Library News

Please join us on Friday, November 30th at 3 p.m. in the Hatfield Room for this week’s Faculty Colloquium being presented by Meredyth Goldberg Edelson, Professor of Psychology.

TITLE:
Why have all the boys gone? Gender differences in prosecution acceptance of child sexual abuse cases.

ABSTRACT:
Cases of child sexual abuse (CSA) referred to the District Attorney (DA) are not necessarily accepted for prosecution. Two pilot studies sought to investigate whether there were gender differences in whether cases of CSA referred to the DA’s office were accepted by the DA and, if they existed, what might account for gender differences in decisions to accept cases and file charges. The results of the first study indicated that cases involving male victims were significantly less likely to be accepted for prosecution than cases involving female victims. Comparisons of acceptance rates were based on expected frequencies given CSA prevalence rates by gender in the literature and on the proportion of males and females seen at a Child Abuse Assessment Center (CAAC) from where the DA referrals were obtained. The second study assessed both disclosure-related variables (assessed by content analyses of disclosures made at a CAAC) and abuse-related variables (that occurred at or near the time of the abuse) that might explain these differences. Few variables were found to significantly differentiate males’ and females’ cases; these were the relationship of the child to the perpetrator, whether the child was offended by a juvenile, whether the child told someone of the abuse, pornography exposure, whether the child displayed concerning behaviors, and whether the child was questioned about possible abuse. Implications of these results are discussed.

Please join us on Friday, November 16th at 3 p.m. in the Hatfield Room for this week’s Faculty Colloquium being presented by David Gutterman, Associate Professor of Politics.

Title: Obama Fought the Battle of Jericho

Abstract: In his first campaign for President, Barack Obama described himself not just as part of the Joshua Generation, but as the American Joshua – prepared, able, and destined to lead the nation beyond the place of Moses on the mountaintop down into the promised land. In part, this portrayal was indicative of Obama’s determination to write himself into the American story, but this story of Joshua is also an effort to tell the nation a story about itself. From his March 5, 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama where he positioned himself figuratively as a son of the civil rights activists to his November 4, 2008 acceptance speech where he answered Sam Cooke’s plaintive hopes by declaring that “change has come to America,” Obama consciously framed his mission as fulfilling the promise of the “Moses generation.”

But this story largely disappeared once Obama began governing. Indeed, one of the remarkable – and for many disappointing – aspects of Obama’s first term in office is that despite the powerful tales he told on the campaign trail, we are still waiting for him to be, as Matt Bai wrote recently in The New York Times, the “narrator in chief.” Even on the campaign trail in 2012, Obama rarely ascended to the heights of his power as storyteller that he demonstrated in the previous campaign – and he never returned to the story of Moses and Joshua. In this essay I address the disappearance of this political narrative during Obama’s term as President and in his campaign for re-election. Is this failure to tell this resonant political narrative indicative of a problem in the story itself – or in the storyteller?