Adam J. Pritchard

A Multidimensional Examination of Campus Safety Victimization, Perceptions of Danger, Worry About Crime, and Precautionary Behavior Among College Women in the Post-Clery Era

Using data from a spring 2004 telephone survey of 1,010 female undergraduate and graduate students at one southeastern state university, the authors examine the objective and subjective experiences with sexual assault or coercion, physical assault, and stalking among college women, paying particular attention to whether actual victimization experiences while in college coincide with cognitive assessments of campus risk, emotionally based worry about crime, and fear-related precautionary behavior. Furthermore, the authors explore whether these interrelationships might be perpetrator specific, focusing on differences in risk perception, worry, or precautionary behavior across acquaintance versus stranger-perpetrated victimization experiences. Results suggest that there is a loose coupling between actual victimization and subjective crime experiences. Implications for how colleges and universities publicly report crime and victimization, as mandated by the Clery Act, are discussed in light of these findings.

Fear of Acquaintance Versus Stranger Rape as a "Master Status": Towards Refinement of the "Shadow of Sexual Assault"

Using a sample of 1010 women from a southeastern state university, we explore whether associations between fear of sexual assault and other crime-specific fears vary based on presumed victim-offender relationship. More specifically, we assess the extent to which fear of stranger- and acquaintance-perpetrated sexual assaults differ in the extent to which they are correlated with fear of other crime victimizations. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that both fear of stranger-perpetrated sexual assault and fear of acquaintance-perpetrated sexual assault were positively associated with nearly all other crime-specific fears under examination. However, associations were particularly strong between fear of sexual assault by a stranger and fear of other stranger-perpetrated crimes. Findings have significant implications for how academic institutions should comprehensively address direct and indirect negative influences of violence against college women.

Lethal and Other Serious Assaults Disentangling Gender and Context

Women represent a relatively small percentage of known violent offenders, a disproportionality in offending that increases as the severity of the crime increases. The exception is intimate partner homicide where some studies find U.S. rates of offending by women approach those of men. Although the literature makes clear that significant gender differences exist in the commission of homicide, a more contextualized picture of the female offenders and the pathways leading to criminal offending does not exist. This study uses data from one state’s correctional system to examine the circumstances under which females kill or seriously assault intimate partners and, in particular, assesses the tenability of a prevailing stereotype that has been invoked to describe female intimate partner violence.

Criminal Offending Among Respondents to Protective Orders: Crime Types and Patterns That Predict Victim Risk

Research has shown that respondents to protective orders have robust criminal histories and that criminal offending behavior often follows issuance of a protective order. Nonetheless, the specific nature of the association between protective orders and criminal offending remains unclear. This study uses two classes of statistical models to more clearly delineate that relationship. The models reveal factors and characteristics that appear to be associated with offending and protective order issuance and provide indications about when a victim is most at risk and when the justice system should be most ready to provide immediate protection.

The Denial of Emergency Protection: Factors Associated with Court Decision Making

Despite the importance of civil orders of protection as a legal resource for victims of intimate partner violence, research is limited in this area, and most studies focus on the process following a court’s initial issuance of an emergency order. The purpose of this study is to address a major gap in the literature by examining cases where victims of intimate partner violence are denied access to temporary orders of protection. The study sample included a review of 2,205 petitions that had been denied by a Kentucky court during the 2003 fiscal year. The study offers important insights into the characteristics of petitioners and respondents to denied orders and outlines individual, contextual, structural, qualitative/perceptual, and procedural factors associated with the denial of temporary or emergency protective orders. Recommendations for statutory changes, judicial education, and future research to remedy barriers to protection are offered.

