Category Archives: Publications

Read about latest research published by staff from the Crime and Justice Research Centre

Book Launch: Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative: Victims, Villians and Heroes

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Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative : Victims, Villains and Heroes by CJSDRC member, Dr Erin O’Brien was launched last night at Avid Bookstore West End, by Professor Kerry Carrington. It was a full house attended by a large audience.

The book is published in a Routledge book series Victims, Culture and Society co-edited by her and Professor Sandra Walklate, from University of Liverpool

Concerns about victimisation, as well as the politics of victimisation, have multiplied over the last 50 years. The book series Victims, Culture and Society explores the major concepts, debates and controversies that this concern has generated. As the impact of globalisation, the movement of peoples, the divergences between the global north and the global south have become ever more apparent, this series provides an authoritative space for original contributions in making sense of these far reaching social, political and cultural changes. These issues by their very nature demand an interdisciplinary approach outside conventional conceptual boundaries. Victims, Culture and Society offers the space for that voice. Erin’s book – which draws upon a range of interdisciplinary insights, from political theory, feminism, criminology and sociology, is therefore an ideal fit for the series. In it Erin deconstructs the familiar story of an Ideal victim of human trafficking, A foreign villain and a Western Hero, and interrogates the discourses and assumptions embedded in this over-simplified and caricatured narrative by turning it on its head. Why do dominant victim narratives construct a hierarchy between ideal and undeserving victims? Why do these narratives construct victims as hapless with no agency? Why are some victims narratives more prominent than others?
Why are the villains always foreign, ’undesirable others’ Johns, or pimps from gangs or organised crime?
What’s the role of the consumers in the sex industry? Are they villains or heros?
And why are the heros in dominant narratives about human trafficking nearly always white anti-trafficking activists and govts from the global north?

Erin’s book provides a beautifully crafted and engaging response to these questions.

Further information about the book can be found here:

https://www.routledge.com/Challenging-the-Human-Trafficking-Narrative-Victims-Villains-and-Heroes/OBrien/p/book/9781138858978

 

 

 

CFP: Special Issue of Internet Policy Review on Power, Jurisdiction and Surveillance

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Topic and relevance

The rise of digital technology has major implications for how states and corporations wield coercive regulatory power through the transnational administration of justice. Increases in data transmitted and stored by public and private actors across jurisdictions raise crucial questions about how individual rights and freedoms can be protected in an era of seemingly ubiquitous transnational surveillance. The expanded development and application of domestic and international law to address behaviour in digital spaces, includes existing law applied to online activities, and new law to cover a growing range of internet-specific conduct. A pertinent site of state and corporate power in the digital realm involves attempts to develop and enforce domestic laws, especially criminal laws, transnationally. These processes generally occur outside existing domestic legislative frameworks, and raises questions about how national sovereignty, extraterritoriality and state and corporate interests are expanding at the expense of individual rights and freedoms in digital societies.

Scope of the special issue
This special issue considers how the intersections between power, justice and space challenge existing conceptual and theoretical categories of contemporary law, that span the fields of criminology, international relations, digital media and other related disciplines (see e.g. Johnson & Post, 1996; Goldsmith & Wu, 2006; Brenner, 2009; Hilderbrandt, 2013; DeNardis, 2014). The legal geographies of the contemporary digital world require rethinking in light of calls for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to understanding sovereignty, jurisdiction and the power to exercise control, yet still protect individual rights through law in the electronic age (Svantesson, 2013). These issues raise a host of additional contemporary and historical questions about the authority exerted by the US over extraterritorial conduct in various fields including laws relating to crime, intellectual property, surveillance and national security (see e.g. Schiller, 2011; Bauman et al., 2014; Boister, 2015).

Legal geography is an emerging multidisciplinary area of inquiry, concerned with interrogating how law is connected to, and interacts with, the social and physical worlds (Braverman et al., 2014). By emphasising how the legitimate exercise of power occurs in and through space, legal geography is of significant relevance to online environments. Initial arguments about regulating the transnational nature of the internet describe the notion of sovereignty becoming ‘softened’ (Culnan & Trinkunas, 2010), while emphasising the need to move beyond outmoded binary notions of extraterritoriality (Svantesson, 2013; 2014; 2017).

