https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/120853 2026-04-04T20:08:46Z 2026-04-04T20:08:46Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/141934 2025-12-04T11:15:45Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Sentencing in Maltese courts : a gender based analysis Abstract: This thesis is set to explore whether discrepancies exist between male and female offenders who appear in front of the Court of Magistrates (Criminal Judicature) and to explore the reasons why this occurs. Another aim of this study is to identify which types of crimes are mostly committed by females in Malta and whether aggravating factors and/or mitigating factors as well as sympathetic life circumstances can influence the type of sentence meted out. In order to answer the research questions a comparison and analysis between similar crimes committed by females and males was performed. The theoretical framework used in this research is that of the Focal Concerns Theory which attributes the more lenient sentences received by female offenders to the fact that the judiciary see female offenders as less blameworthy, less dangerous to society and to practical constraints both on an individual level as well as on a logistical level. The other theory to be tested is the Paternalism/Chivalry Theory which states that the judiciary views female offenders as naïve and therefore in need to protection. Hence they are meted out lenient sentences. This theory also includes the Evil Woman Hypothesis which states that when female offenders commit a crime which is usually perpetrated by males, the female offender will be met with harsher penalties because she is breaking the law and most importantly, she is going against socially accepted gender norms. The research method used in this thesis is that of a Mixed Methods approach. The quantitative research method consisted of gathering data of female offenders who were found guilty of a crime from criminal court sentences published online from the year 2005 to the year 2020. Subsequently the crimes were compared with similar crimes committed by males in the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. The factual information gathered through the quantitative approach helped in formulating the semi-structured interview guide which was used to interview ten professionals working/or used to work in the criminal justice field. A thematic analysis was used as a qualitative research method to place the author in a better position to answer the research questions while portraying exactly the participants’ opinions and experiences on the subject matter. The results of the quantitative approach clearly showed that there are gender discrepancies in Maltese criminal sentencing. Other results include the facts that Females are associated with Assault, Financial crimes, Sexual offenses, and Threats and that Assault is more common among EU and Non-EU Females and that Females are consistently associated with non-incarceration sentences, while males are associated with incarceration sentences. Different themes emerged after an in-depth analysis of the information gathered from participants; Female Offenders’ Demeanor in Court; Societal Views and Gender Stereotypes influencing the Criminal Court’s View of Female Offenders; the Validity of the Evil Woman Hypothesis, Sentencing Practice Outcomes between Male and Female Magistrates and finally the Introduction of Sentencing Guidelines in the Maltese Criminal Court Context. This research highlights the importance of the introduction of sentencing guidelines in the Maltese Criminal Court system. Another policy recommendation is to provide training in relation to stereotypical attitudes to the Judiciary. Description: Ph.D.(Melit.)

2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/141889 2025-12-03T11:24:51Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Comparing linguistic and visuo-linguistic representations for noun-noun compound relation classification in English Abstract: Noun-noun compounds (NNCs), such as ‘restaurant owner’ and ‘city morgue’, are very frequent in the English language, and new ones are created regularly due to the high productivity of compounding as a word formation process. To fully understand the meaning of an NNC, we need to not only know the meaning of its parts, but also deduce the implicit semantic relationship between them. That is, we need to understand whether ‘city morgue’ means ‘a morgue made of cities’, ‘a morgue located in a city’ or something else entirely. Humans have clear intuitions about what relations can hold between the constituents of an NNC, but interpreting NNCs in a computational setting is a challenge. Accurate NNC processing is crucial for the advancement of many natural language processing tasks, including machine translation, text summarization, and natural language inference. Previous methods of computational NNC interpretation have been limited to approaches involving textual representations and linguistic features. However, research from both cognitive science and natural language processing suggests that grounding linguistic representations in vision or other modalities can increase performance on this and other tasks. Backed up by findings about human conceptual combination as well as theories of symbol grounding, our work is a novel comparison of linguistic and visuo-linguistic representations for the task of NNC interpretation. We frame NNC interpretation as a relation classification task, evaluating our approaches on a large annotated NNC dataset, with over 19,000 relationally-annotated compounds (Tratz, 2011). We employ two lines of experiments; one line explores the use of word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013a) embeddings, compositionally combined into NNC representations in various ways, as inputs to an SVM classifier. The other line utilizes a BERT model, fine-tuned with a classifier layer on top. In both settings, we experiment with combining the textual representations with visual feature vectors obtained with a ResNet (He et al., 2016) model on images from ImageNet (Deng et al., 2009). We find that adding visual features increases performance on almost all data configurations in our SVM experiments, and that the results are statistically significant in some cases. In our BERT experiments, we find that BERT performs well on coarse-grained test data that may include previously seen constituents, but performs poorly on all other data configurations. However, adding raw ResNet feature vectors does increase BERT’s performance on the remaining settings, while normalized ResNet feature vectors contribute to little or no increase in performance. Our findings suggest that a visually grounded approach to NNC interpretation is a promising venture, and we view our novel approach as an encouraging starting point for more investigations into multimodal NNC processing. Description: M.Sc. (HLST)(Melit.)

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/140697 2025-10-29T10:29:16Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Social relationships of individuals with Dyslexia in Malta Abstract: This study investigates social relationships of individuals with Dyslexia. Four adults with dyslexia aged between 18 to 25 participated in this study. A qualitative research method was implemented, and data was collected using semi-structured interviews. Data from interviews was transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Five major themes were elicited from data analysis: The Diagnosis, Challenges that come with Dyslexia, Dealing with discrimination, Are there social consequences? and The Support System makes a difference. The main findings of study suggested that individuals with dyslexia do not suffer from significant impairments in their social skills and social experiences. Nonetheless, they face a multitude of challenges that transcend the academic context and reflect into their personal lives, challenges such as anxiety and intense stress. Furthermore, individuals with dyslexia have to deal with discrimination, which is a result of poor understanding and awareness surrounding their learning disability. Finally, findings state that a stable and present support system is essential for individuals with dyslexia to achieve better results academically and have more positive emotional experiences and self-esteem. Description: B.Psy.(Hons)(Melit.)

2024-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/136325 2025-06-10T12:41:12Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Exploring how professionals in Malta conceptualise hypersexual behaviour Abstract: According to Bőthe et al. (2018), hypersexual behaviour refers to “excessive and uncontrollable sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviours accompanied by significant personal distress and adverse consequences”. Hypersexual behaviour can include an excess of masturbation, pornography use, sexual behaviour with consenting adults, cybersex or telephone sex use, and strip club visits (Kaplan & Krueger, 2010). The aim of this research was to explore how professionals working within the therapeutic field conceptualise hypersexual behaviour by sharing their views and the approaches they use in their work. Eight participants were recruited and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Thematic Analysis was used to analyse the data obtained from the interviews, and themes and sub-themes emerged. Findings showed that engaging in hypersexual behaviour can have significant impacts and that several factors may contribute to this engagement. It was also found that certain aspects may influence the way individuals view hypersexual behaviour. Findings concluded that professionals’ perceptions on this subject vary, particularly with regard to their thoughts on diagnosis, their views on sex addiction, and the therapeutic interventions they use. Having a lack of consensus on diagnostic criteria has its implications. Future research on hypersexual behaviour might help professionals to better differentiate between healthy and problematic sexual behaviour. This might aid in providing better interventions and treatment for those who struggle with their sexual behaviour, while ensuring that high levels of sexual drives and common behaviours are not pathologised. Research on this phenomenon within the local context might reduce the stigma surrounding problematic sexual behaviours and help individuals to seek help if needed. Description: M.Sc.(Melit.)

2024-01-01T00:00:00Z