The trouble with safety: Fear of crime, pollution and subjectification in public space

This article examines how fear of crime and safekeeping are constituted as part of the same dispositif of control which subjectifies (produces a specific form of self) and which perpetrates spatial and social injustice. Problematizing how imperatives for safekeeping are constituted, this article outlines the role of the abject and anxiety about pollution and disorder in the production of knowledge about public spaces, of the self, and of the other. I draw on data collected from qualitative interviews with young women aged 17 in the UK about their experiences of fear of crime, safety, belonging, exclusion and well-being in public spaces. By conducting discourse analysis on their talk, this article posits that exclusionary notions of class, race and gender construct part of how some young women produce knowledge about fear of crime and safety. This research has implications for better understanding the social cost of contemporary knowledge about what is safe and what is fearsome in public space

Approaching/Departure: effacement, erasure and 'undoing' the fear of crime

This paper contributes to contemporary debates about the geographies of gendered fear of crime by examining the way in which a group of young women negotiate fear of crime in public space by creating spatial, social, discursive, or affective distance between themselves and the approaching menace of fear in their home towns. These distances are presented here as lacunae which young women construct in order to promote feelings of safety in space. Bringing Sara Ahmed's work on the circulation of affect and Jacque Derrida's notion of erasure (or sous-rature) into a dialogue with each other, and building on a Heideggerian phenomenological understanding of fear as dynamic, this paper uses interview data collected with young women in the South East of England to explore how lacunae are constructed and used in the pursuit of safety. ‘Emotion maps’ and qualitative interviews are analysed discursively to explore how gaps which efface and erase fear, emerge. I argue that creating lacunae – whether verbally, non-verbally or spatially – enables young women to undo the approach of signifiers of fear in public space, which in turn enables them to contest dominant discourses of the gendered nature of fear of crime. I also argue that this has implications for the politics of safe-keeping. This paper complicates conventional understandings of safe-keeping by highlighting how, in the pursuit of safety, erasures based on classed, raced, or gendered othering can manifest themselves and prove exclusionary. By examining the work that such lacunic erasures do, this paper emphasises the importance of the spatial and the affective in understanding the relationship between fear, safety, affective expression and well-being. Grounding this discussion in analyses of the way in which fear and safety operate spatially, this paper highlights the importance, not only of attending to silences and absences used to make people feel safer, but also to the politics of these in the pursuit of safe-keeping

How to break a rape culture: gendered fear of crime and the myth of the stranger-rapist

Concern about the gendered nature of fear of crime (and in particular of sex crime), and the spatialisation of fear of crime discourses have preoccupied feminist activists, criminologists and other social scientists for at least the past quarter century. This chapter examines how it is, despite the fact that women have been speaking out against acts of sexual aggression in public space for decades, we continue to live in a context which promotes spatialized violence against women through fear of crime discourses. Interrogating how rape culture is produced by (and it turn produces) rape myths, which produce fear of crime, this chapter deconstructs some of the ways in which rape myths are perpetuated. It advances, following Deleuze and Guattari, how war machines might work to break a rape culture, or at least begin this work. This chapter emphasises why it is imperative that we continue to speak about, and act against, rape culture in contemporary criminological discourses

On being ugly in public: the politics of the grotesque in naked protests

Sexualised naked protest using young and attractive women’s bodies have long featured in the repertoire of protesting interventions in public space. Anti-rape feminist groups and non-human animal rights activist groups, in particular, have mobilised these bodies to attract attention to their causes. Contemporary debates have suggested that these sorts of protest are objectionable, and that they are entwined with contemporary rape culture. This paper complicates these accounts by considering what happens when the naked body is presented as a grotesquery in the service of these apparently emancipatory politics. Analysing two instances of naked protest as case studies, this paper examines what happens to naked protest when the bodies protesting are ‘ugly’ or are rendered so. The analysis suggests that naked protest featuring bodies which are ‘ugly’ harbours the possibility to mobilise a transgressive politics beyond contemporary rape culture. This paper has implications for better understanding how to mobilise protest in a way that is transgressive and bold without further enshrining rape culture as the normative background against which they take place

