Causes Of Sexual Assaults In School
Psychosocial consequences Snoopy The Musical Analysis of war rape describe how Head Of An Oba Essay linkages between victims and the society are altered as a result of sexual abuses Disadvantages Of Evaluation war. Each of these tests can reveal brain activity. ISSN See also: International humanitarian law. Rape can also Similarities Between Samurai And Knights recognized as Thomson Atomic Model when committed with the intent to destroyin Personal Essay: Moving To America or in part, a targeted group. But everything they've done has violated both.
What Is Sexual Assault?
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She said universities must educate students to prevent assaults and punish the perpetrators and groups fostering an environment in which sexual violence is viewed as normal or no big deal. Older advocates said current students have better access to social media and embrace activism more readily than their predecessors. At the University of Iowa, year-old freshman Amelia Keller and her friends turned to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to rally people to the recent protest at the school. Keller also has worked with a campus group advocating for rape victims. Eastern Michigan students also held a protest in March. At Central Methodist, Beyer said she felt forced to choose between dropping out of band or having to face her assailant frequently despite repeatedly telling administrators that he should be the one to leave.
And Beyer said she lost her passion for music because of the assault and her subsequent treatment. She dropped her music education major and is now majoring in psychology instead. These were committed mainly by the Moroccan Goumiers , colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps FEC , commanded by General Alphonse Juin , and targeted civilian women and girls, as well as men and boys, in the rural area between Naples and Rome. The incident is traditionally known in Italian as marocchinate. The Italian Senate launched an investigation, reaching the conclusion that 2, women were raped, as well as men: [29]. Over 2, women were raped, the youngest at 11, the oldest at Dozens died.
Six hundred men suffered the same fate. Among them a young parish priest, who died two days after the torture suffered. Two sisters, aged 15 and 18, suffered the violence of Moroccan soldiers. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions provides that "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" are prohibited under any circumstance whatsoever with respect to persons who are hors de combat or who are not taking part of direct hostilities in internal conflicts. Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits wartime rape and enforced prostitution in international conflicts.
The United Nations Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict , which went into effect in , does not mention rape specifically. In , the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda established by the United Nations made landmark decisions defining genocidal rape rape intended to affect a population or culture as a whole as a form of genocide under international law. In the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu , the mayor of Taba Commune in Rwanda , the Trial Chamber held that "sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide.
Judge Navanethem Pillay , now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights , said in a statement after the verdict: "From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime. We want to send out a strong message that rape is no longer a trophy of war. Professor Paul Walters in his April statement of support of her honorary doctorate of law at Rhodes University wrote: [31]. Under her presidency of the Rwanda Tribunal , that body rendered a judgment against the mayor of Taba Commune which found him guilty of genocide for the use of rape in "the destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself.
The Akayesu judgement includes the first interpretation and application by an international court of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Trial Chamber held that rape which it defined as "a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive" and sexual assault constitute acts of genocide insofar as they were committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a targeted group, as such. It found that sexual assault formed an integral part of the process of destroying the Tutsi ethnic group and that the rape was systematic and had been perpetrated against Tutsi women only, manifesting the specific intent required for those acts to constitute genocide.
The Tribunal found Jean Paul Akayesu not guilty of the six remaining counts, including the count of complicity in genocide and the counts relating to violations of Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions and of Additional Protocol II thereto. Rape first became recognized as crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issued arrest warrants in , based on the Geneva Conventions and Violations of the Laws or Customs of War. This ruling challenged the widespread acceptance of rape and sexual enslavement of women as intrinsic part of war.
Furthermore, two of the men were found guilty of the crime against humanity of sexual enslavement for holding women and girls captive in a number of de facto detention centres. Many of the women subsequently disappeared. However a total ban on abortion is a requirement of US humanitarian aid for war victims, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The Rome Statute Explanatory Memorandum, which defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court , recognizes rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution , forced pregnancy , enforced sterilization , "or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity" as crime against humanity if the action is part of a widespread or systematic practice.
