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Emotions and Crime
In spite of the fact that crime is an emotive topic, the question of emotion has been largely overlooked in criminological research, which has tended instead to examine criminal conduct in terms of structural background variables or rational decision-making. Building on research into emotions within sociology, this book seeks to show how criminologists can in fact take emotions seriously and why criminology needs to begin considering emotions as a central element of its theoretical, conceptual and methodological apparatus. Thematically organised and presenting both empirical and theoretical studies, Emotions and Crime pays attention to the different emotional dimensions of crime, victimhood, the criminal justice system, the practice of criminological research and the discipline of criminology. Bringing together the work of an international team of authors and discussing research into violence, punishment, gender, imprisonment and mass atrocity, this volume shows how crime and emotions are inextricably connected, and illustrates both the hidden and pervasive role of emotions in criminological work. Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the editor of The Poetics of Crime, Postmortal Society, and Emotions, Everyday Life and Sociology and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, Encountering the Everyday, The Transformation of Modernity, Utopia: Social Theory and the Future, Liquid Criminology, and Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences. Sandra Walklate is Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK and Conjoint Chair of Criminology at Monash University, Australia. She is the co-author of Victims: Trauma, Testimony, Justice and The Contradictions of Terrorism, and the co-editor of Liquid Criminology: Doing Imaginative Criminological Research.
Emotions and Crime Towards a Criminology of Emotions
Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate
First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, 1971- editor. | Walklate, Sandra, editor. Title: Emotions and crime : towards a criminology of emotions / edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate. Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007873 (print) | LCCN 2019012322 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351017633 (ebk) | ISBN 9781351017626 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781351017619 (epub) | ISBN 9781351017602 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9781138497887 (hbk) Subjects: LCSH: Criminal psychology. | Punishment (Psychology) | Emotions. Classification: LCC HV6080 (ebook) | LCC HV6080 .E456 2019 (print) | DDC 364.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007873 ISBN: 978-1-138-49788-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-01763-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction
vii viii 1
MICHAEL HVIID JACOBSEN AND SANDRA WALKLATE
PART 1
Crime and emotions 1 Male violence against women in intimate relationships: The contribution of stress and male peer support
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WALTER S. DEKESEREDY
2 The role of emotions for female co-offenders
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CHARLOTTE BARLOW
3 American self-radicalising terrorists and conversions to radical action: Emotional factors and the allure of ‘jihadi cool/chic’
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CAROLINE JOAN ‘KAY’ S. PICART
4 ‘Violence is difficult, not easy’: The emotion dynamics of mass atrocities
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SUSANNE KARSTEDT
PART 2
Punishment and emotions 5 ‘Forty-five colour photographs’: Images, emotions and the victim of domestic violence DAWN MOORE AND STEPHANIE HOFFELER
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6 Punitiveness and the emotions of punishment: Between solidarity and hostility
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ANASTASIA CHAMBERLEN AND HENRIQUE CARVALHO
7 Capital punishment and the emotional public sphere in midtwentieth century Britain
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LIZZIE SEAL
PART 3
Doing criminology as emotion work 8 Prison life as ‘emotion culture’: Reflections on some of the emotional challenges of conducting prison ethnography
129 131
MICHAEL HVIID JACOBSEN AND DORTE RAABY ANDERSEN
9 Witnessing, responsibility and spectatorship in the aftermath of violence: Reflections from Srebrenica
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ELIZABETH COOK
10 Death justice: Navigating contested death in the digital age
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REBECCA SCOTT BRAY
11 ‘Feeling criminology’: Learning from emotions in criminological research
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STEPHEN WAKEMAN
3 Postscript Concluding thoughts: Some lessons from being ‘liminal’
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SANDRA WALKLATE
Index
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Preface and acknowledgements
This book is the concrete outcome of a previous productive collaboration between the two editors resulting in the volume Liquid Criminology (Routledge, 2015). Based on this book and our continuing discussions about the general state and development of criminology, we decided to start working on this new volume on crime and emotions. Crime is a highly emotional phenomenon – it always has been and always will be. Experiencing, witnessing, committing and sanctioning crime evokes many different emotions such as anger, excitement, courage, regret, retaliation, repentance, a sense of justice and so on. Even though emotions and crime are thus intimately linked together, the topic has not until quite recently attracted widespread or separate attention from most criminologists. Throughout the past two decades, however, emotions – and part of a more general ‘emotional turn’ within the social sciences – have gradually moved from the margins closer to the centre of criminological focus. Despite this embrace of emotions, the topic is, we believe, still part of an emerging research field that theoretically, methodologically and empirically continued to discover and uncover new ground. This book is part of this tendency, and it tries to show some of the many different ways in which crime and emotions relate to each other by looking at the criminal act, punishment and research into crime as emotional activities. Even though this book is far from exhaustive in its coverage of the many links between crime and emotions, it nevertheless points to some important areas of research that shows the bountiful diversity of recent criminological work on emotions. Completing an edited book is a collective process requiring the professional collaboration between editors, authors and the publishing house. We here want to thank the many contributors to this volume for sharing their insightful, thoughtprovoking and research-based ideas on crime and emotions in our book. Moreover, we want to extend our gratitude to our two ‘partners in crime’ at Routledge, Commissioning Editor Neil Jordan and Editorial Assistant Alice Salt as well as the team of proof-readers, front-cover designers and copy-editors involved in the completion of the book. As always, they managed to make the production of this book a manageable and indeed pleasurable task. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate Aalborg and Liverpool
Contributors
Dorte Raaby Andersen is a researcher at the Clinic of Occupational Medicine, Herning Regional Hospital, Denmark. She holds PhD in sociology and her research is concerned with topics such as: workplace culture, emotion management, threats, violence and safety at the workplace, prison research and qualitative methods. Charlotte Barlow is a Lecturer in Criminology at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. She completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool and graduated in 2015. Her broad research interests include violence against women and girls, responses to domestic abuse and female offending. Rebecca Scott Bray is Associate Professor of Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on issues around death and the deceased in law and society, particularly death investigation and the coronial jurisdiction, and cultural practices such as death-related art and media. Henrique Carvalho is Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He writes on the political, legal and social theory of criminal law and criminalisation, especially in relation to matters of subjectivity and identity. Together with Anastasia Chamberlen he has published on the sociology of punishment, particularly on the relationship between punishment attitudes and hostility, the role of prison ‘crises’ in penal politics and the rise of punitivity in contemporary societies. Anastasia Chamberlen is Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department, University of Warwick. She has published on women prisoners’ experiences of imprisonment, the embodied effects of incarceration, the emotions of punishment and the ‘pains of imprisonment’. Together with Henrique Carvalho she has published on the sociology of punishment, particularly on the relationship between punishment attitudes and hostility, the role of prison ‘crises’ in penal politics, and the rise of punitivity in contemporary societies.
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Elizabeth Cook is an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Her research interests include cultural victimology, victim experiences, narratives and the experiences of bereaved families in the aftermath of violence. Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, United States. He has published extensively on topics such as violence against women, rural crime and social control, and critical criminological theory. Stephanie Hoffeler (formerly Lizon) is an activist, writer and gonzo journalist. Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published extensively on topics such as death and dying, palliative care, emotions, utopia, critique, deviance, interactionism, ethics, criminology, qualitative research and social theory. Susanne Karstedt is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University, Australia. She has researched and published widely on cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons of crime and justice, globalisation, state and atrocity crimes, transitional and international justice, and emotions in crime and justice. Dawn Moore is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Canada. Her work examines the use of images as evidence in the prosecution of domestic violence. Rooted in cultural criminology and critical victimology, Moore explores the subject position of the victim as severed from her images and extracted from the adjudication of her own victimisation. Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. Picart is Attorney at Law and Adjunct Professor of Law at Florida A & M University, Orlando, Florida, United States. Her research interests include: law and crime, terrorism, law, culture and the humanities, qualitative research methodology and ethnography, criminology and popular culture, sociology/rhetoric of science, and intellectual property law. Lizzie Seal is Reader in Criminology at University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her previous publications are on capital punishment, historical criminology, cultural criminology, transgression and gender representations of women who kill. Stephen Wakeman is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. He is interested in drugs, popular cultural representations, and progressive criminological theory. Sandra Walklate is Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom, conjoint Chair of Criminology, Monash
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List of contributors University, Melbourne, Australia. She is internationally recognised for her work on criminal victimisation particularly in relation to the fear of crime and is currently engaged in an ESRC funded study entitled ‘Victim’s Access to Justice 1975–2015’ and an ARC funded investigation entitled ‘Securing Women’s Lives: Preventing Intimate Partner Homicide’.
Introduction Crime and emotions, emotions and crime Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate
On the emotionality of crime There is no crime without victims, as the proverb goes. Perhaps we could take the liberty and extend this claim by insisting that there is no crime without emotions. Crime is one of the human experiences that is almost destined to evoke strong emotions. Any violent or offensive breach of the normal, peaceful and smooth running of everyday life – as crime is perhaps an archetypal example of – necessarily provokes emotional reactions among those affected by it. For example, being at the receiving end of crime of whatever kind (be it, for example, theft, robbery, violent assault, rape, torture or murder) can often be experienced as painful, offensive, unjust, debilitating, stressful and so on. To most people, experiencing crime, witnessing it, hearing or reading about it or taking part in the social, psychological, legal or political aftermath of it is a situation characterized by a multitude of different yet often powerful emotional reactions. The emotionality of crime also pertains to the perpetrator. Even though an act of crime may seem to be rationally contemplated, motivated and carried out (and hence is not what is often called a ‘crime of passion’ or ‘affective crime’), stories of emotionally distressed, remorseful and morally regretful criminals are not difficult to come by. It is thus seldom that people who are either victims, witnesses or perpetrators of crime are entirely emotionally unmoved by what has happened. We may react emotionally to the criminal act in its at times grisly detail, we may be emotionally moved by the suffering of the victims and relatives, we can be emotionally engaged by learning about the life-story of the perpetrator behind the criminal act, or we may respond emotionally to the sentencing (of whatever form or duration) of convicted criminals. This is why we suggest that in order to understand crime – its complex causes, processes and consequences – we need more closely to look into the emotions that always accompany crime. In this Introduction, we will not venture into a detailed delineation or discussion of the existing criminological research on crime and emotions. First of all, the task would simply be too daunting and too comprehensive for an introductory chapter and would require an in-depth presentation and an almost encyclopaedic knowledge into all corners of the criminological interest
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in emotions. Second, our aim here is primarily to introduce to the content of the volume as an aspiration towards developing some ideas for a criminology of emotions. Finally, in the Postscript (written by Sandra Walklate), we will revisit the chapters of the volume by relating them to our own research experiences and agendas. Even though the specialised and substantial focus on emotions in criminology, as we see it, is a relatively recent concern and an emerging field of research, already since early classical criminology in the late seventeenth century have emotions figured in criminological explanations of crime and its impact on social life. However, within the past few decades – perhaps as a corollary to the rise of the so-called ‘sociology of emotions’ during the 1980s and 1990s – also criminology has now increasingly started to take emotions seriously in their own right.
Why crime and emotions? Why not? To most people it is common sense and commonplace that crime invokes and involves a lot of different and quite often strong emotions. We sense that perpetrators must feel something whenever they commit their crime, we know that crime spawns emotional responses among victims and witnesses alike, we know that law enforcement officers, jurors and judges behind their ‘objective position’ are necessarily emotional beings and we are aware that the general public as well as elected politicians react with powerful emotions whenever they hear about particular heinous acts of crime or terrorism. Crime is, in almost any possible respect, an emotional activity and an emotional topic – it enrages, it hurts people, it gives great satisfaction, it infuriates, it frightens, it empowers, it saddens, it separates and it creates emotional bonds. Even just discussing crime and punishment animates most people. Despite this, the question of emotions and crime has been overlooked in much criminological research. (There are some notable exceptions here: the edited collection edited by Susanne Karstedt, Ian Loader and Heather Strang, published by Hart in 2014 is one). However, for the most part criminologists have either looked at structural background variables in order to explain criminal behaviour or they have looked at rational decision-making in the planning and execution of criminal activities. Emotions, it seems, have conventionally only been seen as an epiphenomenon to be explained by other and more important social phenomena. Either they have been relegated to the very margins of criminological explanatory models or they have been entirely excluded from consideration. This has started to change and this collection contributes to documenting the increasing attention now being paid to the emotional life of crime, criminal justice and being a criminologist. Somewhat contrastingly, in the discipline of sociology, a ‘sibling discipline’ of criminology, emotions have now received considerable attention throughout the past few decades, and this volume first of all wants to show how some criminologists have, in fact, taken emotions seriously and, second, how criminology more generally should start to consider emotions as a central part of
Introduction
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their theoretical, conceptual and methodological toolboxes. This edited collection focuses explicitly on different emotional dimensions of crime, victimhood, the criminal justice system, doing criminological research and the discipline of criminology more generally. The chapters, each in their way, show how crime and emotions are inextricably connected and how it is important for criminologists to acknowledge the various emotional dimensions of crime, criminality, and being a criminologist in their analyses. Importantly, this collection brings together international contributors at different stages in their career, each of whom is situated in different theoretical and empirical positions within the discipline. Taken together their contributions illustrate both the hidden and pervasive role of emotions in the work in which they are engaged. Crucially each are differently concerned with a range of questions. What relevance are emotions to criminology? How may be understand the emotional aspects of crim and the criminological aspects of emotions? How can emotions be studied and analysed? Why should criminologists pay attention to emotions, feelings and affects? Even though emotions have indeed been explored within the discipline of criminology, the interest in emotions so far has been rather sparse as compared to the ‘explosion of emotions’ evident in sociology, for example. Yet emotions provide an important but relatively overlooked lens for studying and understanding various core criminological themes and fields. The collection itself falls into three parts: crime, punishment and doing criminology. In what follows we provide a brief overview of each of the contributions in the pages that follow.
Part 1: Crime and emotions In Chapter 1, Walter S. Dekeseredy explores the relationship between stress and make peer support as a driver for violence against women. He points to the large social scientific literature showing that men who abuse the women who they are, or were, intimately involved with are angry, insecure, and jealous. Why do they experience these emotions? The criminological work on stress and its relationship to male peer support provides some important answers to this question. Following Sheldon Cohen and Thomas A. Wills, stress arises when a person ‘appraises a situation as threatening or otherwise demanding and does not have an appropriate coping response’. Male peer support is a concept he developed in 1988 and it refers to the attachments to male peers and the resources they provide that encourage and legitimate various types of woman abuse. He along with other male peer support theorists (like, for example, Martin D. Schwartz) contend that numerous men experience various types of stress in intimate relationships, ranging from sexual problems to threats to the kinds of authority that a patriarchal culture has led them to expect to be their right by virtue of being male. Some men try to deal with these problems themselves, while others turn to male friends for advice, guidance, and various other kinds of social support. A growing literature shows that the type of support provided by male peers may influence a man
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to deal with his emotional reactions to intimate relationship stress by abusing his current or former partner. Also, male peer support enables some women’s current or former male partners to resist their attempts to end their abusive behaviour. For example, after beating their wives, some husbands feel ashamed, display contriteness, and offer pleas for forgiveness. Such outcomes may result from stress generated from engaging in abusive behaviour. Still, many violent men have peers who alleviate their stress and encourage them to continue asserting their perceived patriarchal authority though abusive means. The main objective of this chapter, then, is to contribute to the criminological study of the emotional dimensions of crime and criminality by examining the relationship between stress, patriarchal male peer support and violence against women. In Chapter 2, Charlotte Barlow explores the emotional dimensions involved for females who co-offend with their male partners. This work is situated in the growing body of literature highlighting that women follow distinct and often gendered pathways into crime. Violence, coercion and love within intimate relationships have been increasingly acknowledged as motivating factors for female offending behaviour. However, there is a lack of understanding of the ways in which emotions, such as love and fear, influence co-offending women’s pathways into crime. Barlow highlights the significance of emotions for female co-offenders, particularly when they are in an intimate, violent, exploitative and/or controlling relationship with their partner/co-offender. Female offenders more broadly are typically viewed to be either wholly independent, rational agents or as lacking control in relation to their offending behaviour. Both result in the role of emotions in their agency being completely denied. She argues that this dichotomy is problematic, as it fails to consider how emotional dimensions of co-offending relationships may influence offending behaviour and experiences of agency. Barlow argues that these emotions need to be acknowledged and understood alongside structural factors if criminologists are to fully understand such women’s motivations for offending. In Chapter 3, Caroline Joan S. Picart charts a course through an emotional understanding of a different kind of crime: self-radicalisation of terrorists in America and the allure of ‘Jihadi Cool/Chic.’ This chapter employs Clarke McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko’s pathways to radicalization, along with the concept of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ to study how American self-radicalizing terrorists, such as Colleen LaRose (‘America’s First Female Self-Radicalizing Terrorist’), the Tsarnaev Brothers (‘the Boston Marathon Bombers’), and Omar Mateen (‘the Orlando Night Club Killer’) self-radicalized. Of particular significance are a number of pathways, which could lead to violent radical action, and have been characterized as ‘emotional’ or at least, ‘nonrational’, because they are responses neither to ideology nor to political exigencies. Instead, Picart argues these pathways are responses to combinations of sometimes subtle social factors such as group dynamics, boundary hardening, and even love. Further the chapter comments on the romantic appeal of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ whose rhetorical power lies in its ability to tap into the fantasies of the young. Such fantasies are also gendered in a conservative
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manner: for young men, for example, the glory of being a warrior and the thrill of adventures on the battlefield, and the promise of unyielding brotherhood are compelling or for young women, on the other hand, the romance of being married to a mujahid (and bearing his children), of faithful sisterhood and camaraderie in an ideal state, a Muslim Utopia. These can appear irresistible. Another aspect of jihadi cool’s/chic’s power lies in its mastery of Hollywood-style shots and editing, using cutting edge ‘go-pro cameras’ and drones for dramatic aerial shots, alternating with shots from other cameras capturing different angles. This results in slick, high resolution productions that could be an hour-long or edited down, much like ‘teasers’ or commercials for full length cinematic films. Thus, jihadi cool/chic’s allure lies less in an appeal to reason than to emotions and non-rational factors. Ultimately, Picart shows that the rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool’ – or ‘jihadi chic’ – is principally an emotional, or at least non-rational, form of persuasion. Chapter 4 by Susanne Karstedt shifts the criminal lens to the emotional dynamics of mass atrocities. Here she argues that The Holocaust has shaped our common understanding of mass atrocities as a bureaucratic regime and organised machinery of mass killings. Images of hierarchical and authoritarian obedience, of the ‘banality of evil’, and of the driving force of ethnic hatred and prejudice have shaped this understanding of genocide and mass atrocities, thus casting an extreme event as a general model. She goes on to suggest that this ‘exceptionalist perspective’ fails us in understanding contemporary mass atrocities, as well as preventing us from appreciating a more nuanced understanding of the Holocaust itself. The bureaucratic model of mass atrocities excludes the role of emotions in the micro-dynamics of mass atrocity events: of individual and group dynamics of emotions in the very process of ‘doing violence’. Consequently, we know little about the role of emotions in the unfolding of mass atrocities. Using relevant theories and based on empirical data Karstedt argues that understanding of emotions in mass atrocity events is key to their prevention in the first instance, and to dealing with such events in their aftermath.
Part 2: Punishment and emotions In Chapter 5, Dawn Moore with her collaborator Stephanie Hoffeler (formerly Lizon) explore the ways in which images of domestic violence injury are used to conjure emotions in prosecutions for such offences. Situated within feminist legal thought, this chapter furthers the demystification of legal objectivity as conceptualized in nineteenth century discourses of liberal legalism and the various ways in which it draws on gendered dichotomies in its determinations of what constitutes truth. Of particular interest in this endeavour is the categorization of emotion as antithetical to the fact-finding process. Using photographs and personal testimony they argue that the conflation of emotion with the irrational locates the former squarely within the realm of the body and the feminine. They discuss how the law responds to emotions and the body as evoked and mediated
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through images of injuries in domestic violence prosecutions. They explore these questions through examining the use and effects of visual evidence, particularly photographs of injuries and their impact upon one particular wilful victim (Stephanie). This chapter revisits the insights of feminist legal theorists to examine the law’s response to images, the assessments of the emotions they evoke, and their role in the truth finding process. Chapter 6 by Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho offers a further exploration of the dynamics underpinning the drive for punishment. This chapter discusses how and why emotions are at the centre of the social and normative role of punishment, and how punitive emotions are manifest in the practice and representation of criminal justice, media and popular culture in western liberal democracies. Using sociological, social psychological, cultural criminological and socio-legal research, they examine and seek to understand the ‘urge’ to punish – the tendency to pursue punishment and to assume it to be useful or necessary – and how punitive sentiments have recently infiltrated areas of social life that go beyond crime and justice issues. They suggest that punishment is inherently affective. It reflects some of our innermost desires, fears, and insecurities, and seeks to provide an illusory yet temporarily satisfying sense of reassurance in an otherwise uncertain and ambivalent social world, by enacting a sense of social solidarity through hostility. From this perspective, they warn against a rationalist criminology that takes the affective dimension of punishment for granted, and highlight the need in criminal justice scholarship for a rigorous study of how the emotions, subjectivities and self-identities of offenders, victims, judges, juries, media and general members of the public contribute to the existence and maintenance of the framework of punishment in contemporary liberal societies. They conclude by suggesting that unpacking the emotional dimension of punishment is essential to properly examine its role and limitations, and to direct more effective critiques of punishment within critical criminology. The drive to punish is particularly self-evident in debates surrounding capital punishment. In Chapter 7, Lizzie Seal reflects on these debates in twentieth-century Britain. As she points out, the death penalty provokes strong emotions. As a highly symbolically rich punishment, it is a focus for the expression of emotions in relation to crime and punishment, as well as wider issues related to identity, order and the state of society. High profile capital crimes are cultural ‘talking points’ through which shared public emotion is demonstrated. She argues that as the public sphere expanded in mid twentieth-century Britain, the expression of emotion was reconfigured, with greater acceptability of the public expression of emotion. Indeed, certain capital cases were constitutive of the emotional public sphere – the emotional life of the nation. In the 1950s, the hangings of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis were intensely emotional public events. These cases revealed grounds for the public expression of empathy with the condemned, particularly in relation to class and gender. Crucially, perceptions of injustice were also highly significant to these public reactions. There were, however, other cases with
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potentially similar grounds for controversy but which received very little public attention. Through analysing archival sources such as newspapers, letters and case file material, this chapter examines the conditions for, and limits of, the expression of emotions such as empathy in the public sphere. In particular, it explores the relevance of ‘race’ and nationality to the emotional public sphere around the death penalty.
Part 3: Doing criminology as emotion work Chapter 8 is written by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Dorte Raaby Andersen and provides a steppingstone from Part 2 to Part 3. The chapter explores a different facet of punishment: the prison and the emotional toll of researching the prison for the prison researcher. This chapter deals with prisons as emotional containers in which inmates and prison guards within the confined space of a ‘total institution’ – characterized by asymmetrical power positions, a potential for violence and constant surveillance – engage in negotiating roles, exchanging emotions and in developing relationships. Although many of the different emotional aspects of prison life have been previously researched and analysed, this chapter expands on these insights. Here the focus is on how prisons are in many ways breeding grounds for a multitude of emotional ambivalences – friendship and animosity, trust and suspicion, loyalty and confrontation, honour and shame and so on. This chapter documents and discusses the emotional strains and affective negotiations that go on between prison guards and inmates, and it testifies to the fact that conducting research within prison settings routinely places the researcher in the position as a potential threat to the delicate emotional microcosm of the carceral institution. The chapter also discusses some of the ethical and emotional dilemmas and problems involved in doing prison research based on the experiences of previous researchers and on a recent project investigating prison guards. The ethical questions raised in Chapter 8 run through Part 3 of this book. In Chapter 9, Elizabeth Cook, offers some telling reflections from witnessing the aftermath of mass violence in Srebrenica. Cook argues that in the growing appreciation of the extent of the impact of victimisation, not only on individuals, but families, communities and cultures, it is easy to understand how we might lose sight of the individual. In the light of this problem this chapter situates the criminologist as a witness. Cook offers us fieldwork reflections on attending the July 2015 commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,372 men and boys were killed. Each year, on 11 July, families, members of the local and international community and people wishing to pay their respects attend the burial and memorial of newly identified victims. On the day she attended, 136 victims were to be buried at a collective funeral attended by around 50,000 people. Drawing on her field notes, she explores the role of criminologists as witnesses in arenas of mass violence and the types of responsibilities this role elicits, particularly,
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considering the highly-mediatised nature of such atrocities and their aftermath. This chapter forces a focus on the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise from fieldwork tied to highly-emotive, high-violence events which are erased from criminology texts. The dead are the key focus of Chapter 10. Here Rebecca Scott Bray explores the dead as one of criminology’s sovereign subjects. Despite the tragic reality that crime often produces dead bodies, this chapter argues that criminology has barely wrestled with the emotional, social, political, economic and crimino-legal quandaries around the dead. Increasingly, these bodies are on public view. The shifting dynamics of media in the digital age expose diverse and proliferating instances of the dead’s visibility, including the live-streaming of fatal events on social media, the museological exhumation of evidential archives, the forensic aesthetics of artists, and the affective productions of true crime podcasts. While emerging debates in criminology reveal the problematic dimensions of representing death in the contemporary era, and rightly signal the importance of concepts such as empathy, emotion, trauma, and ethics, this chapter argues that the challenge for criminology is not just a question of the dead’s increasing visibility, but also to recognise the foundational work that the dead perform for criminological thinking and the emotions thereby provoked; that is, how the dead body matters for criminology. She argues that, even though criminology is saturated in crime’s emotional life, it still has not contended with the dead as one of its sovereign subjects. Nonetheless, the dead haunt criminological thought. Their presence as a tragic and terrible fact of crime exerts considerable pressure and motivates emotional labour: defining research encounters, affecting policy, and contouring our understandings of both justice and injustice. This chapter asks; what debt does criminology owe to the dead? In what ways does criminology care for the dead? And, importantly, how have the dead inflamed and secured criminological knowledge? In Chapter 11, Stephen Wakeman takes the challenge posed by Scott Bray further. He lays down the gauntlet for ‘feeling’ criminology. This chapter is concerned with the role of emotions in the processes of doing research on crime, deviance, and/or the agencies of their control. He argues that emotions impact upon us as people continually throughout our lives and as such, the claim that they will impact upon the ways in which we do research, and the ways in which we learn from it, should not be considered too controversial. However, very few criminologists ever take the time to reflect upon their emotional processes and how they have shaped what they do and what they know. The chapter develops the claim that more criminologists ought to do this. In order to support this argument, Wakeman uses examples from an (auto)ethnographic exploration of heroin addiction in support of three distinct yet interlinked aims. First, he outlines the ways in which emotions can be harnessed as intellectual tools within research to help criminologists reach alternative conclusions around their findings that can help challenge some of the field’s dominant theories. Second, he considers the ways in which the
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benefits of working with emotions are offset by their sometimes painful experiential realities. Finally, he offers some preliminary guidelines for undertaking ‘criminology with feeling’ with a view to better establishing the role of emotions – their potentials, pitfalls, and the management of both – in the future of criminological research. In the book’s concluding postscript, Sandra Walklate take up the challenge for a ‘feeling criminology’ and offers some thoughts on what she has learned from being ‘liminal’: living in the global north and working in the global south. Here she provides some personal reflections on the challenges and promises of working and living in both the north and the south of the globe at a time when the discipline is faced with significant intellectual challenges in the form of the emergence of Southern criminology. Being neither here nor there renders some distancing effects in both contexts in which connections to colleagues and the discipline change their shape and form sometimes leaving a vacuum sometimes filled with intellectual excitement and occasional critical vision. These reflections afford the opportunity to connect with the themes of the book as a whole and to offer some further suggestions on the implications for criminology in creating a space for a deeper embrace of the emotional. By way of a conclusion this chapter outlines some thoughts on the future promise of an emotional civic criminology. All in all, even though this book does not cover all the possible angles and corners of the intricate relationship between crime and emotions, it is nevertheless our aspiration and hope that this volume will inspire and prove useful to scholars and students with an interest in studying and understanding the emotional nature of crime as either experienced by victims, perpetrators, witnesses, criminal justice and law enforcement personnel and the general public. Crime (and perhaps especially violent crime) has always sparked intense emotional responses and moral outrage, and there is nothing to suggest that this is about to change even in our seemingly ‘postemotional times’.
Part 1
Crime and emotions
1
Male violence against women in intimate relationships The contribution of stress and male peer support Walter S. DeKeseredy
Introduction Many men who abuse their current or former female partners are angry, insecure, and jealous (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Dobash and Dobash 2015; Ptacek 2016). Why do they experience these emotions? One of the most common answers is that these men must be ‘sick’ or mentally disturbed. How could a ‘normal’ person punch, kick, stab, rape, or shoot someone he deeply loves and depends on? The media, too, contribute to the widespread belief that men who assault or kill female intimates are pathological. Consider how a Morgantown, West Virginia newspaper covered a mass murder committed by Jody Lee Hunt. On December 1, 2014, he murdered his former girlfriend Sharon Kay Berkshire, two of her lovers (Michael Frum and Jody Taylor), and Doug Brady, a business competitor, before killing himself. These were not Hunt’s first violent acts nor his first act of violence against women. He had committed a number of the acts that many researchers claim are risk factors associated with intimate femicide, which is the killing of females by male partners with whom they have, have had, or want to have, a sexual and/or emotional relationship (Ellis and DeKeseredy 1997). Yet, the local newspaper portrayed Hunt as basically a good man who suddenly ‘lost it’. For instance, one of Hunt’s friends was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, ‘Our Jody wasn’t that man’ (cited in DPost.com 2014: 1). Certainly, the media’s frequent use of quotations such as ‘we don’t know what happened’ typically ‘makes the cause of death appear inexplicable or the result of a man suddenly having “snapped”’ (Myers 1997: 110). The reality is that male ‘abusiveness turns out to be far less mysterious than it appears at first’ (Bancroft 2002: 2), and most men who victimize women are not disturbed. Rather, they are ‘disturbingly normal’ (Katz 2006). Indeed, an alarmingly high number of men abuse women in a variety of ways. Contemplate the results of Walter S. DeKeseredy, Amanda Hall-Sanchez and James Nolan’s (2018) representative sample survey of close to 6,000 students enrolled at a large residential university in the South Atlantic region of the United States. Thirty-four percent (n = 995) of the women experienced at least one of five types of sexual assault. As well, a recent spate of similar
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surveys conducted in U.S. show that approximately one out of every four undergraduate student women is victimized by some form of sexual assault (DeKeseredy 2018). If only a handful of female students were sexually assaulted, it would be easy to accept the argument that most perpetrators suffer from mental disorders. Of course, some killers, rapists, and batterers do have some serious mental health problems, but the truth is that most men who engage in lethal and nonlethal violence against women are ‘less pathological than expected’ (Gondolf 1999: 1). It is estimated that only about 10 percent of male-to-female violence incidents are spawned by mental illness (DeKeseredy 2011); thus, psychological perspectives cannot explain the other 90 percent (Brownridge 2009; Gelles and Straus 1988). Moreover, widely read and cited data derived from 840 male batterers in four cities who participated in intake sessions prior to program counselling show that less than half of these men showed signs of personality disorders and only 25 percent showed signs of severe mental disorder (Gondolf 2003; 2012). The author of this study accurately concluded that ‘there is little evidence for a prevailing ‘abusive personality’ typified by borderline personality tendencies’ (Gondolf 1999: 13). Then why do abusive men experience the emotions listed at the start of this chapter? The sociological work on stress and male peer support provides some important answers to this question. The main objective of this chapter is to contribute to the social scientific study of the emotional dimensions of crime and criminality by examining the relationship between these two determinants and violence against women. Implications for future theoretical and empirical work are also briefly discussed.
Definition of violence against women My conceptualization of violence against women is heavily informed by definitions provided by women who have been abused by men or are still being abused, as well as by feminist practitioners (e.g., battered women’s shelter staff). My definition is also informed by Liz Kelly’s (1987; 1988) concept of the continuum of sexual violence, which a growing number of scholars are revisiting (e.g., DeKeseredy, Nolan, Schwartz and Hall-Sanchez 2018; DeKeseredy and Rennison 2019; Ptacek 2016). The continuum ranges from nonphysical acts to physical ones like rape. Although the idea of the continuum is often used to portray moving from least serious to most serious, to scholars like Kelly (1988: 76) and to many adult female survivors of abuse, all these behaviours are serious and have a ‘basic common character’. They are all means of ‘abuse, intimidation, intrusion, threat and force’ used mainly to control women (Kelly 1988: 76). No behaviour on the continuum is automatically considered more harmful than another and, as Kelly (1988: 48) states, women’s experiences ‘shade into and out of a given category such as sexual harassment, which includes looks, gestures and remarks as well as acts which may be defined as assault or rape’.
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There are sound theoretical reasons for following in Kelly’s footsteps. First, again, the continuum highlights the similarities between seemingly distinct abusive male behaviours (McGlynn, Rackley and Houghton 2017). What is more, creating a hierarchy of abuse based on seriousness, one that prioritizes physical types of abuse over non-physical ones, obscures the fact that behaviours such as psychological abuse are often seen by many women as more terrifying than what the law defines as assault (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Ptacek 2016). Furthermore, non-physical forms of abuse, especially coercive control, are much more common in women’s lives than are physically violent acts committed by current or former male intimate partners (Kelly 2012). Coercive control creates ‘invisible chains’ and involves behaviours that are often subtle, are hard to detect and prove, and seem more forgivable to people unfamiliar with the dynamics of violence against women (Fontes 2015). The primary objective of coercive control is to restrict a woman’s liberties (Tanha et al. 2010). Common examples are stalking, threatening looks, criticism, and ‘microregulating a partner’s behaviour’ (Kernsmith 2008; Stark 2007: 229). In sum, using a variant of Kelly’s (1987; 1988) continuum enables researchers to identify and name a broad range of interrelated behaviours that thousands of women experience daily, many of which are exempt from the purview of criminal law and that are trivialized or minimized by criminal justice officials, the general public, and the mainstream media (McGlynn, Rackley and Houghton 2017). Numerous researchers may analyse rape, beatings, coercive control and other harms separately, but for countless numbers of women, these forms of abuse ‘seep into one another’ (Ptacek 2016: 128). From a feminist standpoint, conceptualizations like Kelly’s also prioritize women’s experiential knowledge. This is essential because such knowledge:
challenges the usual tendency of social scientists to theorize about other people, rather than with them; gives voice to at least some women who have been abused; opens the door to self-help and peer support programs in which women can share their experiences; and helps those responding to violence against women to identify the need for change as different women with different experiences challenges what is accepted as ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ about woman abuse. (DeKeseredy and MacLeod 1997)
For the above reasons, violence against women is defined here as the misuse of power by a current or former intimate male partner against a woman, resulting in a loss of dignity, control, and safety as well as a feeling of powerlessness and entrapment experienced by the woman who is the direct victim of ongoing or repeated physical, technological, psychological, economic, sexual, verbal, and/or spiritual abuse. Additionally, violence against women includes persistent threats or forcing women to witness violence against their
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children, other relatives, friends, pets, and/or cherished possessions by their current or ex-partners (DeKeseredy and Hall-Sanchez 2018; DeKeseredy and MacLeod 1997).
Stress, male peer support and violence against women Regardless of its shape or form, violence against women is associated with many risk factors. Risk factors are usually defined in the social scientific woman abuse literature as attributes of a couple, victim, or perpetrator that are associated with an increased probability of victimization (Hotaling and Sugarman 1986). They may be causes, co-occurrences, or consequences of abuse (Smith 1990). Two of the most important risk factors are stress and male peer support (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Stress arises when a person ‘appraises a situation as threatening or otherwise demanding and does not have an appropriate coping response’ (Cohen and Wills 1985: 312). The sources of stress examined in this chapter are sexual rejection and other kinds of threats to the kinds of authority that a patriarchal culture has led men to expect to be their rights by virtue of being male (Schwartz and DeKeseredy 1997). Such stress is, in part, a function of a social psychological process in which males develop what Lee H. Bowker (1983) refers to as standards of gratification that dictate they dominate women and children. According to Bowker, these standards are developed through childhood exposure to their mothers being dominated by their fathers and by the men themselves being dominated in their family of orientation. In other words, they learn that both women and children are subordinate to the male head of the household. When these men find that their patterns of domination are threatened, or even get the impression that there is a challenge to such domination, then they suffer from psychological stress. They react to this stress with a contrived rage, designed to re-establish domination patterns that meet their standards of gratification. This is exemplified by an abusive husband, who told Susan Schechter (1982: 219) why he physically coerced his wife to remain at a social gathering: ‘I felt that she didn’t have the right to make the decision to leave. Her decision to leave was not as important as mine to have her stay’. When all else fails, violence is the way to keep control and maintain your identity’. We live in a patriarchal society that promotes male proprietariness, which is ‘the tendency [of men] to think of women as sexual and reproductive “property” they can own and exchange’ (Wilson and Daly 1992: 85). For instance, one survivor of wife rape interviewed by Raquel Kennedy Bergen (1996: 20) was frequently told by her abusive partner: ‘That’s my body – my ass, my tits, my body. You gave that to me when you married me and that belongs to me’. Similarly, one of DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2009: 38) respondents was repeatedly sexually assaulted because, she explained, ‘it was his way of letting me know that I was his’. And another interviewee was often reminded, ‘You’re my wife. You’re my property’.
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Proprietariness refers to ‘not just the emotional force of [the male’s] own feelings of entitlement but to a more pervasive attitude [of ownership and control] toward social relationships [with intimate female partners]’ (Wilson and Daly 1992: 95). Indeed, many male threats to kill women are tactics the men use to terrorize their wives or cohabiters and to ‘keep them in line’ (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017; Dobash and Dobash 2015), signified by the horrifying words: ‘If I can’t have her, no one can’ (Serran and Firestone 2004: 3). Often men combine such threats with violence, which is a form of informal social control (Black 1983; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2009; Ellis and DeKeseredy 1997). The use of violence as a means of social control escalates when female partners leave or attempt to leave a relationship, because exiting is an extreme public challenge to male partners who believe they own their wives or cohabiting partners and they have the right to control them (Block 2003; DeKeseredy, Rogness and Schwartz 2004). Even if relatively few women are actually killed by their ex-partners, most of them who receive death threats or who are victimized by nonlethal violence ‘live with the legacies of terror for the remainder of their lives’ (Stanko 1997: 632). As one of DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2009: 39) interviewees put it: ‘I wasn’t safe anywhere’. Sometimes victims of male proprietariness are not only the women seeking freedom, but also the women’s prized possessions or people they deeply care for. Note the following experiences revealed by some of Aysan Sev’er’s (1997: 580–581) interviewees: Laurette and Sue talked about the shattering of their treasured heirlooms in front of their eyes. Laurette’s husband burned her books when she decided to take a few university courses. Daisy’s husband slashed her favourite dress into ribbons so that she would not look pretty and ‘run away’ with men. Ann’s partner’s violence extended to the cat she loved (and still keeps). He would raise the cat closer and closer to the revolving blades of the ceiling fan, and demand things that Ann did not want to do (such as swallowing large doses of sleeping pills). The partner kept her drowsy and docile and always told her that ‘she needed him’. During the course of women’s dangerous exits, ‘children can become unfortunate pawns in the violent games’ played by male ex-partners (Polk 1994: 143), often being used to control the mothers. The son of one rural woman interviewed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2009: 90) is just one example of a child who had a legitimate fear of being killed due to the abuse he and his mother endured during the process of leaving her husband. Agnes said, ‘My son automatically locks the doors when he gets into the house. He only sleeps with the dog. He has to have the dog in his room at night because that’s his warning signal’. Agnes’ son is alive. Luke Schillings, however, is among a group of children who have died as a result of male ex-partners’ attempts to maintain control over women who leave them. In over three-quarters of murder-suicides in Canada involving a child victim like him, the offender experienced intimate
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partner relationship problems (Jaffe et al. 2014). Luke lived in Ontario, Canada, and despite pleas from his mother, the Ontario family court process allowed his father, Paul, to have unsupervised access visits. The first visit was also the last. Paul strangled and burned three-year-old Luke to death and then committed suicide at the crime scene (Kingston Frontenac Anti-Violence Coordinating Committee 2015). What Paul Schillings did is referred to by social scientists as retaliating filicide or, in layperson’s terms, the ‘deliberate murder of a child to cause harm and suffering to the other parent’ (Jaffe et al. 2014). Many men deal with stress related to women’s challenges to their domination and control themselves by abusing their wives, lovers, or girlfriends. Other men, however, turn to their male peers for advice on how to alleviate stress caused by these challenges. In fact, the above standards of gratification that lead men to beat their wives are fully developed in men who are heavily integrated in male peer groups that continually reinforce these standards (Bowker 1983). Moreover, we now have ample evidence showing that male peer support is one of the most powerful determinants of various types of woman abuse. Originally developed by me (see DeKeseredy 1988), this concept is defined as the attachments to male peers and the resources that these men provide that encourage and legitimate woman abuse. Quantitative and qualitative data accumulated over the past 35 years strongly support Bowker’s (1983: 135–136) claim about all-male subcultures: This is not a subculture that is confined to a single class, religion, occupational grouping, or race. It is spread throughout all parts of society. Men are socialized by other subculture members to accept common definitions of the situation, norms, values, and beliefs about male dominance and the necessity of keeping their wives in line. These violencesupporting relations may occur at any time and in any place. A large body of international research reviewed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2013) shows that male pressure that legitimates the sexual objectification of women and the sexual and/or physical abuse of them is a worldwide problem. There is also evidence of the emergence of pro-abuse male peer support groups in cyberspace (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2016), and many men who abuse women consume electronic forms of pornography with their male friends (DeKeseredy and Corsianos 2016). Male peer support, too, enables some men to resist women’s attempts to end their abusive behaviour (Bowker 1983; DeKeseredy 1988). After beating their female partners, some men display contriteness and offer pleas for forgiveness. Such behaviour may result from stress generated from being abusive. Still, there is evidence that many men have violent peers who alleviate their stress and encourage them to continue asserting their authority through abusive means (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). There is also a relationship between economic exclusion, stress, male peer support and violence against women as identified in research on gender relations in North American public housing estates (DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz and Tomaszewski 2003; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2002). Many jobless men live in
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these dwellings and most of them (about three out of every four in the U.S.) are female headed. Some include married couples and many are homes to ‘longterm male guests’ who are not found in government records. Regardless of whether they are married or cohabiting with women, although the precise number is unknown, numerous male public housing residents and their female partners believe that men should live up to the culturally defined role of breadwinner, as do large numbers of men and women in other socioeconomic groups (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013; Raphael 2001; Sernau 2001). This belief is a function of adhering to the ideology of familial patriarchy (male domination in the family), and men who have a meagre income, are less educated, and who are only able to hold low-status jobs are more likely to adhere to this ideology than are their more affluent counterparts (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2002; Smith 1990). Similarly, many poor women believe that ‘your husband should be able to provide for you and if he can’t, what is he doing marrying you in the first place?’ (cited in Edin 2000: 118). Numerous male public housing residents cannot provide for their families (Dorling 2015). On top of dealing with this problem and others related to social and economic exclusion, since their names are not generally on the lease, many unemployed men are evicted from their homes because their partners view them as irresponsible and/or they cannot afford to house and feed them. According to an African-American Camden, New Jersey woman interviewed by Kathryn Edin (2000: 119): It was like a struggle going on inside of me. I mean, he lost his job at the auto body shop when they went [bankrupt] and closed down. Then he couldn’t find another one. But it was months and months. I was trying to live on my welfare check and it just wasn’t enough. Finally, I couldn’t do it anymore [because] it was just too much pressure on me [even though] he is the love of my life. I told him he had to leave, even though I knew it wasn’t really his fault that [he wasn’t working]. But I had nothing in the house to feed the kids, no money to pay the bills. Nothing. And he was just sitting there, not working. I couldn’t take it, so I made him leave. When men (not only those who live in public housing) who cannot provide for their families are evicted for not obeying their partners’ ‘pay and stay’ rule (Edin 2000), and cannot control their partners through economic means, they experience considerable stress, similar to that described below by one of Lillian Rubin’s (1994: 219) unemployed interviewees: I was just so mad about what happened; it was like the world came crashing down on me. I did a little too much drinking, and then I’d just crawl into a hole, wouldn’t even know whether Marianne or the kids were there or not. She kept saying it was like I wasn’t there. I guess she was right, because I sure didn’t want to be there, not if I couldn’t support them.
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Regardless of whether they are evicted by their female partners, many economically displaced males who cannot meet the responsibilities of being the ‘man of the household’ feel deprived of intimate and social support resources that give them self-worth. They also experience stress due to their partners’ threats to the type of authority that a patriarchal society led them to expect by virtue of being a male (Kimmel 2017). Consider that poor urban women are not simply passive victims of patriarchal domination and control (Edin 2000). Rather, a growing number of them are creating autonomy for themselves and their ‘sisters’ (Enloe 2017). Evicting unemployed partners and other examples of ‘inverting patriarchy’ (Bourgois 1995), such as making the financial decisions for the household and having the lease and the car in the woman’s name, are often perceived by patriarchal men as ‘dramatic assaults’ on their ‘sense of masculine dignity’ (Bourgois 1995: 215). Some men deal with their partners’ inversions of patriarchy by leaving them, while others use violence as a means of sabotaging women’s attempts to gain economic independence (DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz and Schwartz 2017). Other men, though, turn to their male peers for advice and guidance on how to alleviate stress caused by female challenges to patriarchal authority. Many socially and economically male peers in and around public housing view wife beating a legitimate means of repairing ‘damaged patriarchal masculinity’ (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013; Messerschmidt 1993; Raphael 2001), and they serve as role models because many of them beat their own intimate partners (DeKeseredy, Alvi, Schwartz and Tomaszewski 2003). Male peer support can influence the probability of woman abuse regardless of any stress experienced by a man and regardless of his social class position and race/ethnicity. There are cases in which other factors, such as leisure activities and work, integrate men with males who encourage violence against women. For example, some men gather at bars or pubs to drink, have fun, and to avoid women (Jackson 2017; LeMasters 1975; Schwartz and DeKeseredy 1997). Women are not allowed to join them because female exclusion serves to validate and sustain masculine superiority, solidarity, and dominance (Farr 1988). Men often use tavern events, especially ‘nights out with the boys’, to prove to each other that they are not ‘under their girlfriends’ thumbs’. Nonetheless, women remain focal points of conversation. According to Valerie Hey (1986: 66), ‘their ‘presence’ dominates the discourse, in that the main topic of conversation in the pub is women’s sexuality and the effective control of it’. Moreover, these discussions often emphasize violence as a means of maintaining control (Whitehead 1976) and may even encourage some men to become sexually aggressive toward women (Jackson 2017; Schwartz and DeKeseredy 1997). The heavy and frequent use of alcohol is a common feature of many social groups (Bogle 2008), such as university fraternities (Weiss 2013). Particularly for the young, alcohol is consumed socially, with groups of peers working with each other to help binge drinkers explain away, rationalize, and excuse embarrassingly, unsightly, and even violent behaviour (Vander Ven 2011),
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such as sexual and physical assaults on women. Consider the college community studied by Karen G. Weiss (2013: 147): Extreme drinking, drug use and bad behaviour … have become all too common at the party school, endorsed by a prominent party subculture that encourages and rewards extreme routines, rituals, and risk-taking, while providing the rationales that defend it all. For many years, alcohol has been commonly used in North America as a tool to render female undergraduates unable to resist sexual aggression (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013). Although there may not be a direct link between drinking and sexual aggression (in other words, drinking does not automatically cause such aggression), there certainly is an indirect link. For example, Martin D. Schwartz et al. (2001) found that alcohol consumption among Canadian male undergraduates was positively correlated with their self-reported acts of sexual assault. As well, Schwartz et al. found that male students who drank two or more times a week and who had friends who gave them peer support were up to nine times as likely to report engaging in sexual abuse.
Conclusion Most jealous, possessive, and angry men who abuse women ‘turn out to have a reasonable grasp on reality’ (Bancroft 2002: 15). To again quote Lundy Bancroft (2002: 20): Inside the abuser’s mind, there is a world of beliefs, perceptions, and responses that fits together in a surprisingly logical way. His behaviour does make sense. Underneath the façade of irrationality and explosiveness, there is a human being with a comprehensible – and solvable – problem. Jealous, possessive, and angry woman abusers, as well as other types of men who abuse women, did not grow up in a culture that promises and urges complete equality between men and women. Men who abuse are not acting in a deviant manner completely opposite to everything they have ever learned about the way to treat women. Although a majority of men perhaps never assault women, certainly all men in most parts of the world live in patriarchal societies (Renzetti 2013), where no man can avoid exposure to patriarchal and pro-abuse attitudes. And, it is typically an abusive man’s peers who encourage and justify these attitudes and brutal patriarchal practices. Note the peer group dynamics Anne Whitehead (1976: 193) observed in a British pub: The men acted as if a married man should be able to do just what he liked after marriage. He should be able to come to the pub every day; to stay all evening after ‘calling in’ on the way home from work, and to stay out as long as he liked. He could and must row with his wife, hit her, or
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W. S. DeKeseredy lay down the law. Rows and quarrels in which he had the upper hand brought a man esteem, but if his wife rowed with him, locked him out of the house, or refused to cook for him, he lost esteem. If he babysat while his wife went out, he lost face.
Thus, jealousy, possessiveness, and anger are connected to stress stemming from perceived threats to patriarchal authority and to the ‘help’ their male friends provide for dealing with this stress. This is not a profound revelation. As Mark Warr (2002: 3) correctly points out, [c]riminal conduct is predominantly social behaviour. Most offenders are imbedded in a network of friends who also break the law, and the single strongest predictor of criminal behaviour known to criminologists is the number of delinquent friends an individual has. Nonetheless, unless I missed something, nowhere to be found in Warr’s book and in most other mainstream criminological works is there any mention of peer influence as a cause of woman abuse. For reasons provided in this chapter and elsewhere (e.g., DeKeseredy 2017; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013), this is a major omission. Male peer support for woman abuse is ubiquitous and has a long history. The data gathered and the theories produced to date tell us much, but there is still a good deal that we do not know. Where do we go from here? What is especially needed is more research on the role of race and ethnicity. For example, as Christopher W. Mullins and Daniel R. Kavish (2017: 191) remind us, ‘there is generally a lack of male peer support work done on African American men overall’. Other racial/ethnic groups have received even less attention, including male members of Aboriginal, Pacific Islander and Asian communities. The world of adolescent males also warrants more attention because peers play an integral role in the lives of these boys and many of them are at high risk of abusing girls (Agnich, Hong and Peguero 2018; Klein 2012). The absence of research on woman abuse among adolescent populations is not primarily a function of selective inattention. Rather, the main reason is, as Mullins and Kavish (2017: 176) note: Scholars’ inability to gain access to adolescents for the purpose of studying sexual assault. School boards and Institutional Review Boards, until recently, have made it nearly impossible to study sexual assault issues in junior high and high schools. The tendency to use schools and community centers to assist sampling make it difficult to gather a generalizable sample of adolescents. Life course theories and research are popular among some scholars who do not examine woman abuse (e.g., Laub and Sampson 2003), but the life course
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perspective has not entered the realm of male peer support empirical and theoretical work. Applying it to this field of study, however, may enable researchers to answer the following questions that were originally raised 20 years ago:
At what age are most boys or young men most likely to join all-male proabuse subcultures? Do some members of a particular patriarchal male peer support group move on or join another group with similar values, beliefs, and practices? Do some all-male group members simply mature out of them as they get older and become employed? Are current or former members of sexist peer groups who get married or end up in cohabiting relationship more or less likely to be physically, sexually, and psychologically abusive? Do some men who join male peer groups eventually quit and then join again? (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1998)
So far, most male peer support research has focused on off-line male peer support processes. There is likely to change soon because of studies revealing that some men abuse women in a variety of ways but do not directly interact with abuse or sexist peers on a face-to-face basis. This is not to say, though that they are not influenced to victimize women by male peers. We are now seeing the rapid development of patriarchal online communities with members who never come into face-to-face contact with each other but frequently exchange written, audio, and visual communication with their peers (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2016). As well, sociological theories of online female victimization are in short supply. What is more, most of those that have been applied to this emerging problem were not specifically designed to address the gendered nature of online harms, such as image-based sexual abuse (also known as revenge porn). Thus, in another piece (see DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2016), I argue that of the limited theoretical contributions made so far, male peer support theory seems the most promising, but it needs to be tested. Other topics could easily be added to the list of new empirical and theoretical directions. The current condition of criminological theorizing, however, is troubling because it is being undermined not only by ‘the increasing global reach of ‘bogus positivism” (Walklate and Jacobsen 2017: 4), but also by governments and university administrators intent on corporatizing institutions of higher learning (DeKeseredy 2012; Delgado 2018). What Roger Matthews (2009: 341) predicted nine years ago has come true, at least in the American context: ‘[A]cademic criminology appears to becoming more marginalized and irrelevant’. Even so, more progressive ways of thinking about crime, such as those included in this anthology, persist and critical thinkers around the world should band together and resist ongoing efforts to turn them into ‘cheerful robots’ (Mills 1959). Perhaps, then, the best way to conclude this chapter is by repeating Jock Young’s (2011: 225) words:
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W. S. DeKeseredy Let us set about our task, keeping in mind the urgency of opposition, yet with an eye for irony imbued, as always, with a sense of satire at the strange meanderings of the datasaur and the sad charade of science played out before us. Above all, we must constantly be aware of the inherent creativity of human culture and of the rush of emotions and feelings that characterize the human condition and the capacity for imagination that this demands and engenders.