An evaluation of the Royal Borough of Greenwich Domestic Abuse Perpetrators' Group

Local multi-agency approaches are viewed as the most effective approach to tackling domestic abuse as they support more holistic, streamlined, and effective service delivery. In the Royal Borough of Greenwich (RBG), the Domestic Abuse Perpetrator’s Group (DAPG) was established in October 2020 to coordinate agency responses to domestic abuse. It achieves this through the provision of advocacy and support services for perpetrators and multi-agency information sharing and risk management. This report details findings of an evaluation that examined the extent to which is the DAPG is achieving its primary aims and objectives

Of “sluts” and “arseholes”: Antagonistic desire and the production of sexual vigilance

This article examines a contemporary antagonism in gendered safety discourses—the imperative to be free in public space against the obligation to be safe and “properly” feminine. We argue that this produces (and is produced by) contemporary rape culture, which might be contested through recourse to an agonistic ethic. Using qualitative interview data, we examine how participants contest victim-blaming discourses, while limiting how far they will accept the female body’s right to occupy public space. This article has significant implications for approaching social justice, in particular justice for women and their right to occupy public space

For a genealogy of street-wisdom

The study of women’s fear of crime has received considerable academic attention from a range of disciplinary directions. This thesis propels these existing debates further forward by problematising the construction of ‘fear’ and ‘safety’ in existing work and by exploring the range of ways in which public spaces are understood, and knowledge about them constructed and deployed. Using a Foucauldian and affective theoretical framework, the thesis uncovers how safe or fearful ‘knowledges’ are constituted, and reconfigures them, beyond the limits of this lexicon, as ‘at-home-ness’ and ‘un-at-home-ness’. These terms offer both broader and more precise ways of speaking about the specificity of women’s day-to-day experiences of occupying public space. With this in mind, this thesis uses a mix of qualitative methods including Walking Interviews, Map Interviews and Multimedia Diaries to investigate, with 45 female participants across three sites in the South East of England, the ways in which they situate themselves physically and emotionally in their home towns. The study begins to excavate how this knowledge, or street-wisdom, is formed and circulated, reflecting the breadth of sometimes emancipatory, sometimes exclusionary or oppressed ways in which women experience their bodies in space. By adopting this nuanced perspective on fear of crime, and by proposing an understanding of fear of crime which is more complex and contingent than existing discussions suggest, this thesis offers challenging and instructive insights into the possibilities and problematics of fear when used to inform street-wisdom

Disrupting Rape Culture: Public space sexuality and revolt

Pussy grabbing; hot mommas; topless protest; nasty women. Whether hypersexualised, desexualised, venerated or maligned, women’s bodies in public space continue to be framed as a problem. A problem that is discursively ‘solved’ by the continued proliferation of rape culture in everyday life. Indeed, despite the rise in research and public awareness about rape culture and sexism in contemporary debates, gendered violence continues to be normalised. Using case studies from the US and UK – the de/sexualised pregnancy, the troublesome naked protest, the errant BDSM player – Fanghanel interrogates how the female body is figured through, and revolts against, gendered violence. Rape culture currently thrives. This book demonstrates how it happens, the politics that are mobilised to sustain it, and how we might act to contest it

How to change your life: hope, love, anger and other unlikely revolutionaries

Throughout this book, we have set out the different ways in which crime, justice and sexuality interact with each other and with other institutions, including medical discourses, the family, the State, populism, the media, the idea of the nation, and so on. The way that sex is treated by criminal justice systems co-constructs the values and ethics of the time and space that we occupy, wherever and whenever that time and space are. You will have seen how sometimes that works to remedy injustice. You will also have seen how that is not always the case. Here, we are finishing this book by giving consideration to the ways in which you might take some of your learning out of the classroom and into the world: what we call – borrowing from Paulo Freire (2017[1970]) – the establishment of a praxis, or the capacity to act