Criminology Tales

21-October-22 Strangeways, A Nightmare Revisited

(Image credit: Getty/Bert Hardy in Manchester Evening News)

A guest blog, anonymized to protect the writer’s identity.

This is a summarized account of my previous life of a hell on earth in the dark unpublicized shadows of the prison system. It is a journey from abuse to anarchy and finally normality: a path shared by many of my generation.

In 1970, as a young boy of 15 given Borstal training, I entered a prison horror story that has stayed with me throughout my life, with occasional accompanying flashbacks and nightmares.

The 1970s in Borstal were brutal years, and conditions then bordered on the medieval; the dark brick cells looked like gloomy dungeons, reflecting the Victorian era in which they were first built. Dressed in black, uniformed officers resembling the SS, patrolled the grey slate landings. The evenings were the worst times when having nothing to do, groups of officers would target cells of captive vulnerable children and beat then until they screamed. No cameras or ‘phones and no external medical staff or contacting solicitors in those days: we were at their mercy and we both knew it.

The abuse continued because the archaic system could not change under the old ‘Crown Immunity’ law, which meant the state was unable to prosecute itself and therefore what happened within the walls stayed there. On transfer, we were required to sign a form stating that we had been well treated and had no complaints. No threats needed, we signed.

Hungry and frightened into a rule of silence unless spoken to, we lay on beds of bug infested straw mattresses and I challenge anyone who remembers those days not to say they didn’t cry their eyes out at night in that first week. After that, the fear, degradation and brutality slowly became normalized.

An exaggeration? No, it was simply something that happened in that era, a normality similar to that of public hanging spectacles for previous generations. If only those walls, now painted in soothing pastel, could talk.

I would describe the 1990s as a crazy anarchist era. The previous ‘disciplining of the body’ (Foucault, 1977) was replaced with an attitude of complete indifference, elsewhere referred to as ‘human warehousing’ (see Phelps, 2018, writing in the British Journal of Criminology). The beatings continued yet on a lesser scale, but with add-ons. Now, packed in like sardines, the ancient sewage system unable to cope with the volume, which regularly overflowed onto the landings and those unfortunates beneath, attracting rats. The mass sporadic diarrhea outbreaks, head lice and one shower a week in over-crowded conditions were early warning signs of approaching dysentery and cholera, diseases commonly arising from those same conditions elsewhere in the 20th century. The mass disturbance that followed in 1990 was only a surprise to those outside the prison system.

By 1994, I had gone from Cat ‘A’ to an MA Criminology. I discovered education, went on to post-graduate study and, when released, emigrated and became a professional spending many years abroad. Yet the highlight of my life is being transferred out of 1990 Strangeways into the Cat ‘A’ dispersal system, knowing the abusing prison guards were removed (were chased) from that evil blot on the Manchester landscape and the prison was systematically demolished in the biggest riot in British penal history.

Since 1999, new prison rules meant that those days have thankfully long gone, but prison has always been a microcosm of society. As society changes, it in turn produces the inmate population it reflects. In other words, the mental illness, the anarchy, and gang culture in today’s prisons are simply a reflection of the society producing them. Some might argue that prison has swung too far in a liberal direction and that might well be true, in which case that is a current problem that needs addressing, as well as the society that produced it. The jailers too, once exclusively drawn from ex-military personnel are now the products of the same liberal society as the inmates. Although I have no doubt that prison is not easy, you can now complete your sentence without having to hide a piece of bread under your pillow because of hunger (a disciplinary offence involving a compulsory beating in 1970), seeing blood on the walls in the segregation unit (‘the block’), or listen to the accompanying screams.

Research suggests that if a group of people have absolute power over another group, nasty things follow. Moreover, absolute power attracts the worst type of overseers, including bullies, sexual predators, and outright sadists. The people who staffed the old prison system were no doubt respectable law-abiding citizens outside the walls, but inside them they mirrored the participants in the ‘Milgram Shock Experiment’. This was an experiment devised to test how far people were prepared to go given unlimited authority, as opposed to their personal conscience. Briefly, the Milgram experiment revealed a majority of people in the right location and on orders from a figure of authority, were willing to carry out extreme acts of violence against helpless victims. Something not entirely unknown elsewhere in the 20th century.

Even after all these years I have no sympathy for those still living who staffed these evil places and now complain of PTSD and related symptoms. The effects of what they saw and/or participated in is now coming back to haunt them in their later years in the same way it mentally affected us, their victims.

Strangeways: A Nightmare Revisited

O well done! We commend all your pains,

And those yet to come shall share i’ the gains;

And now about thy memories tell,

Of things once unseen in a man-made hell;

If walls too had voices they would scream in despair,

As they tell their grim tales and bid thee beware;

Of times distant past though the nightmares remain,

Of something so wicked that this way once came.

As memories fade and passing time numbs,

The sound of the boots like the beating of drums;

Of whistles and bells, the hunger and pain,

While alone in the gloom a child’s tears fell like rain;

As the evil destroyed though three decades past,

Deep inside an old man the little boy laughs;

May their wickedness visited on children bring shame,

A reminder so wicked that this way once came.

This guest blog, including the poem, are the intellectual property of the anonymous author. The blog site is © Natasha Mulvihill and Criminology Tales, 2022.

24-May-22 MI5, Abuse and the Patriarchal State

Photo by Sora Shimazaki: https://www.pexels.com

Last week, the BBC published details of a long-running investigation into an MI5 agent who, it is alleged, terrorised, abused and attempted to kill an intimate partner. The BBC had further located an intimate partner in another country, with similar experiences, and suggestions of active targeting of young women, by this agent, for exploitation.

The agent is alleged to be a paid informant or CHIS [covert intelligence intelligence source] for MI5 [the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency], who has infiltrated extremist networks on the state’s behalf. Critically, his UK victim claimed that he warned her not to report his behaviour, invoking his protected status as an agent. The BBC reports the victim saying:

“It meant that I couldn’t speak out about any of his behaviour towards me, any of the violence I went through, sexual or physical, because he had men in high places who always had his back, who would intervene and who would actively kill me, if I spoke out.” (BBC, 20 May 2022)

Since publication of the story, the victim has lodged a formal complaint with the watchdog for the intelligence agencies, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) (BBC, 21 May 2022).

As distressing and shocking as the details of the story are, of significant interest also is the experience of the BBC in trying to investigate and publish this story and the Government’s response. Lead journalist Daniel De Simone recounted this in a piece published the day after the story broke.

Over months, De Simone and other BBC colleagues were involved in a protracted legal case in the High Court, involving MI5, government, police and others. He describes how MI5 sought to undermine the credibility of the story and attempts were made by government to secure editorial control (a demand later dropped, according to De Simone). Moreover, a ‘closed material procedure’ was applied, where secret evidence was considered by the judge and by special security-cleared barristers acting for the BBC behind closed doors. The barristers were however barred from communicating with the BBC team, lest the evidence used in the case against them were disclosed. In this way, De Simone found himself experiencing the double bind of secrecy he had himself reported on in relation to terrorism cases over the years (BBC, 22 May 2022).

The BBC sought to expose alleged individual criminality in private, outside of the course of state work (criminality during undercover work has been covered elsewhere in this blog). On the other side, the concern of the state has been to protect that individual as an intelligence asset (whose exposure, it is claimed, could compromise other current and future such assets).

“We argued that it was important to identify X so that other women he encountered could be warned about him and the abusive behaviour our investigation had uncovered. The security service, however, argued that naming X would create an unacceptable danger to him from extremists and discourage other people from acting as informants, which would damage national security.” (BBC, 22 May 2022)

The argument about protecting an intelligence source, and thereby others, has merit on the face of it. But it is a distraction. The more significant question is the lack of oversight and handler knowledge (or inaction based on that knowledge) about the agent in question, over a number of years. First, the BBC investigation suggests that this individual is being paid to infiltrate extremist organisations, yet there is visual and witness evidence that he himself holds extremist attitudes. So he might be more accurately described as an active extremist who has been persuaded to pass information to the state. Second, the government and security services are presented with information (which they may have already known) that this person is a serious (potentially fatal) threat to women and girls. Third, there is evidence that he is leveraging his status to warn these women against reporting him: so he is selectively disclosing that he is a CHIS in order to exert control. All of this should surely have sounded alarm bells.

This story of unchecked males, supported by the state, is not new. The 2015 Stephen Taylor report, revealed that officers in the Special Demonstration Squad (or SDS, a Metropolitan police unit operating from 1968 to 2008) used the identities of dead children to create aliases and entered into romantic relationships with women while undercover (with at least three officers fathering children) (Guardian, 28 October 2020). Despite victims speaking out about their experience over the years, what tipped the balance, the Guardian newspaper argues, was the revelation in 2013 by former SDS Officer Peter Francis that the Metropolitan police had spied on the Lawrence family, in the wake of the murder of their son Stephen, in 1993. The then Home Secretary Theresa May commissioned a review – which became Stephen Taylor’s 2015 report – to understand the links between the Home Office and SDS: in other words, to establish who knew what and when. Yet the Taylor report notes that, “there appears to be no record in the [Home Office] Department of anything related to the SDS during its years of operation from 1968 – 2008” (Taylor, 2015, para.3.2.14). Taylor describes this as a “concern”, noting that, “it is not possible to conclude whether this is human error or deliberate concealment” (Taylor, 2015, para.3.2.13).

The police and security services have historically been dominated by men working ‘undercover’ or ‘in the field’ (with women dominating office-based and administrative roles because the field was/is masculine and therefore their femininity would unhelpfully mark them). Police culture, Westminster culture, and we can guess parts of MI5 culture have traditionally been masculine. This masculine sensibility can mean tolerating stereotypical behaviour such as sexual conquest, violence, coercion and hubris, often at the expense of women, children and less powerful or gender-resistant men.

Intentional or not, in continuing to defend, protect or erase police and security individuals who engage in violence and exploitation against women and girls, the state perpetuates patriarchy. Paradoxically (or perhaps entirely consistently), it does so in the name of public protection.

This informant may well have protected us from a terror attack or prevented other harm – we will never know his contribution, though we do know (thanks to investigative journalism) some of the price paid. Is it too much to expect paid informants to be broadly law-abiding in their personal lives? Is the system of informants at root problematic and in need of reform?

The SDS scandal led to the establishment of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. Given the security services’ response to the BBC investigation, a similar public inquiry into the actions of paid informants and their handling by the state, looks some way off.

26-Apr-22 Sanctions for Sexual Violence in War

Reports from Ukraine in recent weeks evidence that, as in other conflicts around the world and through time, rape is being used as a tool of war. Traditionally, this issue has received minimal attention in the history books. Writing in 1995, Copelon (p.197) observes that:

When war is done, rape is comfortably filed away as a mere and inevitable “by-product,” a matter of poor discipline, the inevitable bad behaviour of soldiers revved up, needy, and briefly “out of control”.

