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Defenders of Freedom or Perpetrators and Facilitators of Crimes? Beyond Progressive Retreatism in the Trump Era
Abstract
Heavily influenced by broad definitions of crime developed by a few pioneering critical criminologists, the main objective of this article is to provide evidence showing that the current Trump administration is a regime that commits crimes of the powerful and facilitates some types of interpersonal violence in private places. Special attention is devoted to direct and in-direct state-perpetrated violent crimes against women.
... The precise number of rape and incest survivors specifically assaulted by offenders for the purpose of forced pregnancy will never be known and the same can be said about the number of survivors forced by the state to give birth. What is known for sure, nevertheless, is that survivors forced to be pregnant will be permanently reminded of having been sexually violated and faced with the task of looking after the children of the men who raped them (Collins, 2016;DeKeseredy, 2019a). ...
... The above coalition has "a lot of work to do" (Jensen, 2007, p. 184), some of which is described in detail elsewhere for readers to mull over (see DeKeseredy, 2019aDeKeseredy, , 2021DeKeseredy & Currie, 2019). Yet, the new solidarity movement envisioned here cannot afford to sideline initiatives aimed at curbing violence against women. ...
In this current era characterized by much fear of, and anxiety about, the political influence and actions of the U.S. alternative right (alt-right), only a small number of men’s rights organizations receive attention from the media, the Democratic Party, or a large cadre of progressives. This article demonstrates that ignoring all-male anti-feminist organizations is a flawed strategy for challenging the recent rise of the alt-right because these misogynistic groups are heavily involved in the gun rights movement, major contributors to racist practices and discourses, and active participants in efforts to criminalize and curtail women’s access to abortion. Another, but equally important, aim of this piece is to briefly suggest new means of creating effective movements aimed at achieving social justice, one that involves a coalition of broader constituencies that prioritize gender and sexuality as well as race/ethnicity and social class.
... Yet various types of face-to-face and digital sexual violence, as demonstrated by decades of sound research, are deeply entrenched in the U.S. college population (Koss et al., 2022). Thus, if sexual assault in higher education is a disease, then it is in its endemic phase, possibly to be compared with methamphetamine and opioid use among residents of West Virginia (DeKeseredy, 2020). ...
This article reports the results of a study specifically designed to examine the types of theories of, and theoretically informed explanations for, sexual victimization/perpetration in higher education that have been published in peer-reviewed journals from 2013 to 2022. The sample consists of 292 articles in ten violence-related periodicals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, and sexual assault was the dependent variable in all the studies presented in them. Ninety-seven percent of the studies are solely quantitative, 44% are purely empirical studies with no theoretical frameworks, and 56% were informed by a theory. Not surprisingly, our analyses found that of the articles guided by theories, 68% were informed by individualist-positivist perspectives that prioritize micro and individualistic factors, while only 30% were guided by feminist theories that give precedence to patriarchy and masculinity.
... Institutional betrayal always existed at colleges and universities, but there is mounting evidence that this problem is worse now than prior to Trump's term in office (Holland & Cipriano, 2021). Some critics of the current state of Title IX goes as far as to argue that it is a "collaborator and facilitator" of various types of violence against women and that it "indirectly facilitates interactional, institutionalized and structural harms suffered by women" (Collins, 2016: p. 88;DeKeseredy, 2019). ...
The social scientific study of sexual assault on North American university/college campuses started in 1957 with a path-breaking survey conducted by Clifford Kirkpatrick and Eugene Kanin. However, it was not until the late 1980s that the interdisciplinary literature in the field started to mushroom. Nevertheless, theoretical developments have not kept pace with the burgeoning empirical body of knowledge in the field. In fact, the current state of scholarly work is now dominated by what the late C. Wright Mills referred to as abstracted empiricism (e.g., research divorced from theory). The main objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to explain how gendered sociological theoretical offerings, especially feminist perspectives, became marginalized and (2) to suggest new sociological directions in explaining male-to-female sexual assaults in institutions of higher learning.
Despite making some of the most important advances in the social scientific study of woman abuse, feminist sociological research and theorizing that prioritize the concept of patriarchy have leveled off or declined in the last 15 years due, in large part, to the current hegemony of mainstream criminologists fundamentally opposed to a rich gendered understanding of one of the world's most compelling social problems. Drawing on nearly 50 years of research done by an international cadre of highly experienced scholars, this article demonstrates the importance of revisiting some major feminist conceptual, empirical, and theoretical contributions from the past. Recommended here are gender-specific conceptualizations of abuse, in-depth reviews of the extant literature, self-report surveys of potential male offenders, quantitative indicators of men's patriarchal attitudes and beliefs, and supplementary open-ended survey questions.
