Sexual Assault and the Justice Gap
Subtitle: A Question of Attitude (Criminal Law Library)
Publisher: Hart Pub
Published: April 2008
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9781841136707
Subjects: Criminal law; Criminal Law - General; Criminology; Law
Description: This book is set against the background of the 'justice gap' in sexual assault cases - the dramatic gap between the number of offences recorded by the police and the number of convictions. It seeks to examine the attitudinal problems which bedevil this area of law and possible strategies for addressing them. Written by a professor of law and a professor of psychology, it reviews evidence from socio-legal and social cognition research and presents new data drawn both from interviews with judges and barristers and from studies with prospective lawyers and members of the public. In the final part, it considers different ways in which rape trials could be improved and suggests steps that could be taken to change public attitudes about sexual assault