In 2013, the G8 (an inter-governmental political forum of leading countries from 1997 until 2014) adopted in London the Declaration on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict (PSVI). In the Declaration, the signatories specifically sought to “challeng[e] the myths that sexual violence in armed conflict is a cultural phenomenon or an inevitable consequence of war or
a lesser crime” (PSVI, Para 1). In other words, it was recognised that rape in war is one of the most serious violations of human rights, that it is a deliberate act of terror, domination and punishment, and that it can be used systematically and on a widescale, including as a constitutive act to genocide. The PSVI calls for effective investigation and documentation of sexual violence in conflict so that perpetrators can be brought to justice.

However, a background paper to a United Nations debate on 13 April 2022 on Accountability as Prevention: Ending Cycles of Sexual Violence in Conflict, notes that, “there are multiple country contexts globally where these crimes are a daily occurrence, including Afghanistan, the DRC, Ethiopia, Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere”. Indeed, it was not until January 2022, that the first conviction for sexual violence during the Syrian War was secured, and this related to offences from 2011-2012. It is notable that the convicted Syrian colonel, Anwar Raslan, was convicted also of multiple murders and the torture of thousands of men and women at the Al-Khatib prison in Damascus. Cases prosecuting sexual violence alone are fewer but growing in number.

The Report of the United Nations Secretary-General on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (S/2022/272), published in April 2022, makes a number of recommendations for the UN Security Council and for member states, donors and intergovernmental organisations, to prevent, monitor and prosecute sexual violence in war. The report underlines the need for action to be survivor-centred, listening to what they need and want, rather than working up mechanisms and initiatives without consultation.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SGS-SVC), Pramila Patten, also calls for sexual violence to be incorporated as a stand-alone designation criterion for targeted sanctions. Indeed, in a speech yesterday to the Georgetown Institute of Women Peace and Security, Patten re-iterated that, while eight of the UN’s current fourteen regime sanctions make mention of sexual violence, “When imposed specifically for sexual violence, they send an unequivocal signal about the gravity of these historically hidden crimes”. Furthermore, she argues:

Leveraging the credible threat of sanctions can change the calculus of parties to conflict that operate on the assumption that rape is “cost-free” or even profitable in the political economy of war, in which women and girls are trafficked, traded, and sold. In practice, very few of these entities are targeted by UN sanctions committees, and none are targeted specifically for sexual violence. This gap is regrettably mirrored in the practice of States in imposing unilateral sanctions.

Patten urges the UN and member states to have the political will and courage to take sexual violence seriously, ensuring also, for example, that rape allegations are not written away under amnesty agreements. Legal, psychological, health and reproductive support needs also to be put in place for rape victims. Too often in the context of war and destruction, the very services rape victims most need are inaccessible.

In her 2019/2020 Annual report, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales Dame Vera Baird, argued that there had been in the previous year a ‘catastrophic decline’ in prosecutions for rape, such that we were, in the UK, effectively witnessing the ‘decriminalisation of rape’ (p.16).

There is then a local and global failure to address rape of women and girls, and of men and boys, in conflict and peace time. This failure means that rape is effectively decriminalised, or not criminalised meaningfully in the first place.

Patten finished her speech yesterday by reminding us that:

“Protection from sexual violence, even in the midst of war, is not merely an aspiration, it is a legal obligation.”

References:

Copelon, R., 1995. Gendered War Crimes: Reconceptualising Rape in Time of War. In: J.S. Peters and A. Wolper, eds., 1995. Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Ch.21.

25-Apr-22 Accountability Re-visited

Photo: https://www.warrington-worldwide.co.uk/

On 14 July 2020, I wrote a blog here on COVID-19 and accountability, thinking through how we monitor real-time and later review governance of the pandemic. I wrote elsewhere about the difficulties of securing compliance with COVID laws. I would not have imagined at that time that the UK Prime Minister himself would be found to have broken COVID lockdown laws and sanctioned through a fixed penalty notice.

The volume of fixed penalty notices, issued as part of Operation Hillman into illegal gatherings in Downing Street and Whitehall, is embarrassing for the Government. It likely reflects a cultural bubble which ministers and civil servants can come to inhabit, acting over and for, but not alongside us.

The revelations are devastating too for those who followed the rules in care homes and hospitals and who now feel that their sacrifices, and lost time with loved ones, were needless.

Our criminal justice system focuses on individual wrongdoing. It is important however not to lose sight of the wider issues of accountability.

Under somewhat muted coverage given events in Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on 17 March 2022 two public inquiries into the handling of the pandemic, one for Scotland (already announced by Scotland’s Deputy First Minister on 14 December 2021) and one for the UK as a whole. You can follow developments on the UK inquiry website and the Scottish Inquiry website, although Inquiry Chairs Baroness Hallett and Lady Poole, respectively, are unlikely to be calling for evidence before 2023. Such is the slow pace of scrutiny.

Although the UK inquiry draft terms of reference are being finalised (the Scottish terms are here), the Commons Library reveals that the topics of focus are likely to include:

the use of public health powers and expertise (e.g. lockdowns and other restrictions, mask requirements, medical evidence)
health and social care policy (e.g. ventilator and PPE availability, shielding, care homes, test and trace, vaccine rollout)
justice policy and administration (e.g. law enforcement, prisons, remote proceedings in courts and tribunals)
education and childcare settings (e.g. closures/re-opening, exam contingencies)
housing and homelessness (e.g. support, notice periods and evictions)
financial impacts (e.g. furlough, business support, Statutory Sick Pay, public sector procurement safeguards)
intergovernmental decision-making between the UK Government and devolved administrations.

Notably, the Scottish inquiry’s terms refer specifically to the impact of pandemic decision-making on human rights. The UK inquiry does not. In September 2021, Strathclyde University published a paper explaining how a human rights framework could add value to a public inquiry on COVID in terms of structure, process and outcomes.

The public inquiry should be a space for candid review of lessons learnt, which in turn requires that those asked to give evidence feel that they can be honest. However, it should also be unflinching in exposing, for example, poor political decision-making and cronyism in the private outsourcing and award of COVID-infrastructure related contracts. This would not only put us in a better place for future pandemics, but help improve the culture of our politics.

24-Apr-22 Returning, and ‘Rough Sex’

Well, it’s been a year since my last blog which tells you something about juggling work and home life. I am actually towards the end of three months research leave, a period which should involve a great outpouring of thinking and writing. But, as other wiser colleagues had told me, and I now realise, you spend the first month of research leave just ‘decompressing’, before being in any state to be creative. So, I start with reproducing a blog I wrote for the University of Bristol School for Policy Studies in February, initiating a new piece of research I am doing on non consensual ‘rough sex’. The survey closes at the end of April/start of May 2022, so do share the link. I will re-visit the research outcomes in a future blog.

Understanding ‘Rough Sex’

‘Rough sex’ refers broadly to aggressive physical or degrading acts during sex. In recent public and popular discourse in the UK, the term has been used commonly in two contexts. The first is to refer to consenting sexual practices following the Fifty Shades trilogy, published by E.L. James over 2011-2012. The second refers to instances of death, usually involving a female victim and male perpetrator, and commonly following asphyxiation, beating or injuries through penetration. In the second case, ‘rough sex’ is an inaccurate euphemism, as such acts represent sexual violence, manslaughter and homicide.

Beyond these two examples, lived experiences of ‘rough sex’ may be better understood on a spectrum, with the line sometimes misjudged between consensual rough sex and sexual violence and abuse.

In a research project commencing this week, I am seeking to understand individual experiences of unwanted ‘rough sex’ – however defined by participants – which occurred within the context of consensual sex, but which the participant felt at the time or later was non-consensual, harmful or upsetting. The research invites participants across different identities of gender, age and sexuality and recognises different contexts of sexual relations, including one-off encounters and short-, medium- and long-term relationships. It recognises too, and welcomes comment on, the limitations of the term ‘rough sex’.

The impact of Fifty Shades is disputed. It is celebrated by some for catalysing popular acceptance of, and engagement in, consensual BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism, submission, masochism); and by others castigated for promoting unsafe practice, commodifying and mass-marketing kink, and sexualising an essentially abusive relationship (see, for further discussion, Bonomi et al, 2013).

Downing (2012) argues that the non-sexual behaviour of one of the book’s protagonists, Christian, is far more “sinister” (2012, p.99) than the exposition of what happens intimately between the couple. She is concerned here to separate sexual practices from normative assessments of character: a fair concern given how, historically, society has stigmatised sexual activity which falls outside of a heteronormative and reproductive template. Yet from a coercive control perspective, it could be argued that the protagonist’s sexual behaviour is entirely consistent with his wider techniques of emotional, psychological and physical control. So, the insight here is that it is not what happens within a relationship or encounter, so much as what it means to each of those involved – albeit recognising from inside when behaviour is harmful, rather than as an external observer, is not always easy.

The second context relates to where the defendant in a criminal trial claims that a victim’s death occurred through sexual ‘misadventure’ or ‘accidental injury’. The campaigning group We Can’t Consent to This and the Centre for Women’s Justice have been at the forefront of documenting the stories of victims, and seeking a change in the law to ensure that perpetrators of sexual violence cannot retrospectively represent their harmful actions as consensual ‘erotic play’. Campaigning and research led to specific amendments to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (England and Wales), namely:

Section 70 of the Act makes non-fatal strangulation an offence in its own right
Section 71 of the Act states that “it is not a defence that the victim consented to the infliction of the serious harm for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification”

It remains to be seen how effectively these offences will be enforced in practice or whether sexual violence packaged as ‘rough sex’ (or the threat of repeating previous episodes of rough sex) is sufficiently recognised by police and prosecutors as part of the repertoire of perpetrators of coercive control (Weiss and Palmer, 2022).

It is likely that experiences of unwanted rough sex broadly are reasonably common and under-disclosed. Indeed, in 2019, a BBC survey revealed high prevalence, particularly in the female under 40 age group, and low police reporting. In common with other sexually harmful experiences, disclosure may be inhibited by embarrassment, shame and confusion about what happened, especially when it occurs within what began as a consensual encounter.

While there is some evidence to suggest that exposure to sexually explicit material online is associated with either a desire to, or an engagement in, ‘rough sex’, the directionality and nature of the relationship continues to be disputed (see, for example, Vogels and O’Sullivan, 2019), as does the assumption that individuals will, through ongoing exposure, come to conflate consensual rough sex and sexual violence. The consumption by young people of sexually explicit material which mainstreams rough sex practices is thought to be a more compelling concern, since their sexual scripts are still in development (see, for further discussion, Wright, Herbenick and Tokunaga, 2021), including their understanding of active and ongoing consent.