References Agnich, Laura E., Jun SungHong and Anthony A. Peguero (2018). ‘Gender-Based Violence in Schools’, in Claire M. Renzetti, Jeffrey L. Edleson and Raquel Kennedy Bergen (eds), Sourcebook on Violence Against Women. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 159–180. Bancroft, Lundy (2002). Why Does he Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Books. Bergen, Raquel Kennedy (1996). Wife Rape: Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Black, Donald (1983). ‘Crime as Social Control’. American Sociological Review, 48: 34–45. Block, Carolyn R. (2003). ‘How Can Practitioners Help an Abused Woman Lower Her Risk of Death’. NIJ Journal, 250: 4–7. Bourgois, Philippe (1995). In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bowker, Lee H. (1983). Beating Wife-Beating. Toronto: Lexington Books. Brownridge, Douglas A. (2009). Violence Against Women: Vulnerable Populations. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Sheldon and Thomas A. Wills (1985). ‘Stress, Social Support, and the Buffering Hypothesis’. Psychological Bulletin, 98: 310–357. DeKeseredy, Walter S. (1988). ‘Woman Abuse in Dating Relationships: The Relevance of Social Support Theory’. Journal of Family Violence, 3: 1–13. DeKeseredy, Walter S. (2011). Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DeKeseredy, Walter S. (2012). ‘The Current Condition of Criminological Theory in North America’, in Steve Hall and Simon Winlow (eds), New Directions in Criminological Theory. London: Routledge, pp. 66–79. DeKeseredy, Walter S. (2017). ‘Explaining Campus Violence Against Women: Unhealthy Masculinity and Male Peer Support’, in Catherine Kaukinen, Michelle Hughes Miller and Rachel A. Powers (eds), Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 65–77. DeKeseredy, Walter S. (2018). ‘Sexual Assault on the College Campus’, in Patrick Lussier and Eric Beauregard (eds), Sexual Offending: A Criminological Perspective. London: Routledge, pp. 204–219. DeKeseredy, Walter S., Shahid Alvi, Martin D. Schwartz and E. Andreas Tomaszewski (2003). Under Siege: Poverty and Crime in a Public Housing Community. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Marilyn Corsianos (2016). Violence Against Women in Pornography. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, Walter S., Molly Dragiewicz and Martin D. Schwartz (2017). Abusive Endings: Separation and Divorce Violence Against Women. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Amanda Hall-Sanchez (2018). ‘Male Violence in the Global South: What We Know and What We Don’t Know’, in Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Maximo Sozzo (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and The Global South. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, pp. 883–900. DeKeseredy, Walter S., Amanda Hall-Sanchez and James Nolan (2018). ‘College Campus Sexual Assault: The Contribution of Peers’ Proabuse Informational Support and Attachments to Abusive Peers’. Violence Against Women 24: 922–935. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Linda MacLeod (1997). Woman Abuse: A Sociological Story. Toronto: Harcourt Brace. DeKeseredy, Walter. S., James Nolan, Martin D. Schwartz and Amanda Hall-Sanchez (2018). ‘“It’s More Than Physical Assault”: The Continuum of Sexual Abuse on the College Campus’. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, Atlanta. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Callie Marie Rennison (2019). ‘Key Issues in the Rape and Sexual Assault of Adult Women’, in Walter S. DeKeseredy, Callie Marie Rennison and Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Violence Studies. London: Routledge. DeKeseredy, Walter S., McKenzie Rogness and Martin D. Schwartz (2004). ‘Separation/Divorce Sexual Assault: The Current State of Social Scientific Knowledge’. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 9: 675–691. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz (1998). ‘Male Peer Support and Woman Abuse in Postsecondary School Courtship: Suggestions for New Directions in Sociological Research’, in Raquel Kennedy Bergen (ed.), Issues in Intimate Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 83–96. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz (2002). ‘Theorizing Public Housing Woman Abuse as a Function of Economic Exclusion and Male Peer Support’. Women’s Health and Urban Life, 1: 26–45. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz (2009). Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz (2013). Male Peer Support & Violence Against Women: The History & Verification of Theory. Boston: Northeastern University Press. DeKeseredy, Walter S. and Martin D. Schwartz (2016). ‘Thinking Sociologically About Image-Based Sexual Abuse: The Contribution of Male Peer Support Theory’. Sexualization, Media, & Society. doi:doi:10.1177/2374623816684692 Delgado, Hector L. (2018). ‘Problems of the Workplace and Workforce’, in A. Javier Trevino (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 531–549. Dobash, R. Emerson and Russell P.Dobash (2015). When Men Murder Women. New York: Oxford University Press. Dorling, Danny (2015). Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists. Bristol: Policy Press. DPost.com (2014). ‘Friends, Family Remember Jody Hunt’. DPost.com. Available online at http://thedpost.com/friends,-family-remember-jody
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Edin, Kathryn (2000). ‘What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say About Marriage?’. Social Problems, 47: 112–133. Ellis, Desmond and Walter S. DeKeseredy (1997). ‘Rethinking Estrangement, Intervention and Intimate Femicide’. Violence Against Women, 3: 590–609. Enloe, Cynthia (2017). The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Farr, Kathryn A. (1988). ‘Dominance Bonding Through the Good Old Boys Sociability Group’. Sex Roles, 18: 259–277. Fontes, Lisa A. (2015). Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship. New York: Guilford Press. Gelles, Richard J. and Murray A. Straus (1988). Intimate Violence: The Causes and Consequences of Abuse in the American Family. New York: Simon & Schuster. Gondolf, Edward W. (1999). ‘MCMI Results for Batterer Program Participants in Four Cities: Less ‘Pathological’ than Expected’. Journal of Family Violence, 14: 1–17. Gondolf, Edward W. (2003). ‘MCMI Results for Batterers: Gondolf Replies to Dutton’s Response’. Journal of Family Violence, 18: 387–389. Gondolf, Edward W. (2012). The Future of Batterer Programs: Reassessing EvidenceBased Practice. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Hey, Valerie (1986). Patriarchy and Pub Culture. London: Tavistock. Hotaling, Gerald T. and David B. Sugarman (1986). Violence and Victims, 1: 102–124. Jackson, Lauren A. (2017). An Ethnographic Case Study of College Male Drinking Societies in Cambridge and Its Implications for Male Peer Support Theory. Master of Philosophy Dissertation. London: University of Cambridge. Jaffe, Peter, Katreena Scott, Angelique Jenney, Myrna Dawson, Anna-Lee Straatman and Marcie Campbell (2014). Risk Factors for Children in Situations of Family Violence in the Context of Separation and Divorce. Ottawa: Department of Justice Canada. Katz, Jackson (2006). The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Kelly, Liz (1987). ‘The Continuum of Sexual Violence’, in Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (eds), Women, Violence and Social Control. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, pp. 46–60. Kelly, Liz (1988). Surviving Sexual Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelly, Liz (2012). ‘Standing the Test of Time? Reflections on the Concept of the Continuum of Sexual Violence’, in Jennifer M. Brown and Sandra Walkate (eds), Handbook on Sexual Violence. London: Routledge, pp. xvii–xxvi. Kernsmith, Poco (2008). ‘Coercive Control’, in Claire M. Renzetti and Jeffrey L. Edleson (eds), Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, pp. 133–134. Kimmel, Michael (2017). Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. New York: Nation Books. Klein, Jessie (2012). The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools. New York: New York University Press. Kingston Frontenac Anti-Violence Coordinating Committee (2015). ‘Women/Children Murdered’. Available online at http://kface.org/ontariofemicide Laub, John H. and Robert J. Sampson (2003). Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. LeMasters, E. E. (1975). Blue Collar Aristocrats: Life-Styles at a Working-Class Tavern. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
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Matthews, Roger (2009). ‘Beyond “So What?” Criminology: Rediscovering Realism’. Theoretical Criminology, 13: 341–362. McGlynn, Clare, Erika Rackley and Ruth Houghton (2017). ‘Beyond “Revenge Porn”: The Continuum of Image-Based Sexual Abuse’. Feminist Legal Studies, 25: 25–46. Messerschmidt, James W. (1993). Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield. Mills, C.Wright (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mullins, Christopher W. and Daniel R. Kavish (2017). ‘It Just Be Like That: Young Men’s and Women’s Attributions of Negative Sexual Behavior’. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, 5: 174–194. Myers, Marian (1997). News Coverage of Violence Against Women. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Polk, Kenneth (1994). When Men Kill: Scenarios of Masculine Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ptacek, James (2016). ‘Rape and the Continuum of Sexual Abuse in Intimate Relationships: Interviews with U.S. Women From Different Social Classes’, in Kersti Yllo and M. Gabriela Torres (eds), Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage, and Social Change in Global Context. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–138. Raphael, Jody (2001). ‘Public Housing and Domestic Violence’. Violence Against Women, 7: 699–706. Renzetti, Claire M. (2013). Feminist Criminology. London: Routledge. Rubin, Lillian (1994). Families on the Fault LineNew York: Harper Collins. Schechter, Susan (1982). Women and Male Violence. Boston: South End Press. Schwartz, Martin D. and Walter S. DeKeseredy (1997). Sexual Assault on the College Campus: The Role of Male Peer Support. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Schwartz, Martin D., Walter S. DeKeseredy, David Tait and Shahid Alvi (2001). ‘Male Peer Support and Routine Activities Theory: Understanding Sexual Assault on the College Campus’. Justice Quarterly, 18: 701–727. Sernau, Scott (2001). Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a New Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Serran, Geris and Phillip Firestone (2004). ‘Intimate Partner Homicide: A Review of the Male Proprietariness and the Self-Defense Theories’. Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior, 9: 1–15. Sev’er, Aysan (1997). ‘Recent of Imminent Separation and Intimate Violence Against Women: A Conceptual Overview and Some Canadian Examples’. Violence Against Women, 3: 566–589. Smith, Michael D. (1990). ‘Socioeconomic Risk Factors in Wife Abuse: Results From a Survey of Toronto Women’. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 15: 39–58. Stanko, Elizabeth A. (1997). ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go? Some Thoughts on Variants of Intimate Violence’. Violence Against Women, 3: 629–635. Stark, Evan (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Tanha, Marieh, Connie J. A. Beck, Aurelio Jose Figueredo and Chitra Raghavan (2010). ‘Sex Differences in Intimate Partner Violence and the Use of Coercive Control as a Motivational Factor for Intimate Partner Violence’. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 25: 1836–1854. Vander Ven, Thomas (2011). Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard. New York: New York University Press.
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Walklate, Sandra and Michael Hviid Jacobsen (2017). ‘Introduction: Introducing “Liquid Criminology”’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sandra Walklate (eds), Liquid Criminology: Doing Imaginative Criminological Research. London: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Warr, Mark (2002). Companions in Crime: The Social Aspects of Criminal Conduct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, Karen G. (2013). Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Whitehead, Anne (1976). ‘Sexual Antagonisms in Herefordshire’, in Diana Leonard and Sheila Allen (eds), Dependence and Exploitation in Work and Marriage. London: Longman, pp. 169–203. Wilson, Margo and Martin Daly (1992). ‘Til Death Do Us Part’, in Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell (eds), Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing. New York: Twayne, pp. 83–98. Young, Jock (2011). The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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The role of emotions for female co-offenders Charlotte Barlow
Introduction This chapter will consider the role of emotions for female co-offenders1 when offending with a male intimate partner. One of the highest profile examples of male/female co-offending in recent UK history is the case of Maxine Carr and Ian Huntley. Carr was convicted of perverting the course of justice in 2003 after she provided a false alibi for Ian Huntley on the night he murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002. He was found guilty of their murder and sentenced to two life sentences, whilst Carr received a three-anda-half year prison sentence. It was concluded during Carr’s trial that she did not know that he had murdered Holly and Jessica when she provided the false alibi. Carr was represented in most news media outlets as a calculated, remorseless manipulator. However, when discussing her motivations and explanations for providing the false alibi for Huntley, she suggested that she ‘lied to protect him’ as she ‘loved him very much’ and that she also lived in fear of him, as he was abusive and controlling towards her throughout their relationship. She stated that ‘no-one had any idea what kind of relationship I had with that man’ (Maxine Carr’s testimony, 5 and 6 December 2003). Carr’s narrative suggests that her offending behaviour and initial motivation to provide the false alibi were influenced by emotions. As will be discussed throughout this chapter, emotions influence offending motivations for women co-offenders in various ways, particularly when co-offending with an abusive and controlling male co-offender/intimate partner. Traditional criminological theories or explanations of crime have mostly left out emotion altogether. Willem de Haan and Ian Loader (2002) argued that the field of criminology needs to actively engage with the sociology of emotions if it hopes to understand the realty of criminal activity. Emotional influences on offending behaviour are significantly affected by gender. Feminist pathways research has identified that women’s law-breaking is characterised by structural, institutional and familial injustices and disadvantages, the most clearly gendered of these being their frequent experience of violence and sexual victimization (Belknap and Holsinger 2006; Batchelor 2005). Due to such experiences, emotions such as fear, guilt and desperation are often
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influencing factors on women’s participation in criminal activity and criminalisation. Coercion within intimate relationships has also increasingly been acknowledged as a potential motivating factor for female offending behaviour (Barlow 2016; Jones 2008; Richie 1996). However, there is a lack of understanding of the ways in which emotions specifically, such as love and fear, influence co-offending women’s initial pathways into crime and continued motivations to offend. As proposed by Gilly Sharpe (2016), it is not the intention of this chapter to identify emotions as a potential ‘risk factor’ for offending, as this essentialises and de-contextualises women offenders’ experiences from institutional injustices. Rather this chapter aims to highlight the significance of emotions for female co-offenders, particularly when they are in an intimate and abusive relationship with their partner/co-offender, and situate their experiences within the context of the social and structural conditions and constraints which shape such women’s lives.
‘Malestream’ criminology and rationality – the absence of emotions What has been termed ‘malestream’ criminology emphasises the male-dominated nature of traditional criminological perspectives and criminology as a discipline. As highlighted by Walklate (2001: 24), early nineteenth century academics, such as Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero (1895), have ‘framed the way in which thinking about males and females and masculinity and femininity has been constructed’. The deterministic and androcentric writings of such early criminological thinkers have had continued significance on criminological thought in more recent years. For example, in more recent history criminologists such as Albert K. Cohen and Edwin Sutherland have mostly researched men’s offending and ‘added women into’ criminological thought, rather than researching with and about women. Gender is a key determinant of likely involvement in offending behaviour, yet the importance of gender has not always been reflected in the development of criminological thought, as such knowledge has historically been based on the assumption that crime is men’s work and not women’s (Walklate 2001). The late nineteenth century criminological shift from physical anthropology to the psychology and personality of offenders also evidenced clear issues with gendered understandings of offending and victimisation. The significance of emotions for women’s offending began to be recognised in early psychological explanations of crime, but this was mostly framed in a damaging and derogatory manner. For example, women offenders were often viewed to be hysterical and psychologically weak in comparison to men (Russett 1989). Emotions are regularly understood as influencing factors on desistance from crime for both men and women, with guilt and shame being recognised emotions in the restorative justice process in particular. However, there is often minimal consideration of the role of emotions on the offending act(s) itself, with explanations such as rationality and rational choice pervading criminological thought and criminal justice practice. This minimisation of
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emotions reinforces rationality and agency being readily ascribed to men’s motivations for offending, whereas women are associated with being emotional and therefore weak-minded (Sydie 1987). Women offenders are often characterised as ‘mad’ in legal and media discourse, suggesting that offending motivations are implicitly linked to irrationality, hysteria or mental health issues (Ballinger 2000; Barlow 2016). Such discourse represents any emotional motivations to offend as non-agentic, and consequently represents women offenders as child-like when compared to male counterparts. Furthermore, there is currently minimal scope for considering nuanced understandings of the influence of emotions in legal and criminal justice practice. This is due to male-defined epistemology pervading legal thought, therefore legal terminology by its nature, such as ‘rational man of the law’, privileges the position and perspective of men (Yeo 1993; Ballinger 2012). However, as highlighted by Anette Ballinger (2012: 452) ‘to make assumptions about the population as a whole based on such constructions is to privilege the understanding of the world of the group which has dominated legal and public life: white, middle-class, heterosexual men’. This legal and public domination of the male perspective has led to all experiences and behaviour which falls outside these parameters to be ‘othered’ and consequently silenced (Barlow 2016; Ballinger 2012; Carline 2005). Ballinger (2012: 452) argues that such principles lead to a double exclusion of the female experience, due to both the gendered nature of the law and men’s experiences being viewed to be hierarchically more valuable. Consequently, women’s experiences are ‘othered’ in criminological and legal thought due to both their sex and the gendered emphasis on rationality or choice being the principle motivation for offending. However, such male-defined explanations for offending do not reflect the experiences of many female offenders, particularly those who co-offend with a male partner. The relatively small body of research exploring women’s cooffending has suggested that women often engage in more serious offending with a male partner than when they do so alone (Mullins and Wright 2003; Koons-Witt and Schram 2003), and that they are more likely to engage in gender atypical offences when they co-offend with a man, such as robbery and murder (Becker and McCorkel 2011). Scholars have also focused specifically on the experiences of women who are in an intimate relationship with their male co-offender. For example, Dorinda Welle and Gregory Falkin (2000) have suggested that these women often experience ‘relationship policing’, which involves many aspects of their relationship and life, including participation in criminal activity, being controlled by their romantic co-offender. The intersecting inequalities of race and gender have also been considered in relation to co-offending women’s experiences. Beth E. Richie (1996: 133) has argued that an intersection of gender and racial inequality can lead women to be ‘compelled’ into a variety of criminal and deviant behaviours, with the notion of ‘gender entrapment’ helping ‘to show how some women are forced or coerced into crime by their culturally expected gender roles, the violence in their
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intimate relationships and their social position in the broader society’. Moreover, Stephen Jones (2008) has suggested that women who co-offend with intimate male partners can have their involvement categorised in three key ways: acting as a result of coercion, offending ‘out of love’, and adopting an ‘equal’ role in the offending. I have also explored elsewhere the notion of a ‘continuum of coercion’ to explain how abusive, controlling and violent relationships with male, intimate partners/co-offenders may influence women’s pathways into crime and offending decision-making (Barlow 2016). This body of work collectively emphasises the significance of relationships on offending behaviour for women in particular. Domestic abuse is increasingly acknowledged as a pathway into crime and continued motivation to offend for some women offenders (Schaffner 2007; Belknap and Holsinger 2006; Barlow 2016). For example, The Duluth Power and Control Wheel, designed as part of Domestic Abuse Prevention Programmes in the United States, acknowledges coercion into crime as a potential method of domestic abuse. Furthermore, the Corston Report (2007), which evaluated women’s experiences of the criminal justice system in the United Kingdom, also emphasises the importance of understanding the ways in which women’s experiences of victimisation and domestic abuse influence their offending behaviour and criminalisation. However, an unintended consequence of such work and policy is that victimisation is increasingly viewed as a criminogenic ‘risk factor’ for women offenders, which consequently essentialises and pathologises such women. This chapter aims to extend these arguments by considering the links between emotions, intimate relationships and offending for women co-offenders, whilst situating these discussions within the broader structural and social inequalities that such women experience. Aspects of the analysis presented in this chapter are based on an empirical study conducted with Dr Siobhan Weare. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight women who co-offended with a male intimate partner. The women were accessing a women’s advice and support centre in Staffordshire, United Kingdom, at the time of interview. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were chosen as the method of data collection as they allowed for women’s narratives and subjective lived experiences to be most clearly communicated. This approach also reflected the feminist methodological and epistemological approach underpinning the project; recognising the experiences of women from their own point of view (Harding 1981.). The women had engaged in a range of relatively ‘low level’ offences, including theft, buying and selling drugs, drug use, and benefit fraud. The interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This method of analysis ensured that the women’s lived experience, and how they made sense of them (Smith 2004), were centralised throughout the project. All of the women have been anonymised and provided with pseudonyms. Rather than this chapter exploring the study in significant depth, as this has been done elsewhere (Barlow and Weare, forthcoming), key findings will be used to develop conceptual ideas.
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Emotions, pathways into crime and continued motivations to offend Emotions are an inherent aspect of intimate relationships. In abusive relationships, the victim/ survivor can experience a range of emotions, ranging from love to fear, guilt to hopelessness (Westmarland 2015; Dobash and Dobash 1979). Offending motivations and pathways into crime for women co-offenders who are in an intimate, abusive relationship with their male co-offender are therefore not separate or separable from the influence of emotions. It is recognised that many women co-offenders may not be in an abusive relationship with their male partner/ co-offender, and therefore may offend with greater levels of agency and adopt a more equal role in the co-offending behaviour. However, abuse, violence and control within a co-offending relationship were influencing factors for all of the women’s offending behaviour in the current study when in a romantic relationship with their male co-offender, despite such experiences not being part of the selection criteria to be part of the study. With this in mind, although various emotions could influence women co-offenders offending motivations, fear and love will be considered at length here. Fear is under-theorised in the discipline of criminology. As a result of patriarchy and high levels of violence against women in society more broadly, pathways into crime and offending motivations for women are likely to be influenced by fear. This is particularly the case if women co-offenders are in an abusive, violent relationship with their male co-offender/intimate partner. Such abuse can be physical, psychological, emotional and controlling in nature (Barlow 2016; Richie 1996). All of the women in our study experienced violence and abuse in their relationship with their male co-offender/intimate partner. All of these women also identified this abuse as an influencing factor on their offending behaviour. For example, Danielle stated that ‘I just did whatever he told me to do. I was scared of him’. She referenced this in relation to her ex-partner pressuring her to smuggle drugs into prison whilst he was serving a prison sentence. Sarah echoed similar sentiments when discussing the reasons why she began and continued to co-offend with her intimate partner: ‘He knocked the life out of me. I didn’t know who I was. I was just this little coward girl who did as he asked’. Three of the women also suggested that their partners were ‘controlling’ and ‘manipulative’ throughout their relationship. They suggested that this control often limited their ‘offending choices’, as their male co-offender exerted control over most if not all aspects of their lives. For six women, their intimate, abusive relationships were clearly a catalyst for their offending. For example, both Rachel and Laura stated that they ‘hadn’t offended before’ they met their romantic co-offender. Danielle also referenced that she ‘wouldn’t have offended if she hadn’t have met him (her ex-partner)’. For these women, the relationships with their male co-offenders seemed to form the basis for their pathways into crime. It is therefore important to acknowledge the potential coercive context of such women’s offending. Welle and Falkin (2000) argue that women co-offenders may become involved
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in crime due to their fear of disappointing, angering, or disobeying their partner, highlighting the influence of fear on such women’s offending ‘choices’. The sustained and insidious nature of such coercive and abusive relationships mean that control can be exerted with or without the presence of the perpetrator, controlling such women’s space for action (Kelly 2003; Stark 2007). Jones (2011) also notes that male co-offenders often pressure women to take the blame for offences committed on their behalf. This was particularly relevant to Rachel’s circumstances in our study. Rachel explained how her expartner ‘threatened suicide’ every time she tried to leave the relationship, evidencing his control and manipulation. She also discussed how he pressured her to commit benefit fraud, as they were struggling financially, mostly due to his gambling addiction. She suggested that even though he was the ‘mastermind’ behind the plan, he ‘pressured’ her to adopt the active role in the offending. Rachel said that ‘he convinced me it was because he loved me’ and it was ‘always just pressure, pressure, pressure to do it’. In such coercive circumstances, male co-offenders may also additionally exploit the social circumstances of women, particularly if they are addicted to drugs (Fleetwood 2013) or living in poverty (Carlen 1988). Three of the women in our study were addicted to drugs and highlighted a clear link between their drug-taking and relationships with their co-offenders. The specifics of the link varied for each of the women. The most extreme example was provided by Vicky who had never taken drugs before her romantic cooffender pressured her into doing so: At first I used to say that I didn’t want to do it. He offered it me all the time, used to call me a pussy for not wanting any and eventually, I just couldn’t be arsed with him being on my case all the time so I did it. Her ex-boyfriend became her drug dealer and then tricked her into taking heroin, intensifying her addiction: It started off with just weed and stuff like that and by the end he get me into heroin and all sorts. I remember one time he told me he had given me a bag of brown (weed) and I took it as normal, he started laughing and said it was fucking heroin. Fucking heroin. That was the first time I took it and it went from there really. This example highlights the importance of considering the broader context of such relationships when attempting to understand women co-offenders’ behaviour and decision making, rather than focussing exclusively on the offending act itself. Understanding the ways in which co-offending women’s abusive and exploitative relationship with their partner and in Vicky’s case, addiction to drugs (or other influencing factors) may intersect to produce multiple, over-lapping offending influences leads to a more nuanced understanding of their lived experiences. Furthermore, recognising the context and
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influence of abusive relationships highlights the impact of emotions on such women’s participation in offending. For example, after Vicky became addicted to heroin, she became dependent on her male co-offender to supply her with drugs. Consequently, he occasionally put pressure on her to take the blame for their or his offending when caught by the police in exchange for drugs, or she felt obliged to do this out of loyalty (as both her romantic partner and drug dealer). This highlights the added power dynamic in Vicky’s relationship, due to her male co-offender being both her drug dealer and intimate partner. However, emotions such as fear also need to be located in the structural context of such women’s lives. To varying degrees, the women in our study were economically disadvantaged, experienced mental health issues, had experienced childhood victimization and abuse and engaged in substance misuse at some point in their lives. Such experiences of marginalisation need to be located within the broader context of gender inequality, adding further complex dynamics to the structural constraints the women experienced. It is within this context that the women’s emotional experiences of fear, and the subsequent influence this had on their co-offending, needs to be considered. Of particular significance are state, criminal justice and other agency responses (or lack of) to the women’s experiences of victimisation. As previously discussed, all of the women experienced extensive victimisation throughout their lives, yet none of them received effective (if any) criminal justice support for this. For example, the women in our study suggested there was no point in contacting the police about the abuse they had experienced within the context of their intimate relationship as they would not be believed as they thought that the police ‘hated’ them (Sarah). Both Sarah and Laura described their ‘hatred’ for the police, due to previous negative and in their view harmful interactions with them. Most of the women in our study were readily criminalised by criminal justice professionals, but their experiences of victimisation were minimised or not fully investigated. One of the women herself acknowledged the issue with subjectivity and discretion influencing the decision-making of criminal justice professionals. When reflecting on the outcome of her case and why she was not sent to prison for the crimes she committed, Lucy stated: I think it was based on my character references, which is ridiculous. Cause if I hadn’t of known local councillors, because I lived on the same street as them … it shouldn’t be like that should it? It should be based on the facts. Cause if I didn’t know them, would I be in prison? Maybe … Policing and criminal justice practices involve judgements about riskiness and perceived identities of ‘victimhood’, which are cross cut by intersecting inequalities such as race and class, ultimately leading to marginalised women more readily coming into contact with the criminal justice system as offenders, rather than victims, irrespective of experiences of victimisation (Sharpe 2016; Burman and Batchelor 2009; Schaffner 2007).
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Furthermore, some of the fear experienced by the women was not only as a consequence of their abusive, intimate relationship, but also due to a lack of state support and fear of punitive state response. For example, Denise reflected on her negative experience of prison, stating ‘my hair went dead white. I was crying all the time, my blood pressure wouldn’t go down’. She went onto say that the experience continues to affect her post-release, stating that ‘if someone slams the door, I jump now. You know what I mean?’ Prior to going to prison, Denise had mental health issues which she suggests were further exacerbated by the prison experience. Two of the women also reported being homeless after serving a short-term prison sentence for low level offences. One of the women appeared to be financially dependent on her male partner/co-offender and received minimal economic support from the state when released from prison. This meant that she had to make the ‘choice’ of returning to their abusive partner and likely continue engaging in co-offending, or being homeless. Although returning to an abusive relationship may be perceived as an agentic choice, she made such choices within the context of broader structural constraints, such as economic marginalisation. This is arguably an example of a state-sanctioned negative consequence for such women, constraining their capacity for autonomy and independence and rendering them at greater risk of intimate partner violence (Sharpe 2016). Additionally, as most of the women were known in some capacity to state authorities mostly due to their previous offending, some suggested that they were afraid to make social services or criminal justice practitioners aware of their experiences of victimisation, due to fear of their children being taken away from them or other negative repercussions. This therefore suggests that punitive responses and systematic failings by the state to recognise women co-offenders’ experiences of victimisation added another layer of fear, which consequently influenced their offending motivations. When conceptualising fear as an offending motivation for women cooffenders, previously discussed explanations such as rationality are clearly in conflict. This raises important questions about perceived offending ‘choices’ (or lack of). For the women in our study, although some recognised that they made a ‘choice’ to offend, others suggested they had ‘no choice’ (Danielle, Rachel, Laura) and all suggested that their choices were influenced by their abusive relationship with their intimate partner. This is exemplified by Vicky, stating: ‘I felt like a prisoner in my relationship with him’, which she believed consequently limited her perceived choices. The women’s offending choices therefore need to be understood within the context of both their abusive relationships and their broader structural and social position in society. Rather than being a ‘rational choice’, the women arguably evaluated and drew upon the limited options available to them due to their social and structural positioning (Fleetwood 2015). The role of the state and criminal justice organisations in exacerbating experiences of victimisation and adding to the harms such women experience
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is often ignored or minimised. It is argued here that the structural constraints many female co-offenders experience, combined with inadequate and harmful state responses to their experiences of victimisation, increase their feelings of fear and desperation, rather than providing empowering support. When considering the role of emotions on female co-offenders offending behaviour, the fear of their abusive partner/co-offender is therefore not separate or separable from their fear of punitive and harmful state responses and their broader social and structural position in society. As well as fear influencing women co-offenders’ motivations to offend, emotions such as love may also impact decision-making. In our study, for Vicky there was a clear overlap between fear of her partner (discussed above) and the love she felt for him. She explained how she ‘would have done anything for him’ but also that she believed he ‘took the piss out of how much I loved him’. She referenced this in relation to an occasion when she took the blame on his behalf after being arrested for theft and shop-lifting they engaged in together. Love is particularly significant to consider in contexts when women take the blame or plead guilty to a crime they have not committed in order to protect the guilt of a male partner/co-offender. Research suggests that women are more likely to confess to crimes that they have not committed out of love or loyalty for male partners/family members (Jones 2011; Klaver, Lee and Rose 2008). As suggested by Catherine Gilligan (1982), whereas men’s moral judgements are founded on ideas such as individual rights, women’s moral reasoning is more based on the importance of human relationships and altruistically caring for the needs of others. This may explain how and why some women choose to protect their loved one by taking blame themselves (Jones 2011). A well-known example of a female co-offender suggesting that she took the blame in this context is Maxine Carr. Carr suggested that one of the reasons she provided the false alibi for Huntley on the night he murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was because ‘she loved him (Huntley) very much’ (Maxine Carr testimony, 5 and 6 December 2003). As highlighted by feminist critique, taking the blame or providing false alibis for male co-offenders ‘out of love’ needs to be located in a patriarchal context, particularly in relation to the gendered nature of caregiving responsibilities that form the basis of women’s socialisation from birth. However, rather than separating emotions of love and fear as motivating factors for women co-offenders, they should be viewed as part of the same continuum (Barlow 2016). In existing research as well as the women’s experiences cited here, women co-offenders often report engaging in offending to avoid disappointing or angering their partner and/or due to loyalty and love. With this in mind, irrespective of whether the women committed a crime out of fear or love, the overlapping nature of such emotions should be considered. Many emotions can be present in the same relationship, therefore categorising and separating such experiences does not accurately reflect the reality of many such women’s lives.
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Emotions and the preoccupation with ‘choice’ Developing an understanding of the ways in which emotions influence offending is central to gaining more nuanced insights into women co-offenders’ experiences. In legal and criminal justice policy and practice, there is an emphasis on rational choice as being the key motivating and influencing factor on decision-making processes. For the women interviewed in our study, their choices were not based on rationality, but rather were at least to some extent influenced by their relationship with their male co-offender, their broader structural and social positioning in society, as well as fear of negative, punitive state response. Failing to understand the ways in which emotions influence offending women’s behaviour has led to a preoccupation with ‘choice’ as a central component of theorising and understanding such women’s experiences. Such debates extend to feminist theorising, with Lisa Maher (1997) suggesting that female offenders are typically viewed to be either wholly in control of their offending behaviour or irrational and ‘out of control’ of their offending decision-making. However, this dichotomisation of choice and emotion is a reductionist approach, and does not apply to all female offenders, particularly those whose offending is influenced by fear and love. The binary dichotomy of agency and emotion leads to over-simplistic and limited understandings of many women co-offenders’ experiences. However, as argued by Sumi Madhok et al. (2013: 3), dichotomising experiences of agency ‘requires us to deny, or at least obscure, the extent to which social relations of inequality and domination continue to structure our lives’. This highlights the emphasis on individual, ‘rational’ choice and autonomy within existing understandings of agency and choice serve to minimise experiences of emotion and the ways in which deep-rooted, gender inequality and oppression impacts upon women’s pathways into crime and offending motivations (Carlen 1988; Ballinger 2000; Sharpe 2016). Rather than focussing on simplistic binaries, such as ‘agent’ or ‘victim’, the complex ways in which experiences of choice and emotion are entwined should be better understood. It is not the intention of this chapter to suggest that emotional influences deny the agency of women who offend, but rather to understand the ways in which emotions such as fear and love may impact upon offending motivations, particularly for women who co-offend with a male, intimate partner. The preoccupation on women’s perceived ‘choices’ often leads to an avoidance of situating such choices in context. This consequently encourages a lack of understanding of the ways in which emotions may influence offending decision-making at both a micro (i.e. abusive, intimate relationship with cooffender) and macro (violence of the state) level. Recognising that women may have agency (albeit to varying levels), whilst simultaneously understanding the ways in which emotions may influence offending choices, enables our understanding of co-offending to move beyond notions such as ‘he made me do it’ and rather allows an exploration of how structural, social and
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cultural context may impact such women’s perceived offending ‘choices’ and behaviour. According to Madhok et al. (2013: 157) ‘what matters most is not whether something is chosen, but what it is that is chosen and whether it is worthwhile and beneficial, or at least not detrimental, exploitative and destructive’. For the women in our study, although they all made a ‘choice’ to offend, they each argued that their offending ‘choices’ were at least in part influenced by their relationship with their male co-offender/partner and their broader social and structural positioning. This collectively highlights that when attempting to understand women co-offenders’ experiences, the ‘preoccupation’ with choice and rationality needs to be re-considered. Theorising and understanding should re-focus to consider the role of emotions, centralising this in social context. This would enable a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which emotions influence such women’s offending experiences, whilst recognising that varying levels of agency can co-exist in such circumstances. Furthermore, when considering the extent of women co-offenders ‘choices’, the violence and injustices of the state and the ways in which these limit offending choices need to be better understood. As previously discussed, emotions such as fear and desperation were often exacerbated by punitive state responses or lack of support and recognition for experiences of victimization. The women cooffenders discussed here are not ‘ideal victims’ (Christie 1986) due to their participation in offending activity. Rather than their offending ‘choices’ being understood within the context of their abusive relationships, they were criminalised by criminal justice professionals and other state authorities, which further increased the harms they experienced. However, it is argued here that reducing experiences of victimisation and emotions such as fear to a potential offending ‘risk factor’ for such women is problematic. Although trauma informed, gender-responsive approaches to justice are increasingly acknowledging women’s experiences of victimization, they do so by targeting individual women’s potential ‘risk’, rather than acknowledging issues with institutional practices (Sharpe 2016). Such approaches focus on encouraging women to make better ‘choices’, which serves to responsibilise such women for their experiences of victimisation and ignores the role of the state in maintaining or exacerbating the harm they experience. It is argued here that the influence of emotions should be situated and understood within the context of punitive state practices, which criminalise and target marginalised women and consequently ignore or minimise their experiences of victimisation.
Conclusion – moving forward Co-offending with a male, intimate partner often influences women’s offending behaviours (Becker and McCorkel 2011) and potentially their pathways into crime (Barlow 2016), particularly if this relationship is abusive and violent. This chapter has examined the influence of emotions, such as fear and love, on women co-offenders offending behaviour and continued motivations
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to offend. In particular, the women in our study suggested that their abusive, toxic relationships with their male co-offender made them feel afraid to anger or disobey their partner, therefore limiting their perceived offending ‘choices’. In the existing literature, there is minimal consideration of the influence of emotions on women’s offending and when this is considered it is often understood as being the antithesis to ‘rationality’, thereby minimising such women’s capacity for agency. Furthermore, experiences of love and fear are often dichotomised rather than understanding such emotions as a continuum (Jones 2008). Feminist pathways literature has made important contributions to knowledge in understanding the ways in which women’s social circumstance and experiences of victimisation can influence their offending behaviour (Belknap and Holsinger 2006; Daly 1994). However, experiences of victimisation for women offenders are increasingly identified as a ‘risk factor’ for future or continued offending, rather than developing a nuanced understanding of the ways in which emotions such as fear influence such women’s lives. There needs to be a greater understanding of the complex interplay between microlevel (i.e. experiences of victimisation and abusive relationships) and macrolevel (i.e. state harm, structural and social positioning) emotional influences and the ways in which these impact female co-offenders experiences and ‘choices’. The ways in which such emotions influence women’s offending decision-making needs to go beyond the individualised, ‘risk’ focussed approach currently dominating policy and practice and rather situate such women’s choices within the context of broader state, institutional and structural harm. It is therefore argued here that the ways in which institutional and structural injustices further invoke fear and consequently harm for women offenders should be better understood.
Note 1 The term female co-offenders will be used throughout the chapter. However, it is emphasised here that the ways in which such women are criminalised more broadly often influences initial and continued ‘decisions’ to offend.
References Ballinger, Anette (2000). Dead Woman Walking. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ballinger, Anette (2012). ‘A Muted Voice from the Past: The “Silent Silencing” of Ruth Ellis’. Social and Legal Studies, 21: 445–467 Barlow, Charlotte (2016). Coercion and Women Co-Offenders: A Gendered Pathway into Crime. Bristol: Policy Press. Batchelor, Susan (2005). ‘“Prove Me the Bam!”: Victimization and Agency in the Lives of Young Women who Commit Violent Offences’. Probation Journal, 52(4): 358–375. Becker, Sarah and Jill A. McCorkel (2011). ‘The Gender of Criminal Opportunity: The Impact of Male Co-Offenders on Women’s Crime’. Feminist Criminology, 6: 79–110.
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Belknap, Joanne and Kristi Holsinger (2006). ‘The Gendered Nature of Risk Factors for Delinquency’. Feminist Criminology, 1(1): 48–71. Burman, Michelle and Susan Batchelor (2009). ‘Between Two Stools? Responding to Young Women Who Offend’. Youth Justice, 9(3): 270–285. Carlen, Pat (1988). Women, Crime and Poverty. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Carline, Anna (2005). ‘Women Who Kill Their Abusive Partners: From Sameness to Gender Construction’. Liverpool Law Review, 26: 13–44. Christie, Nils (1986). ‘The Ideal Victim’, in Ezzat A. Fattah (ed.), From Crime Policy to Victim Policy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Daly, Kathy (1994). Gender, Crime and Punishment. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. de Haan, Willem and Ian Loader (2002). ‘On the Emotions of Crime, Punishment and Social Control’. Theoretical Criminology, 6(3): 243–253. Dobash, Rebecca and Russell Dobash (1979). Violence Against Wives: A Case Against the Patriarchy. New York: Free Press. Fleetwood, Jennifer (2013). ‘Keeping Out of Trouble: Female Crack Cocaine Dealers in England’. European Journal of Criminology, 11(1): 91–109. Fleetwood, Jennifer (2015). ‘A Narrative Approach to Women’s Lawbreaking’. Feminist Criminology, 10(4): 368–388. Gilligan, Catherine (1982). In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harding, Sandra (1981). Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jones, Stephen (2008). ‘Partners in Crime: A Study of the Relationship between Female Offenders and Their Co-Defendants’. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8: 147–164. Jones, Stephen (2011). ‘Under Pressure: Women Who Plead Guilty to Crimes They Have Not Committed’. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 11: 77–90. Kelly, Liz (2003). ‘The Wrong Debate: Reflections on Why Force is Not the Key Issue with Respect to Trafficking in Women for Sexual Exploitation’. Feminist Review, 73: 139–144. Klaver, Jessica R., Zina Lee and V. Gordon Rose (2008). ‘Effects of Personality, Interrogation Techniques and Plausibility in an Experimental False Confession Paradigm’. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 13(1): 71–88 Koons-Witt, Barbara and Pamela Schram (2003). ‘The Prevalence and Nature of Violent Offending by Females’. Journal of Criminal Justice, 31: 361–371. Madhok, Sumi, Anne Phillips and Kalpana Wilson (2013). Gender, Agency and Coercion. London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Maher, Lisa (1997). Sexed Work: Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mullins, Christoper and Richard Wright (2003). ‘Gender Social Networks and Residential Burglary’. Criminology, 41: 813–840. Richie, Beth E. (1996). Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women. New York: Routledge. Russett, Cynthia E. (1989). Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schaffner, Auriel (2007). ‘Violence Against Girls Provokes Girls’ Violence: From Private Injury to Public Harm’. Violence Against Women, 13(12): 1229–1248. Sharpe, Gilly (2016). ‘Re-Imagining Justice for Girls: A New Agenda for Research’. Youth Justice, 16(1): 3–17.
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Smith, Jonathan A. (2004). ‘Reflecting on the Development of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Its Contribution to Qualitative Research in Psychology’. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1(3): 39–54. Stark, Evan (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. London: Oxford University Press. Sydie, Rosalind A. (1987). Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological Theory. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Walklate, Sandra (2001). Gender Crime and Criminal Justice. Devon: Willan Publishing. Welle, Dorinda and Gregory Falkin (2000). ‘The Everyday Policing of Women with Romantic Co-Defendants: An Ethnographic Perspective’. Women and Criminal Justice, 11: 45–65. Westmarland, Nicole (2015). Violence Against Women: Criminological Perspectives on Men’s Violences. London: Routledge. Yeo, Stanley (1993). ‘Resolving Gender Bias in Criminal Defences’. Monash University Law Review, 19: 104–116.
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American self-radicalising terrorists and conversions to radical action Emotional factors and the allure of ‘jihadi cool/chic’1 Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. Picart
Introduction The conversion of American self-radicalising terrorists appears a thoughtprovoking test case for analysing how ‘emotional’ or at least non-rational factors come into play in the movement from radical thought to radical action. This chapter builds from Clarke McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko’s pathways to radicalisation (McCauley and Moskalenko 2011), along with the concept of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ (Picart 2015a; 2015b; 2017) to study how American self-radicalizing terrorists, such as Colleen LaRose (‘Jihad Jane’), the Tsarnaev Brothers (‘the Boston Marathon Bombers’), and Omar Mateen (‘the Orlando Night Club Killer’) self-radicalised. This chapter does not recount detailed biographies due to space constraints, but instead stays focused on parsing out the catalytic emotional and imaginative factors in each case, in the transition from radical thought to radical action. The chapter also analyses the romantic appeal of ‘jihadi cool/chic’, whose rhetorical power lies in its ability to tap into the fantasies of the young, which are also gendered in a conservative manner: for young men, for example, the glory of being a warrior and the thrill of adventures on the battlefield, and the promise of unyielding brotherhood are compelling or young women, on the other hand, the romance of being married to a mujahid (and bearing his children), of faithful sisterhood and camaraderie in an ideal state, a Muslim Utopia, appear to be irresistible – though this gendered division has its limits in analysing Colleen LaRose’s case. Another aspect of jihadi cool’s/chic’s power lies in its mastery of Hollywood-style shots and editing, using cutting edge ‘GoPro cameras’ and drones for dramatic aerial shots, alternating with shots from other cameras capturing different angles, resulting in slick, high resolution productions that could be an hour-long or edited down, much like ‘teasers’ or commercials for full length cinematic films. Thus jihadi cool/chic’s allure lies less in an appeal to reason than to powerful emotions and non-rational factors.
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McCauley and Moskalenko’s twelve pathways to radicalisation McCauley and Moskalenko, psychologists who are acknowledged radicalisation experts and consultants to the Department of Homeland Security, write mainly using a social psychology standpoint but borrowing sometimes from Social Movement Theory. McCauley and Moskalenko (2011), sketch twelve diverse pathways to radicalisation into terrorist activity, echoing contemporary academic findings that there is no single monolithic pathway towards radicalisation. Of particular significance to this book are a number of pathways, which may lead to violent radical action, and may be characterized as ‘non-rational’ (and even principally emotional) because they are responses neither to ideology nor to political exigencies. Instead, these pathways are responses to combinations of sometimes subtle social factors such as group dynamics, boundary hardening, and even love. Because the case studies in this chapter are ‘lone wolves’ or self-radicalising individuals, I build principally from McCauley and Moskalenko’s descriptions of six individual level mechanisms of radicalisation and uncover the relevant pathways operative in each case. Briefly summarized, these six individual mechanisms are: 1 2 3 4 5 6
personal grievance, in which one seeks revenge for harm done to the self, or to loved ones; group grievance, in which one seeks revenge for harm done to a group or cause about which the individual cares; slippery slope, in which an individual is radicalised through increasing political involvement; love, in which one becomes radicalised through attraction to someone already radicalised; risk and status, which can move individuals (especially young men) toward violence regardless of ideology; and unfreezing, in which an individual becomes open to new ideas and identity after losing long-standing reference points. (McCauley and Moskalenko 2011)
As this chapter shows, although there is some cross-pollination or interaction across the different mechanisms, there appear to be principal pathways at work in the four different cases. Nevertheless, the chapter’s conclusions are very much in line with current research regarding how individuals evolve into terrorists. For example, former CIA officer and psychologist, Marc Sageman, analysed over five hundred cases to arrive at the insight that although one could describe distinct stages of radicalisation, he cautioned against the illusion that ‘[o]ne can simply draw a line, put markers on it and gauge where people are along this path to see whether they are close to committing atrocities’ (Sageman 2008: 72). Similarly, the Rand Corporation, based on a fourteen year study of the process of
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radicalisation, concluded that ‘no single pathway towards terrorism exists’ (Cragin 2007, 2009) and that the attempt to predict who, among a group of similarly situated individuals, would likely adopt radical views, much less turn violent, is fraught with difficulty, as much seems to be due to ‘happenstance’ (Cragin 2007; Jenkins 2010). Finally, in a Department of Homeland Securitysupported study, McCauley and Moskalenko concluded that although they had outlined twelve possible pathways to radicalisation (while leaving room for the possible discovery of more), that ‘radicalisation progression cannot be understood as an invariable set of steps or “stages” from sympathy to radicalism’ (McCauley and Moskalenko 2010: 82, 88).
The rhetorics of ‘jihadi cool’ or ‘jihadi chic’ The genesis and evolution of ‘jihadi cool’ Salman Rushdie described ‘jihadi-cool’ as ‘the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry’ and opined that ‘[i]t’s hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today’ (Coyne 2014). However, the term ‘jihadi cool’ was originally coined by psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer, Marc Sageman, to describe al-Qaeda’s growing influence on the internet (Jones 2013). In spite of the prevalence of monstrous metaphors pointing to an utterly foreign menace infecting or seducing American or British men, the concept of ‘jihadi cool’ probably began with Adam Yahiye Gadahn, an American raised in a goat farm in Riverside County, who spent some of his teenage years with his Jewish grandfather in Santa Ana (Walker 2014). Gadahn left for Pakistan in the 1990s, and emerged around 2004 on propaganda videos as an English-speaking spokesman for al-Qaeda. Although Gadahn’s early videos as ‘Azzam the American’ were viewed as more ‘laughable’ than ‘scary’, these rough productions were nevertheless noted as among the first English-language radical jihadist propaganda efforts attempting to reach out to Western audiences (Walker 2014). Additionally, the slick website of Revolution Muslim became a precursor of what has evolved into the look of ‘jihadi cool’. Over an 18-month period, this small New York-based organization peaked, until government officials arrested one of its leaders and shut down the website. Revolution Muslim was created by three American converts to radical Islam, all of whom are serving prison sentences. At the height of its popularity, the website was used by authorities to monitor the communication, recruitment and activities of aspiring radical jihadis (Walker 2014). With the shutdown of the Revolution Muslim website, Inspire magazine, an online publication run by the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula targeting English language speakers, moved in to fill the gap (IPT News 2013). Described as akin to ‘the Sports Illustrated of jihad’, this magazine has
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published articles such as that giving instructions on creating explosive devices, a copy of which was found in the backpack of one of the Tsarnaev brothers (Walker 2014). Yet even Inspire’s glossy and sophisticated manipulation of the media has been eclipsed by ISIS’s deft deployment of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, which feature items as diverse as graphic videos to T-shirts (Brittany 2014) featuring ISIS’s logo, which is a black flag (Walker 2014). Former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter acknowledged that ISIS ‘is using more social media than al-Qaeda ever did’ (Arter 2014). Furthermore, ISIS has taken ‘jihadi cool’ to new merchandising extremes: it now features its own online clothing line run by a company, Zirah Moslem, which specializes in ISIS-themed T-shirts and hoodies, sold via websites in Indonesia, where it is legal to sell jihadi-themed products (Whitmyer 2014). Explaining the seductive appeal of ‘jihadi cool’ How does one explain this upsurge of ‘jihadi cool’ popularity? One factor appears to be the seductive appeal of being a ‘badass’. As UCLA sociologist Jack Katz notes: ‘In many youthful circles, to be “bad”, to be a “badass” or otherwise overtly embrace symbols of deviance is regarded as a good thing’ (Katz 1988: 80). Katz identifies three stages of aggression that a badass aspirant must undergo and become, in order to become initiated into the ranks of the truly ‘badass’. First, he must be tough and morally impermeable – not someone who can easily be influenced by others. Second, he must appear alien – uncompromisingly ‘hostile to any form of civilisation’ and irreducible to anything comprehensible to ‘native sensibilities’, resulting in his presence or acts as ‘unnerving’ (Katz 1988: 80). Third, and ultimately, to be a ‘badass’ requires a genuine meanness, or spontaneous ability to engage in acts of violence, devoid of considerations of either utility or self-preservation: ‘badasses manifest the transcendent superiority of their being, specifically by insisting on the dominance of their will ’ (Katz 1988: 81). Perhaps the seduction of ‘jihadi cool’ is simply the paradigmatic appeal of the ‘badass’ given a jihadi mask (Cottee 2014). However, a second – and, to some extent, contrary explanation – is the success of promoting a romanticized notion of making one’s mark on the world through adventure, linked with a promise of earthly pleasure – to which allure the badass is theoretically immune, with his imperviousness, toughness and meanness. This notion, the idea of a ‘five star jihad’, appears to have two components: (1) the allure of celebrity and (2) the attractions of living in luxury while being ‘virtuous’. There are numerous accounts of young jihadi warriors posting ‘selfies’ of themselves glamorously atop tanks and brandishing guns, or showing some heartwarmingly human aspect. One such internet celebrity is a Dutch national of Turkish descent, who engages in the armed struggle against the Syrian regime, called Yilmaz (Leigh and Crumley 2014). Some of Yilmaz’s popular photos include one of himself tenderly cradling a Syrian toddler
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swathed in pink, and another of himself, immortalized in the quintessential warrior pose, dressed in a black jacket and camouflage, with one leg propped up and his rifle by his side. Yilmaz’s self-promotion paid off: not only did he develop a following among Syria watchers, but he also achieved a presence in international news when the New York Times blogged about him (Leigh and Crumley 2014). Hardly surprisingly, his success spawned imitators. The ripple effects are clear, pointing to the power of jihadi cool.