Polyvictimization means looking at multiple victimizations of different kinds that one person has experienced. Virtually, all of the work in this field focuses on the effects of childhood trauma and victimization on currently distressed children, and empirical and theoretical work on the intertwining of adult female offline and online abuse experiences is in short supply. Recently, however, some scholars are starting to fill these research gaps by generating data showing that technology-facilitated violence and abuse are part and parcel of women's polyvictimization experiences at institutions of higher education. This chapter provides an in-depth review of the extant social scientific literature on the role technology-facilitated violence and abuse plays in the polyvictimization of female college/university students. In addition to proposing new ways of knowing, we suggest progressive policies and practices aimed at preventing polyvictimization on the college campus.
The concept of critical criminology – that crime and the present-day processes of criminalization are rooted in the core structures of society – is of more relevance today than it has been at any other time.
Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simply calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations. Now fully updated and expanded in a new edition, this book offers further coverage of new directions in critical criminology, such as green criminology, indigenous criminology, intersectionality, narrative criminology, rural critical criminology, queer criminology, semiology, critical research methods, and contemporary critical criminological policies.
This book chronicles key contemporary developments in the social scientific
study of various types of male-to-female abuse in rural places and suggests new directions in research, theory, and policy. The main objective of this book is not to simply provide a dry recitation of the extant literature on the abuse of rural women in private places. To be sure, this material is covered, but rural women’s experiences of crimes of the powerful like genocidal rape and corporate violence against female employees are also examined.
Written by a celebrated expert on the subject, this book considers woman
abuse in a broad context, covering forms of violence such as physical and sexual assault, coercive control, genocidal rape, abortion bans, forced pregnancy, and corporate forms of violence. It offers a broad research agenda that examines the multidimensional nature of violence against rural women. Drawing on decades of work in the shelter movement, with activist organizations and doing academic and government research, DeKeseredy punctuates the book with stories and voices of perpetrators and survivors of abuse. Additionally, what makes this book unique is that it focuses on the plight of rural women around the world and it introduces a modified version of Liz Kelly’s original continuum of sexual violence.
An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and
scholars of criminology, sociology, women’s studies, cultural studies, policing, geography, and all those interested in learning about the abuse women face in rural areas.
A number of key risk factors are associated with racist, sexist, and homophobic practices on North American college campuses. However, one additional determinant that has thus far been overlooked is male aggrieved entitlement. Using exploratory qualitative data gleaned by the Campus Quality of Life Survey administered at a large college in the South Atlantic region of the United States, the main objective of this article is to help fill a major research gap by showing that aggrieved entitlement is a correlate that warrants more attention in future empirical and theoretical work on campus climates.
Margaret Atwood is a prolific and versatile writer. Her literary career
began in 1961 with the publication of her first poetry collection, Double
Persephone, and has grown to include sixteen poetry collections, twelve novels,
eight short fiction collections, six children's books, and five major non-fiction
works. Atwood has also edited six literary anthologies including, Survival: A
Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, 1972, her most notable anthology, which has
been credited with renewing interest in Canadian literature. In addition to this
generic diversity, Atwood's work offers thematic diversity: Canadian national
identity, relations between Canada and the United States, relations between
Canada and Europe, the Canadian wilderness, environmental issues,
biotechnology, human rights issues, and feminist issues, a prominent theme
throughout her career. Atwood's representations of gender explore the social
myths defining femininity, representations of women's bodies in art, the social
and economic exploitation of women, as well as women's relations with each
other and with men.
There has been a recent surge in the number of campus climate surveys conducted across the United States; however, little research has examined response rates. Using data from 5,524 students who participated in a Web-based survey at a large university in a South Atlantic part of the United States, four waves of data corresponding with participation rates after reminder e-mails were analyzed. These waves are first compared across a number of demographic variables. Next, the data on rates of stalking, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and stranger sexual harassment for each wave are examined. The results show few significant differences in the characteristics of the students participating in each wave, and the victimization rates remained relatively constant across the 4 weeks of data collection.