Using an anonymous online survey, this research study therefore aims to understand:

The experiences and contexts of unwanted ‘rough sex’, where study respondents feel, either at the time or subsequently, were harmful to them, physically, sexually or psychologically
The impact of that experience(s)
Whether, why (not) and how respondents sought support, advice or justice for what they had experienced and what happened next?
The respondents’ broader feelings about ‘rough sex’, its nature and prevalence
What respondents would like to see in terms of, for example, political, media, criminal justice, cultural or educative interventions, to both prevent future harmful experiences of unwanted ‘rough sex’ and to secure accountability or recognition for what happened to them

It is hoped that this work will inform work with police and criminal justice professionals and practitioners working in support services, including with young people and the production of free online briefings to raise awareness and improve practice.

Participation in the survey is entirely voluntary and can be completed by anyone aged over 18, although participants may refer to experiences under 18. It is open from Monday 7 February 2022 to Friday 29 April 2022.

https://sps.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/experiences-of-rough-sex

First published at: https://policystudies.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2022/02/10/understanding-rough-sex/ on 10 February 2022.

9-Apr-21 Escalation mentality

What’s Going On? Marvin Gaye (1971)
Tamla Records (T 54201)

On Monday, I was listening to Eric Nelson, defence attorney for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who faces three charges of second and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for the killing of George Floyd. Nelson was questioning prosecution witness and Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department Medaria Arradondo, who had fired all four police officers involved in George’s death.

Nelson was attempting to develop an argument that police may find themselves in difficult and dangerous situations and must make in-the-moment decisions without the benefit of 20:20 hindsight. Is it not the case, he asks Chief Arradondo, that use of force can be used as a de-escalation tactic?

His argument is slightly confused, as he gives the example of pointing a pistol, which is surely the threat of force, rather than the use of force. However, he is presumably trying to imply that neck restraint can be used to de-escalate a situation.

Co-incidentally, I was listening to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? (1970) the following afternoon, and the lyric:

Father, father

We don’t need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer…

And this between two other verses:

Mother, mother

There’s too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There’s far too many of you dying

And:

Don’t punish me (Sister) with brutality (Sister)

Talk to me (Sister), so you can see (Sister)

Oh, what’s going on (What’s going on)

Apparently, this song was inspired by an incident of police brutality against anti-war activists witnessed by co-writer Renaldo Benson. Benson gave the song to Gaye who added his lyrics and changed the melody. Gaye in turn was inspired by the 1965 Watts Uprising in Los Angeles, where protests followed the attempted arrest of an African-American man, Marquette Frye.

Forty years exactly from the release of What’s Going On?, African American men, women and children continue disproportionately to be stopped and subject to harm from police officers in the United States. In the UK too, you are significantly more likely to be stopped and searched if you are Black, Asian or Mixed Heritage and more likely to die in custody if you are Black.

The state invests police with the legal use of violence. The use of force and restraint in order to defend self and others is a power that police necessarily wield. Occasionally, officers must make that decision instantaneously. Few would dispute that.

But it is a power which requires careful handling. Police are not meant to be a civil militia: they are peace keepers whose authority relies on public support. They are effective when they know, come from, and work with their communities; when they seek to reduce harm, to calm rather than to inflame.

In academic writing, this is often referred to as ‘soft policing’ (for example McCarthy, 2014) and draws on Joseph Nye’s (1990) work in international relations on ‘soft power’. ‘Soft’ can be deceptively strong.

Some commentators are worried that litigation and ‘political correctness’ will undermine policing. “How are police expected to carry out their job, for fear of prosecution?” they say. But this is a misrepresentation. Police officers should exercise common sense, fairness and compassion and for that, they will always be supported by the public and any jury. These are necessary attributes of the job. Individuals who want to police to enact their power fantasies need not apply.

This idea that you need to escalate, in order to de-escalate, is interesting. There is an argument that force, or risk of mutual harm, can be used to clear space for talk. But wilful and prolonged force in the absence of a threat or continued threat is not rational, fair or compassionate.

A culture where strike first and domination through suppression is prized, secures a fragile and false peace. A default escalation mentality damages policing – it means officers reach for their firearm first; it means use of a counterfeit $20 dollar bill can lead to arrest, restraint and death in nine and a half minutes.

30-Jan-21 Beads

Photo by **Artem Beliaikin** from **Pexels**

I am currently reading David Olusoga’s book ‘Black and British’ (Pan, 2016). The book is brilliant and shocking and it is the author’s ability to pick out the human detail from his research that makes the narrative so vivid.

Olusoga takes us first to Bunce Island, at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River. Here, in the seventeenth century, English slave traders established a slave fortress. Tens of thousands of Africans were brought to this fortress before being take on to slavery in North America and the West Indies. African captives were brought to the beach at the eastern end of the island. From there, the traumatised men, women and children were marched up the path from the beach to the Sorting Yard:

The clearing was where the buying and selling was done. Here the slave-traders displayed their wares – captive human beings, but also ivory, gold and camwood, from which a coloured dye was extracted. The British agents came out to meet their trading partners, bringing with them bottles of wine and rum to help lubricate the coming negotiations. In exchange for slaves and other valuable commodities the British offered glass beads, bundles of cloth, gunpowder, European metal goods, tobacco pipes, bottles of liquor and European weapons. Until a few years ago, the ground of the Sorting Yard was littered with tiny glass beads and fragments of pottery that had been dropped and discarded by both buyers and sellers centuries earlier. Most of these grim souvenirs have been hoovered up here by tourists who travel out to Bunce Island from Freetown, but many more relics of the trade lie beneath the soil, along with iron nails used to attach shackles and chains to African arms and legs, and broken wine bottles. (Olusoga, 2016, p.3)

It was the beads that got me: both the exchange of human life for glass beads and then, the idea of tourists – perhaps not knowing exactly what they meant? – picking up and taking home these tiny remnants of blood and misery. Perhaps in homage to enslaved ancestors, but a dark tourism indeed.

In early December, I showed my first year Criminology students the David Redmon documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China (2008, Carnivalesque Films) You can see for free an abridged version here, with Redmon’s commentary. The documentary is a criminological ethnography exploring the lives of Chinese factory workers who make bead necklaces. The beads are packaged and shipped to the United States, where Mardi Gras participants ‘throw’ the beads from floats and exchange them with fellow revellers.

Alternating sequences between Louisiana (in the US) and Fuzhou (in China), the documentary contrasts the long, relentless, factory hours of the young Chinese women workers, often migrants from rural areas living in onsite dormitories, working unsafe machinery with blistered fingers, trying to keep up the production tally chart demanded by the manager, Roger Wong; with the carefree, noisy scenes on the festival streets, where the crowds cheer and chant for women to show their breasts, and the lights of floats and filming mobile phones illuminates the scene.

Where do the beads come from, the producer Redmon asks the Louisiana partygoers? Nobody knows. Where do the beads go to, Redmon asks the factory workers? They don’t know either.

The journey of the beads reflects the story of globalisation, of inequality and of waste. At the end of the parades, many necklaces are discarded in bins, and on the street. They have little significance to the consumers once the party is over.

I wonder on how many shelves or in how many wardrobe boxes or set into how many pieces of costume jewellery around the world sit the glass beads of Bunce Island. Their owners unaware of the desperate genesis and use of these small shiny objects.

14-Jan-21 Catcher in the Rye

Photo by **Andrea Piacquadio** from **Pexels**

In the week before Christmas, I read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J.D. Salinger (1951). I can remember my old copy, which was the silver cover 1969 Penguin Modern Classics edition. It had the spine ripped away and the front cover hanging precariously: I had probably picked it up in the thrift basket of a second-hand book shop. That I can recall the physical book but not the story is interesting. Perhaps because it’s predominantly a collection of memories and reflections recounted over just a few hours in the life of 16-year old Holden Caulfield.

Holden has been thrown out of Pencey prep school – and it’s not his first expulsion. He is sensitive, hyper-reflective and critical of people. He is particularly averse to ‘phonies’ – people who are insincere, shallow or fake – even if he is a little phony himself at times.

Following a fight with a school peer, Holden gets on a train back to New York. He cannot go home because his parents do not yet know he has been thrown out of school, so he pays for a room in a hotel. Having spent the night drinking in familiar bars and walking the streets, he returns to the hotel where the ‘elevator guy’ procures him a ‘girl’.

Holden is initially excited: he changes his shirt, brushes his teeth and puts some water on his hair. He starts to to think about all the nearly-but-not-quite encounters he has had with the opposite sex.

Finally, somebody knocked on the door, and when I went to open it, I had my suitcase right in the way and I fell over it and damn near broke my knee. I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something (Salinger, 1958, p.102).

The girl at the door is not much older than Holden and seems nervous to him. She sits on a chair “jiggling her foot up and down“. She is not interested in small talk.

“Ya got a watch on ya?” she asked me again, and then she stood up and pulled her dress over her head.

I certainly felt peculiar when she did that. I mean she did it so sudden and all. I know you’re supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy.

“Ya got a watch on ya, hey?”

[…]

“Don’t ya feel like talking for a while?” I asked her. It was a childish thing to say, but I was feeling so damn peculiar. “Are you in a very big hurry?” (Salinger, 1958, p.103)

In the event, Holden asks the girl – ‘Sunny’ – if they can skip anything physical: “I’ll pay you and all“. He lies that he’s just had an operation and that he had under-estimated his recovery time. Sunny is not too impressed, asks for more money than was agreed, and Holden has a second and painful encounter with her the following day – this time with the elevator guy.

Much of my academic research has focused on sex work and so this episode of the book interested me. It captures the peculiar mix of emotions and mundanity that must sometimes characterise such meetings. How some buyers may seek to pay for sex but are really paying for company or intimacy, or seeking something else they cannot define. How a peremptory remark from a time-pushed seller can puncture fantasy and expectations.

I am currently writing a new third year undergraduate Criminology unit called Sex Power and Consumption which will explore the contradictory intersections between sex, power, intimacy, money and markets. These relationships extend beyond the sex industry and have occurred through time.

Often debate on this topic can be difficult, even prohibitive. There can be a significant gap between the experiences of those involved (as articulated in their own voices) and the discussions that occur at the level of academic theory, politics and media. There are lots of truths about the sex industry, but they don’t neatly dovetail into a single truth.

It is through understanding more about everyday experiences of those involved – across the different settings and contexts where sex is exchanged for money or something else – that we can learn more about whether and where harm lies. We can learn that through listening to people’s individual stories. Perhaps that’s why the scene in this book is interesting to me. Fiction is a sourcebook for real life.

