Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
In this article we investigate the harmful effects of the 2018 Upper Secondary School Act (the ‘Study Law’) upon young people in Sweden who have sought to regularise their stay with the help of this law. We analyse these harmful impacts as ‘legal violence’: structural and symbolic violence embedded in or intensified by law (Menjívar and Abrego, 2012), in the context of Swedish welfare regulation.
The Study Law was ostensibly enacted to provide a new opportunity for some 7,000 young people, the majority of whom had fled Afghanistan. These young people had sought asylum in Sweden in 2015, but had not had their needs for protection recognised, instead being subjected to exclusionary laws, policies and growing racism. The Study Law substituted the possibility of protection with strict requirements of study, work and conduct, while the social and material support needed to fulfil these requirements largely was withheld.
In our analysis, we draw upon interviews with young people collected as part of a doctoral research project, legal materials, and our own, earlier joint experiences as legal practitioners working with those affected by this law. The legal violence of the Study Law, we argue, has produced individual and social harms, particularly impacting the lives of young people seeking asylum. The law has created a complex and hard-to-navigate, legally-violent regime that, directly and indirectly, has exacerbated hardships and facilitated suffering and even death.
Research examining the specificity of domestic violence (DV) for culturally and linguistically diverse women has grown considerably in Australia over the past several years, however, few studies have focused on the experiences of East Asian migrant victim-survivors of DV. This article reports on findings from an in-depth qualitative study and explores the perceptions of and responses to DV for Chinese migrant women from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The article shows that sociocultural and patriarchal values had an enduring impact on women’s experiences of and decision-making for DV. It also shows how cultural norms and practices connected to face (面子), family harmony (家庭和睦), family hierarchy (等級家庭制) and filial piety (孝) can be exploited by perpetrators and used against victim-survivors in the enactment of DV and coercive control. Findings highlight the importance of attending to the cultural specificity of DV for migrant women with a shared ethnicity with policy and practice implications for the provision of support from both mainstream and multicultural services.
This article challenges the notion of police neutrality and independence by highlighting the inherent politicisation within the policing apparatus. It explores the complex relationship between the police and political authorities in managing crowds and maintaining public order. Drawing on criminological and sociological perspectives, the study adopts a critical approach to analyse the operational decisions made by the police and their interactions with political authorities. This interaction significantly influences the operational strategies employed during the management of public demonstrations. The dynamic emphasises how a segment of the police force in Italy is tasked with ‘political policing’, serving as a link between government authorities and field agents. Ultimately, this work aims to fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating the ongoing politicisation of the police mandate in Italy, particularly in the context of public order management.
Drawing on prisoners’ accounts, this article explores how mitigation strategies adopted to contain the spread of the virus in prison shaped their everyday prison life. The article, using Stauffer’s concept of ethical loneliness, sheds light on the different ways in which a sense of abandonment was experienced by 26 detained individuals interviewed in a prison in Northern Italy, with a focus on the role of the State regarding the measures implemented (and not implemented) and, on an everyday basis, those of the prison staff. Participants’ narratives tell us how, even during the dramatic emergency of the pandemic, prisoners were conceived as stigmatised and otherised individuals where the issue of security, far from being understood in terms of health protection, continued to take on repressive connotations.
Over the past two decades, UK counterterrorism efforts have involved contentious legal and social measures aimed at preventing harm and increasing security. Critical scholars argue that these measures narrowly define security, risk, and harm, failing to recognise intervention itself as a potential threat to individuals and communities. Despite significant critical research, the legitimacy of the criminal justice model of counterterrorism persists in criminological scholarship. This article uses zemiology, the study of social harm, to critique contemporary counterterrorism’s impact. It employs UK counterterrorism as its case study, highlighting its ‘security first’ approach and its narrow definition of public interest. Three key arguments are advanced: first, counterterrorism is not an exceptional extension of criminal law but a form of hybrid governance; second, viewing this governance through a crime-centric lens obscures the harms of criminalisation and overlooks non-criminalised politically-motivated violence; third, examining counterterrorism through a social harm lens allows for a focus on social and racial structures, rather than state-defined categories of harm. The social harm perspective challenges the conceptualisation of terrorism as a crisis justifying exceptional measures, highlighting instead counterterrorism’s broader social impact. The zemiological approach highlights the role of law, not just as source of protection, but also as a means of repression and state violence, emphasising state accountability and providing a framework for identifying and preventing social harm. This perspective centres the broader implications of counterterrorism policies on social structures and racial dynamics, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of security and harm.
Domestic abuse campaigners managed to prevent parental alienation from being entrenched in the Domestic Abuse Act, 2021; yet the concept continues to be framed as a form of domestic abuse. As debates around the topic continue it is necessary to investigate how the concept has been constructed by proponents. Through critical discourse analysis this study examines key policy debates on the topic from the UK parliament and Families Need Fathers during a period in which parental alienation gained notable traction in England and Wales. It appears the success of parental alienation is dependent upon discourses that deliberately detract from critiques of the concept. Proponents fail to give a consistent definition, describing it as a form of child abuse yet depicting fathers as the primary victims. Despite declaring it a form of abuse, advocates purport false allegations of this type of crime to be widespread, presenting a conundrum into how much weight such claims should be given. These arguments are put forward in a context where parental alienation is argued to be gender-neutral while domestic abuse is understood to be a gendered crime. Overall, these discourses demonstrate a pattern of undermining the prevalence, seriousness, and gendered reality of domestic abuse.