Yokotani, Kenji http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-5971
Article History
Received: 24 October 2017
Accepted: 17 July 2018
First Online: 27 July 2018
Compliance with Ethical Standards
:
: The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
: All procedures performed in the present study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
: The present study abbreviated informed consent for three reasons. First, the participants’ informed consent and researchers’ will do not affect our sampling methods, because our criminal suit documents are based on daily activity logs in Japanese courts. Regardless of the participants and researchers’ will, Japanese courts created and stored the documents as their professional tasks. Second, if we analyzed only those who could provide informed consent in prison, the data could be strongly biased and would not be representative of sexual offenders in the Japanese prison. Third, an analysis of criminal documents is the best method to clarify effective behavioral sequences for avoiding rape. The effective behavioral sequences for avoiding rape were essential to prevent sexual victimization.Given these reasons, we abbreviated informed consent. Abbreviation of informed consent is frequent in epidemiological study (e.g., information about influenza and the Ebola virus was frequently used without informed consent from patients). The present study was also acknowledged by an ethical committee in a local university and a research committee in a local prison in Japan.