Popular Criminology, Sexual Violence and Alternative Modes of Justice

The idea of ‘popular criminology’ has gained currency within academic criminology, with criminologists recognising that popular cultural portrayals of crime, violence and justice offer alternatives discourses which enhance the criminological imagination beyond the limits of academic criminology, offering more complex understandings of crime and violence and reimagining the nature of justice (Brown and Rafter, 2012; Rafter, 2007; Wakeman, 2013; Wattis, 2018, 2022). This article will consider cultural representations of sexual violence as progressive portrayals which reveal the harms of sexual violence, disrupt stereotypical rape narratives and highlight the victim experience (Powell et al., 2015; McGlynn and Westmarland, 2019). There is now a growing activist and academic movement calling for a reimagining of justice beyond formal redress. This is in part a response to the widely acknowledged failure of formal justice systems to deliver justice for victims of sexual violence and the anti-carceral critique of feminism’s support for carceral justice responses to violence against women. Ultimately, I consider how popular culture might contribute to a more progressive vision of justice which resonates with McGlynn and Westmarland’s (2019) notion of ‘kaleidoscopic justice’ where victims are centred and the harms of sexual violence are fully recognised. I conclude by considering the ethics of representations of violence against within popular culture.&nbsp

The disconnection between policy practices and women's lived experiences: combining work and life in the UK and the Netherlands

Combining work and family life is central to women‘s participation in the labour market. Work-life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women‘s lived realities of combining work and family life in the UK in comparison to the Netherlands as a possible ‗best practices‘ model. We argue that women in both countries experience work-life balance as an ongoing process, continually negotiating the boundaries of work and family, and that there needs to be a more sophisticated appreciation of the differing needs of working parents. Whilst policy initiatives can be effective in helping women to reconcile dual roles, many women in both the UK and the Netherlands still resolve these issues at the individual or personal level and feel that policy has not impacted on their lives in any tangible way

Random sequential adsorption with two components: asymptotic analysis and finite size effects

We consider the model of random sequential adsorption (RSA) in which two lengths of rod-like polymer compete for binding on a long straight rigid one-dimensional substrate. We take all lengths to be discrete, assume that binding is irreversible, and short or long polymers are chosen at random with some probability. We consider both the cases where the polymers have similar lengths and when the lengths are vastly different. We use a combination of numerical simulations, computation and asymptotic analysis to study the adsorption process, specifically, analysing how competition between the two polymer lengths affects the final coverage, and how the coverage depends on the relative sizes of the two species and their relative binding rates. We find that the final coverage is always higher than in the one-species RSA, and that the highest coverage is achieved when the rate of binding of the longer polymer is higher. We find that for many binding rates and relative lengths of binding species, the coverage due to the shorter species decreases with increasing substrate length, although there is a small region of parameter space in which all coverages increase with substrate length

International Migration Data Toolkit: A resource for understanding international migration at the local level

This toolkit is designed as a resource to assist local authorities, and partner organisations, to develop an understanding of international migration in their local area. It shares the learning and experience from a project undertaken by Middlesbrough Borough Council and Teesside University that mapped data sources to explore recent international migration, and the impact on communities and services, and sets out a suggested approach for other areas to follow if undertaking similar work

Coagulation and fragmentation processes with evolving size and shape profiles : a semigroup approach

We investigate a class of bivariate coagulation-fragmentation equations. These equations describe the evolution of a system of particles that are characterised not only by a discrete size variable but also by a shape variable which can be either discrete or continuous. Existence and uniqueness of strong solutions to the associated abstract Cauchy problems are established by using the theory of substochastic semigroups of operators

“We are still quite patchy about what we know” International migration and the challenges of definition, categorisation and measurement on local service provision

International migration has a consistently high profile within national and international politics with increased focus on measurement and quantification of migrant numbers, impact on services and contribution to local, regional and national economies. However, the absence of consistency within definitions, categorisations and measurement of international migration and migrant populations create challenges and barriers to both understanding the needs of migrant communities but also the provision of adequate services within specific geographical areas. This paper will present findings from a project designed to map the impact of migration on a settled community within a Local Authority (LA) in the North East of England. As the project encountered routine inconsistencies around definitions, categorisations and measurement of migration within the LA area, this paper demonstrates the complexity of trying to ‘measure’ migration on the ground and while consistency in measurement is key to accurate data, we conclude with an ethical question about the rationale for collecting data on migrant populations

Exploring gender and fear retrospectively:stories of women’s fear during the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders

The murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1979 by Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper can be viewed as a significant criminal event due to the level of fear generated and the impact on local communities more generally. Drawing upon oral history interviews carried out with individuals living in Leeds at the time of the murders, this article explores women’s accounts of their fears from the time. This offers the opportunity to explore the gender/fear nexus from the unique perspective of a clearly defined object of fear situated within a specific spatial and historical setting. Findings revealed a range of anticipated fear-related emotions and practices which confirm popular ‘high-fear’ motifs; however, narrative analysis of interviews also highlighted more nuanced articulations of resistance and fearlessness based upon class, place and biographies of violence, as well as the way in which women drew upon fear/fearlessness in their overall construction of self. It is argued that using narrative approaches is a valuable means of uncovering the complexity of fear of crime and more specifically provides renewed insight onto women’s fear

The social nature of serial murder: The intersection of gender and modernity

The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire Ripper case, it emphasizes how in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation