Of the crimes making contemporary news, mass shootings occur too frequently and result in a tremendous loss of life. Many represent offenders attempting to get even with immigrants, minorities, and others they think have hurt mainstream American culture. Sex offenders include trusted adults such as scout leaders, physicians, and politicians who victimize children, patients, and employees. Some offenders are highly educated and behave as though they are entitled to violate norms and laws. These contemporary offenses involve either exploitation or retaliation in response to a grievance. Both these behavioral responses are associated with the personality style known as narcissism.

Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

This chapter examines the broad legal framework governing sexual offences by examining the selected offences of rape and sexual assault, which provide a foundation for understanding other sexual offences. This chapter will also briefly discuss sexual offences against vulnerable individuals such as children. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge that technology increasingly poses in the area of sexual offences and considers how technology may facilitate traditional forms of offending or create new forms of offending.

1927 was a critical period in Pablo Neruda’s life. At the time, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Rangoon. He was a promising poet and a young diplomat hungry to see the world. Southeast Asia represented a season of solitude that he alleviated with his marriage to Maruca, with whom he would have his only daughter. The girl would die at an early age. In this region, he envisaged Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933). Through the letters to his friend Héctor Eandi and his travel chronicles, we learn the inner landscapes that occupied Neruda’s creative mind. A memorable poem written in this period is “El tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), which describes his tempestuous relationship with Josie Bliss. This period has been revisited lately due to the confession of a sexual assault of a young Tamil woman under his service expressed in his memoirs.

This chapter presents best practices for building comprehensive strategies to prevent sexual violence victimization and perpetration on college campuses. The chapter begins by reviewing the history of legislation that has evolved to not only support but require prevention programming on publicly funded campuses. While this legislation set the stage to ensure prevention programming on campuses, building prevention strategies that are comprehensive and inclusive is a challenge. The literature on the necessary elements making up a comprehensive strategy is presented. The remainder of the chapter reviews what the field has learned that promotes building such strategies. Using the application of the public health model (Mercy et al., 2003), the chapter discusses navigating successful team building, using data to assess campus needs, engaging in strategy selection, evaluating strategies, disseminating strategies that work, and promoting inclusive practices in the process.

Both research into mental illness and its care have largely been conceived of and designed by men. There is insufficient research into women’s experience of serious mental illnesses and training provided in how to help them. Some diagnoses have been only lately recognised in women; for example, autism and ADHD, which continue to be misdiagnosed. Services have striven to be ‘gender neutral,’ which in practice means primarily designed around men. Not only are women not treated with sufficient respect, dignity and compassion, but there is also evidence of widespread sexual assualt of women within mental health care and of frank abuse within services, with maltreatment associated with suicides of young women. Women are being re-traumatised. There is also insufficient recognition of the harms from and lack of adequate regulation of psychological therapy. Feminist psychiatrists are stuck between the two poles of mainstream feminism who see no role for psychiatry at all and defensive institutions. We need to ensure that women who are detained in hospital have advocacy and know their rights under the law, and build true collaboration across sectors to bring about change.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

This chapter charts sexual violence over time and place, showing substantial shifts in thinking about sex as violence, rape as an assault on property, emerging ideas of consent, and changing attitudes towards the victim and the offender. It traces how sexual violence was defined and understood, in both society and law, from the classical world to today, examining case studies that include rape, sodomy and offences against children. It examines the structural impediments to the prevention of sexual violence, and the social and legal barriers to justice when a crime did occur. It highlights the fact that responses to sexual violence vary between individuals and communities, though survivors reveal that many forms of sex might be experienced as violent or traumatic, regardless of whether the acts were normalised or criminalised. Ideas of sexual violence are read through intersectional lenses, highlighting the idea that normative ideas of gender, sexual identity, race and class heightened the potential for sexual exploitation of marginalised groups. Limited, fragmented or unrepresentative sources make it challenging to trace sexual violence in history, but it is imperative to do so, as sexual crimes have had a substantial impact on the life experiences of individuals and their families and communities.

This chapter describes crime victims’ decision to call or not to call the police, which we discuss in terms of the extent to which it is rational, social, and normative. Examining these decisions is especially important as citizens function as the gatekeepers of our system. Victimization is likely to cause distress, anger, fear, and disbelief, meaning that the reporting decision is subject both to biased judgment and to influence from others in the form of information, advice, and normative standards. Although crime seriousness is generally the most important predictor of the reporting decision, factors about the victim and the offender moderate this relationship. Serious crimes against women are often not reported, and although juveniles generally have higher rates of victimization than adults, they have lower rates of reporting. Recent concern about certain hate crimes also indicates low rates of reporting. Future research possibilities and policy implications are also discussed in this chapter.

What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.

After making an arrest, a police officer typically refers the matter to the local prosecutor’s office. Once presented with a case, that office decides whether to charge the defendant with a crime and, if so, which crime(s). Even if prosecutors initially file a charge, they can still dismiss the case later on. If prosecutors do not dismiss the case, they can seek an informal resolution (often called “diversion”), negotiate a plea bargain on behalf of the government, or take the case to trial. These decisions about which cases to prosecute, and how, are important contributors to the incarceration rate. As this chapter explains, over the era of Mass Incarceration, prosecutors’ primary contribution was to follow the lead of police and legislators. Prosecutors applied the new tools enacted by legislators leading to more severe punishments for crimes generally. And, perhaps most importantly, they uncritically accepted the new mix of arrests forwarded to them by police, flooding the courts with a higher proportion of cases that were easy to prove and punish.