31-Dec-20 Criminal Conduct Authorisations

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On 24 September 2020, the Government introduced the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill 2019-21. The Government explained the Bill rationale as follows:

Undercover operatives and agents play a crucial role in preventing and safeguarding victims from the most serious crimes, including terrorism and child sexual abuse. In order to gain the trust of those under investigation, there are occasions where they need to participate in criminality themselves. This is a longstanding capability which remains critical for national security.

The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Bill provides a clear and consistent statutory basis for a limited number of public authorities to continue to authorise participation in criminality, in carefully managed circumstances.

The publication on 24 September 2020 was the ‘first reading‘ and is simply the Bill being published as a House of Commons paper for the first time. The Bill completed its passage through the Commons on 15 October 2020 and had its second reading on 11 November 2020. The second reading is the opportunity for MPs to debate the general principles and themes of the Bill. The Bill then moves to Committee stage, where detailed examination takes place. Committee stage for the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill (referred to here going forward as CHIS) began at the end of November with latest amendments tabled on 11 December 2020.

The notes to the Bill make clear that participation in criminal activity by police, MI5 agents and others “is not new activity”. Rather the aim of CHIS is to put “existing practice on a clear and consistent statutory footing […] It is a continuation of existing practice that is currently authorised using a variety of legal bases”. The concern is therefore not whether criminal participation is appropriate in principle – this seems accepted – but how it should be authorised and what the boundaries of that criminality should be.

In popular culture, our common (albeit fictitious) reference point for British agents involved in nefarious activity abroad is Fleming’s James Bond. James Bond worked for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the government agency charged with protecting the UK from overseas threats. A Guardian article published 15 December 2020 reveals that an MI6 agent had likely breached ‘red lines’ in the field, despite warning. Only after this was flagged by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) in their 2019 report, did MI6 update the Foreign Office. MI6 can seek authorisation for an agent’s activities under section 7 of the Intelligence Services Act. This section allows British agents operating abroad to break any law without fear of prosecution in the UK if they have the written permission of the foreign secretary of the day (Guardian, 15 Dec 2020). CHIS focuses on UK-based activity.

Under CHIS, the details of which crimes are authorised would not be made public, to protect the undercover officer, and a senior judge would report on how the power is used, with no role for the Crown Prosecution Service. The intelligence agencies, NCA, police, HMRC, HM Forces and ten other public authorities would be able to authorise criminal conduct in the UK. Agents would be required to do only what is necessary and proportionate and not to breach the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), which mandates the government to protect life.

Some MPs and human rights organisations, such as Reprieve, would like the government to explicitly state that killing and torture cannot be subject to Criminal Conduct Authorisation (though in principle, that should be covered by the Government’s HRA obligations). However, it is not clear why these acts have been singled out from others: the authorisation of rape, sexual abuse and grievous bodily harm (other than through torture) would also be reprehensible.

Indeed, in the Lords debate on the Bill on 10 December 2020, the scenario of an undercover police officer working as part of a county lines gang is discussed. In the example given, the officer is asked to stab a teenage gang member as a punishment for gang indiscipline. If the officer does not do it, their cover may be blown and their life in danger. For this reason, former front-line detective Lord Davies of Gower proposes that authorisation after the criminal act may, in certain circumstances, be appropriate, since it is not always possible to predict the situations in which an agent may find themselves. Other peers express misgivings about post hoc authorisation. Lord Kennedy of Southwark, for example, argues:

While I share the sentiment that we would not want undercover operatives to be placed in difficult positions simply for acting in the public interest, none the less, one of the key components in the present arrangement is control. The authorising officer must have confidence that proper thought has been given to the consequences of the authorisation, and we do not believe that an after-the-fact analysis, when the activities were not under the control of the public authority, should be retrospectively authorised where an authorisation has such an important legal effect (Vol. 808, Col. 1356).

The CHIS debate raises important questions about undercover work more broadly – the harms related to organised crime or surveillance activity subjects, including victims and low-level perpetrators, as well as to the individual officer. How do we weigh these against the collection of evidence which may prevent future harm?

The Undercover Policing Inquiry, announced by the then Prime Minister Theresa May in 2015, was established to investigate:

Module One: Examination of the deployment of undercover officers in the past, their conduct, and the impact of their activities on themselves and others.
Module Two: Examination of the management and oversight of undercover officers, including their selection, training, supervision, care after the end of an undercover deployment, and the legal and regulatory framework within which undercover policing was carried out.
Module Three: Examination of current undercover policing practices and of how undercover policing should be conducted in future. (Source: ucpi.org.uk)

Unfortunately, dates are still to be announced for Module Three, an element of the Inquiry that could have directly informed CHIS.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry was established to investigate policing practice in England and Wales from 1968. Of particular public concern were the activities of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which was involved in monitoring mainly left-wing political groups and causes. Some officers were involved in long-term relationships with around 30 women as part of their cover. Undercover officer Bob Lambert, fathered a child with his partner, an animal rights campaigner, before disappearing when his deployment ended (BBC, November 2020).

Police identify undercover work as essential to fighting crime, yet the harms – experienced and perpetrated – by undercover work are wide-ranging, particularly for those who are ‘undercover advance operatives‘. These are individuals who are “trained to undertake deployments involving higher-level infiltrations and [who] must be able to withstand intense scrutiny from anyone who may be suspicious” (College of Policing, 2016).

It is hard to imagine the psychological toll of lived deception, committing acts alien to one’s conscience, and the constant risk of exposure and resultant harm, perhaps death. More worrying perhaps, if these experiences have no emotional impact.

We ask much of those employed to keep us safe – police, army, intelligence operatives, private security or detection – but strong oversight should ensure their safety and the safety of others. Since the information on specific cases is so often redacted or learnt piecemeal through the media, it is difficult for the public and politicians to understand exactly the possible scenarios and assess the benefits and risks of undercover work. In addition, the picture is fast-moving, with past evidence becoming obsolete as technology, context, threats and modus operandi change.

Rather than focus on criminal conduct authorisations in isolation, the public and those employed undercover deserve a more expansive and transparent framework for covert operations, including mechanisms for scrutiny, lesson-learning, redress and long-term support, where required. Too often, ‘national security’ or ‘threat to life’ are a convenient roadblock. If the Government (or private companies) cannot define the harms and benefits of undercover work, or cannot establish some key public principles, or cannot acknowledge that accountability for harm resides with the employer, not the employee, then they should not be placing agents in the field.

8-Nov-20 Containment

This week with my first year Criminology students, we are looking at protest and resistance through art and we have been reading, amongst other things, about border walls. From the Berlin Wall to the Derry walls, from the US-Mexico border to the West Bank wall, border walls are sites where people have come to protest, to risk their lives in crossing, and to express their emotion through painting, graffiti and sculpture. While walls have been used for millennia by groups seeking physical protection from attack, today, Carter and Poast (2015) argue, wall construction is predominantly about economic security.

With walls on the brain, it was interesting timing then to read the story about students at the University of Manchester’s Fallowfield campus who woke on Thursday to find two-metre metal barriers being erected around their accommodation. The fencing was designed to bar entry between different blocks and therefore inhibit household mixing during lockdown. The University had however failed to consult or inform the students of this before the fences went up.

Like students around the country, Manchester students had been encouraged to come to University to study. As is inevitable in close quarter accommodation, thousands of students across the UK have contracted COVID-19. While students had been promised blended learning – a mix of face-to-face and online teaching – the reality has been that many have not been able to attend campus because they are in the loop of recurrent periods of self-isolation as contacts and flatmates test positive or are awaiting test results.

We know now that in September 2020, independent SAGE advised against the movement of millions of students to universities, expect where students were doing practice or lab-based courses where attendance was critical. The scientific advisory group advocated a remote learning model until we were, as a nation, in a position of being able to manage the virus better.

But universities were concerned about losing accommodation income and having to offer fee reductions if students were advised to study from home in the Autumn term. Universities today are much like any large corporation: as well as teaching and research and a large staffing complement, they invest heavily in capital infrastructure – beyond just classrooms and labs, but in study centres, community engagement and business incubation spaces, sport and wellbeing, social spaces – and they invest in developing relationships around the world to solicit fee-paying overseas students.

Most institutions clearly felt that seeking to manage the COVID risk on campus, rather than at a distance, would reduce their economic risk.

Some have used the language of wellbeing to justify their approach. Mental health and wellbeing are critical issues amongst this generation of young people, as well as elsewhere in the community.

Yet, the ‘carry on despite COVID’ approach has not enhanced wellbeing, as the experience of Manchester and other students shows. As young people found themselves stuck in accommodation – in a new environment, with people they didn’t know well – they posted up amusing yet poignant signs with post-its and paper: ‘HMP MMU’; ‘Students not Criminals’; ‘Send Drink’ and ‘9k 4 What?’

Now under lockdown 2.0, universities have been allowed to continue teaching on campus, though “they should consider moving to increased levels of online learning where possible”. Within this grey zone, staff are therefore required under contract to teach on campus as normal, even where learning could be online. Students have been told not to go home.

I was struck this evening by Michelle Obama’s tweet celebrating the victory of President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris. She said that they would “restore some dignity, competence, and heart at the White House” [my emphasis].

There was no governance rulebook for COVD-19 and mistakes were inevitable. We are all great armchair critics.

What has been lacking however, is the heart to acknowledge and learn quickly from mistakes and the heart to recognise the human (as well as the economic) impact of decision-making.

Rather than keeping out intruders, the Fallowfield fences were meant to contain the COVID risk and therefore the economic risk to the University. Over the day on Thursday, University of Manchester senior management realised their mistake and promised to remove the fencing. What had seemed a good technical fix in a management team meeting, likely looked rather different from student mobile footage of the site, broadcast on national media.

By the evening, students had taken the matter into their own hands and torn the fences down.

Reference:

Carter, D. B. and Poast, P. (2017) ‘Why Do States Build Walls? Political Economy, Security, and Border Stability’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(2), pp. 239–270. doi: 10.1177/0022002715596776.

27-Oct-20 Body Snatchers

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In a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (2003 [1859], Penguin), there is a character called Jeremiah (“Jerry”) Cruncher, who is a porter at Tellson’s Bank in London. Reading the book last year, it took me a while to twig the nature of the business that he and his young son engaged in at night. We know that Jerry carries something on his conscience as he is enraged and violent each time his wife takes to praying on her knees. He is in fact a body snatcher or ‘resurrection man’.

Initially employed by anatomists in the 18th and 19th centuries who required bodies for dissection, body snatchers exhumed the bodies of the recently dead. They were grave robbers. As the number of teaching centres and hospitals grew, so did their trade.

