Second-to-Fourth Digit Ratio and Impulsivity: A Comparison between Offenders and Nonoffenders

Personality characteristics, particularly impulsive tendencies, have long been conceived as the primary culprit in delinquent behavior. One crucial question to emerge from this line of work is whether impulsivity has a biological basis. To test this possibility, 44 male offenders and 46 nonoffenders completed the Eysenck Impulsivity Questionnaire, and had their 2D:4D ratio measured. Offenders exhibited smaller right hand digit ratio measurements compared to non-offenders, but higher impulsivity scores. Both impulsivity and 2D:4D ratio measurements significantly predicted criminality (offenders vs. nonoffenders). Controlling for education level, the 2D:4D ratio measurements had remained a significant predictor of criminality, while impulsivity scores no longer predicted criminality significantly. Our data, thus, indicates that impulsivity but not 2D:4D ratio measurements relate to educational attainment. As offenders varied in their number of previous convictions and the nature of their individual crimes, we also tested for differences in 2D:4D ratio and impulsivity among offenders. Number of previous convictions did not correlate significantly with the 2D:4D ratio measurements or impulsivity scores. Our study established a link between a biological marker and impulsivity among offenders (and lack thereof among non-offenders), which emphasise the importance of studying the relationship between biological markers, impulsivity and criminal behavior.

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.

Reparative Complementarity: Ensuring an Effective Remedy for Victims in the Reparation Regime of the International Criminal Court

This article examines the reparation regime of the International Criminal Court in light of its first reparation decision. Based on the reparation jurisprudence established in international law and human rights law to provide victims of international crimes an effective remedy, this article suggests that in order for the International Criminal Court to achieve this objective it needs to go beyond individual criminal responsibility due to its limitations. This article considers the role of reparative complementarity in ensuring an effective remedy to victims of international crimes as part of the reparation regime of the International Criminal Court.

Deconstructing Victim and offender Identities in Discourses on Child Sexual Abuse: Hierarchies, Blame and the Good/Evil Dialectic

Contemporary social and political constructions of victimhood and offending behaviour lie at the heart of regulatory policies on child sexual abuse. Legislation is named after specific child victims of high profile cases, and a burgeoning range of pre-emptive measures are enacted to protect an amorphous class of ‘all potential victims’ from the risk sex offenders are seen as posing. Such policies are also heavily premised on the omnipresent predatory stranger. These constructed identities, however, are at odds with the actual identities of victims and offenders of such crimes. Drawing on a range of literatures, the core task of this article is to confront some of the complexities and tensions surrounding constructions of the victim/offender dyad within the specific context of sexual offending against children. In particular, the article argues that discourses on ‘blame’ – and the polarised notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’ – inform respective hierarchies of victimhood and offending concerning ‘legitimate’ victim and offender status. Based on these insights, the article argues for the need to move beyond such monochromatic understandings of victims and offenders of sexual crime and to reframe the politics of risk accordingly.

Justice for Victims before the International Criminal Court

Many prosecutors and commentators have praised the victim provisions at the International Criminal Court (ICC) as 'justice for victims', which for the first time include participation, protection and reparations. This book critically examines the role of victims in international criminal justice, drawing from human rights, victimology, and best practices in transitional justice.

Drawing on field research in Northern Uganda, Luke Moffet explores the nature of international crimes and assesses the role of victims in the proceedings of the ICC, paying particular attention to their recognition, participation, reparations and protection. The book argues that because of the criminal nature and structural limitations of the ICC, justice for victims is symbolic, requiring State Parties to complement the work of the Court to address victims' needs.

In advancing an innovative theory of justice for victims, and in offering solutions to current challenges, the book will be of great interest and use to academics, practitioners and students engaged in victimology, the ICC, transitional justice, or reparations.

