By Jennifer E. Storey, Afroditi Pina, and Cherise S. Williams

Victims of stalking suffer severe and varied impacts requiring assessment and treatment. Research to inform support is limited. This study examines a national sample of stalking victims to identify the types and prevalence of impact reported and the predictors of impact. A secondary analysis of 258 stalking cases reported to a stalking charity was conducted. Four categories of victim reported impact were coded; psychological and substance abuse, physical health, practical impact on life, and impact on others. Stalking duration, severity, the diversity of stalking behaviors, and the relationship between the victim and perpetrator were investigated as predictors of impact. In all, 48 types of impact were identified with victims experiencing an average of four types. Psychological impact was the most prevalent (91.5%). Several new forms of impact were identified including a variety of impacts on persons known to the victim (e.g., children, friends) in 35.3% of the sample. Increased diversity of stalking behavior was predictive of impact in all models (explaining 11% of the variance in total impact scores), except for physical impact which was not analyzed due to low prevalence. Stalking impact was prevalent and varied, suggesting that victims (and potentially those close to them) require trauma-informed support from clinicians. Future research should include the development of a stalking impact index to improve the consistency of research and clinical assessment of need.

Canterbury, UK: Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2023. 26p.

By The Truth Project

The Truth Project was a core part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (‘the Inquiry’) alongside public hearings and research. It was set up to hear and learn from the experiences of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse in England and Wales. With the consent of participants, the Inquiry used Truth Project information in a variety of ways, including for research and data analysis. By doing so, Truth Project participants chose what they wished to share and made an important contribution to the work of the Inquiry. The aim of this research was to examine victims and survivors’ experiences of child sexual abuse across different time periods, victims and survivors’ characteristics and the institutional contexts in which they were sexually abused. We have used the term ‘institutional context’ in this report to refer to child sexual abuse that occurred in the physical location of an institution (for example a school) and/or was perpetrated by an individual affiliated with that institution (for example a teacher). This is the Inquiry’s seventh and final research report drawing on Truth Project information, following previous publications on child sexual abuse in religious institutions, children’s homes and residential care, custodial institutions, sports, healthcare and schools. The report draws together the accounts of more than 5,800 victims and survivors, one of the world’s largest samples of people who have suffered child sexual abuse. It is the Inquiry’s first research report to identify similarities and differences across institutional contexts.

London: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, 2022. 193p.

By Marc-André Argentino, Adnan Raja & Aoife Gallagher

Since QAnon’s rise to prominence, several high-profile celebrities have found themselves at the centre of the movement’s conspiratorial narratives, and therefore, the focus of coordinated harassment campaigns, brigading, dogpilling, slander and hate. This has led researchers who examine the digital information ecosystem to ask whether QAnon-coordinated harassment operates like other forms of targeted hate and harassment online, and specifically, whether vulnerable identity groups are faced with particularly egregious experiences. In this report, based on analysis conducted in early 2021, and examining upwards of 9 million posts and mentions across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we examine the role of gender-based violence against celebrities who were of particular significance to the QAnon community’s conspiracy theories in late 2019 and into the end of 2020: Chrissy Teigen, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Anderson Cooper, Jussie Smollett and Oprah Winfrey. The resulting analysis confirmed the suspicion that the most prominent type of harassment came in the form of brigading individual targets with accusations and slanderous mentions of paedophilia, often with graphic and disturbing language in their accusations.

Amman: Berlin: London: Paris: Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2022. 32p.

By Donna Vandiver, Jeremy Braithwaite and Mark Stafford

Sex Crimes and Sex Offenders: Research and Realities provides an overview of social scientific theory and research on sex crimes and sex offenders. Most other books on the market are focused on a single issue―such as treatment, rape, pedophilia, theory, etc. This book is unique in that it covers the most current theory and research along with individual cases of sex crimes (e.g., Kobe Bryant, Jerry Sandusky, and other case studies), effectively linking theory and research with the realities of sex crimes and sex offenders as well as their victims. Vandiver, Braithwaite, and Stafford are careful to dispel myths and to focus on the heterogeneity of sex crimes and sex offenders, and not on any one issue or population or theory. Instead, they weave a framework using a full range of theoretical concepts and research data to integrate their discussions of crimes, offenders, victims, treatments, and policy implications. The result is a valuable resource for students and early-stage researchers investigating sex crimes or offenders.

New York: Routledge, 2017. 354p.

By Shawn Michael Dove

There have been a few books during time that begin to educate, and explain different opinions on and about pedophilia. All of these books are very good and are very helpful into exploring more about this “Hidden Monster Pedophilia”. Each and every one of these books has helped countless scores of people in their everyday lives. The Hidden Monster: Pedophilia, By Shawn Michael Dove, is written by a Victim, a Pedophile, and a Survivor. Shawn has been through all of these stages in his life, and he is strong on Victim Empathy, and Victim Impact, and as you will see, he encourages all victims, and pedophiles alike, to go through a therapy program designed for them to achieve their individual freedom from their past horror, pain, devastation, nightmares, and fears.

Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2003. 120p.

By The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

The Truth Project enables victims and survivors to share their experiences with a member of the Inquiry in a safe environment. This report shares 50 anonymised accounts of child sexual abuse which were shared with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by survivors participating in the Truth Project. The experiences describe sexual abuse perpetrated by adults from a variety of backgrounds. The Inquiry’s Truth Project has heard from over 1,000 victims and survivors, and is helping the Inquiry to understand more about the circumstances in which the sexual abuse of children can occur.

London: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, 2018. 96p

By Tyrone Kirchengast

This book brings together the diverse and fragmented rights and powers of victims constitutive of the modern adversarial criminal trial as found across the common law jurisdictions of the world. One characteristic of victim rights as they emerge within and constitute aspects of the modern criminal trial is that they are dispersed within an existing criminal process that largely identifies the offender as the benefactor of due process rights, originating in the seventeenth-century adversarial criminal trial. This trial increasingly excluded the victim for the Crown and state, and the role of the victim was slowly eroded to that of witness for the prosecution as the adversarial trial matured into the latter part of the twentieth century. Increasing awareness of the removal of the victim and the need to secure the rights and interests of victims as stakeholders of justice resulted in the last decade of the twentieth century, bearing witness to the gradual relocation of the victim in common law and statute. This relocation has occurred, however, in a highly fragmented and disconnected way, usually following spontaneous and at times ill thought-out law reform initiatives that may or may not connect to the spirit of existing reforms, foundational structures of the criminal process, or international or domestic rights frameworks that have emerged in the meantime.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 360p.