Today it was reported that “The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have seen large-scale ‘password spraying’ campaigns against healthcare bodies and medical research organisations” (NCSC, 5 May 2020). ‘Password spraying’ is an attempt to access a large number of accounts using commonly known passwords. Apparently, these groups are targeting organizations such as academia, pharmaceutical companies, , medical research organizations, and local governments to collect bulk personal information, intellectual property and intelligence.
The lockdown has created additional vulnerabilities as individuals work from home, some accessing remotely via virtual private networks (VPNs). In April 2019, the NCSC published an analysis of 100,000 most commonly re-occurring passwords that had been breached: there were 23.2m victim accounts using the password 123456; 3.6m using ‘password’ and 333,139 using ‘superman’, for example. The NCSC recommends using passwords comprising three random words, as well as two-step authentication processes.
Some press outlets have speculated that China, Russia and/or Iran may be behind some of these attacks, though this is unverified (see blog 21-Apr-20 Entanglements for the politics of attribution). It is fascinating to think how behind the guise of global efforts – such as the EU organised teleconference on 4 May 2020 where $8 billion was pledge globally for coronavirus vaccine research – countries are also vying to be first in the race. The New York Times reports, for example, that the US did not participate in Monday’s effort, but is pouring billions into its own research efforts. Neither did China make a financial pledge.
Whatever, the international politics of vaccine trophy-hunting, the NCSC-CISA statement reminds us that the continued shifting of our lives online requires some safeguards. So check those passwords today: and ‘batman’ (203,116 breaches) and ‘tigger’ (237, 290 breaches) are no good.
‘Feminist’, however, is not on the top 100,000 list . Interesting that.
The court system is not known for its speed (due process, rather than crime control, remember) and the pandemic will exacerbate this further.
The Institute for Government (IfG) reports that “the coronavirus lockdown has seen courtrooms closed for all but a small number of priority cases and jury trials are suspended altogether”. Their research suggests that if the lockdown continues for 6 months, case waiting times could increase 70%, meaning delayed justice for victims and defendants. Crown Courts were suspended in England and Wales on 24 March and, while there have been some attempts to continue some trials through technology, this has not been possible as yet for jury trials.
Some Family Courts have apparently seen a fivefold increase in urgent care proceedings in recent weeks, as already ‘at risk’ family contexts are worsened by, for example, increased substance misuse or the loss of in-person support, since the lockdown. Investigations by the Guardian suggest that some family courts are operating remotely by phone or Skype. A decision to remove children without seeing any of those involved is tough and Family Magistrates will need to find a balance between acting promptly to protect children but ensuring they have good information.
[A side comment on this – as with domestic abuse, it is very important to challenge the current media narrative which suggests the lockdown is causing domestic or child abuse, and hence the increase in reports to helplines or statutory services. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of abuse (and a conflation with ordinary intimate and familial tensions and arguments, which characterise most households). In the vast majority of cases, the current increase in reporting will relate to pre-existing and ongoing abuse. It is more that the lockdown is exacerbating the situation for victims, who are now housed 24/7 with their perpetrators. In addition, the level of abuse may be intensifying – and so victims may for the first time, or increasingly, be seeking support].
As with other public services, this current challenge to the justice system comes following years of cuts. Following the lockdown, the processing of this court case backlog combined with Government’s pledge to employ 20,000 further police officers (more officers likely = more convictions) the prison population will also likely increase.
It will be interesting to see if the use of technology to run court cases and the early release of some prisoners due to the pandemic, will have any longer term impact on how the justice system manages these many pressures.
Continuing in the vein of transnational crimes this week, it is worth noting how criminals are responding to the pandemic and switching into counterfeit PPE and medical supplies.
In normal times, there are established suppliers and distribution chains to manage, for example, the respirator mask needs of the health and social care sector. But since the advent of novel coronavirus, PPE demand globally has soared and so hospitals and other institutions are stepping out of their normal chains and trusted relationships. In markets where products are scarce or in short supply, grey markets will often emerge to sell the item at any price the market will bear.
