Augustine Brannigan

Youthful Prostitution and Child Sexual Trauma

This paper has examined research that attempts to explain entry to prostitution in terms of the family experiences of young prostitutes. Though there is some evidence of rape, incest, and other kinds of sexual trauma in these backgrounds, this evidence is inconsistent and contradictory. A more plausible approach to the question is based on general control theories. Any traumas or conflicts that unattach children and youth from their families make youngsters highly vulnerable to delinquency. In the case of adolescent females, breach of family attachments appears to heighten the risk of early sexual involvements that, in the context of gender differences in sexual development, expose them to partners significantly older than themselves, and in significantly larger numbers than would otherwise be the case. These factors help explain the role of dysfunctional backgrounds in entry to prostitution without presupposing a role for unobservable traumas and psychiatric disturbances. They likewise recognize a role for the interaction between social control factors and the normal process of sexual development.

Practical Knowledge: Applying the Social Sciences.

Knowledge as a Capacity to Act Social Science and Practice The Science of Application Economic Policy as Applied Social Science Pragmatic Knowledge

The Genesis of Adolescent Risk- Taking: Pathways through Family, School, and Peers*

This paper presents an empirical examination of Sampson and Laubs social control theory. It tests the effects of family structure, family attachment, school attachment and peer attachment on a generalized form of risk-taking behaviour which includes delinquency and drug use. The data come from a single stratified sample of 1,075 high school students in Ontario. The findings suggest that the effect of family attachment on risk-taking is moderated by both school and peer involvement. When family attachment is low, school attachment inhibits risk-taking and strong peer attachment reinforces it.

Childhood maltreatment and subsequent conduct disorders: The case of female street prostitution

The large literature on childhood abuse and neglect reinforces the importance of the family as a developmental crucible in the formation of individual propensities to delinquent and conforming conduct (e.g., Cookston, 1999; Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990; Heck & Walsh, 2000; Loeber & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1986; McCord, 1979; Riley & Shaw, 1995; Sampson & Laub, 1993; West & Farrington, 1977). Often, the type of delinquent conduct exhibited is believed to correspond to the type of childhood maltreatment experienced during the early formative years in the family, resulting in ‘‘homotypic continuity’’ (Farley & Barkan, 1998; Farley & Kelly, 2000; Kagan, 1969; Goodman & Fallot, 1998; Messman-Moore & Long, 2000). Social learning theory suggests that childhood maltreatment incurs negative role models and that children may base their future behaviors on the models that they learn to imitate as children. Specific types of childhood maltreatment should therefore produce specific types of delinquency or conduct disorders, i.e., physical abuse leads to childhood aggression. Other analyses, however, suggest that childhood maltreatment is not predictive of specific future conduct disorders, but rather that the effects of maltreatment are more generalized, leading to ‘‘heterotypic continuity’’ in later life (Bennett, Hughes, & Luke, 2000; Brown, Cohen, Johnson & Salzinger, 1998; Kaufman & Widom, 1999; Kagan, 1969). Nowhere is this debate livelier than in the discussion of childhood predictors of female street prostitution and, specifically, the role of incest and sexual abuse in the genesis of prostitution involvement (Brannigan & Fleischman, 1989; Lowman, 1991). In the analysis here, we report the results of a study of problematic behaviors exhibited by a sample of prostitute females and a nonprostitute comparison group. Specifically, we investigate the role

The study of aggressive pornography: The vicissitudes of relevance

This paper reviews some crucial experimental studies of the behavioral consequences of exposure to violent or aggressive pornography and evaluates their validity and relevance as support for censoring pornography in the aftermath of the Meese Commission. We find this research deficient on a number of grounds. Many designs confound the effects of the stimuli with the anger of the subjects. The theoretical models consistently do not explain the results, and, to the extent that they do, such models do not offer support for censorship policies. The evidence of aggression is ambiguous and subject to contradictory interpretations. Means in factorial designs are reported incompletely, scales constructed incredibly (particularly the Likelihood to Rape Scale), and the experimental procedures relate only questionably to everyday realities. Consequently, while censorship policies might have a sound basis on moral and ideological grounds, this particular strain of research does not constitute a scientific basis for s...