Analysing the rhetorical mechanics of ‘jihadi cool’ Part of the reason why the ‘jihadi cool’ message is so popular among particularly young men is its careful tailoring and understanding of its targeted audiences, using emotional and imaginative rhetorical tools. Historically, both the look and the content of ‘jihadi cool’ were crafted principally by American radical jihadi converts Anwar al-Aulaqi, a New Mexico-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen; Omar Hammami, an Alabama native who rose to become a senior commander in Somali and starred in a rap recruiting video, which became an internet sensation, in which Hammam led an armed group of fighters to a catchy musical beat; and Adam Gadahn, a native Californian who became an al-Qaeda spokesman and was charged with treason in 2006, among others (Hsu 2010). Both the ability to communicate in the American vernacular in a manner that appeals to the youth, as well as a command of what it takes to create an MTV aesthetic, are crucial components of jihadi cool’s rhetorical persuasiveness. Videos created specifically for Western audiences try to depict jihad as a ‘Hollywood-like video game’ (Behn 2014). Yet despite this imagined appeal to the virtual worlds of Hollywood video and MTV aesthetics, these ‘jihadi cool’ videos attempt a connection to ‘reality’ by humanising the radical jihadi warriors. Hence, radical jihadi warriors are shown with cats and dogs (Mauro 2014), and with American products that would appeal to their young audiences, such as Nutella, a chocolate spread, and Skittles, a rainbow-like colourful candy (Behn 2014). The irony of jihadi cool/chic is that it deploys Western rhetorical tools to destroy the very culture that created these derivative rhetorical forms and culture, and continues to buttress jihadi cool/chic with powerful persuasive appeal. As Elizabeth Pearson (2013) observed regarding what she termed ‘Grand Theft Auto Culture’: Being a ‘Jihadi’ is not just about ideology; it’s about status, as a man. Increasingly, a nexus is being recognized between the macho masculinity of British street culture and criminal gangs, and the behaviours associated with pathways to violent extremism. Interestingly, many of the radical jihadi converts were initially neither overtly religious, nor openly political; many of them seemed ‘normal’ to the point of being banal. But the rhetorical elements of jihadi cool seemed an irresistible siren’s song:
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‘Jihadi cool’ and gender Prior sections make clear the intimate connection between jihadi cool and the performance of masculinity. What of femininity, as it is clear that not only men, but also women, are subject to jihadi cool’s allure? More recently, ISIS as well has pitched its recruitment towards young women, but principally as jihadi brides and mothers (Roussinos 2013). The recruitment tactics are also working on women, producing a surge in what has been called ‘jihadi girl power subculture’, as ‘hundreds’ of Western Muslim women have travelled to Syria to marry radical jihadi warriors, sending out a flood of messages via the internet (Saleh 2014). That Western women, with all their freedoms, choose instead a more traditional lifestyle is a huge morale boost for the radical jihadi troops, argues Sasha Havicek, director of the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (Saleh 2014). Like the young men who convert, the young women are also young (in general, the demographic covers ages 15– 22), and are also well versed in the use of social media such as Twitter, Tumblr and Kik (Saleh 2014). And although they may pine nostalgically for some imagined version of the lifestyle of early Muslims, the language they use is extremely contemporary, replete with tech-savvy slang and emoticons, with a dash of Arabic religious terms spelt out in English letters – to flash their credentials as being ‘part of the gang’. Of course, there is intelligence that indicates contrary results. Federal investigators believe approximately 100 Americans, including women, have travelled to Syria to join radical jihadi groups, though this number is not certain (Ward 2014). According to these reports, some women are seduced into joining by the lure of becoming virtual Florence Nightingales, as nurses and medical assistants. However, once they do join, they become virtual sex slaves (Ward 2014). Nevertheless, even if these women converts profess to be innocuous, posing no threat to national security, on the contrary, in their online posts, amidst the overwhelmingly domestic and apolitical tweets about washing and the beauty of the sky, are nuggets about the bravery of radical jihadi warriors, who are ‘real men’, unlike the enemy troops – the Kafir [infidels] (Saleh 2014). Startlingly, it appears to be the women who prove to be staunch defenders of strict moral codes; a Twitter account, identifying itself by the handle ‘@irhabbyukhts’ or ‘terrorist sisters’ (an apparent attempt at irony), dedicates itself to the mission of naming and shaming jihadi men who flirt online with girls (Saleh 2014). Notwithstanding the similarities between the rhetorical appeals made to young Western men and women to convert, there is a strict gender demarcation that seems predominantly in place: the place of honour, for a man, is on
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the battlefield; for the woman, it is the home. (Virtuous) men fight and slaughter the enemy mercilessly; (good) women bear children, tend to domestic chores, and praise their men’s feats on the battlefield. That distinction, in the case of Colleen LaRose, was not as clear; nevertheless, the allure of jihadi cool clearly worked its magic on Colleen LaRose in her conversion.
Colleen LaRose: from abused victim to ‘Jihad Jane’ Distilling biographical details, in Colleen LaRose’s case, the following factors can be identified as crucial to the process of her self-radicalisation: 1 2 3 4 5
pre-existing mental, psychiatric, or structural factors; the condition of being a misfit unable to integrate effectively into society; personal grievances conflated with perceived group resentments and imagined empathic identification; the search for a fantasy lover-mentor; the rhetorics of romanticizing the jihadi cool image.
As the first sub-point, the mental scars left behind by LaRose’s traumatic history of incest, sexual abuse, and prostitution are well documented, and appear to have been a factor in her sentencing, in addition to her cooperation with authorities after her arrest (Associated Press 2014). LaRose potentially faced a sentence of life in prison, but prosecutors agreed with the defense that LaRose had suffered abuse prior to becoming radicalised. As a basis for the downward adjustment, officials quoted a 2012 Reuters Investigative Report. This authoritative report ‘described LaRose’s troubled life before she converted to Islam: childhood rapes by her biological father, teenage prostitution, heavy drug use and failed marriages. LaRose said that her father’s sexual assaults, confirmed by confidential court records, began in second grade’ (Brunker 2014). LaRose blamed principally her father for her inability to sustain stable relationships and to become a viable member of society (Pilkington 2012). This first set of factors leads into the second – LaRose’s eternal quest for an exotic, fantasized Perfect Mate, which led her to become vulnerable to manipulation by men like Eagle Eye and Black Flag. The first set of factors led to LaRose’s view of herself as an outcast – someone who did not fit in with most ‘normal’ American citizens, which contributed to her ability to identify, especially with the plight of Palestinian children, wounded in battle. It outraged her that most Americans seemed indifferent to their suffering, and that many American children had been shielded from such traumatic events, unlike herself, as she saw herself as being isolated from most Americans. LaRose recalled one of the key incidents leading to her eventual self-radicalisation: sitting on her couch in Philadelphia, watching footage of the fighting on al-Jazeera. ‘I was crying. I could hear the kids outside playing and laughing, and I remember thinking to myself how unfair that all those children were dying and no one here knows or cares’ (Pilkington 2012).
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From there, it seemed natural for LaRose to fill that brokenness or void with virtual male mentors and abstract ‘brothers’. LaRose’s conversion to Islam, to her, signalled the first time she belonged somewhere – and that she was someone truly significant to that community. Yet the manner in which she talked about her relationship, in particular, with the unnamed individual who called himself Eagle Eye resembles the description of someone hypnotized or rendered zombie-like by a more powerful presence: ‘I did whatever he told me. I was in a trance’ (Pilkington 2012). Ironically, this idealized relationship bore a dark kinship to the relationship she had had with her biological father, and from which she had attempted to flee. Jeffrey D. Simon arrived at several sociological reasons why, in general, there have been very few female ‘lone wolf ’ or self-radicalising terrorists: 1 2
3 4 5
women tend to be more risk-averse than men; many women need the affective and social connections necessary (e.g., the death of a loved one), to be mobilized into jihadization; ‘women are socialized to be interdependent and attuned to relationships, whereas men are socialised to be autonomous, independent, and self-reliant’; paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorders tend to be less common in women than men; women are less likely than men to kill strangers; and when women do kill by themselves, it is usually more emotional and impulsive than premeditated.(Simon 2013: 128–134)
In LaRose’s case, in terms of her history of paternal sexual abuse and her search for exotic male mentor-lover figures, perhaps the most significant were the fifth and the second factors, which have a principally emotional basis. LaRose was consistently impulsive and emotional from the moment of the onset of her radicalisation (sparked by her one night stand with a Muslim man); to her acceptance of her suicide mission under the influence of increasing indoctrination, as if under a proverbial spell, wielded by her mentors, Eagle Eye and Black Flag; and also to her sudden decision to abandon her mission in favour of returning home, allegedly to take care of her reputedly terminally ill mother. Lacking stability in affective and social connections in real life, LaRose sought to fill these via her secret virtual life, and it was these imagined and emotional connections that spurred her, rapidly, into jihadization.
The Tsarnaev Brothers: from ideal immigrants to the ‘Boston Marathon Bombers’ Once again condensing the biographical essentials, and mapping the trajectories of the Tsarnaev brothers’ self-radicalisations, in relation to their activities in real life and on the internet, and cross-referencing LaRose (Picart in Richman and Sharan 2015b: 58–74), reveals the following:
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First, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radicalisation may have been rooted in psychiatric or even ‘structural’ issues, as he may have inherited a propensity for paranoid schizophrenia from his parents, both of whom had documented psychiatric illnesses (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapters 2 and 8). This is in line with Ramon Spaaij’s (2012: 50) observation that ‘lone wolf terrorists tend to have a greater propensity to suffer mental health issues;’ however, it is important not to draw sweeping generalizations from this observation (see Corrado 1981: 293–309; Heskin 1980; Reich in Reich 1998: 261–279). Indeed, this condition of mental illness does not appear to be true, of Jahar, save for headaches, insomnia, and nightmares (Wen in Jammet 2013) – all of which seem to be within normal range, given the pressures he was under. While Tamerlan (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 8), and to some extent, Colleen (Johnson 2010), displayed social ineffectiveness and social alienation – another characteristic hallmark of lone wolf terrorists according to Spaaij (2012: 51) – Jahar seemed ‘chill’ and socially well integrated (Wen in Jammet 2013). Unlike prior well known American lone wolf terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, both Tamerlan and Colleen had stable relationships: Tamerlan, with his wife Katie Russell (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 6), and Colleen, with her live-in boyfriend, Kurt Gorman (Shiffman 2012); nevertheless, the existence of these pivotal relationship did not deter them from either straying from these relationships or becoming fully radicalised. Second, Tamerlan’s movement from radical thought to radical action is generally easy to track, and his transformation seems to follow Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt’s model (2007) for how lone wolf terrorists become what they are; Silber and Bhatt’s model came under fire because it assumed both a linear and reductive progression through the stages of radicalisation, and engaged in a form of profiling based on religious affiliation (Kredo 2016) – which this chapter clearly does not do. In contrast, Jahar’s is not as easy to map. In comparison, LaRose’s conversion, as outlined earlier, entails large leaps through the different phases. All these observations underline the importance of referencing Silber and Bhatt’s model as a general heuristic, not as a reductive, predictive linear model (Patel 2011; Picart 2017). Third, like Colleen (Shiffman 2012, Chapter 1), Tamerlan appears to have had real contact with jihadis, both online and at Dagestan (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 7). Jahar’s only contact with jihadi sites seems to have been instrumental (Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 6). Unlike his older brother, Jahar never visited Dagestan. Jahar’s commitment to his Chechnyan roots appears to have been largely imagined and sentimentalized, rather than built upon real experience. Fourth, unlike Colleen, whose extensive posts online practically cried out for a suicide assignment (Johnson 2010; Shiffman 2012: Chapter 1), despite Tamerlan’s extensive communications on the internet, Tamerlan’s radicalisation did not crystallize into action until after his visit to Dagestan, where he is said to have had real contact with jihadis, but he did not join them, and
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instead chose to return to the U.S., to wage jihad there, not in Dagestan (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 7). It is also important to note that prior to leaving for Dagestan, Brendan Mess, allegedly one of the few close friends of Tamerlan, along with two of Mess’ friends, Erik Weissman and Raphael M. Teken, were found brutally murdered in their apartment, their throats slit and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana (Stebner 2013). The killing has been described as similar to a jihadi-style killing (Zalkind 2014); if Tamerlan was involved in their murder, and there are indications this is probably so, that would have had a tremendous emotional impact on him, which was probably crucial to his conversion to radical action. Fifth, focusing purely on Jahar, Jahar’s full radicalisation occurred only after his brother returned from Dagestan, transformed (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 8), and his parents’ marriage had dissolved (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 6), and it had become absolutely clear to Jahar that he would be unable to achieve his father’s dream for him of achieving academic success and ascending to an Ivy League school (Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 6). Although there is no clear evidence that Jahar corresponded with jihadis, it was he who probably financed preparations for the bombing, most likely from his marijuana sales (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 5), as Tamerlan was unemployed (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 6). In retrospect, returning to McCauley and Moskalenko’s (2008: 415–433; 2011) description of six individual level pathways to radicalisation is instructive in relation to comparing these three case studies. Although there is some interaction across the different pathways, there appear to be principal mechanisms at work in the three different cases. In the case of Colleen LaRose, it was probably mechanism (4), love, or the search for it, and in a gender-bending way, mechanism (5), risk and status. In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it was probably mechanism (1), personal grievance, conflated with mechanism (2), group grievance, as well as mechanism (5), risk and status. In the case of Jahar Tsarnaev, it was probably mechanism (5), risk and status, along with mechanism (6), unfreezing. Nevertheless, one thing that is interesting is that McCauley and Moskalenko tend to focus solely on these individual factors, when analyzing lone wolf terrorists; however, they also outline group mechanisms of radicalisation as well mechanisms of mass radicalisation (McCauley and Moskalenko 2011). What is striking in the case of Colleen LaRose and the Tsarnaev brothers is that despite the many unique factors at play in the unfolding stories of their self-radicalisation, all of them seemed to move quickly from individual mechanisms to one particular mass mechanism: martyrdom. (However, in Jahar’s case, martyrdom appeared largely aspirational and imagined, given his willingness to run over his own brother with the vehicle they had hijacked in his desperate attempt to escape law enforcement prior to his later capture (Malone, Barber and Valdmanis 2015).) That may be an after-effect of the
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role the internet plays in the self-radicalisation of lone wolf terrorists riding what Simon calls the ‘Technological Wave’ (Simon 2013: 133–134).
Omar Mateen: from misfit to ‘Orlando Night Club Killer’ This chapter now turns to doing a brief sketch of Omar Mateen, one of the most recent and notorious U.S. lone wolves, whose rampage led to the highest body count thus far, in incidents resulting from a terrorist-related spree shooting. His story further highlights some striking similarities, particularly with the Tsarnaev brothers, to whom he dedicated his attack. Comparing Omar Mateen with the Tsarnaev brothers, with whom Mateen clearly identified, one uncovers notable patterns. First, like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Mateen may have had underlying mental issues, such as being bipolar, though this may be attributable to steroid use, as hypothesized by his former wife, Sitora Yusifiy (Fantz, McLaughlin and Hume 2016: 4). Like Tamerlan, Mateen seemed best to fit in through physical feats of strength and athleticism, and seemed best integrated when he was focused on achieving his dream of becoming a law enforcement officer (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder and Mashal 2016: 5). Furthermore, Mateen, like Tamerlan, was married; but unlike Tamerlan (at least superficially, as Katherine Russell’s mother later claimed, during Jahar’s trial, that Tamerlan had not been faithful to his wife even if he stayed married to her) (Hayes 2015: 5), his marriages, first to Sitora Yusufiy (Fantz, McLaughlin and Hume 2016: 4), and later, to Noor Salman (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder and Mashal 2016: 7), did not necessarily provide him with a stable relationship, as he continued to pursue or ‘stalk’ other women online as well as in real life (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder and Mashal 2016: 7). Second, although Mateen appears to have many resemblances to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his movement through the phases of radicalisation more closely resembles Jahar’s because they are not easy to track. Like Jahar, his outward appearance remained safely within the mainstream, as he did not radically change his appearance, as Tamerlan did, after his visit to Dagestan (Russell, Abelson, Wen, Rezendes and Filipov 2013; Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 8); neither did Mateen make any suspect overseas trips, as Tamerlan did, and like Jahar, Mateen sailed through security checks despite some youthful indiscretions. Mateen, like Jahar, appeared to have a dark sense of humour (Reitman 2013), but unlike Jahar, whose quirky humour was largely tolerated by his friends, probably partly because the atmosphere has become more sensitized, Mateen’s humour led to his being disciplined, and starkly, to the loss of his dream of becoming a law enforcement officer (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder and Mashal 2016). Third, although Mateen’s demeanour and pronouncements in real life were disturbing enough to attract the attention of the FBI (Blinder, Healy and Oppel 2016: 1; Danner 2016: 4), like Jahar, Mateen’s online presence did not immediately display danger signs. Save perhaps for the acquaintanceship with Moner Mohammed Abusalha (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder
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and Mashal 2016: 8), who had attended the same mosque as Mateen had, for a time, Mateen did not develop any real relationships with radical Jihadis either in real life or online. Mateen, unlike Jahar, did not need to download information on how to create a bomb, as he already had legal access to guns. Thus far, there has been no report regarding Mateen’s directly accessing a jihadi site, either to establish contact or even for instrumental purposes. Fourth, Mateen’s upbringing, unlike the Tsarnaevs’ upbringing, largely because of their mother’s extremely religious bent (Jacobs, Filipov and Wen in Jammet 2013, Chapter 3), never seemed actively to inculcate that imagined connection with a mythical homeland to which Jahar nostalgically clung (although he had never visited it); the New York Times story covering Mateen’s childhood states that ‘two friends say that the Mateen children feared any link to Islamic extremism, and so [the Mateen children] began saying, simply, that they were Persian’ (Barry, Kovaleski, Blinder and Mashal 2016: 3). Although Mateen’s father appeared to be actively seeking a political position in Afghanistan through his podcasts, and he did praise the Afghani Taliban at one point (Johnson 2016: 4, 7, 8, 13), Seddique Mateen’s political position was incoherent and he disavowed any radical Jihadi affiliation (L.A. Times, 2016: 11–12). Thus, the family background that seems to be a predominant factor in the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, seems absent in Mateen’s case. Fifth, the only clear point of full radicalisation, visible only in hindsight, occurred when Mateen actively purchased the Glock 9 mm handgun and AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (or a descendant thereof) (Chivers 2016), approximately a week before the mass shooting (Johnson 2016: 2). Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to ISIS seems to have occurred on the day of the Orlando Nightclub Massacre itself, when he called the 911 operator (CNN Staff 2016: 4; Murdock, Planas, Campbell and Frej 2016: 2). The conjectured catalyst that may have sparked plans for the massacre may have been the sight of two men kissing, in front of his young son, according to his father, Seddique Mateen (Danner, LandsBaum and Kirby 2016: 10). Applying, where relevant, McCauley and Moskalenko’s (2008: 415–433) description of six individual level pathways of radicalisation yields some insights. In Mateen’s case, probably factors (1), personal grievance, and (6), risk and status, were crucial to his movement from radical thought into radical action. Mateen seemed to be a genuine lone wolf who had self-radicalised, not from exposure to radical jihadi sites, but simply from conflating his personal woes and frustrations with the grievances expressed by any radical jihadi group, be they ISIS or Al-Qaeda, however ideologically opposed these groups were, and an imagined Brotherhood with the Tsarnaev brothers. As such, he represents perhaps the most egregious evolution of the Technological wave (Simon 2013: 133–134), which no longer keeps the barrier, however porous, between the ‘reel’ and the real.
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Conclusion As this chapter has shown, although there is some cross-pollination or interaction across the different pathways, there appear to be principal pathways at work in the four different cases. Ultimately, the chapter also arrives at the conclusion that the rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool’ or ‘jihadi chic’ – a principally emotional or at least non-rational form of persuasion, infused with imagined elements – is a reactive miming of Monstrous discourse. ‘Monster talk’, etymologically traced, is a form of public preachment (Ingebretsen 2001; Picart and Browning 2012: 1–12; Picart and Greek 2007: 11–43) that warns against (monere) or points to (monstrare) that which stands beyond the gates of the city state, which the ‘Good Citizen’, the monster’s counterpart, guards. The rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ is strategically targeted towards disenfranchised young men and women, who seek to create a name for themselves, and who are drawn to the romantic construction of the ‘badass’ and of being countercultural, which is principally built upon an appeal to the emotions, fortified through the strategic rhetorical construction of virtual imagined communities of fantasy warriors and their brides.
Note 1 This chapter has been adapted from Picart (2015a; 2015b; 2017). The author thanks Cambridge Scholars Publishing and IOS Press for licenses to adapt the material, and Nicole Santos for her assistance with formatting.
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McCauley, Clark and Sophia Moskalenko (2008). ‘Mechanisms of Political Radicalisation: Pathways Toward Terrorism’. Terrorism and Political Violence, 20(3): 415–433. McCauley, Clark and Sophia Moskalenko (2010). ‘Individual and Group Mechanisms of Radicalisation’, in Laurie Fenstermacher (ed.), Topical Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment (SMA) Multi-Agency and Air Force Research Laboratory, Multi-Disciplinary White Papers in Support of Counter-Terrorism and Counter-WMD, January 2010: 82– 92. Available online at www.start.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/publications/U_Coun ter_Terrorism_White_Paper_Final_January_2010.pdf (accessed January 21, 2018). McCauley, Clarke and Sophia Moskalenko (2011). Friction: How Radicalisation Happens to Them and Us. New York: Oxford University Press. Mauro, Ryan (2014). ‘ISIS: “Cool” Image Winning Over Next Generation of Jihadis’. The Clarion Project, August 31, 2014. Available online at www.clarionproject.org/ana lysis/islamic-state-winning-over-next-generation-jihadis (accessed January 21, 2018). Murdock, Sebastian, Roque Planas, Andy Campbell and Willa Frej (2016). ‘New Details Emerge About Deadliest Mass Shooting in U.S. History’. Huffington Post, June 12, 2016. Available online at www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/terror-shooting-a t-gay-club_us_575d5938e4b0e39a28add1b4 (accessed January 21, 2018). Patel, Faiza (2011). ‘Rethinking Radicalisation’. Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, March 8, 2011. Available online at www.brenna ncenter.org/publication/rethinking-radicalisation (accessed January 21, 2018). Pearson, Elizabeth (2013). ‘Macho Cool: The Appeal of Violent Jihad’. Connect Justice: Justice in Conflict, September 30, 2013. Available online at www.connectjustice. org/blog.php?d=3 (accessed January 21, 2018). Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. (2015a). ‘“Jihad Cool/Jihad Chic”: The Roles of the Internet and Imagined Relations in the Self-Radicalisation of Colleen LaRose (Jihad Jane)’. Societies, 5: 354–383. Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. (2015b). ‘The Radicalisation of American Lone Wolves in Real/Reel Worlds: Strategically Mapping the Role of the Internet, and Beyond, in the Cases of Colleen LaRose (Jihad Jane) and the Tsarnaev Brothers (the Boston Marathon Bombers)’, in Aaron Richman and Yair Sharan (eds), Lone Actors – An Emerging Threat (NATO Science for Peace and Security Studies). Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp. 58–74. doi:doi:0.3233/978-1-61499-585-2-58 Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. (2017). American Self-Radicalizing Terrorists and the Allure of ‘Jihadi Cool/Chic’. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. and John Edgar Browning (eds) (2012). Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. and Cecil Greek (eds) (2007). Monsters In and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Pilkington, Ed (2012). ‘“Jihad Jane” Explains Her Strange Journey from Victim to Radical Muslim’. The Guardian, December 8, 2012. Available online at www.theguardian.com/ world/2012/dec/08/jihad-jane-journey-victim-radical (accessed January 21, 2018). Porter, R. C. (2014). ‘“Jihad Cool” – Young Americans Lured to Fight for ISIS Militants; Seeds of Next 9/11?’. Fortuna’s Corner, June 28, 2014. Available online at http: //fortunascorner.com/2014/06/28/jihad-cool-young-americans-lured-to-fight-for-isis-m ilitants-seeds-of-next-911/ (accessed January 21, 2018). Reich, Walter (1998). ‘Understanding Terrorist Behavior: The Limits and Opportunities of Psychological Inquiry’, in Walter Reich (ed.). Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, pp. 261–279.
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Reitman, Janet (2013). ‘Jahar’s World’. Rolling Stone, July 17, 2013. Available online at www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/jahars-world-20130717 (accessed January 21, 2018). Roussinos, Aris (2013). ‘Jihad Selfies: These British Extremists in Syria Love Social Media’. Vice.com, December 5, 2013. Available online at www.vice.com/read/syria n-jihadist-selfies-tell-us-a-lot-about-their-war (accessed January 21, 2018). Russell, Jenna, Jenn Abelson, Patricia Wen, Michael Rezendes and David Filipov (2013). ‘Brothers Veered Violently Off Track’. The Boston Globe, April 19, 2013. Available online at www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/19/relatives-marathonbombing-suspects-worried-that-older-brother-was-corrupting-sweet-younger-sibling/ UCYHkiP9nfsjAtMjJPWJJL/story.html (accessed January 22, 2018). Sageman, Marc (2008). Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Saleh, Heba (2014). ‘Western Female Jihadis Deploy “Soft-Power” of Isis Online’. Financial Times, October 28, 2014. Available online at www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ 2d8b020c-5792-11e4-8493-00144feab7de.html# (accessed September 11, 2016). Shiffman, John (2012). ‘Jane’s Jihad’. Reuters, December 7, 2012. Available online at www. reuters.com/article/us-usa-jihadjane-idUSBRE8B60GP20121207 (accessed January 21, 2018). Silber, Mitchell D. and Arvin Bhatt (2007). ‘Radicalisation in the West: The Homegrown Threat’. New York City Police Department. Available online at www.nyc.gov/html/nyp d/downloads/pdf/public_information/NYPD_Report- radicalisation_in_the_West.pdf (accessed April 2, 2015). Simon, Jeffrey D. (2013). Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Spaaij, Ramón (2012). Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention. Berlin: Springer. Stebner, Beth (2013). ‘Authorities Link Tsarnaev Brothers to Brutal Triple Homicide in 2011: Report’. New York Daily News, May 11, 2013. Available online at www.nyda ilynews.com/news/national/authorities-link-tsarnaev-brothers-2011-triple-homici de-report-article-1.1341207 (accessed January 22, 2018). Walker, Theresa (2014). ‘Has ISIS Reached O.C.? Arrest Here Intensifies Questions’. The Orange County Register, August 30, 2014. Available online at www.ocregister. com/articles/dandach-633351-isis-orange.html (accessed January 21, 2018). Ward, M. L. (2014). ‘Second American Jihadi Confirmed Dead in ISIS’. Uptown Magazine, August 29, 2014. Available online at uptownmagazine.com/2014/08/sec ond-american-jihadi-confirmed-dead-isis/2/ (accessed September 11, 2016). Wen, Patricia (2013). ‘Dzokhar, the Youngest, Was Drawn to Risk and Spiraled into Infamy’, in Josie Jammet, The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev. The Boston Globe, December 15, 2013. Available online at www.bostonglobe.com/Page/Boston/ 2011-2020/WebGraphics/Metro/ BostonGlobe.com/2013/12/15tsarnaev/tsarnaev.htm l (accessed September 19, 2016). Whitmyer, Steffani (2014). ‘The Jihad Shopping Network, Courtesy of ISIS’. Warrior, June 24, 2014. Available online at http: //warrior.scout.com/story/1414293-the-jiha d-shopping-network-courtesy-of-isis (accessed December 29, 2017). Zalkind, Susan (2014). ‘The Murders Before the Marathon’. The Boston Magazine, March 2014. Available online at www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/02/25/ waltham-murders-boston-marathon/ (accessed January 22, 2018).
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‘Violence is difficult, not easy’1 The emotion dynamics of mass atrocities Susanne Karstedt
Introduction: The salience of emotions Accounts of mass atrocities testify to the role of emotions across events, space and time. Emotions are present in accounts of victims and bystanders witnessing or being victimised by extreme violence. They are also present in accounts of the perpetrators themselves. The men of the Police Battalion 101 who were involved in mass atrocities in the Holocaust report on their own and their comrades’ emotions of disgust, shock, sorrow at the violence they were executing (Browning 1992); similarly, interviews with perpetrators from the Rwanda genocide (Hatzfeld 2004/2005; Fletcher 2007; African Rights 1995), with paramilitaries from Colombia (Civico 2016) or with perpetrators from a small Chinese county, where more than 4,000 people were killed during the Cultural Revolution from August to September 1967 (Hecheng 2017) reveal the emotional undercurrent of mass violence. Emotions of revenge or the fear of revenge are reported by the men of the Police Battalion, as well as by perpetrators in Rwanda (Straus 2006: 155), very often in the context of most atrocious crimes against children. Colombian demobilized fighters name them as a motivation to join paramilitary and rebel forces (Arjona and Kalyvas 2011). Fear of revenge permeates the conversations of German prisoners of war on the rare occasions when they touch upon atrocities committed against civilian populations (Neitzel and Welzer 2011/12). Most disturbing are accounts of emotions of elation, joy and enjoyment during mass atrocities; this includes reports of e.g. singing, shouting and violent games in the course of mass atrocities, as reported for the Srebenica massacre by eye witnesses (Klusemann 2012). Similarly, reports from a group of SS men who go on a killing rampage in a ghetto give evidence of high levels of emotional arousal, and particular enjoyment (Kühne 2008; Klee, Dreßen and Rieß 1988/1996). This also includes exchanging stories, adventures and emotions after the event as reported by Ugandan child soldiers (Elbert, Weierstall and Schauer 2010), or recorded in the conversations of German soldiers in prisoner of war camps (Neitzel and Welzer 2011/2012). Joyful gatherings after the killing are reported for Rwandan perpetrators (Hatzfeld 2004/2005), for Holocaust perpetrators (Klee, Dreßen, Rieß
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1988/1996) and for the staff at Auschwitz. Emotions are also present where they are apparently absent. Thus soldiers write home about having seen and witnessed shocking events about which they cannot speak (Müller 2007); the infamous statement by Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss that he was ‘reassured’ by the method of mass murder might reveal not a lack but more an acknowledgement of emotions involved in the ‘shattering scenes’ of mass shootings that he had witnessed and feared (Smeulers 1996: 25; Smeulers and Grünfeld 2011: 187). The similarities of these accounts across different atrocity events from genocide to warlord violence are striking. These accounts create vivid impressions of emotions, which are imprinted in the memory of the narrators even decades after the events, as e.g. in the case of the men of Police Battalion 101 (Browning 1992). Perpetrators’ accounts from the Rwandan genocide similarly testify to the emotional salience of the violence and killings (e.g. Anderson 2018: 158; Fletcher 2007; Hatzfeld 2004/2005). Notwithstanding the differences in time, space and context on the macro-level of these events, actual acts of atrocity violence are experienced and remembered with high emotional intensity. What emerges from many of these accounts is that in contrast to established images of violent atrocities it is difficult and not ‘something easy for people to do’ (Collins 2011: 5), and precisely therefore related to extraordinary emotional experiences. The accounts presented here bring the subjective and emotional aspects of mass violence to the fore (Mazower 2002: 1166). Beneath the macro-level of state-driven ideology and state organisations the micro-dynamics of mass violence evolve. On the macro-level, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the conflict-related massacres in Uganda, Congo and Guatemala each are unique events with distinctive patterns. However, as Randall Collins (2009: 17) argues ‘macro always contains micro within it.… Distinctive macro patterns connect smaller events into larger patterns … (But) an organization as a whole can do only what its members are capable of as micro-situational actors’. This contribution focuses on the micro-level of direct involvement in violent atrocities. It relies mainly on secondary sources that are based on what Alette Smeulers (1996: 24) terms ‘ego-documents’; this includes testimony by perpetrators during prosecution for crimes, and by eye-witnesses of the events, as perpetrators, bystanders and survivors. However, it is mostly the voices of perpetrators through which we explore emotions in violent atrocities, and aim at understanding the micro-dynamics of mass violence. Daniel Nagin’s (2007: 262) statement that ‘understanding the interaction between cognition and emotion is critical to understanding crime and how to prevent it’ equally applies to atrocity crimes. Mass atrocities might be best understood by framing them through universal and general characteristics of violent action rather than searching for ever new and specific causes for this type of violence. Such universal characteristics and the role of emotions involved in violence might help explaining the mechanisms through which the transition from non-violence to massive violence occurs that epitomises atrocity crimes and through
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which ‘ordinary’ and mostly non-violent people get involved in atrocious violence (e.g., Collins 2006; Dutton 2007: 114; 2012). The types of violent atrocities included here comprise those that are committed by collectives though not necessarily within formal organisations or as part of a large state machinery. According to legal definitions by David Scheffer (2002; overview Karstedt 2013a) they include a substantive number of victims (usually more than twenty) and mostly groups of perpetrators; the events that are explored here are characterised by direct involvement in violent atrocities rather than in remote and hierarchical decision making, or other actions that are related but not of a violent nature. The micro-analytical frameworks used here are not predicated on a distinction between legal and illegal violence, as the processes analysed do not differ between violence e.g. within war and policing, and they often culminate from various origins into extreme and mass violence (Straus 2018: 205; Collins 2006). Even if violent atrocities are mostly of a collective nature, I do not discuss collective emotions as such, as they emerge in mass rallies, or are visible in hate propaganda. Consequently, the aim is to ‘get closely into the process by which violence takes place’ and where ‘causal forces must exist’ (Collins 2008: 22; 2011: 1). In the case of atrocity crimes this in particular includes the process of ‘transition into becoming violent by a previously non-violent person’ (Dutton 2012: 46). After a long period of neglect, the role of emotions in atrocity crimes is increasingly acknowledged (e.g., Brudholm and Lang 2018; Olusanya 2014; Vetlesen 2018). This development was independent of but coincided with a much broader ‘emotional turn’ in criminology (Karstedt, Loader and Strang 2011), which in particular has informed the analysis of offender decision making, and the interaction of cognition and emotion in this process (van Gelder, Elffers, Reynald and Nagin 2014; van Gelder 2017). Both ‘emotional turns’ have in common that they move away from a ‘rational logic’ be it of state/elite interest as in the case of genocide and atrocity crimes or be it involved in the decision making of individual offenders as in a common burglary; importantly both acknowledge the interaction between (rational) cognition and emotions in this process. This chapter starts with a brief overview and critical discussion of this development in genocide and mass violence studies. I then explore the following emotional dynamics involved in violent atrocities: confrontational tension and fear based on Collins’ (2006; 2008; 2009; 2011) micro-sociological and interactional framework; related to this framework the mechanisms of domination and humiliation; the dynamics of vengeance and revenge; and the intrinsic rewards and ‘agreeable’ emotions related to violence.
Emotions and atrocity crimes: from absence to presence According to Barabara Harff (1986: 95), the Jewish Holocaust has been ‘employed as the yardstick, the ultimate criterion for assessing the scope, methods, targets and victims of genocides’. The Holocaust and its explanations thus
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provided the paradigm for an ‘exceptional crime’ and established an inexorable link between genocide as a ‘crime of state’ and the role of authorities in it, and a ‘crime of hate’ of a deeply ideological (and emotional) nature (Alvarez 1999). The ‘crime of state/crime of hate’ model reproduces main characteristics of the Holocaust, namely the role of the state in orchestrating and executing mass atrocities, and the actual execution of mass atrocities through obedience and authority. The resulting paradigm of ‘ordinary men in extraordinary situations’ has promoted a rigid, undynamic portrayal of perpetrator psychology that does not ‘take into account the more subjective and emotional aspects of mass violence’ (Mazower 2002: 1166). Hannah Arendt’s study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience and the willingness of ordinary people to inflict extraordinary pain were tremendously influential in establishing this perspective. As Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam (2012: 109) write: But if each of these contributions has been influential on their own, it is the combination of the two that has been truly powerful: Arendt’s history and perspective of Eichmann and the Holocaust provides social relevance for Milgram’s studies. Milgram’s studies in turn provide scientific credibility for Arendt’s claims. The two strands – the symbol of Arendt’s Eichmann and the symbol of Milgram’s subjects – weave together to make what has often appeared to be an uncontestable model of the psychology of human atrocities. As we succumb to authorities, we are capable of atrocious violence more ‘from inattention rather than from intention’ (Reicher and Haslam 2012: 109). Philip G. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment later confirmed this situational model that under specific situational contexts any person can be made to inflict extreme violence on others.3 Importantly, this paradigm made extreme violence look like an easy choice and option if there were only the ‘extraordinary’ conditions; it implied that there is only a small and last step from anger, hatred or ethnic hostility to violence, and that this step towards violence is an easy and quasi-automatic one. The state-centred and top-down model of state action is complemented with a corresponding model of perpetrator psychology from ‘below’, assuming a seamless transmission of ideology from macro-level contexts to the interior of individual consciousness. Both Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments had proclaimed a uniformity of (violent) reactions that seemed to apply to perpetrators of large-scale mass atrocity. However, recent evidence from both studies shows a range and diversity of reactions and involvement (Milgram: Reicher, Haslam and Miller 2014; Zimbardo: Dutton, Boyanowsky and Bond 2005: 468). This also applies to studies on genocide and mass atrocities: about 30% of the men in Christopher R. Browning’s (1992) study took part in atrocities, and
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similar proportions have been found for involvement in the Rwandan genocide (e.g. Straus 2006). This rigid and uniform portrayal of perpetrator psychology did not leave space for emotions, and in fact glossed over even the most glaring evidence of the presence of emotions in mass atrocities. The men in Browning’s pathbreaking study report emotions with excruciating detail even more than a decade later, and in front of a prosecutor; however, the role of emotions is hardly recognised in the analysis. The statement by Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss ‘that he shuddered at the prospect of carrying exterminations by shootings’ clearly testifies to the anticipation of extremely negative emotions rather than to a mindset free from emotion and led by purely rational considerations (quoted in Smeulers and Grünfeld 2011: 187). This situation has profoundly changed over the past decades. As historian Alon Confino (2014: 18–9) writes, the Holocaust was ‘fuelled by emotions’, and emotions were fundamental to policy and policy making on all levels and at all times, from the first steps in 1933 until the end of the regime, from leaders down to executioners and camp guards. Olaoluwa Olusanya (2014: 104–112) integrates emotions into a macro-micro theoretical model and into the well-known stage model of genocide development. Kjell Anderson’s (2018) account and theorizing of perpetrators particularly focus on the role of empathy as an emotion. ‘Philosophical and theoretical explorations’ of emotions and mass atrocity (Brudholm and Lang 2018) complement social science and criminological perspectives, addressing emotions of fear, pride and hatred. Several interrelated developments account for this thorough ‘emotional turn’, but none more than a shift toward the micro-level of mass atrocity events. As the centres of mass atrocities moved around the globe from Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, to Latin America, Europe and finally Africa in the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, the state-centred perspective that the Holocaust had implicitly encouraged became increasingly obsolete (Karstedt 2012; 2013a). Research on these sites and events showed that on the micro level of local communities and individual involvement processes operated in the spread and prevalence of mass atrocities that defied hierarchical models, pre-defined stages and unambiguous typologies of perpetrators, bystanders, collaborators and victims. Local emotional dynamics, and family and friendship bonds play a role as Lee Ann Fujii (2009) has shown for the recruitment process into violent groups and participation in violence in the Rwandan genocide (also Des Forges 1999; Straus 2006; Fletcher 2007). These new perspectives and insights fed back into research and understanding of the Holocaust itself. As a steady stream of new documents emerged from archives, local histories questioned the established state-centred perspective (Kühne and Lawson 2011; Cüppers, Matthäus and Angrick 2013). Studies of perpetrators in both historical and contemporary atrocity events shed new light on the psychological processes that drive participation in extreme atrocities (Straus 2017; 2018; Williams and Buckley-Zistel 2018).
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However, integrating emotions into existing models as described above has resulted in a rather indiscriminate use of emotions as an analytical tool. Emotions are explored in decisions of leaders (Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann: Olusanya 2014: 81), as well as for an array of violent and non-violent activities. Collective emotions of hatred among the population, in groups of individual perpetrators, as well as individual emotions of leaders and followers are integrated into an overall framework where emotions are predominantly seen as drivers and causes of action, be it in the imminent situation of executing violence or in the remote command position. A mostly implicit framework of causal mechanisms links the macro-level where emotions of resentment, hatred and pride (Lang 2018) are counted among the ‘origins of genocide’ (Straus 2017: 36), with the micro-level where emotions are mainly seen as motivating (and rarely inhibiting) individual perpetrators. The relationship between violence and emotion is more complex than this framework suggests. This is perhaps best illustrated by the quote from an interview with a perpetrator in the Rwandan genocide, which highlights both the mechanism by which emotions are shared and how they are linked to extreme violence: I don’t know why I hated the Tutsis, I was young, all I cared about was soccer, I was in the Kibungo team with Tutsis of my age, we passed the ball to each other without any animosity. The hatred came at the moment of the killing. I took it on by imitation and by convenience. (Fletcher 2007: 30) The aim of this chapter is not to replace a focus on factors outside violent situations with a perspective only on situational micro-dynamics. However, violent atrocities have their own logic and internal patterns which are ‘shaped by micro-interactional, emotional dynamics’ (Klusemann 2012: 469). It is in these processes that we can best understand emotions in mass atrocities and their role in the ‘transition into becoming violent by a previously non-violent person’ (Dutton 2012: 46).
Why violence is difficult: confrontational tensions and fear According to Randall Collins (2006; 2008; 2009; 2011) neither background factors like socio-demographic characteristics nor the motivation of actors can explain when and how violence will happen; this applies to all types of violence, including mass atrocities. Rather, the key to understanding violence is the actual situation in which a violent confrontation occurs and violence is used, and the emotional dynamics of violent micro-interactions develop. Violent situations – and there is no exception – are emotional confrontations, and when doing violence humans are ‘gripped by a high level of confrontational tension and fear. Anger, grievance and ideology fade into the background’ (Collins 2011: 5) when individuals try to overcome this
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confrontational tension, which functions as a barrier to violent action. Situational conditions and interactions thus largely ‘determine what kind of violence will or will not happen, and when and how’ (Collins 2008: 20). The initial ‘confrontational tension/fear’ is a highly stressful emotional experience (Collins 2008: 19). Perpetrators’ facial expressions and body postures show a high level of tension, as photos from the Holocaust or from the Cambodian genocide evidence.4 Martin Cüppers and his colleagues (2013) provide photographical and oral evidence of such tensions and stress from several massacres during the Holocaust. Kjell Anderson (2018: 137) quotes from his perpetrator interviews in Rwanda: ‘everyone was afraid, even Interahamwe’. Tan Hecheng (2017) reports many instances of individual and collective nature during the killings in a small county in China during the Cultural Revolution, when people shied away from extreme violence, hesitated, and often only reluctantly started to actually engage in violent acts. Similarly, Browning (1992) provides evidence of such instances of confrontational tensions and hesitation, as does the statement by camp commander Höss. Confrontational tension/fear makes violence essentially difficult for human beings, especially in close-range and face-to-face confrontations, where atrocity crimes are actually committed.5 Individuals and groups normally refrain from using violence, even after going down considerably on the path towards violence. This perspective is diametrically opposed to the conventional paradigm of atrocity violence being an easy choice and mostly uniform reaction under specific conditions. The emotionally stressful condition of confrontational tension/fear needs to be overcome and managed in order to make violence generally and in its extreme forms possible. Two strategies are essential for violent atrocities, and both typically imply emotions. The first strategy aims at weakening the victim by emotionally dominating them; this strategy mobilises emotions of dominance in order to heighten levels of ‘emotional energy’ (Collins 2008: 19). The second strategy uses an audience to encourage the performance of violence through cheering the actors on, eliciting positive emotions resulting from bonding with others. Both strategies combine humiliation and domination, as emotions of dominance are related to the humiliation of victims. Together they are decisive in the unfolding of mass atrocity events as ‘the emotional mood is interactional … it is shared on both sides’ (Collins 2006: 48) by perpetrators and victims.
Emotional dynamics of dominance and humiliation Collins (2006; 2008, Chapters 1 and 11) analyses the sequence from confrontational tension to extreme violence and mass atrocities as an increase in emotional dominance among the perpetrator group and a simultaneous loss of emotional dominance among victims, leading to complete demoralization. Whilst those that acquire emotional dominance have high levels of confidence, enthusiasm, and emotional initiative, bolstered by solidarity rituals among group members, the victims increasingly lose control and subside into
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low confidence, passivity and shock. This process of gaining and retaining dominance is accompanied by signs of joy, excitement, and mutual emotional reassurance, resulting in a ‘hot rush’ (Collins 2008: 91; 2006; for offender decision generally, see van Gelder 2017). Such signs of positive emotions and enthusiasm are often seen as particularly vile expressions of pleasure in violent acts. In fact they are an integral part of engaging in violence and retaining the emotional energy that is required for massive and extreme violence. Stefan Klusemann (2012) describes this process for the Srebrenica and Rwandan genocidal massacres, and recurrent patterns of atrocity violence observed for both: violence against ‘easy targets’ before the onset of mass violence, killing games and rapes as massacres have gone on for some time and culminate, ‘solidarity rituals’ including singing and shouting before violent attacks, or killing in groups. Collins (2006: 48–49) describes the Rape of Nanking, the mass killings of Chinese soldiers and civilians by the Japanese army, as a case of total and emotional domination resulting in a ‘forward panic’ and killing frenzy (‘overkill’; see also Dutton, Boyanowsky and Bond 2005: 455), accompanied by the ‘panic paralysis’ of victims. It is decisive for the flow of mass atrocity events that the emotional dominance and energy is sustained within the perpetrator group and in all instances when they face the victims. For these reasons, perpetrators confront even individual and unarmed victims in groups (i.e. where it would not be necessary (Klusemann 2012; also Dutton et al. 2005)). Typically, in the course of a mass atrocity they start to shun and avoid facial confrontation as described by Anderson (2018: 158) for Rwanda and by Browning (1992) for the men who were involved in Holocaust massacres.6 It is common to relate these processes of emotional dominance to the ‘dehumanization’ of victims, which precede atrocity crimes and prepare for them. However, as Donald G. Dutton et al. (2005: 462–464) observe reports by perpetrators of ‘victims as not human’ must be confronted with what they actually had to know about human emotions and moral norms when submitting victims to extreme violence. Humiliation practices reveal knowledge of human social taboos, in particular sexual taboos, and ‘their function is to generate a human emotion, humiliation’ (Dutton et al. 2005: 464). This includes stripping victims naked as widely practiced in the Holocaust (Browning 1992; Cüppers et al. 2013). Shouting insults at the victim, as John Hagan and Wynona Rymond-Richmond (2008) found for attacks by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, is as much indicative of humiliation of victims as it is part of the rise of emotional energy and dominance in the act of doing violence. Shouting insults is often interpreted as a reflection of a particular motivation to commit violence, however as Scott Straus (2006) found for Rwanda, most perpetrators did not even support radical forms of ethnic prejudice. Ideological ‘dehumanization’ of victims might provide cognitive patterns of variable motivational strength, however the actual practices of humiliation are based on universally shared knowledge about their emotional impact on human beings. Hence, ‘dehumanization’ as a major explanatory factor of atrocity violence is called into question, as perpetrators act on ‘too
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human traits’ in expectation of the pain that they can inflict on humans (Dutton 2007: 68). The interdependence between emotions of domination and humiliation is further evidenced in ‘killing games’ such as running the gauntlet and carousing rituals (Klusemann 2012). In Rwanda, a series of rituals like painting faces with chalk, singing and dancing ensured the emotional dominance and solidarity among the perpetrator group (Hatzfeld 2004/2005; Fletcher 2007). Immediate precursors of atrocity violence like looting, arson and damage to property, or taking away cars and valuables are accompanied by singing, shouting, laughter and generally done in ebullient mood, as expressions of solidarity increase emotional dominance. For the Holocaust we have numerous reports on such preparations, both in terms of attacks on property or sexual assaults (Browning 1992; Cüppers et al. 2013). Cheerful audiences of common soldiers and officers were attracted by and gathered around the massacres to such an extent that it was soon prohibited by the German Army (Klee, Dreeßen and Rieβ 1988/1996: 106–130). The emotional intensity changes in the course of mass violence and massacres. Emotional dominance is boosted and retained for rather short time spans which accounts for the generally short duration of single massacre events (Klusemann 2012). During the Srebrenica massacre when emotional dominance had been established, the killings became more routinised and impersonal through the division of tasks among the group. The signs of emotional involvement and engagement subsided, and much of the killing was taken over by professional paramilitaries who generally are trained to overcome confrontational tension/fear. In contrast, Collins (2006: 47) observes for the massacres by the Japanese Army in Nanking in 1937 that the mood of emotional dominance and its corollaries ‘lasted unusually long’, being most intense during the first week, but extending across nearly three weeks. Here, the context of military hierarchy and orders might have sustained what Collins terms a ‘moral holiday’ (2006: 47) though commanders had mostly lost control over their troops early on.7
Vengeance and revenge mechanisms For anthropologist Jared Diamond (2008: 10), the ‘thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear’. As an emotional reaction to an ‘initial wrongdoing or provocation’ it is a ‘powerful motivator of violence’ across time, space and all types of violence and aggression (Eisner 2009: 48). It is decisive for understanding atrocity violence that vengeance and revenge can be seen as ‘virtuous’ (Fiske and Rai 2015) or ‘moralistic’ violence (Cooney 1997), and thus mass atrocities be justified as a form of righteous punishment (see also Dutton 2007: 153). Vengeance and revenge therefore have a strong emotional presence in perpetrators and eye-witnesses’ accounts of atrocity violence. According to eyewitnesses the My Lai massacre in Vietnam committed by soldiers of the U.S.