The nation-state can assert jurisdictional reach through the extraterritorial exercise of power. This is more likely to involve powerful geopolitical actors such as the United States, which has recently enacted the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, and the European Union, via its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The emergence of large transnational corporations providing critical virtual and physical infrastructure adds private governance to this equation, which offers further new dimensions to the rule of law and also self- or co-regulation (see for e.g. Goldsmith & Wu, 2006; DeNardis & Hackl, 2015; Suzor, 2018; Brown & Marsden, 2013). Some of the ways jurisdictional tensions emerge in online spaces – with corresponding offline effects – occur through policing and law enforcement practices in the fields of criminal, intellectual property and corporate law. However, the lack of uniformity of these laws at domestic levels can lead to complicated and protracted legal disputes between nations, or amongst different agencies within nations (Palmer & Warren, 2013). Additional concerns arise regarding whether and how due process and human rights protections are maintained through the extraterritorial access to e-evidence (Warren, 2015; Svantesson & Gerry, 2015), the extradition of alleged offenders (Mann & Warren, 2018; Mann et al., 2018), and new and emerging powers many national law enforcement agencies now possess to engage extraterritorial surveillance and offshore government hacking.

Focus of the papers
Power and jurisdiction are central to understanding justice and regulating the contemporary digital environment. For this special issue, Internet Policy Review invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological papers from law, criminology, digital humanities, critical surveillance studies, and related disciplines on the following issues, which bear relevance to European societies and highlight policy implications or make a reference to regulatory debates:
• How the concept of legal geography can be applied to activities in, and regulation of, digital spaces;
• The impact of the expansion in domestic and international cybercrime, data protection and intellectual property laws on concepts of jurisdiction, sovereignty and extraterritoriality;
• The geopolitical impacts of domestic and international cybercrime laws such as the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention), the recent United States CLOUD Act and other lawful access regimes including EU e-Evidence proposals;
• The application of due process requirements in the contemporary policing of digital spaces;
• The objectives of justice in the study of private governance in online environments; and
• The implications of these transnational developments for current and future policy and regulation of online activities and spaces.

A selection of contributions will be made from extended abstracts. Authors of papers selected for the special issue will be invited to present and discuss their paper at a workshop to be held in Brisbane, Australia, in late 2019 (aligned with the Association of Internet Researchers annual conference which will be hosted by QUT Digital Media Research Centre). The workshop will enable exchange of ideas on these timely issues, provide peer-feedback for the finalisation of the papers and promote the forthcoming special edition. A sub-selection of papers will be selected for the special issue based on regular peer review.

Special issue editors
Dr Monique Mann (m6.mann@qut.edu.au)
Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in Technology and Regulation
School of Justice, Faculty of Law
Queensland University of Technology

Dr Angela Daly (angela.daly@cuhk.edu.hk)
Assistant Professor
Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

Important dates
Release of the call for papers March 2019
Deadline for expression of interest and abstract submissions (500 word abstracts) 26th April 2019

Invitation to submit full text submissions May 2019
Full text submissions deadline August 2019

All details on text submissions can be found under http://policyreview.info/authors

Peer review process September 2019
Workshop in Brisbane 1st of October 2019 (attendance is not compulsory)
Resubmission of papers following review January 2020
Preparation for publication February 2020
Publication March 2020

References
Bauman, Z., Bigo, D., Esteves, P., Guild, E., Jabri, V., Lyon, D. and Walker, R.B.J. (2014). After Snowden: Rethinking the impact of surveillance. International Political Sociology, 8(2), 121-144. Doi: 10.1111/ips.12048.

Boister, N. (2015). Further reflections on the concept of transnational criminal law. Transnational Legal Theory, 6(1), 9-30.

Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D., & Kedar, A. (2014). The expanding spaces of law: A timely legal geography. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Brenner, S. W. (2009). Cyberthreats: The emerging fault lines of the nation state. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, I., & Marsden, C. T. (2013). Good governance and better regulation in the information age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Clunan, A., & Trinkunas, H. (Eds.) (2010). Ungoverned spaces: Alternatives to state authority in an era of softened sovereignty. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

DeNardis, L. (2014). The global war for internet governance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

DeNardis, L. & Hackl, A. M. (2015). Internet governance by social media platforms. Telecommunication Policy, 39, 761-770.

Goldsmith, J. & Wu, T. (2006). Who controls the internet: Illusions of a borderless world. New York, Oxford University Press.

Hilderbrandt, M. (2013). Extraterritorial jurisdiction to enforce in cyberspace: Bodin,

Schmitt, Grotius in cyberspace, University of Toronto Law Journal, 63, 196-224.

Johnson, D. & Post, D. (1996). Law and borders: The rise of law in cyberspace,

Stanford Law Review, 48(5), 1367-1402.

Mann, M. & Warren, I. (2018). The digital and legal divide: Silk road, transnational online policing and southern criminology. In Carrington, Kerry, Hogg, Russell, Scott,

John, & Sozzo, Máximo (Eds.) Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 245-260.

Mann, M., Warren, I. & Kennedy, S. (2018). The legal geographies of transnational cyber-prosecutions: extradition, human rights and forum shifting, Global Crime, 19(2), 107-124.

