The Politics of Sex Abuse in Sacred Hierarchies: A comparative study of the Catholic Church and the Military.

I am writing a book and several articles that examine how and why the military and the Catholic Church have responded to cases of sexual assault and sex abuse within their institutions as they have, and the conditions under which civil authorities and elected officials do or do not hold the institutions to account. The project, mostly focused on the US, with comparisons to Australia and the United Kingdom, also explores whether the presumed sacredness or sacrosanct auras of the institutions play a role in how the institutions respond and whether public authorities and citizens defer to them. The project was the focus of my work while a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, AY 2017-18. As one part of this project, with Flinn Scholar and former Arizona State University Honors College student Mia Armstrong, I have published an article in Law & Society Review that examines whether, as is sometimes claimed by the media and some members of Congress, the US military’s handling of sexual assault cases is “chaotic”, and what might be the reasons cases are handled in the ways that they are. Another paper, in Journal of Church and State, examines the religious-based child abuse in Ireland and the recalibration of religion-state relations in the aftermath of the scandals. An article, with Jennet Kirkpatrick in the American Journal of Political Science, examines the US military’s restricted reporting option in light of care ethics and justice.

With recent University of Nevada, Reno PhD student and now Dr. Keely Eshenbaugh, I am working on a paper on the gendered effects of the military’s former “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on victim reporting of sexual assault in the military.

Broadening Our View of Culture

With Professors Adam B. Cohen (PI, Psychology), Gene A. Brewer (Psychology), Leah D. Doane (Psychology), and Kevin Grimm (Psychology), of Arizona State University,  I am involved in a unique and innovative study of culture. For decades, culture in psychology has been virtually synonymous with ethnicity and nationality.  While many advances have been made, a full understanding of culture requires expanding our focus to other forms of culture, including social class, region of origin, religion, profession, gender, political culture, and many others. The work broadens our understanding of culture via a rigorous, multi-method set of studies, including focus groups, quantitative surveys, and a longitudinal study using ecological momentary assessment techniques, with which we will predict successful adaptation.  We also elucidate the role that cultural memories play in constituting cultural identities.  To take maximum advantage of our techniques, we use the most cutting edge methodological and quantitative approaches to research design and data analysis, including hierarchical linear modeling and full information maximum likelihood estimation to account for attrition and missing data.  We will also ensure the measurement invariance of scales before making claims about cultural variation across groups. Our interdisciplinary team, representing social and cultural, developmental, cognitive, and quantitative psychology, is led by principal investigator Adam Cohen, who has forcefully argued for the expansion of psychology’s views of culture.  This work will be important in terms of application potential because US military and strategic interests require a full understanding of what culture is, how various cultures affect our goals and behaviors, how various cultural identities change over time, why cultural identities vary in importance over time, and how such variation predicts adaptation. We have been funded by the U.S. Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences, $1,770,000.

See also https://asunow.asu.edu/20170512-asu-research-culture-through-us-military-grant