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Army was accompanied by ‘expressions of anger and revenge towards the victims’ (Dutton 2007: 120). Reports from the Nanking massacres by the Japanese testify to the expression of such emotions (Collins 2006) that were supported by ideological narratives about the enemy. Combatants in guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia name ‘revenge’ as a motive for joining these groups (Arjona and Kalyvas 2011). Even if this does not indicate actual participation in atrocity crimes, personal accounts from Colombian perpetrators testify to such emotions as motivation for atrocities (Civico 2016). Straus (2006: 155) found that a significant minority (21%) of Rwandan perpetrators he interviewed claimed that they killed to avenge the assassination of President Habyarimana. As such claims are made in hindsight and often as justification of atrocity violence as ‘moralistic violence’, it is not clear in which ways individuals indeed acted upon such emotions when committing violence. Personal anger and a personal desire for vengeance against specific victims are a surprisingly common motive for joining in mass atrocities, as these provide cover for exercising personal revenge for individually experienced wrongs. They are an important part of locally embedded atrocity events. Thus reports from the Holocaust on the involvement of local people in mass killings (Klee et al. 1988/ 1996: 32–34) testify to satisfying a personal desire for vengeance. Tan Hecheng (2017) provides an extraordinary number of accounts of such personal vengeance killings in the villages of the Chinese county, unleashed in the context of orders to kill ‘trouble makers’. In nearly every event he reports, at least one such personal vengeance killing took place. However, rather than vengeance precedes violent atrocity, the expectation and fear of revenge seems to be at least an equally powerful motivation for mass violence, and mostly visible in the micro processes of mass atrocities. We hear these fears of revenge by the Allies in the voices of German soldiers in prisoner of war camps when they touch upon the atrocities committed in East Europe. This is indicative of acknowledgement of atrocious crimes as much as of expectations about retaliation, and the interdependence between both. Such feelings of fear of revenge are expressed by both highest and lowest ranks (Neitzel and Welzer 2011/ 2012). The men of the Police Battalion, who carry out mass shootings in Poland during the Holocaust, in particular justify the killing of women and children with fear of later retaliation by future generations (Browning 1992; see also Klee et al. 1988/1996: 44–51). The extraordinary number of killings of children and teenagers during the ‘Killing Wind’ in the Chinese county, and the killing of whole families was motivated by fear of retaliation and seen as preventive measures against such revenge by the perpetrators (Hecheng 2017). As much as fear of retaliation might act as inhibitor to the initiation of violence according to Collins (2008), once it has started violence seems to be a powerful driver of mass atrocities within two contexts where such fears are more realistic: first, if perpetrators and victims live together in communities, and second, in the case of waves and cycles of mass atrocities between two groups as in Rwanda or Darfur. In
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both contexts, such fears of revenge might be based in experience and equally vindicated (Karstedt 2013a; Anderson 2018: 199).
Emotions as intrinsic rewards of violent atrocities Most people in most situations do not experience pleasurable emotions when watching or inflicting extreme violence. However, it is one of the most disturbing characteristics of mass violence and atrocity crimes that such emotions are present and visible, during as well as after such events. It has been shown that the process of retaining dominance and emotional energy among the perpetrator group is accompanied by numerous expressions of positive emotions like e.g. excitement, pleasure and joy; this also applies to soldiers independent of involvement in atrocities (Harrisville 2018; overview Dutton et al. 2005; Dutton 2012). More generally, in the course of atrocity events individuals and groups become engulfed in states of emotional arousal, expressed in singing and shouting. Afterwards they exchange stories of the violence reminiscing in positive emotions (Elbert, Weierstall and Schauer 2010; Hatzfeld 2004/2005). A perpetrator from the Rwandan genocide describes ‘an unprecedented pleasure for everyone’ (Hatzfeld 2004/2005: 53). Such emotions are widespread among participants in mass atrocities, and thus ‘cannot be reduced to individual pathologies’ (Eisner 2009: 51; Baumeister and Campbell 1999). ‘Ordinary men’ experience such emotions as part of the ’transition into becoming violent by a previously non-violent person’ (Dutton 2012: 46). However, feelings of revulsion and disgust, and later shame are simultaneously reported by perpetrators. There are numerous reports from the Holocaust, including the men in the Police Battalion that the mass shootings were emotionally upsetting, and from perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide about the agony of killing (e.g., Anderson 2018: 158). Independent of involvement in mass atrocities, 20–30% of battle soldiers suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by their own violent actions (Baumeister and Campbell 1999). Such confluence of antagonistic feelings seems to be common in violent actions more generally (Eisner 2009: 52) as much as in atrocity and extreme violence. Two approaches, which both have foundations in evolutionary perspectives, explore these emotion dynamics, in particular for atrocity crimes. Roy Baumeister and Keith Campbell (1999) argue that repetition of violence is decisive for reducing the initial aversive and distressed response to violent acts. When violence is repeated the more pleasant emotions become more dominant; this in particular happens if facilitated by support from a group of perpetrators and/or spectators (Dutton et al. 2005; Dutton 2007, 2012). Collins’ analysis of the process of overcoming confrontational tension/fear concurs with this perspective and Klusemann’s (2012) analysis of the emotional dynamics of massacres provides empirical evidence from Srebrenica and Rwanda. Dutton (2007; 2012) in particular refers to the accounts from the police men executing the Holocaust in Poland; they describe a process in
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which they not only became habitualised to violence, but also shared positive feelings between themselves (Browning 1992). Jean Hatzfeld (2004/2005: 53) quotes one of his interviewees from the Rwandan genocide: ‘the more we killed the more we acquired a taste for it’. Thomas Elbert, Roland Weierstall and their colleagues researched the process in which violence becomes fascinating and exciting, and intricately linked to positive emotions. They term this the ‘appetitive experience of committing violent acts”, and they define ‘appetitive aggression’ as ‘the perpetration of violence or the infliction of harm on a victim for the purpose of experiencing violence-related enjoyment’ (Crombach et al. 2013: 560). Their research demonstrates for Rwandan genocide perpetrators (Weierstall et al. 2011), soldiers and former combatants in Congo (Haer et al. 2013; Hecker et al. 2012; Weierstall et al. 2013b) and Columbia (Weierstall et al. 2013a) and for child soldiers from Uganda (Crombach et al. 2013) that committing violent acts can indeed be highly appetitive. Their findings for Congolese soldiers and Ugandan former child soldiers show that appetitive aggression develops in long-term transitions and conducive environments that reward cruel violence. The earlier in life the Congolese combatants had joined the forces, the more they experienced violence-related enjoyment (Hecker et al. 2012). Ugandan child soldiers who had achieved the rank of a soldier within the Lord Resistance experienced violence more positive and also committed a greater variety of violent acts; appetitive aggression was strongly related to their violence, including atrocity crimes (Crombach et al. 2013). In a similar vein the intrinsic rewards of violence, including the perpetration of atrocities, experienced by volunteer (in contrast to abducted) combatants in Congo are related to higher levels of appetitive aggression (Haer et al. 2013; Hecker et al. 2012). In these as well as in studies on the Colombian rebels it was found that such predispositions for the development of appetitive aggression is widespread and ‘not limited to a small fraction of potentially psychopathic individuals’ (Crombach et al. 2013: 572). It can be assumed that appetitive aggression is a mechanism to overcome the initial negative feelings related to violence. Importantly it has wider reaching implications. Weierstall and his colleagues found that appetitive aggression can inhibit PTSD and other trauma-related symptoms in Rwandan genocide perpetrators and prevent them from being traumatised by their own violence (Weierstall et al. 2011). Similar results were found for Colombian combatants, who had either demobilized on their own initiative or had been forced to demobilise collectively. Higher appetitive aggression was related to reduced risk of PTSD among those who had been collectively mobilised, while the other group had higher levels of PTSD and lower levels of appetitive aggression (Weierstall et al. 2013a). In this way positive emotions related to violent acts function as a shield against negative emotions and the trauma related to violence; fending off trauma emerges as one of the intrinsic psychological rewards of such emotion-driven violence.
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Conclusion: a cautious note Emotions are a powerful factor in all violence. In atrocity violence, emotions are particularly visible and salient. The analytical and empirical move toward the micro-level of mass atrocities and ‘closer into the process by which such violence takes place’ reveals the extraordinary presence of emotions at every stage of this process, and has provided a more realistic perspective on the role of emotions. As emotions – both positive and negative – seemingly are universal corollaries of violence generally, they are decisive in understanding the ‘transition into becoming violent by a previously non-violent person’. Dominance, vengeance and intrinsic emotional rewards are potent drivers of cruel and atrocity violence; however, they are rarely antecedents but rather instigated by the violent action itself. As such, they make violence a less difficult choice for those involved, in particular in major atrocity violence. Both external and intrinsic rewards interact in the recurrent cruel behaviour in crisis regions and extremely violent settings, and it seems to be critical to intervene into emotion-driven violence directly rather than to address even proximate causes. Emotions are neither causes of mass atrocities, ‘origins of genocide’, nor do they fuel mass atrocities across all levels of the state machinery. We should rather think of emotions as the keys that open the doors to the start, persistence and recurrence of mass atrocities. What we need for prevention of mass atrocities in extremely violent settings is a much better understanding of the interaction between cognition and emotion that makes violence a less difficult choice – not different than for any other violent crimes.
Notes 1 This is the essence of Randall Collins’ micro-sociological theory of violence; the quote is from Collins (2011: 5). 2 The collection of photos is available on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/?f%5Brecord_type_fa cet%5D%5B%5D=Photograph&per_page=50&q=hoecker+album&search_field=a ll_fields (accessed August 1, 2018). 3 Both the Milgram experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiments have been critically assessed, and their results widely questioned and disputed (see Haslam, Reicher and van Bavel (2018) for the Stanford Prison Experiment). 4 See Karstedt (2013b), including a range of photographic evidence from different types of atrocity crimes. Reports and photos from the Holocaust in Klee, Dreßen and Rieß (1988/1996); Matthäus and Browning (2013); Paul (2013). 5 Estimates of the victims of the Holocaust show that nearly half of them were murdered in massacres; see also for Rwanda, Straus (2006). 6 See photo from the Holocaust at: http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8509/8519828758_ df3cc5e5a6_b.jpg 7 Sustained emotions of dominance are conducive to atrocious violence; this seems to apply to women involved in the Holocaust in East Europe, who suddenly saw themselves as reigning over estates and people, or accompanying powerful masters over life and death. Tellingly this was termed ‘Ostrausch’ (Eastern Frenzy); Lower (2013) cites wilful killing of Jewish children by these women; see Browning (1992) for reports of spouses of perpetrators watching the massacres.
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Kühne, Thomas (2008). ‘Male Bonding and Shame Culture: Hitler’s Soldiers and the Moral Basis of Genocidal Warfare’, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds). Ordinary People as Mass Murderers. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Kühne, Thomas and Tom Lawson (eds) (2011). The Holocaust and Local History. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Lang, Johannes (2018). ‘The Proud Executioner: Pride and the Psychology of Genocide’, in Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang (eds). Emotions and Mass Atrocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lower, Wendy (2013). Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. London: Chatto & Windus. Matthäus, Jürgen and Christopher R. Browning (2013). ‘Evidenz, Erinnerung, Trugbild: Fotoalben zum Polizeibataillon 101 im ‘Osteinsatz”, in Martin Cüppers, Jürgen Matthäus and Andrej Angrick (eds). Naziverbrechen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch Gesellschaft. Mazower, Mark (2002). ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’. American Historical Review, 10(4): 1158–1166. Müller, Oliver (2007). Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Feinde. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Nagin, Daniel (2007). ‘Moving Choice to Center Stage in Criminological Research and Theory’. Criminology, 45(2): 259–272. Neitzel, Sönke and Harald Welzer (2011/2012). Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. English edition: (2012). Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying. London: Simon & Schuster. Olusanya, Olaoluwa (2014). Emotions, Decision-Making and Mass Atrocities. Farnham: Ashgate. Paul, Gerhard (2013). ‘Lemberg ’41: Bilder der Gewalt’, in Martin Cüppers, Jürgen Matthäus and Andrej Angrick (eds). Naziverbrechen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch Gesellschaft. Reicher, Stephen and S. Alexander Haslam (2012). ‘Obedience: Revisiting Milgram’s Shock Experiments’, in Joanne R. Smith and S. Alexander Haslam (eds). Social Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Reicher, Stephen, S. Alexander Haslamand Arthur G. Miller (2014). ‘What Makes a Person a Perpetrator? The Intellectual, Moral and Methodological Arguments for Revisiting Milgram’s Research on the Influence of Authority’. Journal of Social Issues, 70(3): 393–408. Scheffer, David (2002). ‘The Future of Atrocity Law’. Suffolk Transnational Law Review, 25(3): 389–432. Smeulers, Alette (1996). ‘Auschwitz and the Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators’. Tijdschrift van de Stichting Auschwitz, 50: 23–55. Smeulers, Alette and Fred Grünfeld (2011). International Crimes and Other Gross Human Rights Violations. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Straus, Scott (2006). The Order of Genocide. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Straus, Scott (2017). ‘Studying Perpetrators: A Reflection’. Journal of Perpetrator Research, 1(1): 28–38. Straus, Scott (2018). ‘Is a Comparative Theory of Perpetrators Possible’, in Timothy Williams and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (eds). Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence. London: Routledge. Van Gelder, Jean-Louis (2017). ‘Emotions in Offender Decision Making’, in Wim Bernasco, Jean-Louis van Gelder and Henk Elffers (eds). The Oxford Handbook on Offender Decision Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Van Gelder, Jean-Louis, Henk Elffers, Danielle Reynald and Daniel Nagin (eds) (2014). Affect and Cognition in Criminal Decision Making. London: Routledge. Vetlesen, Arne Johan (2018). ‘Social Science and the Study of Perpetrators’, in Thomas Brudholm and Johannes Lang (eds). Emotions and Mass Atrocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weierstall, Roland, SusanneSchaal, IngaSchalinski, Jean-PierreDusingizemungu and Thomas Elbert (2011). ‘The Thrill of Being Violent as an Antidote to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Rwandese Genocide Perpetrators’. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2: 1–8. Weierstall, Roland, Claudia PatriciaBueno Castellanos, FrankNeuner and Thomas Elbert (2013a). ‘Relations among Appetitive Aggression, Post-Traumatic Stress and Motives for Demobilization: A Study in Former Colombian Combatants’. Conflict and Health, 7(9): 1–10. Weierstall, Roland, RoosHaer, LilliBanholzer and Thomas Elbert (2013b). ‘Becoming Cruel: Appetitive Aggression Released by Detrimental Socialisation in Former Congolese Soldiers’. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 37(6): 505–513. Williams, Timothy and Susanne Buckley-Zistel (eds) (2018). Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence. London: Routledge.
Part 2
Punishment and emotions
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‘Forty-five colour photographs’ Images, emotions and the victim of domestic violence Dawn Moore and Stephanie Hoffeler
Introduction In 2015, Rashmee Singh and I wrote our first article from our research on the collection of images of injuries as evidence in domestic violence prosecutions. The research was based on case law and focused on one particularly egregious case, State of West Virginia vs. Peter Lizon. The case contained every element of evidence collection and prosecution that fuelled our initial interests in and concerns with the use of images of injuries as evidence in domestic violence (DV) prosecutions: a non-compliant, far from ideal victim who explained away 45 images of her battered body. These photos were taken by a shelter worker and placed in the hands of police without the victim’s knowledge or consent. Later, the images became the primary drivers of three separate legal proceedings including a preliminary hearing, a grand jury, threats of perjury against the victim and the victim’s own criminalization culminating in the loss of her children through family court proceedings. In each of these hearings the same photographs told near identical stories of the same victim, all presided over by the same judge.1 Singh and I theorized the images in Lizon (and other cases) work against the victim: they are antagonistic. We knew the images were saturated with emotions, all the predictable ones scripted for DV victims. Meeting the victim herself opened up an emotional landscape that was far removed from the one constituted through legal proceedings by way of these images: the landscape of the victim herself. Within weeks of that article’s publication, I received an email from Stephanie Hoffeler (formerly Lizon), the victim (she feels that the term ‘survivor’ is not appropriate in this context). Stephanie became a key collaborator on our project. She is a writer and, through our collaboration, I am exploring data analysis working with writing, images and, most importantly, foregrounding the voice of someone who could so easily have remained another two-dimensional object in our research. Stephanie has her own reasons for participating in our collaboration: My interest was already piqued, when I had only read the abstract of ‘Seeing Crime’. I read your CVs and was easily able to confirm my first impression that our points of view were complimentary and our political
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D. Moore opinions compatible. I reached out to you because you were the only people, in the whole world it seems, that deemed it appropriate to focus on the travesty of what the state did to me and to my family, rather than whatever did or didn’t happen behind the closed doors of my home and within the confines of my marital bed.
This chapter is a methodologically unconventional study of conventions of emotions and victimization. In the spirit of recent appeals to intersectional scholars to ‘pass the mic’, the backbone of this chapter is Stephanie’s own work, commissioned in a way by me. The principle of ‘passing the mic’ flags the political act of making space for the voices of those traditionally spoken for. This notion is most recently attached to millennial feminisms as a call to feminists in a position of power to cede the floor to those with lived experiences, enabling victims of crime to offer their own stories in their own words. Through the help of the legal clinic at West Virginia University, Stephanie is now in possession of those photographs again. In the spirit of at least sharing the mic, here, together, we explore the emotionality of those images through their expected, scripted emotional invocations and Stephanie’s divergent perspectives. My previous work with Rashmee Singh (Moore and Singh 2015; 2018) focused on the establishment of the ‘data double’ of the DV victim, a docile subject constructed through visual and audio evidence who sits apart from her flesh and blood originator. The data double is a privileged actor in DV prosecutions; she is made to speak while the victim herself remains silent or is forced into silence. The words of victims often encumber the work of investigation and prosecution thus, allegedly threatening the fragility of the promise of justice made to victims (Sibley et al., 2019). My intellectual collaboration with Stephanie begins with the data double because it was this idea that resonated with Stephanie from the start. Contra arguments that ‘everyday’ people take no benefit from theoretical arguments, Stephanie’s collaboration takes that data double into the emotional world, showing that while she, the data double, may be manipulated to form of an ideal victim who elicits scripted emotional responses, she may also be viewed through other eyes, especially those of her originator. Seen from Stephanie’s perspective, the images of her injured body enter into an emotional world that inverts and offends the criminal justice system’s (CJS) view of the vulnerable, helpless victim. In Stephanie’s world, wilfulness and resilience challenge, if not erase, that stereotype.
Forty-five colour photographs – Stephanie’s story From Stephanie: You. The photographs. You remind me of the minefield that my life is. You remind me of all the forks in the road. Did I go the wrong way? Maybe not, because I’ve heard tell that the high road comes with pain. I
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can and may agree to be martyred for the benefit of my marriage, my children, my immortal soul … It’s said, ‘… no, it can’t be true!’ that I, a woman, have strength enough … resolve enough … to choose the faith for which I might be sacrificed. But I do have the strength. And the faith I chose is my own. While the case is a node, this is not a study of The State of West Virginia vs. Lizon. This is the story of the tension Stephanie describes above. This is ultimately a study of how emotions stick to images of violence. Specifically, this is a study of Lizon (images) vs. Lizon (mother, woman, human, activist, writer), 2 an analysis of how images of an injured body become the primary drivers for the criminalization of the person inhabiting that body. Following Stephanie’s words, this is a study of how images turn into landmines and force martyrdom on the very person they are meant to ‘save’, for a cause she herself opposes. This is a story of acceptable and unacceptable emotions and, the consequences for a victim who makes the wrong choice. In the summer of 2012, Stephanie had been in a relationship with Peter Lizon for 12 years, married for ten. Their first child was stillborn in 2009, but they now had a living son, who was just over one year old. Painfully and visibly injured, Stephanie took an opportunity to run. She hid in a store and eventually made her way that night to a women’s shelter. The shelter was not an active choice on Stephanie’s part. Her desire was simply to book a hotel room and let things with Peter cool down. But without identification or a credit card, options are limited, and the women’s shelter was the ‘least distasteful’ as Stephanie puts it. At the shelter, Stephanie gave a fake name and refused to disclose any abuse to anyone. At a certain point she had to take a shower, which meant removing the dressings from her wounds. In the aftermath, Stephanie’s injuries became harder to conceal and she disclosed their existence to her roommate at the shelter. This disclosure and the injuries became a point of interest to shelter workers who ‘berated and blackmailed’ (Stephanie’s description) her, coerced her consent, then photographed her injuries. Stephanie does, however, take credit for her own, eventual, consent to be photographed, with the important caveat that her consent was obtained with the solemn promise of control; the images were for Stephanie alone, ‘just in case’. Contrary to policy and Stephanie’s clear instructions, the shelter retained copies of the images. Days after the pictures were taken, Stephanie’s former shelter roommate brought the Lizons to the attention of the local prosecutor. Within the week, manipulations of policy and law landed Stephanie’s file in the hands of the Sherriff’s office. Although Stephanie was still unaware of it, the saga of the 45 colour photographs had begun. The photos initiated both criminal and family proceedings, as well as a startling amount of sensationalized press coverage. Charges were laid against Peter whose bond was set at an unusually high UD$ 300,000. During the three months it took Stephanie to arrange his release, she spoke to Peter daily. When Peter was released, Stephanie defied the bond order, returned to him
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and conceived her third child. The following summer, her daughter was born. A few days later, criminal charges against Peter were dismissed. Proceedings in Family Court, however, continued. In May of 2014, Stephanie’s (and Peter’s) parental rights were terminated. Both filed appeals to the West Virginia Supreme Court that upheld the lower court’s decision. The photographs of Stephanie, especially their emotional content, played significant roles in each proceeding and served as strong evidence to terminate her parental rights in the face of ‘emotional neglect by failure to protect from witnessing domestic violence’. Here Stephanie describes what happened: Peter and I met in 2000, and were married just over two years later. Together we were artists and activists, and met the coming of the new American Fascism with consistent indignation and resistance. In 2004, just before the election, we were arrested during a direct-action political protest. It became more and more obvious that homesteading in a remote locale would be the best option for us. We ignored concerns based on what we felt must simply be outdated prejudice against rural folk. Surely, we thought, we won’t be singled out, and made examples of, simply for being different … As regrettable as this is, it cannot be disputed that DV is a normal problem. West Virginia is no different than the rest of the world, and women are the victims of gender-based violence on a daily basis. Peter and I had normal problems. What was ‘abnormal’ about us, was our appearance, our accents, our political, religious, and social viewpoints, the weird music we listened to, the imported beer. The gossip began almost immediately, but it was years before our usual problems, mingled with our unusual choices, resulted in full-blown scandal. During the process of acquiring a birth-certificate for our born-at-home son, we came to the attention of the local Department of Health and Human Resources and Child Protective Services. It wasn’t long before fighting them off became our full-time jobs. Somehow, we managed to force the Department to close, ‘without findings’, not one, but two cases against us. The government’s demand to ‘help’ us only served to increase the tension in our relationship, and with that, increased the level and frequency of violence. When I made that, now famous, getaway, in late June of 2012, it was without a plan for the future, without an ID, without any money, and WITH a visible limp and bruises on my face. I didn’t really feel that I had any choice other than a DV shelter. Surely there, I could have a moment to breathe, and figure out what to do. And there I went, headlong into cruel optimism (Berlant 2003). I was immediately at odds, politically, and socially, with the staff at the shelter. Once again, it seemed that I was too uppity. It was a combination of resentment, misunderstanding, and full-on populist crusade, that lead to my outing at the hands of both the shelter (to CPS – Child Protective
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Services) and one of the other residents (to the Prosecutor). But they, unlike I, spoke a ‘language’ that the court understood well … and liked very much. The fundamental lack of respect for my right to self-determination was evident early-on. Dragging my husband into court will make me less, not more, safe, I said. They didn’t seem to care. These particular feminists, were more interested in punishing him, than helping me orchestrate my escape. My safety-plan? Hah! How could someone as backwards as me ever climb out of the pit-trap of complete denial?! I don’t even have enough smarts to not be seduced by a foreigner. It was the shelter staff, that planted those fruitful seeds – Stephanie, the slap-addled. She’s crazy, you know? She’s suffering from some trauma-induced syndrome that preys on the spiritually vulnerable woman who thinks she’s in love. Not a single one of our appearances in the media failed to mention the tidbit that my husband was from, some-other-country-not-the-one-he’s-actually-from. I entered the shelter simply wanting to exit the immediate situation, which I judged to be an ongoing emergency. Yes, of course, I sought relief from my pain, I hoped to eventually treat my injuries, both physical and psychological. I craved to make a home with my son that was safe and loving. But all I really asked for was a bed and a roof. And what did I get? That, I guess, and, oh, I got antibiotic cream, and Tylenol 3. But more than that, I got the angry, foul-mouthed, and careless, total intervention and destructive force of absolute hegemony. I did then, and will continue to, insist that, how, exactly, it unfolded is (although an interesting story) not the important, or even pertinent, question. And it was for this very attitude that I was really put on trial. I continued to resist, and complain, and show myself a whole person, fully desirous of exercising my natural right to life and liberty and, conscience. I was found guilty and punished accordingly. Disobedience is the official finding. At the end of all the litigation, I found myself right back where I started, only now, all of my resources were spent, stolen or destroyed, my children, kidnapped. In this excerpt from ‘Claws’ (2017), I explore the metaphor of the runaway, returned home by force. I embody the unruly woman-child, who is in such dire need of supervision and discipline that her physical safety and freedom of thought and conscience are considered a collateral loss, and any restraint or crippling that might slow her next flight, a regrettable but ultimately necessary means toward the end of protecting the status quo and silencing troubling dissent. As any subordinate, the ‘battered wife’, cannot be humanized, because that evidence of humanity makes it so much more difficult to blame the victim, and justify the captivity of one deemed, ‘lesser’. As for the 45 colour photographs that played such a role for so long? Stephanie tells the rest of their story, excerpted here. While Stephanie requested that the photos be taken for her own reasons, the shelter worker had them
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developed and gave them, without Stephanie’s permission, to Stephanie’s father, who had simply come to the shelter to pick her up. Stephanie believes that this breach of confidentiality was an intentional, strategic manoeuvre: I had many, lengthy conversations with lawyers, PIs, advocates, and, oh, yes, the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. They didn’t even TRY to defend the shelter Director for doing any of those horrible, and possibly illegal things I said she did. No, there was no point. They simply denied that she could have, or did, do or say any of it. But I had the answer; ‘it’s the pictures,’ I said, ‘they are kind of graphic. They seem to elicit irrational emotional responses.’ ‘I don’t know how that could happen,’ was the Coalition’s response. But it doesn’t matter that they didn’t see how. It did happen. And then it happened again, and then again, and again, and again another time, as one after the next, literalist, bigot, misogynist and xenophobe, got to gasp at those pics, and see in them, whatever they wanted to see, and exhibit them for the promotion of their rigid, personal, emotional agendas. Given how quickly the images were spread, it is hardly surprising they made it into the hands of the local prosecutor as well as CPS. The state violence they enabled through their emotional weight, as Stephanie says, is far more important to chronicle than the abuse itself.
Emotions of the image of violence Emotions, in Sara Ahmed’s (2004) words, stick. The adhesive quality of emotions suggests both generalized affective responses to certain emotional assemblages and also dictates a script of relationality indicating in what manner, for how long and under what circumstances we are intended to have an emotional reaction to an image. Axiomatically, images, especially of real people and things, incite emotional reactions. The graphic images of maladies that adorn packages of cigarettes are meant to revolt. Pictures of sad children with big eyes look out from transit ads for a children’s charity illicit solemnity, pity and perhaps guilt. These are scripted responses. The image as evidence animates the argument. Critical scholars point to the truth affect of the image (Biber 2006; 2007; Butler 1993; Feigenson 2011; Mnookin 1998; Sekula 1986; Sontag 2003; Young 1996). These same scholars point to the capriciousness of that truth. While an image may format a particular truth, the familiar contestation of the meaning of an image in the course of a trial serves as a reminder that those truths are neither self-evident nor universal. Images, after all, are consumed as though they begin and end at the click of the shutter, making that microsecond of time a permanent record of a much bigger truth. The shutter click is only one step in the process of creating and consuming an image, a step that sits somewhere in the middle of an assemblage of technical, cultural and political factors (Sekula 1986).
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These factors, spoken or not, affect the ways we respond emotionally to an image (see Sekula 1986; Sontag 2003). Images must be both captured and seen. Both these acts are subjective, contingent and political (Butler 1993; Sontag 2003; Bourdieu 1990). In her essay ‘They Are Objects’, Stephanie offers this reflection: All that YOU can see, when you look [at the photographs] is one exposure, one flash of light, illuminating my skin for a fraction of a second. I am the only one who knows the entire story behind them, because I was the only one that was there, inside that skin. I was there, in that body, beginning to end. I was there for every assault, every accident, and not just the ones you carelessly pasted in that little scrapbook of exhibits. I’m talking about each of those long hours, when the actual damage was done, the injuries that counted to ME, inside and out, to body, mind and soul. I was there when I posed for your evidence collection. I was the once and perpetual driver for their existence, and the only one who actually felt emotions, those pictures don’t feel anything, not even simple pain. No matter how detailed your study, no matter how persuasively you interrogate them and threaten them, no matter how vivid your hallucination and how plaintive the voice you hear, they [the photographs] will not tell you the truth. They won’t tell you the truth because they don’t know the truth, they don’t actually know anything. As Stephanie suggests in her address to you, her reader, the ‘vivid hallucinations’ of images of injuries, as images of truth, are not merely figments of a legal imagination. They are part of a cultural imaginary that can only read battered female bodies through a singular narrative, one saturated with dictated vulnerability (Walklate 2011).
Controlling emotion/controlling victims Carol Sanger (2001: 110) reveals the dangers of victims with emotions: When an emotional response is not only involved in the legal process, but required by it, emotions may lose their very authenticity as a marker of human experience.… We seem now to have an array of officially approved emotions. In its very definition, the crime of domestic violence involves emotions. It is, after all, a crime defined by an emotional connection between victim and assailant (Walklate 2011). The performance of particular emotional states, distress, trauma, shame, sorrow, fear, are crucial to the success of a DV prosecution. Demeanour, especially the victim’s demeanour, matters very much in the course of criminal prosecution of DV. Demeanour is, itself, swelling with emotion and kept under tight surveillance in courts. As such, the victim, as she appears, must embody the drop-down menu of ‘officially approved
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emotions’ to secure a successful prosecution. She must be compliant, submissive, consistent, sombre, sad and respectful. Of course, mandatory charge policies did not increase the number of ‘ideal’ victims. On the contrary, victim commitment to the criminal process remains precarious. Victims are suspicious of the CJS and see its promises as ‘cruelly optimistic’ (Berlant 2003). Once a victim becomes known, charges are inevitable. Left with no exit, victims recant at rates we have yet to accurately measure but anecdotally know to be high. The corrective is the ‘victimless prosecution’ (Moore and Singh 2018). The emphasis is on evidence collection, as much and as fast as possible to capture a ‘true’ account. Police tellingly refer to this as the ‘pure version’. This aggressive policing model includes video statements, photographs of injuries, written statements and witness accounts as well as physical evidence and crime scene investigation. The policing rationality is twofold. Benevolence suggests this investigation model offers a way of protecting victims from retraumatization by eliminating their need to be in the courtroom. Practically, victimless prosecutions seek to document the event before ‘memories change’ or ‘people have time to think about things’. Victimless prosecution is insurance against recantation and ultimately the victim herself. This sort of rationality relies on the notion of the vulnerable victim. Sandra Walklate (2011) argues that DV is tightly bound to assumptions of vulnerability ultimately manifesting in a ‘politics of pity’ for the victim. Walklate’s important documenting of the link between victim and vulnerable makes visible what she theorizes, borrowing from Claudia Aradau (2004), the politics of pity in DV rests on, ‘the foregrounding of trauma … disguises the historically present structural dimensions of those people’s everyday lives and their capacity for managing those structural conditions’ (Walklate 2011: 189). This foregrounding of trauma is the lynchpin of rationalities underlying the victimless prosecution. The traumatized victim is a pathological actor and descriptors of PTSD remind us that trauma breeds all manner of erratic and irrational behaviours that lead victims into emotional traps (often referred to as trauma bonds) of their own making (Moore and Singh 2018). Taken as a whole, the victim cannot be trusted because she is pathological. The only way, then, to protect the victim from both her abuser and herself; to both capture the appropriately vulnerable victim while protecting against her volatility, is to create a second victim, through images and other forms of evidence (i.e. videos, medical reports, see Mulla 2011), who is completely controlled by police and prosecutors. Images are especially important to the victimless prosecution because they present a docile victim for viewing and carefully curate the evidence she provides, things you cannot do with a living victim. There is no chance to see the resiliency Walklate seeks to reveal in challenging tropes of vulnerability. Images presented as evidence cannot show defiance and resistance, all traits of the flesh and blood DV victim that do not fit with the ‘good victim’ (i.e. the docile, vulnerable victim) performance required to secure a conviction. As
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Stephanie observes in her piece, ‘Tough Sledding’, the ideal victim is lifeless and thus neutralizing the threats posed by her flesh and blood counterpart: I wasn’t really the Madonna, and I wasn’t really the whore. I could not be effectively categorized simply because I was still alive, to brazenly resist being called either one … and those murder victims, before their bodies were rendered lifeless (including their mouths and hands and eyes and ears and pussies) were complex creatures. Complex creatures are tiresome to litigate against. Those photographs were so quiet compared to me, and in most of them, you don’t get to see the look on my face, a look that prosecutors and judges … and fathers and husbands … find insubordinate. While the goal is to constitute the ideal victim with the appropriate drop-down menu of emotions by recreating her through virtual means, this is not exactly the practice. Images may make victims, but victims are also made, in the street sense of having one’s cover blown, through the process of image capture.
Making the victim/making the image In R. vs. Stewart, images of an alleged victim’s battered face are captured by a police officer. During testimony, the officer explains that the images do not accurately reflect the nature or severity of the injury. The officer is then invited to provide his own verbal description of the injuries, suggesting the bruising was darker and more extensive than depicted. The victim was cooperative at trial. Not only did she confirm that the photographs were of injuries she sustained through an assault at the hand of Stewart, despite one initial recantation, she maintained the proper demeanour of a victim throughout Stewart’s investigation. Among other things, she agreed to have the photographs taken in the first place. The trial judge references the victim’s co-operative behaviour as an indicator of her credibility and cites the photographs as corroborating the victim’s claims: Based on the evidence of the complainant, as corroborated by the pictures … I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused assaulted the complainant, in the manner that she described. The victim in Stewart was ideal. Her story only once3 strayed and the photographs (despite their attested poor quality), while framed as corroborative evidence, are also character witnesses. They confirm the victim is a good victim, a hurt victim, a vulnerable victim, a cooperative victim who recognized her own helplessness and sought the appropriate forms of help through the police. This victim exhibited fear, shame and sadness throughout the investigation and trial. The importance of the fact that the photos were taken by a constable must be underscored. The victim seemingly willingly revealed her injuries, participating in evidence collection that conforms to the expected
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standards. Who is holding the camera matters and shapes the emotional content of the image. What else, after all, is a police officer capturing with a camera if not criminal evidence? R. vs. Felix presents an uncooperative victim who hides from police, changes and recants her story. The victim in Felix took her own photographs of her injuries from the assault in question. Despite the clear images (as noted by the judge) and the fact that police had observed prior injuries on the victim, Felix was ultimately acquitted because the victim lacked credibility, a perplexing plot twist as compared to Stewart, a case in which unclear images narrated by an observant police officer and corroborated by the victim are sufficient to secure a conviction. The same elements are present in Felix, photos (even higher quality), police observations, testimonial corroboration by the victim. What is the difference? The victim in Stewart embodied vulnerability. Not only did she allow herself to be passively photographed, but she also cooperated and, was pregnant at the time of the assault, a fact that is definitely not forgotten in the judgement. The victim in Felix, in contrast, was actively directing her own survival. Instead of vulnerability, again following Walklate, she displayed resilience and, resistance. The victim evaded police and changed her story several times. She was also known to police and had a reputation for substance abuse. It is as if, in taking her own images, the victim in Felix blew her own cover of vulnerability. Helpless, vulnerable victims do not ask for or take photographs. The victim’s own agency leaches the expected emotional content from the images. Felix’s victim was made colloquially, her wilfulness could not be hidden once it was established she willing/fully took the images herself. After all, which is definitively pitiful: a photo of a battered pregnant woman clearly taken by someone else (Stewart) or a photo of a battered, dubious woman, formatted as selfies (which are always narcissistic – Felix)? Pushing ahead with the ‘flipping of the script’, Stephanie offers analysis of my experience. In January of 2018, I sported a conspicuous black eye. It was an injury I suffered trying to break-up a physical altercation between two people I didn’t know. Colleagues, friends, students, indeed every person who saw that black eye reached the same, scripted, albeit completely incorrect, conclusion: I was hit, by a man I knew, maybe even loved, and was probably in need of help. From Stephanie, to me: I asked you how this gross misrepresentation of your character made you feel. You responded with words like, ‘humiliated’ and ‘angry’, and without thinking, I said, ‘you too!’ and then, a moment later, ‘wow, #metoo’!! Now, you are no longer a successful, credible, educated person, you are, simply, a woman. And with the label of ‘victim’, your majority is stolen. Everyone, I mean everyone, looks at you differently. So, what is to be done with the victim that doesn’t really see themselves as a victim? Many of us simply won’t embrace the role. You knew that you had the privilege to refuse the script, and yet, you still felt the fear of
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being exposed. You were right to be afraid, now that you are a child, your resilience is seen as arrogance not befitting your station. The sight of an injured woman has only one affect in this construct. How do I exit the script of the oppressed within a society whose entire existence is built on the foundation of my submission? Stephanie was also condemned for deviating from the drop-down-list of acceptable emotions. In an editorial, Daleen Berry (2012) highlights not only exactly how damning photographs can be, but also how that damnation is amplified when their originator follows an entirely different emotional script. Berry’s editorial is an indictment of Stephanie who ‘simply refuses to speak to authorities about anything that happened’. Berry goes on to explain Stephanie’s overall demeanour in the courtroom as seemingly in support of her then husband and notes apparent collusion between Stephanie and her husband’s lawyer. Berry concludes: Now for the sad part: Either this woman is terrified of her husband – not an unreasonable possibility, given the extent of her severe injuries – or she has Stockholm Syndrome. Or both because her loyalties definitely seem to be with the defense, rather than the prosecution.… Mrs. Lizon adamantly denied being a victim. Instead she tried to convince the court that her husband accidentally injured her or that she herself is accident prone, and simply a klutzy farmer. Berry is convinced of Stephanie’s piteous state because the photographs did not show ‘mere cuts and bruises’. In the words of the prosecutor, the images show ‘severe, disfiguring and horrendous burns’. In the face of Stephanie’s steadfast denial that those injuries were the result of violence, the State called witnesses to testify against Stephanie, making her an expanding target. The State subpoenaed the same shelter staff who took the photographs of Stephanie, the photographs they non-consensually shared with authorities. The testimony effectively given by the images themselves directly contradicted Stephanie whose unacceptable emotional presentation in court was made all the more acute in the face of the shelter workers’ statements that Stephanie had in fact disclosed abuse to them. Berry offers us two options for understanding Stephanie’s behaviour. Both come from the same assumptions: that to stay in a violent situation, to actively defend one’s abuser, can only be an act of madness, driven by fear, trauma or both. Stephanie, according to Berry at least, had lost control of her faculties to such an extent that she was no longer capable of making her own decisions. Stephanie describes her position that day as a stonewall, an open and notorious refusal to acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction over her life and her mind. But, in the face of those photos, Stephanie is reduced to stubborn, hurt child who would rather suffer in denial than do what is best for her. The infantilization of women is nothing new. Nor is it new that images of a
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woman’s battered body will find insanity in their originator who fails to take scripted steps to end the violence. What is new is that the person involved, the victim, may well have an entirely different emotional response to those images, one that is more wilful than crazy.
The wilful victim How bad must the images be to compel an unofficial finding of insanity on a woman, a finding with such high adhesion it sticks in three separate legal proceedings? As objectively as anyone can claim to view an image, they are awful. In one there is a clear imprint of a skillet seared onto Stephanie’s breast. Others show her swollen, infected foot from different angles. The sheer volume of images suggests there was no part of Stephanie’s body free of injury. Taken together, the photos show all of Stephanie in segments. The whole person is never produced, leaving the consumer to literally piece together a version of Stephanie based on the fragmented images. Seeing this Stephanie is to feel pity, revulsion, disgust, and frustration as her antagonistic flesh and blood counterpart stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the pieced together Stephanie. Seeing this Stephanie is to see a woman betrayed by another version of herself, a breathing self who inhabits an emotional word that can only be pathological lest she actually do something to protect all of the pieces of her we see in the images. This Stephanie is forced into the script of vulnerability Walklate describes. It is, to follow the inspirations offered by cultural criminology (Ferrell 1999; Young 1996) and the emergent field of cultural victimology (Walklate 2011), exactly the Stephanie judges, lawyers, police and, as Berry’s editorial illustrates, the general public, are meant to see. But the script of vulnerability is not the only way to see this Stephanie nor are the emotions popularly stuck to this Stephanie the only available emotional lens through which to view her. Stephanie herself does not see vulnerability, insanity or any other scripted ‘acceptable’ feeling in the images nor does she express any of the expected ‘drop down’ emotions. Instead, she complicates the emotional script: It really is possible for two different things to be true at once. It really is possible to feel in a multitude of conflicting ways. Possible to have many emotions that war, existing together, as witnessed by the dead in the field. Did those lovely, hapless photographs, play more than one role. Hapless? They could only be happy if their goal had been to end my family. That’s not what their goal was. How do I know? Because I created them. I didn’t create them alone, but I am the reason they exist … And you, ‘the photographs’, my problem child. I’m not sorry that you exist. Not really sure that I like how you came out, tho. But nature versus nurture … now that’s one for the ages.
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Stephanie could foresee the fallout of her stay at the shelter and the revelation of her identity, hence her reference to cruel optimism above, a phrase she borrows from Laureen Berlant (2011). The photographs were for her, just in case. They became something completely different, artefacts that would make her into an abuser and themselves the victim. These are not the images Stephanie had captured that day at the shelter. Those images, while every pixel remains constant, change into images created and conceived by the prosecution, the media, child protective services, but not Stephanie. The pixels are hers, the rest is not of Stephanie’s making. In Stephanie’s words, there are multiple truths. The images I saw as awful, Stephanie sees as exposing a rarely understood truth about DV survivors, that they might just be wilful, stubborn and proud. This assertion opens an entirely different emotional script for the victim of DV. Sara Ahmed (2014: 43) tells us: Willfulness is not only what subjects are assigned with but shapes the bodies who receive the assignment. Willfulness could be thought of as a political art, a practical craft that is acquired through involvement in political struggle, whether that struggle is a struggle to exist or to transform an existence. Willfulness might be thought of as becoming crafty. In the context of DV, it would be easy to mistake wilful with willing. These may not be exclusive categories but they are not one in the same. To be willing is a question of consent. As Stephanie reminds us, ‘they [are] complex creatures’ and those complexities may well lead to countless strategies of defiant survival that are not consensual though they may be wilful and even crafty. Stephanie is wilful, I have come to deeply appreciate that truth, and that wilfulness is crucial to understanding the relationship between her and her images. On the topic of the photographs as a whole, Stephanie expands on a conversation she and I are having over email on the topic of exposure. We were comparing notes on how we felt about our own images (my black eye and her images turned evidence). I noted how humiliating the black eye felt because I was all too aware of the assumptions people made as to its origins. Stephanie turned from humiliation to exposure: Humiliation is only ONE of the emotions that are encompassed within the term exposure. I want to assert that, in feeling exposed, I have felt more than one emotion. The first kind of exposure I felt as a result of these pictures WAS the humiliating kind. But the kind of exposure I was seeking when I first agreed to take part in their creation, is actually the same kind of exposure I feel now … the kind that invokes pride in my own courage, my absence of shame. That, to my pleasant surprise, is the emotion that actually stuck. Pride accompanied by anger, indignation, and resolve. Please see my other images of exposure [Stephanie also sent me a series of photos from her past ranging from her elaborate costumes from
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This is the pride of Ahmed’s wilful subject. Stephanie identifies pride as the emotion that sticks. That pride is a direct affront to the narrative of shame meant to be fastened tight to the images. Again, the viewer matters, especially when the viewer is also the subject. There were two images I found particularly bothersome so I asked Stephanie if we could focus on those. The images are similar enough that I speak to only one here. Figure 5.1 is the first in the sequence of 22 photos that were entered into evidence. If one were looking through the file of images, this is the first seen. Figure 5.1 is in the genre of mugshot (Biber 2006). Stephanie stares into the camera more or less expressionless, holding up what appears to be a torn piece of paper with her (misspelled) name at her chest. Why, in a women’s shelter, create such an obvious affect of criminality from the start? Stephanie responds to my direct question: what reason did they give you for the labels?: The same as ever, you know the one, ‘policy’, said with the tone that suggests, ‘… we also have a policy we use on women who ask too many questions.’ But I got my answer anyway. It might just happen that my pics find themselves on the same memory card as another client, and we need to know where one begins and another ends. How is it ok to put these on the same memory card as another client? Why would you not print and erase the memory card? Oh, ha, that’s what we do, that’s why it’s a silly policy. Well, later that day, I found out that they had gotten them printed at Walmart. And the memory card they swore they had already formatted? Well, two weeks later, when the Sheriff’s Department first showed up with the warrant, they didn’t have copies. One of those poor shelter workers apparently caved under the pressure and told the scary cops that the memory card they kept in the camera, would have what they needed, would STILL have what they needed. Arrangements were made, and voila, photographs obtained. It is as though Stephanie’s own condemnation became inevitable from this first piece of evidence. The images, especially Figure 5.1, anticipate Stephanie’s scripted vulnerability will emerge as pathological if not criminal
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resistance, hence the need to create a virtual Stephanie as quickly and easily as possible. This is how the data-double is made. Equally upsetting is the setting. The shabby, out of date couch on which Stephanie is sitting, the clearly non-clinical environment, the room and furniture are of the genre of women’s spaces, worn but comfortable and every effort made to suggest home over institution. This kind of space makes an emotional promise. Women’s space is gentle, it is free of coercion, it is safe. The depiction of this space in the photo signals a profound betrayal on its own as Stephanie explains: The first thing you have to remember about my devious self, I wasn’t green, or stupid enough to believe that, hidden in the women’s self-help manuals, and populist policy papers, was a handy-dandy sensible solution to the whole, men-are-from-mars, issue. Most importantly, for years, already, I had been given many opportunities to view, in wide-eyed terror, the workings of the state baby-taking machine, against other families, and mine. The betrayal. ‘We don’t call CPS. We protect women from CPS,’ ‘The pictures will be for you. You’ll have the only copy [of the photographs],’ ‘… what’s this I hear about a dead baby buried in the yard?!’ ‘Jackie said your husband is from someplace, like, Czechoslovakia … You know, he can’t bring his culture here!’ ‘but he has to be held accountable!’ I didn’t want the shelter to call the State. I must have done well, that day, because on that day, they didn’t. They didn’t call the CPS until nine days later, when I complained about their treatment of me, and demanded that they send me what legally should be their only copy of my file. I finally had to call the State Coalition, in order to gain any promise of compliance. ‘And make sure that you send me any copies of my pictures that you have retained in any format,’ I said. ‘We don’t have any copies,’ they replied, ‘You’re the only one that has them.’ It is already clear Stephanie’s sole proprietorship over the images was instantly offended. Stephanie was both willing and unwilling to have the images taken. She felt tricked by the shelter turning the images over to the police. At the same time, as she indicates above, she wanted the photos, under the terms she originally negotiated between her and the shelter workers. Stephanie anticipated her wilfulness would be a problem and wanted to create her own arsenal of evidence, just in case. Stephanie was wilful and also crafty, two things a victim can never be. And should a victim dare watch out for herself or exercise her intellect and savvy, she is no longer a victim. Stephanie calls herself the abuser to her images for good reason.
Closing arguments If Sara Ahmed is right and wilfulness is a political art, Stephanie’s final reflection on having the photos repatriated is vitally important. In this excerpt from ‘Problem Child’, Stephanie’s defiance reads to me as wilful political
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resistance and her provocative ambiguity at the end reminds us of the absurdity and mundanity of emotions, ascribed, resisted and expected from, in, for the victim of DV: Right at this very moment, I don’t want to detail and dissect all of the different ways in which I was coerced into submitting to the creation of those photographs. Suffice it to say that I also had my own reasons, AS WELL. For example, I knew that in a situation dominated by reflexive and transferred emotion, a photograph can find itself the MOST reliable source of truth available, not the least. I had to wait a long time before I could use MY pictures for MY purpose. To memorialize, and forever anchor this tall-tale, to the real-life story they represent. Now, today, a closer look at those photographs will reveal something that ‘anybody with common sense’ can already see. That those are MY pictures, of MY body and MY injuries. And if you’ll ask her, that woman in the pics, ‘what happened?!’, she WILL finally say something to you, because now SHE, finally, is allowed to speak for herself, too. She’ll say, ‘I don’t answer questions. Why don’t you ask her, the only one that knows the truth? And if she won’t tell you? Well, then, you’ll never know’. Wilful women are a problem and the refusal to be a helpless, vulnerable victim of domestic violence introduces an emotional lexicon into the prosecution of domestic violence that, as of yet, cannot be reconciled with the scripted emotions described by both Carol Sanger and Sandra Walklate. Regardless of the intelligibility of wilfulness in the language of law, victims live complex emotional lives. Here we explore in depth only one emotional relationship; between the victim and the photos that make her body a criminal artefact (Sekula 1986). It stands to reason that if images can ‘make’ a victim by revealing her as the undesirable variety, there can only be other, perhaps endless, emotional variability that diverts from the script of emotional vulnerability.
Notes 1 The same judge presided over all three of Stephanie’s legal proceedings, a fact I found shocking but Stephanie maintains is the norm in small town America. 2 These descriptors are self-chosen by Stephanie. 3 A deviating narrative can itself work in favour of the victim. As psy discourses of the ‘trauma bond’ become common lingo in the courtroom, a memory lapse may well, presented correctly, prove additional suffering and the veracity of the overall claim that this is an abused woman (see Moore and Singh, forthcoming).
References Ahmed, Sarah. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Taylor and Francis. Ahmed, Sara (2013). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
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Ahmed, Sara (2014). Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aradau, Claudia (2004). ‘The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation of Human Trafficking’. Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 33(2): 251–277. Berlant, Laureen (2003). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Berry, Daleen (2012). ‘Is Farming is Deadly or Is This a Domestic Violence Case?’. Available online at www.daleenberry.com/archives/215 Biber, Katherine (2006). ‘The Specter of Crime: Photography, Law and Ethics’. Social Semiotics, 16(1): 133–149. Biber, Katherine (2007). Captive Images: Race, Crime, Photography. New York: GlassHouse. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith (1993). ‘Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and What Paranoia’, in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.). Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–22. Feigenson, Neil. (2011). ‘Seeing Justice Done’. International Journal of Semiot Law, 24: 503 Ferrell, Jeff (1999). ‘Cultural Criminology’. Annual Review of Sociology, 25: 395–418. Mnookin, Jennifer (1998). ‘The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy’. Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 10(1): 1–74. Moore, Dawn and Rashmee Singh (2018). ‘Seeing Crime: ANT, Feminism and Images of Violence Against Women’, in Martin Dufresne and Dominique Robert (eds). Actor-Network Theory and Crime Studies Explorations in Science and Technology. London: Ashgate, pp. 67–98. Moore, Dawn and Rashmee Singh (2017). ‘Seeing Crime, Feeling Crime: Visual Evidence, Emotions and the Prosecution of Domestic Violence’. Theoretical Criminology: 1–17. Mulla, Sameena (2011). ‘Facing Victims: Forensics, Visual Technologies and Sexual Assault Examination’. Medical Anthropology, 30(3): 271–294. Lizon, Peter (2012). ‘West Virginia Man, Kept His Wife Captive, and Tortured Her for Nearly a Decade, Sheriff Says’, CBS News, July 12. Available online at www. cbsnews.com/news/peter-lizon-west-virginia-man-kept-his-wife-captive-and-torture d-her-for-nearly-a-decade-sheriff-says/ Sanger, Carol (2001). ‘The Role and Reality of Emotions in Law’. William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 8(1): 107–113. Sekula, Allan (1986). ‘The Body and the Archive’. October, 39: 3–64. Sibley, Marcus, Elise Wohlbold, Dawn Moore and Rashmee Singh (2019). ‘How She Appears’: Demeanor, Cruel Optimism and the Relationship between Police and Victims of Domestic Violence, in George Pavlich and Matthew Unger (eds). Entryways to Criminal Justice: Accusation and Criminalization in Canada. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Sontag, Susan (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Walklate, Sandra (2011). ‘Reframing Criminal Victimization: Finding a Place for Vulnerability and Resilience’. Theoretical Criminology, 15(2): 179–194. Young, Alison (1996). Imagining Crime. London: Sage Publications.
