Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 30 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Social Harm x
- Access: All content x
The health and fitness industry has experienced a meteoric rise over the past two decades, yet its slick exterior conceals a darker side. Using ethnographic data from gyms, interviews, and social media platforms, this book investigates the growing consumption of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs), the motivations behind their use, and their role in masculine body image.
Addressing a gap in the literature, Nick Gibbs also interrogates both the offline and digital drug supply chains with important insights for IPED harm reduction practitioners, law makers and policy advisors.
Covert violence occurs in all social institutions—including families and close relationships, education, workplaces, politics, mass media, and healthcare—each with its own unique power dynamics that shape the incidence and patterns of these vicious acts. This book focuses on the types of surreptitious murder and mayhem that perpetrators intend to go unnoticed by would-be victims—until it’s too late. When such attacks are carried out with efficiency and competence, they may be disguised in official records as the result of illness, accident, or intentional self-harm, only on occasion to be later reclassified as the brutal crimes they are. This compelling and much-needed book is for all those who seek to understand—and strive to prevent—violence in society.
The first volume in green criminology devoted to gender, this book investigates gendered patterns to offending, victimisation and environmental harms. Including feminist and intersectional analysis, and with original case studies from the Global North and Global South, the book also examines actions that have been taken in response to gendered crimes and harms, together with insights on the gendered nature of resistance.
The collection advances debate on green crimes, environmental harm and climate change and will inspire students and researchers to foreground gender in debates about reducing and transforming the challenges affecting our planet’s future.
The Greek island of Lesvos is frequently the subject of news reports on the refugee ‘crisis’, but they only occasionally focus on the dire living conditions of asylum seekers already present on the island. Through direct experience as an activist in Lesvos refugee camps and detention centres, Iliadou gives voice to those with lived experiences of state violence.
The author considers the escalation of EU border regime and deterrence policies seen in the past decade alongside their present impacts. Asking why the social harm and suffering border crossers experience is normalised and rendered invisible, the book highlights the collective, global responsibility for safeguarding refugees’ human rights.
Do digital networks make a difference to the scope, scale and severity of social harm? Considering four distinct digital affordances for crime (access, concealment, evasion and incitement) this book asks whether they are simply new packaging for old problems, with no greater effect on society overall – or is cyberculture significantly escalating illegality?
Matthew David gives fresh insights into online harms and behaviours in the fields of hate, obscenity, corruptions of citizenship and appropriation, offering a comprehensive and integrated approach for those both new and experienced in the field of cybercrime.
Post-colonial legacies continue to impact upon the Global South and this edited collection examines their influence on systems of policing, security management and social ordering. Expanding the Southern Criminology agenda, the book critically examines social harms, violence and war crimes, human rights abuses, environmental degradation and the criminalisation of protest.
The book asks how current states of policing came about, their consequences and whose interests they continue to serve through vivid international case studies, including prison struggles in Latin America and the misuse of military force. Challenging current criminological thinking on the Global South, the book considers how police and state overreach can undermine security and perpetuate racism and social conflict.
Digital media technologies have enabled some LGBTQ individuals and communities to successfully organise for basic rights and justice. But these technologies can also present risks, such as online and in-person harassment and assault, and unsettled standards of privacy and consent.
Justin Ellis provides new insights on LGBTQ identity formation through social media networks and platform biometrics. Drawing on debate over gender, procreation, religion, nationalism and tech-regulation, he considers the effects of surveillance technologies on LGBTQ agency. In doing so, he brings an interdisciplinary ‘digiqueer’ perspective to negotiations of LGBTQ identity through case studies of digital harms from case law, parliamentary debates, social and mainstream media and LGBTQ-tech advocacy.
Whereas crime more generally has fallen over the last 20 years, levels of serious youth violence remain high. This book presents innovative research into the complex relationship between adverse childhood experiences and serious youth violence. While the implementation of trauma-informed approaches to working with adolescents in the justice system are becoming common practice, there remains a dearth of research into the efficacy of such approaches.
Foregrounding young people’s voices, this book explores the theoretical underpinnings of trauma and the manifestations of childhood adversity. The authors conclude by advocating for a more psychosocial approach to trauma-informed policy and practice within the youth justice system.
There is growing recognition that torture is too narrowly defined in law, and that psychological and/or sexualised violence against women is not adequately recognised as torture.
Clearly defining torturous violence, this book offers scholars and practitioners critical reflections on how torture is defined, and the implications that narrow definitions may have on survivors. Drawing on over a decade of research and interviews with psychologists, practitioners, and women seeking asylum, it sets out the implications of the social silencing of torture, and torturous violence specifically. It invites us to consider alternative ways to understand and address the impacts of physical, sexualised and psychological abuses.
Combining a compulsive read with rigorous academic analysis, this book tells the real-life stories of drug dealers involved in county lines networks, including their methods, motives, and misfortunes. Conventional wisdom surrounding county lines often portrays drugs runners as exploited victims, gang proliferation as a market-driven exercise and suggests a business model facilitated exclusively by smart phone technology and routinely regulated by violence.
Aimed at students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers, this myth-busting, accessible book offers a novel way of thinking about county lines in relation to gangs and serious organised crime and new ideas for drug crime prevention, intervention and enforcement.
