‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

ABSTRACT

Manus prison was officially closed in 2017 following Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Supreme Court decision that the existence of the camp breached the PNG Constitution. The ‘Namah’ decision was significant in signalling and seeking to curb the imperial reach of Australian law but insufficient in resolving the question of refugee imprisonment. Far from ending the imprisonment of refugees, the closure following the judicial ruling has facilitated the expansion of the imperial carcerality that has characterized Australia’s immigration detention policy since 1992. By revealing how refugee incarceration has been extended and offshore processing instantiated following the closure of Woomera camp in 2003, we argue that official closures of refugee camps Woomera and Manus have been constitutive of carceral expansion that is imperial in form and that reiterates patterns of colonial violence. After tracking imperial expansion, we make a call for prison abolition in the refugee incarceration arena as this is a critical decolonizing strategy.     

Violence in the Suites

Abstract

This article examines violence “in the suites” of corporate America. It argues that the magnitude of corporate violence overshadows aggression, and lawbreaking transactions associated with street crime. Specifically, the paper looks at America's Prison Industrial Complex, and privatization as classic examples of the breadth and intensity of corporate malfeasance and structural violence. Suggestions are made on how to humanize the behavior of corporations.     

Response to Johnston and Kelly Critique of PAS Article

Abstract

This article is a response to Johnston and Kelly (2004), who critiqued our original article that criticized the theory and models that have utilized the non-empirically validated construct of Parental Alienation Syndrome. We acknowledge the areas of agreement with Johnston and Kelly, further explain some of our arguments that were not clear in the original article, and outline the few remaining areas where we have different opinions. These different opinions are almost exclusively in the attempts to apply the constructs of alienation to children who are exposed to domestic violence in their homes. Here we argue that the definitions must be more uniform with those used by the domestic violence field of study in order to better understand how to apply the results of Johnston and Kelly's empirical Studies that they describe.     

Balancing fidelity,contextualisation, and innovation: learning from an adaption of SASA! to prevent violence against women in the Dadaab refugee camp

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on SASA!, a community mobilisation approach that was developed in Uganda by Raising Voices, with the aim of preventing violence against women. SASA! proved effective in reducing intimate partner violence against women, and has since been used in over 25 countries worldwide. In this article, we draw on recent research into the International Refugee Committee’s implementation of SASA! in Dadaab, Kenya. In particular, we focus on how the refugee camp setting shapes the adaptation and delivery of the SASA! programme and explore the balance to be struck between fidelity to the SASA! methodology, and adaptations to make it suitable for use in this specific humanitarian context.     

Preventing Domestic Violence by Changing Australian Gender Relations: Issues and Considerations

ABSTRACT

In recent years Australian governments have significantly refocused domestic violence policies to prioritise primary prevention strategies. The objective of such strategies is to change how Australians perceive, acknowledge, and respond to domestic violence as a gender-based problem. Recognising the value of these efforts to address oppressive cultural practices, we draw attention to limitations inherent in shifting culture as a means to prevent domestic violence. We demonstrate how governments may improve policy approaches by addressing the structural inequalities that have historically forced women into positions of subordination. This will help us move toward more effective and long-term solutions to domestic violence.

IMPLICATIONS

• Australian domestic violence policy must include structural and systems changes prioritising women’s equal rights in addition to equal opportunities.

• To change cultural attitudes and behaviours, we must alter the environment in which oppressions and opportunities are located.

• Social workers can shape the debate to ensure that changing culture to prevent domestic violence is conceptualised as part of a wider social and policy change agenda.

     

Children of adult consumers of mental health services: Towards principles of practice

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of a peer support and advocacy Network, Young Mothers for Young Women. The Network evolved through a participatory action research project into young mothers experiences of violence. Through the Network, young women participate in a community development approach to violence reduction. As part of the Network, young women offer peer support to other young women. Network members also engage in ongoing community education and advocacy about issues, such as poverty, isolation and sexism which increase young womens vulnerability to violence. An important aim of this paper is to make visible the dialogue between social workers and young women on which the Network relies. This paper is motivated by the concern that as social work enters an era of increasing accountability it is critical that workers articulate the often invisible role they play in facilitating participatory processes.     

Japanese invasion,war preparation,relief, rehabilitation,compensation and ‘state-making’ in an imperial frontier (1939–1955)

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the history of state-making in an entangled imperial frontier. The northeastern frontier of British India was a mosaic of princely states, administered and un-administered territories. The presence of the colonial state in the region was contentious, marked by violence on one hand and philanthropy on the other. The Japanese invasion of the region during World War Two had several unintended ramifications. Wartime and post-war developments produced institutions and social experiences which facilitated the process of state-making in the region. Relief and Rehabilitation project of the colonial state, and later distribution of monetary compensation was not merely governed by moral or legal obligations but was part of a larger project of imperialist reconquest in Asia after the surrender of the Japanese with Manipur and Naga Hills as the base. This project also provided the postcolonial Indian state with institutions to continue the process of state-making of its own.     