Realising Justice for victims before the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been celebrated for its innovative victim provisions, which enable victims to participate in proceedings, avail of protection measures and assistance, and to claim reparations. The impetus for incorporating victim provisions within the ICC, came from victims’ dissatisfaction with the ad hoc tribunals in providing them with more meaningful and tangible justice.1 The International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY/R) only included victim protection measures, with no provisions for victims to participate in proceedings nor to claim reparations at them. Developments in domestic and international law, in particular human rights such as the 1985 UN Declaration on Justice for Victims and the UN Guidelines on Remedy and Reparations, and transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions and reparations bodies, have helped to expand the notion of justice for international crimes to be more attuned to victims as key stakeholders in dealing with such crimes.

With the first convictions secured at the ICC and the victim participation and reparation regime taking form, it is worth evaluating the extent to which these innovative provisions have translated into justice for victims. The first part of this paper outlines what justice for victims of international crimes entails, drawing from victimology and human rights. The second section surveys the extent to which the ICC has incorporated justice for victims, in procedural and substantive terms, before concluding in looking beyond the Court to how state parties can complement the ICC in achieving justice for victims. This paper argues that while much progress has been made to institutionalise justice for victims within the Court, there is much more progress needed to evolve and develop justice for victims within the ICC to avoid dissatisfaction of past tribunals.

TARGETED BIOMETRIC IMPERSONATION

When applying biometric algorithms to forensic verification, false acceptance and false rejection can mean a failure to identify a criminal, or worse, lead to the prosecution of individuals for crimes they did not commit. It is therefore critical that biometric evaluations be performed as accurately as possible to determine their legitimacy as a forensic tool. This paper argues that, for forensic verification scenarios, traditional performance measures are insufficiently accurate. This inaccuracy occurs because existing verification evaluations implicitly assume that an imposter claiming a false identity would claim a random identity rather than consciously selecting a target to impersonate. In addition to describing this new vulnerability, the paper describes a novel Targeted.. FAR metric that combines the traditional False Acceptance Rate (FAR) measure with a term that indicates how performance degrades with the number of potential targets. The paper includes an evaluation of the effects of targeted impersonation on an existing academic face verification system. This evaluation reveals that even with a relatively small number of targets false acceptance rates can increase significantly, making the analysed biometric systems unreliable.

Personalising Crime and Crime-fighting in Factual Television:an Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images

This article addresses the lack of work on media and crime in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), using an example of a factual television crime report. The existing research in media studies and criminology points to the way that the media misrepresents crime by distorting public understandings and backgrounding structural issues, such as poverty, which are related to crime thereby legitimising a criminal justice system that serves the interests of the powerful in society. Using social actor and transitivity analysis, this article shows how multimodal CDA can make an important contribution as it reveals the more subtle linguistic strategies and visual representations by which this process is accomplished, showing how each plays a part in the recontextualisation of social practice. This programme backgrounds which crimes are committed but foregrounds mental states and the neutrality of policing.

Sexual Abuse in Institutional Contexts

This chapter adopts a cross-national comparative perspective on institutional child sexual abuse. It seeks first to provide a critical overview of a range of high profile inquiries and official reviews into allegations of institutional child abuse and the dominant transnational themes arising from them. It also seeks to highlight the dynamics of what I have previously termed 'institutional grooming' (McAlinden, 2006) and the features of the organisational environment which both facilitate institutional child sexual abuse and help mask its discovery or disclosure. In so doing, the analysis examines the tension between what others have termed 'preferential' or 'situational' sexual offending – that is whether offenders deliberately set out to gain employment which affords access to children or whether the motivation to sexually offend only emerges after they become ensconced in an institutional environment. Finally, the article concludes by offering some suggestions for combatting institutional grooming and sexual abuse.

Risk, Regulation and the Reintegration of Sexual Offenders

Media reporting of and public concern about sexual offending, particularly relating to children, affects and reflects political, policy and organisational responses to those convicted of such crimes. The development of regulatory policies on sexual offending has taken place within a highly emotive and overtly politicized public and policy discourse. This chapter charts the various ways in which the risks imagined or posed by sexual offenders have been conceptualised within public discourses and regulated and managed under the legislative and organisational ‘risk paradigm.’ Ultimately, it argues that risk-based responses to sexual offending are at best uncertain in their effects and at worst counterproductive, in that they often reduce the potential for successful reintegration. In seeking to look ‘beyond risk’, the chapter also explores the usefulness of restorative and related practices in supporting sex offender reintegration aimed at the primary and secondary levels of harm prevention.

