"You Can't Stop The Bell From Ringing." Protean, Unpredictable, And Persisting: The Victim Impact Statement In The Context Of Sexually Assaulted Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The victim impact statement (VIS) is a victim’s voluntarily written account of a range of harms experienced as a consequence of a crime. Rarely is the VIS investigated specific to sexual assault or from a theoretical perspective. This qualitative study was designed to address these gaps. Interviews were conducted with 44 participants who sought or provided VIS-related services in Canada. Findings were analyzed using insights from actor-network theory. Findings of the overall study are presented through three distinct but interrelated papers. “Obliging Detours” (Miller, submitted) describes the development of the VIS in Canada, and its multiple, innovative, and unauthorized pathways of use. These pathways created novel opportunities, demands, and risks for sexual assault victims, particularly those who were mothers, female offenders, or had been excluded at trial. “Relational Caring” (Miller, 2014) identifies an ethic of care that underpinned use of the VIS by sexually assaulted women. Victims prioritized the well-being of others by constructing VIS narratives that privileged the harms experienced by others, protected future victims, and promoted the interests of intimate partner offenders. Victims who were mothers, especially those abused as minors, and those who were intimate partners of their offenders were particularly implicated. “Purposing and Repurposing Harms” (Miller, 2013) demonstrates how harm descriptions were manipulated by victims and others in keeping with, and contrary to, legislators’ design of the VIS. VIS repurposing occurred through victims’ practices of strategic disclosure, which was intended to effect changes in others’ behaviours, and harm peddling, which was the circulation of the VIS in nonsentencing arenas by victims and nonvictims to obtain compensation, child custody, and parole delay. Taken together, the findings revealed that the VIS has a protean nature that is produced by structural and relational factors, and lends itself to multiple uses in multiple contexts. VIS-related outcomes and the effects on victims and others could neither be wholly predicted nor prevented, and involved interactions beyond the criminal court setting. The protean, unpredictable, and persisting positive and negative effects of the VIS hold promise—and danger—for sexual assault victims.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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.
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".