In , the U. Security Council adopted resolution , which noted that "rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide". The Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict SRSG-SVC was established by Security Council Resolution , one in a series of resolutions which recognized the detrimental impact that sexual violence in conflict has on communities, and acknowledged that this crime undermines efforts at peace and security and rebuilding once a conflict has ended. The office serves as the United Nations' spokesperson and political advocate on conflict-related sexual violence, and is the chair of the network UN Action against Sexual Violence in Conflict.
While six of the eight priority countries are in Africa, this problem is widespread and the Office of the Special Representative is engaged on this issue in Asia and the Pacific in Cambodia for residual cases from the Khmer Rouge period and the Middle East Syria. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution , which supported abortion rights for girls and women raped in wars, "noting the need for access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including regarding pregnancies resulting from rape, without discrimination.
Security Council earlier in in September that girls and women raped in war should have access to "services for safe termination of pregnancies resulting from rape, without discrimination and in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law. Rape has accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era. The practice of raping the women of a conquered group has remained a feature of warfare and conquest from the second millennium B.
It is a social practice which, like the torture of prisoners, has been resistant to "progress," to humanitarian reforms, and to sophisticated moral and ethical considerations. I suggest this is the case because it is a practice built into and essential to the structure of patriarchal institutions and inseparable from them. It is at the beginning of the system, prior to class formation, that we can see this in its purest essence. The Greek and Roman armies reportedly engaged in war rape, which is documented by ancient authors such as Homer , Herodotus , and Livy.
Roman military officers using young Batavian boys for homosexual intercourse during the Revolt of the Batavi was noted by the historian Tacitus. According to medieval historians, the Huns and Avars , who invaded eastern Europe during Late Antiquity , harassed Wendish women and kept them in bondage as sex slaves : [44]. Each year, the Huns [Avars] came to the Slavs, to spend the winter with them; then they took the wives and daughters of the Slavs and slept with them, and among the other mistreatments [already mentioned] the Slavs were also forced to pay levies to the Huns. But the sons of the Huns, who were [then] raised with the wives and daughters of these Wends [Slavs] could not finally endure this oppression anymore and refused obedience to the Huns and began, as already mentioned, a rebellion.
The Huna invasions of the Indian subcontinent helped hasten the decline of the Gupta Empire. The Huna invaders conquered Kashmir , Punjab , and finally entered into the Ganges valley , in the very heart of India, slaughtering, pillaging, looting, burning, demolishing, and raping. Many cities in India were wiped out by the onslaught of the invaders; monasteries , temples , schools, and libraries were not spared, causing immense cultural destruction to the Indian subcontinent.
Accounts are consistent that the Huna warriors practiced mass rapes of women in India. The Vikings Scandinavians who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the late 8th century to the early 11th century , [47] have acquired a reputation for "rape and pillage". Viking settlements in Britain and Ireland are thought to have been primarily male enterprises, with a lesser role for female Vikings. Female slavery and war rapes were also common during the medieval Arab slave trade , where prisoners of war captured in battle from non-Arab lands often ended up as concubine slaves who are considered free when their master dies in the Arab World.
Before the Jurchens overthrew the Khitan , married Jurchen women and Jurchen girls were raped by Liao Khitan envoys as a custom which caused resentment by the Jurchens against the Khitan. The Mongols, who established the Mongol Empire across much of Eurasia, caused much destruction during their invasions. Documents written during or after Genghis Khan 's reign say that after a conquest, the Mongol soldiers looted, pillaged and raped.
Some troops who submitted were incorporated into the Mongol system in order to expand their manpower. These techniques were sometimes used to spread terror and warning to others. Murray said that "This drastic solution of the Bedouin question removed the pure Arab descendants of the Conquerors from the scene and so enabled the Beja to preserve themselves as an African race practically uninfluenced by Arab blood, while leaving the desert edges of Upper Egypt free for settlement by the Western Bedouin. During Timur' s invasion of Syria, in the Sack of Aleppo , Ibn Taghribirdi wrote that Timur's Tatar soldiers committed mass rape on the native women of Aleppo, massacring their children and forcing the brothers and fathers of the women to watch the gang rapes which took place in the mosques.
