Her work addressed an important community issue in a theoretically grounded and methodologically sophisticated way by applying Social Dominance Theory as a guiding framework to understand systems of oppression and the mechanisms by which individuals and institutions maintain existing social structure. Dr. Shaw developed a typology of justifications used by police investigating sexual assault cases and applied this typology to 248 case files that were classified as unprocessed. The analysis demonstrated that investigator’s attribution of blame predicted how far a case prosecution proceeded, and demographic variables (e.g., victim age, race, number of perpetrators) were strongly associated with the extent of investigation.