There is evidence of substandard (though not necessarily ‘counterfeit’) masks being produced in China and Turkey for example, but also fakes of branded masks such as 3M N95’s. N95 respirators are the gold-standard in COVID-19 protection and are used by frontline health workers. The designation ‘N95’ means that in testing the mask blocked out at least 95 per cent of small particles from passing through – including viral pathogens. Unless masks meet that N95 standard, they are unlikely to protect the wearer from infection. So this is a deadly issue, potentially.
For hospital managers buying on the open market, signs to spot (as we learnt in the cybercrime lecture this week) are unsolicited emails from unknown sellers; requests to pay before receipt or use of payment methods which conceal the buyer identity. But no-one is immune from making a mistake: last week Sussex and Surrey police forces realised that three batches in a 10,000 PPE facemask order had fraudulent paperwork. Two-thousand seven hundred masks already delivered to local police stations had to be recalled.
On 17 April 2020, Europol published a 17-page report considering viral marketing, counterfeits, substandard good and intellectual property crime in the wake of the pandemic. The report notes that particular attention should be paid when a COVID-19 vaccine is developed, since this will likely create a wave of offers for counterfeit vaccines. So ongoing vigilance is required.
I am drawing across two lecture topics delivered this week – torture and violence against women – to raise a question about definitions and power. What we include in definitions matter; the boundary between what is ‘in’ and what is ’out’ has material impact. So when we are trying to think critically, we should always ask, “Why is this issue represented as this, and not this?”
In much of the literature on ‘torture’, the perpetrator is identified as an actor of the state and the context is often political. So we focus on the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers on Iraqi detainees, the rendition and torture of terrorist suspects by UK intelligence and security services, or ordered by former Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir in Darfur, for example. This is because international legal definitions of torture require the involvement of a state actor/public official. For example, Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states:
“Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”
This definition contains three cumulative elements:
the intentional infliction of severe mental or physical suffering
by a public official, who is directly or indirectly involved
for a specific purpose.
It is of course crucial that light is shone on state-perpetrated, state-sanctioned or state-enabled torture: both historic and present day.
However, there is torture in other contexts. The coercive and sadistic practices of some domestic abuse perpetrators, of some human traffickers, and of some who perpetrate sexual violence and abuse against women (men) and children in a domestic setting, fit the definition of torture, but the perpetrator is not a public official. Gender violence scholars, activists and some policy-makers have considered this overlap:
United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, n.d. Domestic Violence and the Prohibition of Torture and Ill-Treatment. Thematic Consultations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. [online]. Geneva: OHCHR.
McGlynn, C., 2008. ‘Rape as ‘torture’? Catharine MacKinnon and questions of feminist strategy.’, Feminist legal studies., 16 (1). pp. 71-85.
Mulvey, A., 2017. Female Genital Mutilation should be recognised as a form of torture. LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security Blog. [online] London: London School of Economics.
Sarson and MacDonald (2017) take a single case study approach to consider the trafficking and facilitating of sexual torture perpetrated against children. This is a very tough piece, so a strong health warning please if this could be an emotional trigger or otherwise upsetting.
The authors do make a strong case that the torture practices of private or public actors may be indistinguishable. So why raise this question of definitions? Well, if states were obliged to consider some forms of violence against women and girls as torture, this could place new accountabilities on states to act, and in new ways. In many countries, such violence falls out of view as a ‘private’ or ‘domestic’ matter or it is under-penalised because the range of offences available do not reflect the gravity of the acts perpetrated, or their impact, both on individual victims and society broadly.
Maintaining this distinction between what happens in the private sphere of the home and relationships, and what happens in the public sphere of state and politics – can enable the minimisation and suppression of harm in the former. That’s exactly what the feminist writer Karen Millett meant when she wrote in her 1970 book Sexual Politics, ‘the personal is political’.
Some you may now be watching the new Netflix series on wrongful convictions, ‘The Innocence Files’. This new documentary considers the cases of individuals (young Black men in the first two episodes) convicted wrongly in the 1980s and 1990s in the US. It focuses on three areas: misuse of forensic evidence, false eyewitness testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. As TV-crime fans, we have all watched the storylines with police reluctant to re-open closed cases, evidence-handling blunders, or nefarious prosecutors. But the real-life experience of a miscarriage is devastating: Thomas Haynesworth, convicted at 18, served 27 years before he was acquitted and released due to DNA evidence. Twenty-seven of the best years.