Tatar soldiers openly raped gentlewomen and virgins in public in both the small mosques and the Great Mosque. The brothers and fathers of the women were being tortured while forced to watch their female relatives get raped. The corpses in the streets and mosques resulted in stink permeating Aleppo. The women were kept naked while being gang raped repeatedly by different men. Mass rapes were also recorded in Timur's Sack of Damascus. Spanish conquistadors kidnapped and raped Native American women. A significant number of women were gang-raped by Royalist and Irish Confederate troops under General Montrose who sacked Aberdeen in Scotland in In the Second Manchu invasion of Korea when Qing forces invaded the Korean Kingdom of Joseon , many Korean women were subjected to rape at the hands of the Qing forces, and as a result they were unwelcomed by their families even if they were released by the Qing after being ransomed.
The Ush rebellion in by Uyghur Muslims against the Manchus of the Qing dynasty occurred after Uyghur women were gang raped by the servants and son of Manchu official Su-cheng. The invasion by Jahangir Khoja was preceded by another Manchu official, Binjing who raped a Muslim daughter of the Kokan aqsaqal from to The Qing sought to cover up the rape of Uyghur women by Manchus to prevent anger against their rule from spreading among the Uyghurs.
Multiple Taiwanese Aboriginal villages in frontier areas rebelled against the Dutch in the s due to acts of oppression, such as when the Dutch ordered that aboriginal women be turned over to them for sex, and when they demanded that deer pelts and rice be given to them by aborigines in the Taipei basin in Wu-lao-wan village, sparking a rebellion in December Two Dutch translators were beheaded by the Wu-lao-wan aborigines and in a subsequent fight 30 aboriginals and two additional Dutch people died, after an embargo of salt and iron on Wu-lao-wan.
The aboriginals were forced to sue for peace in February Dutch women were kept as sexual slaves by the Chinese after the Dutch were expelled from Taiwan in The Dutch missionary Antonius Hambroek , two of his daughters, and his wife were among the Dutch prisoners of war who were being held captive by Koxinga. Koxinga sent Hambroek to Fort Zeelandia demanding that he persuade them to surrender or else Hambroek would be killed when he returned. Hambroek returned to the Fort, where two of his other daughters were being held prisoner. He urged the commander of the Fort not to surrender, and returned to Koxinga's camp. He was then executed by decapitation, and in addition to this, a rumor was spread among the Chinese that the Dutch were encouraging the native Taiwanese aboriginals to kill Chinese, so Koxinga ordered the mass execution of Dutch male prisoners in retaliation, in addition to a few women and children who were also being held prisoner.
The surviving Dutch women and children were then enslaved, with the Dutch women being sold eventually to Chinese soldiers to become their wives, [77] [78] [79] after Koxinga's commanders had thoroughly used them for their own sexual pleasures. Happy was she that fell to the lot of an unmarried man, being thereby freed from vexations by the Chinese women, who are very jealous of their husbands. As late as some of these Dutch women were still being held captive as wives or slave concubines by the Chinese. Memory of the fate of the Dutch women and of Hambroek's daughter has been kept alive through the subsequent historiography of the period, [87] [88] [89] [90] whence it has stoked various dramatised and fictionalised retellings of the story.
The topic of the Chinese taking the Dutch women and the daughter of Antonius Hambroek as concubines was featured in Joannes Nomsz's play which became famous and well known in Europe and revealed European anxieties about the fate of the Dutch women along with their sense of humiliation after being subjected to defeat at the hands of non-Europeans. Cossacks took Muslim Circassian women and had children with them. Russians raped Circassian girls during the Russo-Turkish war from the Circassian refugees who were settled in the Ottoman Balkans. During the Circassian genocide , general Grigory Zass of the Russian army and Nikolai Yevdokimov ordered their officers and soldiers to be allowed to rape 7 year old Circassian girls.
