Social Workers' Perspectives on the Victim Impact Statements in Cases of Sexual Assault in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The victim impact statement (VIS) is a written account of the physical, psychological, and economic harms experienced by a victim as a result of crime. This paper describes a qualitative study conducted in Ontario, Canada with 15 hospital-based sexual assault care and treatment centre social workers (SWs) who had supported victims through the process of producing a VIS for criminal court. It was found that while SWs' formal knowledge of VIS legislation and legal practice was often poor, they were mindful of its implementation in the courts and concerned with assisting women in avoiding inciting ire in judges through the use of inappropriate or inadmissible VIS commentary. The practice of many SWs was guided by a firm belief in the intrinsic expressive function of the VIS, which contrasted with most victims' motivation to complete a VIS due to its perceived instrumental value. The authors conclude with recommendations for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".