Social psychological aspects of rape: a study of recorded rape and images of rape victimisation

This thesis is organised into four parts. In Part 1 relevant literature is reviewed and presented in three chapters. Chapter 1 examines legal and cultural factors in identifying the. boundaries of rape. Chapter 2 discusses idiographic features· and causal characteristics of rape suspects and victims. Chapter 3 reviews the evidence relating to attitudes toward rape,. attribution of responsibility to victims and the routine management of rape cases by the police. Part II comprises an experimental investigation of observer perception of the victims of violent crime. The experiment, examined the processes by which impressions were attributed to victims of personal crime. The results suggested that discrepancies from observers' stereotypes were an important factor in their polarisation of victim ratings. The relevance of. examining . both the structure and process of' impression, formation was highlighted. Part III describes an extensive field study in which the West. Midlands police files on rape for an eight year period (1071-1978) were analysed. The study revealed a large number of interesting findings related to a wide range of relevant features of the crime. Further, the impact .of common misconceptions and "myths" of rape were investigated across the legal and judicial processing of rape cases. The evidence suggests that these "myths" lead·to differential biasing effects at different stages in the process. In the final part of this thesis,. salient issues raised by the experiment and field study .are discussed·within the framework outlined in Part 1. Potential implications for future developments and research: are presented.

Representations of voluntary childlessness in the UK Press, 1990-2008

Representations of voluntary childlessness — the declaration by an individual that he or she does not wish to bear or raise children — were studied in 116 articles published in British national newspapers in the period 1990—2008. Media framing analysis was used to examine broad patterns of framing of the topic, identifying four frames: voluntary childlessness as an individual rights issue, as a form of resistance, as a social trend, and as a personal decision. These frames, it is argued, may act as potential ‘scripts’ for newspaper readers who are debating the decision to start a family.

Looking for redemption in a globalised North:representations of the Arctic in Judith Hermann’s Short Stories Kaltblau (Cold –Blue) and Die Liebe zu Ari Oskarsson (Love for Ari Oskarsson)

This paper explores the literary representation of Iceland and Norway in two short stories by contemporary German writer Judith Hermann. It analyses both the depiction of these countries as part of the globalised western world and the redemptive power they are tentatively ascribed by the author. Continuing a long German tradition of looking at Scandinavia from an almost colonial perspective, Hermann on the one hand presents these northern countries as a mere extension of central Europe, largely devoid of distinguishing national characteristics. At the same time she makes reference to the topos of the north as a vast and empty space and highlights both the specific arctic nature of the environment and the effect it has on her urban characters, who find themselves on a search for meaning and orientation in a postmodern fragmented world. Despite Hermann's overall sceptical attitude towards her characters' quest for happiness, these northern locations ultimately appear as potential places of self-realisation and enlightenment.

The Riesz transform and simultaneous representations of phase, energy and orientation in spatial vision

To represent the local orientation and energy of a 1-D image signal, many models of early visual processing employ bandpass quadrature filters, formed by combining the original signal with its Hilbert transform. However, representations capable of estimating an image signal's 2-D phase have been largely ignored. Here, we consider 2-D phase representations using a method based upon the Riesz transform. For spatial images there exist two Riesz transformed signals and one original signal from which orientation, phase and energy may be represented as a vector in 3-D signal space. We show that these image properties may be represented by a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the higher-order derivatives of the original and the Riesz transformed signals. We further show that the expected responses of even and odd symmetric filters from the Riesz transform may be represented by a single signal autocorrelation function, which is beneficial in simplifying Bayesian computations for spatial orientation. Importantly, the Riesz transform allows one to weight linearly across orientation using both symmetric and asymmetric filters to account for some perceptual phase distortions observed in image signals - notably one's perception of edge structure within plaid patterns whose component gratings are either equal or unequal in contrast. Finally, exploiting the benefits that arise from the Riesz definition of local energy as a scalar quantity, we demonstrate the utility of Riesz signal representations in estimating the spatial orientation of second-order image signals. We conclude that the Riesz transform may be employed as a general tool for 2-D visual pattern recognition by its virtue of representing phase, orientation and energy as orthogonal signal quantities.

Transatlantic representations of Religion

Introduction to special issue: Transatlantic representations of religion

“Seismic cultural change?”: British media representations of same-sex ‘marriage’

The legal recognition of same-sex relationships is a contested terrain that has been hotly debated by feminists. This article provides a social constructionist analysis of the UK newspaper media coverage around the time of the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act (2004). In examining the 348 national newspaper coverage over a three month period (November 2005–January 2006) we highlight three prevalent, and conflicting, themes: ‘same-sex marriage becomes legal under the Civil Partnership Act’; ‘couples will not get full legal status’ and ‘marriage is a heterosexual business’. We discuss these media representations and argue that the heteronormativity of the coverage provided little space for more radical constructions of same-sex relationship recognition.