Palmer, D. and Warren, I. (2013). Global policing and the case of Kim Dotcom. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2(3), 105-119.

Schiller, D. (2011). Special commentary: Geopolitical-economic conflict and network infrastructures. Chinese Journal of Communication, 4(1), 90-107.

Suzor, N. (2018). Digital constitutionalism: Using the rule of law to evaluate the legitimacy of governance by platforms. Social Media and Society, 1-11.

Svantesson, D. (2013). A ‘layered approach’ to the extraterritoriality of data privacy laws. International Data Privacy Law, 3(4), 278-286.

Svantesson, D. (2014). Sovereignty in international law – how the internet (maybe) changed everything, but not for long. Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology, 8(1), 137-155.

Svantesson, D., & Gerry, S. (2015). Access to extraterritorial evidence: The Microsoft cloud case and beyond. Computer Law & Security Review, 31, 478-489.

Svantesson, D. (2017). Solving the internet jurisdiction puzzle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Warren, I. (2015). Surveillance, criminal law and sovereignty, Surveillance & Society, 13(2), 300-305.

Essay-“Ordinary People”-Dr Dean Biron

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School of Justice affiliated academic Dr Dean Biron has published an essay titled “Ordinary People,” which appears in the Autumn 2019 edition of Meanjin Quarterly.

“Ordinary People” is a quasi-memoir piece reflecting upon the author’s experience of dealing with historical sexual abuse investigations while working as a detective in the Queensland Police Service between 1998 and 2004. The essay considers the impediments to justice faced by abuse victims and concludes by suggesting that their extraordinary courage can help provide a paradigm for broader social reform in Australia.

Dean’s previous writing has appeared in such publications as Child Abuse & Neglect, The Journal of Family Violence, Overland, Children Australia, Metro Magazine, Thesis Eleven, Rock Music Studies and Portal: the Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies. His contribution to Meanjin’s “What I’m Reading” blog series will appear in April.

Dean is currently teaching in QUT Justice undergraduate subjects ‘Deviance’ and ‘Policing in Context’.  A full copy of the essay can be found here – https://meanjin.com.au/current-edition/

Public Lecture: Good Universities or Ghastly Futures: How can we find a democratic path for higher education and research?

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Join us for a keynote presentation with Emerita Professor Raewyn Connell where she will address a ‘big idea’ that is central to social democracy and justice, access to knowledge and participation in Australian public life.

Professor Connell is an internationally renowned scholar and public intellectual. An enduring theme throughout her career has been access to justice, whether this is in relation to education, or the impact of gender relations in everyday life. More recently this has been evident in her consideration of knowledge and global power, and the significance of this in the university context.

Raewyn’s more recent work is a critique of the Northern bias of mainstream social science and the colonial structures of knowledge. Her book Southern Theory (2007) discusses intellectuals and social theories from the global periphery and explores paths towards knowledge democracy on a world scale. In 2019 she will publish a new book that extends this work called Knowledge and Global Power. She will also publish a book about the impact of neo-liberalism on universities – called the Good University. This will be the topic of her lecture.

27 March 2019
5.30pm arrival (networking and refreshments)
6.00pm – 7.00pm
Gardens Theatre, X Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus, 2 George St, Brisbane

Dress: Smart Casual

Register here by 20 March 2019:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/good-universities-or-ghastly-futures-public-lecture-tickets-56025975200

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Migrant women and technology-facilitated domestic abuse 

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QUT Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre members Dr. Bridget Harris and Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz published a Conversation piece with Professor Heather Douglas from The University of Queensland School of Law on 1 February 2019.

Migrant women are particularly vulnerable to technology-facilitated domestic abuse discussed findings from the article Technology-Facilitated Domestic and Family Violence: Women’s Experiences.

Read more

Book: Good Data

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Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member Dr Monique Mann, along with former QUT Law colleagues Drs Angela Daly and S. Kate Devitt, recently published the open access edited text Good Data.

In response to the totalising datafication of society, there has been a significant critique regarding ‘bad data’ practices. The book Good Data proposes a move from critique to imagining and articulating a more optimistic vision of the datafied future. Good Data examines and proposes ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this edited collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds of digital futures we want to see. The book presents concrete steps on how we can start realising good data in practice, and move towards a fair and just digital economy and society.

The Good Data book was launched (via QR code) on Thursday the 24th of January in Amsterdam in collaboration with the publisher Institute of Network Cultures (INC Amsterdam) and the ERC funded research programme DATACTIVE at the University of Amsterdam. Around 150 people attended the event where Monique Mann introduced the book, alongside a panel of contributors who discussed their chapters.

The book can be found here for free download (in various formats):

The Institute of Network Cultures has published a series of blogposts from Good Data authors summarising their Good Data interventions, including a post by the editors outlining 15 principles of Good Data, which can be found here:

Book, Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention

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Associate Professor Michael Flood has published a new book, Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention.

