What are appropriate punishments?

Dr. Suparna Chaudhry, Lewis & Clark’s newest Assistant Professor of International Affairs, has been awarded competitive external funding for her research project, “Gender Violence and Public Attitudes Towards Punishment”. This $2,500 competitive grant from the American Political Science Association’s Edward Artinian Fund for Publishing will fund this study, which will explore how individual citizens respond to issue frames used by human rights advocacy groups to encourage and discourage different punishments for gender crimes. Dr. Chaudhry will use the grant to hire an undergraduate research assistant to help collect and analyze data from a series of survey experiments on capital punishment for gender crimes and leverage qualitative data from interviews with representatives of human rights organization Amnesty International.

This research project offers a significant contribution to the scholarship and practice of human rights. Specifically, it will help bridge the gap between public attitudes and measures to remedy gender violence, asking to what extent people believe different policies to be more or less appropriate than others. Previous research has not considered whether the public is concerned about the extent to which different punishments deter gender violence and are compatible with human rights.

Dr. Chaudhry’s areas of expertise include Human Rights, International Law, Non-Governmental Organizations, Political Violence, and South Asian Politics; you can learn more about her scholarship and teaching on her website.

September 2020