Annie Cossins

Expert Witness Evidence in Sexual Assault Trials: Questions, Answers and Law Reform in Australia and England

A review of the psychological literature shows that jury-eligible citizens rely on a range of misconceptions based on victim and gender stereotypes when assessing the credibility of sexual assault complainants and rendering verdicts. Since these misconceptions are likely to account for the high attrition and low conviction rates in sexual assault trials in both England and Australia, this article investigates whether or not educative information ought to be admitted in these trials via an expert witness or a judicial direction. It also investigates the type of expert evidence that would be admissible in an adversarial context and the legislative models for doing so, based on Australian reforms. The article concludes by making four recommendations for reform to the laws of evidence in Australia, England and Wales.

The Cycle of Abuse When Victims Become Offenders

Various psychological theories exist in the literature to explain the behavior of men who commit child sex offences, including the belief that child sexual abuse (CSA) is a predisposing factor for the transition from victim to offender. These theories are, however, unable to explain the fact that while most victims of CSA are female, most perpetrators of CSA are male. The sex specificity of CSA in terms of victims and offenders suggests that the experience of CSA and its psychosocial effects may be different for boys, compared to girls. We hypothesize that CSA experiences may involve risk factors that affect the development of sexually abusive behavior for boys, rather than girls. Our aim was to determine whether the literature provides evidence of a cycle of abuse from victim to offender, and, if so, to document its characteristics. We undertook a comprehensive literature review of studies on both victims and offenders, including studies which revealed the following: age of onset of CSA, duration of abuse, gender of the abuser, the relationship between victim and abuser, grooming behaviors, the types and severity of abuse, and disclosure of abuse. While we found no evidence for the existence of a cycle of abuse for female CSA victims, we discovered evidence to support the existence of a cycle of abuse for male CSA victims who had experienced particular abuse characteristics. As an original contribution to the literature, we identified four factors that may be associated with a boy’s transition from victim to offender as well as the methodological issues to be addressed in future research. Based on criminological theories, we argue that these four factors share a common theme, that is, that they represent experiences of power (for the abuser) and powerlessness (for the victim).

Validation of the Child Sexual Abuse Knowledge Questionnaire

ABSTRACT A validation study of the Child Sexual Abuse Knowledge Questionnaire (CSA-KQ) was conducted on a sample of 1712 non-empanelled jurors in the greater Sydney area, Australia. The CSA-KQ contains nine items derived from empirical findings on common misconceptions about typical features of abuse offences, children’s responses to child sexual abuse, and their ability to give reliable evidence. Study 1 tested the factor structure of the questionnaire in a sample of 843 non-empanelled jurors. The best model indicated by exploratory factor analysis had two factors: the Impact of Sexual Abuse on Children and Contextual Influences on the Report. Study 2 cross-validated the findings and tested the predictive validity of the CSA-KQ in a realistic simulated trial in which an 11-year-old complainant alleged abuse by her grandfather. Confirmatory factor analysis replicated the findings of Study 1, showing strong reliability for each of the factors (ρy = 0.70 to ρy = 0.80) and for the CSA-KQ (ρy = 0.76). CSA-KQ scores were significantly correlated with the perceived credibility of the complainant (r = 0.23). Moreover, the CSA-KQ scores predicted verdict: jurors with greater knowledge about CSA were more likely to convict the defendant than jurors who knew less about CSA.

Masculinity and Sexual Abuse Explaining the Transition from Victim to Offender

Psychological theories attempt to prove the abnormality of child sex offenders’ behavior through a deterministic analysis, whereby particular psychological characteristics are considered to predict child sex offending. Such a focus ignores the structures of power that influence men’s lives, a man’s active engagement with that social context, and how we might understand child sexual abuse as part of that engagement. By considering the meanings that sexual behavior with children has for offenders’ lives as men, this article discusses how an offender’s body and the body of a child are related to the concepts of sexuality and potency, how those bodies are ascribed meanings by the individual offender and other men, as well as the analytic utility of social learning theory and the power/powerlessness theory for understanding why sexually abused boys rather than sexually abused girls are more likely to become sex offenders with reference to two case studies.

Introduction: ‘Dumb Brutes’ and Murderous Mothers

This introductory chapter launches a journey into the role of the sexed female body (defined below) in the criminalisation of infanticide and in the moral regulation of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the female body as a construct in two different historical periods when maternal infanticide became major public concerns: 1861–1870 and 1998–2003.

The Implications of the Body for Female Criminality

This book has focused on the type of criminality with which women, historically, have been associated—child-murder and infanticide. By contextualising this crime within a framework of moral regulation, I have investigated the role of the sexed body in morally regulating infanticidal women during two different periods: (i) the moral panic response to female baby-farmers during the mid-nineteenth century when rates of illegitimacy and infanticide were at an historical high and infanticide was a largely unpoliced, hidden crime which rarely resulted in arrests and convictions; and (ii) the exaggerated responses to cases of multiple familial infant deaths which resulted in the wrongful convictions of three women during the late twentieth century.

The Moral Regulation of Infanticidal Mothers

The previous chapter revealed that the image of perfect motherhood has a history rooted in the social and economic oppression of women, while this chapter describes how women’s sexuality and childbearing has been defined by various forms of moral regulation since at least the early seventeenth century. This moral regulatory framework is based on contradictory values whereby motherhood, as a social construct, is both a biological and a moral destiny because it comes ‘naturally’ to women. Images of the ideal mother populate Western culture in art, religion, television, fiction, film, poetry and folk stories, while women who have ambivalent feelings about motherhood have been the subject of myths that invoke the dark side of the sexed female body and images of the ‘wicked’ mother.

Regulation of the Female Body: Was Infanticide a Moral Panic of the Nineteenth Century?

In order to answer the question in the title of this chapter, it is necessary to document the development and significance of Victorian concepts of womanhood and motherhood, since it was in the Victorian period that female sexuality and the body became a critical issue for social commentators, legislators and the medical profession. What were the values associated with the female body during this time?