JustResearch Edition no. 9

Reviews (cont'd)

ASSESSING VICTIM COOPERATION IN ONE SPECIALIZED DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COURT

Dawson M., and Dinovitzer, R. (2001). Victim cooperation and the prosecution of domestic violence in a specialized court. Justice Quarterly, 18, 3, 593-622.

Reviewer: Alessandra Iozzo, Research Officer

Despite much research, legislation, and a growing public awareness, domestic violence continues to persist in Canada. Past analysis has shown that women continue to suffer significantly higher rates of physical violence. Domestic violence cases are often not prosecuted as social and legal hurdles persist in carrying the charge through to trial. The widely held belief, as identified by prosecutors and challenged by few, is that cases are often dropped because the victim becomes unwilling to cooperate with members of the criminal justice system. Prosecutors argue that if the victim suddenly changes her mind, recants, or refuses to testify, they are left without sufficient evidence to sustain a case. Dawson and Dinovitzer challenge this view through a multivariate analysis of 474 case records derived from a specialized domestic violence court in Toronto.

Designed to meet the needs of the mandatory arrest program for domestic violence calls, new measures are being taken by the police to ensure ample evidence exists in the event of a victim's unwillingness to cooperate. For example, after the charge has been laid, police officers ask the victim for a videotaped statement (the victim's permission is needed). The authors argue that in a court designed to meet the specific challenge and unpredictability of domestic violence cases, a victim's willingness to cooperate should have little effect on the prosecution of the case. Secondly, the authors seek to identify who among victims are the most likely to cooperate with members of the criminal justice system.

Data for the study was drawn from a specialized domestic violence court in Toronto, which commenced hearing cases in mid-January 1997. Corresponding case records obtained from the Victim/Witness Assistance Program (VWAP) supplemented the data. The study began on April 1, 1997, and continued until March 31, 1998. Cases were tracked from the initial charge to the final disposition. Cases in which the prosecutor withdrew the charges were also included, and the authors made note of the reasons why the charges were withdrawn. The sample revealed that 91 percent of victims were female, while 93 percent of defendants were male.

This study finds that victim cooperation continues to be a strong predictor of prosecution, despite the measures taken by the specialized court. That is to say, the more willing the victim is to cooperate, the more likely her case will be prosecuted. Dawson and Dinovitzer encourage the increased use of videotaped statements to further improve the prosecutor-victim relationship. The authors conclude that "cooperative victims tend to cooperate" (Dawson and Dinovitzer, 2001).

For the Department of Justice Canada, one of the most interesting research findings is the success of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program. The authors found that victims were more likely to cooperate with the overall process if they had met with victim/witness workers. Many of the victims reported feeling intimidated by the police and prosecutors but felt much more at ease with members of the program. Continued work with victims may allow them to participate more actively in the criminal justice process and, in turn, produce better results.

The authors acknowledge that the results of this study are difficult to generalize since they were collected in the first year of operation of a specialized domestic violence court. A follow-up study revealing similar results would strengthen the findings here. It would be interesting to see what future research will reveal, especially if the study were expanded to include regional, language, and cultural factors. Similarly, a deeper gender analysis would also enrich the current research. The authors further note that they made use of victim assistance records and procured interviews with some victims. However, due to time and practicability constraints, only 60 interviews were held and were not directly used in this study. Again, a follow-up study would be beneficial in examining the problem from the victims' perspective. Dawson and Dinovitzer have certainly succeeded in engaging both policy makers and academics in a fresh debate over the role victims play in the prosecution of domestic violence cases.

ADDRESSING YOUTH PROSTITUTION POLICY

Bittle, S. (July 2002). When protection is punishment: Neo-liberalism and secure care approaches to youth prostitution. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 317-350.

Reviewer: Alessandra Iozzo, Research Officer

Youth prostitution is a growing concern among policy makers, social activists, and youth workers. Recent trends in government policy view the young prostitute not as an offender but as a victim of sexual abuse. This article addresses the implications of secure care programs on young prostitutes and assesses the neo-liberal political reasoning behind such programs. These programs, such as the Alberta model in place since February 1998, grant child care workers and police the authority to detain for up to 72 hours a young person they believe to be in danger. The underlying philosophy is a "best interests of the child" policy, but curtailing one's liberty is rarely in one's best interest according to Bittle. Secure care programs are portrayed as decisive efforts undertaken by a provincial government to combat youth prostitution. However, a tension emerges between theory and practice when the young person is indirectly held responsible for the problem. Bittle argues that these programs actually put the onus, and consequently the blame, on the individual, the community, and the family to invoke change. These neo-liberal responses fail to challenge the power issues involved.