A 2014 report issued by the White House Council on Women and Girls included the alarming statistic that one in five female college students in the United States experience some form of campus sexual assault. Despite more than fifty years of anti-rape activism and over two decades of federal legislation regarding campus sexual violence, sexual assault on American college and university campuses remains prevalent, under-reported, and poorly understood. A principle reason for this lack of understanding is that the voices of women who have experienced campus sexual assault have been largely absent from academic discourse about the issue. In Campus Sexual Assault, Lauren J. Germain focuses attention on the post-sexual assault experiences of twenty-six college women. She reframes conversations about sexual violence and student agency on American college campuses by drawing insight directly from the stories of how survivors responded individually to attacks, as well as how and why peers, family members, and school, medical, and civil authorities were (or were not) engaged in addressing the crimes. Germain weaves together women's narratives to show the women not as victims per se, but as individuals with the power to overcome these traumatic experiences. Aimed at students, parents, faculty members, university leaders, service providers, and lawmakers, Campus Sexual Assault seeks to put an end to the silence around sexual trauma by giving voice to those closest to it and providing tools for others to hear with-and to act on.
Sexual assault, dating/domestic violence, sexual harassment, and stalking are complex crimes and have been a major focus of national attention at institutions of higher education (IHEs). To grasp the extent and nature of these crimes on campuses, institutionally specific climate surveys are being developed and endorsed by the federal government and conducted at IHEs. These climate surveys differ in content and length. This article describes 10 different climate surveys and outlines the variables measured in each tool. Next steps for assessing climate surveys are discussed.
Violence against Women in Pornography illuminates the ways in which adult pornography hurts many women, both on and off screen. A growing body of social scientific knowledge shows that it is strongly associated with various types of violence against women in intimate relationships. Many women who try to leave abusive and/or patriarchal men also report that pornography plays a role in the abuse inflicted on them by their ex-partners. On top of these harms, male pornography consumption is strongly correlated with attitudes supporting violence against women. Many researchers, practitioners, and policy makers believe that adult pornography is a major problem and offer substantial evidence supporting this claim. Violence against Women in Pornography, unlike books written mainly for scholarly and general audiences, specifically targets students enrolled in undergraduate criminology, deviance, womens studies, masculinities studies, human sexuality, and media studies courses. Thoughtful discussion questions are placed at the end of each chapter, and appropriate PowerPoint slides and suggestions for classroom exercises will be available to aid student understanding. The main objective of this book is to motivate readers to think critically about adult pornography and to take progressive steps individually and collectively to curb the production and consumption of hurtful sexual media, including that from the “dark side of the Internet.”
Left realists continue to offer progressive ways of studying and solving various types of crime in the streets, in the “suites,” and in intimate relationships. This article briefly describes the central themes, assumptions, and concepts of left realism and charts new directions in research, theory, and policy. Special attention is devoted to using new electronic technologies and to responding to the rabid corporatization of institutions of higher learning.
Backlash critics of campus rape research have claimed that researchers exaggerate their figures by labeling as rape victims those women who experience bad dates. Although researchers have compared stranger with acquaintance rape victims, they have not compared women raped while too drunk to resist and those raped by force. This study of 65 rape victims (in a sample of 388 college seniors) found no evidence for critics' claims. Women raped by intoxication are not less emotionally affected and do not blame themselves more. Most women did not classify their experiences as rape, although all were victims under criminal law. This lack of recognition is what causes hidden victims, who do not report or seek help.
Although all‐male friendship networks may have an important effect in motivating some men to physically, sexually, and psychologically harm female intimates, particularly in dating relationships, the study of the dynamics of these groups is still limited. DeKeseredy's early model has some of the best explanatory value, but it fails to address a number of factors, including macrolevel forces, the role of alcohol abuse, membership in formal social groups such as fraternities, and the absence of deterrent factors on many campuses. This paper attempts to build a stronger theoretical model by adding these factors to DeKeseredy's base. Further, it argues that an important next step, in addition to strong multivari‐ate analysis, is ethnographic study to look at the work of men's peer groups in promoting a discourse and dramaturgy of everyday student life that legitimates the use of various forms of violence against women.
Violence against women is a major problem in all countries, affecting women in every socio-economic group and at every life stage. Nowhere in the world do women share equal social and economic rights with men or the same access as men to productive resources. Economic globalization and development are creating new challenges for women's rights as well as some new opportunities for advancing women's economic independence and gender equality. Yet, when women have access to productive resources and they enjoy social and economic rights they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies. The Political Economy of Violence against Women develops a feminist political economy approach to identify the linkages between different forms of violence against women and macro structural processes in strategic local and global sites - from the household to the transnational level. In doing so, it seeks to account for the globally increasing scale and brutality of violence against women. These sites include economic restructuring and men's reaction to the loss of secure employment, the abusive exploitation associated with the transnational migration of women workers, the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones, the spike in violence against women in financial liberalization and crises, the scourge of sexual violence in armed conflict and post-crisis peacebuilding or reconstruction efforts and the deleterious gendered impacts of natural disasters. Examples are drawn from South Africa, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the Pacific Islands, Argentina, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Iceland.
