By Helen Benedict

In the last few years, the national press has lavished coverage on several major sex-related scandals: the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and the Mike Tyson case. With each event came lurid stories pitting either a loose or virginal woman against an unwilling or monstrous man. Such extreme coverage, argues Helen Benedict, perpetuates myths that are harmful to victims of these crimes (and sometimes to the accused). In <em>Virgin or Vamp Benedict examines the press's treatment of four notorious sex crimes from the past decade--the Rideout marital rape trial in Oregon, the Big Dan's pool table gang rape in Massachusetts, the ''Preppy Murder'' in New York City, and the Central Park jogger case--and shows how victims are labelled either as virgins or vamps, a practice she condemns as misleading and harmful. Benedict also looks at other factors that perpetuate the misunderstanding of rape. For instance, she shows how the New York press presented the Central Park jogger rape case as motivated by racism because of its unwillingness to consider rape an issue of gender. She also addresses our inherent language bias, the press's tendency to use sexually suggestive language to describe crime victims, and its preference for crimes against whites. In conclusion, Benedict offers a number of solutions that will help reporters cover these increasingly common crimes without further harming the victims, the defendants, or public understanding.

Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 320p.

Edited by Gillian Abel, Lisa Fitzgerald and Catherine Healy

New Zealand was the first country in the world to decriminalise all sectors of sex work. Previous criminal or civil laws governing sex work and related offences were revoked in 2003 and sex workers became subject to the same controls and regulations as any other occupational group. This book provides an in-depth look at New Zealand's experience of decriminalisation. It provides first hand views and experience on this policy from the point of view of those involved in the sex industry, as well as people involved in developing, implementing, researching and reviewing the policies. Valuable comparisons pre- and post-decriminalisation are made, based on research in the sex industry prior to decriminalisation. Presenting an example of radical legal reform in an area of current policy debate this book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates in criminal justice, political science, sociology, gender studies and social policy as well as policy makers and activists.

Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2010. 280p.

By Chrysanthi Leon

From Megan’s Law to Jessica’s Law, almost every state in the nation has passed some law to punish sex offenders. This popular tough-on-crime legislation is often written after highly-publicized cases have made the gruesome rounds through the media, and usually features harsh sentences, lifetime GPS monitoring, a dramatic expansion of the civil commitment procedures, and severe restrictions on where released sex offenders may live. In Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles, Chrysanthi Leon argues that, while the singular notion of the sexual boogeyman has been used to justify these harsh policies, not all sex offenders are the same and such ‘one size fits all’ policies can unfairly punish other offenders of lesser crimes, needlessly targeting, sometimes ostracizing, citizens from their own communities.While many recognize that prison is not the right tool for every crime problem, Leon compellingly argues that the U.S. maintains a one-size-fits-all approach to sexual offending which is undermining public safety. Leon explains how we’ve reached this point—with a large incarcerated sex offender population, many of whom will be released in the coming years with multiple barriers to their success in the community, and without much expertise to guide them or to guide those who are charged to help them. Leon argues that we cannot blame the public, nor even the politicians, except indirectly. Instead, we might blame the institutions we charge with making placement decisions and with the experts—both those who have chosen to work in the field and those who have caused its

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  marginalization. Ultimately, Leon shows that when policies intended for the worst offenders take over, all of us suffer.

New York: New York University Press, 2011. 263p.

By Chris Greer

Sex crime has become a central issue in public life, and an area of intense public and political concern. Sex offenders have become society's most reviled deviants, a process in which the media have played a key role. Understanding press representation of sex crime, and how and why these are produced, is central to the way sex crime has been perceived, yet little detailed research or investigation has been carried out into how this has happened. Drawing upon the views of both journalists and practitioners, the book also formulates clear recommendations for positive and realistic change, both in the way the press report sex crime and in the way that relevant agencies act as sources in the news production process. It will help promote much needed change within the media and relevant statutory and voluntary organizations.

Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan, 2003. 229p

Edited by D. Richard Laws ahd William T. O'Donohue

Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, this important work provides authoritative scientific and applied perspectives on the full range of paraphilias and other sexual behavior problems. For each major clinical syndrome, a chapter on psychopathology and theory is followed by a chapter on assessment and treatment. Challenges in working with sex offenders are considered in depth. Thoroughly rewritten to reflect a decade of advances in the field, the second edition features many new chapters and new authors. New topics include an integrated etiological model, sexual deviance across the lifespan, Internet offenders, multiple paraphilias, neurobiological processes, the clinician as expert witness, and public health approaches.

New York: Guilford Press, 2008. 642p.

Edited by Gayle Letherby, Kate Williams, Philip Birch and Maureen Cain

This book brings together chapters by academics, researchers and practitioners to analyse how crimes such as sex work, domestic violence and rape and sexual assault have risen up the Government agenda in recent years. For example, the 'Paying the Price' consultation exercise on sex work in 2004, and recent legislation around sex crimes, including the Sex Offences Act (2003). This is a multi-disciplinary, social scientific, pro-feminist collection, which draws upon practice, empirical research, documentary analysis and overviews of research in the areas of sex work and sexual violence. Within Sex as Crime there are two distinct sub-sections: 'Sex for Sale' and 'Sex as Violence', but the broader and overriding link of sex as crime remains a paramount theme that spans the collection. Chapters include discussions of the impact of new regulations on street sex workers, and of street sex work on community residents, the use of the internet by men who pay for sex and men who sell it, sexual violence and identity, sex crimes against children and protecting children online and working with sex offenders. Other chapters explore reasons for such offending behaviour.

Abingdon, Oxon: Willan, 2008. 416p.

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 Terry Thomas

Sex Crime, Third edition offers a comprehensive and integrative introduction to sex crime, written by an expert in the field. The third edition has been fully expanded and updated to include further coverage of a range of critical topics, including child sexual exploitation, child pornography, female sex offenders, treatment approaches such as the ‘Good Lives Model’ and the European Convention on Human Rights. Delving into and beyond the news headlines about sexual crimes that seem to appear on our screens and in our newspapers almost every day, this third edition draws on a range of high profile case studies, such as Vanessa George, Stuart Hall, Jimmy Savile and Operation Yewtree and also offers a review of all relevant legislation. This new edition also includes an analysis ofpossible causes of sex offending, as well as public and professional responses to sex crime. Including an examination of the policing of sexual crime; the prosecution of the accused; the sentencing and punishment of sexual offenders; and ‘public protection’ measures, this new edition covers all of the key aspects of sex crime and how it is dealt with. Wide-ranging and authoritative, Sex Crime, Third edition presents a complex area in a straightforward and understandable manner. Thomas guides the reader through the range of policies and law which have accumulated over the years, making this essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of sex crime, sexual violence and the treatment of sex offenders. It will also be of great interest to criminal justice practitioners.

Abingdon, Oxon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2016. 272p.

Edited by William T. O'Donohue , Paul A. Schewe

This timely handbook provides in-depth overviews of the myriad and multi-faceted issues surrounding sexual assault and its pervasiveness in today’s culture. Drawing for multiple viewpoints and experts, the book is divided into seven comprehensive sections, covering such topics as risk factors, varying theoretical frameworks, prevention and intervention, and special populations. Within these sections the authors provide historical background as well as the latest research, and offer treatment outcomes and potentials. Selected topics covered in this book include: feminist theories of sexual assault; social and economic factors surrounding sexual violence; mental, physiological, physical, and functional health concerns of victims, including PTSD; major categories of sexual offenders; treatment of sexual assault survivors in the LGBTQ+ community; procedural processes related to sexual assault investigation and adjudication within the criminal justice system.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2019.  857p.

By Stephen Kershnar

This book provides a philosophical analysis of adult–child sex and pedophilia. This sex intuitively strikes many people as sick, disgusting, and wrong. The problem is that it is not clear whether these judgments are justified and whether they are aesthetic or moral. By analogy, many people find it disgusting to view images of obese people having sex, but it is hard to see what is morally undesirable about such sex: here the judgment is aesthetic. This book looks at the moral status of such adult-child sex. In particular, it explores whether those who engage in adult-child sex have a disease, act wrongly, or are vicious. In addition, it looks at how the law should respond to such sex given the above analyses.

Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 192p.

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.

