Using court reports to enhance knowledge of sexual abuse in sport

Sexual abuse in sport is a relatively recent addition to the research agenda but has risen to prominence as a result of a number of highly-publicised cases. For scientists it is difficult to gain access to data on sexual abuse in sport through conventional survey or interview methods, or to verify media reports of such cases. One potential alternative source of data is court reports. The study reported here used a small number of court reports to examine a range of issues confronting those researching sexual abuse in sport. The following two questions were investigated: What characterised the perpetrators who were sentenced for sexual abuse in sport? How useful is content analysis of court reports for acquiring more knowledge about sexual abuse cases in sport? Altogether 15 sport-based cases were revealed from the Norwegian Lovdata (Lawdata) website. Some perpetrator-related patterns of risk and harm arising within and across the cases were examined: the findings confirm many of those of previous studies in relation to the characteristics of perpetrators and the absence of any perpetrator stereotype. The article concludes that court reports provide one valuable, yet still incomplete, source of information against which to test our understanding of sexual abuse in sport

Using court reports to enhance knowledge of sexual abuse in sport: A Norwegian case study

Copyright @ 2013 The authorsSport scientists face difficulties in gaining access to data on sexual abuse in sport through conventional research sources and also in verifying media reports of such cases. One potential alternative source of data is court reports. The study reported here used a small number of court reports to examine issues confronting those researching sexual abuse in sport. Two questions were investigated: What do the court reports tell us about the perpetrators and their abuse strategies? How useful is content analysis of court reports for acquiring more knowledge about sexual abuse cases in sport? Data were drawn from electronic searches of the Norwegian Lovdata (Lawdata) website. 15 sport-based cases were revealed by the searches and then subjected to content analysis, both within- and cross-case. The findings confirm previous studies in relation to the perpetrator strategies and the absence of any perpetrator stereotype. The article concludes that court reports provide one valuable, yet still incomplete, source of information against which to test our understanding of sexual abuse in sport and develop abuse prevention measure

Do new Ethical Issues Arise at Each Stage of Nanotechnological Development?

The literature concerning ethical issues associated with nanotechnologies has become prolific. However, it has been claimed that ethical problems are only at stake with rather sophisticated nanotechnologies such as active nanostructures, integrated nanosystems and heterogeneous molecular nanosystems, whereas more basic nanotechnologies such as passive nanostructures mainly pose technical difficulties. In this paper I argue that fundamental ethical issues are already at stake with this more basic kind of nanotechnologies and that ethics impacts every kind of nanotechnologies, already from the simplest kind of engineered nanoproducts. These ethical issues are mainly associated with the social desirability of nanotechnologies, with the difficulties to define nanotechnologies properly, with the important uncertainties surrounding nanotechnologies, with the threat of ‘nano-divide’, and with nanotechnology as ‘dual-use technology’

Microblogging and Nanotweets: Nanotechnology on Twitter

The social web represents a new arena for local, national and global conversations and will play an increasing role in the public understanding of science. This paper presents an analysis of the representations of nanotechnology on Twitter, analysing over 24,000 tweets in terms of web metrics, latent semantic and sentiment analysis. Results indicate that most active users on nanotechnology are distributed according to a power law distribution and that web metric indicators suggest little conversation on the topic. In terms of content, there is a remarkable similarity with previous studies of nanotechnology’s representations in other media outlets. Related to content is the sentiment analysis that indicates predominantly positively loaded words in the corpus. Negative sentiments mainly took the form of uncertainty and fear of the unknown rather than open hostility