6
Punitiveness and the emotions of punishment Between solidarity and hostility Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho
Introduction This chapter discusses how and why emotions are at the centre of the social and normative role of punishment.1 It looks at how emotions are articulated in the context of punishment, and examines how punitive emotions are manifest in the practice and representation of criminal justice in media and popular culture in western liberal democracies. By considering the relationship between emotions and punishment, this chapter also suggests that those same emotions that drive much of criminal justice practice are now also exercised and expressed outside and beyond criminal justice institutions, making punishment not just a concentrated institutional expression of the state’s response to crime, but a broader social phenomenon. We argue that understanding the emotional dimension of punishment requires us to understand it as a social phenomenon with significant span and impact on a range of communities and relations. We additionally suggest that the emotions of punishment have much to say not only about how we feel about one another, but also about how we feel about ourselves. To conduct this exploration into the relationship between punishment and emotions, we focus on a critical analysis of the concept of punitiveness. Punitiveness is a widely mobilised concept in criminology (e.g. Cheliotis 2013; Pratt et al. 2005; Skinns 2016; Adriaenssen and Aertsen 2015), but arguably it remains under-theorised, and its links to emotions, while partly acknowledged, have not been fully explicated (Andriaenssen and Aertsen 2015). Using sociological, social psychological, cultural criminological and socio-legal research, this chapter seeks to understand the ‘urge’ to punish (Garland 2001) in contemporary, Anglo-phone societies. The urge to punish is our tendency to increasingly pursue punishment and to assume it to be useful, unavoidable or necessary. We unpack this urge by arguing that punishment is inherently affective and often acts as more than just a response to crime, as a broader coping or defensive strategy. It reflects some of our innermost desires and fears, and seeks to manage a range of anxieties, insecurities and uncertainties by providing an illusory yet temporarily satisfying sense of reassurance in an otherwise uncertain and ambivalent social world. Punishment does this by
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enacting a (perverse and deeply problematic) sense of social solidarity (Durkheim 2014) through hostility (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2017; Chamberlen and Carvalho 2018). Through this argument, we warn against a rationalist criminology that takes the affective dimension of punishment for granted, and highlight the need for a rigorous study of how the emotions, subjectivities and self-identities of offenders, victims, judges, juries, media and general members of the public contribute to the existence and maintenance of our framework of punishment in contemporary liberal societies. The chapter begins by investigating some of the problems and limitations with the rationalism surrounding the predominant scholarship on punishment, then examines the place of punitiveness within the recent flourishing of an emotionally aware criminology scholarship. The third section of the chapter provides a conceptual framework based on the relation between solidarity and hostility within the role of punishment in society. The last section then draws on the implications of this framework, which suggest the need to investigate punishment as a broader social phenomenon beyond the confines of criminal justice, affecting politics as well as other areas of social life.
The problem with rationalist understandings of punishment Traditionally, emotions have been strangely missing from many of the main studies of punishment. Beyond the work of a few sociologically oriented scholars in the area (e.g. Durkheim 2014; Braithwaite 1989; Douglas 1993; Garland 2001; De Haan and Loader 2002; Karstedt 2002, 2006; Karstedt, Loader and Strang 2011), emotions were usually neglected or seen as secondary to criminological understandings of punishment (e.g. Bagaric 2001; Dolinko 1997; Matsueda et al. 2006). Much of the predominantly emotionless discussion in the field tended to view the definition and justifications for punishment as largely reliant on and derived from legal norms and philosophical rationales, and so assumed these to be based on predominantly ‘rational’ and pragmatic reasonings that sought to adequately respond to crime. This way of thinking about punishment as a rational response to violations of the criminal law stems from a legal and philosophical-normative approach that dates back to its intellectual origins in Enlightenment thinking (on this, see Norrie 1991; 2014). As a result, much of the philosophical and socio-legal literature on punishment and criminal justice has followed a similar rationalist logic, some of which seems to have deliberately avoided consideration of the emotional dimension of punishment, so as to avoid ascribing any assumption of irrationality to the institutionalised penal practices of modern societies. Similarly, criminology until recently has cast itself as a positivist discipline aspiring to appeal to ‘objectivist’ projects that prioritised rational choice models and structuralist accounts and critiques of justice and crime. This is primarily the result of criminology’s close focus and observation of the law and the criminal justice system, which have sought to perform a similar kind of rationalist agenda (for a discussion on this, see Carvalho and Chamberlen
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2016; Karstedt 2011). This rationalist, sterile criminology has more recently been challenged (see Gadd and Jefferson 2007; Jacobsen and Walklate 2016), but its legacy still impacts much of criminological thinking and research on criminal justice. This impact is evidenced by how an ‘emotion-free framework’ can also be identified in much of sociological criminology’s engagement with punishment, as it adopted a structuralist perspective in critiquing penal practices and institutions, locating punishment’s social function within broader structures of exclusion, regulation and socio-economic inequality (e.g., Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939; Melossi and Pavarini 1981; Wacquant 2009). Such analyses mostly neglect the emotionally-mediated dimension of punishment’s exclusionary and exploitative character, and overlook the extent to which its cultural-structural practices rely on expressive and repressive forces conditioned by feelings such as fear, anger or frustration. These sociological narratives have also consistently assumed that punishment has a rational and social-functional basis. Even among its critics, punishment’s social function in controlling, disciplining and excluding particular social groups has been presented within a rationalist functionalism (Garland 1990) that ascribed to punishment an unavoidable link to notions of utility – that is, to the idea that punishment has a function in society, and that this function has to be understood, and criticised, on rational grounds. Much like its ‘sister discipline’ of sociology, criminology can be criticised for being, rather surprisingly, insular and inward-looking in terms of its approaches, reach and span. Its concentration on application of, practice in, and solutions to criminal justice, though valuable, has also meant that, conceptually and theoretically, criminology occupied a relatively narrow field, drawing from some overtly rehearsed ‘grand narratives’ (Bosworth and Kaufman 2013), and neglecting other perspectives that are indispensable to a concrete understanding of crime, punishment, justice and social control. Arguably, a fuller and more nuanced exploration of the social role of punishment can only be pursued through a serious engagement with its emotional dimension, and this is only feasible if it includes a serious commitment to trans-disciplinarity. Given the complexity around unpacking the concept of emotions, this trans-disciplinarity should not shy away from studies of emotions and affect discussed in both the ‘hard’ sciences and the humanities, but in so doing, it should also strive to remain critical and reflexive in its conceptualisation and deployment of emotions. However, such commitment arguably offers an additional challenge. A critical and trans-disciplinary examination of punishment must move beyond the confines of the institutional penal practices of the criminal justice system, and recognise that punishment is a broader social phenomenon, whose discourse and logics are reproduced in other social contexts. In our societies, we (or some of us) continue to punish (and exclude) our children at home and at school; we punish, police and discipline each other in intimate relations and in the workplace, and apply penalties and disciplinary measures in many areas of social life, ranging from more consequential practices like
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‘preventive’ healthcare provision, to less serious yet equally symbolic penalties, like those applied in plagiarism committees in colleges and universities. More recently, we have especially seen punitive discourses being used to enact and justify a range of public policies oriented towards the ‘governmentality of unease’ (Bigo 2002). We have seen this consistently applied in explicit performances (Jones et al. 2017) of hostility towards racialized ‘others’, and in mundane bordering practices in universities and public services. Most notably and emblematically, in the recent Anglophone context, punitive discourses have been deployed to shape populist political rhetoric, and appropriated punitive and exclusionary practices to create strategies of ‘management’ and bordering towards migrant populations, even when these are young children (Bosworth 2014; Aas and Bosworth 2013). Language and logics that evoke ideas of blame, responsibility and deterrence have also been invoked in austerity policies, and we have seen those reliant on welfare support or those in debt become subject to processes of control, retribution and discipline, while the lack of access to various services, housing and public spaces has been justified within a punitive logic exercised against those classified as the ‘undeserving poor’ (Kirwan et al. 2016; Chunn and Gavigan 2004; Costelloe et al. 2009; Kornhauser 2015; Hogan et al. 2007). These broader societal manifestations of punitive logics, which mirror, borrow from and reinforce the normative and symbolic framework of criminal justice, are indispensable to a comprehensive understanding of the social role of punishment, especially as they constitute emotional moments that are intrinsic to the constitution of this social role. In other words, we argue that to understand the emotions of punishment is to appreciate the problematically wider application of punitive sentiments and practices in our social lives.
The role of emotions in recent criminological scholarship Although it is still fair to say that criminology remains significantly influenced by its positivist and rationalist origins, today, it is no longer entirely accurate to suggest that emotions are absent from scholarship on criminal justice and punishment. The past twenty or so years have seen a revival of interest on emotions, which was in many ways related to the broader ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities that has become more prominent since the 2000s (Clough et al. 2007; Hoggett and Thompson 2012). The impact of psychosocial approaches in criminology has been crucial in positioning emotions as key within a range of studies, including theorisations of punishment, histories of penality, and empirical research into the experience and effects of imprisonment, among others (e.g. Gadd and Jefferson 2007; Pratt et al. 2005; Liebling and Maruna 2005; Gelsthorpe 2007; van Marle and Maruna 2010; Chamberlen 2016, 2018). This scholarly turn to emotions was also driven by developments in criminal justice, especially by the increased presence of emotions in public debates on criminal justice practice observed in the past thirty years (Karstedt 2011). Since the late 1990s, rationalistic perspectives in law and criminal justice were
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abruptly side-lined, and as Kathy Laster and Pat O’Malley (1996) argue, our contemporary criminal justice environment underwent a ‘re-emotionalisation’ process where blaming and the ascription of responsibility came to be expressed with clear emotive undertones. This re-emotionalisation tended to focus on negative emotions such as fear or more generally hostility towards the offender, but this was not always the case. For example, shame appeared as an important emotion for the pursuit of justice and, especially through restorative justice, since the mid-1990s we have seen a renewed focus on the experiences and perspectives of victims – meaning also a more concentrated focus on victims’ needs, and the introduction of often elaborate efforts to involve victims’ narratives in the justice process (Morgan and Zedner 1992; Walklate 2012; Rock 1990, 2012). As Sandra Walklate has argued, the victim’s role in criminal proceedings has evolved into being ‘used more and more as a political and symbolic reference point’ (Walklate 2012: 15). This more victim-centred approach has reflected various policy changes since 1997, many of which have been influenced by and intertwined with political rhetoric (e.g. see Hall 2013). However, while these developments in criminal justice did provide a context in which the role of emotions is more active, and more widely acknowledged, such role was predominantly problematic, even in its less negative connotations. For instance, although the re-emotionalisation of criminal justice did provide for a greater involvement of victims in the criminal justice process, this has acted less as a means of recognising victimhood and more as a justification for increased criminalisation and harsher penalties, essentially working in the service of punitiveness.
A return to emotions via the rise of punitiveness It is now widely accepted that, since the late 1970s, criminal justice systems in the UK and USA have become increasingly more punitive, seeking to criminalise more, incarcerating for longer periods, and generally adopting a ‘tough’ political and sentencing agenda to crime control (Skinns 2016). Though the rise of punitiveness is the subject of widespread discussion in criminology, the empirical evidence around it has been more opaque (for a review of data on punitiveness, see Andriaessen and Aertsen 2015: 94–95 on global research; Warner et al. 2017 for research on punitiveness with jurors in Australia; and Roberts and Hough 2013 for public attitudes to sentencing in England). While definitions of punitiveness can vary (Matthews 2005), broadly speaking, discussions about punitiveness in the sociology of punishment have mostly been influenced by David Garland’s leading analysis of the penal realm in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his discussion of recent penal changes in the UK and the USA, Garland (2001: 9) argues that in the latter part of the twentieth and at the start of the twenty-first century penal policy has returned to a ‘just deserts’ approach where retribution reappeared as a renewed, dominant goal of the system, in contrast to the consequentialist, ‘welfarist’ approaches that were previously predominant. This
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re-legitimisation of retributive purposes has allowed for politicians to express ‘punitive sentiments’ more openly and intensely, and for legislators to enact ‘more draconian laws’ (Garland 2001: 9). This is not to say that the welfarist model that preceded this more punitive atmosphere was not emotionally-driven. As Garland (2001: 10) clarifies, this previous moment just focused on a different set of emotions, and according to him had a ‘more progressive sense of justice’ that retained a sense of ‘decency’, ‘humanity’ and ‘compassion’ for the needs of offenders. The move towards punitivism switched the emotional landscape of criminal justice towards more negative emotions, which were driven by a more generalised rhetoric and sense of anxiety. Garland summarises this affective, historical shift as follows: Since the 1970s fear of crime has come to have new salience. What was once regarded as a localised, situational anxiety, afflicting the worst-off individuals and neighbourhoods, has come to be regarded as a major social problem and a characteristic of contemporary culture. (Garland 2001: 10) According to this account, the context of crime has been ‘re-dramatised’ in the eyes of the public, and was used to influence ‘the style and content of policy making’ in recent decades. And, beyond the specifics of policy, scholars like Garland, John Pratt (2002) and Jonathan Simon (2007) have also argued that in late-modernity and under neoliberalism we have witnessed an increased tendency to seek more expressive and visual penalties, some of which are purposefully public and stigmatising (see also Valier 2002 on ‘gothic populism’). Even the prison, which has been traditionally considered an impermeable, invisible space, removed from the public’s view, in recent years has been increasingly scrutinised by the media and the public, through news articles, documentaries, TV and cinematic portrayals and political debates. These representations of prison life not only have become a popular source of entertainment, but also are to a large extent a direct expression of the tendencies discussed above, as they feed into public sentiments, and both shape and express punitive attitudes (see Chamberlen and Carvalho 2018). Thus, policy as well as discourse on punishment are not only emotionallydriven, but more recently they have also contributed to shifting the public’s emotions towards a more punitive approach (see e.g. Newburn and Jones 2005). This means that, while it would be simplistic to see the emotionality of punishment primarily as an irrational reaction to rhetoric and fear-mongering, it must be recognised that, in more recent years, there has been a rise in what we call a form of hostile politics, which can be seen to be directly related to an emotional attachment to an illusory but largely hegemonic idea that punishment is useful and necessary. The following sections in this chapter engage with sociological, social psychological and political debates, paying particular attention to our contemporary feelings of insecurity and anxiety, to unpack the links between hostility and the emotionality of punishment.
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The emotions of punishment in criminal justice: lessons from sociology and social psychology In the beginning of this chapter, we suggested that a proper understanding of the emotionality of punishment requires a committed trans-disciplinary investigation of punishment as social phenomenon, practice and coping strategy. This section concentrates on exploring how the social role of punishment can be conceptualised as inherently emotional, and how this conceptualisation can explain the prevalence and the allure of punitive attitudes and discourses in contemporary liberal societies such as the UK and the USA. Any exploration of the emotional dimension of the social role of punishment must inevitably engage with the work of Émile Durkheim. It was Durkheim (2013; 2014) who first suggested that the primary purpose of punishment was not to deter or control crime, but to provide for the ‘ritualised re-affirmation of collective values and the reinforcement of group solidarity’ (Garland 2013: 23). In other words, the apparatus of punishment symbolically promotes the image of an ordered, cohesive society whose values and rules are shared by the whole of its political community. Crime is experienced by this community as a violation of its norms, and punishment, by symbolically reaffirming those norms, also maintains and reinforces the bonds of social solidarity, thus bringing the community together. The images and ideas around this conception of punishment – the re-affirmation of shared values, the notion of crime as a moral and social violation, the expression of solidarity with the victim and those affected by crime – are present in many contemporary normative understandings of punishment, and are commonplace in recent criminal justice discourses. At the same time, the image of society put forward by the symbolism of punishment, of a strong community brought together by common values that are only truly disturbed by crime, is nothing if not problematic. Instead, many sociologists conceptualise the last 30 or so years as a period largely characterised by processes of social fragmentation rather than cohesion (see Giddens 1991; Bauman 1991; Rose 2001), something which has only been exacerbated by the recent economic crisis since 2008. What is more puzzling is that this is precisely the period where a rise in punitive attitudes has been identified, so that there is now significant indication that there might be an inverse correlation between the urge to punish and levels of solidarity in contemporary social settings (Greenberg 1999; Pratt 2007). This does not mean that the link between punishment and solidarity proposed by Durkheim should be completely abandoned; it does, however, mean that it must be reconceptualised from a critical perspective. We have argued elsewhere (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2017; Chamberlen and Carvalho 2018) that the contemporary surge of punishment and punitive feelings in specific social settings can be related precisely to the lack of a concrete and comprehensive sense of social solidarity in these settings. This idea finds resonance in research that has suggested that levels of punishment tend to be high in
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contexts where there are high levels of inequality, or lack of welfare provision (Downes and Hansen 2006; Lacey 2007; Pickett and Wilkinson 2010), and that processes of criminalisation are more widespread and authoritarian in periods of heightened social insecurity and anxiety (Ericson 2007; Sparks 2012), which themselves have been linked to the erosion of more solidary forms and structures of citizenship (Ramsay 2006; Reiner 2010; Carvalho 2017). These diverse links can illustrate that, as Durkheim suggested, there is an intimate relation between the symbolic function of punishment and social solidarity; however, contrary to what Durkheim predicted, in contemporary societies the urge to punish may be at its strongest when the bonds of social solidarity are precarious. In these circumstances, punishment performs an important symbolic and emotive role, as part of an apparatus geared at managing feelings of insecurity and anxiety, and social alienation more broadly. It does so by channelling such turmoil towards crime and criminals. This ‘governmentality of unease’ (Bigo 2002) relies on an artificial sense of solidarity, which effectively promotes a sense of identification through estrangement (Bauman 2000; Sparks 2001) by advancing an image of community in which individuals are bonded together by means of their vulnerability against crime and their antagonism towards offenders. This sense of solidarity on which punishment relies can be deemed artificial because it does not build upon or even actively relate to what can be considered the conditions for concrete solidarity, such as welfare, communication and recognition. Furthermore, since the sense of solidarity promoted by punishment needs to be constructed, the image of social order which it produces is necessarily simplified: individuals are brought together as members of an essentially good, lawful social order, and pitted against criminals, which are also presented primarily as dangerous others. This essentialised worldview is reproduced through the rituals of criminalisation (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2017) performed in political, public and media discourses, which precede and follow punishment. This social imaginary (Taylor 2004) put forward by punishment is inevitably abstract, since it is removed from most people’s social experiences; however, symbolically this abstraction from concrete experience is precisely what gives punishment its strong appeal in circumstances of social fragmentation. The emotionality of punishment speaks directly to the ‘anxious subject’ (Isin 2004), serving as a social psychological defence mechanism (Brown 2003) which these subjects can use to cope with deeper, generalised feelings of insecurity and anxiety by channelling these feelings towards specific threats and fears (Marsh 1996; King and Maruna 2009; Carvalho and Chamberlen 2016). While such feelings are channeled, and thus managed, by the symbolism of punishment, since punishment does very little about the lack of concrete solidarity underpinning such feelings, it offers no way out of the persecutory phantasy (Reeves 2018) which it builds around them. This coping mechanism embedded within the symbolic logic of punishment is particularly enthralling because, as Janet Ainsworth (2009) has observed,
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this logic is intimately related to cognitive biases that individuals commonly maintain to deal with the many anxieties and perceived sources of danger that affect their sense of safety and wellbeing. Most importantly, punitive attitudes are linked to an ‘illusion of control’, through which individuals manage their anxiety by focusing on specific identified threats (such as crime) which they believe can (or must) be controlled, therefore engaging in ‘continued irrational and ineffective behaviour even in the face of negative feedback’ (Ainsworth 2009: 265). Furthermore, beyond giving individuals a sense of control, punishment also reinforces an illusion of order, providing a ‘sense of orderliness’ which permits individuals ‘to experience an idealized world with just resolutions’ (King and Maruna, 2006: 23), which often contrasts with a much less neat and coherent social reality. This sense of orderliness is potentially the most appealing trait of the symbolic framework of punishment, particularly since it is tied to a host of penal practices which, to this day, remain inextricably linked to pain and violence (Sykes 1958; Christie 1981; Liebling and Maruna 2005; Liebling 2011; Chamberlen 2016, 2018). Thus, the emotionality of punishment allows anxious subjects to repress their feelings of insecurity and anxiety, by giving or reinforcing illusions of control and order, at the same time as it provides them with a channel through which to express their frustration by projecting hostile feelings toward criminalised others. For that reason, we have argued (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2017) that the form of solidarity embedded within punishment is characterised by its hostility, since it is linked to what George Herbert Mead (1918: 591) called ‘the emotional solidarity of aggression’.
The emotions of punishment beyond criminal justice: the psychology of justice and the politics of hostility For us, acknowledging the hostility within the emotionality of punishment has interrelated implications. First, an important consequence of the dynamics between the symbolism within punishment and its emotional appeal is that the emotionality of punishment is inherently political. To have expressive value, punishment relies on a set of moral images and ideologies that not only drive penal policy, but also more generally shape and influence our politics. For instance, going back to the earlier discussion on the punitive turn, rightwing authoritarianism and conservatism have been held to be a common predictor for punitive attitudes (Palasinski and Shortland 2017; Adriaenssen and Aertsen 2015). Likewise, research into recent political developments has indicated that punitive attitudes have been closely related to feelings of disgruntlement toward mainstream politics, expressed by those who feel that their status and values have been neglected and who long to rescue an image of community which they believe is currently under threat. For instance, after the EU Referendum in the United Kingdom, the British Election Study’s internet panel survey of 2015–2016 found significant links between voters’ age, religion, race and ethnicity, their level of support for Brexit, and
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endorsement of capital punishment and other harsh penalties (Kaufmann 2016). Such links between support for Brexit and support for capital and corporal punishment were again suggested in a more recent survey (British Social Attitudes Survey 2017). The idea that punishment constitutes ‘a way to act decisively in a time of relative uncertainty’ (van Marle and Maruna 2010: 8–9) gives it significant ideological allure. Now, it is important to highlight how, somewhat paradoxically, whilst invoking and relying on fear, anger and frustration, the pursuit of punitiveness is sought in an effort to alleviate these same emotions and thus, when harsh punishment is seen to be exercised, it can also end up giving those feeling punitive a brief sense of satisfaction, reassurance and comfort. This complex interplay between hostility and satisfaction suggests that feelings for punishment play at our self-perceptions and, though focused on punishing others, they seek to make us feel better about ourselves. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that scholars have also identified a link between the emotional features of punishment and the proliferation of economic uncertainty. Michael T. Costelloe et al. (2009: 28) have found that ‘those men [note not women] who expected their economic situation to become worse, were significantly more punitive than those who expected to be doing better’, and this is particularly the case for white men. Such research points to the links between the rise in punitiveness and the rise of economic individualism under neoliberalism. The governmental prioritisation of self-steering neoliberal subjects has arguably created a perfect ‘other’ towards whom punitive logics and policies are often directed, the ‘undeserving poor’ who fail to engage with the fast-paced, competitive nature of neoliberalism (Kornhauser 2015). Interestingly, those affected by austerity measures often also become the target audience for hostile political rhetoric. Meanwhile, psychologists and criminologists have also found that there is a link between racial prejudices and preference for harsher penalties (Johnson 2009; Unnever and Cullen 2007). More generally, the mostly US-based research that identifies links between attitudes to punishment and race also suggests that punitive feelings are strongest towards those we identify as different to us. For instance, white juries tend to show more solidarity with white victims and defendants and more hostility towards BME defendants (Garland 2013; Lynch and Haney 2014). These links illustrate possibly the most problematic aspect of the hostile solidarity of punishment: its punitive logic produces a sense of solidarity and satisfaction only through hostility, and this means that it occurs only insofar as it also produces and reinforces structural violence and processes of marginalisation and exclusion. In so doing, it contributes to conditions that are likely to perpetuate cycles of hostility, for three reasons. First, it allows and encourages explicit performances of aggression towards those identified as other, the ‘abject’ (Kristeva 1982), who falls outside the ‘community of value’ (Anderson 2013). Second, it requires the maintenance of hostility to preserve the sense of solidarity that it engenders. And, third, in derogating and dehumanising the other in order to legitimise
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and facilitate punitive attitudes towards them, it generates in the other the same feelings of insecurity and alienation that encourage hostility in the first place (see Kteily and Bruneau 2017), thus turning the process of criminalisation into a self-fulfilling prophecy (see Phillips 2017). The second implication is that while the emotionality of punishment is constructed, expressed and repressed in particular contexts, this does not necessarily mean that such feelings remain constrained only within these contexts. The reason for this is that emotions are intersubjective and they travel via our interactions, lived experiences, exchanges and relations (Chamberlen 2018). Thus, our punitive feelings or our feelings towards justice can be transferred and reproduced elsewhere, meaning that scenarios and dynamics traditionally thought of as criminal justice specific may now be spilling onto other practices, casting binaries of dangerous/law-abiding or trustworthy/risky citizens towards groups who have not been previously subjected to them. More broadly, expressions of hostile solidarity now abound in many institutional settings, such as migration and borders (Aas and Bosworth 2013; Bosworth 2017; Kaufman 2015), education (Lyons and Drew 2009), and even health and wellbeing (Kirkland 2014). This reflects a dispersal of penal power, where the spectacle of justice and punishment is no longer exclusively in the remit of criminal justice systems (Cohen 1979; Wacquant 2009). Third, the psychosocial dynamics involved in the emotionality of punishment mean that these emotions are complex and enduring, but are also pliable and potentially changeable. Arguably, this raises attention to the complexity and problematic nature of those sentiments driving punishment today. This, however, does not necessarily mean that negative emotions such as vengeance or fear have to be the central or only feelings we express in the realm of justice. Indeed, we think that to acknowledge the emotionality of punishment serves as both a problem as well as a kind of hope for a solution. All the institutions of criminal justice are ‘simultaneously objects and representations of collective emotions’ (Karstedt 2011: 7), and therefore it should be feasible to re-imagine justice in more ‘emotionally intelligent’ (Sherman 2003) practices that rely more on ‘positive’ emotions such as forgiveness and reparation. Doing so would require a reconceptualization of the framework surrounding punishment and criminal justice, which would ultimately reimagine these institutions, moving their focus away from hostility and punitiveness, and towards emotional transformation. This chapter has suggested that in order to do this, punishment and criminal justice practice and scholarship need to move beyond problematic dualisms, and especially ought to problematize and overcome the Cartesian dichotomy between rational and emotional approaches to justice. As Susan Karstedt (2011) has suggested, the creative making of processes through which criminal justice transforms the emotions and lived experiences of offenders, victims, and the public are questions that ought to be more closely observed by criminologists.
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Conclusion The question of why we punish is arguably a fundamental question to the study of the relation between punishment and emotions, as there are strong reasons to believe that the urge to punish is intrinsically related to the role of punishment in society. This field of enquiry can both provide interesting insights in developments and debates on retributive and distributive justice, and highlight the difficulties in pursuing a fulfilling sense of justice through punishment. This chapter has shown that emotions are an essential and defining feature of punishment and require more dedicated scholarly attention. Paying closer attention to the affective aspects of punishment can have several implications for future practice and scholarship in this area, as recognition of the emotional conditioning of punishment raises important theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. First, an emotionally-aware account of punishment raises questions about who we are as punishers. To achieve this, we need a renewed, affective theory of criminal justice, which is necessarily engaged with notions of modern identity and subjectivity and situates the emotions of punishment beyond our feelings about crime, but traces our emotional urge to punish to how we feel about and perceive our own individual and social identities. Attention to the psychosocial aspects of modern identities can potentially position punishment in processes of latemodern ambivalent relations and a general sense of uncertainty. The emotional features of punishment also raise questions about whether it should be considered a pathological phenomenon. If we are to acknowledge the affective and deeply problematic elements of punishment, we then also ought to ask whether there is a therapeutic approach to punishment. Moreover, a positive emotional transformation in criminal justice requires a more sustained critique of punishment as a concept and phenomenon; it thus requires a more activist account of how the defining features of punishment are not only ineffective for those who experience it, but are also detrimental to all of us as communities. An emotional redirection, in other words, may mean that scholars of punishment ought to engage and commit more with the possibilities of abolitionism, decarceration and transformative justice. To show that punishment is emotionally motivated is an exercise of critique, and researchers of punishment should more actively reflect on the role of scholarship in not only observing and analysing such phenomena, but also in opposing the expansion of the penal state and the exacerbation of negative emotions in the criminal justice field.
Note 1 We are grateful to Rachel Lewis for her valuable work as a Research Assistant for the project ‘Punishing Politics: A pilot study exploring links between biographies, attitudes to punishment, and political orientation’, which was funded by the Research Development Fund at the University of Warwick. Her work contributed to collating some of the literature referenced in this chapter. We are also thankful to the editors’ encouraging comments.
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Capital punishment and the emotional public sphere in mid-twentieth century Britain Lizzie Seal
Introduction: capital punishment and emotion Capital punishment is intensely emotional. It is, as Susan A. Bandes (2008; 2009) argues, inherently expressive and entails debates about morality and feelings. The death penalty is both a concrete policy that is enacted and an abstract symbol for a range of social and cultural issues. Actual capital cases confront us with ‘human lives in all their complex, messy concreteness’ (Bandes 2008: 41). Emotion attaches to the trial and carrying out the punishment – but also to the story of the particular case. The lives and perceived character of the condemned individual, their victim and the relatives and friends of both can all become part of the story’s emotional landscape. This chapter examines how in mid-twentieth century Britain, the emotionality of capital punishment became central to its significance in the public sphere. The death penalty is a prime example of shifting cultural norms in the 1950s towards greater emotional expressiveness in public life (Langhamer 2012). The cultural and political salience of capital punishment deepened in the mid- twentieth century as certain cases became very high profile and abolition was debated in Parliament. The emotional nature of some capital cases generated a strong public reaction at the national level and empathy for the condemned – if they could be perceived sympathetically according to contemporary emotional regimes. This connected to concerns about injustice. However, not all cases generated such concerns, even when there were strong grounds for suspecting injustice. I discuss some of the conditions for the generation of public empathy in mid- twentieth century capital cases and the issues this raises about the politics of feeling. How emotions are expressed, felt, understood and conceptualised is culturally variable and historically specific (Rosenwein 2002). Emotional experience is social as well as personal (Cvetkovich 2003). Societies exhibit contradictory emotional values and contain different emotional communities. These communities share ‘the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore’ (Rosenwein 2002: 842). Certain emotional communities are
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understood to be more legitimate than others: for example, those created through marriage and conventional family structures (Cook 2017). As Matt Cook (2017: 57) argues, emotion is ‘woven into attempts to voice, prompt and persuade in a multitude of places and social practices, from the domestic to the operations of the state’. Cook (2017: 51) describes the historian’s attempt to understand emotions in the past as like ‘grasping at retreating shadows’. However, sources such as news media provide a means through which to do this. He explains that newspapers set the emotional tone in relation to the 1987 AIDS crisis in Britain. Cultural texts are repositories of feeling and emotion, both in terms of their content and also in relation to how they were produced and received (Cvetkovich 2003). They reveal how affective life pervaded public life and formed different publics. Ann Cvetkovich (2003) refers to such texts as providing ‘archives of feeling’. Cook (2017) highlights that an emotional pulse runs through archival collections, whether these are collections of personal testimony or of official bureaucratic documents. There has been a tendency in history and criminology to construct emotions as less significant than ‘the rationality associated with governance’ (Cook 2017: 73). However, governance is itself emotional. Attention to the social, cultural and historical role of emotion helps to blur the boundaries between the public and domestic, and society and subjectivity. Using the history of emotion as a lens through which to look at the death penalty in mid-twentieth century Britain is revealing. One interpretation of capital punishment at this time is that it was largely an elite concern, with the move to abolition taking place ahead of the wishes of the populace. The extremely emotional nature of capital punishment as an issue, and its importance as a vehicle for public emotional expression, disproves the argument that it was primarily an elite preoccupation. It also troubles the assumed civilised elite/bloodthirsty public binary that underpins some interpretations. Capital punishment was certainly an issue that aroused strong feelings, but following Cook (2017), there is no reason to suppose that strong feelings were only the province of an ‘untutored’ public. Rather, the emotional reactions of legal professionals, civil servants and politicians were also understood to be significant. While punitive sentiments were a constituent part of the emotional public sphere generated by the death penalty, so was solidarity with and empathy for the condemned and their families.
The emotional public sphere The public sphere can be understood as referring to places to which there is general access and which have visibility (Adut 2012). This does not necessarily imply physical places; for example, different forms of news media constitute the public sphere. Particular events, such as a death penalty case, can create publics and spur collective action. Normative conceptions of the public
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sphere frequently conceptualise it as being consonant with civil society. However, as Ari Adut (2012) argues, an understanding of the public sphere based on general access does not contain the same normative precepts. The normative view allows little space for the presence of emotion (Richards 2009), and assumes that emotion poses a threat to the constitution of a democratic public sphere (Gamson 1999). However, emotion is inescapably part of public discourse (Gamson 1999). It is both omnipresent and multivalent (Pantti 2010). The emotional public sphere refers to the ‘emotions which are involved in the political life of a nation’ and to the display of emotion in the public sphere (Richards 2009: 301). It is where emotion is expressed, shared and managed. News media is central to shaping and strengthening emotions in the public sphere. Different sources present stories in different emotional registers but all news content elicits feeling and therefore plays a role in generating public conscience about issues (Richards 2009). News provides interpretive frameworks for events and moments of national significance. Its representations ‘participate in socializing the public to the proper expression of emotion, in particular by means of ritual performances’ (Pantti 2010: 223). Frequently, this upholds the dominant consensus but mediatized rituals ‘can serve democratic impulses as well as conservative forces of continuity’ (Cottle 2006: 413). News media can mobilise collective sentiments for transformative purposes and mediatized rituals generate particular solidarities and publics. These particular publics can confront authority and criticise elites (Cottle 2006). Crucially, the emotional public sphere is not separate from, or opposed to, a rational public sphere. Rather, emotional engagement is necessary as a basis for entering public discussion and for taking moral or political action. It frames the creation of social solidarities, communities and nations (Pantti 2010). Values and emotions presuppose one another; emotion is required in order to make evaluations and moral judgments and is integral to decision-making (Jaggar 1989; Bandes and Blumenthal 2012). Rather than being binary opposites, reason and emotion are mutually constituted (Jaggar 1989). Normative values, and what is considered to be appropriate emotional expression, serve the interests of dominant groups (Jaggar 1989). Emotional regimes constitute the ideals and ways of behaving that individuals should follow, and the emotions towards self and others that they are expected to feel (Johnson 2010). This is exemplified by the premium placed on ‘reason’ and ‘restraint’ in mid-twentieth century British culture, and by the ways in which these attributes were perceived to be successfully performed – albeit this was also an era in which the normative expression of emotion was in flux (Langhamer 2012). Nevertheless, individuals do not simply experience their emotions in line with hegemonic ideals, but frequently react in a range of ways counter to this (Jaggar 1989).
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Capital punishment in mid-twentieth century Britain Capital punishment moved up the political agenda following the Second World War and abolition seemed like a serious proposition. There were unsuccessful attempts to abolish the death penalty in 1948 and 1956, although in both cases a majority of MPs in the House of Commons voted in favour in abolition. The Homicide Act 1957 restricted the application of capital punishment to certain murders, whereas previously death was the mandatory punishment for all murder. The Murder Abolition of the Death Penalty Act passed in 1965, introducing an initial five-year suspension of capital punishment. Abolition of the death penalty for murder was confirmed by a vote in the House of Commons in December 1969 (Seal 2014a). News reporting of capital cases in the interwar period increasingly highlighted the emotional nature of the death penalty, and the toll that it exacted on the friends, relatives and romantic partners of the condemned (Seal 2014a). This intensified in the 1940s and 50s and can be contextualised in three ways. The emotionality of capital cases resonated with the news values of the popular press, which gave prominence to human interest stories and negotiated cultural norms of gender, family life and sex. Newspapers such as the Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Mail had large readerships and around 90% of the population had access to a Sunday newspaper (Bingham 2009). In the 1950s the public sphere included greater emotional expression than earlier in the century and what constituted the public sphere had also expanded to include, for example, ‘the politics of consumerism and the politicization of housewifery’ (Langhamer 2012: 421). The executions of Derek Bentley in 1953 and Ruth Ellis in 1955 exemplify the formation of emotional public spheres in relation to capital punishment. These were both high profile cases that generated substantial press coverage and were also highly contentious in terms of whether justice had been done. Derek Bentley, a 19-year-old, was under arrest when his 16-year-old friend, Christopher Craig, shot a police officer. Reportedly, Bentley uttered the words ‘Let him have it, Chris’ before Christopher fired the gun. Whether he had actually said this and, even if so, whether this was enough to hang for was hotly debated. Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, shot her boyfriend David Blakely outside a pub in Hampstead. He had been violent and abusive towards her, something newspapers made clear, particularly Ellis’s ghost authored four-part autobiography that appeared in the Woman’s Sunday Mirror (Seal 2011; 2014a). She was also the mother of two young children. The vast majority of women sentenced to death were reprieved and Ellis’s execution despite perceptions of strong mitigation caused significant disquiet. The following sections examine how newspapers set the emotional tone in relation to these two cases and, therefore, to the issue of capital punishment. This created an emotional public sphere that contained different emotional communities and different ways of conceptualising the role and appropriateness of
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emotion. It draws on letters that members of the public sent to the Home Secretaries about Bentley and Ellis in order reveal how individuals participated in the emotional public sphere surrounding these cases and how they articulated their own emotions in relation to them. These sources are particularly valuable as they traverse the public/domestic and society/subjectivity boundaries. Their authors undertook an act of citizenship in writing letters that responded to a social issue, but did so from their own perspective and in an unofficial capacity. Taken together, news stories and letters from the public constitute an ‘archive of feeling’ about the death penalty.
Derek Bentley Derek Bentley’s parents and sister were prominent in news coverage of the case, which followed their desperate attempts to secure a reprieve. Newspapers depicted their home life and reported the devastating impact of receiving the letter that informed the Bentleys there would be no reprieve (Seal 2014a). Their anguish following the execution was portrayed in stark visual terms by the Daily Mirror (1953a), which ran a front page with a large photograph of Iris and Lilian Bentley covering their faces in grief. The Bentleys were portrayed as an ordinary and recognisable working-class family with a loving and cosy domestic life. This aligned them with contemporary emotional regimes of family life and rendered them sympathetic. One role of the newspaper coverage was to create an emotional public sphere that facilitated empathy. Press stories also highlighted emotional reactions to the case from the public and in this way linked it to the emotional life of the nation. Following Derek Bentley’s execution, a Daily Mirror (1953b) editorial stated that the hanging had ‘deeply distressed and sharply divided the public’. Editorials and comment pieces emphasised the significance of the Bentley execution via comparison to other events of national importance. The Western Morning News (1953) referenced the Don Pacifico and Dreyfus affairs as controversies which, like the Bentley case, related to issues of citizenship and the importance one man could have. The editorial opined that the case had ‘stirred a great deal of feeling, and where this exists it cannot be suppressed’. An article in the Picture Post described the ‘emotional upset’ of the nation and named ‘Dunkirk and the King’s death’ and the ‘only two comparable occasions’ (Allsop 1953). Whether emotions should be part of the discussion was debated. The Manchester Guardian (1953) contended that ‘arguments advanced for special consideration [of Derek Bentley] make a powerful appeal to the emotions, and in so tragic a story it is right that they should’. The Daily Express (1953) conceded it was understandable people felt emotional about a ‘boy’s life’ but stated arguments for reprieve were ‘based on emotion – and on nothing else’. However, whether critical of emotionalism or not, there was agreement that capital punishment was part of the emotional life of the nation.
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Another aspect of the emotional public sphere created around the Bentley case was concern about the emotional impact of the heavy decision that the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, needed to take. The Yorkshire Post (1953) argued knowledge of the ‘emotional background to the case’ must have increased his burden. Fyfe’s decision was a ‘heavy responsibility for one man’ (Daily Dispatch 1953) and the execution ‘has brought sorrow for everybody, including the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a humane man who has had to take a terrible decision’ (Daily Mirror 1953c). Martin Francis (2002: 380) argues that in the 1950s contemporaries identified ‘a significant shift in British social values from a culture of self-discipline to a culture of self-expression’ and a concomitant loosening of restraint. This encompassed a remodelling of the emotional economy of politics to incorporate acknowledgement of (male) politicians’ emotions. Members of the public who wrote to Fyfe in relation to Derek Bentley described their own emotions about the case. One woman was ‘filled with horror at the sentence’1; another correspondent wished to ‘register my horror and disgust at this crime [the execution]’.2 A man informed Fyfe ‘I don’t think that in all my life I have been as angry with anyone as I am with you’, pointing out that Fyfe had ignored the jury’s recommendation to mercy.3 Other letter writers referred to the collective nature of feeling about Bentley. An author from Enfield stated: ‘I, among many other Britishers [sic] feel it very deeply’ and another correspondent, in asking for a reprieve, explained ‘there is so much public feeling’.4
Ruth Ellis Ruth Ellis’s friends and relatives were, as with Derek Bentley, a constituent part of the press narrative of her case and of the emotional public sphere it generated. Newspapers recounted the final visits to Holloway Prison made by her parents and best friend, Jaqueline Dyer. The Daily Herald (1955) acknowledged their plight, commenting: ‘The agony of Ruth Ellis will be momentary compared with the agony of those who love her, those who watch over her, those who will see her die’. This extended the trauma of the execution beyond her loved ones to those who had to administer the execution. Ellis’s ghostwritten autobiography provided access to (a version of) her life story and, supposedly, her inner life. Additionally, ghostwritten articles by her relatives and articles that quoted her directly made her a familiar and ‘knowable’ subject to news readers. Emotion was particularly salient in Ellis’s case because she had committed what was widely perceived as a ‘crime of passion’. During the trial, her defence evocatively described her as inhabiting ‘something like and emotional prison from which there seemed no escape’ and this was reported in press accounts (Manchester Guardian 1955a). That the emotional circumstances of the crime offered no legal mitigation engendered criticism of British culture as cold and unfeeling. A letter to the editor published in the Daily Mirror asked:
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‘When is this cold-hearted country going to recognise – and make allowances for – the crime of passion?’ (Sheffield 1955). The Evening Standard (1955) quoted a reflection on the case from French newspaper, Le Parisien Libere: ‘Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease’. Ruth Ellis’s femininity also made the case one that was particular suitable for generating an emotional public sphere. The People (1955) suggested that her case had revolted people more than had Derek Bentley’s, even though hers ‘was a far more calculated crime’, and asked ‘Is it because she is a woman and a mother?’. An editorial in the Daily Express (1955) linked the case to the emotional life of the nation, stating ‘In every home in the land controversy and emotion are aroused by the strange and moving story of Mrs Ruth Ellis’ but argued that the decision of whether to reprieve should not be based on whether the condemned was male or female. In the Evening Standard, Dr Neil Layton (1955) noted that ‘particularly when a woman is concerned, public emotion on behalf of the condemned (often forgetting the dead victim) runs wild. This can do no good’. The Daily Dispatch (1955) noted that the Home Secretary needed to make a ‘dispassionate decision’ about the case, and there was criticism more widely of the unwarranted ‘sentimentality’ that it had generated. However, it was not only abolitionists or those hoping for a reprieve who were charged with sentimentality. Increasingly, in the mid-twentieth century the retentionist position was portrayed as irrational and overly emotional – and therefore not civilised. A letter to the Birmingham Post referred to ‘the sentimentality of the protagonists of hanging’ (Shewell 1955) and a Manchester Guardian (1955b) editorial argued that underlying the death penalty ‘the concept is simple and emotional – one of vengeance’. Letter writers to Gwilym Lloyd George understood emotional duress to be a sufficient mitigating factor for reprieve. Ruth Ellis was ‘the victim of emotion’, ‘lost in a sea of utter dereliction and frustration’ due to becoming ‘overwrought, losing complete control of herself ’.5 A woman from Rhyl, Ellis’s hometown, commented ‘Her crime was prompted by raw tender emotions not anything dirty or bestial’.6 Crucially, extreme emotionality meant that she was not acting normally at the time of the murder. A man from Newquay stated ‘she was dominated by an emotional outburst of such intensity and magnitude that, at the very time of the act, she had momentarily lost the power of reason and self control’.7 Correspondents emphasised in particular the power of jealousy as an emotion and the need to understand how, as a woman from London stated that ‘anyone overwhelmed by those furious conditions of love and jealousy is not normal at the time’.8 Another letter writer contended ‘only those who know what jealousy is and how it swamps at times’ would realise that Ruth Ellis was a good person.9 An author describing herself as ‘a respectable woman of 50’, ‘suffered so much jealousy, hatred, fear and pain’ when her husband flirted with attractive women that her ‘nature was completely changed’.10
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These responses are significant for what they reveal about emotional regimes in the mid-1950s. Unlike Derek Bentley, Ruth Ellis was not framed as respectable. She was not married to David Blakely and it was also clear that she had had sexual relationships with other men to whom she was not married. However, the perceived passionate intensity of her love resonated with members of the public and they saw it as reason for reprieve. Claire Langhamer (2013: 3) argues that ‘the emotional landscape was changing’ in the mid-1950s. The valuing of self-discipline conflicted with the growing value of self-expression. Crucially, ‘[r]omantic love, allied to sexual expression, became central to the making of subjectivities in this period’ (Langhamer 2013: 3). This helps to explain why Ruth Ellis’s case in particular became such as cause celebre. Three other women had been hanged since the Second World War without generating such strong reactions but their cases were not love stories. Women’s greater capacity for emotion – and their emotional difference from men – was also significant for letter writers. A letter from Poole signed by 27 women stated: ‘Mrs Ellis killed in a fit of jealousy and passion, I am a woman and have experienced those exact same emotions’.11 A man from Lancashire contended: ‘The reactions of a woman driven mad by jealousy are incalculable – far different to those of a man’.12 For some correspondents, this meant that a male judge could not assess the case fairly. A woman from Barnet stated: ‘A male judge understands the reactions of a man, not a woman’.13 The emotional public sphere that formed around the Ellis case contained different emotional communities. Not all of the news coverage was sympathetic to Ruth Ellis and not all letter writers empathised or personally identified with her. The sentimentality of the ‘emotional outbursts’ towards the case troubled many. References to ‘sloppy sentiment’, ‘sentimental nonsense’ and ‘an outbreak of frothy and dangerous sentimentality’ appeared in the letters of those who felt that Ruth Ellis should hang.14 The conflict between selfrestraint and self-expression can be discerned. A woman from London stated that ‘much hysteria has been written by MPs and BBCers and other West End pub-crawlers on the death sentence in this case’ but argued that exempting Ellis from hanging would indicate ‘sex is an uncontrolled animal passion’.15
The limits of the emotional public sphere The Bentley and Ellis cases demonstrate how the emotional public sphere that formed around the death penalty communicated views on punishment and justice, and also competing understandings of appropriate relationships and emotional expression. By no means everyone empathised with these two condemned individuals but the emotional tone set by many newspapers helped to facilitate this type of identification. Theirs were not the only mid-twentieth century cases to be portrayed as emotional or to provoke emotional reactions from the public. They are notable, however, for having lodged in the collective memory as stories about the injustice of capital punishment and their
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emotional resonance is highly pertinent to this. Feature films Dance With a Stranger (1987) (about Ellis) and Let Him Have It (1991) (about Bentley) retold their stories years later and they have been the subject of numerous documentaries, books and news articles. Both cases were referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission; Bentley’s conviction was quashed in 1998, Ellis’s was upheld in 2003 (Seal 2014a). The creation of an emotional public sphere around the death penalty can be illustrated through focusing on high profile cases such as Bentley and Ellis. The vast majority of capital cases passed with relatively little press or public attention on a national scale, including where the condemned was hanged rather than reprieved. Diagnosing exactly why certain cases become so resonant and others do not is complex. Whichever elements can be identified in the former may well have applied to other contemporary cases that did not spark the same uproar and have not been remembered. Others – the majority perhaps – have less potential for public emotional resonance. Cvetkovich (2003: 278) counsels that we should reflect on whose trauma gets recognised in the national public sphere, and should ask ‘Whose feelings count?’. This raises issues about the politics of feeling in relation to the death penalty. As Wendy Lesser (1993: 253) argues, the discomfort generated by executing ‘sympathetic’ murderers implies ‘the execution of a banal, unappealing [murderer] would not warrant our concern’. Protest against the death penalty engages with the politics of feeling, meaning that certain condemned are easier to campaign for than others. The ability to identify with them through emotional regimes is key to this. Rosanne Kennedy (2007: 37) argues that for young men, the ‘good son’ portrayal enables sympathetic representation, especially where their mother becomes part of the public narrative. Derek Bentley was a prime example of this portrayal. However, this ‘only extends empathy to selected few’ (Kennedy 2007: 37). Individuals without families, or without families who publicly campaign for them, or who do not have a comprehensible story of mitigation, are unlikely to form the basis of an emotional public sphere. Kennedy (2007) argues that this highlights the contingency of the politics of feeling, which may ultimately mean they are not a good basis for opposing the death penalty. She also suggests that framing cases in terms of ‘painful feelings’ rather than through discourses of justice and human rights ends up blunting wider abolitionist critique. The emotional public sphere can, however, be means to facilitate discussions of justice. This quite clearly happened in relation to Bentley and Ellis – they evoked not just the expression of painful feelings in public but also questioning of the morality of the death penalty and whether it should be retained as a form of punishment. The uneasiness about Ruth Ellis’s conviction extended to questioning whether the legal system could give her a fair trial as the law could not recognise her torment (see Seal 2011). Public reaction was about more than simply feeling upset. However, the contingency of the politics of feeling that Lesser (1993) and Kennedy (2007) identify does need to be addressed.
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Ruth Ellis is a good example of how emotional resonance did not necessarily depend on the respectability of a condemned individual, but did depend on their emotional life being rendered recognisable in the public sphere, enabling empathy and solidarity. In relation to the American death penalty, Craig Haney (2005) highlights how racial disparities in death sentencing in part result from an ‘empathic divide’ between white jurors and male African American defendants. He identifies ‘[p]utting the defendant’s life in a human context, situating his actions within a personal history, and appreciating the set of connections he has to other lives’ as the most compelling way to avert juries from the death sentence (Haney 2005: 191). The empathic divide is the cognitive and emotional distance between a white juror and African American capital defendant, which prevents jurors from connecting ‘themselves to the defendant through familiar experiences, common moral dilemmas, and recognizable human tragedies’ (Haney 2005: 203). The death penalty was never decided by the jury in Britain but the empathic divide is a useful concept in understanding the limits of the emotional public sphere. Like the American death penalty, capital punishment in twentieth century England and Wales showed racial disparities. Men of colour were overrepresented among the hanged – they accounted for 4% of executions but less than one percent of the general population (no women of colour were sentenced to death in the twentieth century). While 40% of condemned white men were reprieved 1900–1955, only 25% of men of colour had their death sentences commuted.16 Fully unpicking the reasons for this is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it is a stark example of racial disparity and suggests that the empathic divide played a role in making reprieve decisions. No cases of men of colour generated emotional public spheres like Bentley and Ellis. As noted earlier, this applied to the vast majority of capital cases of condemned white men too. However, the execution of Somali born Mahmood Mattan in 1952 offers an example of an egregious miscarriage of justice that did not lodge itself in collective memory, even after it emerged as a very likely case of injustice in 1969, or after the conviction was quashed in 1998.