The series highlights the risks of the adversarial court system, where the point-scoring cut-and-thrust between defence and prosecution can mean that, in the desire to win, the truth is lost. Justice requires convicting the guilty but also exonerating the innocent.
The opening episodes also illustrates how the criminal justice system is experienced differentially. Those who suffer miscarriages of justice are usually working class, often young and non-White, and lacking the social capital and legal representation required to ‘win’ in court.
Check it out: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11958922/
There has been much media coverage about the impact of the global lockdown on the environment. Satellite pictures are showing dramatic declines in air pollution; wildlife is repopulating clearing lakes and canals; animals have started to reclaim urban streets and towns; flights have been grounded and the price of crude oil has plummeted as demand collapses. It looks like we may see a record drop in carbon emissions of 5% this year: when we were celebrating 2020 on New Year’s Eve, such a cut would have looked an unimaginable achievement.
Yet, despite the romantic narratives of the ‘earth healing’ and ‘nature re-asserting itself’ – this achievement comes due to a virus pandemic and economic meltdown, creating widespread and likely medium-term loss of livelihood (or life) for millions. It is not because world leaders and corporations have changed their beliefs and policies on climate change. Speaking to the Guardian (12 April 2020), Dr Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said that unless governments start to support clean energy going forward, then once Covid-19 is brought under control.
“…this decline could be easily wiped out in the rebound of the economy. These figures are important and impressive. But they don’t make me happy. For me it’s more important about what happens next year, and the year after that.”
In other words, these gains can be easily lost.
A relatively new entrant to the discipline, Nurse (2017) explains the rationale of Green Criminology:
Green criminology applies a broad ‘‘green’’ perspective to environmental harms, ecological justice, and the study of environmental laws and criminality, which includes crimes affecting the environment and non-human nature. Within the ecological justice and species justice perspectives of green criminology there is a contention that justice systems need to do more than just consider anthropocentric notions of criminal justice, they should also consider how justice systems can provide protection and redress for the environment and other species.
Too often however, there has been a conflict between the interests of states and corporations in pursuing economic growth (which can involve the exploitation and commercialisation of natural resources) and the need to safeguard the planet. States and corporations may return to their old ways post-COVID-19.
However, two things may prevent that. First, as Greta Thunberg argues today (the 50th anniversary of Earth Day), coronavirus has demonstrated how precarious our economies are – it is a wake-up call that we need a more sustainable way to live and produce. Second, despite the grief and the economic misery, people are also finding new and positive ways to be. Having tried, survived and possibly thrived at living differently, we may be reluctant to go back to how things were. So while governments and corporations may want to revert to type, people power may finally bring environmental change.
Nurse, A. 2017. Green criminology: shining a critical lens on environmental harm. Palgrave Communications, 3(10). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0007-2
A slight digression into politics (or ‘harms of the powerful’, you could say), but I have been rather taken today with this phrase ‘entanglement’. It comes from a lecture I gave this week on cybercrime and describes a form of cyber-attack deterrence.
Entanglement is a situation where the cost of an action exceeds the benefits, because the costs accrue to the perpetrator, as well as to the victim. In terms of cyber-attacks, the idea is that in an interdependent world where my fortunes are somewhat dependent on yours, I will make a rational calculation to avoid the risk of entanglement (Nye, 2016). So that risk imposes self-restraint on states and other actors. A similar ethos underpins the idea of ‘mutually assured destruction’.
I have been thinking about it also in the context of claims by some in the US that COVID-19 was released by China deliberately. Trump has not entirely backed that version but he has lent support to a theory that the release of COVID-19 was some sort of lab accident in Wuhan, which the authorities sought to cover up. This has been strongly denied by China and indeed stories circulate there that this virus originated with the US military.
While most of these stories will turn out to be ‘fake news’, occasionally the far-fetched turns out to be true, or almost. However, in terms of the intentional release of a biological virus (rather than an internet virus), it would seem surely that the risks of entanglement are rather too high. You would have to either have a vaccine (which would blow your cover) or risk innumerable deaths and destabilisation of your own country and a worldwide economic downturn, which as an exporting country, China would presumably not want.
