Forgiving may lead to an improvement of mental health, and from a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective it is important to establish what aspects of judicial procedures can be changed to promote forgiving. The literature suggests that receiving an apology may encourage forgiving. However, there is a dearth of empirical research regarding the association between forgiving and apology in judicial settings. This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the association between forgiving and four restorative situations (i.e. excuse, admission of guilt, apology, and true sorriness) in a group of 134 victims of gross human rights violations who were actual or potential participants in the proceedings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The best predictors of forgiveness in this sample were gender and whether victims perceived wrongdoers to be truly sorry.
There is no consensus in the psychological literature regarding the operational definition of an apology, nor is there a comprehensive theory of apology. The object of this study was to use a hermeneutic phenomenological approach and grounded theory methodology to develop a theory of apology based on lay people's interpretation of apologetic responses. Data were methodically gathered by interviewing 23 people who had been wronged by an intimate partner. The analysis of the data suggests that there is not a single discrete definition of an apology, but that it is more appropriate to conceptualise apology as a process that consists of one or more of three components: affect, affirmation, and action. Each of these components has two categories; one that reflects a self-focus on the part of the wrongdoer, and the other a self-other focus. What will be accepted as a good enough apology appears to depend on the severity of the consequences of the wrong, the level of responsibility attributed to the wrongdoer, and the perceived wrongfulness of the behaviour.
This paper reports the findings of a retrospective study designed, primarily, to investigate the predictive accuracy of the Rapid Risk Assessment for Sexual Offence Recidivism (RRASOR); the Static 99 and two models developed in Western Australia, namely the Violent Offender Treatment Program Risk Assessment Scale (VOTPRAS) and the 3-Predictor model on a Western Australian sample of violent and nonviolent sexual offenders. A secondary aim was to establish whether the instruments are equally valid for Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and violent and nonviolent sexual offenders. The data of 538 convicted sexual offenders, who were assessed by the Sex Offender Treatment Program of the Western Australian Department of Justice from 1987 to 2002, were used. The predictor variables were the total scores obtained for each instrument and the outcome variable a conviction in a court for a further sexual offence and, in the case of the VOTPRAS, also a further violent offence. In general the predictive accuracy of the 3-Predictor model was the best, followed by the Static 99, the RRASOR and last, the VOTPRAS. The study provides tentative support for the argument that risk assessment tools that were developed overseas should not be used with Indigenous people without further research and that different assessment tools should be developed for violent and nonviolent sexual offenders respectively.
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