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"How do you define rape?" When one does research on rape, this question is one of the most basic and common. Ostensibly, the question is about methodology. But if we scratch beneath the surface, it is fundamentally an ontological question: what is rape? This article explores where the threshold which separates sex that is okay from sex that is rape comes from. Does it come from a deeply embodied sense of being violated, a normative limit that is socially and/or legally constructed—or something else? Ultimately, the article suggests a reimagining of rape as a sexual trespass on the boundaries of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stalking among intimate partner is a vicious crime for the police to deal. Several aspects make the police work in intimate partner stalking (IPS) cases demanding for best actions: risk of escalation, reluctance of the victim to report, minimization by the police of impact of stalking, and lack of police skills in non-specialized trained units, increasing risk of secondary victimization. Dedicated types of protective orders (POs) such as warning measures are forms of administrative preventive measures the police can apply in stalking cases. Victims' perspectives on the efficacy and usefulness of these types of POs and the relationship between their use and the way victims report their experience with the police has been rarely investigated. The current study, conducted with 130 Italian victims of IPS who applied for—and obtained —a police warning measure for the stalker, aimed at looking at the efficacy of such measures and at assessing victims' perception of police work, based on victims' perspective and not on the police records on breaching orders. Results indicate that compared with the official police statistics on recidivism rates in stalking cases, the proportion of breaching orders reported by the victims is higher than official data, with over 50% of victims reporting after 1 year they were still stalked. Victims report an overall positive experience with the police and results show a significant relationship between positive experience with the police and perceived efficacy of police work. Results are discussed for purposes of improving training programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advantages and problems of weighting crime counts by harm inflicted are detailed. To obtain a better understanding of crime trends and distributions, victim judgements of the seriousness of offences committed against them derived from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) were analysed and used as weights of crime counts. The data were used to check whether there was a seriousness drop paralleling the crime drop of recent decades. There was, albeit somewhat less precipitous. Series crimes (i.e. repeated crimes against the same targets and presumed to be by the same perpetrators) account for an astonishing 39% of all crime and around 42% of crime weighted by seriousness. The article focuses on distributions across households. In line with our earlier work on crime events per se, the most victimized households have benefited most from the seriousness 'drop' in absolute terms, but still account for a similar proportion of total harm over time. A case is made for the use of CSEW victim seriousness judgement for a variety of analytic and practical purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study builds on previous work by Andresen by examining the effects of entry into the European Union (EU) on the levels of homicide in the 10 Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Andresen's research has indicated that accession to the EU led to increased levels of violent crime across municipalities in Lithuania over the 2001-2006 period. We go beyond prior work by using pooled cross-sectional time-series data that cover approximately 20 years for these 10 Eastern European nations. The results from fixed-effects regression analyses at the national level are generally consistent with Andresen's research, indicating that entry into the EU is positively associated with levels of homicide. In addition, we find that economic growth has a negative effect on homicide rates, whereas the divorce rate and income inequality have positive effects on homicide rates. These findings reaffirm for the sample of Eastern European countries results reported for other cross-national samples. However, our analyses also reveal that these structural covariates do not account for the observed relationship between EU entry and homicide rates. We conclude with a discussion of the some of the mechanisms that might be responsible for the EU effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the misconceptions involved in dealing section 309, Article 21 of the Indian Penal Code concerning laws related to suicide. Topics discussed include erroneous understanding that Indian Penal Code, consideration of suicide as an offence, constitutional challenges to the provision made before the Supreme Court in India on the issue, and the Right to personal liberty facet under Article 21.