College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item THE UTILITY OF DETERRENCE-BASED SANCTIONS IN THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST ABORTION PROVIDERS: TESTING A BLENDED MODEL OF DETERRENCE AND BACKLASH(2012) Bartholomew, Brad; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The American abortion debate has existed since the early 19th century; however, the previous four decades have born witness to fundamental changes within the abortion opposition movement. Beginning in the 1970s, activists started to focus more of their attention on abortion providers. Soon thereafter, the traditionally peaceful protest activities of the activist movement began to share space with acts of harassment, arson, bombings, assaults, and even assassination. Today, abortion provider-related crime has become an unwelcome staple within the broader pro-life movement. In an attempt to prevent future attacks, state and federal legislatures have enacted a series of protection laws designed to raise the penalties associated with crimes against abortion providers. Despite the recent proliferation of these laws, their impact on abortion provider-related crime has seldom been the subject of rigorous empirical research. In this dissertation, I aim to address this shortcoming by using zero-inflated negative binomial regression modeling to present the first longitudinal test of the relationship between protection laws and abortion provider-related crime using incident-level data from 1975 to 2008, collected during a year-long research project at The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). The results of this study offer considerable support for the backlash hypothesis and the notion that traditional deterrence-based policy is often demonstrably unsuccessful in the prevention of this particular type of crime. Additionally, the findings suggest that not all protection laws are created equal with respect to their impact on crime. While state laws prohibiting minor forms of anti-abortion crime are shown to produce a backlash effect for crimes of harassment and vandalism, other types of state protection laws were shown to have no effect on crime whatsoever. Furthermore, the presence of the highly visible FACE Act is shown to generate similar increases for both major and minor crime types.Item Adapting to Norms at the United Nations: the Abortion-Rights and Anti-Abortion Networks(2007-11-20) Swinski, June Samuel; Conca, Ken; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the practical effects of international norm construction for social movements attempting to navigate the UN system, specifically UN global conferences. Do norms become ingrained in the practices of intergovernmental organizations to such an extent that they hinder a movement with different norms or help a movement that conforms to them? In studying the UN and especially UN global conferences on issues of social significance, it has been argued that the norms stemming from classic Lockean liberalism, such as emphasis on individual liberties, a rights-based framework for developing policy, and progress through science and reason, are embodied in the procedures and frameworks of UN global conferences. I compare the strategies and influence of the abortion-rights and anti-abortion movements over time at the UN, particularly through the International Conferences on Population and Development, and trace how each movement has adjusted its strategies to accommodate the normative context it has encountered at the UN. I use a combined structural and agency-oriented framework that identifies the concrete mechanisms and processes through which the interplay of movement ideology and institutional-normative context may constrain or facilitate a social movement's actions within the UN system. What I've found in my research is that the abortion-rights network has had more success in actually influencing the debate and changing the language of population policy to reflect their goals, whereas the influence of the anti-abortion network can really only be measured by the language that they have blocked. But it is important to note that both the abortion-rights network and the anti-abortion network have adjusted over time to the UN in terms of their strategies, which is interesting because of the more progressive character of one, and the conservative character of the other. However, the progressive and conservative characters of the two movements still affected how easily each movement adapted to these norms at the UN, and the success of their strategies in that forum.Item FEAR AND DARKNESS: ANTI-ABORTION TERRORISM AND THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT(2006-08-30) Bartholomew, Brad; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Relative deprivation theory (Davies, 1962) suggests that acts of anti-abortion terrorism result from the general widening of the gap between the individual's goals and expectations to a point of intolerance, whereas rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke, 1986) sees such acts as the product of the individual's cost/benefit analysis. This thesis endeavors to improve upon our knowledge of the causal mechanisms associated with anti-abortion terrorism, within the context of relative deprivation theory and rational choice theory using a macro-level research design. The results of this study suggest certain Supreme Court decisions have a significant influence on whether some within the pro-life community view the use of violence as an appropriate method of protest. Additionally, the results suggest that anti-abortion offenders make decisions according to a rational, cost/benefit analysis. This suggests that policy makers may effectively reduce the number of anti-abortion attacks by raising the penalties associated with the crime.