Who ordered the feminicide of Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco on 14 March 2018? Our response draws on feminist language criminology in an era of misogyny; and it admits the hypothesis of a quantum causality (or imputation by remote symbiosis), which serves as explanatory model, for instance, of the intellectual authorship of crimes executed by radical members of Latin American political sects (Bolsonarism, Kirchnerism, and so on). Such connatural followers are so psychically entangled with their charismatic leader that they begin to act on the same frequency as him, even spontaneously eliminating eventual threats.
This paper argues for the substantial reduction of the ambit of police custody, and for the regulation of police conduct in custody blocks. Detention in custody is widely used by the police to apply pressure on suspects to make confessions. This is oppressive and wasteful. Custody should be used much more sparingly and only where detention is necessary for safety reasons. Custody can in any case be a dangerous place for detainees. An average of up to 23 people die in police custody every year, including four detainees from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Heritage, a greater proportion than their percentage of the population. Regulation of police conduct in custody blocks is supposed to be carried out by the little-known statutory Independent Custody Visiting Scheme. The scheme enables members of the public to make unannounced visits to police stations and to check and report on the welfare of detainees. As the result of government policy and the power of the police, the visiting scheme is neither independent nor effective, fails to challenge the police, makes no discernible impact on their behaviour or on the deaths in custody figures, provides no measure of police accountability, and obscures the need for urgent reform. This paper recommends immediate implementation of these reforms because they would save lives.
Emotional abuse and psychological violence refer to patterned maltreatment used to break down the personal integrity and sense of self-worth of the target. In this article, I address the experiences of emotional abuse and psychological violence of women in long-term heterosexual relationships based on my feminist activist research in collaboration with Women’s Line, an anti-violence, women’s rights non-governmental organisation in Finland. The research included co-moderating two online support groups for women and conducting follow-up interviews. In the analysis, I show that non-physical forms of violence are deeply felt and transform a target’s sense of self and their relationships with the world. However, targets may have difficulty recognising that they are subjected to abuse and doubt their own experiences, despite the severe effects of abuse and the risks posed to their safety. Thus, I argue for the need to name and identify non-physical abuse as severe violence in order to raise awareness and to validate the target’s experiences.
The chapter explores the conception of being ‘on-road’ as a gendered space, with historical antecedents. It explores the intersection of race and gender politics in early modern Britain, specifically the interwar period, which informed early youth penal reform. The analysis draws on documentary research from the Liverpool University Archives. In historicising and gendering the ‘on-road’ existence in this way, the chapter emphasises the importance of conceptual approaches expanding the explanatory scope about racialised youth’s contemporary contested positioning, beyond the customary suturing to crime and punishment. Historicising and gendering the logic of ‘the road’ enables exploration of racialised youth’s circumstances as part of a historic exclusion from the resources and opportunities associated with early modern justice reform.
This chapter is written as three sets of reflections by the editors on the preceding collection and the next steps for on-road scholarship. The editors each reflect on the aspects of the collection which speak most to them and our own work, and most importantly, what the next steps are for this field of study and what questions need to be further posed and answered. Levell’s section focuses on the use of feminist theory to understand subjectivity, relationality, love and community in the collection. She argues that this humanised previously stigmatised young people. Young looks at the contentions that result from the over-focus on gangs, including enhanced racial discrimination and over-policing. Earle weaves in his own journey to on-road scholarship with reflections on the chapters, and the undercurrents of music, inequality, Whiteness, racial capitalism, and the desire to see beyond youth criminality and instead focusing on the richness of their lives.
This chapter presents a reflexive account of an ‘on-road’ criminologist who has operated both in prisons and the streets for over four decades. The ‘on-road’ criminologist inhabits the world of his/her research participants. ‘On-road’ dialogue takes place in shopping centres, barbershops, bookies, car parks, street corners and other locations within the confines of the inner cities. In light of the proliferation of ‘county lines’, violence during the (COVID-19) lockdown and the growing sophistication of the digital space, ‘on-road’ criminological research is a vital component in the way we understand the changing nature of our inner cities, which moves beyond the traditional ethnographic encounter. The author argues that a critical aspect of being an ‘on-road’ researcher is in the sociocultural identification and articulation of ‘political Blackness’. Blackness centres on the understanding of the history of Black oppression and subordination, combined with acquiring the psychic tools and ability to transcend its impacts. Central to the proposition therefore laid out in this chapter is the way the narrative of the ‘on-road’ criminologist is produced and produces change within our understanding of inner-city life and the wider criminal justice system.
‘On-road’ is a complex term used by young people to describe street-based subculture and a general way of being. Featuring the voices of young people, this collection explores how race, class and gender dynamics shape this aspect of youth culture.
With young people on-road often becoming criminalised due to interlocking structural inequalities, this book looks beyond concerns about gangs and presents empirical research from scholars and activists who work with and study the social lives of young people. It addresses the concerns of practitioners, policy makers and scholars by analysing aspects and misinterpretations of the shifting realities of young people’s urban life.
This chapter outlines a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between male adult youth work professionals characterised, or as I shall argue, positioned, as ‘role models’ and young men positioned as ‘roadmen’. It begins with a critique of social policy that promotes male role models for young men in the UK, as it relates to both formal and informal education settings. It then sets out a theoretical perspective on masculine subjectivities using positioning and psychosocial theory and highlights some implications for our understanding of relationships between male youth professionals and young men. Using a closely observed case study of a young Black man and his older White male youth worker, the author argues that male youth workers seeking to proffer alternative ‘roads’ for younger men need to develop a deep, reflexive awareness of their own and young men’s identity constructions. The chapter concludes that social policy making and professional training regimes may need to be more acutely attuned to the complexity of these professional relationships.
The opening chapter sets out the main objectives of the book and its subject matter. This will include a preliminary discussion of the animating concept of on-road and the origins of the editors’ interests in this field of study. The chapter will outline the importance of intersectional approaches that build on Black feminism’s insistence on focusing on the co-constitutive features of race, gender and class. The chapter will include brief discussion of critical race theory, gender theory and the class stratification in racialised capitalism. These will be linked to the empirical work around youth and young people’s lives in the UK, with an argument for raising the profile of more explicitly gendered perspectives in research on young men and young women’s lives. The chapter outlines the structure of the book and its constitutive chapters.
This chapter aims explore the resemblances between Albanian ‘street life’ (jeta e rrugës) with life on-road in the United Kingdom. The salience of this proposed comparison is that the young people who took part in the research in Albania discussed being literally ‘on the roads’ as they experience international migration in adolescence, much of which involved journeys on both sides of the law in the respective countries. In drawing the comparisons between the hustle of the international ‘street life’ (jeta e rrugës) experienced by Albanian young people and the life ‘on-road’, we propose that some live the translocal on-road hustle. This chapter draws on original research findings derived from life-story interviews using music elicitation with young men in prisons and under probation supervision in the community. The authors conclude that the transnational aspect of Albanian street life is what distinguishes it from the UK on-road, which is conceptualised as more geographically localised.
