"Secoituxesta järjettömäin luondocappalden canssa" : Perversiot, oikeuselämä ja kansankulttuuri 1700-luvun Suomessa

Bestiality was in the 18th century a more difficult problem in terms of criminal policy in Sweden and Finland than in any other Christian country in any other period. In the legal history of deviant sexuality, the phenomenon was uniquely widespread by international comparison. The number of court cases per capita in Finland was even higher than in Sweden. The authorities classified bestiality among the most serious crimes and a deadly sin. The Court of Appeal in Turku opted for an independent line and was clearly more lenient than Swedish courts of justice. Death sentences on grounds of bestiality ended in the 1730s, decades earlier than in Sweden. The sources for the present dissertation include judgment books and Court of Appeal decisions in 253 cases, which show that the persecution of those engaging in bestial acts in 18th century Finland was not organised by the centralised power of Stockholm. There is little evidence of local campaigns that would have been led by authorities. The church in its orthodoxy was losing ground and the clergy governed their parishes with more pragmatism than the Old Testament sanctioned. When exposing bestiality, the legal system was compelled to rely on the initiative of the public. In cases of illicit intercourse or adultery the authorities were even more dependent on the activeness of the local community. Bestiality left no tangible evidence, illegitimate children, to betray the crime to the clergy or secular authorities. The moral views of the church and the local community were not on a collision course. It was a common view that bestiality was a heinous act. Yet nowhere near all crimes came to the authorities' knowledge. Because of the heavy burden of proof, the legal position of the informer was difficult. Passiveness in reporting the crime was partly because most Finns felt it was not their place to intervene in their neighbours' private lives, as long as that privacy posed no serious threat to the neighbourhood. Hidden crime was at least as common as crime more easily exposed and proven. A typical Finnish perpetrator of bestiality was a young unmarried man with no criminal background or mental illness. The suspects were not members of ethnic minorities or marginal social groups. In trials, farmhands were more likely to be sentenced than their masters, but a more salient common denominator than social and economical status was the suspects' young age. For most of the defendants bestiality was a deep-rooted habit, which had been adopted in early youth. This form of subculture spread among the youth, and the most susceptible to experiment with the act were shepherds. The difference between man and animal was not clear-cut or self-evident. The difficulty in drawing the line is evident both in legal sources and Finnish folklore. The law that required that the animal partners be slaughtered led to the killing of thousands of cows and mares, and thereby to substantial material losses to their owners. Regarding bestiality as a crime against property motivated people to report it. The belief that the act would produce human-animal mongrels or that it would poison the milk and the meat horrified the public more than the teachings of the church ever could. Among the most significant aspects in the problems regarding the animals is how profoundly different the worldview of 18th century people was from that of today.

Rwanda Crisis and Genocide in Case Law of Rwanda Tribunal

After the Second World War the public was shocked to learn about the horrors perpetrated. As a response to the Holocaust, the newly established United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention of 1948 to prevent future genocides and to punish the perpetrators. The Convention remained, however, almost dead letter until the present day. In 1994, the long-lasted tension between the major groups of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda erupted in mass scale violence towards the Tutsi ethnic group. The purpose was to eradicate the Tutsi population of Rwanda. The international community did not halt the genocide. It stood by idle, failing to follow the swearing-in of the past. The United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (the ICTR) to bring to justice persons responsible for the genocide. Ever since its creation the ICTR has delivered a wealth of judgements elucidating the legal ingredients of the crime of genocide. The case law on determining the membership of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups has gradually shifted from the objective to subjective position. The membership of a group is seen as a subjective rather than objective concept. However, a totally subjective approach is not accepted. Therefore, it is necessary to determine some objective existence of a group. The provision on the underlying offences is not so difficult to interpret compared to the corresponding one on the protected groups and the mental element of genocide. The case law examined, e.g., whether there is any difference between the words killing and meurtre, the nature of mental harm caused by the perpetrator and sexual violence in the conflict. The mental element of genocide or dolus specialis of genocide is not thoroughly examined in the case law of the ICTR. In this regard, reference in made, in addition, to the case law of the other ad hoc Tribunal. The ICTR has made a significant contribution to the law of genocide and international criminal justice in general. The corpus of procedural and substantive law constitutes a basis for subsequent trials in international and hybrid tribunals. For national jurisdictions the jurisprudence on substantive law is useful while prosecuting international crimes.

