The concept of safety is closely related to the activities of law enforcement agencies and, above all, the police. In this regard, the individual qualities of police officers and their influence on the effectiveness of the State Police in ensuring individual safety of citizens are of great importance. One of the most pressing problems in modern society is to protect women from sexual and physical violence, which is required by the main provisions of the Istanbul Convention. The article presents the results of the research on the representations of Latvian police officers about victims of sexual violence in connection with individual representations of justice through a study of belief in a just world. The topicality of this topic is based on numerous researches of the stereotypical view on victims of sexual violence and the negative impact of these stereotypes on the further investigation of crimes and provision of assistance to victims, which leads to frequent concealment of rape cases and distrust to law enforcement agencies in the professional context of making a fair decision. The aim of this research was to determine how the belief in a just world among police officers (N = 170) affects their attitude towards women who have been sexually abused and their ability to objectively assess the situation. The research was conducted based on the results of 4 used methods: “Personal belief in a just world”; “General belief in a just world”; Attitudes toward Rape Victims Scale; Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale followed by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the LSD Post Hoc test method to identify statistically significant differences between groups.
The objective of the research is to define the development of constitutionalism and socio-cultural challenges related to the formation process of the European Union’s legal identity. To achieve this goal, the concept of constitutionalism and its changes during the period of the European Union’s development are examined. Tendencies of the European Union Member States’ constitutionalism process are analysed and socio-cultural tensions of the formation of the contemporary European Union’s legal identity, which arise between security and freedom, order and justice and government and society are identified. The article states that the sustainability of public democratic processes and the functioning of the European Union is possible only if the constitutional values are protected. The reseach also reveals that the further evolution of European constitutionalism and legal identity still needs to enhance the development of the rules which could influence the creation and activities of the independent, self-governing EU’s political community.
Crime is an essential social problem that seriously influences the security of the society and every individual. Social security, in turn, rather closely correlates with state security. Recidivism takes an important place in the general structure of crime and is closely related with the organized crime and state security. Trying to solve the problems of crime by isolating the criminals, at the same time overlooking the gaps in legal and moral cognition, the consequences of crime are temporary prevented but the causes of this problem is often not unmade thus reinforcing the risk of recidivism. The increase of the crime rate among females becomes more topical that taking into account the role of women in the process of reproduction directly influences mental health and security of the society. That, in turn, strengthens the necessity to study the causes of female crime, as well as those determinants that deter the representatives of certain gender from the criminal action. In this regard the study of psychological preconditions in the context of gender differences can arouse interest, highlighting such component of moral and legal cognition as justice.