Incidents of rape committed by Indian sepoys against British women and children were reported in the English press , particularly after British civilians fell into Indian hands after sieges such as at Cawnpore. However, after the rebellion was suppressed, detailed analyses by the British government concluded that although Indian sepoys had engaged in massacres of British civilians after they captured them, there had never been one single instance of war rape committed by the sepoys. As British troops suppressed the rebellion, angered by reports of massacres and rapes of British civilians, reprisals were often carried out against Indian civilians, particularly at Cawnpore.
Indian women were often a target of rape by the enraged soldiers. The Ever Victorious Army which defeated the Taiping Rebellion in Qing China gained notoriety among the Chinese populace for frequently looting villages and raping women they came across, but their commander Charles Gordon did attempt to control them, executing men accused of looting or rape. During the Boxer Rebellion , the Yihetuan committed several massacres of foreign civilians motivated by their anti-Christian and anti-Western sentiment. The number of women who committed suicide numbered in the thousands. Luella Miner wrote that the behavior of the Russian and French was particularly appalling. Chinese women and girls killed themselves in order to avoid being raped.
The French commander dismissed the rapes, attributing them to the "gallantry of the French soldiers". In German South-West Africa during the Herero rebellion against German rule and the subsequent Herero and Namaqua Genocide , German soldiers regularly engaged in gang rapes [] before killing the women or leaving them in the desert to die; a number of Herero women were also forced into involuntary prostitution. Rapes were allegedly committed during the German advance through Belgium in the first months of the war.
Lasswell dismissed the rape allegations as propaganda in his Freudian-oriented study, "Propaganda Technique in the World War". The individual stories of the women that were impacted were used to justify the war and to market it to the civilians. The sometimes widespread and systematic occurrence of war rape of women by soldiers has been documented. During World War II and in its immediate aftermath, war rape occurred in a range of situations, ranging from institutionalized sexual slavery to war rapes associated with specific battles.
The term " comfort women " is a euphemism for the estimated ,, mostly Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Filipino women who were said to be forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese military brothels during World War II. In the Nanking Massacre , Japanese soldiers were said to have sexually assaulted Chinese women who were trapped in the city of Nanjing when it fell to the Japanese on 13 December The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20, women, children, were raped or otherwise sexually assaulted during the occupation. It was reported in that many Russian women were raped and as result many Japanese troops were infected with venereal disease.
A unknown number of white females and children's were either raped or sexually assaulted at various locations such as Banoeng, Padang, Tarakan, Menado, Flores island and Blora, at the beginning of the Japanese initial invasion and occupation. There was , interned Europeans males, females and children's throughout Indonesia as prisoners or civilian internees. Besides Dutch women, many Javanese were also recruited from Indonesia as comfort women including around Timorese women and girls who also used as sexual slaves.
Melanesian women from New Guinea were also used as comfort women. Local women were recruited from Rabaul as comfort women, along with a small number of mixed Japanese-Papuan women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night'. A large number of rapes were committed by U. Soon after the U. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war.
Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another. According to Toshiyuki Tanaka, 76 cases of rape or rape-murder were reported during the first five years of the American occupation of Okinawa. However, he asserts this is probably not the true figure, as most cases were unreported. When the Japanese surrendered, they anticipated that widespread rapes would occur during the following occupation and made rapid efforts to set up brothels to curb this.
Despite this precaution, 1, rapes reportedly occurred during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture , although a similar figure has also been given for the whole of Japan. Individual instances of rape by members of the United States Army in Japan were reported while their forces were stationed in post-war Japan , such as the Yumiko-chan incident and the Okinawa rape incident. Some historians state that mass rapes took place during the initial phase of the occupation. For instance, Fujime Yuki has stated that 3, rapes occurred in the first month after American troops landed. During the Soviet invasion of Manchuria , Soviet and Mongolian soldiers attacked and raped Japanese civilians, often encouraged by the local Chinese population who were resentful of Japanese rule.