The Controversy Over Pornography and Sex Crimes: The Criminological Evidence and Beyond:

Renewed governmental inquiries into the regulation of sexually explicit materials have revived interest in the relationship (if any) between pornography and sexual offences. In this article we review the criminological studies which have explored this relationship. Availability of sexually explicit materials appears to be unrelated to the frequency distributions of reported rape, though evidence points to a decline in child molestation. In the second part of the article we situate the putative link between pornography and sexual deviance within some of the contemporary theories of rape causation and some of the known social correlates of rape victims and offenders. Community, victim, offender and legislative characteristics would appear to be much more convincing explanations of variations in the rates of reported rape than the circulation of pornography and sexist repression attributed to it by certain feminist and Christian writers.

Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine

The current issue of Theory & Psychology is devoted to Stanley Milgram and his contribution to the study of obedience. It presents a decidedly critical evaluation of these well-known experiments that challenges their relevance to our understanding of events such as the Holocaust. It builds on recent investigations of the Milgram archive at Yale. The discipline’s adulation of the obedience research overlooks several critical factors: the palpable trauma experienced by many participants, and the stark skepticism of the deceptive cover-story experienced by many others, Milgram’s misrepresentation of the way in which the prods were undertaken to ensure standardization, and his failure to de-brief the vast majority of participants. There is also the cherry-picking of findings. The project was whitewashed in the film, Obedience, prepared by Milgram to popularize his conclusions. The articles contributed for this issue offer a more realistic assessment of Milgram’s contribution to knowledge.

Juvenile Prostitution and Mental Health: Policing Delinquency or Treating Pathology?.

Juvenile prostitution has been characterized alternatively as an expression of delinquency based on opportunity, and, as a form of pathological work chosen by adolescent victims of sexual abuse. Analysis of the trends in arrests for solicting in Canada suggest that the majority of persons arrested for soliciting are not juveniles. In addition, estimates of abuse in the background of prostitutes are extremely inconsistent. Questions are raised both about the relevance of the pathological model and the utility of treating soliciting as a crime.

Genocide and the Legal Process in Rwanda: From Genocide Amnesty to the New Rule of Law

Prior to the 1994 genocide, Rwandan law provided amnesty for persons who committed serious crimes in the service of the Hutu “Social Revolution” against the Tutsi elites. Murder and other criminal acts undertaken by Hutus who challenged Tutsi political domination were effectively forgiven by amnesty. The law was subsequently repealed during the reconstruction of Rwanda when the judicial system was restructured. This entailed the revitalization of the traditional Gacaca courts due to the enormous number of cases arising from the 1994 massacres. Simultaneously, it spurred constitutional changes to ensure the modernization of the rule of law. This article describes the amnesty law and its role in creating a culture of impunity that led to genocide. It explains how the Gacaca courts arose in the face of massive criminal caseloads and it describes the legal changes that reformed the judiciary and paved the way for constitutional guarantees of legal rights.

Book Review: The Disappearance of the Social in American Social Psychology

Greenwood argues for a most paradoxical thesis—the idea that the very centrality of ‘the social’ in American social psychology was abandoned in the 20th century and superseded by a social psychology premised on individual attributes. The social dimension he refers to is the supposition that cognitions, emotions, normative behavior, ego formation, personality, attitudes, stereotypes and so on develop primarily through the individual’s exposure to society, and particularly by the mediation of individual experience by group membership, reference groups and other meaningful social ties. This perspective was reflected in Wundt’s folk psychology, Durkheim’s conception of social facts as sui generis, McDougall’s analysis of the group mind, as well as the pioneering writings of J.M. Baldwin, W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, and Ellwood Faris, among others. ‘The fundamental distinction between social and individual psychological states and behavior . . . is grounded in a postulated difference in the manner in which the psychological states and behavioral dispositions of individual persons are engaged’ (p. 11). Faris notes, for example, that racial stereotypes in children emerge from group prejudice, and so are ‘socially engaged’ or socially acquired. Likewise, Muzafer Sherif’s studies of ‘individually and socially engaged “frames of reference” in relation to the “autokinetic effect” established the potency of social forms of perception: that is, perceptual judgments oriented toward previously established social norms’ (p. 180). This view began to be overtaken in the late 1930s by a more individualistic perspective, although it survived into the 1960s in the work of Asch and Sherif. Asch is mentioned since the subjects in his ‘line discrimination’ study were frequently acquainted with one another beforehand, suggesting they were more of a ‘genuine’ group than was found in typical experiments. The same would apply even more so in Sherif’s Robber Cave study, where days were spent cultivating ingroup loyalties, but the latter case is not discussed. Although Greenwood believes that the disappearance of the social was not an inevitable consequence of the wholesale adoption of experimental methods, he does point out that assumptions of statistical independence in the measurements of individual subjects progressively hounded natural groups from experimental investigation, leaving the field to the study of unattached social aggregates.