Speaking of Stigma and the Silence of Shame: Young Men and Sexual Victimization

This study addresses male sexual victimization as that which is both invisible and incomprehensible. Forensic interviews with young men following reports of suspected sexual assault reveal patterns of heteronormative scripts appropriated to make sense of sexual victimization. These scripts show that victimhood is largely incompatible with dominant notions of masculinity. Sexual coercion and assault embodied threat to boys’ (hetero)gendered selves, as they described feelings of shame and embarrassment, disempowerment, and emasculation. These masks of masculinity create barriers to disclosure and help to explain the serious underreporting of male sexual victimization. Questions of coercion and consent are addressed, as it relates to matters of legitimacy, sexuality, and power. With few exceptions, boys’ constructions of sexual violence have received little attention. This study adds the voices of young men to the developing empirical and theoretical research on male victims of sexual assault

Regulating Bodies: Children and Sexual Violence

The interdisciplinary silences on sexual violence and the omission of children and youth from social science research speak volumes of the power of the child as a flexible, cultural signifier. In this article, I argue that dominant frameworks of children and childhood make child sexual assault a discursive impossibility for most young people. The epistemic violence of silencing matters, and it is these erasures that are fundamental to understanding violence and power. I argue it is paramount for feminist researchers to call attention to the undermining qualities of Institutional Review Boards that act as gatekeepers of representation and voice

Constrained General Regression in Pseudo-Sobolev Spaces with Application to Option Pricing

State price density (SPD) contains important information concerning market expectations. In existing literature, a constrained estimator of the SPD is found by nonlinear least squares in a suitable Sobolev space. We improve the behavior of this estimator by implementing a covariance structure taking into account the time of the trade and by considering simultaneously both the observed Put and Call option prices.isotonic regression, Sobolev spaces, monotonicity, multiple observations, covariance structure, option price

Gendered Violence and the Ethics of Social Science Research

The issue of ethical conduct in research settings is important and complex. As tenure-track researchers who study gendered violence, we found Clark and Walker’s discussion provocative, thoughtful, and interesting. They urge researchers to attend both to the structural dynamics of research carried out under the pressures of tenure and promotion while advocating an ethical frame that draws attention to the limited definition of risk or harm that animates typical human subjects research. Victims of violence, they argue, should not be subjected to a standardized understanding of risk. A broader framework is needed, one that brings into conversation virtue ethics with consequentialist and ontological frameworks. Given the impossible task of responding to the many points discussed by Clark and Walker, we chose to focus on four areas. In all likelihood, these areas of discussion reflect our own interests rather than Clark and Walker’s, but challenged to think seriously about research ethics in victimization studies, we attend to the following points. First, we seek to put virtue ethics in conversation with care ethics, in part because care ethics formed an important component of feminist discourse during the historical period in which institutional review boards came into being. Although virtue ethics may have lost its masculinist inflection after shedding its etymological roots,1 care ethics was explicitly seen as suited for the feminist subject. Following our discussion of care ethics, we address the question of setting victims of violence apart as a special class of vulnerable human research subjects. We argue that such a designation may yield more problems than it does solutions. Next, we turn to the violence of epistemology as a concern in research ethics. How do we come to an ethical definition of the research object, and to whom are we accountable? Finally, we turn to the relation of care when carrying out ethically and methodologically sound research

Intersectionality and Credibility in Child Sexual Assault Trials

Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneys’ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshaw’s focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of children’s experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the child’s unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status

Increasing Equity through B Corp Certification in the Coffee Commodity Supply Chain

The coffee industry is a cornerstone of Nicaragua’s economy. Coffee production shapes communities and is a major factor in the development of the country. Coffee cooperatives in Nicaragua are often Fairtrade and Organic certified, yet their farmers continue to struggle to secure stable livelihoods. In this inquiry, I sought to understand whether becoming a Certified B Corp and interacting with the B Corp network could improve farmer livelihoods for production cooperatives. B Corp Certification seeks to redefine success in business with the unifying goal of creating a more inclusive economy. B Corps, for-profit businesses which have passed the rigorous B Impact Assessment, are certified by the nonprofit B Lab. B Corp certification may increase access to the market through the B Corp network and may thereby increase farmers’ incomes. B Corp Certification may also be a means to redistribute value in the commodity’s supply chain. Most importantly, the B Corp movement could promote sustainable change in the coffee value chain by joining like-minded companies in the global north and south. I argue that B Corp certification within the coffee industry could help to redistribute value in the supply chain by working within the B Corp network and will ultimately improve the livelihoods of farmers

The California Cooperative Remote Sensing Project

The USDA, the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR), the Remote Sensing Research Program of the University of California (UCB) and NASA have completed a 4-yr cooperative project on the use of remote sensing in monitoring California agriculture. This report is a summary of the project and the final report of NASA's contribution to it. The cooperators developed procedures that combined the use of LANDSAT Multispectral Scanner imagery and digital data with good ground survey data for area estimation and mapping of the major crops in California. An inventory of the Central Valley was conducted as an operational test of the procedures. The satellite and survey data were acquired by USDA and UCB and processed by CDWR and NASA. The inventory was completed on schedule, thus demonstrating the plausibility of the approach, although further development of the data processing system is necessary before it can be used efficiently in an operational environment

Exoffender Accounts of Successful Reentry from Prison

Reentry research often focuses on those who have recidivated, with little work addressing the experiences of those who successfully reintegrate into their communities. This study examines individual accounts of successful transitions from prison to community in the months and years postrelease. Interview data point to three metanarratives used to make sense of reentry: as reverence, as reunification, and as reconstruction. In different ways, each narrative centers on connections to important others through faith, family, or community. We discuss the legitimacy of the self-narratives offered, and add to a growing body of work exploring reentry via the lens of the exoffender