This article attempts to examine the following in reference to youth prostitution and secure care programs. Firstly, this article seeks to examine the impact of neo-liberal political reasoning on strategies to control crime and deviance and, secondly, to examine the sexual abuse discourse regarding youth prostitution and its impact on secure care strategies. Finally, this article attempts to reveal how sexual abuse discourse coupled with secure care strategies reinforce unbalanced power relations.

Although the language is theoretically dense at times, the analysis is provocative. Bittle persistently and convincingly argues that, beneath the surface, secure care programs reinforce complex power relations leaving the conditions that facilitate youth prostitution unchallenged. By limiting individual freedom, the state is exerting control. In the case of secure care programs, the state seeks to both control and protect. The sexual abuse discourse currently used to characterize youth involvement in prostitution serves to further compound the problem as it reinforces the victim-as-offender ideology. A limitation of this study is that, after an impressive examination of existing literature, his recommendation section is rather sparse. Closer examinations of the recommendations in address

YOUTH TRANSFERS TO ADULT COURT

Schindler, M. and Arditti, J.A. (2001). The Increased prosecution of adolescents in the adult criminal justice system: Impacts on youth, family and community. Marriage and Family Review, 32, 3-4, 165-187.

Reviewer: Jill Edgar, Research Officer

"Adult time for adult crime!" is the catchy slogan used by advocates of the get-tough approach in response to the perceived "epidemic" of violent youth crime. An outcome of this get-tough ideology is that an increasing number of American youth are being transferred to adult court and serving their sentences in adult institutions. The transfer of youth to the adult criminal justice system is ostensibly done to protect the public; however, the scant amount of empirical research conducted in this area indicates that this practice is actually placing the public at greater risk (Bishop, Frazier, Lanza-Kaduce & Winner, 1996).

Schindler and Arditti critically review the impacts the proliferation of transfer policies in the United States has had on youth, their families, and their communities and add the voice of experience to this small body of literature with a narrative account of a youth transferred to adult court. The authors discuss the high rates of suicides and sexual assaults among youth who are transferred to the adult criminal justice system. Much of the discussion on the impacts of youth transfers to adult court on the family is drawn from research on adult offenders, highlighting the necessity for research in this area. Given the over-representation of minorities in the American juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, it is minority communities that suffer the consequences of youth transfers to adult court. For example, the authors state that transferred youth are more likely to recidivate earlier and commit a more serious offence than adolescents who are processed in the juvenile system. The article concludes with "Gene's" story to illustrate the consequences transfer policies have had on this youth, his family, and his community.

The authors rely heavily on descriptive accounts to demonstrate the implications of transfer policies – most likely because of the dearth of empirical data on this subject. They proceed to make recommendations based upon the sole narrative account they provide, trusting the reader to assume that this experience is typical for all transferred youth. Furthermore, the authors fail to recommend that more empirical research be conducted in this area given their predictions that transfer rates will continue to rise.

Despite the fact that the American situation varies considerably from Canada's in terms of its criminal justice philosophy, the consequences of the transfer policies in the United States-the high rates of suicide and sexual assault, increased recidivism, and fragmented families-should be viewed by Canada as an opportunity to better research transfers. Under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the age a youth can receive an adult sentence is fourteen years. The previous transfer provisions of the Young Offenders Act, however, have been eliminated in favour of trying all youth in youth court and, once guilt has been determined, electing for an adult or youth sentence. There exists a virtual absence of information in Canada, however, on previous youth transfers to adult court. For instance, little is known of the types of sentences youth received when tried as an adult and the reality of their experiences in prison (e.g., what programs were taken, time spent in protective custody, suicide attempts. The Research and Statistics Division is attempting to address this knowledge gap by collecting data on youth in Canada who were transferred to adult court during the last five years in order to better describe and understand what happened to them as they proceeded through the adult criminal justice system.

