV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) related training. Community leaders, private sector involvement and business in HIV needs to be encouraged. Current, surveillance has been conducted on key population, therefore outcome of this study recommend a large-scale study on FGWs in urban areas of Bangladesh to guide policymakers and researchers on how to prevent HIV and improve FGWs' health.

Cracking Self-Defense's Intractable 'Difficult Cases'

Cracking Self-Defense's Intractable 'Difficult Cases'

Fans of Violent Music: The Role of Passion in Positive and Negative Emotional Experience

Extreme metal and rap music with violent themes are sometimes blamed for eliciting antisocial behaviours, but growing evidence suggests that music with violent themes can have positive emotional, cognitive, and social consequences for fans. We addressed this apparent paradox by comparing how fans of violent and non-violent music respond emotionally to music. We also characterised the psychosocial functions of music for fans of violent and non-violent music, and their passion for music. Fans of violent extreme metal ( n=46), violent rap ( n=49), and non-violent classical music ( n=50) responded to questionnaires evaluating the cognitive (self-reflection, self-regulation) and social (social bonding) functions of their preferred music and the nature of their passion for it. They then listened to four one-minute excerpts of music and rated ten emotional descriptors for each excerpt. The top five emotions reported by the three groups of fans were positive, with empowerment and joy the emotions rated highest. However, compared with classical music fans, fans of violent music assigned significantly lower ratings to positive emotions and higher ratings to negative emotions. Fans of violent music also utilised their preferred music for positive psychosocial functions to a similar or sometimes greater extent than classical fans. Harmonious passion for music predicted positive emotional outcomes for all three groups of fans, whereas obsessive passion predicted negative emotional outcomes. Those high in harmonious passion also tended to use music for cognitive and social functions. We propose that fans of violent music use their preferred music to induce an equal balance of positive and negative emotions.

Unspoken victims: A national study of male rape incidents and police investigations in South Africa.

The burden of sexual violence has been well described in children of both sexes and in women, but there is minimal literature on adult male rape victims. Studies of adult male rape victims have mainly been conducted among incarcerated males or military personnel, and in high-income countries. To describe the epidemiology, occurrence and reporting of rape cases involving male victims, both child (<18 years old) and adult, in South Africa (SA). The study consisted of a nationally representative sample of case dockets maintained by the SA Police Service of rape incidents reported in 2012. A retrospective review of the dockets provided sociodemographic information on the victim and suspect, the circumstances of the rape and the medicolegal services provided to the victim. Data on male victims were analysed using Stata 13 to test for significant differences between child and adult male victims. The study comprised 209 male victims, including 120 (57.4%) children and 89 (42.6%) adults. The findings showed that there were significant differences in the occurrence and reporting of rape of male victims by age. Adult males experienced more violent rapes, perpetrators were more likely to be armed and often humiliated the victim, and rapes were more likely to occur in institutional settings. Adult males reported incidents of rape earlier and therefore had visible non-genital injuries during the medical examination. In contrast, more child rapes involved known perpetrators, occurred in a home and perpetrators were more likely to act kindly to the victim after the incident. This parallels the patterns in rape circumstances seen in female adult and child victims. While there is political commitment to understanding sexual violence against women as a societal problem, work on such violence against men lags behind and is little understood. Rape of males needs to be acknowledged, and their vulnerabilities to sexual abuse and rape need to be addressed. Prevention efforts to end violence against women and girls, especially in relation to children, can be used to address violence against men and boys.

A ‘Bad Rap’: R. v. Skeete and the Admissibility of Rap Lyric Evidence

This paper explores the evidentiary treatment of violent and prejudicial defendant-authored rap lyrics in Canadian criminal trials. It argues that the current evidentiary threshold jeopardizes trial fairness by allowing the Crown to adduce highly prejudicial rap lyric evidence at trial. It also problematizes the judicial reliance on corroborative evidence, which does not establish the truthfulness of the lyrics tendered, to admit these violent rap lyrics at trial. It argues that the reliance on such corroborative evidence results in a misapprehension of the lyrics’ evidentiary value and ultimately in the admission of defendant-authored rap lyric evidence of low probative value at trial. This result is particularly concerning in the case of young black male defendants, since the introduction of their lyrics at trial can prime a jury’s unconscious anti-black bias and therefore serve to increase the distortive effect of this type of evidence on the fairness and integrity of criminal proceedings. It concludes by advocating for a rap specific approach to the admissibility of this evidence.

Women Protection and Decision of Customary Justice on The Ride of Cross Action (Women Protection Based On Law And Customary Justice In Atambua)

Rape can be occured in all women from all side of life, occupations, age, and marital status, which was done alone or abuzz. The perpetrators of violence also come from various circles, work, age, social class and marital status. In this case, the number of women violence against in Atambua is quite high. Sexual abuse cases and sexual harassment turned out most of the perpetrators are still related to blood with victims, such as biological father, siblings, uncle and neighbors. The cases of sexual assault against women in Atambua are resolved in customary. However, any form of resolution, the act of violence of rape against viewed from various aspects still must be responded as a criminal act, for example the custom settlement of tallitan tafani still apply penal sanction in the form of penalty as one of the effort of restoration of good name, and also dignity for the victim.