The local Chinese population sometimes even joined in these attacks against the Japanese population with the Soviet soldiers. In one famous example, during the Gegenmiao massacre , Soviet soldiers, encouraged by the local Chinese population, raped and massacred over one thousand Japanese women and children. Property of the Japanese were also looted by the Soviet soldiers and Chinese. Many Japanese women married themselves to local Manchurian men to protect themselves from persecution by Soviet soldiers. These Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" zanryu fujin. According to British and American reports, Soviet Red Army troops also looted and terrorized the local people of Mukden located in Manchuria.
A foreigner witnessed Soviet troops, formerly stationed in Berlin, who were allowed by the Soviet military to go into the city of Mukden "for three days of rape and pillage". Konstantin Asmolov of the Center for Korean Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences dismisses Western accounts of Soviet violence against civilians in the Far East as exaggeration and rumor and contends that accusations of mass crimes by the Red Army inappropriately extrapolate isolated incidents regarding the nearly 2,, Soviet troops in the Far East into mass crimes. According to him, such accusations are refuted by the documents of the time, from which it is clear that such crimes were far less of a problem than in Germany.
Asmolov further asserts that the Soviets prosecuted their perpetrators while prosecution of German and Japanese "rapists and looters" in WWII was virtually unknown. Italian statistics record eight rapes and nineteen attempted rapes by British soldiers in Italy between September and December , during and after the invasion of Sicily. Though a high priority for the Royal Military Police , some commanders proved reluctant to prosecute their men. Rapes were committed by Wehrmacht forces on Jewish women and girls during the Invasion of Poland in September ; [] they were also committed against Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian women and girls during mass executions which were primarily carried out by the Selbstschutz units, with the assistance of Wehrmacht soldiers who were stationed in territory that was under the administration of the German military; the rapes were committed against female captives before they were shot.
Rapes were also committed by German forces stationed on the Eastern Front , where they were largely unpunished as opposed to rapes committed in Western Europe ; the overall number of rapes is difficult to establish due to the lack of prosecutions of the crime by German courts. French Moroccan troops, known as Goumiers , committed rapes and other war crimes in Italy after the Battle of Monte Cassino [] and in Germany. In Italy, victims of the mass rape committed after the Battle of Monte Cassino by Goumiers, colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps , are known as Marocchinate.
According to Italian sources, more than 7, Italian civilians, including women and children, were raped by Goumiers. French Senegalese troops too, known as Senegalese Tirailleurs , who landed on the island of Elba on 17 June , were responsible for mass rapes, though their behaviour was considered less brutal than that of the French North African troops in continental Italy. Secret wartime files made public in reveal that American GIs committed at least sexual offenses in Europe, including rapes in the United Kingdom, between and Robert Lilly estimates US soldiers raped at least 11, women and children during the occupation of Germany.
During the war, German women were victims of brutal mass rapes committed against them by Soviet [] [] soldiers. Polish sources claim that mass rapes were committed in Polish cities that had been taken by the Red Army. Reportedly the scale of the attacks prompted communists installed by the Soviets to prepare a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin , while masses in churches were held in expectation of a Soviet withdrawal. Many of these victims were raped repeatedly. A female Soviet war correspondent described what she had witnessed: "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty.
It was an army of rapists. Soviet women were not spared either. Antony Beevor estimates that up to half of all rape victims were victims of gang rapes. Naimark states that not only did each victim have to carry the trauma with her for the rest of her days, it also inflicted a massive collective trauma on the East German nation. Naimark concludes "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of the occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of , until, one could argue, the present.
During 11 months of in the ,man logistics branch of Chinese Volunteer Army , there were 41 men charged with rapes. Hundreds of thousands of instances of rape and other sexual violence were committed by French troops and opposing members of the Algerian National Liberation Front FLN during the Algerian War. There were rapes and sexual atrocities commmited by American servicemen and South Korean troops in the Vietnam war. The Indonesian invasion of East Timor and West Papua caused the murders of approximately , to , West Papuans and many thousands of women raped.