Elaborating Justice for Victims at the International Criminal Court: Beyond Rhetoric and the Hague

Justice for victims has often been invoked as the raison d’être of international criminal justice, by punishing perpetrators of international crimes. This article attempts to provide a more holistic account of justice for victims by examining victims’ needs, interests, and rights. The International Criminal Court itself includes participation, protection and reparation for victims, indicating they are important stakeholders. This article also suggests that victims are integral to the purpose of the ICC in ending impunity by ensuring transparency of proceedings. However, there are limits to the resources and capacity of the ICC, which can only investigate and prosecute selected crimes. To overcome this justice gap, this article directs the debate towards a victim-orientated agenda to complementarity, where state parties and the Assembly of State Parties should play a greater role in implementing justice for victims domestically. This victim-orientated complementarity approach can be achieved through new ASP guidelines on complementarity, expanding universal jurisdiction, or seeking enforcement and cooperation through regional and international bodies and courts, such asUniversal Periodic Review or the African Court’s International Criminal Law Section. In the end, ifwe are serious about delivering justice for victims we need to move beyond the rhetoric, with realistic expectations of what the ICC can achieve, and concentrate our attention to what states should bedoing to end impunity.

Beyond Attribution: Responsibility of Armed Non-State Actors for Reparations in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Uganda

This chapter explores the responsibility of armed non-state actors for reparations to victims. Traditionally international law has focused on the responsibility of the state, and more recently the responsibility of convicted individuals before the International Criminal Court, to provide reparations for international crimes. Yet despite the prevalence of internal armed conflict over the past few decades, there responsibility of armed groups for reparations has been neglected in international law. Although there is a tentative emerging basis for armed groups to provide reparations under international law, such developments have not yet crystallized into hard law. However, when considering the more substantive practice of states in Northern Ireland, Colombia and Uganda, a greater effort can be discerned in ensuring that such organizations are responsible for reparations. This paper finds that not only can armed non-state actors be held collectively responsible for reparations, but due to the growing number of internal armed conflict they can play an important role in ensuring the effectiveness of reparations in remedying victims’ harm. Yet, finding armed groups responsible for reparations is no panacea for accountability, due to the nature of armed conflicts, responsibility may not be distinct, but overlapping and joint, and such groups may face difficulties in meeting their obligations, thus requiring a holistic approach and subsidiary role for the state.

Penser la guerre au XXIe siècle

Ce numéro était déjà sous presse quand, le 13 novembre 2015, Paris était une nouvelle fois la cible d’attentats terroristes d’une ampleur sans précédent, faisant plus d’une centaine de morts. Le Président François Hollande parla cette fois, de manière répétée, d’‘un acte de guerre’. Des voix solidaires se sont élevées des quatre coins de la planète, soulignant bien que, à travers la France, ce sont bien les valeurs qu’elle représente et qu’elle partage avec nombre de pays que les assassins de Daech visaient. Parmi tous les messages de solidarité, il nous semble important de souligner celui d’Hassan Rohani, le Président iranien, et celui d’Abdelaziz Bouteflika, le Président algérien: immédiatement, le premier ‘condamn[ait] avec vigueur ces crimes contre l'humanité et présent[ait] [s]es condoléance au peuple français endeuillé et au gouvernement’; le second dénonçait sans réserve ‘cette horreur planifiée [qui] constitue un véritable crime contre l'humanité’. Quant à Anouar Kbibech, le nouveau président du Conseil français du culte musulman, il ‘condamn[ait] avec la plus grande vigueur ces attaques inqualifiables’ et ‘appel[ait] à se regrouper autour de ces valeurs qui font la France’. Plus que jamais, il faut éviter les amalgames pour ne pas faire le jeu des minorités extrémistes.