Left realism is “[o]ne of the most important critical criminologies in the world” (Schwartz & Hatty 2003: xii). Although there are variations in this school of thought, all versions begin with the assertion that inner‐city crime is a major problem for socially and economically disenfranchised people, regardless of their sex or ethnic/cultural background. Further, left realists contend that chronic urban poverty and an exclusionary labor market are major symptoms of contemporary capitalism, which in turn spawn crimes committed in public housing complexes and other poor areas. However, for left realists, it is not sheer poverty and the absence of prized material possessions (e.g., cars, high‐definition television sets) that motivate socially and economically marginalized people to prey on each other. Rather, it is a “lethal combination” of relative deprivation and market individualism (Young 1999). Thus, as left realists remind us, it is not absolute poverty, but poverty experienced as unfair (relative deprivation when compared to someone else) that breeds discontent. The form of capitalism that is predominant in North America, individualism, takes such discontent to the extremes, where in the most exaggerated situations one finds the urban poor living in a “universe where human beings live side by side but not as human beings” (Hobsbawm 1994: 341). Crime, then, is an individualistic solution to experiences of injustice (Young 1997).
In Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, institutions of higher learning are commonly seen as places where students, faculty, administrators, and support staff constantly strive to provide “practical solutions to the problem of the day” (Strong-Boag, 1996, p. 105). In the United States, due to the ongoing efforts of feminist coalitions’ lobbying and education initiatives, the establishment in 2014 of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, the widespread viewing of Kirby Dick’s 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground on college campuses, and the creation of the federal Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SaVE) in 2013, many people now view sexual assault and other crimes against women as the current “problems of the day” on college campuses and their immediate surroundings. The same can be said in many parts of Canada. For example, on October 28, 2016, the Quebec government announced that it will spend 500,000 of that amount will go toward resources and campaigns on post-secondary school campuses (Lalonde, 2016). Still, the reality is that North American college campuses have a long history of high levels of crime (Fisher & Sloan, 2013; Schwartz & DeKeseredy, 1997; Sloan & Fisher, 2010). More than 170 years ago, Harvard University complained that students frequently committed “crimes worthy of the penitentiary” (Shenkman, 1989, p. 135). Since then, college students have steadily engaged in a host of crimes (Weiss, 2013), with male-to-female sexual assault being one of the most common (Daigle, Mummert, Fisher, & Scherer, 2015). The main objective of this chapter is to provide a review of the current state of criminological empirical and theoretical knowledge on campus sexual assault. This offering concludes with a brief discussion on bystander intervention training, which is now one of the most widely used campus-based prevention and intervention strategies. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Patrick Lussier and Eric Beauregard; individual chapters, the contributors.
Abusive Endings offers a thorough analysis of the social-science literature on one of the most significant threats to the health and well-being of women today-abuse at the hands of their male partners. The authors provide a moving description of why and how men abuse women in myriad ways during and after a separation or divorce. The material is punctuated with the stories and voices of both perpetrators and survivors of abuse, as told to the authors over many years of fieldwork. Written in a highly readable fashion, this book will be a useful resource for researchers, practitioners, activists, and policy makers. © 2017 by Th e Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Since the mid-1980s, researchers across the United States have uncovered high rates of sexual assault among female college students. However, to advance a better understanding of this gendered type of victimization, and to both prevent and control this problem, the research community needs to identify its major correlates. One that is consistently uncovered in North American campus survey work is negative peer support, especially that provided by male peers. Yet, some earlier studies have found that mixed-sex negative peer support, too, contributes to campus sexual assault. Using recent data from the Campus Quality of Life Survey conducted at a large residential school in the South Atlantic region of the United States, the main objectives of this article are to examine the role of mixed-sex negative peer support in campus sexual assault and to identify the groups of women most at risk of having friends who offer such support.
This book challenges contemporary criminological thinking, providing a thorough critique of mainstream criminology, including both liberal criminology and administrative criminology. It sets a new agenda for theoretical and practical engagement, and for creating a more effective and just criminal justice system.