In 1752, Parliament passed the Murder Act which allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be made available for dissection, rather than public display. However, the demand for bodies was unsated and grave robbers interestingly operated in a grey zone: human corpses were not legal property so could not be stolen or owned, as such.

Indeed, the (secular) status of the body after death remains in some legal and philosophical limbo. As Ellen Stroud (2018, p.115) neatly summarises:

The central puzzle of the law of the dead is that a corpse is both a person and a thing. […] Scholars generally divide the law of the dead body into the three intertwined realms of defining, using, and disposing of the dead, and debates in each realm center on where and how to draw the line between person and object. The thing-ness of the dead human body is never stable or secure.

The poor were most likely to fall victim to these resurrectionists, as were abandoned children, infants, and suicide victims. Deals could be struck with prison and gallows officials over recently dead or condemned prisoners.

The rich were able to secure their graves with mortsafes (iron cages around the coffin or iron boxes), with booby traps or pay a night watchman to patrol the cemetery.

In 1832, the Anatomy Act ended the tradition of anatomising felons but did allow for people to give up their bodies for dissection after death. There is evidence that this was abused by some of those managing workhouses, who facilitated for payment the journey of the unwilling but dead paupers to the anatomist’s table (Sen, 2017).

Captive populations, the poor and vulnerable remain at risk of corporal exploitation: in China, there have been allegations of organ harvesting among Falun Gong detainees; in the United States, the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal saw prisoners paid for blood donations, infecting thousands across the world with Hepatitis C and HIV (Chase, 2012), to devastating effect in the UK and elsewhere; in hospitals in Liverpool and Bristol, it emerged that for decades the organs of babies and children were systematically removed after they died, without their parents’ knowledge or consent (Bauchner, 2001).

While work on violence, punishment, trafficking, abuse and so on is concerned with incursion into, and exploitation of, the physical body, corporal dignity after death deserves attention too. I think of this today following the news of four deaths of migrants, including two children, in the English channel. Media coverage referred back to the death of 3-year old Alan Kurdi, whose small drowned body was photographed and disseminated around the world in 2015. Published on the pretext of ‘shocking the world into action’: no action came.

Resurrectionists are the grotesque characters of a Dickens novel: a macabre chapter of history. But we should be alert to the contemporary ways in which bodies continue to be stolen and misused.

References

Bauchner, H., 2001. What have we learnt from the Alder Hey affair? That monitoring physician’s performance is necessary to ensure good practice. British Medical Journal, 322(7282): 309–310. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.322.7282.309

Chase, S., 2012. The Bloody Truth: Examining America’s Blood Industry and its Tort Liability Through the Arkansas Prison Plasma Scandal. William & Mary Business Law Review, 3(3). Available at: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmblr/vol3/iss2/6

Sen, S., 2017. From Dispossession to Dissection: The Bare Life of the English Pauper in the Age of the Anatomy Act and the New Poor Law. Victorian Studies, 59(2), pp.235-259. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.59.2.02

Stroud, E., 2018. Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 14, pp.115-125. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110316-113500

05-Oct-20 The Outsiders and Youth Justice

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“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home” (Hinton, p.1)

This opening line will resonate for many who read The Outsiders (London: Penguin Books, 2016; originally USA: Viking Penguin, 1967) as a teenager and perhaps also watched the 1983 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

The story is narrated by Ponyboy, a fourteen year old member of the ‘Greasers’, who fight running battles with the rich-kid ‘Socs’ on the streets of Tulsa, in the United States. What is extraordinary is that Susan Eloise Hinton wrote the book as a teenager while at high school, although it was not published until she was 19. She was advised to publish under the name S.E. Hinton in case male book reviewers dismissed her writing as a female.

Ponyboy is a sensitive, bookish dreamer, though is also fiercely loyal to his older Greaser peers and gets stuck into the periodic, often brutal, street brawls with the Socs. His parents are recently dead and he lives with his two older brothers who seek to keep Ponyboy in school, maintain boundaries and keep a clean house. Their home is in a down-at-heel area and his older brothers have dropped out of school to work and pay the bills.

The wider Greaser gang members have their share of troubles at home – alcoholism, emotional neglect and violence – although as Hinton shows so well, the rich Soc kids have their troubles too.

One night, a terrible incident changes everything for Ponyboy and we follow him through a heart breaking and intense few weeks. Hinton wants us to understand, if not like, all of the characters. She reminds us of the struggles of growing up through teens and into early twenties: amplified for those who do not have a safe anchor and resources at home.

On 16 September 2020, the Government published a White Paper ‘A Smarter Approach to Sentencing‘. In the section of the paper concerning youth sentences, The Rt Hon Robert Buckland QC MP set the tone in his accompanying speech:

Judges’ hands are too often tied in handing down sentences to young offenders that are too lenient and potentially put the public at risk.

While the Government recognises in the document that more must be done to tackle the causes of crime and the inequalities in the youth justice system, the only concrete details relate to punitive measures: for example, increasing the minimum release point from custody for the most serious offences from half-way through the sentence, to two thirds.

Moreover, political commentary in the lead up to the White Paper’s publication had raised the case of Hashem Abedi, who helped his brother Salman plan the Manchester Arena bombing. Hashem was jailed in August 2020 for life and ordered to serve at least 55 years in prison. Yet because he was under the age of 21 at the time of the murders, a whole-life order was not an option open to the courts. Writing in the Sunday Express, the Prime Minster Boris Johnson cited the Abedi case and said that if a young person is involved in a plot to kill dozens of people “then it doesn’t matter if you’re ‘only’ 18, 19 or 20 when you do so”. And so the new White Paper proposes whole life orders to be a sentencing option from aged 18.

The Abedi case is a high profile, terrible, and mercifully rare event. However, the application of whole-life orders for 18 year olds is not the most pressing issue in youth justice (whether you agree with the proposal or not).

More pressing issues in England and Wales include:

• around a quarter of the youth custody population are children who are on remand, and 66% of that group do not go onto receive a custodial sentence (Youth Justice Legal Centre, 2020);

• around half of the current youth custody population are Black, mixed heritage, Asian and other ethnicities (other than ‘White’ – which the Youth Justice Statistics define as including White British and White ethnic minorities);

• for the year ending March 2019, children and young people had the highest reoffending rate of all age groups at 38.4%, compared, for example to 28.5% for adults (aged 21 and over);

• fewer than 1% of all children in England are in care, but they make up
around two-fifths of children in secure training centres (44%) and young offender institutions (39%).

The number of young people in custody has ebbed and flowed over the decades – up in the thousands in the 2000s and down to hundreds now in 2020, for example – although this number has less to do with the level of overall youth offending as much as how the state responds.

Containment may be required for the most serious cases, but the vast majority of young offenders are troubled and experiencing significant personal and social difficulties. They are more likely to be from urban, deprived areas and they are more likely to be to be Black or Asian, as these groups are more intensely policed. They may be chaotic, insecure and angry and it can take time to undo the self-protective behaviours and attitudes that develop while growing up under stress.

The public do deserve protection from harm: likewise, young people deserve protection from social and family harm. Punitive sentences incapacitate and have symbolic value in signifying retributive justice, but they are unlikely to deter or to disrupt youth offending patterns.

Governments talk about tackling the social causes of crime, but we know this work is difficult and long term, beyond the electoral cycle. It requires investment in the 0-5 age group through children’s centres and family and parenting support; it requires an enabling rather than punitive approach to welfare and benefits; it requires a rapid response to children struggling at school to avoid exclusion (including early diagnosis and intervention for learning barriers and disabilities); and it requires adults of all ages to get involved in mentoring young people, supporting them to make positive choices and being a listening ear. It takes a village to raise a child, they say.

Some will accuse Hinton of a youthful optimism at the close of the book, when Ponyboy reflects that every young person could be turned around. But it is an indictment on all of us if we cannot muster the policy and personal investment to at least try.

Suddenly it wasn’t only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world and it was to late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn’t believe you if you did. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. (Hinton, 2016, pp.214-215)

27-Sept-20 Marshals and Police

Like all significant social events, COVID-19 has its own lexicon of words and phrases that we find ourselves hearing and using – ‘test, track and trace’, ‘a V-shaped recovery’, ‘asymptomatic’, ‘lockdown’, ‘second spike’, and so on. One word doing the rounds currently is ‘marshal’.

To ensure that the public are following social distancing rules, Boris Johnson announced in September the introduction of ‘marshals’ to towns and cities across the country. These marshals are either volunteers or council workers who are asked to patrol busy areas and give advice on social distancing guidelines, hand out masks and sanitiser and provide a visible nudge to the public to comply. They do not have powers to arrest or fine – they would need to call the police were enforcement required – and it is not clear that local councils have received any extra funding for these posts since their unexpected announcement.

COVID marshals have already been trialled in Leeds and Cornwall and they bear some similarity with established night-time economy roles, such as Street Angels or street pastors. The latter are usually charity-based, often faith-based, initiatives where workers walk the streets, seeking to defuse street tensions and help those who have drunk too much, are upset, separated from friends or need to get home safely. Notwithstanding the potentially positive impact of these street workers, some criminologists argue that these initiatives are consistent with a New Right agenda, where groups are co-opted by the state into policing activity, but without cost to the public purse; Johns, Squires and Barton, 2009; Johns et al., 2019; see also van Steden, 2017).

This trend is referred to as the ‘pluralisation of policing’ (Crawford, in Newburn, 2003; Johnston and Shearing, 2003), where the “police increasingly need to work with other government agencies, the third sector, community organisations and the private sector” (Rogers, 2016). Policing ‘beyond the police’ appears consistent with David Garland’s (2002) thesis that late modern society is characterised by a ‘culture of control’, where networked actors and agencies across society are engaged in managing and preventing criminal risk.

On 23 September, the supermarket ASDA announced it was creating a 1,000 new COVID marshal roles to support safety in store. Universities are also employing marshals to patrol student accommodation, social areas and on-campus. Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan universities are paying security contractor Mitie to provide marshals, who “will report antisocial behaviour and breaches of social distancing to the relevant authorities“. Marshals, university security services and police have been involved in monitoring student halls and accommodation as hundreds of students up and down the country are now subject to quarantine due to COVID outbreaks.

As I wrote back in April 2020 for this blog, the pandemic has enabled new surveillance measures which, while legitimate now, may quite easily become re-purposed and normalised. Supplementing this technological, scientific and increasingly privatised armoury are the physical presence of public police and army (if needed), private security guards and now also marshals. In principle, these resources could be harnessed productively to support us through COVID. But the nagging question remains – while they are all busy watching over us: who is watching over them?