Of course, most of this war of words is part of the ongoing posturing between the two rival powers, US and China, and Trump needs an explanation for rising US deaths and a contracting economy if he is to secure the next presidential election.
Quite separately, I discovered this funded project based at University of Copenhagen 2018-2023 called Criminal Entanglements (CRIMTANG), focused on transnational organised crime. The project brings together criminologists, anthropologists and political scientists to look at the illegal and overlapping flows of migrants and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe.
So there we are: transnational crime and an interdisciplinary focus: ‘entanglement’ is the word of the day.
It is difficult to mount a terrorism operation and certainly to run a terrorist organisation, without people, knowledge and money. Indeed, there is much in common between licit and illicit organisations. It’s why both management experts and criminologists have useful insights to offer on organised crime such as county lines, human trafficking operations or the funding of Far Right groups. To grasp terrorism financing, Lormel (2018) says that we need to visualize funding flows and understand how money laundering works:
The terrorist funding cycle is to raise, move, store and spend money. Money laundering is a three-step process consisting of placement, layering and integration.
Placement involves putting the money raised somewhere in the financial system – for example, buying an asset or placing funds in an off-shore account. (If you are wondering how money is raised, see: https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/10/isiss-new-plans-to-get-rich-and-wreak-havoc.html). The money then needs to be moved, possibly several times, to layer over the original money source. At some point, this money becomes integrated and its original source is obscured: the laundering is ‘complete’.
For example, Millie steals £1000 from the cash till where she works; she buys an electric bicycle on Gumtree for cash and then sells the bike for £900 on Ebay (changing the amount is always useful to cover tracks), which she asks the buyer to transfer to her bank account; she then puts £400 of that in an ISA; asks her Nan to look after £400 (Nan doesn’t trust banks and keeps money around the house) and spends the remaining £100 on hair straighteners. When questioned by police, she can explain that the £900 paid into her bank relates to an Ebay transaction and is unrelated to the missing money at work. Once things cool down, she can combine and move the two lots of £400 and deposit or invest them elsewhere.
Lormel’s funding flow visual is helpful and see also this NCA brief. You can see why it takes so long nowadays to open a new bank account!
Now imagine the Millie example in terms of a large terrorist network, operating across multiple countries, using complex financial instruments including digital cryptocurrencies, taking advantage of tax havens (including free ports, which the UK Government is currently very keen on promoting) and exploiting the regulatory differences and freedom of information laws between countries. It is a very complex picture.
Of course, it is important to remember that the rich and powerful ‘non-terrorists’ use many of the same methods to extract and store their wealth, away from the public eye and tax authorities. So while academic and expert commentary on this topic may guide us to look at the activities of ‘bad guys over there’; we should keep an eye on activities close to home too.
Two items have caught my eye this week. Yesterday, I got an email from a leading UK supermarket updating me where they are on online deliveries and making sure that food gets to the older and most vulnerable. There was one sentence of particular interest:
At the end of last week we received the government database, which includes details of all the people in England who have registered with the government to say that they are vulnerable and need help getting a food shop. […] We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.
We are in a situation where many regulations are being relaxed (car MOTs and business rate deferrals; early release from prison; removal of caps on delivery drivers’ hours etc.). Clearly data-sharing is required to meet current challenges and indeed the Information Commissioner’s Office has issued guidance on managing data protection during this time. But it does raise a question about what happens to this data long term, now it has been shared, and what precedents these actions may set.
Second, I was interested in the QR codes on the phones of Chinese citizens, which signal their health status. Although the West may view China as a highly authoritarian state tracking everyone with ruthless bureaucratic efficiency (hence, it is argued, China has managed to get a handle on COVID-19), this FT article suggests the reality may be a little messier.
What is worth noting is how this pandemic experience will affect how all countries, both authoritarian and democratic, survey their citizens. Nicholas Wright for Foreign Affairs explores this challenge. He writes:
…going forward, one of its most significant legacies will be the way that the pandemic dovetails with another major global disruption of the last few years—the rise and spread of digital surveillance enabled by artificial intelligence (AI).