Lethal combinations: A conjunctive analysis of crime scene behavior associated with sexual homicide.

This research investigates violent stranger rapes and the factors leading these cases to sexual homicides. Variables relating to modus operandi characteristics on one part and offender behavior on the other part are examined using conjunctive analysis of cases configuration to identify the different combinations leading to a lethal outcome. Using a French sample of 1263 cases of violent rapes and 303 cases of sexual homicides involving female adult victims, we find that blows given by offenders and information about physical resistance of victims are strongly associated intentional and non-intentional sexual homicides. Psychoactive substance consumption by offenders as well associal isolation are in a lesser extend also associated with the lethal outcome.

The relationship between concealed carry permits and state-level crime rates

ABSTRACTThe purpose of the present study is to determine the relationship between concealed carry permits and state-level crime rates. Using pooled data for the period 2003–2014 and a least squares model with state dummy variables and a time trend, results of the present study suggest that the lagged value of per capita concealed carry permits had a statistically-significant and negative effect on the following crime rates: violent crime, rape, aggravated assault, and auto theft. For all other crimes examined, the number of active concealed carry permits had no statistically significant effects. These results somewhat corroborate the findings of Lott (2000).

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Mirrored Harms: Unintended Consequences in the Grant of Tribal Court Jurisdiction over Non-Indian Abusers

1st Place Winner of the American Indian Law Review National Writing Competition 2019-2020. Rates of domestic violence are astonishingly high in Indian country. More than half of Indian women have experienced physical violence in their lifetimes. They are twice as likely to experience rape as white women and to experience more violent rape when it occurs. Their plight is also deeply intertwined with race: Ninety percent of women reported that the intimate partner violence they experienced was at the hands of a non-Indian perpetrator. At the same time, tribes are largely unable to address this problem through their criminal laws due to the centuries-long erosion of tribal sovereignty. In the 1977 case of Oliphant v. Suquamish Tribe, the Supreme Court held that tribes had no inherent authority to prosecute non-Indians for crimes committed on Indian land. This departure from commonly understood tribal sovereignty principles created a vacuum that disproportionately affected Indian victims of domestic violence. Non-Indians could act with virtual impunity, immune from prosecution by the tribe and, usually, the state. Meanwhile, the federal government, which retained criminal jurisdiction, declined to prosecute an astonishing two-thirds of sexual violence cases and nearly half of assault crimes. In response to these problems, Congress passed Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction (SDVCJ) in its 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. This provision “recognize[s] and affirm[s]” the “inherent power” of tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians, effectively overruling Oliphant with respect to crimes of domestic violence. Tribes overwhelmingly applauded this legislation for its enhancement of tribal sovereignty and for its effort to combat the scourge of domestic violence in Indian territory. Despite the best intentions of the legislators, however, a number of defects in the legislation undermine its goal of protecting Indian victims of domestic violence. In this paper, I argue that SDVCJ has created unintended harms that mirror the very harms that the domestic violence movement as a whole has been trying to address. I do not argue that SDVCJ is a net detriment to remediating domestic violence or enhancing tribal sovereignty, but that the harms present in the current iteration of SDVCJ should concern legislators and advocates seeking to actually address domestic violence. In particular, I track how limitations on the type of crimes that can be prosecuted — essentially, only physical assaults — mirror problems from early periods in the domestic violence movement, including the perception that only physical assaults are sufficiently serious to be worthy of state sanction and the failure to recognize domestic violence as an exertion of power and control over a victim rather than a series of discrete, isolated incidents. I also explore how the elements of SDVCJ can be manipulated by a perpetrator based on his own identity or the identity of the victim — a problem that is unique to the intersection of SDVCJ and the political classification and racial makeup of Indians on tribal lands — and argue that this, too, mirrors existing and prior harms of domestic violence’s interaction with the law. I further argue that SDVCJ’s definition of a victim puts the onus on her to prove that she is worthy of protection, reflecting the traditional blame placed on the woman for failure to prevent her own battering. Finally, I discuss some potential solutions, and conclude that SDVCJ should be expanded to encompass all crimes committed within a domestic violence context and without regard to the identity of perpetrator or victim.

Social media as a gateway for young feminists: lessons from the #IWillGoOut campaign in India

ABSTRACTOver New Year’s Eve in 2016, a slew of sexual assault cases against women came to light in India’s tech hub of Bengaluru. Four years prior, against the backdrop of a violent rape in the nation’s capital of Delhi, prominent feminists and activists took to the streets as part of mass public protests calling for legal protections for women in India. The response to the New Year’s Eve allegations, however, differed in two ways. The first was the conspicuous role social media played for the first time in the feminist movement in India. The second was the leadership provided by young feminists in the country. A coalition of various feminist organisations and individuals banded together to form a collective under the hashtag #IWillGoOut. This article discusses feminist activism over a period of two weeks at the start of 2017, when the #IWillGoOut collective rapidly mobilised widespread public support calling for the safety of women and minorities in public spaces in India. The campaign organised and led marches and events in over 30 towns and cities of India with no formal fundraising effort. I draw on my personal experience of organising the campaign to share insights into its success in transforming online support to offline action using social media. This experience provides a useful example that can be used in other social justice movements in the Indian subcontinent.