11-Sept-20 Prisoners on Remand

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While media and public attention has understandably been focused on the NHS and education, the already strained criminal justice system is now struggling to address the backlog of court cases delayed by the pandemic. As a result, the number of prisoners on remand has increased 25% since this time last year to around 11,500, around 15% of the total prison population.

Being ‘on remand’ means being in custody pending a court hearing. Typically, an individual has been arrested and charged and is awaiting trial, or they may have been convicted and are awaiting sentencing. According to http://www.gov.uk, you will probably be put on remand if:

you have been charged with a serious crime, for example armed robbery
you have been convicted of a serious crime in the past
the police think you may not go to your court hearing
the police think you may commit another crime while on bail
you have been given bail before and not stuck to the terms

Given the principle of ‘presumption of innocence’, pre-trial detention is subject to safeguards, to protect the individual. In the UK, these are known as Custody Time Limits:

Custody Time Limits (CTL) safeguard unconvicted defendants by preventing them from being held in pre-trial custody for an excessive period of time. The Act and Regulations governing CTL require the prosecution to progress cases to trial diligently and expeditiously. The legal burden of monitoring and complying with CTLs rests on the prosecution. (CPS Guidance, 2020)

In broad terms (with the precise limit governed by the circumstances of the case):

for ‘summary only‘ offences (offences heard at the magistrates court), the time limit is 56 days
for ‘either way offences‘ (offences which can be heard at the magistrates or Crown court, depending on whether magistrates feel their sentencing powers are sufficient to deal with the offence), the time limit is also 56 days
for ‘indictable‘ offences (a serious criminal offence that is triable only on indictment (trial by jury) in the Crown court), the time limit is 182 days

During the lockdown, around half of court buildings were closed for a period. Some criminal and civil hearings were conducted using BT MeetMe for telephone hearings and Skype for Business for video hearings. In June 2020, the Independent reported that the number of cases waiting to be heard at the magistrates court was nearing half a million. The backlog of Crown court cases was around 40,500. However, it is worth noting that it was 37,400 pre-COVID in December 2019, due, among other factors, to austerity-induced cuts to the number of days that Crown courts can sit.

A coronavirus protocol, agreed between between the Senior Presiding Judge (SPJ), HM Courts & Tribunals Service and the Crown Prosecution Service, has allowed for temporary extensions to remand periods. However, some judges are increasingly unhappy with this situation. On 11 September, the BBC reported that:

Judge Keith Raynor refused to extend the time a teenager charged with drugs offences could be held in custody before his trial. Woolwich Crown Court heard Tesfa Young-Williams was charged with serious drug offences last October and had been in custody for 321 days because of delays. That is 139 days beyond the custody time limit (CTL), the judge said.

In July 2020, ten ‘Nightingale’ courts were set up to help clear the backlog. These new venues were meant to deal with non-custodial hearings, to enable existing courts, equipped with cells and secure dock facilities, to run cases involving defendants in custody. However, although a start, the Criminal Bar Association called for a far higher number of venues to be opened. In August 2020, Private Eye (No. 1528) reported that one barrister told a custody time limit hearing:

“When… a man of good character faces an indefinite period of time in custody because there has been a deliberate lack of investment, that cannot in my submission be said to be justice.”

You might think that individuals on remand are going to be convicted anyway and that they must represent a danger to the public, otherwise bail would have been granted. The Prison Reform Trust Bromley Briefings report than more than half of people entering prison on remand awaiting trial are accused of non-violent offences; that two-thirds are awaiting trial (rather than awaiting sentencing) and that around 25% of those remanded into custody by magistrates courts are either subsequently acquitted or receive a non-custodial sentence.

If you are on remand for a number of weeks, there is a real possibility you could lose your job, lose your income, lose your home. Remand prisoners receive no financial help from the prison service at the point of release: you are not compensated if you are acquitted.

You are also 25% more likely to be remanded in custody if you are a Black or mixed ethnicity male, than if you are White male. What is more, compared to the general prison population, a remand prisoner is around 30% more likely to commit suicide.

So the power of the state to imprison the innocent must be used carefully. It is not just to hold someone in prison without any prospect of a timely trial; neither is it just to release individuals who present a likely but unproven risk to their victims and to the public.

The Chancellor has ever increasing demands on the public purse. Prisoners on remand are likely low on public visibility and sympathy in good times, never mind during a pandemic. But for the individuals involved and their families, and for the victims seeking justice, these delays can be devastating. This is a problem that is not going to be resolved quickly.

10-Sept-20 Stepford Wives

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This week I read for the first time ‘The Stepford Wives’ by Ira Levin (1972, my edition is 2011, published by Corsair).

In just 139 pages, Levin weaves a gripping story about Joanna Eberhart who moves with her husband and two children to the perfect suburb of Stepford, full of beautiful home-loving wives and successful husbands. Joanna is a feminist, committed to the goals of the National Organisation of Women, and an amateur photographer. She looks for like-minded women to establish a NOW chapter or to develop a women’s group, but they are all too busy waxing floors or attending to laundry.

At the centre of town life is the Men’s Association, run by ex-Disneyland employee Dale Coba and attended most nights by the town’s menfolk. The Stepford husbands are employed in the tech and chemical businesses on the nearby Route Nine. The Association building is imposing and highly secure: no women permitted.

Joanna’s husband Walter initially agrees with Joanna that the Association is outdated, but argues change can best be achieved from within. He therefore starts to attend, occasionally at first, but becomes increasingly active.

Meanwhile Joanna finds two women who, like her, do not buy into the domestic perfection of Stepford: Bobbie Markowe and Charmaine Wimperis. Like Joanna, both are recent arrivals at Stepford. The women get together for tennis at Charmaine’s – she is rich and bored and dislikes her husband. Later in the book, Charmaine confides that she and Ed are having a ‘weekend together’, which she is dreading as it will involve sex. But Ed is due at a conference the following week – ‘Thank God’ she says – so they agree to catch up then. Yet, Charmaine does not call.

When Joanna, concerned, turns up at her house, her friend has changed dramatically. The house is spotless, Charmaine is relaxed, apron-clad and smiling. She leads Joanna outside to show her beloved tennis court being turned into a putting green for her husband, Ed:

‘My God,’ Joanna said, looking at the men working on the cutter handles. ‘That’s crazy, Charmaine!’

‘Ed plays golf, he doesn’t play tennis,’ Charmaine said.

Joanna looked at her. ‘What did he do to you?’ she said. ‘Hypnotize you?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Charmaine said, smiling. ‘He’s a wonderful guy and I’m a lucky woman who ought to be grateful to him’. (Levin, 2011, p.61)

The story ratchets up to an inevitable but horrifying conclusion. Joanna is positioned as the hysterical woman, a charge so often made at women who seek to find out the truth (I was reminded of this watching an interview with environmental campaigner Erin Brokovich on Channel 4 News).

The truth of what is happening at Stepford remains elusive and I discovered through some internet searching afterwards that it is considered part of the science fiction genre.

While I had been waiting for explanation of those curious cartons that Gary Claybrook is seen unloading outside the Men’s Association near the start of the book, ultimately, I felt the more terrifying conclusion than water pollution, drugs or animatronics was that the women were simply acquiescing in patriarchy. In other words, Joanna (and Bobbie and Charmaine) is the outlier and for many of the readers of this book – published in 1972 – Stepford is more mirror than horror. The book could be read as a straight commentary on women’s struggle for liberation and the nature of backlash.

The book reminded me too of a recent Unreported World episode ‘Trump’s Housewives‘. Reporter Karishma Vyas meets her first interviewee in Modesto, California, who shows her around her family-photo and US memorabilia-filled house:

“My heart’s desire was to get married, to start a family and be at home and I took my job as a wife and as a homemaker super-serious.”

The women in the documentary are proud-homemakers, take a strongly heteronormative view of gender and sexuality and charge feminism with many of society’s ills. The irony that these women are actually living out the very feminist choice of combining motherhood and political and social activism, is not lost on the viewer.

Feminism is about enabling women to flourish in every way they wish, unobstructed by structural and cultural barriers. (It goes without saying that men should experience the same: generally through history, they have. Thus the need for feminism). Feminists can stay home raising a merry brood of children; they can fight in a boxing ring; or they can be a tree or a cardiac surgeon – or at some point choose to do all of the above. But they do so with critical awareness and with deliberate autonomy.

The real poison of patriarchy is how it turns women against each other: judging each other by different yardsticks of feminism or anti-feminism. This creates distraction and weakens focus on the collective prize: freedom, fulfilment and safety for all.

25-Aug-20 Privilege

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How do we decide when the actions of the privileged are harmful? When do they also become criminal?

On Friday 21 August 2020, US actress Lori Loughlin was handed a two-month jail sentence, fine and community service for her part in a college admissions scandal. Around 50 individuals have been charged following Operation Varsity Blues, including over 30 parents and a number of sports coaches and college administrators in the United States. At the centre of the operation, college admissions counsellor Ricky Singer was paid over $25m by his clients to arrange entrance for their children into the most prestigious schools. The fraud is thought to date back to 2008.

There were two routes in: either a college administrator was paid to correct SATS (admissions test) papers to ensure candidates got the requisite score or coaches were bribed to label applicants as recruited athletes. In Lori Loughlin’s case, for example, she and her husband paid $500,000 in bribes to have their two daughters admitted into the University of Southern California (USC) as fake rowing-team recruits. Elite schools including Georgetown, Stanford and Yale were targeted.

The former head of Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco), Douglas Hodge, paid nearly $1m in bribes to get three of his children into top US colleges. He was in the process of securing access for a fourth child. His sentence was reduced given his history of philanthropy to children’s causes globally (around $30m in total, it was alleged by his defence team). The BBC reported that:

A tearful Hodge said in a prepared apology following the sentencing that “ego” or “status” did not drive his decision. “Rather, I was driven by my own transformative educational experiences and my deep parental love.”

It is not clear how transformational education at an Ivy League university can be when your parents are multi-millionaires. Intellectually yes, but the earnings potential and social networks are already a given.

Parents from all backgrounds will go to many lengths for their children’s health, happiness and success. This is natural. And privileged children in the US, when faced with the option of relying only on their own ability and graft to secure a college place, or to use their parents’ legacy connections to inch ahead, for example, may well take the latter path. Many will recognise and nurture their good fortune with grace and hard work.

However, it is ironic that affirmative action for Black, Asian and Hispanic, or other under-represented or deprived young people, is considered by some as favouritism or unequal, yet the use of wealth or alumni ties (which, at this point in history, is often connected to White privilege), is not considered a helping hand. It is normalised and therefore invisibilised.

We might think of the applicants who over the years failed to secure a place at their chosen institution, not because they did not have the academic or athletic achievement, but because their space was bought. These are the indirect and unknown victims.