Transnational crimes are different from international crimes. The ‘trans’ prefix (from the Latin meaning ‘across’ or ‘through’) shows us that this refers to crime which is planned, executed or has an impact in more than one country. ‘International crime’ refers generally to crimes against humanity which may involve two or more countries. Albanese (2017) identifies three types of transnational crime:
provision of illicit goods (drug trafficking, trafficking in stolen property, weapons trafficking, and counterfeiting)
illicit services (commercial sex and human trafficking)
infiltration of business and government (fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and corruption)
Transnational crimes may exploit different regulatory regimes between nation-states: for example, differential tax rules, cyber-laws or freedom of movement. Often too, these practices will exploit the social, political and economic inequalities between states. This is why, for example, trafficking (for forced labour or sexual exploitation) occurs commonly from developing or economically emerging countries into Western and richer states.
The following blog posts explore some examples of transnational crime and harm:
To give you a taste on wildlife harm, read this Magazine special from National Geographic on wildlife tourism. Note how this business relies on selling packages to tourists from richer countries, to bring them into areas which may be economically weaker and where laws around animal treatment may differ.
Friday evening I watched the Netflix documentary ‘How to Fix a Drug Scandal’ – a very interesting example of organisational crime and harm. The four-part series tells the story of two (unconnected) lab chemists, one in Amherst, West Massachusetts and one in Boston, East Massachusetts. Each were from stable homes, were academically successful and took jobs as analysts in state crime labs, doing routine work testing drugs seized as evidence by police. Neither were ‘dangerous’ or ‘evil’ per se, but each committed crimes through complex motivations, as explored in the documentary.
Apart from the individual stories, what comes out strongly in the documentary is how organisational culture (high-volume but not highly paid, low-profile, thankless work, with a pressure on getting ‘results’) and a stunning lack of supervision or oversight on the work produced or the welfare of employees. Their actions threatened the security of thousands of drugs convictions – although the state authorities were reluctant to acknowledge that impact, preferring instead to demarcate both cases as recent and limited in scope. As one of the speakers in the documentary says, the official focus was on ‘containment’ rather than ‘truth and justice’. Worth a watch.
In-person sex work is under lockdown at the moment (unsurprisingly, there has been a spike in camming and other online services), but this is difficult for those for whom sex work is their main income. Many individuals selling sex are carers (for children, partner, parents); may be managing long term mental or physical health issues (which make ‘regular’ jobs difficult); are migrant workers; or are transitioning gender, and so on. See this recent Home Office report.
Some individuals are registered with HMRC but many, if not most, will not be eligible for the self-employed support being provided by the Government. They are some of the hundreds of thousands of people who are part of the (GDP-contributing) ‘grey economy’. Remember, it is not illegal to buy or to sell sex in this country. It is some of the related activity which is criminalised, such as kerb-crawling or working with another person out of premises, which in English law constitutes a ‘brothel’.
National Ugly Mugs, a national organisation which works to improve the safety of sex workers, is asking Government to recognise these under-the-radar workers. It is also calling on adult online platforms and others to contribute to hardship funds. Some are asking whether these online platforms should be closed temporarily (as with other businesses), but it is likely this will only displace activity to more informal apps and sites, possibly presenting higher risks. Instead, the leading adult online platforms are being encouraged to remove in-person service adverts and remind users on the public health message. Getting financial support quickly to those involved in survival sex work will also reduce supply.
A recent Europol intelligence report suggests a number of trends given the COVID virus – a decline in domestic burglaries; an upsurge in domestic abuse reporting; a reduction in cross-border drug supply and on-street dealing but an increase in drug distribution through mainstream couriers; more child abuse activity shifting to the Dark Web; and an impact on refugee camps, where COVID outbreaks are forcing migrants to make dangerous onward journeys. In terms of sex work, this shift to online activity means organised crime gangs may now open online platforms to advertise coerced individuals. This presents a significant policing and prosecution challenge.
Police often do not have the resources to focus on sex work, except where there is exploitation or community complaint. So the law is selectively enforced, depending on local priorities, initiatives and contexts. Criminalisation does not keep sex workers safe, does not recognise the different motivations and contexts for selling sex, and can raise significant barriers to leaving.