Across the globe, violence prevention initiatives focused on men and boys are proliferating rapidly. Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention highlights effective and innovative strategies for the primary prevention of domestic violence, sexual violence, and other forms of harassment and abuse. It combines research on gender, masculinities, and violence with case studies from a wide variety of countries and settings. Through the cross-disciplinary examination of these varied efforts, this work will enable advocates, educators, and policy-makers to understand, assess, and implement programs and strategies which involve men and boys in initiatives to prevent violence against women.

The book is available from: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137442109

Citation:

Flood, M. (2018). Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

New Book: Southern Criminology by Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Maximo Sozzo and Reece Walters

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Southern Criminology By Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters, just published! (Routledge, London and New York)

Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. It is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice.

This book turns the origin stories of criminology upsidedown. It traces criminology’s orientalist  fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism.  It uncovers the colonial legacy of criminal justice,  best exemplified by the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples.   It analyses the ways in which discourses about punishment have simply assumed that forms of penality roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world. It  advances the case that although the major drivers of eco-crime and  global warming come from the Global North, their most harmful impacts are felt in the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes distinctive patterns of violence in the Global South.

Reviews

“A thought provoking book! Written by the leaders of Southern Criminology, it is a most important contribution that addresses the issue of North-South imbalance in the production of criminological knowledge. The book powerfully challenges the assumed universality of dominant criminology theories and explains how contemporary criminology knowledge has been highly limited by Western experiences.”

– Professor Jianhong Liu, Department of Sociology, University of Macau

“Southern Criminology takes the reader on a journey of critical imagination to offer a future landscape for the discipline of criminology. This journey is challenging and profound. The authors chart a route from the discipline’s past to the promise of a dawn for its future that anyone willing to travel with them will find intellectually valuable and hugely rewarding. Take a risk. Take this journey. You will not be disappointed.”

– Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool and Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology

“For most of its existence, criminology has been moulded by the intellectual perspectives and ideological reflexes of the global North—a region that contains only a fraction of the world’s population and only a fraction of its experience of violence and social harm. Southern Criminology promises to be a foundational document in a growing movement to bring the rest of the world into the centre of criminological dialogue and action.”

– Professor Elliott Currie, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Irvine

“This book is an inspiring project of retrieval of wisdom bubbling up from marginality and domination in global structures of social relations. The ideas retrieved bridge global divides rather than essentialize ‘North’ or ‘South’. Dialogue across diverse divides helps build new intercultural and interscalar understandings in a pathbreaking volume.”

– Professor John Braithwaite, RegNet, ANU

“This book presents a convincing argument about the need to develop a Southern Criminology to overcome the monopolization of criminology by the Northern part of the world. It leaves us well informed on important issues, especially on the richness and pertinence of incorporating Southern perspectives into the Global understanding of crime and violence. Far from trying to discredit the knowledge produced by Northern Criminology, this book proves a simple fact: that we can learn from each other, and that knowledge can travel from Global South to North, South to South, East to West and vice versa.”

– Professor Elena Azaola, Mexican Criminologist, del Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS

Book: Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative: victims, villains, and heroes’ by Dr Erin O’Brien

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What is the moral of the human trafficking story, and how can the narrative be shaped and evolved? Stories of human trafficking are prolific in the public domain, proving immensely powerful in guiding our understandings of trafficking, and offering something tangible on which to base policy and action. Yet these stories also misrepresent the problem, establishing a dominant narrative that stifles other stories and fails to capture the complexity of human trafficking.

This book deconstructs the human trafficking narrative in public discourse, examining the victims, villains, and heroes of trafficking stories. Sex slaves, exploited workers, mobsters, pimps and johns, consumers, governments, and anti-trafficking activists are all characters in the story, serving to illustrate who is to blame for the problem of trafficking, and how that problem might be solved. Erin O’Brien argues that a constrained narrative of ideal victims, foreign villains, and western heroes dominates the discourse, underpinned by cultural assumptions about gender and ethnicity, and wider narratives of border security, consumerism, and western exceptionalism.

Drawing on depictions of trafficking in entertainment and news media, awareness campaigns, and government reports in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, this book will be of interest to criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, and those engaged with human rights activism and the politics of international justice.

https://www.routledge.com/Challenging-the-Human-Trafficking-Narrative-Victims-Villains-and-Heroes/OBrien/p/book/9781138858978

 

Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz wins domestic violence prevention award

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Associate Professor Molly Dragiewicz won a 2018 Domestic Violence Prevention Leadership Award from the Domestic Violence Prevention Centre Gold Coast for Furthering the Work – adding new information and knowledge. Read more