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The Perfect Victim: Computational Analysis of Judicial Attitudes towards Victims of Sexual Violence

Published: 07 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We develop computational models to analyze court statements in order to assess judicial attitudes toward victims of sexual violence in the Israeli court system. The study examines the resonance of "rape myths" in the criminal justice system's response to sex crimes, in particular in judicial assessment of victim's credibility. We begin by formulating an ontology for evaluating judicial attitudes toward victim's credibility, with eight ordinal labels and binary categorizations. Second, we curate a manually annotated dataset for judicial assessments of victim's credibility in the Hebrew language, as well as a model that can extract credibility labels from court cases. The dataset consists of 855 verdict decision documents in sexual assault cases from 1990-2021, annotated with the help of legal experts and trained law students. The model uses a combined approach of syntactic and latent structures to find sentences that convey the judge's attitude towards the victim and classify them according to the credibility label set. Our ontology, data, and models will be made available upon request, in the hope they spur future progress in this judicial important task.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Peculiarities of the speech ways of responding to victims of sexual violence, taking into account internet communicationMedicine and ecology10.59598/ME-2305-6045-2024-111-2-13-23(13-23)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
  • (2024)AI, Law and beyond. A transdisciplinary ecosystem for the future of AI & LawArtificial Intelligence and Law10.1007/s10506-024-09404-yOnline publication date: 16-May-2024

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICAIL '23: Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
June 2023
499 pages
ISBN:9798400701979
DOI:10.1145/3594536
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0 License.

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Published: 07 September 2023

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Author Tags

  1. Judicial decision making
  2. Rape myths
  3. Sexual violence
  4. Witness credibility

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 169 submissions, 41%

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View all
  • (2024)Peculiarities of the speech ways of responding to victims of sexual violence, taking into account internet communicationMedicine and ecology10.59598/ME-2305-6045-2024-111-2-13-23(13-23)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
  • (2024)AI, Law and beyond. A transdisciplinary ecosystem for the future of AI & LawArtificial Intelligence and Law10.1007/s10506-024-09404-yOnline publication date: 16-May-2024

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