During the Bangladesh Liberation War in , numerous women were tortured and raped by Pakistani army. Exact numbers are not known and are a subject of debate. Most of the women were captured from Dhaka University and private homes and kept as sex-slaves inside the Dhaka Cantonment. He was of the opinion that the , to , rape victims was an underestimation. On the actions of Pakistan army he said "They'd keep the infantry back and put artillery ahead and they would shell the hospitals and schools. And that caused absolute chaos in the town. And then the infantry would go in and begin to segregate the women. Apart from little children, all those were sexually matured would be segregated And then the women would be put in the compound under guard and made available to the troops…Some of the stories they told were appalling.
Being raped again and again and again. A lot of them died in those [rape] camps". Bangladeshi women have been raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War in by the Pakistan army during night raids on villages. The word Birangona war heroine is a title given, by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after the war, to the women raped and tortured during the war. This was a conscious effort to alleviate any social stigma the women might face in the society. How successful this effort was is doubtful, though.
In June , the United States Department of State organized a conference titled "South Asia in Crisis: United States Policy, —" where Sarmila Bose , published a paper suggesting that the casualties and rape allegations in the war have been greatly exaggerated for political purposes. This work has been criticized in Bangladesh and her research has been attacked by expatriate Bengalis.
During the war Bengali nationalists also indulged in the mass rape of ethnic Bihari Muslim women, since the Bihari Muslim community had remained loyal to the cause of a United Pakistan. The article was the first that exposed the brutal crackdown by the Pakistan army. It has been reported that in Peru , throughout the year internal conflict , women were frequent victims of sustained war rape perpetrated by government security forces and the Shining Path. The Soviet forces abducted Afghan women in helicopters while flying in the country in search of mujahideen. In November a number of such incidents had taken place in various parts of the country, including Laghman and Kama.
Soviet soldiers as well as KhAD agents kidnapped young women from the city of Kabul and the areas of Darul Aman and Khair Khana, near the Soviet garrisons, to rape them. Wars and civil conflicts can create a "culture of violence" [] or a "culture of impunity" [] towards human rights abuses of civilians. During periods of armed conflict, there are structures, actors, and processes at a number of levels that affect the likelihood of violence against civilians. Among some armies, looting of civilian areas is considered a way for soldiers to supplement their often meager income, which can be unstable if soldiers are not paid on time. Some militias that cannot afford to adequately pay their troops promote pillaging as a compensation for victory, and rape of civilians can be seen as a reward for winning battles.
According to UNICEF , "systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in ethnic cleansing ," having been used in various armed conflicts throughout the twentieth century alone, including Bosnia and Herzegovina , Cambodia , Uganda , and Vietnam. She argues that explanations must take account of the increased general risk of rape, that certain groups of women are at more risk of rape, and that men are raped.
In the structuralist framework, rape may be seen as a form of torture designed to destroy a woman's identity as a woman within a particular culture, or to destroy an ethnic community itself. She cites examples of women being raped in front of other civilians, and different groups of women being more likely to experience sexual violence. In the social constructionist framework, she cites work that argues that the act of sexual intercourse can be used to feminize one participant and masculinize another, so the rape of men can seem to damage the identity of those who are raped by feminizing them.
Dara Kay Cohen argues that some military groups use gang rape to bond soldiers and create a sense of cohesion within units, particularly when troops are recruited by force. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak characterizes "group rape perpetrated by the conquerors" as "a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition". Evidence provided by Cohen also suggests that some militaries that use child soldiers use rape as a maturation ritual to increase the tolerance of troops for violence, especially in patriarchal societies that equate masculinity with dominance and control.
Some refugees and internally displaced people experience human trafficking for sexual or labour exploitation due to the breakdown of economies and policing in conflict regions. In discussing gang rape as a means of bonding among soldiers, Cohen discusses the viewpoint of " combatant socialization ", in which military groups use gang rape as a socialization tactic during armed conflict. Research suggested that when the cortisol level is high a person's attention is sharp and he or she is physically active. In contrast, researchers found low levels of cortisol were associated with short attention spans, lower activity levels, and often linked to antisocial behavior including crime. Studies of violent adults have shown lower levels of cortisol; some believe this low level serves to numb an offender to the usual fear associated with committing a crime and possibly getting caught.
