La estrategia europea de la prevención de la delincuencia a través del incivismo a examen [Inspecting the European crime prevention strategy towards incivilities]

In recent years the crime prevention (CP) policies of many EU countries have been expanded up to including the regulation of uncivil and disorderly behaviour, and have been implemented at the local level through measures that have often excessively constrained individuals’ rights and freedoms. By drawing on the analysis of EU policy documents retrieved in the database EUR-lex, this paper investigates whether the European CP strategy has also focused on the regulation of incivilities. Furthermore, it inspects whether any attention has been paid at the EU level to how local authorities have exercised their CP powers in the field of urban disorder. In the conclusions, the emerging results are compared against the backdrop of the existing literature on the legitimacy of incivility regulation, with the aim to draw conclusions informing the EU CP strategy targeting nuisance and its regulation

END OF PROJECT REPORT: Law in Action: local-level and collaborative governance of prostitution in two European cities – Antwerp (Belgium) and Catania (Italy)

This project comparatively analysed city-based prostitution policies and practices and their effects on sex workers in the cities of Antwerp (Belgium) and Catania (Italy)

Law in Action: Local-level prostitution policies and practices and their effects on sex workers

This article comparatively analyses city-based prostitution policies and practices and their effects on sex workers in countries that have adopted a partial criminalisation model of intervention towards prostitution—Belgium and Italy. The two case studies selected for this research, i.e. the cities of Antwerp (Belgium) and Catania (Italy), have been chosen for their adopted local approach towards prostitution in designated RLDs: while prostitution has been collaboratively governed in Antwerp, it has simply been tolerated in Catania. By considering the factors that have led to the development of prostitution policies and practices in these two cities, and their characteristics both within and outside the two cities’ RLDs, this article compared and analysed the effects produced on sex workers across city areas. The study revealed a number of similarities between the two considered local cases: local practices towards sex work in both cities have been shaped by urban regeneration in RLDs, and by concerns about nuisance and crime across city areas (irregular immigration and trafficking, in particular); in all instances, they have had similar exclusionary effects on sex workers—and especially on migrant women among them. The study also identified two key differences in the practices towards prostitution adopted in these two cities: they differed in the level of access to support services offered to sex workers, and in the pervasiveness of proactive police controls. The article concludes by arguing that all these local practices—including the ones seemingly different—ultimately converge in their ethos: they reinforce the socially constructed status of migrant sex workers as either law-breakers or trafficked victims to be subject of control and, in the latter case, also protection

Media representations of complementary and alternative medicine in the Italian press: a criminological perspective

Complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs), here broadly intended as all those healthcare approaches developed outside standard science-based medicine, are increasingly the object of highly polarized public debates. Some CAMs can cause great social harm, with serious repercussions both on the health of people and on their confidence in the medical profession and the scientific method. This notwithstanding, criminologists have so far overlooked this issue. Based on the awareness that people’s perceptions of CAMs often depend on what they learn about them through the media, this exploratory study presents a longitudinal systematic analysis of media representations of CAMs in the Italian press. The results indicate that media have conveyed confused and ambivalent messages on the topic of CAMs, partly because of the lack of preparation of journalists on this subject and partly because of the insubstantial presence of the voices of experts and medical organizations in the press discourse. In addition, the study identifies avenues for further criminological research on this topic

Regulation of incivilities in the UK, Italy and Belgium: Courts as potential safeguards against legislative vagueness and excessive use of penalising powers?

In recent years, the legislators in the UK, Italy and Belgium have progressively empowered local authorities to subject sometimes already criminalised and harmful, but also some relatively harmless uncivil conduct to intrusive and punitive measures deeply affecting individuals' rights. However, judicial action in these three countries has been recently trying to restrain the (illegitimate) use of penalising powers of local authorities by delivering interesting liberty-safeguarding decisions. This paper firstly describes the (expanded) regulation of incivilities in the three aforesaid European countries. Secondly, it focuses on two criteria that inform judicial review of legislative and administrative action, namely the principle of legality and the principle of proportionality. Thirdly, it examines the case law of English, Welsh and Scottish courts, along with Italian and Belgian courts, and shows how courts can safeguard the individual's rights and freedoms against (illegitimate) penalisation of conduct that is deemed anti-social or uncivil at the local level

Representations of environmental protest on the ground and in the cloud: The NOTAP protests in activist practice and social visual media

This article advances knowledge on activist technosocial practice by studying the realities and representations of on-the-ground environmental resistance and their intersections with visual representations of protest on Twitter. It does so by focusing on the case of resistance to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, commonly known as TAP, in southern Italy, and on mixed methods for data collection, including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and an AIassisted visual ethnography of a large collection of computationally collected and categorised images posted on Twitter. By comparing online and offline representations of protest, the study demonstrated that only a partial overlapping existed between them, thus adding a nuance to the digital criminological literature premised on the existence of blurred boundaries between online and offline experiences of injustice. Themes overlapped in their representations of protest, with images of on-theground visual resistance being used on Twitter to extend and amplify the contestation of everyday spaces and to support offline and online initiatives to stop the pipeline. Differences in the recurring themes were instead reconnected to the inherent secrecy of some of the protest’s strategies and to the typical ways in which Twitter tends to be used by social movements