This pandemic experience may provide the tipping point for action on practices and ways of thinking which, for so long, we have either tolerated or failed to question. Criminalisation of sex workers should be one of them.
Incapacitation is a method of removing or limiting someone’s freedom such that they cannot commit further crime. It can be seen also to protect society. Examples include prison, electronic tagging, restraining orders or the stocks. For white collar crimes, there is removal of license to practice or a restraint of trade order, for example. Indeed, we are all experiencing a mild form of house arrest at the moment, during the COVID-19 lockdown! There is a useful overview of incapacitation techniques in history and currently, here (see pp.17-20) and further explanation and critique, here (see pp.463-465):
Incapacitation is controversial. Sometimes it is imposed on those who are considered at risk of committing a crime, but have yet to do so: see for example control orders, introduced in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. Prison is our foremost tool of incapacitation but has a poor record in deterring future crime once individuals are released. So while incapacitation might meet our immediate needs for retribution (think of chemical castration for sex offenders or the ultimate disabler – capital punishment), there is a risk that we temporarily confine the risk but do not change offender’s hearts, minds or social context.
To address this, many call for more investment in rehabilitative programmes for offenders. Interestingly, the former Director General of the Prison Service Sir Martin Narey said in October 2019 :
“Stop fretting about rehabilitation. Politely discourage those who will urge you to believe that they have a six-week to six-month course which can undo the damage of a lifetime. The next time someone tells you they have a quick scheme which can transform lives – transform is the word of which you should be particularly suspicious – politely explain that life isn’t that simple.”
His argument was that we should instead be focusing on providing prisons which are safe and where prisoners are treated with “decency and dignity”. He probably has a point, but it also reflects the current state of our prison system which is experiencing record levels of prisoner self-harm, violence and drug use. It is not possible to find any space to reflect and grow in our prisons today; nor can prisons address the neglect, poverty, exclusion, violence and poor mental health which characterise the back-stories of so many inmates. That requires social, rather than criminal justice, policy.
So in summary, while incapacitation has its place, it does not solve the problem and may not address future risk. Perhaps you will be involved one day in designing something better.
A short blog to round off the week, along the theme of interesting and emerging areas of Criminology. Have you ever been on a crime tour? There are plenty around the UK, including Criminal London and Gangster Tours.
You might already know that there is a sub-discipline of Criminology called ‘Deviant Leisure’ (see Smith and Raymen, 2018) which looks at leisure practices and harm. One area of interest is ‘Dark Tourism‘, where individuals visit sites marking tragic events in human history. Some have noted this contemporary activity overlaps with the much older practices of pilgrimage (Collins-Kreiner, 2016).
Other areas of interest in Deviant Leisure include slum tourism (listen to this BBC podcast) or voluntourism, where (usually) Westerners engage in volunteer projects in developing countries. Across all these practices, we need to ask, “Why do people engage in these activities?”, “What are the benefits and harms and, importantly, to whom?” And if we do think aspects of these practices are harmful… how ought we respond?
It is not possible to understand contemporary police-BME community relations and the BME experience of crime control, without recognising the historical context of colonialism, erasure and settlement, as well as the regimes of apartheid, subjugation and discrimination that follow(ed).
The importance of Indigenous Criminology is in challenging our assumptions about the world and our systems of knowledge. The discipline of Criminology, like most academic subjects, was developed by White, middle class men in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet as Moosavi (2019, p.258) argues:
“Like all other social sciences, criminologists have insufficiently reflected on the ethnocentrism of their discipline, preferring instead to believe that criminology is ‘universal’ and ‘scientific’ rather than culturally and historically constituted, even though criminologists routinely prioritize Western concerns and ignore non-Western knowledge and experiences (Connell 2006: 258–262; Connell 2007: 44–47; Lynch 2000: 146–147; Tauri 2013: 221–222).”
Moosavi (pp.264-265) also says the risk of establishing separate categories, such as Southern Criminology or Asian Criminology, is that it can suggest they are just specialist sub-fields within the discipline. And that means that mainstream Criminology continues business as usual, prioritising and valuing particular types of knowledge. This is exactly the argument that feminist criminologists like Carol Smart made about bringing gender into Criminology… and they were probably right!
