Institutional Betrayal in the Criminal and Civil Legal Systems: Exploratory Factor Analysis with a Sample of Black and Hispanic Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence
Journal of Interpersonal Violence2024
Institutional betrayal (IB) is well-documented among survivors of gender-based violence seeking help and/or reporting incidents of violence in various settings, including college campuses and health care settings. Two of the most common institutions from which survivors seek help are the criminal and civil legal systems; however, less is known about the experiences of IB among survivors interfacing with those systems. Previous studies exploring IB have implemented the Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire (IBQ) and its various adaptations, but this scale has not yet been analyzed in the criminal or civil legal context, nor has it been analyzed among racially marginalized survivors. This paper explores the potential for utilizing the IBQ-Health among a sample of 199 Black and Hispanic survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) who sought help from the criminal and/or civil legal system(s).
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Theorizing Feminist Abolitionist Approaches to Gender-Based Violence: A Descriptive Case Study of Gender-Based Violence in SportsWorld
Gender & Society2024
Gender-based violence has long been a concern for feminist scholars and activists. Second-wave feminists agitated for the criminalization of violence, and more recently, feminist abolitionists have articulated the dangers and risks of relying on the criminal legal system to effectively address gender-based violence. Here we theorize the application of feminist abolitionist principles for addressing gender-based violence in the institution of sports in the United States, with the goal of addressing harm and reducing future acts of violence. After analyzing data from our unique data set, which documents gender-based violence in college and professional sports and tracks noncarceral sanctions imposed by professional leagues, teams, and colleges, our analysis reveals few consequences for perpetrators coupled with relatively high rates of serial abuse. Despite failures in the implementation of these noncarceral sanctions, we theorize the potential of sport organizations to intervene in and prevent gender-based violence in ways that advance feminist abolitionist goals.
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Book Review: Researching Gender-Based Violence: Embodied and Intersectional Approaches By April D. J. Petillo and Heather R. Hlavka
Gender & Society2023
Approaches effectively weaves a diversity of narratives, identities, and concepts to identify and advocate for novel strategies for researching gendered violence in ways that reject colonial practices common within academia. Petillo and Hlavaka provide a persuasive argument for the adoption of embodied, intersectional methodologies in all research that focuses on gendered violence, but particularly for research conducted in non-Western contexts. This anthology grapples with questions surrounding the roles and benefits of reflective intersectional methodologies and the ways in which researchers unknowingly reproduce harmful hegemonic understandings of gendered violence, and they identify approaches to conducting research that reject such understandings. Petillo and Hlavaka, established scholars of gender-based violence, take on the task of considering the ways in which we study gender-based violence …
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FEMINIST LECTURE:(Re) Imagining gender-based violence as a strategy for enforcing institutional segregation and reproducing structural inequalities
Gender & Society2022
In this article, I develop a framework for re-imagining gender-based violence not as an outgrowth of patriarchy but as a response to the threat of gender integration and the inversion of the gendered hierarchy. I argue that this reconceptualization is critical to re-envisioning not just research but also prevention and intervention strategies. I begin by identifying two reasons for the stalled revolution in reducing rates of gender-based violence: (1) the focus on intimate partner violence and sexual violence as distinct rather than as similar tools that are simply deployed in different spaces, and (2) the de-centering of Black feminist voices and the obscuring of the similarities between gender-based violence and racialized violence. Finally, I conclude with recommendations to transform policies and hegemonic ideologies that limit the impact of gender-based violence—including by holding perpetrators accountable—and render …
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Differentiating Black and Hispanic: outcome differences of segregated communities and police shootings in the USA, 2015–2020
Injury Epidemiology2022
Police shootings are unevenly spatially distributed, with substantive spikes throughout the USA. While minorities are disproportionately the victims of police force, social or structural factors associated with this distribution are not well understood. The objective of this work was to evaluate police shootings in relation to victim race or ethnicity and residential segregation and racial diversity. Validated crowdsourced data from the Washington Post’s Fatal Force (2015–2020) were linked with census tract-level data from the American Community Survey. Residential minority dissimilarity, interaction, and a racial and ethnic diversity metric were calculated in order to assess the potentially variant importance of evenness in distribution, exposure likelihood, and general representation. Logistic and multinomial regression was used to model associations between segregation and diversity, adjusted for other ecological characteristics. Analyses were stratified by victim race or ethnicity (Black, Asian, or Hispanic). ...
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Diversity, equity, and inclusion in research teams: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Race and Justice2022
Since the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the racial justice protests that followed, many institutions, including the academy, pledged their support for policies and practices that combat on-going racial injustice. Social justice and anti-racism initiatives abound on college campuses, including programming, hosting speakers, and proposing required ‘diversity’ classes for all students. For all this rhetoric, college and university administrators have remained silent when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion practices as they relate to research. And yet, extant research documents the ways in which racial and gender biases have consistently shaped every level of research from the development of the research question, to the diversity (or not) of the sample, the availability of funding, and the probability of publishing. In this paper we focus on one aspect of the research process: the assembling (or not) of …
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Sex logics: Negotiating the prison rape elimination act (PREA) against its’ administrative, safety, and cultural burdens
Punishment & Society2021
The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) reforms correctional institutions via administrative mechanisms and represents a major shift in both correctional policy and workplace practice. Using qualitative data within six prisons in one U.S. state, finding suggest that staff view PREA as an administrative, safety, and cultural burden, which creates a misalignment of institutional logics. Rather than seeing themselves as central to eliminating prison sexual misconduct/violence, staff see PREA as interfering with their “real” custody/control work. This misalignment has major implications for the productive implementation and use of PREA and the broader shift to administrative rather than legal processes for institutional reform.
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