If I were a judge in juvenile court, I would strive to be fair and just in my decisions. To me, justice means evaluating each individual case on its own merits, taking into account the facts at hand as well as mitigating factors that may have led to the offense being committed. It also means holding juveniles accountable for their actions in a way that is appropriate for their age and level of maturity.
Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that young people often make mistakes due to lack of knowledge or understanding thus it’s important to take this into consideration when deciding upon a course of action which should always err towards rehabilitation rather than strict punishment (Kovandzic & Marvell, 2007).
However, if an offender has demonstrated habitual negligence or malicious intent then it becomes necessary to show them consequences for their actions through stricter sentencing guidelines since leniency could lead towards more severe offenses down the line.
Overall, while all cases must be judged according to diligence, there also must be room for leniency & empathy so that we can create meaningful change instead of just issuing arbitrary punishments which don’t address underlying issues faced by these individuals.
Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat – and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organisation), (imperilled) victims, and main target (audiences (s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought (Schmid & Jongman, 1988, p. 28)
For their study, Weinberg, Pedahzur and Hirsch-Hoefler selected 73 definitions from the 55 articles and compared these to Schmid’s (1988) 22 elements. The exercise yielded mixed results. For example, while some components such as the psychological elements of terrorism were in decline (41.5% to 5.5%), probably due to the absence of contributors from the field of psychology; the authors of the articles in the three journals made no variations between terrorist targets, that is – “combatants and non-combatants” or the “immediate target and wider audience” (p. 782). However, certain traits remained prevalent across both studies, and were used by the authors to generate another definition: “terrorism is a politically motivated tactic involving the threat or use of force or violence in which the pursuit of publicity plays a significant role” (p. 782).
The significant achievement of the trio lay in the ability to adopt observable and measurable terrorism components in designing their definition of terrorism. Thus, a remarkable achievement for research in the field of terrorism, especially media-related terrorism research as a result of the renewed focus on the publicity component, an element, which has remained relatively constant across both studies (p. 781).
However, in line with Sartori’s (1970) assertion that “the rules for climbing and descending along a ladder of abstraction are thus very simple rules ….We make a concept more abstract and more general by lessening its properties or attributes …” (p. 1041), the definition by the trio, may have lost one of the core ingredients of terrorism – the psychological impact. The trio had, however, explained that the reduction in salience accorded the psychology element, is not unconnected to the temporal differences from Schmid’s study. They also suggested that the writers of the published articles, which they used for the