Relationship and Injury Trends in the Homicide of Women Across the Life Span: A Research Note

In 2006, more than 3,600 women in the United States lost their lives to homicide. Descriptive data regarding homicides of women are beginning to reveal important complexities regarding victim—offender relationships, severity of injury, and age of female homicide victim. More specifically, there is some indication that the correlation between victim—offender relationship and injury severity may be conditional, depending on victim age. This retrospective review accessed medical examiner records of female homicide victims from 2002 through 2004, and its findings offer additional illumination on the trends in associations of injury and relationship variables in the homicide of women over their life span. The study also examined the utility of the recently proposed Homicide Injury Scale (HIS) created by Safarik and Jarvis as a potential tool to explore these complicated associations by quantifying injury severity and examining its interrelationships with victim—offender relationship and age in cases of female homicide in Kentucky.

Nonfatal Strangulation as Part of Domestic Violence: A Review of Research:

This article reviews recent scholarship around the issue of nonfatal strangulation in cases of domestic violence. In the mid-1990s, the San Diego City Attorney’s Office began a systematic study of attempted strangulation among 300 domestic violence cases, becoming one of the first systematic research studies to specifically examine the prevalence of attempted strangulation as a form of injury associated with ongoing domestic violence. Prior to this time, most of the research into strangulation was conducted postmortem, and little was known about the injuries and signs of attempted strangulation among surviving victims. This article reviews the research that has since been conducted around strangulation in domestic violence cases, highlighting topics that are more or less developed in the areas of criminology, forensic science, law, and medicine, and makes recommendations for future research and practice.

A Qualitative Comparison of Battered Women’s Perceptions of Service Needs and Barriers Across Correctional and Shelter Contexts

This study explores the confluence of victimization and incarceration to contribute to the understanding of battered women’s experience of the criminal justice system. Building on previous qualitative research investigating pathways to incarceration for battered women, this study utilizes qualitative data from 10 focus-group interviews to investigate and compare battered women’s experiences with victimization, help-seeking, and perceptions of incarceration across four different site types: jails, prisons, shelters, and post-release support groups. The study makes comparisons across these sites and identifies site-specific service needs and perceived barriers to meeting these needs. These data also reveal three ways battered women perceive incarceration to operate with respect to their service needs: as a symbolic barrier, as a potential opportunity, and as a structural barrier. The association of these divergent perspectives on incarceration with specific locations in the criminal justice system and the implications for targeted interventions based on these findings are discussed.

RURALITY-URBANISM AND PROTECTIVE ORDER SERVICE: A RESEARCH NOTE

ABSTRACT Examination of contextual effects on legal case processing has a long tradition. However, that tradition largely emphasizes jurisdiction-level variation in outcomes at the point of arrest, prosecution, or adjudication within the criminal justice system. In the area of domestic violence specifically, however, additional stages of “justice” come into play, including those surrounding the processing of civil protective orders. There has been a recent call for attention to jurisdiction-level variation in the issuing and serving of such protective orders, with particular emphasis placed on understanding more fully apparent contextual differences that correspond with rural-urban court location. This paper responds to that call with a county-level analysis of non-service of issued protective orders using data from every county in one state. Findings suggest that rurality is positively associated with rates of non-service. The effect of rurality, however, appears substantially mediated by an SES index presumed to tap resource deprivation. Measures of population heterogeneity/instability play less of a mediating role but have significant associations with non-service nonetheless.

Improving identification of strangulation injuries in domestic violence: pilot data from a researcher-practitioner collaboration

Efforts to partner researchers and practitioners have the potential to significantly improve both research and response to non-fatal strangulation within the context of domestic violence. Non-fatal strangulation is far more common than most formal data suggest and is a highly gendered form of domestic assault often used to control or intimidate a partner; however, depending on how the assault takes place, it can leave little obvious physical evidence to an untrained investigator. The present study estimates the occurrence of strangulation cases and possible strangulation cases that may not be explicitly classified as such in official police reports due to inadequacies in law enforcement training. We offer a description of these types of cases as they compare with domestic violence police reports from non-strangulation cases. Results highlight the gendered nature of strangulation as well as the importance of practitioners and researchers critically reflecting on issues within the criminal justice system in an effort to redress inadequacies, hold offenders accountable, and save lives.