College Student Perceptions of Criminal Justice System Responses to Stalking

Abstract

In the current study, a survey was administered to 513 U.S. undergraduate college students from a large east coast university to examine whether extra-legal factors influenced their personal judgments of criminal justice system responsiveness to stalking. MANOVA results indicated that students believed police and prosecutors would not treat analogous cases similarly (this bias was not apparent with judges). College students perceived that prior relationship and target/offender gender would impact arrest decisions, and that target/offender gender would also impact police investigations and the filing of criminal charges. Potential explanations and practical implications of these findings are discussed, as well as directions for future research.

Gender and Stalking: Current Intersections and Future Directions

“…In this manner, we can begin to see how genderspecific consequences can reverberate throughout the criminal justice system. It is not surprising then that Cass and Rosay (2011) found that U.S. college students believe these gendered biases exist with regard to arrest rates, police investigations, and the decision to file criminal charges in stalking cases.…”

“…Instead, using methodologies that include: self-report (Thompson et al 2010), mock juror (Dunlap et al 2011), manipulated vignettes (Sinclair 2010;Cass and Rosay 2011), and generation of stalking scripts by laypeople (Yanowitz and Yanowitz 2010), has elucidated the complex interplay between gender and stalking. Important theory development (Duntley and Buss 2010) and theory integration articles (Davis et al 2010) are also included in this issue; these articles further tackle how to understand stalking in the context of gender socialization and evolutionary necessity.…”

An Introduction to Issues of Gender in Stalking Research

“…Researchers in this issue examined college student perceptions of stalking by eliciting stalking schemas (Yanowitz and Yanowitz 2010), examining stereotypical attitudes ("stalking myths") held about stalking (Sinclair 2010), and judgments of how stalking cases may be tried (Dunlap et al 2011) and processed through the criminal justice system (Cass and Rosay 2011).…”

“…This special issue is intended to contribute to this literature by using gender as a focus point in 1) applying new theoretical perspectives that incorporate the role of gender to the study of stalking perpetration (Davis et al 2010;Duntley and Buss 2010), 2) addressing divergent findings regarding gender in experiences of victims (Sheridan and Lyndon 2010) and perpetrators (Thompson et al 2010), and 3) furthering the study of how gender influences perceptions of stalking (Cass and Rosay 2011;Dunlap et al 2011;Sinclair 2010;Yanowitz and Yanowitz 2010). To place this special issue in context of the current state of knowledge on gender and stalking, we review the state of the existing research as relevant to the articles in this special issue.…”

“…Another study uses an Australian sample to explore gender differences, or lack thereof, in the commission of moderate to severe stalking behaviors (Thompson et al 2010). Lastly, we will examine lay prototypes of stalking (Yanowitz and Yanowitz 2010), and the consequences of lay perceptions for blaming victims (Sinclair 2010), perceiving legal interventions as likely (Cass and Rosay 2011), and assigning guilty verdicts (Dunlap et al 2011). Unless otherwise specified, general population and community sample numbers are percentages of the population who are stalked.…”