The legal grading of sexual citizenship: sentencing practices in Norwegian rape cases

This article maps and discusses the legal processing of rape cases in Norwegian appellate courts. Drawing on data from a multivariate regression analysis and a qualitative frame analysis, we examine the significance of space, accuser-convict prior relationship, the social context, accuser-convict marital relationship status, and convict racial background for grading of sentences in rape cases. The data-set consists of 176 rape cases that were processed in 2011 and 2012. Excluding acquittals and controlling for the application of relevant legal provisions, we find that sentences are reduced by 30% if the rape occurs in a private space as opposed to a public space. If the rape occurs at a party or is committed by a perpetrator who is a member of a racial majority, we find that sentences are reduced by 20%. A prior relationship between the victim and the perpetrator reduces sentencing by 18%. Results regarding victims of marital rape are inconclusive. The study concludes that sentencing is stratified according to the public/private divide, prior relationship, social context and race. Despite progress made on behalf of victims of domestic violence and a gradual implementation of stricter sentencing in line with legislative intentions, the legal processing of rape cases is permeated by race and gender discrimination.     

Crossing boundaries in the Mediterranean: papal trade licences from the Registra supplicationum of Pope Clement VI (1342–52)

This article examines a number of ‘trade licences’ issued during the pontificate of Clement VI, found predominantly in the unpublished Vatican Registra supplicationum. These licences were privileges granted to merchants exempting them from the papal ban on trade with the Muslim world. The article argues that the licences can demonstrate, amongst other things, that merchants were more concerned with their spiritual welfare and the ramifications of illegal trade than has often been presumed, and that the papacy was aware of the need for merchants to have contact with Muslims, in contradiction to the view of a fundamental opposition between the Church and Islam during the period. They provide a valuable insight into the changing Western attitudes towards contact with different Muslim groups in the Mediterranean, and also shed considerable light on the complex interaction between mercantile objectives and religion in the Middle Ages.     

Historical Archaeo-Geographies of Scaled Statehood: American Federalism and Material Practices of National Prohibition in California, 1917–1933

This paper discusses the ways that a more explicit engagement with the discipline of historical geography could contribute to archaeologies of the recent and contemporary past. Scholars working in this time period must consider multiple scales of connectivity between people and places through time and would benefit from political geography’s recent theorizing on scale and the state. We present a preliminary case study of what we term a historical archeo-geography drawing upon archaeological materials from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century sites to demonstrate how state and federal legislation is enacted at the household level.     

Changing Welfare Cultures in Region and State

The article takes a regional case study of three northern counties—Durham,Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire—to examinehow the hardships of communities, devastated by long-term structuralunemployment, exposed the inadequacy of a locally based welfaresystem, where poverty was itself expected to relieve destitution.Local welfare administrators put up a sustained challenge tomany of the preconceptions and practices of central governmentin their administration of a hierarchy of relief, assistanceand benefits in public welfare. In doing so, these northernadministrators precipitated draconian central action in an exemplarytakeover of administration in three out of the five local administrationsthat suffered this strategic intervention nationally, whileseveral others were threatened. This crucible of confrontationprovided a regional catalyst for the traditional concept ofconditional benefits, and a stigmatized welfare dependency tobegin to be superseded by a more egalitarian, democratic viewof entitlements as a citizen's right within a mixed economyof welfare. The article ends with a brief reflection on thewider and longer-term significance of this changing culture.     

Professional advantage and public health: British veterinarians and State Veterinary Services, 1865-1939

At the beginning of the twentieth century, municipal authorities in England and Wales, and in Scotland, began to develop systems of veterinary public health which encompassed both the welfare of animals and the safety of meat and milk intended for human consumption. This paper examines the motives behind veterinary attempts to extend the integration of human and animal health considerations within the public health framework in the inter-war period. In 1938 the Ministry of Agriculture implemented a national administrative structure for the management of animal diseases which absorbed the veterinary personnel of the municipal authorities, whose own veterinary public health activities largely fell into abeyance. As a result, the ideal of veterinary public health disappeared from British public health practice after 1939, and lost its force as a professional political cause. The mid-century disappearance of animal health from consideration in British public health programmes was one of a complex of historical strands which contributed to the late-twentieth-century emergence of public health crises over such animal-borne diseases as salmonellosis, Escherichia coli infection, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.