In Operation Varsity Blues, the bribery was overt and criminalised. Yet many young people have secured university places through their wealth and connections. Current US President Donald Trump got into private college Wharton in Pennsylvania in part, it is alleged, because his brother Fred was childhood friends with the then admissions officer, James A. Nolan. It is said that Fred asked James to help the application through. In those days too, the successful application rate was far higher – 40% – compared to a more competitive 7% now.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney from 2006-2018, wrote to Trump’s high school and colleges threatening them with legal action if they released any details about his academic performance. While Trump claims to have got the highest marks possible at Wharton, no record of such achievements can be found in the 1968 class archive.

Closer to home, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent appointments to the House of Lords make interesting reading. Private Eye (No 1528, p.14) reports that peerages were given to:

His own brother, Jo Johnson
Two former colleagues from his days as London Mayor – Ed Lister and Daniel Moylan
Former Tory MP James Wharton, who managed Boris’ successful leadership campaign in 2019
Fundraisers and donors Aamer Sarfraz and Michael Spencer; the latter, according to Eye, has donated £4.6m to the Conservative party either individually or through his companies over the years
Evgeny Lebedev, who owns the London Evening Standard and whom, the Eye says, allows Boris to holiday in his Palazzo Terranova near Perugia, in Italy

The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 was introduced after a cash for honours scandal involving the then Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Maundy Gregory, who brokered Lloyd George’s honours, is the only person ever to be convicted under the 1925 Act.

In 2006, several individuals were nominated for life peerages by Prime Minister Tony Blair but were rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. It turned out that they had loaned significant amounts of money to the Labour Party, potentially exploiting a loophole in electoral law, which required the public declaration of donations to political parties, but not loaning money at commercial rates of interest. An investigation ensued, involving arrests and police questioning of a number of Labour grandees, but no charges were brought.

In 2015, researchers at the University of Oxford found a positive correlation between party political funding and peerage nominations over the period 2005-2014. They argue that the undue influence of large donors on the political process deepens public mistrust in politicians and undermines democracy.

What is the line between paying for a peerage or being awarded a peerage following significant political donations? What is the line between your parents financially bribing college admissions and your parents drawing on their legacy connections or on family and friendship networks and donating capital funds to the college, to smooth the admissions path? Both have similar motives and outcome. But while straight corruption is criminalised, nepotism and leveraging wealth tend to be ‘regulated’ by institutions themselves, sometimes rather loosely.

It is not clear that we need more criminal law. Rather, institutions need to be far more transparent around financing, publish more data, and ensure that processes (such as college admissions or honours nominations) are robustly scrutinised by professional teams or independent bodies, who are themselves subject to regular corruption audits.

We should also examine the purpose and values of our institutions. In the UK, what is the role (if any?) of the second chamber and how should it be constituted? Should membership of the second chamber be a political reward or should it be a role reserved for our brightest and best? In the US, how has the marketisation and commercialisation of higher education impacted the sector and student intake, for good and for ill? How do universities ensure that they attract both income and those with the greatest intellectual and social potential?

Privilege should not always be castigated: we do not choose our birth. Privilege is relative and may be earned. Entitlement is the issue. Entitlement practices may not be criminal, but are socially corrosive. They suggest that money and ties should grant access: “I pay, therefore I can”.

12-Aug-20 Nordic Noir

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In recent years, many of us will have enjoyed TV series such as The Killing, The Bridge or Borgen or read Larrson’s Millennium series or Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books. They form part of cultural genre known as ‘Nordic noir’, a term believed to have been coined by Guardian critic Sam Wollaston in 2012.

In July 2020, Keith J Hayward and Steve Hall published an article in the British Journal of Criminology entitled Through Scandinavia, Darkly: A Criminological Critique of Nordic Noir. They identify three elements, popularly associated with this genre.

First, the melancholy aesthetic of ‘landscape, atmosphere and Scandinavian imagery’ (p.4), which is often heightened with colour tinting and sombre music through production. Further the Scandi interior style depicted is associated with a natural, stripped-backness, signifiying purity and simplicity.

Second, is the use of both male and female ’emotionally complex or psychologically troubled lead characters’ (p.5). Interestingly, it is suggested that male leads in this genre tend to be more emotive and female leads more tough. This perhaps links to the idea that Scandinavian societies are less stratified by gender.

Third, this genre is deemed ‘realist’ and ‘gritty’ because it is said to offer a trenchant critique of the Scandinavian welfare model. Often viewed by Western democracies as an exemplary society, Nordic noir appears to point to a darker underbelly and indeed the substitution of welfarism with neoliberalism.

So to summarise, Nordic noir is a genre which represents a nostalgic longing for the social democracy and homogeneity that is believed to have characterised Scandinavian countries and, at the same time, a critique of this supposed golden age (p. 9). Drawing on both ultra realism and cultural criminology (which are not obvious bedfellows), Hayward and Hall suggests that this orthodox reading of Nordic noir is missing something.

Ultra realism problematises identitarian ‘social movements’ approach to criminology (preoccupied, for example with gender, ethnicity or penal abolitionism) and return to Criminology’s fundamental question, which it claims is, “why do some individuals and groups risk harm to others as they pursue their instrumental and expressive interests?” Ultra realists call for criminologists to move beyond sociological and constructionist ways of understanding the world and look to cognate disciplines such as “history, economics, politics, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis”, as well as pursuing more ethnographic approaches to make sense of lived reality.
An interview with Steve Hall (Injustice, 2018)

Cultural criminology “views crime and the agencies and institutions of crime control as cultural products or as creative constructs”, which carry meaning. It is particularly focused on late modern culture and how contemporary forms of capitalism, anomie, state activity, power, resistance, crime and crime control play out in cultural artefacts, practices and ideas. Cultural criminology is inter-disciplinary and action-focused.
Cultural Criminology by Keith Hayward (Oxford Bibliographies, 2018)

Hayward and Hall argue that, rather than gritty realism, Nordic noir has lost its grip on reality. It has done this in two ways. First, there is an increasing retreatist element to the genre, with action set in rural communities, seemingly insulated from the globalised world. Second, the storylines are increasingly sensationalist, with macabre and unlikely plot lines (p.10). The authors attribute this shift to a recognition by Scandinavians that they are unable to recover a romanticised past, yet also unable to adapt in a progressive way to the reality of the neo-liberal globalised order. Drawing on Lacan’s work, Hayward and Hall suggest that the Symbolic Order – that is the shared set of understandings and relations (language, law, culture, religion etc.) that define a society – is malfunctioning. Scandinavia has lost its binding story and purpose. They argue that the escape route from this impasse is expressed culturally through sensationalism, fantasy and retreatism. These sentiments are reflected in “modernity’s vigilant and powerful engines of mythology—TV, film and popular fiction” (p.14).

The article is theoretically complex and I hope I have simplified it, while retaining its essence. The central argument is internally coherent and fascinating. At the same time, I think a malfunctioning Symbolic Order characterises most neo-liberal economies – that is the late modern predicament. From that perspective, Scandinavia and Nordic noir is but one case study.

The key takeaway for those interested in crime and its representation is how it is possible to relate socioeconomic shifts at the global level with specific cultural artefacts and practices at the regional and local level. It is not necessary to ‘prove’ these relationships in a scientific sense: rather the intellectual exercise of tracing the ‘loops and spirals’ (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2015, p.155) between art and life opens up new ways of understanding crime and crime control.

10-Aug-20 Abuse in Religious Organisations

On 5 August 2020, the BBC reported leaked excerpts from a forthcoming report by independent investigator Vicky Lawson-Brown into abuse of women and children within the ‘Jesus Army’ or ‘Jesus Fellowship’.

Established in 1969 at a chapel in Northamptonshire, the Jesus Army grew quickly, drawing in the homeless and substance misusers, among others, to live in tight-knit households and communities.

Members worked in the church’s many businesses and farms, often unpaid. Many recount an atmosphere of bullying, humiliation, severe physical and sexual abuse, particularly of women and children, who were seen as subservient to men in the group. Forty-three people who were active in the Church have been named as alleged perpetrators, including the founder, Noel Stanton.

Allegations of abuse were reported on a number of occasions to the group’s leadership. The report names five male leaders who failed to act on these allegations, and therefore, it is argued, were complicit in the abuse continuing.

Although the Jesus Army has now closed, the Jesus Fellowship Church Trust (JFCT) continues to manage a portfolio of properties and assets totalling tens of millions, many of which it has been seeking to divest in recent months. It is hoped that much of this money can be used to compensate victims financially: the Jesus Fellowship Survivors Association represents around 800 individuals.

Since the allegations of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church started to garner media attention in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of theories, notably focused on sexuality emerged: under scrutiny was the institution of a male celibate priesthood and an alleged disproportionate representation of gay priests and male victims. Yet these theories reflected widespread homophobia by inferring a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. (Tracing the emergence of the ‘paedophile’ as currently understood in Western discourse, Angelides (2009) argues that the category of the ‘paedophile’ was homosexualised in order to demarcate ‘normal’ from ‘pathological’ masculinities). Research in 2010 from Harvard Medical School states that, “it is generally agreed that pedophilia is a distinct sexual orientation, not something that develops in someone who is homosexual or heterosexual”. Symmetry or asymmetry between the gender of the perpetrator and the victim is separate to adult sexual orientation (if the perpetrator is attracted also to adults).

Moreover, since these early scandals, we have come to realise that sexual abuse can be found in state and non-state institutions across society: in the family, religious organisations, schools, hospitals, youth offender institutions, sports, or in residential care, to name a few.

Clinical psychologists and psychotherapists will provide detailed analysis of the profile and characteristics of ‘paedophiles’, but as a criminologist, my interest is in the social factors. First, feminist scholars have for decades been telling us that sexual abuse and violence is about power. It is perpetrated largely by males because we live in a patriarchal society and because male sexuality (in normative terms, not necessarily embodied in every living male) is associated with dominance and objectification. Notwithstanding genetic factors, environmental and cultural factors must play a significant role in how male (and female) sexuality is enacted, for good and for ill. This in turn must be an explanatory factor for the disproportionate representation of males among child sex offenders, even accepting possible under-reporting of female perpetration.

Second, publications by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in the UK shows us how the nature of institutions – their structure, their values – can facilitate, or at least hinder the identification of, abuse. Projecting IICSA findings to the Jesus Army, for example, it is likely that perpetrators were outwardly devout Christians who offered refuge; who represented truth, certainty and authority to members; who were charismatic; who asserted traditional patriarchal ideas about female and child submission and sexual passivity; who manipulated loyalties and used emotional blackmail to silence victims. The institutional context meant that victims risked disbelief, ostracism or further punishment; non-perpetrating leaders may have felt reporting behaviour to external authorities risked the reputation of the church and the closed nature of these communities meant that allegations could be effectively contained.

