Reading Between the Lines:Subjectivity and Men’s Violence

This article discusses the relative merits of psychoanalytic and psychodiscursive approaches to the study of masculinities and men’s violence. The case histories of four men are presented and analyzed. Two of these men were antisexist men seeking to help other men to change, and the other two were men who were getting help to stop being violent. Using these case histories, this article seeks to demonstrate that psychic experience is not a simple product of social discourses, and therefore masculinity cannot be straightforwardly read off from what men say. The article concludes by arguing that the psychoanalytic notion of a defended subject draws our attention to the unities among men more effectively than psychodiscursive approaches precisely because it is able to acknowledge biographically mediated differences between men.</p

Misleading the World on Modern Slavery? Reassessing the Impact of the UK’s Anti-Trafficking Agenda

There is an emerging international consensus that the UK’s efforts to redress modern slavery within its own borders are not as exemplary as has been claimed, begging the question as to how valid its claim also to be ‘leading the world’ on this new agenda is. This collection of articles reveals the frequently mixed, muddled, and sometimes malign influence British social policy has had on other countries it has advised to follow its lead, as well as the prospects for something more progressive to emerge from the tensions the modern slavery agenda engenders. Articles within this collection speak to the influence of British law and policy on trafficking, exploitation and modern slavery in the Caribbean, India, Nigeria, Australia, Romania, Albania, Ukraine, and Vietnam, as well as on foreign nationals within UK’s National Referral Mechanism, prison, and immigration estates

Hate and Bias Crime: Criminologically Congruent Law? A Review of Barbara Perry's Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader

Barbara Perry (2003) Hate and Bias Crime:A Reader Routledge: New York, 520 pp., ISBN 0415944082.The last decade of the 20th century has seen a flurry of hate crime legislation and other state activities, none of which have had an appreciable effect on the frequency or certainly the severity of hate crime. Such initiatives are insufficient responses to bias-motivated violence, in that they do not touch the underlying structures that support hate crime. Abdicating responsibility for countering such violence to the state, then, will not be a sufficiently effective long-term strategy. Rather, the responsibility must be shared and distributed across institutional and interactional levels. Moreover, the ultimate goal is not only to attack hate crime, but to disrupt the institutional and cultural assumptions about difference that condition hate crime. To the extent that difference is socially constructed, it can also be reconstructed (Perry, 2003, p. 387

Deconstructing male violence:a qualitative study of male workers and clients on an anti-violence programme

This thesis analyses the narratives elicited from eleven men the author interviewed using Hollway and Jefferson’s (1997) ‘Narrative Interview Method’. Six of these men were violent men who were getting professional help to ‘change’. The other five were men who worked with violent men to help them change. The primary rationale for analysing these eleven cases was to investigate the extent to which the poststructuralist/psychoanalytic notion of a ‘defended subject’ helps explain why some men are violent to female partners when other men are not. The relative merits of the various sociological and social-psychological approaches to the study of masculinity are tested against these interviewees’ accounts of their lives. The author argues that the notion of a defended subject illuminates a more recognisably contradictory set of experiences of masculinity than other sociological structuralist approaches, as well as enabling one to conceive of a more complex relationship between ‘class inequality’ and ‘destructive behaviour’ than criminologists ordinarily acknowledge. The policy and practice implications of positing a defended psychosocial subject are also dealt with in this thesis. In particular, the author takes issue with the broadly cognitivist assumptions that underpin the government’s current strategy of research and intervention in this field. The philosophical implications of using psychoanalytic ideas to make sense of other people’s lives are discussed in most depth in this thesis’ concluding chapter

Mapping the Contours of Modern Slavery, two years on

‘Mapping the contours of modernslavery’ project was initially acollaboration between the Universityof Manchester, Greater ManchesterPolice (GMP) and University of Leeds.The main aim of the collaborationwas to map the contours of modernslavery as they appeared in 2015 datarecorded for the Greater Manchesterarea by GMP and the Modern SlaveryHuman Trafficking Unit (MSHTU)– formerly the United KingdomHuman Trafficking Centre (UKHTC).Conducted over 12 months in 2016/17,the research mapped the victims,suspects and geographical distributionof the cases known to GMP in 2015

For Better or Worse? Improving the Response to Domestic Abuse Offenders on Probation

As the Ministry of Justice looks to develop a ‘new generation’ of programmes to reduce reoffending, we reflect on what can be learnt from the only accredited domestic abuse programme in England and Wales, Building Better Relationships (BBR). Findings from an ethnographic study of BBR are situated within the Probation Inspectorate’s recent inspection of domestic abuse work within the newly unified Probation Service which revealed a fractured and overstretched workforce. Our central argument is that if we are to avoid making matters worse, practitioners must be equipped with the time, supervision and skill needed to maintain something akin to a ‘therapeutic alliance’, that will endure in moments of crisis in their own lives as well as those of their clients

Epistemology and the Ethics of Homeopathy: a Response to Freckelton

The death of two patients in the care of Australian homœopaths is undeniably tragic and reflects poorly on the homœopathic profession at large. While Freckelton admits that it is not fair to judge a profession by its worst practitioners, this is precisely what he has done. If the same argument were applied to all Australian hospitals, in which there are an estimated 18,000 deaths each year due to adverse events or medical errors, then the public could be expected to lose confidence in conventional medicine. Generalising risk by citing extreme examples does not facilitate healthy debate or consideration of the deeper epistemological and ethical issues. While addressing Freckelton's valid concerns, we believe that the appropriate practice of homœopathy is epistemologically robust, ethical and empirically sound. Furthermore, while debate continues on definitions of evidence and the appropriate delivery of health care, we argue that the deliberate exclusion of certain forms of evidence, including positive patient outcomes measured according to different quantitative and qualitative criteria, inappropriately constrains individuals' rights to select models and methods of health care according to their values and to the goals that they wish to achieve