Mahmood Mattan Mahmood Mattan was born in Somaliland in 1923 and had lived in Wales since 1943. He was executed for the murder of Lily Volpert, a shopkeeper, in the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff in September 1952. Volpert had her throat cut with a razor and around £100 was stolen from the shop. The evidence against Mattan was circumstantial and relied on eye witness identification. The burglary and murder were violent but banal and not of the kind that usually became high profile or the subject of strong emotional reactions. It received news coverage as murder trials and executions frequently did, but of a usual and not extensive amount. In 1969, Harold Cover, whose eye witness evidence had been significant to the prosecution’s case, was convicted of the attempted murder of his daughter by cutting her throat with a razor. The People
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newspaper investigated whether the hanging had been a miscarriage of justice (Wickham 1969). Attention to archival case file material indicates that there was a local emotional community that had formed around Mattan’s case – there was a meeting in 1969 between two prominent members of the Somali community and a representative from the Welsh Office.17 However, despite the attention of The People newspaper and abolitionist Labour MPs Ted Rowlands and Tom Driberg, it did not resonate nationally (and Home Secretary James Callaghan declined to reopen it). Potentially, the discovery of a wrongful conviction and execution in 1969 could have been significant – capital punishment had been suspended in 1965 prior to the intended final abolition for murder in 1970 and the Mattan case could have been a compelling example of the pitfalls of the death penalty. Mahmood Mattan was, however, not a good subject for the politics of feeling or the development of an emotional public sphere. He was not white or British – he did not belong to the national imagined community (see Seal 2014b). He was separated from his wife and children at the time of his execution, which meant he did not fit ideals of masculinity according to emotional regimes. He lived in a boarding house rather than a family home. Even if he had not been separated from his wife and children, as a black man with a white wife and mixed heritage children, he would still have violated contemporary emotional regimes. As he was an immigrant, there were no members of his wider family to speak of his loss. John Minkes and Maurice Vanstone (2006) highlight the racist language employed by Mattan’s own defence barrister Thomas Rhys-Roberts during his trial, who in his closing speech described him as ‘a childish liar’ and ‘[h]alf-child of nature; half, semi-civilised savage’.18 Although shocking and seemingly dehumanising, Rhys-Roberts was likely making an emotional appeal to the jury – one based on paternalistic racism rooted in colonialist assumptions about white British superiority. He may have perceived emphasising Mattan’s supposed racial inferiority as the only way to make him sympathetic. Clearly though, paternalistic racism does not bridge the empathic divide between the defendant and jury as it explicitly invites them to regard the defendant as racialised other. In 1997, Mattan’s case was the first to be referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal by the newly formed Criminal Cases Review Commission, which identified a number of reasons why his conviction should be regarded as unsafe. Harold Cover’s original statement to the police included the detail that the Somali man he saw leaving Lily Volpert’s shop had a gold tooth. The police interviewed Taher Gass in March 1952, who stated that he had passed the shop at between 8.10 and 8.15, the time of the murder. Gass was Somali and had a gold tooth. In 1954, he was tried for murder by stabbing and found not guilty by reason of insanity. In the 1950s, it was not required or usual practice for the prosecution to show witness statements to the defence so Mattan’s defence did not know these details. Mattan’s conviction was quashed in February 1998 (R vs. Mahmoud Mattan (Hanged) [1998] EWCA Crim 676).
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News coverage of the campaign to reopen the case in the 1990s and Mattan’s subsequent exoneration demonstrate how emotional regimes had shifted since the end of the 1960s. Headlines such as ‘Family Seek Pardon for Man Hanged “Because of Racism”’ (Gow 1995) and ‘Hanged Dad is Cleared 46 Years On’ (Armstrong 1998) placed Mattan within family relationships and appealed to readers’ empathy and emotional identification. His widow Laura was the central figure in news stories and features, which established ‘years of campaigning by the family of Mahmood Mattan, in particular his widow Laura’ as the spur to reopening the case (Bennetto 1997). Stories appealed to emotions by highlighting the impact of the hanging on Mattan’s family. The Mail on Sunday informed readers ‘as a young wife of 20, [Laura] was desolated by grief when they hanged her husband’ (Gammon 1996) and Laura was quoted in The Mirror following the exoneration as stating ‘I have gone without a husband and my children lost a good father’ (Armstrong 1998). New stories emphasised the significance of 1950s racism to the Mattans’ daily lives, and to Mahmood’s trial. Laura’s separation from Mahmood at the time of the murder was explained as resulting from racism; ‘mixed marriages were regarded as an unspeakable disgrace’ (Gammon 1996) and Laura was called ‘a black man’s whore’ by neighbours (Gow 1995). The Daily Mail referred to ‘a trial tarred by racial bigotry’ (Allen and Gysin 1998) and The Independent quoted then First Minister for Wales Rhodri Morgan’s description of Mattan’s trial as ‘the nearest thing to a legalised lynching you could get’. Morgan also asserted that the case should lead people to rethink ‘complacent’ attitudes to Tiger Bay as ‘a cosmopolitan melting pot’ in the midtwentieth century (Bennetto 1998). Highlighting the significance of racism to Mattan’s execution was a constituent part of making him a sympathetic figure. He was portrayed as a victim of his time. The attention to prejudice against ‘interracial’ relationships and marriages in the 1950s partly framed the case as a tragic love story; a very different rendering from the 1950s press coverage and one which heightened its emotionality. The acknowledgement of racism in the past distanced its relevance from 1990s Britain, implicitly suggesting that trials in the present did not exhibit the same racism and that more enlightened attitudes towards mixed families prevailed. This evoked a collective identity of Britain as a ‘good’ society, able to recognise and act on historical injustice. Linking the case to issues of contemporary injustice and racial discrimination would have undermined this identity. Mahmood and Laura Mattan could be recognisable as a loving couple in accordance with emotional regimes of the 1990s in a way that they could not in the early 1950s or late 1960s. Racism could also be understood as an impediment to their relationship and as the explanation for the miscarriage of justice of Mahmood’s execution. Nevertheless, despite his conviction being overturned the Court of Criminal Appeal, Mahmood Mattan did not enter into collective memory in the way that Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis did. Despite a more emotional and potentially empathetic media framing of the
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Mattan case in the late 1990s, he remained obscure. This demonstrates the limitations of the emotional public sphere, especially in relation to race and nationality, and illustrates how collective memories of capital punishment in Britain elide attention to the racism of the death penalty.
Conclusion: emotion, criminology and politics of feeling An examination of capital cases in mid-twentieth century Britain reveals that the death penalty was part of the emotional life of the nation and reflected the shifting emotional norms of the era. News mediated portrayals of the cases of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis sought to engage emotion and in doing so generated empathy and solidarity. The emotional public sphere around the death penalty was a means to challenge perceived injustice and brought misgivings about this punishment to the fore. However, identification with Bentley and Ellis was contingent on their recognisability through contemporary emotional regimes and as members of the imagined national community. The case of Mahmood Mattan illustrates how when the condemned individual did not meet these expectations injustice alone was not enough for the formation of an emotional public sphere. This presents criminologists with a dilemma in relation to the politics of feeling. The individual story can be powerful, emotive and representative of wider or systemic failures of justice. The right story offers considerable potential for campaigning for changes in policy and practice. However, the seeming contingency of mobilising the politics of feeling for empathy raises questions about their ethics and effectiveness. Where the majority white population cannot bridge the empathic divide of race and nationality, certain cases will never generate emotional public spheres. This especially applies where injustice in relation to punishment and other types of social control is disproportionately or solely applied to ‘others’. Such dilemmas have long been part of campaigns to abolish the death penalty. Many individuals who are sentenced to death have committed crimes which mean they are not sympathetic and rather than empathy their cases rouse punitive sentiment. This sentiment frequently entails empathy for their victims at the expense of recognising the humanity of the condemned (Bandes 1996). This could lead criminologists to conclude that minimising emotion in favour of broader rights-based arguments is preferable to mobilising the politics of feeling. However, returning to this chapter’s earlier points about the imbrication of emotion and reason, such an approach also seems unsatisfactory. Emotion underpins rights-based arguments. Rather, awareness and acknowledgement of the contingency of the emotional public sphere is a starting point from which to broaden its scope. Empathy is not an unalloyed good in and of itself, but must be joined to the advancement of social and political equality (Bandes 1996). Maggie O’Neill (2001) argues that the politics of feeling can enable access to the lived experiences and feeling worlds of others. They have radical potential for challenging unequal power relations
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and can explicitly seek to highlight marginalised perspectives. Bringing this critical perspective to the emotions generated by punishment entails awareness of how emotions reinforce the dominant order, but also how feeling can be a means to challenge it.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18
TNA/HO291/225, Letter, woman, illegible date and address. HO291/225, Letter, gender unknown, Cardiff, undated. HO291/225, Letter, man, Stockholm, received 2.9.53. HO291/225, Letter, gender unknown, Enfield, 22.1.53 and Letter, gender unknown, illegible date and address. TNA/HO291/235, Letter, ‘A Legionary of Mary’, unaddressed, 5.7.55 and Letter, woman, Hastings, 4.7.55. HO291/235, Letter, woman, Rhyl, 1.7.55. HO291/235, Letter, man, Newquay, 30.6.55. HO291/235, Letter, woman, London, 27.6.55. HO291/235, Letter, woman, Brixton, 29.6.55. HO291/235, Letter, ‘Housewife’, unaddressed, 30.6.55. HO291/235, Letter, 27 women, Poole, 8.7.55. HO291/235, Letter, man, Lytham, 7.7.55. HO291/235, Letter, woman, Barnet, 29.6.55. HO291/235, Letter, gender unknown, London, 30.6.55; Letter, gender unknown, Tavistock, 25.6.55 and Letter, gender unknown, London, 5.7.55. HO291/235, Letter, woman, London, 9.7.55. This is harder to assess post 1955. The death penalty was suspended during certain periods while abolitionist bills were under consideration, meaning all death sentences were reprieved. The restrictions on the death sentence following the Homicide Act 1957 mean that there were relatively few 1957–65. TNA/DPP2/2145, Note of interview 19.6.69, Minister of State’s room at the Welsh Office. DPP2/2145, Trial transcript, Mr Rhys-Roberts closing speech.
References Adut, Ari (2012). ‘A Theory of the Public Sphere’. Sociological Theory, 30(4): 238–262. Allen, Peter and Christian Gysin (1998). ‘46 Years Too Late; Man Hanged for 1952 Murder is Declared Innocent’. Daily Mail, 25 February. Allsop, Kenneth (1953). ‘The People Didn’t Think So’. Picture Post, 14 February. Armstrong, Jeremy (1998). ‘Hanged Dad is Cleared 46 Years On’. The Mirror, 25 February. Bandes, Susan A. (1996). ‘Empathy, Narrative and Victim Impact Statements’. University of Chicago Law Review, 63(2): 361–412. Bandes, Susan A. (2008). ‘The Heart Has its Reasons: Examining the Strange Persistence of the American Death Penalty’. Law, Politics and Society, 42: 21–52. Bandes, Susan A. (2009). ‘Repellent Crimes and Rational Deliberation: Emotion and the Death Penalty’. Vermont Law Review, 33(3): 489–518. Bandes, Susan A. and Jeremy A. Blumenthal (2012). ‘Emotion and the Law’. Annual Reviews, 8: 161–181. Bennetto, Jason (1997). ‘Hanged Man’s Case Reopened’. The Independent, 25 September.
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Bennetto, Jason (1998). ‘Racial Hatred that Led to a “Legalised Lynching”’. The Independent, 25 February. Bingham, Adrian (2009). Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, Matt (2017). ‘“An Archive of Feeling”: The AIDS Crisis in Britain 1987’. History Workshop Journal, 83(1): 51–78. Cottle, Simon (2006). ‘Mediatized Rituals: Beyond Manufacturing Consent’. Media, Culture and Society, 28(3): 411–432. Cvetkovich, Ann (2003). An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Daily Dispatch (1953). ‘As We See It’. 28 January. Daily Dispatch (1955). ‘As We See It: Jealousy and the Law’. 1 July. Daily Express (1953). ‘Opinion: Emotion is a Bad Master’. 29 January. Daily Express (1955). ‘Opinion: When Women Kill’. 2 July. Daily Herald (1955). ‘Ruth Ellis: The Woman on Britain’s Conscience’. 9 July. Daily Mirror (1953a). ‘Bentley Dies Today: No Last Minute Reprieve’. 28 January. Daily Mirror (1953b). ‘Bentley and the Law’. 29 January. Daily Mirror (1953c). ‘The Last Act’. 27 January. Evening Standard (1955). ‘Mrs Ellis Sees a Solicitor’. 12 July. Francis, Martin (2002). ‘Tears, Tantrums and Bared Teeth: The Emotional Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers’. Journal of British Studies, 41(3): 354–387. Gamson, Joshua (1999). ‘Taking the Talk Show Challenge: Television, Emotion and Public Spheres’. Constellations, 6(2): 190–205. Gammon, Clive (1996). ‘The Dark Secret of Tiger Bay’. Mail on Sunday, 1 December. Gow, David (1995). ‘Family Seek Pardon for Man Hanged “Because of Racism”’. The Guardian, 13 February. Haney, Craig (2005). Death by Design: Capital Punishment as Social Psychological System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaggar, Alison M. (1989). ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’. Inquiry, 32(2): 151–176. Johnson, Carol (2010). ‘The Politics of Affective Citizenship: From Blair to Obama’. Citizenship Studies, 14(5): 495–509. Kennedy, Rosanne (2007). ‘The Media and the Death Penalty: The Limits of Sentimentality, the Power of Abjection’. Humanities Research, 14(2): 29–47. Langhamer, Claire (2012). “The Live Dynamic of Whole Feeling and Behaviour’: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Emotion, 1945–1957’. Journal of British Studies, 51(2): 416–441. Langhamer, Claire (2013). The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layton, Neil (1955). ‘Ruth Ellis’. Evening Standard, 9 July. Lesser, Wendy (1993). Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry in the Subject of Murder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Manchester Guardian (1953). ‘Death Sentence’, 29 January. Manchester Guardian (1955a). ‘Model Says She Intended to Kill Racing Driver: Counsel Speaks of “Emotional Prison”’, 21 June. Manchester Guardian (1955b). ‘Comment’, 17 July. Minkes, John and Maurice Vanstone (2006). ‘Gender, Race and the Death Penalty: Lessons from Three 1950s Murder Trials’. The Howard Journal, 45(4): 403–420.
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O’Neill, Maggie (2001). Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling. Oxford: Blackwell. Pantti, Mervi (2010). ‘Disaster News and Public Emotions’, in Katrin Döveling, Christian von Scheve and Elly A. Konijn (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media. London: Routledge, pp. 221–236. Richards, Barry (2009). ‘News and the Emotional Public Sphere’, in Stuart Allan (ed.). The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism. London: Routledge, pp. 301–311. Rosenwein, Barbara H. (2002). ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’. American History Review, 107(3): 821–845. Seal, Lizzie (2011). ‘Ruth Ellis and Public Contestation of the Death Penalty’. The Howard Journal, 50(5): 492–504. Seal, Lizzie (2014a). Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain: Audience, Justice, Memory. London: Routledge. Seal, Lizzie (2014b). ‘Imagined Communities and the Death Penalty in Britain, 1930– 1965’. British Journal of Criminology, 54(5): 908–927. Sheffield, W. P. (1955). ‘When is This Cold-Hearted Country Going to Recognise – And Make Allowances For – the Crime of Passion’. Daily Mirror, 2 July. Shewell, Wilfrid (1955). ‘Capital Punishment’. Birmingham Post, 22 July. The People (1955). ‘Talk it Over: Ruth Ellis is the Test’. 3 July. Western Morning News (1953). ‘Bentley’: 28 January. Wickham, David (1969). ‘Was the Wrong Man Hanged’. The People, 1 June. Yorkshire Post (1953). ‘Justice Has Been Done’. 28 January.
Archival collections The National Archives, Records of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). DDP2/2145. Home Office (HO). HO291/225, HO291/235.
Cases cited R vs. Mahmoud Mattan (Hanged) [1998] EWCA Crim 676.
Part 3
Doing criminology as emotion work
8
Prison life as ‘emotion culture’ Reflections on some of the emotional challenges of conducting prison ethnography1 Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Dorte Raaby Andersen
Introduction In Denmark, from which we write, approximately 3,500 people are on a daily basis kept behind bars in prisons. In the United Kingdom, the number is around 90,000 prisoners. In the United States, almost 2 million people are imprisoned on an average day. Looking at the global prison population, it comes out at around 9 million people. This means that prison life for many people around the world is equivalent to everyday life – most obviously for those incarcerated, but also for their families outside the walls coming to visit at various intervals as well as for those working professionally in prisons such as prison guards, administrators, teachers, priests, psychologists, auxiliary staff members and so on. As people spend time inside prisons for either shorter or longer periods, their emotional experiences also change, including their feelings and relations to self and others. Such emotions are an important and integral part of everyday life outside as well as inside prison walls. As once poignantly observed by existential sociologist Jack D. Douglas: Love and hate, ecstasy and agony, pleasure and pain, lust and satiety, hope and despair, satisfaction and frustration, excitement and boredom, sympathy and spite, full and hungry, tasty and foul, comfort and discomfort. These and a vast number of other feelings, named and unnamed, are the core of our being, the stuff of our everyday lives. (Douglas 1977: 51) This proposed deep-seated emotionality of everyday life is equally true of company offices, kinder gardens, construction sites, schools, executive corridors, hospital wards, entertainment venues, etc. Obviously, it, perhaps even more so, also pertains to everyday life as lived in prison settings. Prisons are for all practical intents and purposes peculiar, insular places. In many ways they differ radically from the world outside the walls: they are institutions intended to contain those individuals who are confined in prison
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as punishment for whatever their deeds or who are deemed too dangerous to be let loose in ‘normal society’. On the other hand, however, prisons also mirror many of the ways in which everyday life outside the walls transpires with its well-known routines, daily rituals, formal and informal relationships and not least emotional ups and downs. Erving Goffman (1961) famously coined the term ‘total institutions’ to capture all those places where life was cut off from normal and unrestrained interaction such as mental hospitals, prisons, schools, army barracks and concentration camps, and which were guided by their own sets of interaction rituals. Just as famously, Michel Foucault (1975/2002) drew on Jeremy Bentham’s description of ‘the Panopticon’ as a physically sequestrated place for normalising and disciplining the deviant and as a general image of modern society. The fact that these two concepts – total institutions and the Panopticon – are still frequently invoked in contemporary prison research bears witness to their continued analytical potency. However, instead of talking about ‘total institutions’ or ‘the Panopticon’ as if they refer to fixed and unchanging phenomena, we should perhaps rather talk about institutions with varying degrees of totalising or panoptic traits. The architectural setup and the treatment philosophy of mental hospitals and prisons alike have changed quite considerably over time (at least in the Western world) since Goffman and Foucault wrote their pieces, not least due to psychiatric and penal reforms. Despite this, many of the totalising and panoptic traits of prisons remain as they are still institutions serving the purpose of securely separating the inside from the outside. This also means that to most people, prisons remain no-go areas, sealed-off from ordinary life on the outside. Such no-go areas often ignite our imagination, because we want to know what goes on behind hermetically closed doors. As American actor and screenwriter Wentworth Miller, who rose to prominence not least due to his leading role in the television series Prison Break, proposed: ‘Prison has a universal fascination. It’s a real-life horror story because, given the right set of circumstances, anyone could find themselves behind bars’. Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why prisons seem to continue to attract our attention and stir the public imagination. As we will show in this chapter, criminologists and sociologists have not been immune to this fascination with prisons and prison life and for many decades prison research has been a core concern of a lot of particularly criminological studies and continues to be so. In recent years, social scientists – in the slipstream of what has been called ‘the emotional turn’ – have now also started to focus specifically on the emotional experiences of prison life – of the everyday emotional experiences of the inmates, relatives and professionals. Moreover, the deep-seated and special emotionality that is so characteristic of prison life has not escaped the self-reflexivity of researchers when contemplating, planning, conducting and evaluating their own research endeavours and engagements in prisons. To do research in prisons, and particular doing ethnographic research, is indeed an emotional enterprise.
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In this chapter, we want to explore prison life by looking at it as an ‘emotion culture’, which also influences the way in which ethnographic work in prisons is carried out. First, we will differentiate between different types of prison research, which leads us to focus on the ethnographic work conducted within prison settings. Then we will look at the emotion culture of prison life as a way of appreciating how and why prisons are such emotional research sites. Based on this, we will provide insights into a study conducted by one of the authors on correctional officers in a Danish prison, because it highlights some of the emotional dimensions and tensions of prison life and prison research alike. Towards the end of the chapter, we will discuss some of the broader as well as more specific emotional, methodological and moral challenges to prison ethnography. The purpose of the chapter is thus to shed light on prison life and prison research as an emotionally charged field encouraging the researcher to tread carefully.
Four approaches to prison research Prisons, it seems, have always attracted the attention of the public mind. People on the outside have vividly contemplated what actually went on in this inaccessible world existing behind the thick walls of these secluded and seemingly godforsaken places. So, when old dilapidated prisons have served their time, they are thus many places now turned into fancy ‘dark tourism’ hotels (with varying levels of comfort) for the picky consumers, as is evident, for example, in Horsens in Denmark, Oxford in England or Liepaja in Latvia. Also, politicians and social reformers have continuously shown a keen interest in prisons, especially when launching their own ‘law and order’ initiatives or when, on the other hand, criticizing the inhumane character of existing penal policies. Either based on pure fiction or on first-hand biographical experience, poets, writers and film makers of epic masterpieces such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Papillon, The Gulag Archipelago, Brubaker, Escape from Alcatraz, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption not to mention numerous television series have swelled in the often gory details of incarcerated life and in the emotional turmoil and human relationships unfolding there. Often, popular culture, it seems, has been particularly well-suited to capture some of the things that go on behind the watchtowers, closed doors and iron bars of the prison, not least because the restrictions applying to access can be sidestepped by novelists and script writers in their more creative way of working (Jacobsen and Petersen 2015). Social researchers themselves, however, have not been slow to take an interest in empirically studying prisons and prison life, and the history of criminology, sociology and criminal justice contains many such studies. As anything else in social life, prisons can be studied by the use of many different social research methods, each fully equipped with their potentials and pitfalls. When wanting to understand everyday life in a prison setting, however, some methods are more useful and appropriate than others.
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American anthropologist Lorna A. Rhodes has usefully separated between four different types of prison research, which, in her own words, can be defined as follows: 1 2 3 4
Contemporary critiques directed against the numbing effects of the present situation Efforts … to revisit and revise our understanding of prison history Work that attempts an entry into and a direct engagement in the interior life of the prison Work that addresses women as prisoners and problematizes the predominance of masculine perspectives in and on the prison. (Rhodes 2001: 66).
Rhodes is thus suggesting the existence of respectively a critical, a historical, an ethnographic and a gender-sensitive research perspective on prisons and prison life. The first two types of prison research are often more of the ‘armchair’ kind, in which the researcher gathers information about prison life or prison development through the meticulous study of secondary data sources such as, for example, through statistics or document analysis. Just think of the previously mentioned historical-genealogical writings of Michel Foucault (1975/2002) on the development of the modern pantopic prison, Nils Christie’s (1993) critical work on the rise of the ‘prison industry’ or Loïc J. D. Wacquant’s (1999) equally critical work of the so-called ‘prisons of poverty’. It is a common characteristic of this type of critical or historical work that it is often motivated by a highly normative assessment of the role of prisons that problematizes the purposes and negative consequences of prison sentencing in society. Scholars in these traditions thus often ‘write against’ the prison. The third type, which is the one that concerns us most here, often requires that the researcher is physically co-present in the field with his or her informants and connects with them, also in an emotional sense. This kind of prison ethnography dates back to some of the classics of criminological prison research such as the pioneering work of Donald R. Clemmer (1940) and Gresham M. Sykes (1958), who both by way of detailed descriptions of the daily life unfolding inside prisons wrote about ‘prisonization processes’ and ‘deprivation’ experiences. In these ethnographic texts, one will find many rich depictions of the emotional impact and the ‘pains of imprisonment’ on prisoners and prison guards, although descriptions of the emotional effects on the prison researcher himself are largely conspicuous by their absence. Even though it has been claimed that this type of ethnographic prison research has experienced a ‘curious eclipse’ in our time (Wacquant 2002), it seems as if the past few decades have somewhat rectified this situation. Finally, the fourth type of research, which is of a more recent date, mostly relies on feminist or post-structuralist understandings of the way in which the prison as an institution and prison research rests on and perpetuates a culture of masculinity that renders women invisible in a double sense: by focusing predominantly on
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men as prisoners (thus ignoring the topic of female prisoners), and by focusing on prisoners as men, thus taking the maleness of prison life – male values, experiences and violence – almost for granted and leaving unconscious gender assumptions unchallenged (Rhodes 2001: 74). One can only speculate that this reported male bias in a lot of classic and contemporary prison research can maybe account for the somewhat sparse attention to emotions in many studies. In his ethnographic PhD dissertation on everyday life in a men’s prison in Oslo, Norwegian criminologist Thomas Ugelvik (2010) elaborated and expanded on Rhodes’ listing and substituted her category of gender-sensitive studies with what he terms a ‘practical-technical’ perspective, which is concerned with evaluating and improving prison institutions. According to him, such a practical-technical view is often initiated by external agencies (i.e. on the political-administrative level) and is aimed at technically optimizing the prison as a correctional institution. Ugelvik also elaborate on the ethnographic-descriptive perspective and states that it often relies on primary data sources dealing with relations, roles, emotions, group dynamics, interaction patterns, culture, everyday life and the social anatomy of prison life. Knowledge is often negotiated and obtained from direct social intercourse with prisoners and different groups of professionals. A point can be made that such in-depth ethnographic-descriptive studies are often an important precondition for developing a critical or practical-technical perspective (Ugelvik 2010: 35– 41). In the following, we will move deeper into some of these ethnographic dimensions of and experiences with prison research.
Ethnographic experiences of prison life Over time, a wide range of studies have employed ethnographic methods to map, study and analyse the organisation of prisons and the minute and intimate details of inmates’ and staff members’ everyday life in prison (see e.g., Drake, Earle and Sloan 2016). These studies have been conducted in Western as well as non-Western settings (see e.g., Bandyopadhyay 2010; Blue 2012; Cunha 2014), and even though cultural differences are obviously evident beyond the prison walls, multiple studies bear witness that a number of common denominators can be identified across very different cultural contexts characterising the experience of life in prison. Starting in the 1930s and stretching forward a few decades, a range of different criminological and sociological studies of prison life were conducted in the United States in particular. The studies focused on prison organisation, culture and everyday life (see e.g., the references in Caldwell 1956 to the literature in the field emerging at that time). In his classic work The Prison Community (1940), American sociologist Donald Clemmer – who was employed in the penitentiary system for many years – described the inmates’ adaptation to prison life. He analysed the prison as a unique culture and established the notion of ‘prisonization’: a process in which the inmates are socialised into the prison’s culture, traditions and norms and thereby become part of the prison community (see e.g.,
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Gillespie 2002). In his studies which were conducted in the course of several years, Clemmer drew on both interviews with inmates, observations of their everyday lives, autobiographies, psychometric tests and biographic and demographic information all of which afforded him in-depth insights into the special prison culture of which the inmates were part (Bosworth 2010: 76ff). According to Clemmer, prisonization was characterised by prison-oppositional attitudes, norms and behaviours. Inmates were to remain loyal to each other, while avoiding collaborating with prison staff (Clemmer 1940). In 1958, another American sociologist and criminologist, Gresham M. Sykes, published the book Society of Captives (1958). Based on thorough studies of a high-security New Jersey prison, he described the inmates’ social community as a world with its own argot, roles, codes, culture, conventions and hierarchies. He analysed the inmates’ formal power relations and their experiences of captivity. Sykes described how the prison regime, attempting to control all facets of everyday life, forced the inmates to engage in criminal behaviour (Sykes 1958: 22). He also described the inmates’ social world as an attempt to tackle and survive the suffering imposed on them in prison – the so-called ‘pains of imprisonment’. According to Sykes, the pains included more than simply the loss of liberty. They included the loss of, for example, heterosexual relations, safety, personal belongings and autonomy, and not least the coercion that the inmates experienced towards social deviation rather than adherence to conventional norms (Sykes 1958). The inmate social system arose in response hereto, bringing a shared identity, loyalty and solidarity among the inmates that served to compensate for the pains imposed on them by the prison (Sykes and Messinger 1960). Sykes’ descriptions redirected the study of prisons as complex organisations and produced an emerging perception of social deviation as a form of psychological survival strategy used in a secluded world (see also Cohen and Taylor 1972; Heffernan 1972; Toch 1977). In addition hereto – and even though he was studying a mental hospital rather than a prison unit – Erving Goffman analysed both patient and staff adaptation strategies and identity transformations in so-called ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1961). Goffman focused on the deprivations that characterised life in the total institution and which shaped the adaptation to and the daily experiences made within the institution. He described deprivation as a process by which the patients were gradually separated from the social roles and identities that are normally maintained in contact with significant others beyond the confines of the institution. He described how the mentally ill patients of the total institution (which according to Goffman is, in various respects, not substantially different from the context of inmates or concentration camp prisoners) are deprived of their normal identity constituents necessary to maintain a feeling of self. They are forced to socialise with other patients and succumb to the authority of staff and institutional routines. Goffman colourfully described this as the ‘mortification of the self ’ (Goffman 1961).
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Within a Scandinavian context, the best-known representative is Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen who published the book The Defences of the Weak in 1965, in which he unearthed the solidarity and normative community among inmates. He demonstrated how institutional deprivation does not necessarily lead to the formation of an inmate social system. In Mathiesen’s study, the inmates’ adaptation manifested as a critical posture towards and resistance against the prison system in general. They accused prison staff of not abiding by their own norms of justice, their own treatment objectives and ideals. After the 1970s, prison research gradually moved from studies of the inner life of prisons, adopting instead a bidirectional track. On one hand a prison-history track was explored, inspired by Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work Discipline and Punish (1975/2002) occupied with the disciplining authorities’ and the penitentiary systems’ historical origins. On the other hand, researchers voiced growing critique of the construction of prisons as social technology, its modes of action and its social legitimacy (see e.g., Christie 1993; Mathiesen 1990). In recent years, an upsurge has occurred within ethnographic prison research that focuses on relationships, culture and the everyday life in prison. This trend has gained a footing even though gaining access to the secluded world of prisons is not always straightforward. In Denmark, for example, Kriminalforsorgen (the Danish Prison and Probation Service) reports that the number of requests to study prisons and interview inmates has risen steadily over the years (perhaps due to the recent development of criminology as a university discipline), which now also means that access to prisons as sites for empirical research in many cases is limited. Moreover, Kriminalforsorgen often only seems to allow access if the reason for requests for research access (to prisons and prisoners alike) is of relevance to the work performed by Kriminalforsorgen. Emotional culture may perhaps not be the most obvious topic in order to prove such relevance, however some recent PhD dissertations from Denmark have dealt with the emotional and relational aspects of the work of correctional officers (e.g., Andersen 2018; Billund 2016; Nielsen 2010a), and we return to some of the main findings of one of these dissertations later. In order to be granted access to prisons, you typically need to follow an occasionally rather strict, centralised approval procedure. You need to undergo a number of checks and achieve a number of approvals. Once formal access to a prison has been granted, the researcher needs to achieve informal acceptance from the field, what introductions to ethnography usually describe as field entry. Not many pre-defined patterns for civil access exist, so you need basically to muddle through to clear your own path. Unlike, for example, Clemmer who was a staff member of the prison that he studied, current prison researchers need to make special efforts to ensure that their presence is meaningful to inmates and staff alike (Reiter 2014; Ugelvik 2014). This negotiation of relations and positions between the researcher and informants (be they inmates or prison staff) is all about building trust and making the researcher’s presence intelligible and meaningful. In this way, the encounter
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between the researcher and the prison world is not unlike the strategic play or the negotiation of position and identity that plays out on a daily basis between staff and inmates in the prison, and which may assume a more or less strategic form (McDermott and King 1988; Nielsen 2012). The process of negotiation may, naturally, be particularly challenging in a prison as prisons are what Goffman as mentioned above referred to as ‘total institutions’. Goffman described how total institutions harbour two groups who tend to understand each other in hostile terms: the guards and the guarded. This special relationship between the two groups – inmates and staff – impact the researcher’s encounter with the prison and affects the researcher’s window of opportunity to explore various research problems. More specifically, the two groups will likely seek to establish with whom the researcher sympathizes in relation to the prison as an institution in general and with respect to specific elements of prison life in particular (Liebling 2001). Researchers may be confronted with questions regarding their trustworthiness and group affiliation, e.g., ‘Whose side are you on?’ or ‘How do I know that you’re not a spy?’ (Liebling 2014: 484). The special and often tense relation between the two groups in a prison may give rise to various accusations or trigger a lack of trust in the researcher. One of the authors of this chapter in her PhD thesis concerned with investigating emotion work among prison guards was asked by both the inmates and the guards whether her study was about ‘them’ or ‘us’, and she experienced how an open and friendly inmate suddenly and literally turned his back on her in the middle of the conversation, when she revealed her perspective of the prison guards (Andersen 2018). He came back with a co-inmate not willing to talk without an ‘assessor’. When investigating inmates and/or guards it is therefore important that the researcher knows how to balance his or her presence and can handle being tested and/or being accused of sympathising with one or both groups (Ugelvik 2014: 478). The test of the researcher’s trustworthiness does not apply only to the relationship between the groups. Ethnographically oriented prison researchers have also pointed out how prison guards are at times particularly suspicious to external researchers, as they have often been depicted from the point of view of the inmates. This has occasionally increased mistrust of staff members towards researchers (see e.g., Liebling, Price and Elliott 1999; Beyens et al. 2013, 2015). Last, the access to the everyday life of prisons is obtained through permission from the management, and this can also cause reservation towards researchers, who has to work on gaining the trust of the staff and make them dispel any doubts or reservations they may have towards them and the research project.
Prison life as ‘emotion culture’ Let us now look a bit closer at prison life as a so-called ‘emotion culture’. An ‘emotion culture’ can be described as the often unacknowledged and invisible set of values, norms, guidelines, grammar and patterns of behaviour existing in a given cultural setting or context, which pertains to how, when, where and
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towards whom one is expected to express or suppress feelings and how to talk about or otherwise deal with emotions. An ‘emotion culture’ is most often something implied and is seldom explicitly stated in official rules and formal regulations. It is a part of the ‘silent language’ that American anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1959) once spoke of that in its unspoken and discreet ways often directs our lives and shapes how we interact with other people. After for a long time having been relegated to the margins of social science research, in recent decades the interest in studying and understanding the importance of emotions has gained momentum within disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology and criminology. Even though the study of emotions is still not regarded as mainstream, it is nevertheless one of the most potent emerging fields of sociological research that theoretically and empirically has covered a lot of new ground over the years (Bericat 2016). Obviously, all organisations and work places embody and embrace a specific ‘emotion culture’ that circumscribes the emotional experiences and expressions of those involved in organisational life. Prisons are no exception to this rule as they are permeated by a multitude of different interpersonal and group dynamics that also draw on strong, powerful and complex emotional energies (for a classic reference, see e.g. Caldwell 1956). Within the social sciences, it has taken quite some time to recognize this deep-seated emotionality of organisational life. Even though one might entertain the (mis)conception that prisons – which are indeed an (admittedly exceptional) type of organisational structure with values, norms, culture and so on – are unemotional or emotionally empty environments, they are, in fact, full of a variety of different, important and indeed strong human emotions. There are many different reasons why prisons to a large extent are to be considered emotional arenas. First and foremost because the inmates are incarcerated against their own will, which means that, the ‘emotion culture’ that persists within the prison walls is characterized by strong and often negative emotions. This type of ‘emotion culture’ requires the ability – by inmates as well as staff members – to perform a specific form of ‘emotion work’ that equally concerns how to suppress unwanted and inappropriate emotions and, on the other hand, how to express those emotions demanded by the situational circumstances (Hochschild 1983). Prisons are often painful places for many inmates, who suffer from different forms of deprivation as Clemmer, Sykes and Goffman all mentioned. Thus, emotions such as anxiety, fear, distress, stress, sadness, hopelessness, frustration, anger and depression are more prevalent and characteristic of everyday life than emotions such as joy, happiness, satisfaction and other positive emotional states. Besides this, inmates are forced, for a shorter or longer period of time, involuntarily to share confined space with others and to be confronted and contaminated by their emotions. Some of these ‘forced companions’ may provoke feelings such as fear, hate or repulsion (even though strong friendships, trust and loyalty may also develop). The relationship between inmates and staff is also challenged, and the degree of emotional intimacy and involvement in inmates’
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lives is substantial. Often prison staff members for extended periods of time work and engage with the same inmates, many of whom have suffered different types of psychological and emotional trauma as well as personal problems and disappointments during their imprisonment. As a consequence of this, staff work life is often very emotionally demanding (Crawley 2004a; 2004b), which often also has repercussions on their private lives outside the work situation (see, e.g., Botelho 2016). Quite a lot of existing prison research – classic as well as contemporary – is concerned with describing prison ‘emotion culture’ as characterized by mistrust, fear, aggression and violence. To be subjected to external control, fixed and mandatory routines and the more or less arbitrary will of others, which is the daily lot of the inmates, can create the foundation for emotional experiences such as anxiety, stress, frustration and aggression, just as the power to control, monitor and manipulate the lives of others may support sadistic personality traits or provoke transgressive behaviour, even though one is only ‘playing prison’ as shown in one of the most famous simulated prison studies (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo 1973). In real life prisons, such strong and negative emotions can often be recurring and self-perpetuating features, fluctuating over time, that are dealt with differently by inmates and staff. For example, it is described how inmates adapt to this environment by putting up an emotional facade or mask that – albeit deceptively – shows off a masculine ‘bravado’, suppresses vulnerability and seeks to deter other inmates (Crewe 2014). In his classic study, Sykes also described how the prison norm system encouraged a specific form of stoicism in which emotional expressivity had to be avoided at any time and any cost (Sykes 1958: 101). This kind of ‘facade work’ or defensive mechanism has been observed in a number of ethnographic studies arguing that the inmates utilises so-called ’impression management’ (Goffman’s concept) in order to create tough yet false identities (Jones, Piccard and Jones 2000), which together with controlled aggression is necessary in order to emotionally survive imprisonment (Jewkes 2002: 56; see also Jewkes 2011). Several of these studies combines such a ‘front management (again Goffman’s concept) with broader forms of performative masculine culture (Crewe 2014; Crewe, Warr, Bennett and Smith 2004), and thus draw on Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor from his theory on social interaction, in which people are regarded as capable performers in everyday life without revealing their true and all-too-human emotional depths to each other (Goffman 1959). Also staff members in prison adapt to the unwritten norms and rules of emotional management. They are expected to handle both the emotions of inmates and their own feelings, and as a consequence of this the professional life of staff members is often emotionally demanding (Andersen 2016; Crawley 2004a, 2004b; Tracy 2003, 2005). Staff management of inmates’ emotions is taking place both at the institutional and the individual level. At the institutional level, staff members – such as prison guards – by way of so-called ‘emotion management programmes’ must try to make inmates respond more
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rationally and less emotionally in stressful situations. At the individual level, staff members must on a daily eye-to-eye basis tackle the many different yet often strong and negative emotions expressed by inmates and simultaneously the emotions created by this within themselves (Crawley 2004b). They must always appear to be in a professional poise and seem to be unaffected by the fact of being around people that most others would either fear, loathe or despise, and they must be cool and clinical when handling violence, threats, injuries or even death at work. Prison guards who become agitated, angry or afraid every time they pass a convicted murderer or rapist cannot perform their job in a proper manner (Dilulio 1987: 169), just as prison guards who internalise all the sorrows and concerns of the inmates will also find it challenging to live up to the professional demands of their work (Andersen 2017). Besides this, they must always be alert to the possibility that something unexpected or even dangerous may happen, and the anxiety and insecurity caused by this awareness may be particularly difficult to handle for newcomers to the profession. They are expected to look competent and unaffected, although they find themselves on, for them, new and shaky ground. Through the interaction with more experienced colleagues they will gradually learn how emotions should be handled and what happens when rules are breached (Crawley 2004b). In order to live up to their professional role and make everyday life in prison running as smoothly as possible, prison guards must also at the same time show kindness to and forbearance with the inmates as well as expressing a certain amount of anger and dissatisfaction. However, it can be risky business if a prison guard appears to be too kind or too angry. Both types of expression threaten the professional identity of the prison guard and may have detrimental consequences for the asymmetrical relationship with the inmates as well as the trust-based relationship with colleagues. Therefore, prison guards must adjust their emotional expressions to the existing emotion culture of the prison (Andersen 2016), and prisons are thus permeated by the staff members’ need for and attempts to balance emotionally, which creates a very peculiar kind of emotional atmosphere. Expectations may be that they must downplay or suppress fear, appear hardened and be constantly vigilant and suspicious, at the same time as there may be expectations that they should appear to be caring, warm, trustworthy and respectful (Tracy 2005). Moreover, prison guards must be able to navigate between creating order, security and control on the one hand and showing encouragement, motivation and support on the other, and this dual role is in and by itself burdened with a range of personal, professional and emotional dilemmas (Billund 2016). As mentioned, prisons are places where the inmates may often experience different kinds of suffering and deprivation such as boredom, remorse, anger and depression and where they may be subject to self-harm, violence or threats for other inmates. In such situations, staff members must handle the emotions of inmates as well as their own feelings. Prisons, however, are also places where people live, where they joke and have positive relationships and where they dream about the future after serving their sentence. They are
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places where different kinds of activities take place such as completing an education, working in the prison kitchen, laundry or workshop, participating in choir sessions or engaging in available sporting activities, which may all create meaning and emotional energy for the inmates (Liebling 2013) and also for the staff. Newcomers to the profession and also researchers may be surprised by this unknown and peaceful side of prison life, where the guards and the inmates sometimes talk, joke and have a relaxed and friendly interaction with each other. Prisons are places where people work, have Christmas parties and celebrate birthdays and New Year’s Eve together. In prisons one will find family photographs, flirtation, gossip and rumours, football talk, baking, bodybuilding and backgammon games. Shopping, cleaning and decorating for seasonal festivities are also part of the daily routine. Prisons are thus the de facto home for many inmates and often for many years, and prison guards and inmates inevitably spend a lot of time together in close physical and emotional proximity. Whenever people spend a lot of time together in physically confined spaces, they are drawn into an emotional relationship of one or the other form with each other. Everything from friendly teasing to brutal harassment may happen in prison. Disagreements and conflicts as well as cooperation and personal favours may develop, and friendships and animosities are part and parcel of prison life. Prisons are, willy-nilly, characterised by a variety of different and often mutually opposing emotions as well as complex interpersonal relationships. Goffman described how in ‘total institutions’ such as prisons can be areas where there is free space. For example, there may be more emotional free space in the infirmary, church facilities, kitchens, teaching rooms and workshops than in one’s cell or in overcrowded prison dormitories (Goffman 1961). Following this, it makes sense to suggest that prisons do in fact embody more than one set of ‘emotion rules’ and more than simply one ‘emotion culture’. They have a special kind of emotional geography, as it were, which refers to how prisons have different zones, areas or regions in which certain emotions or emotional expressions are more or less acceptable (Crewe 2014), just as they are also temporally and emotionally organised – as when, for example, a newcomer (‘fresh fish’) suddenly in the dark of night realises his/her new situation and experiences a growing sense of despair, when a life-sentence prisoner feels depressed and lonely, when a prisoner close to being released finds himself/ herself full of hope and enthusiasm, or when a minor disagreement within a split second explodes in aggression and violence. Prisons thus contain within their walls several and different ‘emotion cultures’ that the prison researcher must try to decode if he or she wants to understand – and not least be able to navigate in – the world of the prison. To summarize, prison life in many different ways, and for many different reasons, rests on a peculiar ‘emotion culture’. Within the prison, the inmate may gradually experience what Goffman (1961) famously, as mentioned earlier, called a ‘mortification of the self ’ that also entails a lot of emotional consequences. By this he meant the many ways in which the self is being stripped of its autonomy and the means to maintain that self. However, staff
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members – such as prison guards – may also experience a multitude of emotional problems and dilemmas between professionally required restrain and emotional involvement. As stated above, imprisonment does something emotionally to people and to their relationships to others. This has been documented by researchers as well as fiction writers. Just think of how Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky in his autobiographical novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1861/2013) described the deep existential and emotional distress of being locked up in a Siberian prison for four years. Or how his fellow countryman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in an equally gripping autobiographical account in The Gulag Archipelago (1973/2002) described the shear hopelessness, fear, loneliness, torture, snitch system and daily struggle to survive in a Soviet ‘labour camp’. In each case, as in many other prison memoirs or fictions, the inherently strong emotionality of prison life is at the forefront. The aforementioned ‘pains of imprisonment’ are also well-described within social research (Shammas 2017), and we here want to stress how these ‘pains of imprisonment’ at times also tend to become the ‘pains of the prison researcher’ requiring a well-developed reflexive attitude among criminologists in general and prison researchers perhaps in particular as to what they study and how they study it (see, e.g., Gaborit and Jefferson 2015; Hannem 2014; Phillips and Earle 2010; Piché, Gaucher and Walby 2014). Let us now look at some studies of how prison as ‘emotion culture’ requires staff members to perform ‘emotion work’ before looking at some of the specific emotional challenges for the prison researcher involved in such studies.
Emotion work among prison guards Some more recent ethnographic studies address some of these emotional aspects of prison life and the unwritten norms and rules for managing emotions to which prison guards adapt. As mentioned above, the guards are expected to manage the inmates’ emotions as well as their own emotions. Therefore, the staff’s work life is emotionally demanding (see, e.g., Andersen 2016; Crawley 2004a, 2004b; Nielsen 2010b; Tracy 2005). The handling of the inmates’ emotions is done at the institutional level and at the individual level. At the former, the staff makes use of so-called ‘emotion management’ programmes to have inmates respond more rationally and less emotionally to stressful situations. At the latter, the staff needs to handle on a daily basis the feelings that inmates express and the feelings that are triggered inside themselves (Crawley 2004b). They always need to be professional and unaffected in the presence of people that most of us would be afraid to be with, and they need to stay cool and clinical when it comes to handling injuries, violence, threats and even fatalities at work. Staff members who become agitated, angry or afraid whenever they go by a murderer or rapist are unable to do their job properly (Dilulio 1987: 169). Similarly, a staff member who internalises all the inmates’ hardship and worries will also find it hard to handle the challenges of a normal workday (Andersen 2017; 2018).
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In order to live up to their professional role expectations and make everyday life in prison running as smoothly as possible, prison guards must also at the same time show kindness to and forbearance with the inmates as well as expressing a certain amount of anger and dissatisfaction. Expectations that prison guards should suppress fear, appear tough and remain constantly vigilant and suspicious may co-occur with expectations that they are caring, receptive, trustworthy and respectful (Tracy 2005). Prison guards, then, need to navigate between maintaining order, safety and control on one hand, and appearing to be trustworthy and empathic on the other. This creates the foundation for a double role that comes with a wide range of professional as well as personal dilemmas (Billund 2016). The prison guards’ emotional work is not only about aligning opposites, but also about balancing emotional performance. In practice, this means that prison guards must be capable of expressing some measure of kindness towards the inmates, but also a measure of anger. Even so, it may prove risky if a prison guard appears to be too friendly or too angry. Both expressions constitute a threat to the professional identity and may have fatal consequences for the relation to the inmates and the relation to the guard’s colleagues. To take an example, inmates may misunderstand the ‘overly’ friendly guard and therefore increase their pressure on the guard to engage in corruption; and if a friendly guard appears to fraternise with the inmates, the other guards may end up doubting his or her loyalty towards the group of guards. Similarly, the prison guard who appears ‘overly’ angry may be perceived a guard who is prone to escalating conflicts, and intense anger may cause the guard to act in an unprofessional manner. Prison guards therefore need to manage their emotions and express the ‘right’ emotions in the ‘right’ contexts and in the ‘right’ dose to perform in a professional manner. The ‘emotion culture’ varies from one unit to the other depending on the prisoner clientele, the type of unit and the group of guards working in the unit. This means, that there are different pertains to how, when, where and towards whom one is expected to express or suppress feelings and how to talk about or otherwise deal with emotions (Andersen 2016; 2018). These differences in culture may be explained by the distribution of male and female guards at different units, length of experience, the approach to caring for prisoners and different ideals of the job (Nylander, Lindberg and Bruhn 2011; Tait 2011; Bruhn 2013; Fredwall 2014; Andersen 2017, 2018). Furthermore, prison guards also need to balance their gendered performance. They need to be masculine, yet empathic and feminine, but not to the extent that they become an object of desire. Once again, the emotion-related task comes down to balancing and avoiding extremes. Prison guards also need to consider how much or how little personal information they share with inmates and to weigh the advantages and drawbacks of rigid rule-following as opposed to a more flexible approach to the rules. The same applies to humour (Fredwall 2014: 463, Andersen 2018). Humour may be employed both by prison guards to handle their emotions towards inmates and as a manner in
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which they handle their relationship to their colleagues. The use of humour may serve to reduce conflicts between inmates and prison guards, and it may serve to raise the spirits, thereby transforming unpleasant emotions within the guards themselves and the people surrounding them. Humour has a value for stress relief and can be seen as a way of coping with hard feelings and everyday challenges. However, humour internally in the group of prison guards may also allow the guards to indirectly express their anger and hostility within a group that otherwise call for solidarity and loyalty (Nielsen 2010a: 105–126; Andersen 2018: 40). Humour is thus complex and can be doublesided and it is a part of the ‘emotion culture’ in prison. Therefore, the use humour is also relevant for the researcher to be able to decode and understand when doing prison research. The prison is thus characterised by the staff’s need and attempts to achieve an emotional balance in a range of areas, which establishes a unique emotional setting in the prison. Goffman described how in ‘total institutions’ such as prisons can be areas where there is free space and he noted how ‘total institutions’ such as prisons (but also schools, mental asylums, military barracks and concentration camps) may comprise areas that allow for leverage or breathing space. There may be more emotional leverage, e.g., in storage rooms, at hospital wards, in kitchens, at garages, etc., than in the cells or dormitories of a prison (Goffman 1961). Following this line of thought, it should be emphasized, as also mentioned above, that prisons contain and rely on more than one set of ‘emotion rules’ and more than simply one ‘emotion culture’. Prisons, then, harbour a special emotional geography, if you like, i.e., various zones or areas within which specific emotions or expressions of emotions are more or less acceptable (Crewe 2014). This also applies to staff. There are differences between what is expressed in direct interaction with inmates and in the staff room. There are invisible set of values, norms, guidelines, grammar and patterns of behaviour existing, which pertains to how, when, where and towards whom one is expected to express or suppress feelings and how to talk about or otherwise deal with emotions in prison. (Andersen 2018). To get insight into the ‘emotion culture’, it is useful for the researcher to combine observations of group interactions and emotional expressions with in depth interviews, and hereby provide another emotional space for the informants, where emotions or emotional expressions are acceptable to show and to talk about. Such in-depth interviews provide the opportunity of getting more detailed and emotional narratives from the informants and gives the researcher a deeper understanding of the prison world.