Our sensitisation to institutional abuse is recent. Yet while we refer to cases as ‘historic’, we are actually talking about recent history and contemporary incidence. All the more reason why we pay attention to the research emerging from IICSA, to better safeguard children now and going forward.

4-Aug-20 Changing Laws

For those UK citizens who have not lived through conflict, authoritarianism, pandemic or social unrest, coronavirus has presented us with a novel legal context. Since March 2020, we have experienced multiple changes to our ability to meet with friends and family, to go to work and school, to buy and sell goods and move around our locality, within our country, or beyond.

What is particularly marked is the speed and detail of changes. While many of us paid attention to the initial easing of lockdown in May, subsequent shifts in numbers gathering and household contact, metres apart, if and when to wear face masks, the types of venues opening or not and how, are harder to track. Over time, the slogans have changed and the four nations of the United Kingdom have moved into different lanes within the recovery track. Localised spikes can also mean local tightening. We are like the animals in Animal Farm who wake to find the rules and principles of yesterday have been superseded.

Of course, the nature of the coronavirus challenge requires swift social action. But it does present a challenge in keeping the public informed and compliant, and thereby maintaining legitimacy.

A review in June of the first prosecutions under the Coronavirus Act revealed a number of problems. Charges had been withdrawn or overturned for 53 people and more cases were being reviewed. As I noted in a blog in March, the changing context has been difficult for policing, with some discrepancies in interpretation and enforcement vigour between local forces. This has had implications for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS):

When asked by The Independent why the CPS did not stop police using the Coronavirus Act, given the 100 per cent rate of unlawful prosecutions, [Greg McGill, the CPS director of legal services] replied: “We can’t tell people not to charge under the act but we’ve issued legal guidance to the lawyers so they understand the precise circumstances where it can be used. It’s not for the CPS to stop charging offences, it’s to make sure that it’s appropriate.” (Lizzie Dearden for The Independent, 28 June 2020)

The police and CPS cannot refuse to implement bad laws; although they might neglect to use them. Laws are proposed by Government and approved through Parliament. The reasons behind under-enforcement are complex and may include poorly written law; lack of police prioritisation or resources; under-reporting of offences; evidential reasons; and so on.

It is a well known saying that ‘ignorance is no defence’, when it comes to the law. This means that it is not an acceptable defence in court to say that you did not know that your activity or omission was illegal. However, the most effective laws must be those which have both public knowledge and broad public support. In this way, particular activities become unacceptable and citizens engage in social control through self-regulation.

This has risks too, for example where majority public opinion is oppressive to minority groups or where individuals engage in vigilante action. However, in terms of maintaining social order and social distance, which are the challenges presented by COVID-19, it is preferable that people willingly comply, encourage by example and are given some latitude to self-correct their behaviour. Rather than engaging the costly, time-consuming and often inequitable criminal justice system, we need simple and consistent public information: wear a mask in public; wash hands and surfaces regularly; meet those outside your household in public or open-air; always maintain personal space.

Laws are often drafted by civil servants who are good at turning policy ideas into detail; their capacity to produce reams of commentary and guidance is formidable (I used to be one). However, this can be at the expense of simplicity and thinking through practical translation. In addition, there is a tendency to focus on restrictions, rather than enablers. For example, instead of introducing laws which have effectively closed arts and performance activities (among others), it would have been better to fund these venues to alter their delivery model and consider how we can better use available space (physical disused, under-used, re-purposed; online) to try to continue activities in new ways. Some of these innovations or accelerations of change will continue post-corona.

COVID-19 has provided us with three lessons: first, to maintain legitimacy, governments should focus on simple and consistent messaging; second, the criminal justice system is not necessarily the best approach to maintaining social order; and finally, informing, investing in and enabling citizens positively to self regulate and to innovate through social challenges, is more likely to ensure public support, compliance and long-term resilience for the next systemic shock.

24-July-20 Achebe and retributive justice

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My current read is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (first published by William Heinemann, 1958 though my copy is Penguin, 2001). Born in 1930 in Nigeria, Achebe studied in London and worked for the BBC, later becoming Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The book has a great back story. In 1957, an advert was published in the Spectator, offering to type author manuscripts for a fee. Achebe, then 27, was working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos but aspired to be a writer, and had a handwritten manuscript ready. He sent it to England.

Months passed. Achebe sent follow-up letters to check the status of his manuscript, to no response. Can you imagine, first, the act of bravery in sending away the only copy of your creation to another country and, second, the rising panic when you hear nothing further?

A British colleague from the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, taking her annual leave in England, sought out the typists firm for Achebe and returned to Nigeria with the finished product. It was published by Heinemann the following year, to critical acclaim.

The book tells the story of Okonkwo, a famed wrestler and warrior in the village of Umuofia, who has made his name and wealth through personal graft, catalysed by shame at the indolent reputation of his father. Okonkwo has three wives and many children whom he governs harshly: his eldest son, Nwoye, concerns Okonkwo, since he seems to have inherited his grandfather’s sensitivity and indifference to work.

One day, a woman in Umuofia is murdered in a neighbouring village; Okonkwo is sent to threaten war unless the village give up a young man and a virgin in atonement. Okonkwo returns with both. The young man, Ikemefuna, is sent to live with Okonkwo until a decision is made on his fate.

He ends up living with Okonkwo and his extended family for three years, becoming inseparable with the younger Nwoye – who matures significantly in Ikemefuna’s company – and comes to be considered as a son by Okonkwo.

Yet one day, news is brought that the Oracle of the Hills and Caves says that Ikemefuna must be taken outside of Umuofia, as is the custom, and killed. The boy is told that he is being returned to his family – much to his sorrow, as he has learnt to love his new home – and is led out with a party of men from the village, up through the forest. Okonkwo is among them. In a dense part of the trail, Ikemefuna is hit by a villager:

As the man who had cleared his throat drew up and raised his matchet, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, ‘My father, they have killed me!’ as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak. (Achebe, 2001, p. 44).

Okonkwo has taken five human heads in battle, yet in the days that follow the boy’s death, Okonkwo cannot eat. Instead, he sits drinking palm wine ‘from morning till night’: what modern readers would describe as ‘self-medicating’.

This passage made me think about justice systems, retribution and harm. He didn’t know it, but Ikemefuna’s time at Okonkwo’s house was a happy death row. He suffers through separation from his family and then, much later, death. In common with a few prisoners on death row, he is innocent and his interim sentence and execution are pronounced and managed by authoritative others.

It is common across indigenous (Cunneen and Tauri, 2016), restorative and Westernised justice systems to view harm committed against an individual as a harm borne by, or committed against, the whole community. This is why an apparatus is in place to bring together the offender, the victim (or victim’s family) and the community (represented in most contemporary states, by judges and legal professionals, but in other settings by elders, community leaders or mediators) to decide what action should follow. In principle, what separates restorative and some indigenous justice from Western practice, is that the sentence that follows should repair the harm done and restore victim and offender to their status prior to the offence.

Native American justice, for example, “is rooted in notions of relationship and dialogue rather than adversarial dispute, harmony and balance rather than proof and guilt, and renewal rather than punishment” (Peat, 1996). In Zulu culture, there is the concept of ubuntu which represents group solidarity, the collective, the importance of humanity one to another. Retribution or punishment is not absent, but the goal is reconciliation. Given the difficult history of division in South Africa, there was a recognition that the future had to be founded on peaceful co-existence. To that end the 1993 Constitution specifically recognises the need for ubuntu and it was this philosophy the underpinned the establishment and process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In Maori culture, two concepts in particular are important in understanding how justice is dispensed: whanau (the extended family group) and hapu (groups of families). Responsibility is collective, rather than individual. Offending may both be caused by, and produces, a disharmony within and between families and the community. This means that the focus is on restoring the relationship between the offender (and their family) and the victim (and their family).

What is particularly interesting is that these justice systems and principles operated before colonising Western Europeans arrived, who took a fairly dim view of such practice, and who, over time imposed their own vertical, codified and ‘professionalised’ legal structures. Yet today, the discourse of restoration and reparation are de rigeur among justice policy-makers and have been appropriated and translated into systems around the world – with varying degrees of success. Indeed, Maori, Native Americans and others are recovering and re-interpreting their own justice heritage.

It is important to recognise the limitations of all systems, however. As the story of Ikemefuna demonstrates, some indigenous or local justice forms have been discriminatory and punishments brutal. Equally, contemporary state justice systems can be discriminatory, unduly retributive, convict the innocent, fail to restore or rehabilitate, or meet the needs of victims or communities.

The second issue that the story raised for me is the potential harm caused by retributive systems to the administrators of justice.

When Ikemefuna joins Okonkwo’s household, he has no real identity or value: he is the outcome of a justice barter. But as time progresses, the boy becomes someone worthy of affection and respect. Okonkwo is profoundly upset by the death sentence, yet participates even in the final act, because of his concern to maintain face.

Achebe describes Umuofia as a strongly patriarchal society. Men’s reputations are built and maintained through acts of power and force. There are a number of passages in the novel which refer to Okonkwo’s internal affection for some of his children, but he never shows it outwardly with kind words or touch. This is an example of the toxic aspects of masculinity and of social duty, which only harm those who feel obliged to embody them.

Through time, prison and punishment systems have been maintained through acts of power and force. Prisons are tough, disciplinarian spaces where collective order must be placed above individual need or subjectivity. In the UK, as in most countries, the public are distanced from the realities of prison life. Instead, prison and probation officers, governors, youth offending team and social workers, administrators, cleaners, chaplaincy, medical and counselling staff do this work on our behalf. And currently, our prisons and youth institutions are often violent and challenging places, with high levels of self-harm, dirty protest, drug-taking, untreated mental health conditions, histories of abuse, minimal rehabilitation and overcrowding. They are holding spaces for those who have offended, sometimes gravely, but they also often warehouses for the marginalised (Wacquant, 2011), the flailing and the harrowed. Unsurprisingly, prison officers report ‘considerably higher levels of psychological distress than other occupational groups, including ’emotionally demanding jobs’ such as policing and social work‘.

So retributive systems deliver on justice as punishment, but containment and violence exert a high price on those charged with its administration. High recidivism suggests the wider public are not protected longer term. Problem-solving approaches and restorative justice take us some way, but need further development in different contexts and need to gain victim and public confidence.

We have yet to grasp fully what makes justice just.

Reference

Cunneen, C. and Tauri, J., 2016. Indigenous Justice. Bristol: Policy Press.

Peat, D., 1996. Blackfoot physics, London, England: Fourth Estate Limited

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