We are currently looking to supervise students in our areas of expertise:
On Tuesday the 18th of September Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre member Dr Monique Mann spoke at the CSIRO Data61Live conference. Data61Live is Australia’s premier science and technology event. More than 2,000 people registered to attend the event from corporates, SMEs and start-ups, universities, government and schools. Dr Mann spoke about some of the different ways forward (i.e. law, regulation, policy, design) for making the most out of big data while protecting privacy and preserving trust in new technologies.
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.
8 October 2018
1 – 5 pm
Room-Three-Sixty, Level 10, Y Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus
Please join the QUT School of Justice for a special domestic violence event with Fulbright specialist Mark Wynn. This interactive training will enable participants to see domestic violence offender manipulation through the eyes of people who have experienced domestic violence, first responders, and advocates. This session will enhance participants’ understanding of the power, control, and manipulation tactics used by abusers, touching on probable cause, interpretation of injuries, justifiable self-defense and determining the dominant/primary aggressor.
Sponsored by:
Professor Kerry Carrington with Liliana Pienda Superintendent of Women’s Police, Ministry of Security, Province Buenos Aries.
(Photo: Diego Zysman)
Professor Kerry Carrington has just returned from Argentina where she is researching women’s police stations (Comisarias de Mujer) with Partner Investigator – Professor Máximo Sozzo Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina. The field research has involved interviewing officers who work at these special women’s police stations (WPS). The research team includes – Natacha Guala Research Assistant, Maria Victoria Puyol HDR student, Professor Diego Zysman a Senior Research Associate from the Faculty of Law, Universidad de Buenos Aries. The research has been funded by an ARC Discovery Grant and will report is outcomes in both Spanish and English.
Women’s only police stations emerged historically at a time of re-democratisation in Latin America. They were designed to enhance women’s confidence in the criminal justice system, encourage reporting, prevent re-victimization, and send a message to the community that gendered violence was no longer tolerated and men who abuse women will be made accountable. Brazil was the first country in Latin America to establish women’s only police stations in 1985. Since then, women’s police stations have been established in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Uruguay, and more recently in Sierra Leone, India, Ghana, India, Kosovo, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa and Uganda. A 2011 United Nations Women evaluation found that women only police stations in Latin America enhanced women’s access to justice and their willingness to report, increased the likelihood of conviction, and enlarged access to a range of other services such as counselling, health, legal, financial and social support. Of those surveyed for the evaluation, 77% in Brazil, 77% in Nicaragua, 64% in Ecuador and 57% in Peru felt that women only police stations had reduced violence against women in their countries (Jubb et al 2010).
A recent study of WPS in Brazil used female homicides as a proxy measure for assessing their effectiveness. They compared 2074 municipalities from 2004 to 2009 and found that ‘women’s police stations appear to be highly effective among young women living in metropolitan areas’ . The homicide rate dropped by 17 per cent for all women, but for women aged 15-24 in metropolitan areas the reduction was 50 per cent (or 5.57 deaths reduction per 100,000) (Perova and Reynolds 2017: 193-194).
The province of Buenos Aries currently has 138 women’s police stations employing around 2300 officers. The first one was established at La Plata in 1988. They are designed to address, respond and prevent gendered violence. WPS are hybrid agencies, partly funded by provincial, local barrio, government and community organisations. In Buenos Aires, WPS are commonly located in brightly painted houses that provide a holistic range of services including child care, transport, counselling, legal, social support and comfort. They do not remotely resemble police stations as commonly conceived. Social workers, lawyers and health professionals work in an integrated response team with officers from the WPS to assist victims of gendered violence. The stations have a mandate to prevent gendered violence through grass roots community level primary interventions, local activism, forging partnerships, running local campaigns, and producing informative material for public dissemination. Their effectiveness in preventing gendered violence and the identification of what elements might transfer to other countries has never been studied.
Come along to the biggest event of the QUT Justice Society. This is a great opportunity for students to make connections with justice professionals.
WHO: The event is open to all students (must be 18+ years old)
WHEN: Wednesday 3rd October, 6pm-9pm
WHERE: Darling & Co., Paddington
DRESS: Business attire
COST: $20 for members; $25 for non-members (tickets include membership)
All details and tickets can be found on the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1796169797133417/.
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
Professor Reece Walters (Director, Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Research Centre) is pictured above with Professor Gorazd Mesko (President of the European Society of Criminology) at this week’s ESC conference in Sarajevo. Reece has been an International Partner Investigator with Professor Mesko on a Euro$770,000 project examining Water Crimes in Europe funded by the European Commission. This research will be published in a forthcoming book entitled Water, Governance and Crime. Reece has also presented a paper at the ESC as part of special panel on Southern Criminology chaired by QUT Adjunct Professor Maximo Sozzo. Reece’s paper was based on a chapter co-authored with QUT Adjunct Professors Nigel South and Avi Brisman and published in the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and Global South edited by Kerry Carrington et al. Reece’s presentation focussed on the following:
The politics and conquests of the Global North have long necessitated the forced migration, colonization and ecological plunder of the Global South for imperial and capital expansionism. In recent decades, these excesses of accelerated industrialization have created new victims, with entire populations or “climate refugees” (Barnes and Dove 2015) or “environmental refugees” (Seelye 2001) dislocated by human-induced climate change. This presentation adopts Connell’s (2007) southern theory and Carrington and colleagues’ (2015) idea of a “southern criminology” to examine critically the notion of ‘climate apartheid’ and explore its impacts on the increasing number of individuals displaced by environmental harms.
Following a recent recruitment process, it is with great pleasure that we announce the appointment of Melissa Bull as Professor in the School of Justice.
Melissa Bull is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Her two main areas of research include drug regulation and policing diversity. Her work involves theoretically informed analysis of policy and its translation in to practice in different contexts. Recently this has extended to comparative criminological investigation that considers how various criminal justice responses to offending behaviour translate across differently organised states. Melissa’s current research projects include work that focuses on harm reduction and drug law reform in China and Australia, as well as a project with colleagues from the University of Queensland that explores new ways of thinking about policing in Pacific Island states.
Melissa has published widely on drug regulation and drug control, sentencing and punishment, long term immigration detention, community policing and diversity, counter terrorism narratives and prevention programs, and gender violence in Pacific island states. While at Griffith University she has held a number of research leadership roles, including Deputy Director and then Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (2012-15). Since 2016 she has been the leader of the Justice, Law and Society research program in the Griffith Criminology Institute. Melissa will join us in November this year in her new role.
We warmly welcome Melissa and congratulate her on her appointment.
Organisations and networks around Australia are involved in work to engage men in building gender equality, across such fields as violence prevention, men’s health, and parenting. CJSDRC Member Associate Professor Michael Flood from the School of Justice was part of a recent meeting in Melbourne intended to bring this work together under a national Engaging Men Alliance. This new body will contribute to policy advocacy, the development of best practice in ‘men’s work’, and community awareness-raising. Dr Flood was invited because of his longstanding research and advocacy work on men, gender, and violence. Organisations and networks represented at the meeting included White Ribbon Australia, Domestic Violence Victoria, Male Champions of Change, No To Violence, Survivors And Mates Support Network (SAMSN), Communicare, and the Department of Social Services. Participants in the meeting affirmed that the Engaging Men Alliance will be attentive to gender inequalities, to intersecting forms of social injustice, and to both privilege and disadvantage in men’s lives.