Migration and divisions:thoughts on (anti-) narrativity in visual representations of mobile people

This article developed as part of a dialogue between the two authors. The dialogue was sparked off by MARLEY's response to a seminar presentation by GILLIGAN. In keeping with its origins we have retained the dialogue format. The article focuses on two sets of images—one a still image taken by a photojournalist, the other a sequence of stills taken by one of the authors. The authors use these images to explore the question "what imbues an image with narrative content?" and to explore the possibilities for developing a positive visual representation which promotes the idea of open borders. The article draws on linguistic theory to explore the grammar of visual narrative and relates this to the issue of the visual representation of immigration in contemporary Europe.

From icon to naturalised icon:a linguistic analysis of media representations of the BP Deepwater Horizon crisis

This research explores how news media reports construct representations of a business crisis through language. In an innovative approach to dealing with the vast pool of potentially relevant texts, media texts concerning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill are gathered from three different time points: immediately after the explosion in 2010, one year later in 2011 and again in 2012. The three sets of 'BP texts' are investigated using discourse analysis and semi-quantitative methods within a semiotic framework that gives an account of language at the semiotic levels of sign, code, mythical meaning and ideology. The research finds in the texts three discourses of representation concerning the crisis that show a movement from the ostensibly representational to the symbolic and conventional: a discourse of 'objective factuality', a discourse of 'positioning' and a discourse of 'redeployment'. This progression can be shown to have useful parallels with Peirce's sign classes of Icon, Index and Symbol, with their implied movement from a clear motivation by the Object (in this case the disaster events), to an arbitrary, socially-agreed connection. However, the naturalisation of signs, whereby ideologies are encoded in ways of speaking and writing that present them as 'taken for granted' is at its most complete when it is least discernible. The findings suggest that media coverage is likely to move on from symbolic representation to a new kind of iconicity, through a fourth discourse of 'naturalisation'. Here the representation turns back towards ostensible factuality or iconicity, to become the 'naturalised icon'. This work adds to the study of media representation a heuristic for understanding how the meaning-making of a news story progresses. It offers a detailed account of what the stages of this progression 'look like' linguistically, and suggests scope for future research into both language characteristics of phases and different news-reported phenomena.

Resisting the final word:challenging stale media and policy representations of students’ performative technological encounters in university education

This article explores powerful, constraining representations of encounters between digital technologies and the bodies of students and teachers, using corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It discusses examples from a corpus of UK Higher Education (HE) policy documents, and considers how confronting such documents may strengthen arguments from educators against narrow representations of an automatically enhanced learning. Examples reveal that a promise of enhanced ‘student experience’ through information and communication technologies internalizes the ideological constructs of technology and policy makers, to reinforce a primary logic of exchange value. The identified dominant discursive patterns are closely linked to the Californian ideology. By exposing these texts, they provide a form of ‘linguistic resistance’ for educators to disrupt powerful processes that serve the interests of a neoliberal social imaginary. To mine this current crisis of education, the authors introduce productive links between a Networked Learning approach and a posthumanist perspective. The Networked Learning approach emphasises conscious choices between political alternatives, which in turn could help us reconsider ways we write about digital technologies in policy. Then, based on the works of Haraway, Hayles, and Wark, a posthumanist perspective places human digital learning encounters at the juncture of non-humans and politics. Connections between the Networked Learning approach and the posthumanist perspective are necessary in order to replace a discourse of (mis)representations with a more performative view towards the digital human body, which then becomes situated at the centre of teaching and learning. In practice, however, establishing these connections is much more complex than resorting to the typically straightforward common sense discourse encountered in the Critical Discourse Analysis, and this may yet limit practical applications of this research in policy making.

The discursive construction of evidence in police interviews:case study of a rape suspect

This article presents an analysis of the discursive construction of evidence in an English police interview with a rape suspect. The analytic findings differ from previous research on police–suspect interview discourse, in that here the interviewers actively lead an interviewee to produce defence evidence. The article seeks to make the following contributions: (i) it demonstrates the interactional mechanisms through which the interviewers co-construct the interviewee’s own version of events, and highlights the potential legal ramifications by focusing on the construction of one key evidential aspect, namely, consent; (ii) it lends weight to the hypothesis that interviewer agendas are strongly determinative of interview outcomes in terms of the evidential account produced, while making the important new contribution of showing that this is not simply a case of police interviewers being inevitably prosecution-focused; and (iii) it aims to provoke further investigation into the significance of interviewer discursive influence in cases where consent is at issue, against a backdrop of increasing numbers of rape cases being discontinued by the police at this early stage of the criminal justice process.