Edited by M. Susanne Schotanus

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. Gender Violence, the Law, and Society analyses and explores the historical and cultural roots of issues of gender-based and sexual violence in Japan, India and South Africa. Using a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods, this edited collection highlights the intersection of marginalized gender and sexual identities – such as raped women, gay men and women who are victims of commodified violence – and marginalized geographic areas.Taking a structured and holistic approach, the chapters authors break down issues across three levels: violence, state, and society. By exploring case studies from the three selected geographical areas, both the roots and effects and related organization and belief systems are explored in their relations to the issues of sexual and gendered violence. The chapters expose and consider the complexities and nuances in each country in terms of their varying cultural practices, their religious and caste systems, and racial disparities, whilst exploring and expanding the understanding of the concept of violence itself. Gender Violence, the Law, and Society takes an important step towards synthesizing area-specific issues and knowledge into a more comprehensive and global body of knowledge on the apparently universal appearances of forms of sexual and gendered violence.

Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2022. 201p.

By Alessandra Gribaldo

Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis, she advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. This book will be of great interest to all social scientists concerned with gender and the law.

Chicago: HAU Books (Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2021. 157p.

By Carina Gallo, Kerstin Svensson

. This book provides a rich analysis of the history of Swedish victim support. With the majority of research on victim support centering on the Anglosphere, this book offers a unique case study for considering the role of the victim in the criminal justice system. While Sweden has enacted many laws to support victims, and victim assistance programs have grown rapidly, welfare policy has become more restrictive and crime policy, to some degree, more punitive.

Routledge (2021) 186 pages.

By Bennett Clifford and Jon Lewis

On January 6, 2021, a mob composed of activists, unaffiliated sympathizers, and hardened extremists violently entered the United States Capitol, destroying property, assaulting law enforcement, and attempting to disrupt the American electoral process. During the siege, as it has come to be known, several thousand people are believed to have unlawfully breached the Capitol. The violence that day left five dead and more than a hundred injured.1 The Capitol Siege was a watershed moment for domestic violent extremism in the United States. In its immediate aftermath, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a nationwide investigation into the alleged perpetrators of the violence. It quickly became the largest investigation of its type in the Bureau’s history, heralding investigations in nearly all 50 states and 704 criminal charges to date (as of January 1, 2022). The breadth of the federal 2 investigation has resulted in an unprecedented pace of prosecutorial activity, with nearly two criminal charges released per day on average during the first three months after the Capitol Siege. Today, a year after January 6, 2021, new charges are still being released every week, and the operational tempo for the DOJ and FBI has not significantly slowed. The events of that day also led the U.S. government to redesign its approach to counterterrorism, largely reorienting its focus from international to domestic extremism. At the same time, January 6, 2021, was not only a turning point for counterterrorism authorities, but has numerous ramifications for various American domestic violent extremist groups and their efforts to recruit and plan activities while avoiding law enforcement scrutiny. On the one-year anniversary of January 6, 2021, this report takes stock of the Capitol Siege’s impacts on domestic violent extremism in America, and the U.S. federal government’s efforts to respond to the threat over the past year. This research is based on the Program on Extremism’s Capitol Siege Database, a collection of over 20,000 pages of court documents from cases of individuals who have been federally charged for their participation in the Capitol Siege, as well as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, interviews with U.S. government officials and defense attorneys, media reports, and other open-source information.

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2022. 48p.

Edited by Gorazd Meško, Eszter Sárik, Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac

This timely and comprehensive collection of discussions on victimology, victims of crime and victim protection policies in the Balkans and beyond engages readers with the current state of the art of regional victimology in the Balkans and Central Europe. Original contributions from as many as ten countries of the region analyse the development of victimology, victim protection policies and practices, as well as major areas of victimological research. The main idea of the book at hand is to provide an insight into the complex nature of victimisation in contemporary societies and a deeper understanding of the nature of, and responses to, victimisation in the context of the criminal justice system and civil society. Chapters about the recent developments of victimology in Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey reflect on cultural victimology and contextualisation of victimology and victimological thought from a broader societal perspective. More importantly, the chapters thus present, for the first time, a comparative and contextual account of regional contributions to present-day victimology. This publication is a milestone of victimological research calling for a follow-up and more comparative victimological studies in the future, improvement of practice in victim protection and more feasible victim protection policies.

Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 596p.

By Violence Policy Center

This annual study examines black homicide victimization at the state level utilizing unpublished Supplementary Homicide Report data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The study ranks the states by their rates of black homicide victimization and offers additional information for the 10 states with the highest black homicide victimization rates.

Washington, DC: Violence Policy Center, 2022. 18p.

By The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

1. In early July 2022, Rose1 , 25 years old, was one of at least 52 women and girls who were collectively raped by armed elements during a week of intense violence opposing two rival gang coalitions in Cité Soleil. In the afternoon of 7 July 2022, Rose, a mother of four and five-months pregnant, was severely beaten and raped, in the presence of her children, by three heavily armed masked men. The latter had forced their way into her home during an attack launched against the residents of Brooklyn, in Cité Soleil. Earlier that day, Rose’s husband had been shot dead by members of the same gang. Before leaving, the armed individuals set her house ablaze, forcing Rose and her children to sleep out in the open in a public space for many nights. The story of Rose, like that of many other women, illustrates the ordeal of victims of sexual violence who are targeted by armed gangs. This report, jointly published by the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), shows how armed gangs have used rape, including collective rapes, and other forms of sexual violence to instill fear, punish, subjugate, and inflict pain on local populations with the ultimate goal of expanding their areas of influence, throughout the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince. As of August 2022, large swathes of the capital, accounting for at least 1.5 million people, were reportedly under the control or the influence of gang elements.

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  Gangs are able to commit acts of sexual violence and other human rights abuses mainly because of widespread impunity and ease of access to high caliber weapons and ammunitions trafficked from abroad. Women, girls and boys of all ages, as well as to a lesser extent men, have been victims of ruthless sexual crimes. Children as young as 10 and elderly women were subjected to collective rapes for hours in front of their parents or children by more than half a dozen armed elements during attacks against their neighborhoods. Viewed as enemies for their real or perceived support to rival gangs, or for the simple fact of living in the same areas as those rival gangs, some of these victims were mutilated and executed after being raped. Gangs have also resorted to sexual violence as a weapon to disrupt the social fabric by targeting women and girls crossing “frontlines” or moving across neighborhoods on foot or in public transport to carry out their daily livelihood activities, such as going to work, to marketplaces or to schools.

United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022. 25p.

Edited by K. Jaishankar and Natti Ronel

Global criminology is an emerging field covering international and transnational crimes that have not traditionally been the focus of mainstream criminology or criminal justice. Global Criminology: Crime and Victimization in a Globalized Era is a collection of rigorously peer-reviewed papers presented at the First International Conference of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology (SASCV) that took place in Jaipur, India in 2011. Using a global yardstick as the basis for measurement, the fundamental goal of the conference was to determine criminological similarities and differences in different regions.

Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2013. 409p.

Edited by Elena Martellozzo and Emma A Jane

The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the development of information technology, to the point that people spend a major portion of waking life in online spaces. While there are enormous benefits associated with this technology, there are also risks that can affect the most vulnerable in our society but also the most confident. Cybercrime and its victims explores the social construction of violence and victimisation in online spaces and brings together scholars from many areas of inquiry, including criminology, sociology, and cultural, media, and gender studies.

The book is organised thematically into five parts. Part one addresses some broad conceptual and theoretical issues. Part two is concerned with issues relating to sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation, as well as to sexual expression online. Part three addresses issues related to race and culture. Part four addresses concerns around cyberbullying and online suicide, grouped together as ‘social violence’. The final part argues that victims of cybercrime are, in general, neglected and not receiving the recognition and support they need and deserve. It concludes that in the volatile and complex world of cyberspace continued awareness-raising is essential for bringing attention to the plight of victims. It also argues that there needs to be more support of all kinds for victims, as well as an increase in the exposure and punishment of perpetrators.

Drawing on a range of pressing contemporary issues such as online grooming, sexting, cyber-hate, cyberbullying and online radicalization, this book examines how cyberspace makes us more vulnerable to crime and violence, how it gives rise to new forms of surveillance and social control and how cybercrime can be prevented.

London: Routledge, 2017. 251p.