Frequency and Types of Partner Violence Among Mexican American College Women

Objective and Participants: The authors studied the prevalence of partner violence, by type, among Mexican American college women aged 18 to 35 years (N = 149; response rate = 85%). Results: Twelve percent of women who reported a dating partner in the past year were physically or sexually assaulted, 12.1% were stalked, and 9.1% scored as psychologically abused. Among those experiencing partner violence, almost half experienced stalking and 89% reported psychological abuse. Few women (25%) who experienced physical violence believed violence was a problem in their relationship. Conclusions: Partner violence was prevalent in this population, and participants experienced many forms of violence. Because few women experiencing physical violence report that violence is a problem in their relationship, interventions must address perceptions of violence and its impact on women's mental and physical health in college populations.     

Winning the Battle but Losing the War on Violence

Abstract

Scholars have recently claimed that global violence – defined largely as homicide and casualties from war – is in steep decline. However, research dedicated to using data to prove the decline of violence, in particular Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, almost completely neglects evidence of gendered violence within and across states. This methodological and analytical failure results from flawed theoretical assumptions about what violence is and how to count violent incidences. While prevalence surveys show that a large proportion of women and girls (not to mention men and boys) experience sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), it does not appear in declinist analyses. This is especially problematic given the burgeoning evidence of SGBV's scale and significance in current conflicts, often as a “tactic of war” targeting civilians. Analyzing global violence from a feminist perspective thus radically challenges declinist views about trends of violence. The explicitly feminist perspective on international relations in this article provides a more universal accounting of global violence, and the contemporary changes in the nature and forms of violence.     

Unsettling Spaces: Grassroots Responses to Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women During the Harper Government Years

Abstract

In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 4.5 times more likely to become victims of homicide than other women. Over the last 30 years, more than 1000 women identified as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis were murdered in Canada, and more than 100 are still missing. However, the Canadian government has not acknowledged the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. Focusing on activism around the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people in Canada during the years of the Conservative Harper Government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge Canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. Specifically, Twitter campaigns, memeing, the REDress Project, and Walking With Our Sisters are studied. Engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, this article, in turn, discusses how activism can disrupt violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces.     

Consent requires a relationship: rethinking group consent and its timing in ethnographic research

ABSTRACT

Activist groups in ethnographic research re-negotiated our Ethics Committee’s expected order of securing consent before data collection, demonstrating the importance of researchers taking time to build relationships first. Although the Ethics Committee expected us to obtain group consent, the literature provides little guidance on how to do this. We developed a Memorandum of Understanding to summarize what forms of participant observation each group agreed to and how we would reciprocate. In this article, we (re)conceptualize consent, using analogies to consent in social contract theory and sexual relations to offer a critical perspective on what constitutes consent. We argue that taking time to build relationships before expecting research participants to consent and replacing informed consent with a negotiated agreement is a more ethical approach. We advocate for Ethics Committees to expand the meaning of ‘informed consent’ and review its timing, especially for ethnographic research with groups.     

Home is where the heart is: Latinx youth expression and identity in a critical maker project

ABSTRACT

Making has been touted for its potential to democratize STEM yet could be replicating issues of limited participation of persons from educationally underserved populations. This version of making could be problematic for young women of color, limiting participation and aspirations for STEM careers. We present a counterexample with Critical Making, an approach of action, reflection, and community dialog to promote social change. We examine a multimedia design and implementation project as an expression of seven young Latinx¹ women’s experiences. Participants were tasked with creating a maker artifact to display data from a community survey and produced an interactive (touch capacitive) heart-shaped word cloud capturing positive qualities of their community. We utilized cultural-historical activity theory to focus on relations of the teen participants, meanings conveyed by the word cloud, and how digital tools interacted with norms, division of labor, and community relationships to mediate understanding. We report tensions between group versus community values and between possible design features and tool limitations. We also report how participants authored intersecting identities as makers, group members, and contributors to their community. Our results document the dynamics of a Critical Maker program and expand understanding of how young Latinx women experience making and STEM learning.     

Relationships between Early Life Victimization,Antisocial Traits,and Sexual Violence: Executive Functioning as a Mediator

ABSTRACT

Few research studies examine how the relationship between trauma and executive functioning can influence sexual violence among youth. Knight and Sims-Knight (2004) proposed a Developmental Etiological Theory (DET) connecting early life physical and sexual victimization to sexual violence via antisocial traits. Drawing from research that identifies a link between early life victimization and executive functioning, this study tests an adaptation to the DET by including executive functioning as an intervening factor. Using data on adolescents adjudicated of sexual and non-sexual crimes in a western state (N = 200), multiple structural equation models tested direct and indirect relationships between early life sexual, physical victimization, and other adversity, four differential forms of executive functioning, callousness, and sexual violence. Results revealed statistically significant direct pathways between variables of interest and a multi-meditational effect of certain forms of executive functioning and callousness in the relationship between victimization and sexual violence. Treatment and research implications are discussed.     

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain!

Abstract

This paper considers issues of violence against women through the conceptual lens of public/private ideology, exploring numerous ways that the public/private dichotomy is reinforced in the law and public policy of rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. We argue that the power of this ideology continues into the contemporary law of gendered violence, as evidenced most recently by the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Morrison (2000). We find that public/private ideology offers men a “violence shield”: freedom from scrutiny that enables gendered violence to thrive. Although gendered violence is now on the public agenda, these crimes remain shielded from scrutiny because they are associated with the private sphere. We suggest that feminist activists concentrate on undermining these ideological roots when crafting strategies to combat violence against women.     

