Rosemary Gartner

The Victims of Homicide: A Temporal and Cross-National Comparison

This paper develops and tests a model of cross-national and temporal variation in homicide rates using sex- and age-specific victimization data from 18 developed nations for the years 1950-1980. The results indicate that the structural and cultural factors that explain homicide rates in the United States are also associated with sex- and age-specific homicide rates in other countries. Some factors such as absolute deprivation and extent of official violence are associated with higher risks across victim types. Others have effects that vary by the sex or age of the victim. (EXCERPT)

Violence and crime in cross-national perspective

This prizewinning reference work provides data on crime in 110 nations and 44 major cities, making it possible for the first time to examine the patterns and causes of violent crime on a cross-national basis. Winner of the 1985 Prize for Behavioral Science Research from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Winner of the 1986 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Associations Criminology Section Winner of the 1985 Award for Outstanding Scholarship given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Winner of the Gordon Allport Prize from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

Women's Imprisonment

Incarceration of women in the United States is at a historic high, but understanding of womens experiences in prison, their responses to treatment, their lives after prison, and how changing prison regimes have affected these things remains limited. Individual attributes, preprison experiences, and prison conditions are associated with how women respond to incarceration, but assessments of their joint and conditional influences are lacking. Needs assessments abound, but systematic evaluations of interventions based on these assessments are rare, as are studies of the long-term consequences of imprisonment. Understanding of ways women negotiate power and construct their lives in prison is greater than in the past; new theoretical frameworks have provided important insights, but fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Differences in the Characteristics of Intimate Femicides The Role of Relationship State and Relationship Status

The relationship between a victim and an offender is critical to understanding the context and dynamics of homicide. It is recognized that the causes and correlates of homicides within intimate relationships differ from the causes and correlates of homicides by strangers. Systematic research has seldom examined, however, differences in the nature of intimate violence, particularly lethal violence, among intimate relationships that vary in the degree of intimacy and level of commitment. Such an examination is important, not only for understanding the phenomenon of intimate femicide, but also for explaining variations in the reactions to such acts. Using relationship state and relationship status to differentiate among various degrees of intimacy and commitment, we show that the characteristics of the people involved in intimate femicides as well as the circumstances surrounding the killing do differ by relationship type.

Women's involvement in serious interpersonal violence

The relationship between gender and acts of serious interpersonal violence has generated much scholarly interest and debate. Research now encompasses work on individual-level predictors that include biological, psychological, and environmental factors. Other scholars have focused on the situational correlates of violence involving women and men in order to determine what factors are associated with the initiation and outcome of violent events. Still others have looked at the distribution of violence by gender across time and space. This article evaluates and synthesizes work within each of these levels of analysis in an effort to identify critical research domains and questions that may help us to further understand the longstanding and marked gender differences in the nature and extent of interpersonal violence.

The Social Distribution of Femicide in Urban Canada, 1921-1988

How well do conventional perspectives on homicide account for the social distribution of femicide, or the killing of females? An analysis of 670 cases of femicide in Toronto and Vancouver from 1921 to 1988 provides stronger support for an alternative perspective that acknowledges both the intimate, domestic character of femicide and the historically contingent nature of opportunities and motivations for femicide. Rather than coming to resemble male homicide, femicide remains as concentrated in private, domestic locations and relationships as it was seventy years ago. However, the relationships between femicide and some social statuses, such as womens employment, have changed over time.

Female Violent Offenders: Moral Panics or More Serious Offenders?

Abstract Nearly 40 years ago, in research conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Ward and his colleagues, asked ‘Are women more aggressive in committing violent crimes today than in the past?’ The reason they asked this question, and others have continued to, is the common fear that women, as the putative gatekeepers of social morality, are changing. Using data from the same prison Ward and his colleagues relied on to document the nature of womens violent offences, we examine whether and how the characteristics and crimes of incarcerated female offenders have changed. In so doing, we also seek to explain observed patterns of stability and change over the last third of the 20th century in womens crimes of violence and the moral panics that circumscribe violent criminality by women.

The Spatial Distribution and Social Context of Homicide in Toronto’s Neighborhoods

Objectives: To examine the social ecology of homicide in Toronto, Canada. Method: Using both ordinary least squares regression and negative binomial models, we analyze the structural correlates of 965 homicides occurring in 140 neighborhoods in Toronto between 1988 and 2003. Results: Similar to research in U.S. cities, Toronto neighborhoods with higher levels of economic disadvantage, higher proportions of young and Black residents, and greater residential instability have higher homicide rates. In contrast to U.S. studies, Toronto neighborhoods with higher proportions of residents who are recent immigrants also have higher homicide rates. In multivariate models, only two of these characteristics—economic disadvantage and the proportion of residents aged 15 to 24—are significantly associated with homicide in Toronto’s neighborhoods. Despite low levels of both lethal violence and spatial inequality in Toronto, the correlates of homicide in its neighborhoods are similar in some respects to those in U.S. cities. Conclusion: Our findings lend support to the notion of invariance in some ecological covariates of homicide but also highlight the need to be cautious about generalizing from U.S.-based research on the relationship between immigration and homicide.

Is there room for resilience? A scoping review and critique of substance use literature and its utilization of the concept of resilience

Research in the area of illicit substance use remains preoccupied with describing and analyzing the risks of people who use drugs (PWUD), however more recently there has been a drive to use a strengths-based or resilience approach as an alternative to investigating drug use. This leads us to ask: what can be known about PWUD from the point of view of resilience? The objective of this scoping review is to analyze how the concept of resilience is defined, operationalized, and applied in substance use research. Popular health, social science, psychology, and inter-disciplinary databases namely: SCOPUS, PUBMED, PsycINFO, and Sociological Abstracts were searched. Studies were selected if they used the concept of resilience and if substance use was a key variable under investigation. A total of 77 studies were identified which provided a definition of resilience, or attempted to operationalize (e.g., via scales) the concept of resilience in some manner. Data were charted and sorted using key terms and fundamental aspects of resilience. The majority of studies focus on youth and their resistance to, or engagement in, substance use. There is also a small but growing area of research that examines recovery from substance addiction as a form of resilience. Very few studies were found that thoroughly investigated resilience among PWUD. Consistently throughout the literature drug use is presented as a ‘risk factor’ jeopardizing one’s ability to be resilient, or drug use is seen as a ‘maladaptive coping strategy’, purporting one’s lack of resilience. Currently, substance use research provides a substantial amount of information about the internal strengths that can assist in resisting future drug use; however there is less information about the external resources that play a role, especially for adults. Though popular, outcome-based conceptualizations of resilience are often static, concealing the potential for developing resilience over time or as conditions change. Studies of resilience among PWUD predominantly concentrate on health-related behaviours, recovery-related factors or predefined harm reduction strategies. Indeed, overall, current conceptualizations of resilience are too narrow to recognize all the potential manifestations of resilience practices in the daily lives of individuals who actively use drugs.

Interpersonal violence by authoritarian rulers: Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin compared

Why do some authoritarian rulers, such as Saddam Hussein, kill or torture other people personally, whereas others, like Joseph Stalin, delegate such violence to subordinates? Such politically motivated interpersonal violence committed by authoritarian leaders has never before been theorized. Through a comparison of Hussein and Stalin, we explain why some dictators engage in this behavior and others do not. We propose a model based on three components: the individuals prior habituation or non-habituation to violence; regime characteristics that ‘select for’ a personally violent or non-violent ruler; and, once a ruler takes power, the interaction of the first two variables. We also suggest that most communist regimes featured organizational characteristics that discouraged such violence by the leader.