Pub Date : 2021-10-11DOI: 10.1177/17416590211050333
Kaitlyn Regehr, A. Birze, C. Regehr
With the ubiquity of technological devices producing video and audio recordings, violent crimes are increasingly captured digitally and used as evidence in the criminal justice process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study involving Canadian criminal justice professionals, and asks questions surrounding the treatment of video evidence and the rights of victims captured within such images. We argue that loss of control over personal images and narratives can re-traumatize survivors of sexual violence, creating technologically-facilitated cycles of abuse that are perpetuated each time images are viewed. We find that the justice system has little to no consistent policy or procedure for handling video evidence, or for ameliorating the impact of these digital records on survivors. Subsequently, we assert that the need for a victim-centred evidence-based understanding of mediated evidence has never been greater.
{"title":"Technology facilitated re-victimization: How video evidence of sexual violence contributes to mediated cycles of abuse","authors":"Kaitlyn Regehr, A. Birze, C. Regehr","doi":"10.1177/17416590211050333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211050333","url":null,"abstract":"With the ubiquity of technological devices producing video and audio recordings, violent crimes are increasingly captured digitally and used as evidence in the criminal justice process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study involving Canadian criminal justice professionals, and asks questions surrounding the treatment of video evidence and the rights of victims captured within such images. We argue that loss of control over personal images and narratives can re-traumatize survivors of sexual violence, creating technologically-facilitated cycles of abuse that are perpetuated each time images are viewed. We find that the justice system has little to no consistent policy or procedure for handling video evidence, or for ameliorating the impact of these digital records on survivors. Subsequently, we assert that the need for a victim-centred evidence-based understanding of mediated evidence has never been greater.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"597 - 615"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44096597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-28DOI: 10.1177/17416590211048251
Ellen Daly
There have been growing concerns about the malleability of digital communications evidence and its potential to reinforce embedded rape myths and cultural narratives that undermine victim-survivors in sexual offences trials. There is however a paucity of research exploring this issue in practice, and none in England and Wales. This article therefore uses two case studies, drawn from court observation research in 2019, to explore how digital communications evidence is used in English sexual offences trials. In both case studies the prosecution argued that digital communications between defendant and victim-survivor constituted admissions of guilt; both defendants resisted this by providing alternative meanings to the well-known colloquial phrases within the messages. Through the process of entextualisation, defence counsel bolstered the meanings defendants attributed to digital communications by drawing upon rape myths and deeply embedded gendered narratives. Defence counsel further employed rape myths and gendered narratives to undermine prosecution entextualisations of the digital evidence. This analysis builds on the existing literature by demonstrating that the malleability of digital evidence extends even to seemingly unambiguous communications.
{"title":"Making new meanings: The entextualisation of digital communications evidence in English sexual offences trials","authors":"Ellen Daly","doi":"10.1177/17416590211048251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211048251","url":null,"abstract":"There have been growing concerns about the malleability of digital communications evidence and its potential to reinforce embedded rape myths and cultural narratives that undermine victim-survivors in sexual offences trials. There is however a paucity of research exploring this issue in practice, and none in England and Wales. This article therefore uses two case studies, drawn from court observation research in 2019, to explore how digital communications evidence is used in English sexual offences trials. In both case studies the prosecution argued that digital communications between defendant and victim-survivor constituted admissions of guilt; both defendants resisted this by providing alternative meanings to the well-known colloquial phrases within the messages. Through the process of entextualisation, defence counsel bolstered the meanings defendants attributed to digital communications by drawing upon rape myths and deeply embedded gendered narratives. Defence counsel further employed rape myths and gendered narratives to undermine prosecution entextualisations of the digital evidence. This analysis builds on the existing literature by demonstrating that the malleability of digital evidence extends even to seemingly unambiguous communications.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"578 - 596"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44133326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1177/17416590211039430
L. Alexandrescu
Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.
{"title":"Violence, crime dystopia and the dialectics of (dis)order in The Purge films","authors":"L. Alexandrescu","doi":"10.1177/17416590211039430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211039430","url":null,"abstract":"Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"561 - 577"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47462381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-23DOI: 10.1177/17416590211041017
Ronald van Steden, Shanna Mehlbaum
WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention (WNCP) groups are popular in the Netherlands. As a basic assumption, this kind of digital neighbourhood watch could prevent crime, but what is the evidence? Drawing on a mixture of qualitative research and a review of additional publications, we conclude that WNCP groups stimulate social cohesion rather than prevent crime. We reach our conclusion by applying the evaluation EMMIE framework – an acronym for Effect, Mechanisms, Moderators, Implementation and Economics – to the available data. A point for further discussion is the limited scope of the economic dimension. Moral costs must be calculated, too, as WNCP groups tend to deepen divisions between groups of citizens and fuel exclusionary practices in the name of community safety.