Working with Stories: Street-Level Bureaucrats and Their Work with Individuals with Psychiatric Disability Exposed to Interpersonal Violence

ABSTRACT

The focus of our attention is the meeting between street-level bureaucrats and individuals with psychiatric disability exposed to interpersonal violence. Based on 11 interviews, we illustrate how stories are understood, used, and made meaningful to the street-level bureaucrat. The contribution of this article is first of all that of being a framework, from a storytelling point of view, for the work and organizational experiences of street-level bureaucrats. Second, by paying attention to the story part of these relationships, we can better understand the situation of individuals with psychiatric disability exposed to interpersonal violence given their interaction with different street-level bureaucrats.     

Economies of sacrifice: Recognition,monadism, and alien‐ation∗

Abstract

‘Economies of Sacrifice’ compares Girard's (1987) Hegelian inter‐dividualism to the Cartesian notion of the cogito and the Freudian theory of the unconscious in order to show how the monadic identity position violates the communicative balance of the self‐other bind. By looking at how both these thinkers constitute an identity category through the concept of sacrifice, the paper refers to the Girardian (1986) and Bataillean (1990) theories of violence and recognition in search of an alternative stance that may provide a more balanced view of human sociability. With regard to Bataille's theory of radical difference we can see how the idea which seeks to attack monadic individualism by destroying all identity advocates a principle of amoralism which views equality as ‘the generalisation of expendability’. As such, through reference to the work of Goux (1998) and O'Neill (2000) the article shows how the Bataillean thesis may pre‐empt the emergence of the post‐modern political economy. In light of this realisation the paper looks beyond both the Bataillean attempt to collapse identity, by exposing humanity to the total violence of the state of nature/post‐modern economic system, and the solipsistic theories of Descartes and Freud, which emphasis the centrality of the self at the cost of an acceptance of otherness, and towards Girard's theory of social justice as a communicative attempt to re‐state the importance of Hegelian recognition and human sociability.     

Rethinking about Civilizations: The Politics of Migration in a New Climate

Abstract

In this paper, I will lay out some useful conceptual/theoretical markets that will help us to understand, and resolve, significant political challenges to ‘action’ on climate change migration. Thus, while this paper is concerned with climate change and migration responses, it is also concerned with understanding how we understand migration in the context of climate change, and how climate change forces a radical shift in such understandings. To do so, I pick up on the work of Robert W. Cox and push it in a different direction. In particular, I am interested in his work on civilizations, and how this civilizational account of world politics opens up space for thinking about climate change broadly, and climate change migration specifically. I argue that Cox’s account of ‘inter-civilizational’ politics helps us to solve a pressing analytical problem: how to rethink the coordinates of contemporary cosmopolitics in the ‘Anthropocene’, and reconsider the frames of analysis that we adopt to understand and respond to climate change migration. I demonstrate this by considering two distinctly different ‘civilizational’ accounts of migration and mobility in the Asia-Pacific/Oceania region (one territorial and the other maritime), and consider how these might reveal an important source of future change. By sketching out this approach, my intention is to mobilize the resources offered by Cox in order to further his project of envisaging alternative world orders, and post-hegemonic political relations therein.     

Neo-Gramscian Theory and Third World Violence: A Time for Broadening

Abstract

This article argues that the neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony is not as useful in explaining the rise and consolidation of the modern world system. In particular, while the force-consensus approach may indeed be relevant in examining relations among the Western countries, it is fundamentally wanting when applied to the third world. The two main reasons concern the persistent violence against the third world, and the dominance of race and racism as social forces in the production and maintenance of successive world orders. Neo-Gramscian theory needs to be broadened perhaps by paying attention to the relevant thinking in postcolonialism.     

Transcending Boundaries

SUMMARY

This paper presents a participatory research and planned change effort to develop a coordinated community response system to domestic violence in a United States culturally diverse community with a large immigrant population. This work grew out of an international, interdisciplinary project that was designed to establish ongoing collaborative relationships between university and community practitioners in the United States, Honduras, and Costa Rica around the theme of intra-familial violence, particularly gender-based violence against women. The paper analytically describes the international collaborative project, the local community-based participatory research and community development project, and lessons learned from both the local and international interdisciplinary collaboration. Examination of differences across disciplinary and cultural contexts generated critical reflection on the need to consider reframing domestic violence in the context of fundamental human rights, as is the case in Central America. At the same time, challenges around developing a coordinated community response, addressing inadequacies in the legal system, and implementing education and training were echoed across boundaries, demonstrating the need for continued international collaboration.     

Introduction

Abstract

This article discusses why it is important to consider how cultural racism contributes to the construction of motives and justifications among individuals who have committed acts of structural violence, including, lynching, hate crime and police violence against African Americans. Cultural racism is also discussed as a factor that contributes to interpersonal structural violence in situations involving black offenders and victims.