“I thought I’d be safe there”:pre-empting blame in the talk of women reporting rape

One routine “common sense” means of explaining sexual violence is the ideologically facilitated tendency to blame the victim, and previous research has identified patterns of victim-blaming in the talk of perpetrators of rape, and also in that of the professionals who deal with rape in their day-to-day work. This article focuses on the discursive resources drawn on in police interviews by rape victims themselves as they attempt to account for their own behaviour in relation to the attack. It identifies and describes points within interviewees’ talk where they produce “accounts” (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), and considers what these tell us about the participants’ shared understanding of what is relevant to the on-going talk. Occasions when there is evidence of a mis-match in the understanding of the participants will also be discussed. The analyses illustrate that for the accounts of interviewees to be heard as relevant, a number of prevalent and problematic themes of victim-blaming must be assumed. Interviewees anticipate and pre-empt implications that various aspects of their own behaviour contributed to their attack, and interviewers vary in the level of skill they display at negotiating these shared understandings.

Die Poetik des Extremen. Ausschreitungen einer Sprache des Radikalen:excesses of a language of radical

Gibt es eine Traditionslinie extremistischer Poetiken in der deutschsprachigen Literatur? Uwe Schütte untersucht anhand literarischer Texte ab dem späten 18. Jahrhundert den Konnex zwischen historischen Phänomenen wie Revolution, Krieg oder Terrorismus und extremen biografischen Umständen wie Schizophrenie für die Herausbildung radikaler Schreibweisen. Die Spannbreite der behandelten Autoren reicht dabei von der Klassikertrias Kleist, Hölderlin und Büchner über Schriftsteller des 20. Jahrhunderts wie Ernst Jünger oder Hans Henny Jahnn bis zu den Gegenwartsautoren Ernst Herbeck und Rainald Goetz. The study investigates aesthetic representations of extremism in German-language literature from around 1800 to the present. Its aim is to examine the interplay between three different areas: historical circumstances, (auto)biographical issues, and literary texts. Discussed are texts by both major and marginal writers from various genres, ranging from classics such as Heinrich von Kleist or Friedrich Hölderlin to the marginalised poet Ernst Herbeck or the contemporary writer Rainald Goetz. Subjects and factors considered include extremist phenomena in modern history (such as revolutions, wars, terrorism) and extreme individual experiences (such as suicide or schizophrenia) on the aesthetic domain(s) with regard to the production of literary discourses that could be considered as extremist. These manifest themselves in the development of what can be viewed as ‘radical poetics’, decidedly innovative styles of writing and moral or political transgression in fiction. Being the first critical attempt to trace the history of radical discourses in German literature, the study explores the validity of creating an aesthetic category of 'literary extremism'.

Category learning induces position invariance of pattern recognition across the visual field

Human object recognition is considered to be largely invariant to translation across the visual field. However, the origin of this invariance to positional changes has remained elusive, since numerous studies found that the ability to discriminate between visual patterns develops in a largely location-specific manner, with only a limited transfer to novel visual field positions. In order to reconcile these contradicting observations, we traced the acquisition of categories of unfamiliar grey-level patterns within an interleaved learning and testing paradigm that involved either the same or different retinal locations. Our results show that position invariance is an emergent property of category learning. Pattern categories acquired over several hours at a fixed location in either the peripheral or central visual field gradually become accessible at new locations without any position-specific feedback. Furthermore, categories of novel patterns presented in the left hemifield are distinctly faster learnt and better generalized to other locations than those learnt in the right hemifield. Our results suggest that during learning initially position-specific representations of categories based on spatial pattern structure become encoded in a relational, position-invariant format. Such representational shifts may provide a generic mechanism to achieve perceptual invariance in object recognition.

Rape myth in true and false rape allegations

Police records of 38 rape allegations, evenly split into maintained-as-true and withdrawn-as-false categories were compared with 19 generated-false statements from recruited participants. The Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (IRMAS) was used to assess the attitudes of the participants and a content analysis derived from IRMAS was used to compare the three categories of allegation. Rape myths were present in all three allegation types. The two categories of false allegation both contained more rape myths than the true allegations but no differences were found between the generated and withdrawn false allegations. High scorers in IRMAS also produced more violent false accounts. In addition to these findings, this study provides support for the further examination of rape myths in both false and true statements and use of generated allegations as proxies for real false statements.

"Well did you feel jealous?" Control and ideology in police interviews with rape complainants

The methods used by the UK Police to investigate complaints of rape have unsurprisingly come under much scrutiny in recent times, with a 2007 joint report on behalf of HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary concluding that there were many areas where improvements should be made. The research reported here forms part of a larger project which draws on various discourse analytical tools to identify the processes at work during police interviews with women reporting rape. Drawing on a corpus of video recorded police interviews with women reporting rape, this study applies a two pronged analysis to reveal the presence of these ideologies. Firstly, an analysis of the discourse markers ‘well’ and ‘so’ demonstrates the control exerted on the interaction by interviewing officers, as they attach importance to certain facts while omitting much of the information provided by the victim. Secondly, the interpretative repertoires relied upon by officers to ‘make sense’ of victim’s accounts are subject to scrutiny. As well as providing micro-level analyses which demonstrate processes of interactional control at the local level, the findings of these analyses can be shown to relate to a wider context – specifically prevailing ideologies about sexual violence in society as a whole.