{"title":"Do-it-yourself surveillance: The practices and effects of WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention groups","authors":"Ronald van Steden, Shanna Mehlbaum","doi":"10.1177/17416590211041017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211041017","url":null,"abstract":"WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention (WNCP) groups are popular in the Netherlands. As a basic assumption, this kind of digital neighbourhood watch could prevent crime, but what is the evidence? Drawing on a mixture of qualitative research and a review of additional publications, we conclude that WNCP groups stimulate social cohesion rather than prevent crime. We reach our conclusion by applying the evaluation EMMIE framework – an acronym for Effect, Mechanisms, Moderators, Implementation and Economics – to the available data. A point for further discussion is the limited scope of the economic dimension. Moral costs must be calculated, too, as WNCP groups tend to deepen divisions between groups of citizens and fuel exclusionary practices in the name of community safety.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"543 - 560"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47644817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-19DOI: 10.1177/17416590211039797
Simon Mackenzie, Diāna Bērziņa
The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.
{"title":"NFTs: Digital things and their criminal lives","authors":"Simon Mackenzie, Diāna Bērziņa","doi":"10.1177/17416590211039797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211039797","url":null,"abstract":"The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"527 - 542"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48566535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-17DOI: 10.1177/17416590211037384
M. Wood
This article develops a new approach to analysing the technology-harm nexus. The approach distinguishes between different technology-harm relations: relations with technology that are harmful by virtue of what they contribute to bringing about. In this article, I focus on categorizing generative harm relations: relations with technology that are harmful by virtue of what they do to actors. Drawing together insights from zemiology, moral philosophy, postphenomenology, Stiegler’s technophenomenology, and Latour’s actor-network theory, I distinguish six generative harm relations: ambient harms, alterity harms, exclusion harms, interface harms, harm translation and zemiosis. Distinguishing between these generative harm relations helps us delineate the techno-sociality of a range of social harms, from gun violence and digital coercive control, to forms of oppression, inequality and immiseration (re)produced by algorithms.
{"title":"Mapping technology-harm relations: From ambient harms to zemiosis","authors":"M. Wood","doi":"10.1177/17416590211037384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211037384","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a new approach to analysing the technology-harm nexus. The approach distinguishes between different technology-harm relations: relations with technology that are harmful by virtue of what they contribute to bringing about. In this article, I focus on categorizing generative harm relations: relations with technology that are harmful by virtue of what they do to actors. Drawing together insights from zemiology, moral philosophy, postphenomenology, Stiegler’s technophenomenology, and Latour’s actor-network theory, I distinguish six generative harm relations: ambient harms, alterity harms, exclusion harms, interface harms, harm translation and zemiosis. Distinguishing between these generative harm relations helps us delineate the techno-sociality of a range of social harms, from gun violence and digital coercive control, to forms of oppression, inequality and immiseration (re)produced by algorithms.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"509 - 526"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42376131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-28DOI: 10.1177/17416590211027337
L. Vitis, L. Naegler, Ahmad Salehin
In November 2018, Monica Baey, a student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) was recorded by a fellow student while showering in university accommodation. After the perpetrator was issued a formal warning and a one-semester suspension, Baey posted about the case on social media and named the perpetrator. This generated public support, news coverage and institutional reform. In this article, we explore a range of responses to the Monica Baey case through a thematic analysis of publicly available comments about the case on a popular message board forum, Hardwarezone. By contextualising our analysis within the political setting of Singapore, this research demonstrates that public responses to testimony-based resistance require close analysis, as extant tools for citizens to engage in ‘naming and shaming’, were relevant to understanding these responses to this mode of resistance and reflected what Ibrahim (2018) calls ‘everyday authoritarianism’.
{"title":"‘This is not a case of gender inequality. This is a case of injustice’: Perceptions of online resistance to camera sexual voyeurism","authors":"L. Vitis, L. Naegler, Ahmad Salehin","doi":"10.1177/17416590211027337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590211027337","url":null,"abstract":"In November 2018, Monica Baey, a student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) was recorded by a fellow student while showering in university accommodation. After the perpetrator was issued a formal warning and a one-semester suspension, Baey posted about the case on social media and named the perpetrator. This generated public support, news coverage and institutional reform. In this article, we explore a range of responses to the Monica Baey case through a thematic analysis of publicly available comments about the case on a popular message board forum, Hardwarezone. By contextualising our analysis within the political setting of Singapore, this research demonstrates that public responses to testimony-based resistance require close analysis, as extant tools for citizens to engage in ‘naming and shaming’, were relevant to understanding these responses to this mode of resistance and reflected what Ibrahim (2018) calls ‘everyday authoritarianism’.","PeriodicalId":46658,"journal":{"name":"Crime Media Culture","volume":"18 1","pages":"491 - 508"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/17416590211027337","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43234194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}