Tytöt, pojat ja sukupuolinen häirintä

In this research I ask what is interpreted as sex-based harassment by 15-16-year old girls and boys. By sex-based harassment I refer to one-sided, unwanted attention that is based on gender and that makes the target feel embarrassed, frightened, hurt or angry. My focus is not on the most overt cases of harassment but rather on everyday encounters. While young people differentiate between harassing and non-harassing attention, at the same time they define, assign value to and construct differences and power relations on the basis of gender, age and ethnicity, for example. My main data consists of essays (N 104, 54 girls, 54 boys) and thematic interviews (N 14; 20 girls, 3 boys) of ninth graders of a secondary school in Helsinki. In the essays and interviews, students construe the border between pleasant and unpleasant, tolerable and intolerable attention as clear in principle, but, they suggest that in practice this border is ambivalent, negotiable and contextual. The interpretations of incidents are justified by referring to features of the target, the scene or the perpetrator. Targets of harassment are most often construed as being girls who are characterized as thin-skinned, but at the same time they are expected to be understanding toward any sex-based attention they may get, particularly when it is not physical. On the other hand, girls are regarded as equal and even active participants in incidents of harassment. Such statements include considerations of how girls either reject or invite particular kinds of attention by their actions and outward appearance. Forms of harassment, ways of understanding it as well as overcoming it vary according to spatial context. By situating incidents in different spaces and places, young people contrast their experiences with ordinary and predictable non-harassment that takes place e.g. in discos and unusual and unexpected harassment that takes place e.g. in the city streets in the daytime. The behaviour of boys harassing a girls is naturalized by appealing to young masculinity and the childishness but also strong sexual drive which is seen as characteristic of teenage boys. On the other hand, sex-based harassment is racialized and pathologized in ways that separate the phenomenon from young, Finnish, normal masculinity. Both the material experiences of the young people and the definitions of the parties involved in harassing incidents are gendered. Girls encounter and deal with sexualized commenting and unwanted approaches much more often and in a more intensive way than boys. Furthermore, there is a vast cultural repertoire of acceptable accounts that can be mobilised in order to excuse male harassers, to critically evaluate the appearance or action of the female targets and to divide the responsibility between the female target and the male perpetrator.

Organisational Responses to Workplace Harassment: An Exploratory Study

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to explore what kind of measures personnel managers have taken to intervene in workplace harassment and to explore how organisational characteristics and the characteristics of the personnel manager affect the choice of response strategies. Design/methodology/approach – The study was exploratory and used a survey design. A web-based questionnaire was sent to the personnel managers of all Finnish municipalities and data on organisational responses and organisational characteristics were collected. Findings – The study showed that the organisations surveyed relied heavily on reconciliatory measures for responding to workplace harassment and that punitive measures were seldom used. Findings indicated that personnel manager gender, size of municipality, use of “sophisticated” human resource management practices and having provided information and training to increase awareness about harassment all influence the organisational responses chosen. Research limitations/implications – Only the effects of organisational and personnel manager characteristics on organisational responses were analysed. Future studies need to include perpetrator characteristics and harassment severity. Practical implications – The study informs both practitioners and policy makers about the measures that have been taken and that can be taken in order to stop harassment. It also questions the effectiveness of written anti-harassment policies for influencing organisational responses to harassment and draws attention to the role of gendered perceptions of harassment for choice of response strategy. Originality/value – This paper fills a gap in harassment research by reporting on the use of different response strategies and by providing initial insights into factors affecting choice of responses.

Bullying and organisational politics in competitive and rapidly changing work environments

This paper argues that workplace bullying can in some cases be a form of organisational politics, that is, a deliberate, competitive strategy from the perspective of the individual perpetrator. A cross-sectional study conducted among business professionals revealed that there was a correlation between a politicised and competitive climate and bullying. This finding implies that globalisation, increased pressures for efficiency, and restructuring, which limits the number of management positions and thereby contributes to increased internal competition, may lead to more bullying. The findings have important implications for management, since the possible political aspects of bullying must be taken into account in order to be able to undertake successful prevention and intervention measures.