It is difficult to isolate brain activity from social and psychological factors, as well as the effects of substance abuse, parental relations, and education. Yet since some criminals are driven by factors largely out of their control, punishment will not be an effective deterrent. Help and treatment become the primary responses. Conforming to Merton's earlier sociological theories, a survey of inmates in state prisons in the late s showed very low education levels. Many could not read or write above elementary school levels, if at all. The most common crimes committed by these inmates were robbery, burglary, automobile theft, drug trafficking, and shoplifting.
Because of their poor educational backgrounds, their employment histories consisted of mostly low wage jobs with frequent periods of unemployment. Employment at minimum wage or below living wage does not help deter criminal activity. Even with government social services, such as public housing, food stamps, and medical care, the income of a minimum wage household still falls short of providing basic needs.
People must make a choice between continued long-term low income and the prospect of profitable crime. Gaining further education, of course, is another option, but classes can be expensive and time consuming. While education can provide the chance to get a better job, it does not always overcome the effects of abuse, poverty, or other limiting factors. A person's peer group strongly influences a decision to commit crime. For example, young boys and girls who do not fit into expected standards of academic achievement or participate in sports or social programs can sometimes become Crack cocaine pipe displayed by police.
Drugs and alcohol impair judgment and reduce inhibitions, giving a person greater courage to commit a crime. Children of families who cannot afford adequate clothing or school supplies can also fall into the same trap. Researchers believe these youth may abandon schoolmates in favor of criminal gangs, since membership in a gang earns respect and status in a different manner. In gangs, antisocial behavior and criminal activity earns respect and street credibility.
Like society in general, criminal gangs are usually focused on material gain. Gangs, however, resort to extortion, fraud, and theft as a means of achieving it. The fear of young people, mostly boys, joining gangs influenced many government projects in the last half of the twentieth century including President Lyndon Johnson's —; served —69 "War on Crime" programs. Some social factors pose an especially strong influence over a person's ability to make choices.
Drug and alcohol abuse is one such factor. The urge to commit crime to support a drug habit definitely influences the decision process. Both drugs and alcohol impair judgment and reduce inhibitions socially defined rules of behavior , giving a person greater courage to commit a crime. Deterrents such as long prison sentences have little meaning when a person is high or drunk. Substance abuse, commonly involving alcohol, triggers "stranger violence," a crime in which the victim has no relationship whatsoever with his or her attacker.
Such an occurrence could involve a confrontation in a bar or some other public place where the attacker and victim happen to be at the same time. Criminologists estimate that alcohol or drug use by the attacker is behind 30 to 50 percent of violent crime, such as murder, sexual assault, and robbery. In addition drugs or alcohol may make the victim a more vulnerable target for a criminal by being less attentive to activities around and perhaps visiting a poorly lighted or secluded area not normally frequented perhaps to purchase drugs. The idea that drug and alcohol abuse can be a major factor in a person's life is why there are numerous treatment programs for young people addicted to these substances. Treatment focuses on positive support to influence a person's future decision making and to reduce the tendency for antisocial and criminal behavior.
Another factor many criminologists consider key to making a life of crime easier is the availability of handguns in U. Many firearms used in crimes are stolen or purchased illegally bought on what is called the "black market". Firearms provide a simple means of committing a crime while allowing offenders some distance or detachment from their victims. Of the , violent crimes involving firearms in , over , involved handguns.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century firearm use was the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. Similarly, the increased availability of free information on the Internet also makes it easy to commit certain kinds of At the beginning of the twenty-first century, firearm use was the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. Web sites provide instructions on how to make bombs and buy poisons; all this information is easily available from the comfort of a person's home.
Easy access, however, will not be the primary factor in a person's decision to commit a crime. Other factors—biological, psychological, or social—will also come into play. Bowlby, John. New York: Basic Books, Curran, Daniel J. Theories of Crime. Fleisher, Mark S. Karr-Morse, Robin, and Meredith S. Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, Renzetti, Claire M. Women, Crime, and Criminal Justice. Los Angeles: Roxbury, Criminal Justice.