Research

My work focuses on gender, sex, and sexualities; crime, law, and deviance; and organizations. Using gender-based violence as a central case, I examine how state, nonprofit, and market actors collaborate to solve social problems. My work reveals that, though well-intentioned, these groups often have competing priorities and, in solving some problems, unintentionally create new ones. I call this the "problem-solution cycle."

Civil Remedies for Sexual Violence

Weiss, Benjamin R. 2025. “Bottom-up Hybridity: How Sexual Violence Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Blur the Boundaries between Civil and Criminal Law.” Law & Society Review 59(3):524–47. doi:10.1017/lsr.2025.19.
- Interviews with civil plaintiffs’ attorneys reveal their active collaboration with criminal prosecutors. For sociolegal scholars, attorneys’ purposive action is introduced as a novel mechanism generating hybridity between civil and criminal law.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2025. “Anticipatory Discrimination: How Attorneys’ Assumptions about Fact Triers’ Biases Sustain Race and Gender Inequality in the Civil Legal System.” Criminology 63(1):239–67. doi:10.1111/1745-9125.12399.
- Interviews with plaintiffs’ attorneys illustrate that fear of potential juror biases leads attorneys to accept fewer cases and demand better evidence from socially marginalized clients. I show how the anticipation of discrimination, not just discrimination itself, generates unequal outcomes.

Conventional Responses to Sexual Violence

Weiss, Benjamin R. 2023. “To Empower or Safeguard? How Novice Rape and Domestic Violence Victim Advocates Render Institutional Complexity Visible.” Qualitative Sociology 46(4):603–24. doi:10.1007/s11133-023-09544-8.
- Ethnographic observation at a crisis center reveals contradictory directives to empower and protect victims of sexual violence. While novice staff and volunteers pick one directive or the other, experienced staff and volunteers strategically combine both. These findings encourage organizational scholars to look to novices, not to experts, for evidence of contradictions.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2022. “‘I’m Sick of Doing Nothing:’ How Boredom Shapes Rape Crisis Center Volunteers’ Social Movement Participation.” Social Movement Studies 21(4):549–64. doi:10.1080/14742837.2021.1928486.
- Ethnographic observation at a rape crisis center shows that, while many victim advocates experience boredom while on the job, they understand boredom differently. For social movement scholars, findings demonstrate that emotions are not necessarily activating or deactivating. Rather, interpretations of emotions shape activist trajectories.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2022. “Carceral Lock-in: How Organizational Conditions Stymie the Development of Justice Alternatives in a Rape Crisis Center.” Theoretical Criminology 26(1):91–111. doi:10.1177/1362480620971784.
- Ethnographic observation at a rape crisis center illustrates how built-in features of the organization, such as physical infrastructure and departmental silos, grant criminal legal responses to violence primacy despite many advocates skepticism of them. For sociolegal scholars, I identify lock-in as a novel barrier to the development of alternatives to the criminal legal system.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2021. “‘When You’re Here, You’re Not a Militant Feminist’: Volunteer Professionalization in a Rape Crisis Center.” Theory and Society 50(2):231–54. doi:10.1007/s11186-020-09420-2.
- Ethnographic observation at a rape crisis center demonstrates that staff members teach volunteer advocates to mask their political commitments to police abolition when working with law enforcement partners to ensure victims’ access to humane care. For organizational theorists, these data reveal that workers low in organizational hierarchies share responsibility for maintaining healthy relationships with organizational partners.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2021. “Rhetorical and Organizational Typification of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking as Discrete Forms of Violence.” Social Problems 68(3):625–41. doi:10.1093/socpro/spaa007.
- Data generated through ethnographic observation at a rape crisis center detail how language, paperwork, and routine practices socially construct domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking as isolated forms of violence despite their frequent co-occurrence. For social problems theorists, I reveal new mechanisms through which typification, or the generation of knowledge about a problem, occurs.
Weiss, Benjamin R. 2020. “‘Who Can We Tell Survivors to Call?’ The Institutionalization of Criminal-Legal Interventions in a Domestic Violence Organization.” Social Problems 67(2):270–85. doi:10.1093/socpro/spz017.
- Ethnographic observation at a rape crisis center shows that volunteer and staff victim advocates direct victims toward the police not because they believe in their effectiveness, but because they cannot think of alternatives. For organizational theorists, these findings offer new explanations for similarities between organizations within a given field.

Knowledge About and Experiences of Sexual Violence

Littlejohn, Krystale E., and Benjamin R. Weiss. Forthcoming. “‘It Definitely Was Consensual, But…’: Normative Tensions about Gendered Heterosexuality and Young Women’s Mixed Feelings about Sex.” Available online first at Sexualities. doi:10.1177/13634607241298538.
- Interviews with women in college demonstrate that contradictory gendered expectations lead to sexual ambivalence, or the feeling of both wanting and not wanting sex. We introduce sexual ambivalence as a form of sexual injustice.
Weiss, Benjamin R., and Mahala Shulman. 2022. “Organizational Bias in Gender-Based Violence Research.” Social Currents 9(6):511–25. doi:10.1177/23294965221111339.
- Systematic literature review reveals oversampling of gender-based violence victims who report to formal organizations. Implications for knowledge about gender-based violence are discussed.

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