Purposing and Repurposing Harms: The Victim Impact Statement and Sexual Assault
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of the victim impact statement (VIS) is to inform judges of victims’ crime related physical, psychological and financial harms. Findings from interviews with Canadian sexual assault victims, advocates, victim services workers, and prosecutors (N=37) demonstrated harm descriptions were manipulated by victims and others in keeping with, and contrary to, VIS design. Victims and prosecutors purposed the VIS to inform court outcomes through harms claims, and struggles over those claims. The repurposing of harms claims occurred through practices of strategic disclosure, intended to effect changes in others’ behaviors, and harm peddling, the circulation of the VIS in nonsentencing arenas. Victims, adversaries and criminal justice professionals engaged in harm peddling to obtain compensation, child custody and parole delay. Implications of purposing and repurposing harms claims included novel opportunities and legal pitfalls for victims, varied responses by judges, and an expansion of social control over victims and offenders.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".