Emotional, methodological and moral challenges of prison ethnography Prison studies also entail a wide range of other practical, methodological, research-ethics and moral challenges that also apply to other research fields and topics, but which are particularly relevant in and to the special world of prisons that is characterised by elements that may be considered risky, forbidden and dangerous for the ethnographic researcher (Jacobsen and
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Kristiansen 2017; Sloan and Drake 2013). In this section, we will briefly address three such challenges, admitting that many other challenges could have been mentioned. First, you study human beings who are in involuntary confinement and whose lives therefore evolve within a framework characterised by control, limitations and routines that they do not control themselves. As Goffman observed early on, people who are incarcerated have been stripped of many of the tools for self-representation that are normally available to the people you interview or observe as they engage in normal everyday activities. In prisons, people – staff and inmates alike – work or live under extraordinary conditions in places that are normally secluded from the rest of the world. These two conditions – an environment characterised by constant monitoring and control and the same environment’s seclusion from the rest of the world – combine to pose a challenge to the ethnographic researcher and are also challenged by the researcher’s presence in the prison (Bandyopadhyay 2016: 442–443). As was mentioned above, this also means that your field access may be limited and that access presupposes formal authorisation and safety approval from the Danish Prison and Probation Service. Furthermore, you need to be attentive to the fact that prisons are characterised by a special mentality – often one of mistrust and suspicion, but at times also by a considerable willingness to share experiences and by helpfulness and an abundance of available time – all of which you need to be able to navigate through and benefit from. To take an example, many prisoners do not want to be interviewed about their life in prison when other prisoners are present, because they are afraid that they will be labelled as informers and fear that they will be facing reprisals. In other cases, the researcher needs to be particularly aware that exaggerated statements, bragging, concealment, lies and intimidation are not simply classic myths or tall tales about inmates’ approach to interview situations (see e.g., Waldram 2009: 4) in which they present criminal acts, guilt and the hardship of prison life, but that these misrepresentations do, in fact, occur. As a researcher, you need to prepare for such misrepresentations, know how to handle them during fieldwork and take into careful consideration the risk of misrepresentation when analysing and drawing conclusions. Second, you study people who have been sentenced for actions that are at times offending, dismal and horrifying. Compared to the so-called ‘normal society’, prison is a place characterised by abundance of pathological traits and an excess representation of exposed and vulnerable people, deviating values and moral perceptions, violence, misuse, suicide attempts, emotional, psychological and health-related issues, affiliation to criminal settings, etc. (Mohseni 2012). Often, these traits will mutually strengthen each other, making prison a potentially dangerous place to be not only for the inmates and staff, but also for people conducting research into prison culture and life in prison. In this manner, much prison research may be considered an archetypical example of so-called ‘dangerous fieldwork’ (Jacobsen and Kristiansen 2001). Dangerous fieldwork comprises both physical elements of danger,
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psychological strain, emotional stressors as well as threats to the researcher, to the people who are the object of the investigation and to their life world and community. As a prison researcher, it is not at all uncommon to obtain what in the ethnographic field of research is termed ‘secret knowledge’, ‘forbidden knowledge’, ‘guilty knowledge’, ‘intimate knowledge’ and ‘dangerous knowledge’. The researcher needs to administer this knowledge appropriately and responsibly to meet research ethical guidelines, honour informants’ trust and keep safe. It is important to keep in mind that prison research may ultimately be exploited for purposes that you as a researcher do not believe are fair or expedient for the people whose knowledge, information and time you have been relying on while conducting your research (see e.g., Sparks 2002). Furthermore, you should not forget that many of the people you may encounter in prison have frequently been sentenced for rather serious actions, that they are in prison involuntarily and that at some point they will be released back into society. Naturally, you should not be intimidated by the fact that you are occasionally observing or interviewing hardened criminals, but commonsense awareness of this fact during the research process and when writing up your research may be expedient. Third, human beings are not robots; and that applies to prison researchers as well. As we briefly mentioned above, they build relationships with people, get to know their informants well, become witnesses to their victories and defeats, sorrows and joys, they end up having feelings (positive or negative) for them, etc., particularly if they are together for prolonged periods of time. You thus undergo what is known as a ‘moral career’ as a researcher (Schwandt 1995) that gradually evolves over time based on the knowledge and understanding that you obtain. As a researcher who explores life in prison, you may therefore find that you become attracted to or abhor or feel pity for your informants – you might feel repulsion or disgust, but you might also build trust, feel compassion or even develop a friendship or a romantic relationship, which may be inexpedient for your role as a researcher. To take an example, in the appendix to his The Defences of the Weak Thomas Mathiesen discussed some of his methodological, ethical and relational problems related to such friendships in his previously mentioned study that stretched across more than two years in a Norwegian prison: As these men [the inmates] started to perceive me as a friend, it became increasingly difficult for me to view them as objects for research. This actually became the most delicate problem I encountered during my whole stay, and I never solved it completely. I was torn between the loyalty of friendship and the role of the scientist. For example, after informal evenings of bridge, I found it difficult to take notes on what had happened. It seemed to me like a breach of friendship, and at times I refrained altogether from taking notes. (Mathiesen 1965: 240)
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Mathiesen’s experiences are by no measure exceptional, and the collection of ethnographic knowledge about prisons is thus not without pitfalls or risks. There are, of course, many other sources the researcher may draw on to collect knowledge about life in prison in addition to the dedicated ethnographic approach that calls for your presence within the walls and which offers a host of opportunities and also comes with a number of challenges to the generation of exciting knowledge. Whereas some scholars have made the case for the use of so-called mixed methods (Jenness 2010) capable of capturing various facets of life in prison, others have reported good experiences with the use of questionnaires among inmates (Sutton 2011). Yet others argue that so-called ‘vicarious resources’ like movies and novels about life in prison may allow us to gain some important insights that may supplement our empirically collected knowledge and elucidate elements that are otherwise hard to study (see, e.g., Jacobsen and Petersen 2015; 2016).
Conclusion In this chapter, we have pried into the topic of prisons as institutions embodying a place-specific ‘emotion culture’ that is contained within the walls of the prison. Even though prison life is daily penetrated by a number of outside influences – such as the coming and going of visitors, the arrival of newcomers, guard shifts or prisoners leaving on and returning from temporary parole – it nevertheless as a sort of ‘totalising institution’ expose a world that is often emotionally self-contained and founded upon the presence of strong emotions whether they are positive or negative. Emotional experiences such as anger, loyalty, despair, longing, hatred, love, hope, friendship, animosity, fear or boredom are thus not uncommon in prisons. This fact also poses, as we have seen, a potential challenge to many ethnographic researchers wanting to investigate prison life, inmate subcultures, the relationship between prisoners and staff or staff members’ emotion work. They will not only have to be able to empirically tease out but also deal with and navigate in the not always self-evident or stable ‘emotion culture’ of their research site. So, besides the well-known ethnographic problems of getting access, abiding by the established codes of research ethics and ensuring personal safety, prison researchers also have to take the reality of institutionally contained and processed (and at times also institutionally provoked) strong emotions into consideration. Even though emotions are thus most definitely part and parcel of daily prison life, they are not easily talked about, openly revealed or willingly shared by either inmates or staff members with the inquisitive ethnographic researcher. This chapter has not aspired to provide the reader with an exhaustive exposé of the emotional nature of neither prison life nor prison research. Rather, we have wanted to point – by way of examples from existing studies and experiences from our own research – to some areas of prison research that highlight the emotional aspects of prison life. It is important to stress, as
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a point of reservation, that not two prisons are similar (and neither are no experiences with serving time) – their respectively totalising and panoptic traits, as mentioned already in the beginning of the chapter, may differ considerably depending on the specific population of prisoners, the level of security and surveillance measures, architectural construction, interior organisation, penal philosophy, supply of recreational activities, codes of conduct and so on. So, the maximum security prison does obviously not provide for or promote the same ‘emotion culture’ as the open prison or the halfway house. Despite such comparative differences, in the chapter we have sought to show how studies of incarceration and prisonization experiences in general have important implications of a moral, methodological and not least emotional character. We have admittedly here merely been scratching the surface, knowing that the emotional depths of prison life and prison research run much deeper than what we have been able to explore. In his book on the so-called ‘sociological imagination’, C. Wright Mills once recommended the researcher to let his/her ‘mind become a moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible’ (Mills 1959: 214). To use this terminology, our chapter has more served as such a moving prism for catching light from some angles of emotions in prison life and prison research than as any final statement on the topic.
Note 1 This chapter advances insights and ideas presented in a chapter previously published only in Danish dealing with the same topic (see Andersen and Jacobsen 2018). Some sections contain direct translations from the Danish chapter and are reproduced here with the kind permission of the publishing house.
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Witnessing, responsibility and spectatorship in the aftermath of violence Reflections from Srebrenica Elizabeth Cook
Introduction The act of witnessing the suffering of others is an unfortunately characteristic feature of modern life. As Susan Sontag (2003: 16) noted in her seminal work Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience’. With the rise of global mass media, the social network culture and nonstop live streaming, the image of distant suffering has become an unusually familiar sight to spectators. Trends of globalisation and the collapse of public and private spheres in late modernity have encouraged us to move closer, empathise with and imagine the suffering of others. Of course, this phenomenon has not been without criticism and spectatorship of this kind has been criticised for its apathy, indifference and tendencies towards voyeuristic consumerism where victim hierarchies have emerged to divide worthy and unworthy suffering. Following the saturation of society with visual representations of suffering and vivid displays of cruelty in mass media, spectacles of violence have raised several questions over moral responsibility, authenticity and ethics that remained unanswered. However, ‘seeing’ the suffering of others is the essence of much criminological research. Seeing violence imposes ethical challenges for the spectator and emotional burdens, which are often written out of criminological research in favour of sanitised and seemingly unvexed abstractions of suffering. While criminology has for a long while struggled with questions of ‘the self’ in research, the influence of the spectator society would seem to make it increasingly difficult to maintain distance between criminologists and the ‘data’ of crime and deviance. The challenge for criminologists is to move beyond the assumption that emotion might in some way undermine orthodox standards of validity, reliability and objectivity. This chapter explores the insights that emotion can offer in criminological research and the contribution it can make to understanding the visceral experiences of suffering, harm and injustices. The chapter falls into three parts. The chapter begins firstly by discussing the influence of mass media culture and spectatorship on our ways of seeing suffering before considering the implications for criminological research. As a response to the critiques of spectatorship, the concept of witnessing is explored to denote a sense of responsibility on the part of the witness. To
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illustrate the value of this concept of witnessing for criminologists, the second part continues by providing an overview of the Srebrenica Massacre and offering reflections on attending the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre at the Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Following Richard Quinney’s (2000) notion of ‘criminologists as witnesses’, the notion of witnessing is used here as a way of making sense of these experiences arguing that criminologists should move beyond merely what we ‘see’ and towards how we act upon these experiences. The third part concludes the chapter by exploring the emotional burdens and challenges posed by the role of criminologists as witnesses. The chapter argues that criminology should resist the habit of viewing emotion as impulsive and irrational and, rather, seek to embrace the sentiments of insecurity, anxiety and guilt in criminological research that the many candid reflections of autoethnographies have revealed. The act of witnessing can be uncomfortable and unfamiliar. However, for an exhaustive insight into lethal violence these emotions must be written in rather than written out of criminological research.
Spectators of suffering, mass media and complicity Contemporary media culture has prompted a proliferation of new ways of seeing, spectating and hearing testimonies irrespective of where, when, or who you are. Testimony has emerged in the form of photography, oral history, archival and documentary work, biographies and, even, more recently, virtual reality projects, sparking many observations of ‘witnessing fever’ (Kurasawa 2009: 93), the ‘era of the witness’ (Wieviorka 2006) and the ‘age of spectacle’ (Evans and Giroux 2015; see also Peters 2001; Zelizer 2002; Rentschler 2004; Frosh 2006; Hill 2018). The saturation of society with visual representations of suffering, or the ‘carnival of cruelty’ as Zygmunt Bauman has famously referred to, has encouraged us to take interest in, empathise with and imagine the suffering of others but often as spectators who are able to watch at a distance from the safety of their own home. The move towards the collapse of public and private spheres in late modernity has only intensified this trend further. In Liquid Modernity, Bauman (2000: 37) comments on the resonance between public and private spheres, where the ‘“public” is colonized by the “private” … and the art of public life is narrowed to the public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments’. The boundary between private grievances and public life is always shifting and this remains true for legacies of mass violence where ‘public spaces have been transformed into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence (of a visual, oral or textual variety)’ (Kurasawa 2009: 93). There is now a range of technologies which are able to close the distance between reality and representations of suffering and gather spectators at a time of increased global connectivity. New co-presence technologies, virtual memorials and testimony represent just a few examples, but more controversial gaming platforms and virtual reality experiments have
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also emerged claiming to simulate experiences of solitary confinement, the asylum journey and homelessness. Testimony has served as evidence, data, public memory and become institutionalised in truth commissions and court proceedings where the private suffering of victims has become the obsession of detached public spectators. Each method collapses obstacles of time and space, encouraging us to share in and imagine the experiences of ‘others’ and immerse ourselves in distant suffering. The refugee crisis perhaps represents the most recent example of this phenomenon where media representations have ended up aestheticising refugees’ experience rather than humanising their suffering (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017). Many people are now able to witness events they have never or likely will never experience in their lifetime. The images of suffering that reach us in the confines of our home have been filtered and streamed through sophisticated technologies, social media platforms and a global audience. Traded and controlled by media monopolies, we are confronted by these images and it is no longer enough to say, as Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Meštrovic´ (1996: 6) write, that ‘we did not know’. For many, the suffering that atrocity causes can only be known through the images created in mass media and has therefore raised concerns over ‘compassion fatigue’ (Cohen 2001: 187–195), voyeurism (Carrabine 2014), and the dangers of hyper reality and representation (Baudrillard 1996). The question of complicity and responsibility has also arisen as spectators are only able to look on passively, unable to act upon the burden (Ellis 2002). However, as Lilie Chouliaraki (2006) argues, the ‘spectatorship of suffering’ can invite compassion and even move us to action, depending on how suffering is presented and commodified for spectators. Powerful institutions such as the media play an important role in hierarchizing victims, drawing our attention to the suffering of some and ignoring others. In Disposable Futures, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux (2015: 33) speak to this when discussing the role of mass media in sensationalising violence and supressing critical engagement with images of suffering: In the process of occluding and depoliticizing complex narratives of any given situation, it assaults our senses in order to hide things in plain sight. The spectacle works by turning human suffering into a spectacle, framing and editing the realities of violence, and in doing so renders some lives meaningful while dismissing others as disposable. It operates through a hidden structure of politics that colonizes the imagination, denies critical engagement and preemptively represses alternative narratives. The spectacle harvests and sells our attention, while denying us the ability for properly engaged political reflection. These developments have raised new questions in criminology regarding the moral responsibility of witnessing suffering, the ethics of spectatorship, and the dangers of voyeurism, apathy or empty gestures of outrage. Criminology is a discipline that deals with conflict, violence, and danger and, for many
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criminologists, the act of witnessing the suffering of others is the essence of much criminological research. Seeing the suffering of others in fieldwork can be uncomfortable and unfamiliar yet many of these insecurities are often written out of criminological research. Rather, criminology has historically been preoccupied with a set of prescriptive ‘normative standards regarding objectivity, replicability, and the accumulative advancement of knowledge’, consisting of its own standards of knowledge, methodological traditions and orthodox theoretical frameworks (Ferrell 2011: 66; Garland and Sparks 2000). As Wayne Morrison (2004: 69) argues, criminology sports its own ‘ideology’ with a system of ideals and acceptable truths to pursue. Amid these ideals there has been a hesitancy to display the presence of ‘the self ’ in criminological research. Just over 20 years ago, Nils Christie (1997: 13) puzzled over this omission in criminological research, asking: ‘How can it be like this? How come that so much criminology is that dull, tedious and intensely empty to new insights?’. Criminologists experience many of the frustrations, desires and sentiments that they attempt to study yet do not seek to access these during criminological research. The influence of quantitative research towards rational and regimented ways of seeing crime and deviance has been especially criticised by Jock Young who has argued that our dependence on numbers in criminology has encouraged research which is abstract, ‘denatured and desiccated’ (Young 2004: 13). The context of funding pressures in the current climate of higher education, the demands of orthodox criminology’s administrative functions and political leanings, and the role of criminology in knowledge production for the state has contributed to this trend. At the same time, the influence of natural scientific methods in criminology has encouraged a dogmatic commitment to causal relationships, objective measurement and technical precision. This ‘oversocialization’ in higher education towards particular acceptable knowledge and pseudo-scientific standards has rendered fieldwork lacking a sense of the experience of doing research and detached from the anxieties, fears and vulnerabilities that much criminological research embodies (Christie 1997: 15–17). Criminological research in this shape risks becoming abstracted and perhaps in this way provides some sanctuary from the study of lethal violence for criminologists; as Young (2011: 13) writes, ‘the more they are distanced from what they are studying, the more secure they feel’. We are often presented with somewhat bloodless descriptions of research that are wiped of the insecurities and inconsistencies characteristic of understanding human suffering. However, with the rise of commercial media, globalised viewing and live video streaming, it seems increasingly difficult to maintain distance between criminologists and the ‘data’ of crime and deviance. Late modernity has unsettled the commitments to objectivity and measurement as our points of reference for the world are constantly moving and changing in meaning (Young 2004). The influence of autoethnographic approaches in criminological research and cultural criminology has resisted this trend, calling for the renewal of otherwise sanitised fieldwork accounts with writings of ‘the
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self ’, the ‘emotive researcher’ and the biography of the researcher (Wakeman 2014). There is an assumption that emotion is a liability or risks ‘contamination’ and therefore some hesitancy has been voiced over how exactly to incorporate them into criminological research (Farrant 2014; Jewkes 2012). The challenge for criminologists is to not merely confess to the tensions created by fear, shame or compassion in the field but to critically reflect on them for a better understanding of harms and injustices. This chapter aims to follow these lessons by exploring the idea of emotion as a means of reinvigorating criminological research, broadening our understanding of lived suffering and recognising the responsibilities that are placed upon criminologists who ‘bear witness’. The following section provides a brief summary of the Srebrenica Massacre before presenting reflections on attending the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre at the Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Bosnian War and the fall of Srebrenica At the end of the Cold War and upon the fall of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1980s, a series of bloody conflicts sparked across the Balkans. BosniaHerzegovina represented one of the most cosmopolitan and diverse countries in the Balkans, populated by Bosnian-Serbs, Bosnian-Muslims (or Bosniaks) and Croats who lived together surrounded by a rich cultural heritage. Following the collapse of the Yugoslav Empire, political rhetoric fostering ethnonationalist hostilities emerged and desires for autonomous, ethnically homogenous territories became violent. At the centre of Europe, the Bosnian War erupted where the destruction of cultural and religious symbols, campaigns of systematic rape, concentration camps, torture, death marches, and executions followed, resulting in mass displacement, the besiegement and destruction of cities and thousands of deaths. A systematic campaign unfolded across central and eastern Bosnia carried out by Bosnian Serb military and paramilitary forces with the aim of expelling Bosniak civilians from their homes. Mass atrocities in all forms played out on television screens, across newspapers, and in war reports and photography as the international community watched from a distance (Cushman and Meštrovic´ 1996). The war gained global attention prompting responses from foreign governments, international security forces such as the UN and NATO, and humanitarian agencies. By the close of the war, it was estimated that up to 150,000 had been killed, over two million civilians were displaced and between 20,000 and 50,000 women had been raped (Diken and Laustsen 2005; Helms et al. 2007). The atrocities that unfolded in the Bosnian War took many forms and extended to Bratunac, Prijedor and Focˇ a where civilians were forced from their homes and many were interned at concentration camps or massacres unfolded. However, there was one event in particular that captured the gaze of many around the world. The Srebrenica Massacre has become a universal symbol for the brutalities of the Bosnian War and the inaction of the
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international community. Declared as a civilian ‘safe area’ by the United Nations Security Council in April 1993, the Srebrenica Enclave became a sanctuary to thousands of refugees fleeing from nearby areas. Besieged by Bosnian Serb soldiers, Bosniak refugees inside the ‘safe area’ were disarmed with conditions inside becoming progressively worse due to the lack of aid, medical facilities and food supplies. On the 11 July, protected by only 400 illequipped Dutchbat peacekeepers, the enclave fell to approaching Bosnian Serb troops. In the ten days following its fall, 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were systematically killed in a campaign of genocide; either in and around Srebrenica in farms, football pitches and outside schools or in an attempt to escape to another ‘safe area’ in Tuzla, over 60 miles away. The remains of victims were scattered across various mass graves and later reburied in secondary graves in order to conceal evidence. As a result, the identification of victims still continues today. In post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, efforts to commemorate and memorialise the victims of the massacre have played a significant role in reversing the intentions of ethnic cleansing and genocide, resisting discourses of state denial, and remembrance and reconstruction. Since the end of the war, survivors struggled to establish space for communal remembrance and a place for burial for the growing numbers of recovered remains. In 1999, a survey conducted by the Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves and the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) of surviving family members concluded that 83% wanted to bury their loved ones in Potocˇ ari: a place that marked the site of massacre, acted as a symbolic reminder of the failure of the international community, and as a cornerstone for the eventual return of displaced persons and reversal of ethnic cleansing (Nettlefield 2010; Pollack 2003a: 796–797, Pollack 2003b; Simic´ 2009). In 2001, the Srebrenia-Potocˇ ari Memorial was established with the unveiling of a foundation stone. The Cemetery opened shortly after in 2002 and the first bodies were interred there in 2003 in a communal burial. The Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery represents a complex configuration of law, policy and family activism which serves both personal and political purposes (Pollack 2003b; Wagner and Nettlefield 2013). The Cemetery marks out a space for ‘proper burial’ where grieving families can pray, mourn and symbolise their loss with epitaphs and other markers to help preserve memory. The space ordinarily appears tranquil and somewhat serene, offering an opportunity for reflection, prayer and contemplation. However, the Cemetery also holds political significance as a symbol of belonging in a country divided by the past and unsettled by internal displacement, to symbolically resist the conclusion of ethnic cleansing and as a tangible reminder of where the responsibility lies for the atrocities in Srebrenica. The arrival of the annual commemorations and mass burials brings the political symbolism of the Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery sharply into focus as thousands gather in the small village of Potocˇ ari wishing to pay their respects. Every year on 11 July, families, survivors, local
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communities and members of the international community gather to attend the burial and memorial of newly identified victims. The following section presents fieldwork reflections on attending the July 2015 commemorations which marked the 20th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre. That day, 136 victims were to be buried at the annual commemoration attended by over 20,000 people.
The aftermath of Srebrenica: 11 July 2015 Commemoration and memorialisation Nestled deep within the easternmost part of the Republika-Srpska, the Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery stands on the site of one of the largest massacres on European soil since the end of the Second World War. The village of Potocˇ ari, located just outside the town of Srebrenica, is sheltered in the mountains surrounded by a serene backdrop of countryside and clear skies. The route from Sarajevo, the culture-rich and historical capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to Srebrenica is a serene three-hour drive through mountains and countryside. That day, I am invited to accompany a research team seeking to understand the act of commemoration in mass violence. We set off at 4.30am on the drive to Srebrenica to join many others in paying respects to and remembering the victims of the massacre. The scenery holds a surreal quality, jarring with the underlying intentions of the day. As we close in on our destination, we join a trail of cars and other travellers heading to the village. A convoy of dozens of international representatives takes precedence and, along with several hundred other travellers, we are diverted across a dirt road, through a quarry and eventually arriving just outside the village of Potocˇ ari. There is a sense of apprehension and hesitancy on our approach to the village that has been building since our departure in the early hours of the morning. Thousands of people have accumulated in the streets, either milling along the road side where venders are selling cooked meats and local delicacies or have joined the long column of people marching down towards the main cemetery. The compound stretches across a single road leading away from Srebrenica. The Cemetery sits on one side of the road on a slight slope, parcelled out into several petal-shaped plots of lands by winding cobbled paths of stone. Thousands of white marble headstones occupy the area, standing in long regimented rows and as a testament to the gravity and intensity of the atrocities that happened in Srebrenica. Each headstone marks the resting place of a victim and is etched with their name. The musalla lies at the centre of the grounds, half encircled by the Memorial Wall engraved with the names of over 8,000 victims where people trace the wall with their hands in search of names of their loved ones. Victims are listed alphabetically by surname with many rows of names filled by the same extended family reminding spectators of the far-reaching effects that lethal violence inflicts. We arrived well before
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9am but the Cemetery is already filling with large numbers of people in colourful garments from football shirts and jeans to blouses and scarves while others are dressed in formal suits. People have settled down around the outskirts of the cemetery or near the graves of loved ones sheltered by umbrellas, some sharing picnics while they wait. There is a sense of communality to the whole picture. Following the cobbled paths of the Cemetery, we glimpse the lines of coffins prepared for burial that day. The coffins are all draped in a green cloth that makes them appear identical and are crowded by families and survivors and spied upon by media representatives clutching their cameras. Around the Cemetery, graves have been dug and prepared to receive the coffins and piles of fresh earth sit nearby with half a dozen shovels ready for families to bury their relatives. In one instance there are three such graves in a row as one family is preparing to mourn three generations: a son, a father, and a grandfather. Moving off the cobbled path, people are very careful not to tread on the graves although unmarked. The bereaved could be seen kneeling at some of the headstones to share a prayer and spend time at the grave but it seems that three camera crews are ready to capture the private moment. Representatives of the international community and the media occupied a rather guarded podium at the centre of the cemetery whilst the rest of the crowd, people of all generations, settled where there was space throughout the grounds. Moving to the opposite side of the road, a large industrial battery factory remains intact and preserved as the site where many refugees were ‘protected’ by the United Nations Dutch Battalion, the ‘Dutchbat’, and as an admonition of their responsibility in the atrocities at Srebrenica. For many, the battery factory was the final place that relatives saw their loved ones alive and represents a symbolic resistance to, and undoing of, the efforts of ethnic cleansing. Its emptiness is stark and is a haunting reminder of the many that were previously sheltered here. An exhibition now fills the space, displaying the hyper-sexualized graffiti inscribed by Dutchbat soldiers and other symbols of derogatory nature against Bosniak victims. The Memorial Room next door displays personal belongings and artefacts recovered from victims and donated by the victims’ family, set alongside a photograph of the victim and personal testimony. These acts of remembrance represent important efforts to humanise the impersonal figure of ‘8372’, not only giving a sense of the victims’ death but their life. Denial and the political posturing in commemoration The commemorations that we observed was a complex meeting of political necessities, religious rituals and expressions of grief. Alongside the bereaved, a number of different communities are in attendance, including activists, international representatives and, as Sarah Wagner and Lara Nettlefield (2013: 48) observed of their attendance at the fifteenth anniversary commemorations, summer school programmes. This year, the proceedings are also broadcasted
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and live streamed. Many of those in attendance remained unmoved by the speeches offered by the international community and there is an air of indifference to this section of the day. Speeches from high-profile international representatives such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former Prime Minister of Turkey Ahmet Davutog˘ lu continue for much of the morning but are barely noticeable and the crowds continue with their own burdens. Other dignitaries such as Princess Anne representing the UK and Queen Noor of Jordan are also present, but seem to depart shortly after the conclusion of the speeches. The atmosphere of the Cemetery changes swiftly upon the arrival and opening speech of the Reis-ul-ulema Husein efendija Kavazovic´, the Grand Mufti or head of the Islamic Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Cemetery stands still as they are addressed with prayers and funeral sermons. However, before the sermon ends, a murmuring of noise begins to emerge, coming in waves from the back of the Cemetery and becoming progressively louder halting the Grand Mufti. People begin to move towards the back of the Cemetery, some perhaps out of urgency and others out of curiosity. Bodies begin to push forward, forcing their way in a crowd to the top of the sloping Cemetery. Word spreads throughout the Cemetery that the Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucˇ ic´, has entered at the back of the grounds to place flowers and a number of people jostle their way forward past security guards to throw water bottles, small rocks and stones. The atmosphere is provocative and heavily charged but the unrest underscores a deep anger and resentment at the persistent attempts at denial by Serbian authorities of the atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. Vucˇ ic´ was a member of the Serbian Radical Party, an ultranationalist political party during the Bosnian War and fall of Srebrenica, and served under Slobodan Miloševic´’s regime for Serbian expansion. The jeering is loud now and my eyes are drawn to a large banner that has been splashed across the bank of the Cemetery which we were to later find out was scrawled with the phrase: ‘If you kill one Serb, we will kill 100 Muslims’ – a phrase that Vucˇ ic´ is most well-known for reciting a matter of days after the massacre of Srebrenica. The rest of the Cemetery looks on as what was a peaceful day of remembrance turns into one of hostility and panic. Amid this turmoil, the voice of the Grand Mufti returns to the podium and our eyes and ears turn back towards the centre of the Cemetery. He continues with his speech and reminds the crowds of why they are here: ‘Let us be dignified … Turn your faces toward the coffins, and not towards those who have come today’ (Wagner 2015). The crowd cheers, partly at the Grand Mufti’s intervention and partly at the departure of Vucˇ ic´ who has been evacuated from the Cemetery. The crowds slowly and quietly start to shuffle back to their places and, apart from a few mumblings, the grounds fall to complete silence. The sound of the imam echoes around the Cemetery and several thousand people kneel to begin the prayers. There seemed to be a jarring disconnect between the
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charged and hostile atmosphere that had just passed and the air of reflection and stillness that we had returned to. Mourning After the final prayers and speeches were concluded, coffins were dispersed throughout the crowds. The crowd begins to shuffle around again as if people know what they are supposed to do and, as many families have been waiting two decades for this moment, this perhaps should not seem as surprising as it is. Glimpses of the green-draped coffins can be caught as they are scattered throughout the Cemetery and attention is switched from the centre of the grounds to the graves. Each grave is surrounded by family members waiting to receive the coffins and a short prayer is conducted. We are sat in a spot on the outskirts of the Cemetery, away from centre. The air starts to fill with the noise of only two things: the sound of people weeping and the shovelling of earth back into the graves by relatives. There is a gendered dimension to this scene as men take the role of handling the coffins and burial while women are beside the grave. Crying and weeping in very public expressions of grief can be heard and younger members of the crowd look on in disbelief. The act of burial and the outpourings of grief that followed were overwhelming and crystallised my feelings of confusion and uncertainty. I also felt some sense alienation: while these images of distress and suffering were unusually familiar to images too often broadcasted across global media, these expressions were visceral, raw and confronting. Reflecting on these feelings seemed narcissistic and wildly misplaced in the scheme of things. Glimpses of these displays created a feeling of trespassing and intrusion: I should not be there, I do not have anything to offer, and even more I did not have the authority to do so. My position made me question the intentions and responsibility in the field and I struggled with the same question Olivera Simic´ (2008) wrestled with upon her own visits to mass graves in Potocˇ ari: ‘is it really necessary?’. Did I really need to be there and what is to be learned from doing so? The apprehension that had lingered for many days before the ceremony later turned into uneasiness and angst over my responsibility in the field. The public expressions of grief compelled compassion and understanding and the presence of the aftermath of violence became immediate in those moments. Despite the fact that many families here had waited twenty years to bury their loved ones, the process of burial was over in the space of thirty minutes. Shortly after the end of the ceremony the crowds start to disperse to begin the trip back home and we join a long convoy of vehicles on the only road leading out of Srebrenica. Reflecting on the day on our return, there is a mixture of complete overwhelmedness and confusion. I would like to write that these images of suffering immediately roused me in deep and critical thought, but the initial impact is overpowering and seems to foster inertia rather than action. We are exhausted, stunned and have left the scene with more questions than when we arrived.
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Beyond spectatorship and towards witnessing These experiences highlighted the ethical ambiguities of ‘seeing’ the suffering of others and the distinction between spectatorship and witnessing. The notion of ‘spectatorship’ itself reduces violent realities to aesthetics and even more speaks to a kind of privilege and complicity. Susan Sontag (2003: 98– 99) reflects upon this and critiques at length the reduction of violence into just images, representations and spectacles: To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment.… It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. The danger here is that images of suffering become heavily mediated in mass media, humanitarian agency efforts and political posturing to the extent that they become just representations. Jean Baudrillard (1996) has taken particular issue with the spectatorship of suffering and has criticised mass media and intellectuals in the West (including Sontag herself) for capitalising upon the suffering of those in the Bosnian War. By acting as spectators of the suffering of others, he argues that we are able to reaffirm our own values and realities from the safety of our own homes. One response to this way of ‘seeing’ has been the act of witnessing explored more recently in debates on journalism, media culture and testimony (Frosh 2006; Hill 2018; Kurasawa 2009; Peters 2001; Wieviorka 2006; Zelizer 2002). The act of witnessing is now a much-discussed phenomenon with many scholars drawing the distinction between witnessing and spectatorship, where the latter is merely seeing and the former moves beyond and towards acting upon what we see (Walklate 2017). Witnessing can take the form of photography, activism, journalism among many others and therefore demands participation. It is not enough, as Evans and Giroux (2015: 12) argue, to be there or see what happens, we must move ‘beyond the spectacle’ and ‘make visible the reality of violence’. Fuyuki Kurasawa (2009) states that witnessing can be performed through the act of speaking out and giving voice, engaging in critical thought to acts which seem beyond comprehension, creating empathy in
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the face of indifference and encouraging public memory of atrocities. As David Hill (2018) contends, witnessing is a moral act. Witnessing in the aftermath of violence bears responsibility on the part of the criminologist and the act of ‘making visible the reality of violence’ requires us to be on the ground. Richard Quinney (2000) has employed the concept of witnessing in his discussion of criminology as a ‘moral enterprise’. Moving away from the idea of criminologists as detached and dispassionate observers, Quinney (2000: 203) argues that we should develop a ‘criminology with awareness’ with the act of witnessing first hand providing conscience and purpose to social research. These acts of witnessing can be uncomfortable and unfamiliar but offer a way of making sense of these experiences. As Evans and Giroux (2015) state, to witness ethically we must bear witness to acts which we think are intolerable and make visible the power relations and structural features of violence that reinforce these atrocities. Seeing the vivid expressions of grief that unfolded at the SrebrenicaPotocˇ ari Memorial underlined the familial intimacy of grief and the gendered reordering of mourning in public. The significance of communal burial in the aftermath of mass violence emerged here as a means of coming to terms with past and deepening kinship and social ties, although the political undertones of commemorations are also palpable. These experiences also spoke to the mobility of boundaries between public and private spheres where the private experiences of victims have become the subject of public reflection. Witnessing is an ethical demand that moves us to document, educate and preserve memory and can reveal underlying social, cultural and political dynamics in suffering (Walklate et al. 2011). ‘Looking is never “just looking”’, as Young (2010: 91) summarises. Witnessing events that we believe are intolerable or beyond comprehension provokes emotions of compassion, guilt and apprehension which have often been considered to hinder criminological research. These insecurities and uncertainties certainly do not seem to resemble the ‘data’ so often studied by criminologists and the question of how to process these sights, sounds and smells is one that has still not been fully answered today. In the moment a conflict emerged between the assumption of impartiality found in textbook criminology and the embodied experience of doing research. Feelings of hesitancy over my position, uncertainty, and exasperation towards the unfolding scenes were uncomfortable yet revealed something about not only the lived reality of violence but the ‘living embodiment of how we research’ (Wakeman 2014: 719). The false dichotomy between the impulsive and unstable influence of emotion and the rational and technical project of intellectuals is misleading and assumes that they can be easily separated. Emotions, as Martha Nussbaum (2001: 1) argues, ‘are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and … contain in themselves an awareness of value or importance’. The challenge for criminologists is to not only declare these insecurities and vulnerabilities in research but to learn from them as a means to better understanding the realities of suffering. As Yvonne Jewkes (2012: 69) questions:
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The sense of insecurity and vulnerability faced in the field offered their own insights, prompting me to question more broadly the role of criminology in explaining harms and state injustices. Sharing these emotions in the writing of criminological research prompted a deeper consideration of subjectivities of those affected by violence and how the researcher comes to know these intimate details (Wakeman 2014). Writing in the feelings of insecurity, guilt and angst that the many candid accounts of autoethnography have revealed would offer a richer understanding of violence and its effects. This is not to turn the practice of writing criminological research into a confession but to open up a critical dialogue about the lived reality of suffering rather than just its representations. This is also a self-reflexive task that asks what criminology might learn about itself through the writing in of emotions in research. How might our talk about crime and deviance change if we treated emotion as part of the intellectual inquiry rather than a burden to it?
Conclusion Criminology is a discipline that by its very nature deals with matters of danger, anguish and pain and often criminologists end up ‘where the suffering takes place’. This chapter has presented reflections on attending the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre at the Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and considered what can be learned through the act of witnessing. It is crucial to remember that these reflections represent just one day in this aftermath of violence and the struggle for truth and justice continues for families. We must look beyond what happens on 11 July every year and also consider how lives are lived in the aftermath of violence for those left behind: how do they rebuild, survive or struggle against such injustices outside of these commemorations? Despite the growth of commercial mass media, excess of visual representations of suffering and the commodification of violence for public consumption, criminologists must find a way to move beyond the passive and dispassionate ways of seeing that spectatorship encourages. Rather, criminologists must act as witnesses to intolerable violence in order to make sense of these experiences and overcome distance between researchers and those that suffer lethal violence. Witnessing requires criminologists to make visible the power relations, structural features and everyday meanings behind violence and ultimately bear some responsibility in softening the harms of crime and deviance. The act of witnessing can be a troubling and unsettling experience and the feelings of compassion, guilt and sorrow can seem difficult to reconcile with the normative commitments of criminology to objectivity and measurement. However, emotion offers its own
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insights about the realities of violence and, if treated as part of our reflections rather than something that corrupts our research, reveals insights about the relationship between criminologists and those that experience violence. Indeed, scholars such as Evans and Giroux (2015) argue that there is simply no room for ‘objective’ discussion in efforts to make visible the underlying structures of violence and its aftermath. If criminology can find a way to talk about emotion, the seemingly methodical ‘research process’ often described in criminology textbooks can be demystified and more insight can be gathered instead into how the research experience is lived.
References Baudrillard, Jean (1996). ‘No Pity for Sarajevo; The West’s Serbianization; When the West Stands in for the Dead’, in Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Meštrovic´ (eds). This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Carrabine, Eamonn (2014). ‘Seeing Things: Violence, Voyeurism and the Camera’. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2): 134–158. Chouliaraki, Lilie (2006). The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage Publications. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Tijana Stolic (2017). ‘Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee “Crisis”: A Visual Typology of European News’. Media, Culture and Society, 39(8): 1162–1177. Christie, Nils (1997). ‘Four Blocks Against Insight: Notes on the Oversocialization of Criminologists’. Theoretical Criminology, 1(1): 13–23. Cohen, Stanley (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cushman, Thomas and Stjepan G. Meštrovic´ (1996). ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Meštrovic´ (eds). This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. New York: New York University Press. Diken, Bülent and Carsten Bagge Laustsen (2005). ‘Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War’. Body & Society, 11(1): 111–128. Ellis, John (2002). Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers. Evans, Brad and Henry Giroux (2015). Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle. San Francisco, CA: City Light. Farrant, Finola (2014). ‘Unconcealment: What Happens When We Tell Stories’. Qualitative Inquiry. 20(4): 461–470. Ferrell, Jeff (2011). ‘Disciplinary Drift’, in Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle (eds). What Is Criminology?Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frosh, Paul (2006). ‘Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media and the Imagined Lives of Strangers’. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(4):265–284. Garland, David and Richard Sparks (2000). ‘Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of Our Times’. British Journal of Criminology, 40: 189–204. Helms, Elissa, Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings (2007). ‘Introduction’, in Elissa Helms, Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings (eds). The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
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Hill, David W. (2018). ‘Bearing Witness, Moral Responsibility and Distant Suffering’. Theory, Culture & Society, June 4. Jewkes, Yvonne (2012). ‘Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources: Doing Prison Research Differently’. Qualitative Inquiry, 18(1): 63–75. Kurasawa, Fuyuki (2009). ‘A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice’. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(1): 92–111. Morrison, Wayne (2004). ‘Criminology, Genocide, and Modernity: Remarks on the Companion that Criminology Ignored’, in Colin Sumner (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to Criminology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Nettlefield, Lara (2010). Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, John (2001). ‘Witnessing’. Media, Culture & Society, 23: 707–723. Pollack, Craig (2003a). ‘Burial at Srebrenica: Linking Place and Trauma’. Social Science and Medicine, 56(4): 793–801. Pollack, Craig (2003b). ‘Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics and Memorials Following the Massacre at Srebrenica’. Death Studies, 27(2): 125–142. Quinney, Richard (2000). Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rentschler, Carrie (2004). ‘Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering’. Media, Culture & Society, 26(2): 296–304. Simic´, Olivera (2008). ‘A Tour to a Site of Genocide: Mothers, Bones and Borders’. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9(3): 320–330. Simic´, Olivera (2009). ‘Remembering, Visiting and Placing the Dead: Law, Authority and Genocide in Srebrenica’. Law Text Culture, 13(1): 273–310. Sontag, Susan (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Books: London. Wagner, Sarah (2015). ‘The Ghosts of Bosnia: Genocide Deniers Rob Mourners of Peace’. Truthout, July 18. Wagner, Sarah and Lara Nettlefield (2013). Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wakeman, Stephen (2014). ‘Fieldwork, Biography and Emotion’. British Journal of Criminology, 54(5): 705–721. Walklate, Sandra (2017). ‘Victimhood and Witnessing’. The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Crime, Media and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walklate, Sandra, Gabe Mythen and Ross McGarry (2011). ‘Witnessing Wootton Bassett: An Exploration in Cultural Victimology’. Crime, Media, Culture, 7(2): 149–165. Wieviorka, Annette (2006). The Era of the Witness. New York: Cornell University Press. Young, Alison (2010). ‘The Scene of the Crime: Is There Such a Thing as “Just Looking”?’, in Keith Hayward and Mike Presdee (eds). Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image. London: Routledge. Young, Jock (2004). ‘Voodoo Criminology and the Numbers Game’, in Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Wayne Morrison and Mike Presdee (eds). Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London: The Glass House Press. Young, Jock (2011). The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zelizer, Barbie (2002). ‘Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events’. Media, Culture & Society, 24(5): 697–714.
10 Death justice Navigating contested death in the digital age Rebecca Scott Bray
One of the most rudimentary duties toward the dead is the recognition of them as ‘somebody’ (Woods 2014: 342)
Introduction: Death duty As the quote above suggests, criminology needs to better account for the dead, who exert pressure on thinking through criminological issues because they are a terrible fact of fatal violence, a seemingly unabating fact of migration, of refugee life and asylum seeking, of protest and custody. Even though criminology is saturated in crime’s emotional effects, it still has not contended with the dead as one of its sovereign subjects and significant objects. This is despite the fact that the dead have underwritten the birth of criminological knowledge, where ‘the link between the corpse and the criminal is one of the fundamentals of the discipline’ (Anstett and Dreyfus 2015: 5). Additionally, the dead have agency; their presence as a catastrophic outcome of violence motivates often-emotional labour, affecting policy, reforming law, and contouring our understandings of both justice and injustice, but there is little disciplinary debate about this. Despite this, the dead, death and how we die are occupying public space in revolutionary ways. Western societies are witnessing a broad positive death movement where there are increasing efforts to support a ‘good death’; defined as a death that follows from better conversations and information provision – ‘death literacy’ – around end-of-life options, rights and responsibilities. And yet, this rising emancipatory logic around death lies in direct contrast to the lack of choice, the violence and absence of control that many communities and individuals experience at end-of-life, where death is not ritualised, it is premature, traumatic, delivered in state care, undeniably marginalised and racialised, and preventable. Across this troubling spectrum, death does not have one site, or texture, or genre; it is not always positive, even when it is palliated (Mowll 2018).
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In the midst of this public entanglement of mourning and of celebration, where is the critical criminological attention to the dead, their deaths and their bereaved? This chapter considers digital developments around contentious deaths to assess how deaths in contested circumstances are being navigated in the digital age. It is specifically concerned with a largely overlooked aspect of deathwork (Walter 2005) by criminologists – coronial practice – and how the public space is registering the politics of death and bereavement through initiatives that draw on, but do not centre, criminological knowledge. Such initiatives bring a form of scrutiny to issues typically the province of criminologists, but which mainline death knowledge into the public space in interactive ways. In this way, they contribute to the blurring between academic and popular criminology identified by Nicole Rafter (2007: 415), with sense-making practices around facets of death such as bereavement and experiences of death investigation processes, including inquests. The chapter progresses by briefly surveying the disciplinary acknowledgement of the dead. It then details the evolving publicity around coronership and emergent digital initiatives that privilege the dead and bereavement stories. In examining these digital developments, the chapter suggests that criminologists need to better account for the dead and the difficult space they occupy as both criminological objects and subjects, without reducing them to mere disciplinary contingencies or crime’s marginalia.
The contingent politics of the dead and their visibility Dead bodies are pieces in a larger assemblage of how [political] communities understand themselves via shared conceptions of how they live and die and how their deaths are remembered and commemorated. (Auchter 2016: 43)
Writing about the dead in her home discipline, security studies, Jessica Auchter notes that while the dead have been under-theorised they are nonetheless ‘already subjects and objects of security in practice’ (Auchter 2016: 37). In her analysis, the disjunction between the lived experience of death and the dead, and disciplinary attention to them, highlights the work engaged in ontological, epistemological and methodological denial of the politics of death and dead bodies (Auchter 2016: 3). There are parallels here for criminology. If, as Willem de Haan and Ian Loader (2002: 245) assert, ‘the victim of crime has become the symbol par excellence of the late modern condition, and protecting victims’ rights the predominant ideological justification of criminal justice’, it is surprising that there has not been more co-ordinated attention paid to the primary victims of fatal violence, the dead, including their bodies beyond questions of evidence (Shute 2015: 83–84). Although the dead have not been articulated as central facets of criminology – instead existing at the margins of study as the tragic outcome of crime – criminologists and criminal justice stakeholders do realise the symbolic, evidentiary and
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emotional significance of death and the dead. Scholars and stakeholders alike have wrestled with how to recognise and account for victims (Walklate 2007), and criminology has a clear commitment to addressing specific contexts of violence. For example, emerging research is contending with distinct homicide events, such as filicide (Brown, Tyson and Arias Fernandez 2017), and family/ domestic violence death review is gaining momentum, not only as a field of policy-based death review, but as a distinct field of research (Dawson 2017). There are many solid analyses of the social situations and institutions, and of the processes, practices, and behaviours within them, that produce death, including prisons and detention facilities, and policing practices (e.g. Cunneen 2006; Hogan, Brown and Hogg 1988; Scraton 2006) and official responses to them (e.g. Baker 2016; Scraton and Chadwick 1987). Researchers are now looking outside of those institutions and processes and into others, such as museums, art galleries and across the mediascape to assess the creation, disinterment and exhibition of crime’s pictures, which include those that represent death (Biber 2013; Carrabine 2012, 2014; Scott Bray 2014; 2017). Analyses that track the cultural production of crime include those that engage with aspects of aesthetics and representational strategies, including how crime information reaches us and elicits spectator engagement (Young 2010; 2014), which are valuable because they disrupt a simple reading of the image encounter instead highlighting its contingency. This has implications for how we read and think about pictures of crime that otherwise might be thought to elicit specific emotional responses, such as pictures about murder (Valier and Lippens 2004). Yet there is still more to be tackled. As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian points out, there is a broader aesthetics of violence implicated in our relationships with crime, and with the dead, that we need to consider, which operate through an ‘occupation of the senses’ (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2017: 1279), involving bodies, homes and streetscapes of settler colonial societies (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2017: 1290). The settler colonial state’s deployment of aesthetic and sensory violence requires a criminological rethink of not only aesthetics, but also crime and its spatial and sensory facets (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2017: 1282), in addition to modes of resistance (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014). This approach also recognises that not only is death a devastating outcome of violence, but that the life of death is resonant; the dead do not exist just in pictures, they have material remains, ceremonies and funeral rituals, and bereaved families and friends who grieve. Reinstating sociological reflections on the importance of the relationship between the dead and the living for society, Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014: 38) identifies that the underexplored voice of the dead can be a site of criminological knowledge. The importance of all these aesthetic, institutional and policy analyses that build knowledge is their ultimate recognition that deaths – including their cause, their location, the institutional responses to them, and the bereaved – matter. The following section examines new forms of public, mediated scrutiny of death events with the potential to shape how we might understand aspects of death justice and knowledge about the dead. By analysing podcasts and digital databases, and reflecting on death investigation and the jurisdiction of
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coronial deathwork, the chapter explores the growing, interactive public dialogue around deaths in controversial circumstances, and the formal responses to them, which include coronial inquests and findings. These are not emotionless engagements; such public encounters with the dead and their bereaved raise questions that extend beyond mere images, into audio, and audio-visual media that are simultaneously engaging with, relying on, analysing and challenging coronial practice and state talk around contested deaths. The next section takes up this development, commencing with a discussion of the underexplored practices of coronership, before a concluding discussion about the place of emergent digital mechanisms in death justice and knowledge.
Coroners, bereavement and criminologies of the dead The body cannot be understood without recognizing the life that was lost. (Weber and Pickering 2011: 8)
As alluded to above, coronial death investigation is relatively unique in largely adversarial legal landscapes such as Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). And while inquests into contested deaths are typically represented as inquisitorial, public, fact-finding exercises which seek to establish the facts of death – the who, what, when, where and how – they can and do realise much more than these facts and perform a broader meaning-making task around death. Deaths are deeply contextualised by their social circumstances which petition disturbing legacies around, for example, policing, custodial and other institutional practices (Scott Bray 2013: 464). The justice work of such inquests is therefore not plain nor it is uncontroversial, freighting specific histories which shape contemporary expectations (Scott Bray 2010: 587). While inquests can ensure public scrutiny of contested deaths, and possess therapeutic potential, they have also been known to exact ‘damage instead of justice’ (Scott Bray and Martin 2016b: 117; Scraton and Chadwick 1986). Arguably, there are divergences between jurisdictions, each with their legislative idiosyncrasies determining differences in coronial findings and the impact of human rights for example, including the legacies of coronial evolution (Scott Bray 2017). It is all the more surprising then, that, despite being alive to the numerous criminal justice contexts in which deaths occur where coronial death investigation follows, criminologists tend to overlook the coronial jurisdiction as a site of analysis. Coronial practice has interested only a handful of criminologists globally, although these accounts have delivered concentrated and critical insights. As part of their analyses of fatalities in prisons or after police contact for example, criminologists and socio-legal scholars have unpacked coronial processes that make meaning of the dead, their lives and deaths (see e.g. Baker 2016; Martin and Scott Bray 2013; McIntosh 2016; Razack 2015; Scraton 2002, 2006), and substantial insights continue to come from outside of criminology (for a summary, see Scott Bray and Martin 2016a).
