The Smallest Victims

This book provides a review of how child maltreatment has been socially constructed, ignored, and formally responded to as it tells the story of how America's system of child protection has evolved. Additionally, it identifies key questions and related issues. When child maltreatment occurs, it strikes chords in our hearts because we sense the terrible injustice inherent in the matter: children are innocent and not able to protect themselves. This book provides readers with an overview of how perceptions of child maltreatment have changed over the years and how the American child protection system has evolved to keep pace with them, revealing the historical origins of current child protection issues and surveying efforts to find solutions. The Smallest Victims is unique in stressing the subjective and relative nature of the social construction of child maltreatment as it includes abuse and neglect. It identifies historical social factors and links them to perceptions of child maltreatment and responses to it. How maltreatment was once perceived in pre-American and American societies, for example, has had significant implications on the reactions it elicited, from tolerance to outrage. The book devotes a chapter to the exploitation of children in the labor market and as sexual victims, timely subjects given the national interest in human trafficking. Other chapters explore state intervention in family affairs and when children are removed from their homes. The book also includes a detailed timeline that denotes critical milestones since antiquity.

Race and Crime: A Text Reader includes a collection of recent articles on race and crime published in a number of leading criminal justice journals, along with original textual material that serves to explain and unify the readings. Through discussion of selected articles, numerous topics are explored, including the historical, social, economic and political contexts of race and crime, such as class, gender, comparative perspectives, justice issues, theories and statistics.

This book provides a review of how child maltreatment has been socially constructed, ignored, and formally responded to as it tells the story of how America's system of child protection has evolved. Additionally, it identifies key questions and related issues. When child maltreatment occurs, it strikes chords in our hearts because we sense the terrible injustice inherent in the matter: children are innocent and not able to protect themselves. This book provides readers with an overview of how perceptions of child maltreatment have changed over the years and how the American child protection system has evolved to keep pace with them, revealing the historical origins of current child protection issues and surveying efforts to find solutions. The Smallest Victims is unique in stressing the subjective and relative nature of the social construction of child maltreatment as it includes abuse and neglect. It identifies historical social factors and links them to perceptions of child maltreatment and responses to it. How maltreatment was once perceived in pre-American and American societies, for example, has had significant implications on the reactions it elicited, from tolerance to outrage. The book devotes a chapter to the exploitation of children in the labor market and as sexual victims, timely subjects given the national interest in human trafficking. Other chapters explore state intervention in family affairs and when children are removed from their homes. The book also includes a detailed timeline that denotes critical milestones since antiquity.

This innovative collection presents original theoretical analyses and previously unpublished empirical research on criminal victimisation. Following an overview of the development and deficiencies of victimology,subsequent chapters present more detailed challenges to stereotypical conceptions of victimisation through their focus on: male victims of domestic violence; victims of male-on-male rape; corporate victims; and the 'victim-offenders' who are the recipients of IRA punishment beatings. The second half of the book considers criminal justice responses to victimisation, focusing in particular on the potential of, and limits to, restorative justice, the social (and gendered) construction of the victim within contested trials and the exclusionary nature of current 'victim-centred' initiatives. This important book will further the debate on how we conceptualise victims as well as their appropriate role within the criminal justice system. New Visions of Crime Victims will be of interest to academics, students, criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers. It has particular implications for scholarship in the fields of victimology, restorative justice and feminist approaches to criminology and criminal justice. The integration of work by established criminologists, such as Carolyn Hoyle, Paul Rock, Andrew Sanders and Richard Young with that of young, previously unpublished scholars, makes for an interesting and stimulating book. As well as being a valuable addition to the literature, it can be used to support undergraduate and postgraduate courses in criminal justice and criminology.

This Brief provides an overview and history of the definition of serial homicide, from the perspectives of psychology, medicine, criminology and forensics. It reviews research to provide a standard definition of serial homicide (as opposed to multiple or mass homicide), and provide insights on profiles of victims and offenders for police practitioners. It also includes a discussion of the media approach to covering serial homicide. The Brief is divided into four major sections covering: definitions and overview of serial homicide, profiling perpetrators according to different typologies, profiling victims, applied case studies, and recommendations for investigation and prevention. The author’s approach is aimed primarily at researchers in police studies, but will be of interest to researchers in related fields such as criminal justice, sociology, psychology, and public policy.

This book accurately identifies the various forms of identity theft in simple, easy-to-understand terms, exposes exaggerated and erroneous information, and explains how everyone can take action to protect themselves. Identity theft is a classic crime with a modern (and perhaps decidedly American) twist. The rise of technology over the past few decades—and its influence on the processes of modernization and globalization—has created many new opportunities for identity theft both locally and internationally. Moreover, this process has transformed the nature of identity from something largely personal to something almost purely financial. Although identity theft is not a global crime per se, it does pose a pervasive and universal threat that will need to be acknowledged and addressed by many nations throughout the world. In this text, author Megan McNally examines the concept of identity theft in universal terms in order to understand what it is, how it is accomplished, and what the nations of the world can do—individually or collectively—to prevent it or respond to it.