References

Bishop, D., Frazier, C., Lanza-Kaduce, L., and Winner, L. (1996). "The transfer of juveniles to criminal court: Does it make a difference?" Crime and Delinquency, 42, 171-191.

GROUP CRIME IN CANADA

Carrington, P.J. (July 2002). Group crime in Canada. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 277-315.

Reviewer: Fernando Mata, Senior Research Officer

Using information from the revised Unified Crime Reporting survey (UCR-2) covering the 1992-1999 time period, Professor Carrington focuses his attention on the dynamics of group crime in Canada. Using Reiss (1988) and others as theoretical guides, he distinguishes crime committed by lone offenders and cooffenders, the latter group consisting of two or more offenders. He also differentiates group crimes such as youth crime from those where criminal activities are of a more organised nature.

Looking at 2.9 million crime incidents reported by police forces, Carrington finds that group crime is not a common occurrence among young offenders or among young adults. Only 44% of the former group and 25% of the latter offended with identified accomplices. Despite its salience in the mass media, youth crime committed in groups of three or more constituted only 1% of all recorded incidents. Thus, the data contradicted other official sources and analyses done on group crime around the world. The author responds to this discrepancy by arguing that the UCR-2 undercounts group crime due to the fact that police officers may be more stringent in the inclusion of "chargeable" offenders. In addition, UCR-2 comprises a wide variety of offences rather than the limited offences collected by other official sources.

In the second part of the paper, Carrington turns his attention towards the age and gender patterns in co-offending. Group crime peaks at 71% at the age of eight and plunges to 23% when individuals reach the age of 20. Pair offending is found somewhat more common among females than males, and offending in groups of three or more is slightly more common among males than females. Group crime is also more prevalent in serious types of violent crimes such as homicide and attempted murder as well as in property crimes such as break and enter, arson, and robbery.

Looking at each individual offence, Carrington finds that the great majority of crimes involved a lone offender. This pattern is observed among children, young adult, and adult populations. He finds discrepancies with the findings of the 1999 General Social Survey on Victimization, where at least for robberies, co-offending was estimated in 49% of incidents (in contrast with only 28% found in the UCR-2). Neither American nor European research seem to corroborate these findings. Professor Carrington questions the veracity of victims' reporting in self-reporting surveys. Philosophically, he asks: who is right about the prevalence of group crime - the victim or the police? (Carrington, 2002) He suggests that the answer may depend on what we are asking: plain "involvement" or "legal" implication in an offence. Exploring this question requires further analysis.

In the final part of the article, the author ponders theoretical explanations for group crime. Functional and developmental theories are highlighted. To attempt to find support for any of these explanations, co-offending is examined in detail by type of offence and age of offender. He concludes that developmental theory, simply an association with certain peers over the life cycle, is supported over the functional theory of group crime. As he does in previous sections, Carrington ends the article by raising questions about the data quality of UCR-2, the inability of the police to identify all those involved in crimes, and the impossibility of distinguishing incidence from prevalence of co-offending with the data at hand.

In spite of frequent lamentations about UCR-2 and about why the data is not in agreement with other official sources, Professor Carrington does a good job at discovering some important patterns regarding group crime in Canada (e.g., higher among children and teenaged offenders, decline of importance after age 20, and the possible presence of developmental related factors in this process). The reader is left with the impression that group crime is a very difficult phenomenon to study in Canada, or anywhere for that matter. Administrative data usually provides only rough information about the number of individuals involved in a crime incident as recorded by police officers. Self-reporting surveys, where the victim is supposed to have a better recollection of the number of offenders involved in a crime incident, are not exempt from systematic errors such as recall biases and social desirability influences. Professor Carrington's recipe for unveiling the mysteries of group crime in Canada is to triangulate these data sources and study individual crime careers in a longitudinal fashion. This is definitely good advice.

In terms of the policy value of the article, it is clear that the kind of social networks established at different points of the life cycle may play an important role in explaining group crime in Canada. Effective rehabilitation approaches should include interventions related to these types of variables, particularly when dealing with young recidivist offenders. Given certain psychological traits, many would more likely be predisposed to commit crime in the company of others rather than alone.

References

Reiss, A.J. (1988). "Co-offending and Criminal Careers." In M. Tonry and N. Morris (Eds.), Crime and Justice: Annual Review of Research, Vol. 10, Chicago: Chicago University Press.