disproportionate punishments are punishments passed or enforced without considering the criteria of proportionality, namely the criteria of harm done, the absolute or relative seriousness of crimes, the kind of committed crime and offender characteristics, the degree and kind of victim culpability. considering the penological aims, such as retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence and securing so...

Cyberstalking (CS) can have major psychosocial impacts on individuals. Victims report a number of serious consequences of victimization such as increased suicidal ideation, fear, anger, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology. Research is largely limited to quantitative outcome research. This study examines the diversity of experiences reported by people who define th...

Recent changes in juvenile justice policies have stimulated debate among legal professionals and social scientists. As such, public opinion concerning juvenile offenders is an important and timely topic for empirical study. In the present study, respondents read a scenario about a juvenile who committed a crime, and then decided on a sentence and rated perceptions of the juvenile's accountabili...

Impression management refers to an individual's deliberate efforts to cultivate a particular image. Sometimes impression management occurs in reaction to a face threatdan incident or behavior that could create an impression inconsistent with one's desired self-image. On social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, where content can be shared widely and is often persistent, studies have repeate...

The crime of virtual property theft has become a serious problem in virtual worlds in recent years. Players of these games are repeatedly falling victim to this crime, with little or no repercussion for the offender. Virtual property often has a substantial real world monetary value and the theft of such items impacts greatly on victims. The problem of virtual property theft is complex, involvi...

This review examines the psychological impact of adult sexual assault through an ecological theoretical perspective to understand how factors at multiple levels of the social ecology contribute to post-assault sequelae. Using Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1986, 1995) ecological theory of human development, we examine how individual-level factors (e.g., sociodemographics, biological/genetic factors), ...

ABSTRACT This paper provides a review of Benjamin Mendelsohnvs delineation of a typology of criminal victims. The typology consists of six categories: (1) completely innocent victims; (2) victims with minor guilt; (3) voluntary victims; (4) victims more guilty than the offender; (5) victims who alone are guilty; and (6) the imaginary victims. It is noted by the author that of the six categories...

A case of a 61-year-old African-American male who sexually assaulted and murdered four individuals, of different ethnicities and both genders, is reported. The subject additionally engaged in sexual activity with each victim postmortem. Each murder is reviewed in detail, and the subjective state of the offender during the murders is commented upon. Psychological test data are reviewed. The subj...

Joseph Fredericks--one of Canada's most notorious sex offenders--was defined through the institutions that dealt with him from his infancy to his death to the inquest held after his death. In this paper, we locate in historical context and compare the different narratives that were constructed of his life in each of these institutional settings from unwanted child to 'mental defective' to psych...

The present investigation evaluated relations between bullying, victimisation, multiple dimenstions of self-concept, sex and age over two occasions for a large sample of students (N =3445) from six high schools in Year 7 to 11. In Study 1, there was strong psychometric support (confirmatory factor analysis and reliability) for two new instruments; a new short version of the widely used Self Des...