In the Eyes of the Beholder: Border enforcement, suspect travellers and trafficking victims

Over the past decade, the border and border policing has figured as central to identifying and responding to trafficking. This article draws on original research into immigration officers’ decision-making — both at the border and within the nation — to identify the persistent preoccupation with suspect travellers. Examining research in Australia and Thailand that spans seven years, the article brings together research that demonstrates the predominance of the binary category of victim of trafficking/unlawful migrant worker and highlights the ambiguity of daily decision-making processes that categorise women who come into contact with immigration authorities. While the policy rhetoric is based on categories and risk profiles for identifying suspected victims of trafficking or those deemed at risk, we contribute to the growing body of work that has highlighted the presence of gendered and racialised stereotypes in immigration decision-making and consider implications this may have on women’s mobility across and within borders

Freeing the Modern Slaves, One Click at a Time: Theorising human trafficking, modern slavery, and technology

This paper analyses relations between human trafficking, modern slavery, and information communication technology. It looks at the history of the technology-trafficking nexus and flags some key advances in the counter-trafficking discourse in the last two decades. It provides an overview of how technology has been framed as both a part of the problem and part of the solution in the trafficking/slavery context and emphasises the impact of such developments on a range of actors, in particular, potential victims, NGOs, and the nation state. We suggest that the technology-slavery/trafficking connections, while often elusive, act as potent narrative and policy setters that can advance existing challenges and create new points of tension in the counter-trafficking context. We critically analyse these points of tension and destabilise some of their underpinning assumptions. In the conclusion, we highlight the need for rigorous empirical evidence, arguing that a more robust scholarly engagement with the role of technology in enabling and disrupting exploitation is essential. We also point to the importance of ensuring that technology is not a distraction from addressing the root causes of exploitation and abuse

Policing intimate partner violence in Victoria (Australia): examining police attitudes and the potential of specialisation

The adequacy of police responses to intimate partner violence has long animated scholarly debate, review and legislative change. While there have been significant shifts in community recognition of and concern about intimate partner violence, particularly in the wake of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, it nonetheless remains a significant form of violence and harm across Australian communities and a key issue for police, as noted in the report and recommendations of the Royal Commission. This article draws on findings from semi-structured interviews (n 163) with police in Victoria and pursues two key inter- related arguments. The first is that police attitudes towards incidents of intimate partner violence remain overwhelmingly negative. Despite innovations in policy and training, we suggest that this consistent dissatisfaction with intimate partner violence incidents as a poli- cing task indicates a significant barrier, possibly insurmountable, to attempts to reform the policing of intimate partner violence via force-wide initiatives and the mobilisation of general duties for this purpose. Consequently, our second argument is that specialisation via a com- mitment to dedicated intimate partner violence units – implemented more consistently and comprehensively than Victoria Police has to date – extends the greatest promise for effective policing of intimate partner violence in the future

Editorial: What’s in a Name? Distinguishing forced labour, trafficking and slavery

Over the last fifteen years the parameters of anti-trafficking have shifted considerably. This shift has not been immediate or seismic. It has been a gradual shift, and what was once advocated for as a specific practice of trafficking is now associated with, and at times used interchangeably with, slavery and forced labour

Compulsivity is measurable across distinct psychiatric symptom domains and is associated with familial risk and reward-related attentional capture.

BACKGROUND: Compulsivity can be seen across various mental health conditions and refers to a tendency toward repetitive habitual acts that are persistent and functionally impairing. Compulsivity involves dysfunctional reward-related circuitry and is thought to be significantly heritable. Despite this, its measurement from a transdiagnostic perspective has received only scant research attention. Here we examine both the psychometric properties of a recently developed compulsivity scale, as well as its relationship with compulsive symptoms, familial risk, and reward-related attentional capture. METHODS: Two-hundred and sixty individuals participated in the study (mean age = 36.0 [SD = 10.8] years; 60.0% male) and completed the Cambridge-Chicago Compulsivity Trait Scale (CHI-T), along with measures of psychiatric symptoms and family history thereof. Participants also completed a task designed to measure reward-related attentional capture (n = 177). RESULTS: CHI-T total scores had a normal distribution and acceptable Cronbach's alpha (0.84). CHI-T total scores correlated significantly and positively (all p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected) with Problematic Usage of the Internet, disordered gambling, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, alcohol misuse, and disordered eating. The scale was correlated significantly with history of addiction and obsessive-compulsive related disorders in first-degree relatives of participants and greater reward-related attentional capture. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the CHI-T is suitable for use in online studies and constitutes a transdiagnostic marker for a range of compulsive symptoms, their familial loading, and related cognitive markers. Future work should more extensively investigate the scale in normative and clinical cohorts, and the role of value-modulated attentional capture across compulsive disorders

Risk, vulnerability, resilience and adaptive management in the water sector

Developments in the theories and applications of risk, vulnerability, resilience and adaptive management within the context of urban water services are described and evaluated, facilitating consensus on their interpretation and subsequent management approaches. A synopsis of current thinking in the literature and the models, tools and techniques used in the application of risk, vulnerability, resilience and adaptive management concepts is presented. Representatives from two European water service providers were interviewed to explore whether and how these concepts are understood and interpreted within their organisations. This report presents evidence that the concepts of risk and (perhaps to a lesser extent) vulnerability are more widely applied and embedded in the water services sector than resilience and adaptive management. Discrepancies in how resilience is characterised were also observed. The engineering-based approach to resilience focuses on improving ?critical infrastructure resilience?, whereas the socio-ecological approach seeks to improve flexibility and foster creative re-organisation of complex systems. A case for further exploration of the latter, socio-ecological, concept and its operational aspects in the context of urban water services is provided.Smith, H.; Ugarelli, R.; Van Der Zouwen, M.; Allen, R.; Gormley, AM.; Segrave, A. (2013). Risk, vulnerability, resilience and adaptive management in the water sector. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/4662

Temporary migration and family violence:how perpetrators weaponise borders

This paper explores the implications of domestic and family violence occurring across borders, specifically the utilisation of border crossings to exert control and enact violence. While gendered violence can and does occur in border-crossing journeys, this paper focuses more specifically on how domestic and family violence extends across national borders and how violence (or the threat of violence and deportation) can manifest across multiple countries when women are temporary visa holders. This paper illuminates the way in which migration systems play a significant role in temporary migrant experiences of domestic and family violence. Drawing on a study of 300 temporary migrants and their experiences of domestic and family violence, I argue that perpetrators effectively weaponise the migration system to threaten, coerce and control women in different ways, most often with impunity. I also argue that we cannot focus on perpetrators and the individual alone—that we need to build on the border criminology scholarship that highlights the need to focus on systemic harm in the context of domestic and family violence and identify how the migration regime contributes to gendered violence