Sexual offences against children: An exploration of attrition in the Northern Ireland criminal justice system

Objective: This paper uses data provided by the Police Service for Northern Ireland (PSNI) to compare the characteristics and outcomes of reported sexual offences involving child and adult victims and explore the factors associated with case outcomes.
Method: PSNI provided data on 8,789 sexual offences recorded between April 2001 and March 2006. Case outcomes were based on whether a case was recorded by police as having sufficient evidence to summons, charge, or caution an offender (detected). Where an offender was summonsed, charged, or cautioned, this is classified as detection with a formal sanction. A case can also be classified as "detected" without a formal sanction. The analysis focused on two key categories of detection without formal sanction: cases in which the police deem there to be sufficient evidence to charge an offender but took no further action because the victim did not wish to prosecute, or because the police or the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) decided that no useful purpose would be served by proceeding.
Results: The analysis confirmed that the characteristics of recorded sexual offences involving adult and child victims vary significantly according to gender, offence type, the timing of report and victim-offender relationship. Almost half of child sex abuse cases are not detected by police and a quarter do not proceed through the criminal justice system because either the victim declines to prosecute or the Police/PPS decide not to proceed. Only one in five child cases involved detection with a formal sanction. Child groups with lower detection with formal sanction rates included children under 5, teenagers, those who do not report when the abuse occurs but disclose at a later date; and those who experience abuse at the hands of peers and adults known to them but not related. The analysis also highlighted variation in formal sanction rates depending on where the offence was reported.
Conclusions: Consideration needs to be given to improving the criminal justice response to specific child groups as well as monitoring detection rates in different police areas in order to address potential practice variation.
Practice implications: Consideration needs to be given to improving the professional response in relation to with particularly lower detection with formal sanction rates. There is also a need to monitor case outcomes to ensure that child victims in different areas receive a similar service.

The Terror that Underpins the “Peace”: The Political Economy of Colombia's Paramilitary Demobilization Process

Studies on terrorism have traditionally focused on non-state actors who direct violence against liberal states. These studies also tend to focus on political motivations and, therefore, have neglected the economic functions of terrorism. This article challenges the divorce of the political and economic spheres by highlighting how states can use terrorism to realise interconnected political and economic goals. To demonstrate this, we take the case of the paramilitary demobilisation process in Colombia and show how it relates to the US-Colombian free trade agreement. We argue that the demobilisation process fulfils a dual role. First, the process aims to improve the image of the Colombian government required to pass the controversial free trade agreement through US Congress to protect large amounts of US investment in the country. Second, the demobilisation process serves to mask clear continuities in paramilitary terror that serve mutually supportive political and economic functions for US investment in Colombia.

Climate Change Mitigation and Intergenerational Justice

Existing climate change mitigation policies are particularly concerned with the reconciliation of two seemingly conflicting aims: environmental protection and economic efficiency. The normative principles underlying these policies meanwhile focus on two central ideas: fair burden-sharing and agents' responsibility. However, both existing policy instruments and their supporting philosophical principles are highly problematic in terms of intergenerational justice and truly effective climate change mitigation. Three competing conceptions for allocating and distributing the burdens of climate change mitigation (cap-and-trade schemes, carbon emission taxes, and personal ecological space quotas) and their compatibility with principles of intra- and intergenerational justice are analysed and evaluated. None of the proposed instruments is able to satisfy the demands of effective mitigation and egalitarian justice on its own, which suggests that existing proposals for the distribution of emission rights and climate change-related costs need to be supported by a thicker account of intergenerational justice.

Crime, justice and the legitimacy of military power in the international sphere

This article examines how a discourse of crime and justice is beginning to play a significant role in justifying international military operations. It suggests that although the coupling of war with crime and justice is not a new phenomenon, its present manifestations invite careful consideration of the connection between crime and political theory. It starts by reviewing the notion of sovereignty to look then at the history of the criminalisation of war and the emergence of new norms to constrain sovereign states. In this context, it examines the three ways in which military force has recently been authorised: in Iraq, in Libya and through drones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. It argues the contemporary coupling of military technology with notions of crime and justice allows the reiteration of the perpetration of crimes by the powerful and the representation of violence as pertaining to specific dangerous populations in the space of the international. It further suggests that this authorises new architectures of authority, fundamentally based on military power as a source of social power.