I have a lot of friends who have told me lately that they no longer read newspapers. This isn’t because they get their news on the internet now, but because they can’t stand to read news at all because the news is so grim. I haven’t gone that far, but I am sympathetic. It’s undeniable that reading the paper today is a fairly gruelling experience, because the news seems to be full of almost nothing but accounts of the various crises that afflict much of the planet. In particular, the global economic order most of us live under - so-called ‘free-market’ capitalism - seems to lurch from crisis to crisis and indeed often seems to be in a state of perpetual emergency.
Almost twenty-five years ago Jock Young described crime as a “moral barometer” of society—a “key indictor as to whether we are getting things right, achieving the sort of society in which people can live with dignity and without fear” (Young 1992, p. 34). Today, the pattern of violent crime around the world provides a particularly troubling reading of how far we are from “getting things right” in our contemporary global society, and it cries out for serious attention and action. But whether we will see that sustained attention, much less social action, on the scale we need in the coming years is by no means certain.
In 1988, Walter S. DeKeseredy announced Male Peer Support (MPS) Theory, which popularized the notion that certain all-male peer groups encourage, justify, and support the abuse of women. In 1993, DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz modified and expanded MPS Theory. Today, after twenty-five years of research, numerous studies from a diverse range of fields and practitioners support the original claim, providing a powerful explanation for the mechanism that underlies much of North America's violence against women. This book provides a history of the theory, traces its development and uses over a quarter century, and offers an update on Internet-generated abuse.
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Although awareness of campus sexual assault is at a historic high, institutional responses to incidents of sexual violence remain widely varied. The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence provides higher education scholars, administrators, and practitioners with a necessary and more holistic understanding of the challenges that colleges and universities face in implementing adequate and effective sexual assault prevention and response practices. In this volume, a diverse mix of expert contributors provide a critical, nuanced, and timely examination of some of the factors that inhibit effective prevention and response in higher education. Chapter authors take on one of the most troubling aspects of higher education today, bridging theory and practice to offer programmatic interventions and solutions to help institutions address their own competing interests and institutional culture to improve their practices and policies with regard to sexual violence.
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Feminist criminology grew out of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, in response to the male dominance of mainstream criminology – which meant that not only were women largely excluded from carrying out criminological research, they were also barely considered as subjects of that research.
This useful text provides a comprehensive introductory overview of the study of victims and victimization. Victimization is here considered as a reflection of American society. Taking a broad perspective, Elias argues that the study of victimology requires more than merely analyzing criminal justice; it requires linking it to much wider social, political and economic relations--especially to the American political economy. This study rejects the official definition of crime and victimization and establishes a relationship between victimology and human rights, thus advocating a "new" victimology which embraces victims of both crime and repression. Elias proposes that since much crime arises in response to various forms of oppression, a society unconcerned with human rights violations and its victims can likewise provide little help for crime victims.
There are 2 purposes for this book. In the 1st place, it is designed to be an introduction to the topic of sexual assault on college campuses. Throughout this book, we will present both theories and the latest empirical findings on a broad range of issues related to sexual assault. A few of the questions we will discuss include: How often does sexual assault occur? Is alcohol abuse related? What do we know about alcohol abuse today? Are fraternities more likely to be engaged in sexual abuse than other groups? Do education programs have an effect?
At the same time, we will be discussing our own theoretical model of male peer support.
What we will examine in this book is that many men remain in groups that actively support the emotional and sexual abuse of women. The authors have become convinced that male peer support is an integral underlying factor in campus sexual assault. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Many women are victimized by their boyfriends. Furthermore, male social networks may encourag e members to abuse their girlfriends. A review of relevant literature shows that social support theory may be useful for understanding this problem. The purpose of this paper is to describe this social psychological theory''s potential contribution to the study of woman abuse in dating relationships.
This paper explores issues related to the analysis of a type of criminality frequently ignored in criminological literature:
crimes of the state. It explores the potential of critical criminology to deal with state criminality via investigation of
such issues as state interventions, overlapping activities of criminal versus non-criminal organizations and the distinction
between individual and state actors. The paper specifically examines state criminality via analysis of the activities of the
CIA and FBI in the United States. These activities include methods of surveillance, wiretapping, mail tampering, and the use
of agents provocateurs. It also examines issues related to relativity in the definition of terrorism and the use of terrorism
by the state. It is argued that, unless criminologists begin to address these issues, criminologists may find themselves in
the awkward position of aiding the criminalization of non-criminal peoples around the world.
Confronting adult pornography
- W S Dekeseredy
DeKeseredy, W. S. (2018b). Confronting adult pornography. In W. S. DeKeseredy &
M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (2nd ed., pp. 455-464).
London, UK: Routledge.