So the takeaway is that we should be alert to the missing voices and missing perspectives in Criminology. We should also take time to look at our history and see how the threads run through to the present day.
Moosavi, L., 2019. A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’. British Journal of Criminology, 59(2), pp.257-275. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy045
I have been thinking recently about social order and how fragile that always is. Thank goodness, we have seen umpteen instances of kindness and human spirit in recent days. There are always those, however, who will seek to exploit the situation (perhaps we all will in some way). The National Police Chiefs Council has reported instances of thefts of oxygen tanks and even two Iceland delivery vans were allegedly attacked in Bristol.
Following Boris Johnson’s announcement on Monday night, that gatherings of more than two people would be dispersed and fines would be handed out, police reported a lack of clarity on how to enforce these new rules. Indeed, the rules came in before the legislation! Different forces have responded in different ways, underlining the difficulties in coordinating nationwide practice when you have 43 police forces.
In the end, the police rely on the majority of the public doing what they are told, ideally because they agree. If the public or prisoners or school children rise up, they will always outnumber the police, the guards and the teachers. We operate on the assumption that people buy into the legitimacy of the regime, sufficient to maintain stability. Hence the social order is always fragile.
And if the people don’t comply, the state has force and internment powers at its disposal. In Jordan, those breaking the curfew have been threatened with up to one year imprisonment – in Kuwait, up to three years.
I started re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus last week. A bit macabre perhaps, but it’s a book I enjoyed in my teens and seems to offer some interesting insights now. Early in the book, you see the first cracks in the social order breaking. In this story, the whole town is under quarantine and the virus more serious. It is the perceived lack of hope that presents a particular challenge to order here.
Perhaps because so many people in the UK have good things that they want to protect (family, friends, homes, income, freedoms), this keeps a natural brake on widespread disorder. People are also surprisingly resilient and resourceful too. Indeed, isolation could help us re-discover our connections.
I mentioned in our last lecture that the current situation of containing people at home would have particular implications for victims of domestic abuse. See, for example.
While many associate domestic abuse with physical abuse (which can certainly feature) and perhaps sexual abuse (less often talked about), abuse is always defined by control, known as ‘coercive control’ (Stark, 2007). This describes how the perperator may, for example, submit their partner to endless scrutiny and demands, belittle them, interrograte them and may expect them to abide by particular behaviours and routines. Perpetrators will seek to isolate victims from family and friends; they may threaten the victim with suicide or blame them for illness. For many victims, this is the real horror of domestic abuse, because it takes over their mind.
This behaviour was not recognised until recently in the criminal law in England and Wales. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 introduced an offence to address coercive control, although prosecutions are still low.
Part of the issue is that victims are negotiating an ‘unreal’ situation (Williamson, 2010), which they may not recognise. Some feel shame about anyone knowing; others have children and/or are financially co-dependent (often the partner takes control of earnings). Domestic abuse is most commonly perpetrated by men, but abuse can certainly occur in different gender and relationship configurations (see e.g. Hester and Donovan, 2015; Seelau and Seelau, 2005). It also occurs across the age range, from teens to elder women.
Years of austerity has meant cuts to services and some refuges and organisations (and expertise) have been lost. The capacity, therefore, to respond to extra need now is lacking.
So in this difficult context, informal responses are important: looking out for friends, family and neighbours. Nicole Westmarland and Rosanna Bellini give some practical suggestions here.
Today, I thought it would be interesting to think about behaviour in the current context. The papers have been full of stories of people profiteering from COVID-19. See for example here and here.
Authorities are looking at enforcing regulation, including competition rules. But it’s not just smaller actors seeking to flog handwash or toilet rolls at inflated prices (and perhaps shaming is the best tool against this kind of behaviour?): asset and hedge fund managers and those who profit from them are also doing well out of short positions (a bet that a company’s stock price will fall). See for example.
There has also been some evidence of ‘nudge’ in action, with Government trying to work out how best to make the public comply with anti-virus-spreading measures, including moral appeals; advertising; and threats of tougher measures to come. Though it’s likely that tougher social controls may follow if we do not comply.
Criminology Tales 
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