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Witch Hunt – The Media's Obsession With One Infamous Canadian

2022· book-chapter· en· W4309155882 on OpenAlexaffabout
Jane E. Barker

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsNipissing University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCommitWitchCriminologyPrisonSentenceSexual assaultMedia coverageHistoryPsychologySociologyLawPolitical scienceMedia studiesPoison controlSuicide preventionMedicinePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This chapter reviews the media's fascination with one of the most infamous women in Canadian history. Karla Homolka was found guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of two Ontario teenage girls in the early 1990s. Her husband, Paul Bernardo, was convicted on a number of charges associated with these deaths, including sexual assault and first degree murder. The chapter traces the initial print reports of the arrest, trial and sentencing of Karla Homolka; the application of the ‘Ken and Barbie’ moniker as a description of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo; and the characterization of Karla Homolka's sentencing as the proverbial ‘deal with the devil’. The media continued to pursue Karla Homolka long after she had completed her twelve-year prison sentence and was released into the community. The media's evolution in coverage of this case is described, and it is argued that Karla Homolka's treatment by the media was, and continues to be, an example of the kind of biased coverage that illustrates the gendered manner in which violence is conceptualized in our society, and calls into question the structural and systematic condemnation that is directed towards those women who commit violent crimes. This chapter emphasizes that the lens through which the media covers violent crimes for which women are accused and/or convicted is often clouded with vitriol and malevolence.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.094
Threshold uncertainty score0.679

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.004
Science and technology studies0.0630.030
Scholarly communication0.0180.006
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0050.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0130.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.033
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.225 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2022
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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