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Coates, L., & Wade, A. (2004). Telling it like it isn’t: Obscuring perpetrator responsibility for violent crime. Discourse & Society 15, 499-526, doi:10.1177/0957926504045031

Abstract: Part I of this article introduces the interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance, Part II illustrates its application to the analysis of sexual assault trial judgments, and Part III provides a detailed analysis of an entire judgment. In giving their reasons for verdicts and sentences, the majority of judges accounted for the assaults by drawing on psychological concepts and constructs.

Questions to Consider:

1. Discuss an interactional and discursive view of violence and resistance.

2. How accurately do judges apportion responsibility for sexualized assaults in cases where the perpetrators’ guilt was established? 

McDonagh, E. (1974). Modes of human violence. Irish Theological Quarterly, 4(3), 183-204. doi: 10.1177/002114007404100301

Abstract: Perhaps human violence was even more widespread in the past. The present concern may be based on expansion of communications, the horrifying possibilities of the weapons available, and our crumbling illusions about the growth of civilization. Without invoking for the moment any of the current explanations of the violence from the ethological to the theological, it is necessary to recognize its pervasiveness and the threat it poses for human living, immediately and directly in so many places, immediately and indirectly every place.

Questions to Consider:

1. Discuss Conventional Event-Based Designs versus Matched Pairs.

2. Why was it impossible, for example, to determine whether respondents were truthful about their level of intoxication during both conflicts?