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While orthodox criminology has largely ignored coronial work, tranches of law and policy reform have made progress towards a modernised death investigation system that, for example, more decisively recognises the rights and role of families in death investigation, aims to respect cultural beliefs around post-mortem examination practices and acknowledges the key place of public communication, such as via coronial recommendations as tools for death prevention and the importance of information provision and accessibility of coronial information (Scott Bray 2012). These changes have also contributed to a new dimension of publicity growing around coronership, where coronial practice is far more visible and able to be assessed. However, the character of this publicity is inconsistent across coronial jurisdictions; in Victoria, Australia for example, the online availability of coronial information has a statutory basis, while digital developments in other Australian states and territories have been more ad hoc. All Australian coroners’ offices regularly publish coronial findings on their websites, but again, the extent of this is unsatisfactorily inconsistent (Scott Bray, Carpenter and Barnes 2018); it is even more makeshift and irregular in the UK, where findings also take a different form (Baker 2018). Despite these inconsistencies between emergent digital coronial bureaucracies, and notwithstanding the fact that publicity has always been at the heart of the most troubling deaths in society, and the coroner’s inquest is historically a ‘people’s court’ (Burney 2000), underscored by the principle of open justice, coroners and the deaths they investigate now face unparalleled scrutiny in the digital age. There are now, broadly speaking, four key elements to this: first, the use of dedicated inquest websites for specific cases; second, the proliferation of media and social media responses to controversial deaths which have also evolved into, third, journalistic facilitation of public expressions of bereavement in coronial cases, and four, digital databases that track deaths in contested circumstances. A number of inquests have had dedicated websites which publish transcripts and evidential material. This has been particularly pronounced in the UK; examples include the Jean Charles de Menezes Inquest, the inquests into the deaths from the London, 7 July 2005 bombings, the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson, the Hillsborough Inquests, and, in Australia, the Sydney Siege Inquest. These inquests also highlight how coronial systems globally are embracing the digital domain, albeit with key differences in approach. For example, each opening address of the Sydney Siege Inquest segmented hearings was live-streamed, but not archived. CCTV footage and other evidence was subsequently networked instantly across the 24/7 global mediasphere, but online archiving of material was restricted to opening statements by Counsel Assisting, and the coroner’s rulings, in distinction to high-profile UK inquests which routinely archive daily transcripts and inquest material. It is crucial to note that, other than media reporting, many cases have not had dedicated websites or an online presence, demonstrating the somewhat ad hoc nature of what is considered a ‘public interest’ case that receives sufficient public airing. The inquests mentioned have all progressed in the context of changing media
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practices where inquests are being analysed, their documents reproduced and discussed in social media, podcasts, blogs and online forums among community groups, non-government organisations and the public, often in concert with real-time engagement with coronial inquests. A key example of this evolving digital media industry and infrastructure around inquests is the 2011 inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson, who died during the G20 protests in London on 1 April 2009 after he was struck from behind by a police officer wielding a baton and then pushed to the ground. Ian Tomlinson’s inquest had its own website, and was the subject of a rolling media blog, Twitter commentary and hashtags that contemporaneously discussed the case (see Scott Bray 2013). In Sydney, Australia, during the Sydney Siege Inquest, the Twitter account for the New South Wales Department of Justice, @NSWJustice, tweeted on witness appearances and evidence, case updates and inquest developments such as adjournments and resumptions. Journalists tweeted using the hashtag #sydneysiege, and The Guardian newspaper published its weekly Sydney Siege Inquest Recap on iTunes, in addition to dedicated press webpages which collated press reports, rolling inquest blogs and related reportage throughout the inquest as an inclusive and comprehensive site of inquest detail and associated information. Ostensibly, these developments have also enabled the rise of informal justice responses to death.
Bereavement stories As communication technologies such as social media have facilitated a reshaping of court reporting on such cases, these tools have also been taken up by bereaved individuals and communities. There are a number of cases in Australia, and internationally, that have expanded an understanding of activism and pursuits of informal justice sitting alongside formal processes of investigation and inquest. In 2016, there was scrutiny of the Western Australia inquest into the death in custody of 22-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu, including of the Western Australian State Coroner’s decision not to release the CCTV footage depicting the last hours of her life in custody despite Ms Dhu’s family calling for its release (McQuire 2016). This decision has to be appreciated in the context of global movements around the increasing public visibility of state violence, particularly in North America, and corresponding attention to gendered and racial justice in campaigns such as #SayHerName and #BlackLivesMatter (Blue 2016: 16–17; Williams 2016). Added to this, three months after Ms Dhu’s inquest concluded, in July 2016, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s (ABC) investigative journalism program Four Corners revealed the abuse of young people in detention in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Detention Centre. The CCTV images from Don Dale were devastating and their media exposure led to a Royal Commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory. It was in this climate of revelation and response that the #releasethecctv campaign was born, to persuade the coroner to release the footage of Ms Dhu in custody.
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Public scrutiny intensified following the publication of both the coronial findings and the CCTV footage, and included the release of a protest song by Felix Riebl of Cat Empire, with its corrective message about colonial governance as criminal violence in a videoclip publicised via social media (Klippmark and Crawley 2018: 3). The significance of the CCTV footage as evidence of racialised and unaccountable violence was not lost on commentators, who criticised the coroner for reducing the actions of police to ‘minor and non-prosecutable misdemeanours’ (Perera and Pugliese 2016: 7). While Ms Dhu’s inquest did not have a dedicated webpage, it did receive particularly in-depth reporting by The Guardian, a matter to which the chapter returns below. Entangled in these media advances is now a third wave of development in relation to media and inquests that is of increasing importance, and involves the support of media – specifically of journalists – in public expressions of bereavement around cases of contested death, or unsolved and suspected homicides. Notably, we see this in the emergence of podcasts commonly publicised and discussed under the banner of ‘true crime’. But, in fact, this underplays what is occurring here. What is often overlooked in public discussions of these podcasts and the neat categorisation of them as ‘true crime’, is the coronial element. These podcasts directly, and sometimes inadvertently, encounter, scrutinise and rely on coronial work and outcomes, and exert pressure to enact coronial reform or re-open cases. In 2016, the Fairfax media group published the popular podcast, Phoebe’s Fall, which questioned the 2014 inquest finding by a Victorian coroner into the death of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk. Phoebe Handsjuk was found by the coroner to have died after falling down the garbage chute of an apartment building, in what the coroner determined was a circumstance of accidental death. Phoebe Handsjuk’s family disagreed with this conclusion, and the podcast explored their views, and that of investigators, interviewing police and a pathologist, and questioning the coronial outcome and canvassing the family’s ability to appeal the coroner’s finding. On this last point, the podcast revealed that appealing a coroner’s finding in the state of Victoria was legislatively (and financially) prohibitive, because the coroner’s finding could only be appealed on a question of law. Phoebe’s Fall and accompanying media coverage of the case led to a review by the Coronial Council of Victoria of coronial appeal rights (Martin 2019: 56). The review recommended legislative amendments to provide more clarity and options for families, which have been actioned. Similarly, the ABC podcast, Trace, concerning the unsolved murder of Maria James in Melbourne in 1980, has drawn attention to the coroner’s powers to re-open historical cases under contemporary legislation, joining the push for reform in Victoria (Brown 2018a; 2018b; Baker and Bachelard 2018). These popular Victorian podcasts are being joined by equivalent podcasts and significant case scrutiny in New South Wales, including that of the 1988 death outside Tamworth of Mark Haines, a 17-year-old Gomeroi teenager, in Blood on the Tracks, Season One of the ABC’s new true crime podcast series Unravel, and Breathless, a podcast jointly created and published by The Guardian
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and Radio 2SER that details the inquest into the death in custody of Dunghutti man, David Dungay Jr. What is noteworthy about these podcasts is their sensitive engagement with the bereaved, and also their accompanying online life, where the media coverage of troubling death extends beyond the headlines into photo essays, news reports, videos and images amounting to compassionate reportage, which all stress the impact of premature and sudden death on families, and document their pursuit of justice. Breathless is but one piece in The Guardian’s integrated reporting of David Dungay Jr’s death in custody. These virtual cultures humanise the deceased in the context of their life and relationships with family and friends, acknowledging that death, the dead, grief and the living cannot be separated. With Breathless, the listener learns more about David Dungay Jr than could ever be gleaned through the pithy court reportage typical of inquest proceedings and, even though this podcast is a purposeful contemporaneous form of (coronial) court reportage, it demonstrates that legal cases and their narratives take form in particular contexts (Goodrich 1990), made all the more explicit when weighed up against a family’s bereavement. As David Dungay Jr’s family members talk about him, recounting his personality, relationships and events – his life – the listener is simultaneously encountering them and their painful experience of loss and bereavement. Often this is ignited by tensions uncovered in the podcast when family members have to face death investigation practices and procedures. Episode 2 of Breathless, for example, includes arduous moments when the families collide with handling funeral and medico-legal process, including reading the autopsy report. The episode broaches an account of the injuries to David Dungay Jr as told by his mother, Leetona Dungay. As a formal female voice reads out details of injury from the autopsy report, Leetona Dungay translates this information into a language and a voice we might understand, so that we not only imagine those injuries, but also the shadow that they leave on David Dungay Jr’s family. In this instance, as one of many, key details shift out of the evidential register to personalise what has happened. The intention is clear: we might not grasp technical medical language, but we can understand what Leetona Dungay is describing. Breathless has been temporarily suspended due to the inquest’s adjournment, but rather than the factual notation about such legal procedure often found at the end of court reports – the inquest continues or the inquest is adjourned – the podcast engages with what the adjournment means for the family: a continuation of pain and delayed justice. This sort of work is portrayed as both the ‘forensic and the compassionate art of true crime podcasts’ (Coleman 2018), where journalists navigate the ethical minefield of broadcasting crime and death by either implicitly or explicitly announcing, and demonstrating, their responsibility to the bereaved. It is worth pausing here to acknowledge this. Very little academic research has been conducted into bereaved people’s experiences of the coronial system, let alone the racial and gendered dimensions of those encounters. We hear
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very little, publicly, about people’s experiences with coronial process and outcomes beyond the newsflash when inquests occur, and when they conclude. This is changing because the media landscape is also, but it is still relatively uncommon. The experiences of the bereaved become visible through submissions informing coronial law reform, or reviews, such as those of the Coronial Council of Victoria’s (2017) review of rights to appeal coronial decisions and findings. Academic research typically addresses bereaved people’s experiences in terms of specific issues, such as postmortem practices (Drayton 2013; Mowll, Lobb and Wearing 2016), inquest process (Biddle 2003), particular contexts of death, such as workplace death (Matthews et al. 2017) or other critical events such as disasters (Scraton 1999). Important insights also come from research conducted by advocates such as the UK charity, INQUEST (2002), which supports people bereaved through a death in custody or other contested circumstances. Most of the time, but not always, these experiences are anonymised. The insights that these podcasts and their additional reporting offer the community, their immersion in the troubling life of death, entreat us as listeners to unpack their otherwise seemingly brute categorisation as ‘true crime’ to recognise and to sense what else is going on. When some of these journalists say, as they have, that true crime is not entertainment (Brown in OzPod 2017), they are pointing up the distinction in the new media landscape between in-depth podcasts and traditional daily news journalism, with inferences about the latter’s characterisation as a frenzied, fleeting consumption of headlines (Hayward 2010; Jewkes 2015; Martin 2019). But they are also talking about the responsibility that comes with long form journalism which records the rent left in people’s lives by sudden and traumatic death. Ostensibly, the tension between these ‘real’ impacts and the affective power of podcasts on distant listeners (Boltanski 1999), and those podcasts climbing iTunes Top Ten lists, is yet to be fully reconciled. Part of the answer might lie in their justice efficacy, but if this is the goal, then more research is needed into how ‘evidence’ is understood in this context, including how it is gathered, scrutinized, interpreted, narrated and mobilized, and to what end. We also need to assess the justice work of such journalism, including whether it offers a shift in investigative journalism and advocacy centring on wrongful convictions; alternatively, it is worth evaluating whether it challenges traditional categories of (and distinctions between) crime reporting and true crime (see Buozis 2017). Suspending these questions, in addition to the thorny issues about entertainment and spectacle, is there something different about the immersive experience of these podcasts dealing with contested deaths? Do they enable a sensitivity to listening and delving beyond concurrent headlines, where ‘real-time’ engagement means not superficially consuming a ‘true crime’ narrative but a bereavement story? With burgeoning criminological insights into digital developments such as podcasts (Yardley, Kelly and Robinson-Edwards 2018; see also Yardley, Wilson and Kennedy 2017) and social media practices (Powell, Stratton and Cameron 2018), the digital
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terrain around coronial work, justice outcomes for the bereaved and public understanding about controversial deaths deserve attention.
Death and databases The emphasis on ‘real-time’ monitoring brings this chapter to the fourth and last digital development I want to discuss around coronership and public scrutiny of death: digital databases. In August 2018, The Guardian Australia launched its Deaths Inside database, an online, searchable database that tracks every known Indigenous death in custody throughout Australia since 2008. It was produced by some of the journalists involved in reporting deaths the subject of podcasts and inquests discussed above, including that of Ms Dhu, and assisted by advocacy organisations, such as the First Nations Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, and academics and research assistants, including criminologists. The database was conceived of when the Guardian journalists were reporting on Ms Dhu’s inquest. They were searching for up-to-date statistics about the number of Indigenous deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) handed down its 1991 report, but were faced with vague numbers they later discovered fell short (Wahlquist, Evershed and Allam 2018). Part of the issue around up-todate statistics includes lags in official data releases about deaths in custody, compounded by inquest delays, which mean that formal findings are often not produced until some years after death. Despite the Australian Institute of Criminology’s (AIC) Deaths in Custody National Monitoring Program established in 1992 in response to a RCIADIC recommendation, the Deaths Inside database emphasises that up-to-date information is actually difficult to locate, creating a gap in public knowledge that the database seeks to fill (Wahlquist, Evershed and Allam 2018). It does this by relying on coronial findings where they exist, but where inquests have not been held or findings not yet published, information is compiled from media reports, justice or police press statements, and interviews with families, highlighting the circuit of information that goes into the public knowledge of death. In response to the Deaths Inside database, the AIC states that it ‘does not support the concept of “realtime” reporting as this would not allow for the validation and cross-checking of data required to produce a robust and statistically accurate report’ (cited in Wahlquist, Evershed and Allam 2018). But I would argue that these death data sets are pursuing different aims. For Deaths Inside, it is not solely about data and statistics. As the database introduces, ‘Australia should know the stories behind the statistic’, and it is hard to gauge this humanity from numbers. We undertake a lot of counting of deaths in Australia and the UK, and the ways this is occurring – and the ways we are seeking to account for death – are clearly growing outside of formal institutional practices and very much in ‘real-time’, even when they deal with past events. In Australia alone, there are a number of initiatives such as the Border Crossing Observatory’s Australian
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Border Deaths Database, the Facebook page Counting Dead Women by Destroy the Joint, and the recent Australian Femicide Map, in addition to interactive digital maps of Indigenous massacres, such as Waanyi descendent and artist Judy Watson’s map the names of places, and historian Lyndall Ryan’s map of Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. Measurement is horrifying, but it is also useful and practical; numbers, maps, do speak. They are acts of remembrance (Gregory 2014), and classifying a death is a translation that has meaning. Jessica Auchter (2016) writes about the way that counting deaths mobilises attention, and some criminologists have been agitating for a number of years about the failure to consistently count, and so classify, deaths in immigration detention as deaths in custody with their ensuing, mandatory inquest scrutiny (Powell, Weber and Pickering 2015). These counting practices – and indeed mortality statistics generally – all acknowledge that an awareness of death in its numbers and categories is an important facet of taking the mortal temperature of society past and present. But Auchter (2016: 43) also cautions against an over-emphasis on death’s numbers, stating that focusing on body counts can negate the important context of deaths; that is, it can relegate their circumstances to mere marginalia. As if recognising this, many of the death records mentioned above supplement statistics with narrative, however bare the detail. Deaths Inside is not the only initiative tracking deaths in custody. Just under a month before the launch of Deaths Inside, The University of Queensland, Australia launched its UQ National Deaths in Custody Project in partnership with Sisters Inside, an advocacy organisation for women and children in prison. Researched by students under academic supervision, the database provides demographic information, including Indigenous status, personal characteristics (such as mental illness), jurisdiction, cause of death and specifics, custodial status and location, and whether there were coronial recommendations. The motivation behind the database was similar to The Guardian’s drive: to fill the gap in up-to-date public information around deaths in custody, make it an accessible and transparent tool, and draw attention to the stories of those who died in custody (AAP 2018). Significantly, these digital practices all engage in some way with coronial processes or records to sketch these stories. For example, both databases link to coronial findings where they exist. In and of itself, this is a significant achievement and a substantial co-ordination of information that could otherwise only be gleaned by interrogating coroners’ websites. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. The National Coronial Information System, which stores national Australian and New Zealand coronial information, is not a publicly accessible resource in the way these databases are. With the move to online coronial documentation, we are witnessing a unique instantiation of digital legacies. Coroners’ findings in Australia are strongly narrative based (Scott Bray 2010) and, in cases of contested and controversial deaths, lengthy. As such, they constitute significant death data. Correspondingly, it is appropriate that this coronial data is being
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scrutinised and discussed across media platforms, and in public. Deaths Inside state it is a resource that we hope will be used by researchers, lawyers, community advocates, and most importantly, families, who have lost someone in the justice system and are trying to navigate what can be a very complex and dense coronial process … we are not criminologists. Our aim is not to provide more statistics, but to share the stories behind those statistics and draw attention to failures and oversights that continue to occur and contribute to deaths in custody, despite countless pages of reports and coronial recommendations. The UQ National Deaths in Custody Project reflects this push for reform, referring to the importance of listening to coroners and their coronial recommendations aimed at avoiding such deaths in future (AAP 2018). While all Australian coroners possess the power to make recommendations, mandatory responses are required in only some jurisdictions, which has led commentators to question the real impact of preventative coronial insight stockpiling without consequence throughout Australia (Scott Bray 2008: 36). In this way, both the UQ and Guardian initiatives call attention to issues within the coronial system that have been highlighted by researchers for decades without much traction (Watterson, Brown and Mackenzie 2008). Taking a different approach, the interactive website, Deathscapes, eschews any account of numbers and is steadily compiling a community-focused, multi-layered database of Indigenous and racialised custodial deaths in the settler states of Australia, the United States, Canada, and the UK and Europe as origin sites. It was created by academics from those locations, with a team of researchers including advocates and activists, and an Ethics Advisory Board, and available online in July 2018. The database is an immense, but deeply case-based and qualitative unfurling cartography of violence in settler colonial societies, detailing both lethal and legal history and their continuing legacies, enfolded in the generosity of biographies of the dead, that privilege lives of contribution and meaning, and which are echoed in the voices of the bereaved and communities. It demands an investment of time and attention as it draws on videos, news reports, community resources such as posters, footage of gatherings, photographs, institutional resources, including coronial findings, artwork, poetry, song and interviews among critical discussion. It picks apart criminal justice and coronial practices along timelines that also stretch back into Australia’s colonial history, or across and between borders, constituting a devastating excursion through the terror and sorrow of these deaths, and the loss that marks communities. Recognising the labour of these journeys, Deathscapes is kind to its visitors; at various points through each it enables visitors to click on a symbol of a tree to exit to another page – the Courtyard – which is designed as a space of respite from the pain and sadness of the stories. In addition, Deathscapes team members have attended recent
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inquests, such as the inquest into the death of David Dungay Jr in Sydney, and the inquest into the death of Fazel Chegani Nejad in Perth, and have delivered ‘Daily Dispatches’ from those inquests. These text, images and audio-visual dispatch materials are filed under, and sit alongside, numerous ‘Engagements’ on the Deathscapes site. These dispatches are contemporaneous notes of the coronial inquest process, its techniques and strategies of representation, and which document its effects on families and communities, including, for example, the torturous replaying in court of the CCTV footage of David Dungay Jr’s last moments. The database has a Twitter handle that periodically draws attention to the case studies, particularly in the wake of critical deaths in mirrored contexts. Part of the significance of this qualitative endeavour is to avoid the reduction of the dead to statistics, and to participate in their naming (Williams 2016) as a resistance to their effacement as victims of state violence (Deathscapes 2017). Although their techniques and outcomes are different, this refusal of silence and invisibility is akin to the values of Forensic Architecture (Weizman 2017). Deathscapes acknowledges and actions Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2014: 50) pronouncement that ‘reading and writing the voice of the dead is a powerful site of knowledge production in settler colonial contexts’, including what counts as crime (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014: 51).
Conclusion: the sting of death As this chapter has argued, we can learn a lot from these public, digital treatments of how the dead, their bodies, and deaths can figure as relational subjects in thinking through critical death events and outcomes. Why does this matter? Because the genres of death – such as murder, state violence and negligence – matter a great deal, including to criminologists. The expansion of coronial work in the new mediascape, and the ways and means in which contested deaths are being scrutinised, and bereavement expressed, mean that coronership across its law, practice and effects is not merely subject to scrutiny, but becomes a part of everyday mediated life and death. While criminologists are attending to the impacts of, for example, social media on justice outcomes in the criminal context (see Fileborn 2017; Salter 2013), there is no research that tracks how these concerns are uniquely operationalised in the context of coronial justice. As Anastasia Powell (2015: 577) identifies in the criminal context, ‘communications technologies provide ready mechanisms for activist projects’, and tools for pursuing informal justice, but what do these mechanisms mean for the public expression of bereavement in coronial cases of death? If there is ‘an integrating function served by the dense networking and interactivity of social media’ in relation to crime (Salter 2013: 13), does the immediacy and social connectivity of such media have any relationship to justice outcomes in the coronial context? In an era following significant coronial reform, with the emergence of new forms of publicity and attention to coronial work, bereavement and an increasing public awareness
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around contested deaths through digital tools, the generalised oversight and neglect of coronial work and its impacts demands remedy. Elizabeth Yardley, Emma Kelly and Shona Robinson-Edwards (2018: 3) note that ‘serialized true crime podcasts have risen to prominence against a backdrop of social and cultural liberalism, progressive ideals and anti-state sentiment’, offering space for ‘critical voices and the new perspectives embodied within them’. They point out that this includes the story of the accused (see also Pâquet 2018), but also note how families and friends of victims – and their emotions – have long drawn audiences to media representations of crime (Yardley, Kelly and Robinson-Edwards 2018: 12). They describe the affective labour at play concerning victims’ families and friends, where they occupy ‘specific roles and identities’ for podcasts, collapsing the distance for listeners through the use of emotions such as sadness, hope and love, and highlight how this is taken up by presenters, too (2018: 12–14). Are these concerns the same for coronial cases that privilege the voices of the bereaved, including when their experiences are enfolded in larger initiatives such as the integrated virtual cultures of Deathscapes, Deaths Inside or case reporting on deaths in custody, such as the death of David Dungay Jr? These initiatives all redeploy death’s facts through techniques of presentation and engagement that attempt to account for death. Where the dead then materialise – not as human remains, statistics, or ‘the deceased’, but as people – it is worth assessing whether these initiatives might enable a just response to the injustice of contested death. As Jon Shute describes, for scholars of lethal violence, ‘there is, sadly, no shortage of “data”’ (Shute 2016: 173), and we would do well as criminologists to understand the privations caused by contested death by accounting for what is being built across public space.
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y-be-re-opened-under-new-laws-20180621-p4zms8.html (accessed 10 September 2018). Biber, Katherine (2013) ‘In Crime’s Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence’. British Journal of Criminology, 53(6): 1033–1049. Biddle, Lucy (2003). ‘Public Hazards or Private Tragedies? An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Coroners’ Procedures on Those Bereaved by Suicide’. Social Science & Medicine, 56(5): 1033–1045. Blue, Ethan (2016). ‘Seeing Ms Dhu: Inquest, Conquest, and (In)visibility in Black Women’s Deaths in Custody’. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(3): 299–320. Boltanski, Luc (1999). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Thea, Danielle Tyson and Paula Arias Fernandez (2018). When Parents Kill Children: Understanding Filicide. London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Brown, Rachael (2018a). ‘Trace: Cold Case Families “Relieved” as New Laws Make it Easier for Coronial Inquests to Be Reopened’. ABC News Online, 21 June. Available online at www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-21/breakthrough-for-cold-case-families-a fter-coronial-law-changes/9894984 (accessed 16 October 2018). Brown, Rachael (2018b). ‘Trace Podcast Subject Maria James’s Murder Case Reopened by Victorian Coroner’. ABC News Online, 30 November. Available online at www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-30/trace-podcast-subject-maria-james-murder-ca se-to-re-opened/10569792 (accessed 10 December 2018). Burney, Ian A (2000). Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Buozis, Michael (2017). ‘Giving Voice to the Accused: Serial and the Critical Potential of True Crime’. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14(3): 254–270. Carrabine, Eamonn (2012). ‘Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology’. British Journal of Criminology, 52(3): 463–489. Carrabine, Eamonn (2014). ‘Seeing Things: Violence, Voyeurism and the Camera’. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2): 134–158. Coleman, Zoe (2018). ‘The Forensic and Compassionate Art of True Crime Podcasts’. Medium, 28 July. Available online at https: //medium.com/the-walkley-magazine/ the-forensic-and-compassionate-art-of-true-crime-podcasts-7514605cb754 (accessed 5 October 2018). Coronial Council of Victoria (2017). Reference 4 – Coronial Council Appeals Review (29 November). Cunneen, Chris (2006). ‘Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: A Continuing Systematic Abuse’. Social Justice, 33(4): 37–51. de Haan, Willem and Ian Loader (2002). ‘On the Emotions of Crime, Punishment and Social Control’. Theoretical Criminology, 6(3): 243–253. Deathscapes (2017). ‘Humanising What Has Been Dehumanised: On the Politics of Art, Images and Names’. Deathscapes. Available online at www.deathscapes.org/a bout-project/ (accessed 10 September 2018). Drayton, John (2013). ‘Bodies-in-Life/ Bodies-in-Death: Social Work, Coronial Autopsies and the Bonds of Identity’. British Journal of Social Work, 43(2): 264–281. Earl, Carly (2018). ‘Photo Essay: David Dungay Jr Dies in Custody, and His Family Are Changed Forever’. The Guardian, 3 July. Available online at www.theguardian.com/a ustralia-news/2018/jul/13/david-dungay-jr-dies-in-custody-and-his-family-are-changedforever-photo-essay (accessed 10 September 2018).
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Dawson, Myrna (ed.) (2017). Domestic Homicides and Death Reviews: An International Perspective. London: Palgrave/Macmillan. Fileborn, Bianca (2017). ‘Justice 2.0: Street Harassment Victims’ Use of Social Media and Online Activism as Sites of Informal Justice’. British Journal of Criminology, 57(6): 1482–1501. Fishman, Jessica A (2017). Death Makes the News: How the Media Display and Censor the Dead. New York: New York University Press. Goodrich, Peter (1990). Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Tom (2014). ‘Body Counts Disguise the True Horror of What Wars Do to Bodies’. The Conversation, 10 November. Available online at https: //theconversa tion.com/body-counts-disguise-the-true-horror-of-what-wars-do-to-bodies-31416 (accessed 10 September 2018). Hayward, Keith (2010). ‘Opening the Lens: Cultural Criminology and the Image’, in Keith Hayward and Mike Presdee (eds). Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image. London: Routledge, pp. 1–16. Hogan, Michael, David Brown and Russell Hogg (eds) (1988). Deaths in the Hands of the State. Sydney: Redfern Legal Centre. INQUEST (2002). How the Inquest System Fails Bereaved People: INQUEST’s Response to the Fundamental Review of Coroner Services. Jewkes, Yvonne (2015). Media and Crime. London: Sage Publications. Klippmark, Pauline and Karen Crawley (2018). ‘Justice for Ms Dhu: Accounting for Indigenous Deaths in Custody in Australia’. Social and Legal Studies, doi: doi:10.1177/09646663917734415: 1–21. Martin, Greg. (2019). Crime, Media and Culture. London: Routledge. Martin, Greg and Rebecca Scott Bray (2013). ‘Discolouring Democracy? Policing, Sensitive Evidence, and Contentious Deaths in the United Kingdom’. Journal of Law and Society, 40(4): 624–656. Matthews, Lynda R., Philip Bohle, Michael Quinlan, Dan Kimber, Mark Ngo, Cath Finney Lamb and Irene Mok (2017). Death at Work: Improving Support for Families. Final Report. Available online at http: //sydney.edu.au/health-sciences/ research/workplace-death/ (accessed 5 October 2018). McIntosh, Sam (2016). ‘Taken Lives Matter: Open Justice and Recognition in Inquests into Deaths at the Hands of the State’. International Journal of Law in Context, 12(2): 141–161. McQuire, Amy (2016). ‘Ms Dhu’s Hidden Pain: How To Hurt An Aboriginal Family Without Even Really Trying New Matilda’. New Matilda, 30 March. Available online at https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/30/ms-dhus-pain-how-to-hurt-an-abor iginal-family-without-even-really-trying/ (accessed 16 October 2018). Mowll, Jane (2018). ‘The Bereavement Experiences and Support Needs of Bereaved Family Caregivers in the Context of Palliative Care’. Bereavement Care, 37(2): 74–77. Mowll, Jane, Elizabeth A. Lobb and Michael Wearing (2016). ‘The Transformative Meanings of Viewing or Not Viewing the Body After Sudden Death’. Death Studies, 40(1): 46–53. OzPod (2017). ‘Panel 4: Ethics is Not a Dirty Word, with Martin Van Beynen, Rachael Brown, Siobhan McHugh, Anna Priestland, moderated by Sarah Macdonald’. Available online at www.abc.net.au/events/ozpod/2017-panel-4—ethics-isnot-a-dirty-word/8870648 (accessed 10 September 2018).
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Pâquet, Lili (2018). ‘Literary Forensic Rhetoric: Maps, Emotional Assent and Rhetorical Space in Serial and Making a Murderer’. Law and Humanities, 12(1): 71–92. Perera, Suvendrini and Joseph Pugliese (2016). ‘What the Law Saw: Repertoires of Violence and Regimes of Impunity’. Available online at: rapbs.org/wp-content/uploa ds/2016/12/What-the-law-saw.pdf (accessed 10 September 2018). Powell, Anastasia (2015). ‘Seeking Rape Justice: Formal and Informal Responses to Sexual Violence through Technosocial Counter-Publics’. Theoretical Criminology, 19(4): 571–588. Powell, Anastasia, Gregory Stratton and Robin Cameron (2018). Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society. London: Routledge. Powell, Rebecca, Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering (2015). ‘Every Death Counts: An Argument for Counting Deaths in Custody Collection’. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 27(1):113–121. Rafter, Nicole (2007). ‘Crime, Film and Criminology: Recent Sex-Crime Movies’. Theoretical Criminology, 11(3): 403–420. Razack, Sherene (2015). Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Salter, Michael (2013). ‘Justice and Revenge in Online Counter-Publics: Emerging Responses to Sexual Violence in the Age of Social Media’. Crime, Media, Culture, 9(3): 225–242. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2008). ‘“Why This Law?”: Vagaries of Jurisdiction in Coronial Reform and Indigenous Death Prevention’. Australian Indigenous Law Review, 12(2): 27–44. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2010). ‘Death Scene Jurisprudence: The Social Life of Coronial Facts’. Griffith Law Review, 19(3): 567–592. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2012). ‘Executive Impunity and Parallel Justice? The United Kingdom Debate on Secret Inquests and Inquiries’. Journal of Law and Medicine, 19(3): 569–592. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2013). ‘Paradoxical Justice: The Case of Ian Tomlinson’. Journal of Law and Medicine, 21(2): 447–472. Scott BrayRebecca (2014). ‘Rotten Prettiness? The Forensic Aesthetic and Crime as Art’. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 40(1): 69–95. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2017). ‘Death Investigation, Coroners’ Inquests and Human Rights’, in Leanne Weber, Elaine Fishwick and Marinella Marmo (eds). The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights. New York: Routledge, pp. 146–156. Scott Bray, Rebecca (2017). ‘Images of Fatal Violence: Negotiating the Dark Heart of Death Research’. Mortality, 22(2): 136–154. Scott Bray, Rebecca and Greg Martin (2016a). ‘Introduction: Frontiers in Coronial Justice – Ushering in a New Era of Coronial Research’. International Journal of Law in Context, 12(2): 103–114. Scott Bray, Rebecca and Greg Martin (2016b). ‘Exploring Fatal Facts: Current Issues in Coronial Law, Policy and Practice’. International Journal of Law in Context, 12(2): 115–140. Scott Bray, Rebecca, Belinda Carpenter and Michael Barnes (2018). ‘Southern Death Investigation: Theorising Coronial Work from the Global South’, in Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott and Máximo Sozzo (eds). The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. London: Palgrave/Macmillan, pp. 139–161.
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Scraton, Phil (2002). ‘Lost Lives, Hidden Voices: “Truth” and Controversial Deaths’. Race & Class, 44(1): 107–118. Scraton, Phil (2006). ‘“They’d All Love Me Dead …”: The Investigation, Inquest, and Implications of the Death of Annie Kelly’. Social Justice, 33(4): 118–135. Scraton, Phil and Kathryn Chadwick (1986). ‘Speaking Ill of the Dead: Institutionalised Responses to Deaths in Custody’. Journal of Law and Society, 13(1): 93–115. Scraton, Phil and Kathryn Chadwick (1987). In the Arms of the Law: Coroner’s Inquests and Deaths in Custody. London: Pluto Press. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera (2014). ‘Criminality in Spaces of Death: The Palestinian Case Study’. British Journal of Criminology, 54(1): 38–52. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera (2017). ‘The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror’. The British Journal of Criminology, 57(6): 1279–1300. Shute, Jon (2015). ‘Moral Discourse and Action in Relation to the Corpse: Integrative Concepts for a Criminology of Mass Violence Unthinkable’, in Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds). Human Remains and Mass Violence: Methodological Approaches. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 81–105. Shute, Jon (2016). ‘Bereaved Family Activism in Contexts of Organised Mass Violence’, in Dale Spencer and Sandra Walklate (eds). Reconceptualising Critical Victimology: Interventions and Possibilities. New York: Lexington, pp. 173–190. Valier, Claire and Ronnie Lippens (2004). ‘Moving Images, Ethics and Justice’. Punishment & Society, 6(3): 319–333. Wahlquist, Calla, Nick Evershed and Lorena Allam (2018). ‘We Examined Every Indigenous Death in Custody Since 2008: This is Why’. The Guardian, 28 August. Available online at www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/28/we-examined-e very-indigenous-death-in-custody-since-2008-this-is-why (accessed 16 October 2018). Walklate, Sandra (2007). Imagining the Victim of Crime. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Walter, Tony (2005). ‘Mediator Deathwork’. Death Studies, 29(5): 383–412. Watterson, Ray, Penny Brown and John McKenzie (2008). ‘Coronial Recommendations and the Prevention of Indigenous Death’. Australian Indigenous Law Review, 12(2).4–26. Weber, Leanne and Sharon Pickering (2011). Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Weizman, Eyal (2017). Forensic Architecture: Violence on the Threshold of Visibility. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press. Williams, Sherri (2016). ‘#SayHerName: Using Digital Activism to Document Violence Against Black Women’. Feminist Media Studies, 16(5): 922–925. Woods, Simon (2014). ‘Death Duty – Caring for the Dead in the Context of Disaster’. New Genetics and Society, 33(3): 333–347. Yardley, Elizabeth, Emma Kelly and Shona Robinson-Edwards (2018). ‘Forever Trapped in the Imaginary of Late Capitalism? The Serialized True Crime Podcast as a Wake-Up Call in Times of Criminological Slumber’. Crime Media Culture, doi: doi:10.1177/1741659018799375: 1–19. Yardley, Elizabeth, David Wilson and Morag Kennedy (2017). ‘“To Me Its (Sic) Real Life”: Secondary Victims of Homicide in Newer Media’. Victims & Offenders, 12(3): 467–496. Young, Alison (2010). The Scene of Violence. London: Routledge. Young, Alison (2014). ‘From Object to Encounter: Aesthetic Politics and Visual Criminology’. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2): 159–175.
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Websites Australian Border Deaths Database. Available online at https://arts.monash.edu/socia l-sciences/border-crossing-observatory/australian-border-deaths-database/ (accessed 5 October 2018). Australian Femicide Map. Available online at www.facebook.com/AustralianFemicide Map/ (accessed 5 October 2018). Australian Institute of Criminology. Deaths in Custody National Monitoring Program. Available online at https://aic.gov.au/publications/mr/mr20/national-deaths-custo dy-program (accessed 5 October 2018). Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. (University of Newcastle). Available online at https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/ (accessed 10 September 2018). Deaths Inside. Available online at www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/ 2018/aug/28/deaths-inside-indigenous-australian-deaths-in-custody (accessed 5 October 2018). Destroy the Joint. Available online at www.facebook.com/DestroyTheJoint/ (accessed 10 September 2018). Forensic Architecture. Available online at www.forensic-architecture.org/ (accessed 10 September 2018). The Names of Places. (Judy Watson’s map). Available online at http://thenamesofpla ces.com/tnop/ (accessed 10 September 2018). UQ Deaths in Custody Project. Available online at https://deaths-in-custody.project.uq. edu.au/ (accessed 10 September 2018).
11 ‘Feeling criminology’ Learning from emotions in criminological research Stephen Wakeman
Introduction There are many ways in which emotions can feature in criminological research. This chapter is concerned with one of them specifically – the ways in which criminologists might learn from emotions. That is, the purpose of this chapter is to map out some of the ways in which emotions can constitute what Yvonne Jewkes (2011) has called ‘emotional resources’, in that they can be considered ‘tools’ within research that can help criminologists develop their ideas and move them in new and potentially innovative directions. In this respect, it is possible to understand emotions as a core component of a progressive programme for reform within criminology in that they can help move the discipline forward. It is hoped that this short chapter will play a small – but certainly meaningful – role in this process. In essence, the chapter is as its title suggests; it is about feeling criminology, rather than simply practicing it. The chapter is predicated upon the belief that reform is both timely and beneficial with recourse to criminology’s relationship with the emotions. As a field of study criminology still clings sternly to notions of objectivity, and while in many instances the motivations behind this adherence to the basic principles of ‘science’ are good, they have the adverse effect of blinding many practicing and would-be criminologists to the potentials of fully embracing emotions and emotionality. There are many factors underpinning this situation, and Jock Young (2011) neatly overviews them in his account of what he called criminology’s ‘physics envy’. The core of his argument is that criminology has an envious relationship with the natural sciences and their objective methods of doing and knowing things in their respective fields. These ways of thinking are deeply embedded at criminology’s core, and one does not have to look far to find evidence of this – in the United Kingdom for example, one of the first things undergraduate students are taught is to stop writing ‘I think’ in their essays. Here begin the processes of what Judith Aldridge (1993: 53) termed the ‘textual disembodiment of knowledge’. Right from the start of their careers, criminologists are taught to write themselves out of their work. As such, the present chapter joins a small but significant set of contributions which aim to counter and reverse these processes by encouraging criminologists to write the self back in to
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what they do (see, for example, Ferrell 2012; Jewkes 2011; Lumsden and Winter 2014; Wakeman 2014). The core aim of this chapter then, is to provide an account of the ways in which criminologists might embrace emotions in their research and how they might learn from them if they do so. In order to achieve this aim, the chapter is broken down into three sections that all draw on the authors previous research around drug addiction as a prime example of the potentials to be found in ‘feeling’ criminology (for further details of this research see Wakeman 2014; 2015; 2016). Section one is concerned with the question of how. It outlines some of the ways in which emotions can be harnessed as intellectual tools within research to help criminologists reach alternative conclusions around their findings that can in turn help challenge some of the field’s dominant ideas. The second section then concerns itself with the what – what happens as a result of using emotions in this way? Importantly here, the ways in which the benefits of working with emotions are offset by their sometimes painful experiential realities are bought into focus. While it is certainly true that there are significant gains to be achieved from working more closely with emotions in criminology, there is a price to pay for these gains and this must be recognised and properly accounted for. Following this, in the third and final section is about the why. That is, why feeling criminology is important. Here some preliminary guidelines for undertaking a ‘criminology with feeling’ are mapped out with a view to better establishing the role of emotions – their potentials, pitfalls, and the management of both – in the future of criminological research. By presenting the reader with three questions to ask themselves in undertaking criminology with feeling, it is argued to close that one of the less immediately obvious benefits of working with emotions is the fact that more emotionally-attuned ideas have the potential to challenge some of the structures and hierarchies of knowledge that underpin much academic criminology today.
Positioning emotions as intellectual resources: the how As above, the goal of this opening section is to map out some of the ways in which emotions can be understood – and more importantly, used – as ‘intellectual tools’ in criminological research. While there is something of a history to ideas such as this (see Wakeman 2014 for a brief overview), a useful point of origin can be found in Jewkes (2011). In an important contribution Jewkes offers an account of her experiences of doing research in prisons, and postulates that there is a significant absence in criminological scholarship around the emotional impacts of doing research in this setting. Of great relevance here, she notes that there is realistic potential currently untapped in this scenario: The extracting out of emotion and humanity from the research process and the pervasive failure of researchers to own up to empathetic feelings
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In response to this, she advocates an ‘acknowledgment that subjective experience and emotional responsiveness can play a role in the formulation of knowledge’ (Jewkes 2011: 72). This, in turn, would – it is claimed – ‘deepen our understanding of the people and contexts we study’ (Jewkes 2011: 72). In essence, her argument is that the emotional responses that all researchers experience from their work should be acknowledged and embraced; that they can actually constitute intellectual resources that can help in developing understandings of the subjects’ criminologists study. Related to Jewkes’ claim is a point that is worth restating time and time again: criminology – perhaps more so than any other social science – exists in an emotionally-charged arena. The ‘hot climate’ that Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2010) talked of is not bypassed by employment at a university; it impacts upon researchers as much as it does anyone else. This is important as it means that doing research on issues related to crime, deviance and the agencies/systems of their regulation will illicit emotional reactions from its practitioners. Moreover, these will be further complicated by the fact that criminologists are, first and foremost, people. People have life experiences – they all have pleasurable, painful and purposeful memories that colour the ways in which present emotional impacts have their effect. Thus, the argument here is as follows: criminologists are people before they are anything else, and as people they continually experience emotive processes. Furthermore, as criminologists do what they do in an emotionally-charged setting, emotions and emotional processes must play a significant role in everything that they do. The above line of thought leads directly to the idea presented here that emotions can, and indeed should, play a role in the day-to-day life of a criminologist. The question now has to be then, how exactly can emotions be used in criminological research? In response to this, there are two possible ways to use emotion in research that are worthy of attention here. They are the instrumental (that is, the ways in which feelings can guide research in terms of how it is actually done); and then there are the intellectual too (that is, the way in which feelings can help us learn new and different things from what we do). My own work around habitual heroin use in the UK can serve as a useful example of both of these in practice. During this project, I set out to do two things: (1) embrace the fact that I have a history of heroin addiction, and accept that fact that this will colour everything that I can ever know about this subject; and (2), be as open as I possibly could to the emotional experiences that I underwent throughout my fieldwork.1
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Emotions as tools: the instrumental potentials The core claim here is ostensibly quite simple: our feelings about things that happen in our research ought to play a role in directing it. In practice, this would mean that criminologists work with their feelings over and above their carefully constructed (and ethics committee-approved) research plans. This would mean that we attempt to harness our excitement, our curiosity, our fears, tensions and antagonisms and let them guide what we do. It is not difficult to see why this position is somewhat at odds with the objective doctrines of positivistic social science, but this is not to say that it is not without merit. Moreover, while what follows here is most obviously suited to ethnographic research, it is not exclusively so – there is room for an increased role for the emotions in all criminological research, no matter how it is conducted methodologically. In the context of my own work, there are two examples that can support the claim made here around the utility of employing feelings as intellectual tools. The first involves a feeling of mistrust – a feeling of negativity towards someone who was offering to help me. Access for researcher in the setting I was in can be problematic – many of the activities associated with the habitual use of heroin and crack cocaine are kept private for a very good reason. Not long into my work however I encountered an individual who was unusually willing to help. He offered to participate with no expectation of anything in return and was more than willing to allow me to accompany him about town. He appeared to be a young ethnographer’s dream. However, my gut feeling around this individual was to distrust him; while this is potentially difficult to admit and objectively justify, it was a very real feeling that I used instrumentally to direct my research. In this instance, to keep myself and my work as far away from him as I possibly could. Not long after my first meeting with him I was warned by others that he was planning to rob me – my feelings were right, and, in this instance, they kept me safe. In a manner similar to the above, I found it possible to use my feelings to push me towards certain events, as well as away from them. One example of this occurred on one of the many trips into town I took with heroin users who were out ‘earning’, which was the term they used to describe shoplifting. Usually this was unspectacular to say the least – it more often than not involved stealing cheese and bacon from supermarkets to then be sold in local pubs. However, on one particular afternoon when nothing much was happening, I decided against calling things a day and going home because of a feeling of excitement that I experienced at the arrival of a new member to our group. In short, her arrival brought with it a certain energy and feelings of anticipation that ‘something’ would happen. In this instance, that something was a theft of some electrical equipment which turned out to be crucially important in terms of teaching me about the informal economic systems which underpin and support heroin use in marginalised communities such as the one I was in.
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Importantly, in both of the above examples is impossible to quantify or objectively measure the impact of these feelings. However, this is not to say that these impacts should not be recognised as real. While it is perhaps true that my biography made me more acutely aware of the possible implications of these feelings, this should not mean that others cannot use their feelings in similar ways. The crux of the matter is this: the emotional experiences that I underwent during my fieldwork were able to act as guiding technologies to help said research progress forwards. It is in this respect that feelings can be understood as tools in criminological research. Emotions as tools: the intellectual potentials As indicated above, the utility of working with emotions in criminology is not limited to their instrumental potentials – feelings also have intellectual potentials too. That is, they can help us learn things differently from the research we do. The essence of my argument here is this: as feelings help us understand the world, what we see and what we hear, they can be used to critically interrogate and interpret the data we collect in the field and then go on to theorise with. There is a precedent here, and it is rooted in criminology’s sometimes problematic adherence to a set of ideas about research that essentially dictates that data be read ‘as is’. This has been usefully outlined by David Gadd and Tony Jefferson (2007), but also Hollway and Jefferson (2000), who noted how ‘telling it like it is’ methodologies lack any sort of critical and/or interpretive edge. Obviously, researchers should take the word of their participants and believe what they see and hear in the field. However, they should not do so uncritically, because people’s outward appearances – whether constituted of their words or actions – do not always accurately reflect their inward realities. The psychosocial approach advocated by Gadd and colleagues recognises this, and in so doing encourages researchers to treat data a little more critically. My argument here is that our emotions and feelings can be understood as a very useful means of doing just this. To exemplify the above, it is possible to point to the frequent contradictions between words and actions that I witnessed as an ethnographer surrounded by habitual heroin users. It was often the case that I would be told one thing or another over and over again by the people I was with, only to watch them do something totally different at a later date. On occasions, that ‘later date’ might have just been a matter of hours after they had told me they would/ would not do something. In Stephen Wakeman (2014) there is an account of one particular user going to great lengths to explain how he has control over his heroin use and would not be taking any on that day, only for him to be seen doing just a few hours later. Had I taken this man at his word that morning, I would have left with little doubt that he had control over his heroin use. However, my feeling was that this was not quite the case, and as a result it left me open to intellectually pursuing a different path. This is an important point that will be returned to below, there are however further
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examples of how an increased focus upon feelings can help steer research intellectually. To be clear about this – it is categorically not the case that researchers should regard participants’ accounts as false through any sort of maliciousness or dishonesty. The argument here is that researchers should however treat accounts cautiously and if they do not ‘feel right’, be open to following alternative lines of inquiry. This has been noted before in drugs research, with Philippe Bourgois (1998) claiming observation to be the best method of researching heroin use for precisely this reason – the frequent distinctions between what this population say they do, and what they actually do in practice. Like Bourgois in his work, heroin users would regularly tell me about their ‘responsible’ injecting practices (using fresh water every time, not sharing needles or equipment, cleaning injection sites with sterile wipes etc., etc.), however observing them would often paint a very different picture. In an ideal world they did all of these things and more. In their often-less-than-ideal worlds however, they frequently did not practice these ways of taking care of themselves. The crux of the matter is this – the core element that left me open to looking for these alternatives to what I was told was my feelings; that there was more going on than meets the eye (or ear!) in the lives of these people. Thus, the constitutive elements of my data are read differently because I use emotions as a tool in the field. This resulted in me learning new things; it resulted in the production of alternative theory.
The potential impacts of using emotions in criminological research: the what The purpose of this section is to address some of the potential consequences for embracing emotions in criminological research in the ways outlined above. That is, to map out some of the things that might happen if we start to use emotions as tools. From the off, it is important to stress that there are both positive and negative consequences of using emotions, and in the interests of balance remind the reader that the positive effects of using emotions – that are mainly linked to the previously noted ideas around learning new things and challenging core ideas – are returned to below in the final section. In the present section however, the negative impacts are focused upon. This is essentially because of their significant potential to cause distress; it is vital that these elements of working with emotions are discussed openly and shown the light of day. Again, if the rationale underpinning this work is linked to a wider programme of reform in criminology with recourse to its relationship with emotions, then a core part of it must involve identifying and then transcending some of the barriers that researchers face when it comes to working with their feelings. One of these barriers – perhaps the most significant one – is fear. Fear is complex and multifaceted, and can obviously work in a myriad of different ways. However, in the present context, it is ultimately reducible down to the fact that the field of criminology remains sceptical at best (and outright hostile at worst) to the intrusion of feelings into its ‘scientific’ domain. In one
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form or another, this is the sort of fear that Richard Sparks (2002), Yvonne Jewkes (2011), Stephen Wakeman (2014) and Randol Contreras (2013) all wrote of in their respective autoethnographic works – it is a fear that tells people not to talk of their struggles, to hide their emotional difficulties away behind the façade of the professional, objective, and detached social scientific researcher. It is held here that this is something of a problem. It is a problem because: (a) the kind of things criminologists will routinely encounter in their research are significantly likely to generate painful and/or upsetting emotions; and (b), because there is potential to be found within this fear with recourse to changing the way we do things. Once more, this sort of thinking has a history in criminology – Jeff Ferrell spoke of the need to embrace ‘profound self-disclosures’ in our research, going on to argue that such reflexive self-awareness could ‘reintroduce the humanity of the researcher into the research process’ (Ferrell 1998: 24). A similar motivation is at work here – my goal in this chapter, and in advocating a ‘criminology with feeling’, is to put the human right at the core of what we do. As above, a core part of this is acknowledging (and then managing) the painful emotions that can flow from our work. In what follows here then, I will offer three examples of this from within my own research: (1) isolation and loneliness; (2) over-identification; and (3), what Contreras (2013) has called ‘representational dilemmas’. The emotional impacts of fieldwork: isolation and loneliness Here I want to make an ostensibly simple claim – that working with emotions and emotionality can be a lonely business. This is not only the case because there are relatively few criminologists doing it, but rather because such work is based upon introspection, and this itself can be isolating. In earlier work I noted an important paradox about using autoethnographic methods in criminology; that it is not something that should be undertaken alone (see Wakeman 2014). By their very nature, the research projects that many criminologists undertake require a significant amount of emotional investment on the part of their researchers, whether we acknowledge this for what it is or not. This level of investment is unlikely to be shared by many other people, and this is possibly the root cause of the feelings of loneliness and isolation that can accompany criminological fieldwork. While this is something that may strike readers as somewhat obvious, it is not something that is regularly discussed formally in our field, and this absence is unhealthy for new and established researchers alike. Unfortunately, there is perhaps no solution to the isolating nature of the work we do. There are however, strategies for managing it. In my experience, these are based in proper supervision and guidance. Yet herein lies a problem – the quality of supervision and research mentorship available to criminologists is varied and dependent upon a whole host of variables that researchers have little-to-no control over. Some researchers may find
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themselves working with good mentors in supportive institutions, however others may not (they may in fact find themselves in the very opposite situation). The task then is to source support from elsewhere if needs be – to find someone whom it is safe to open up to and talk through the emotions presented by research. True, there are ethical issues here that must be negotiated. But care of the self is an ethical prerogative too; it is even possible to suggest that not properly caring for one’s own self in research constitutes unethical research practice. Arguably, is it not the case that a researcher who cannot (or will not) take responsibility for their own emotive wellbeing is perhaps not best placed to assume responsibility for the wellbeing of others? This does not require a huge change in practice, simply a willingness to own and discuss emotional difficulties and to make them a core component of any given research project. The emotional impacts of fieldwork: over-identification As above, the essence of what follows here is reasonably straightforward. However, this is not to say that it should be taken lightly, or underestimated in terms of its impact. Emotional identification is powerful, and this is all the more true in the emotionally-charged context of criminological research. This type of identification can come across a number of different intersections of identity, and can underpin a wide range of emotive responses – both positive and negative – as well. Again, to say that this is under-discussed in criminology would be something of an understatement, and this is more than a little surprising when it is considered alongside the fact that it is not at all unusual to find researchers who have some sort of shared life experiences or biographic factors with their participants. My claim here and in my ongoing autoethnographic work is that these factors matter, and that they can teach us new and innovative things about the subjects we study. They can however be problematic too, and this needs to be recognised and accounted for. In my work on heroin use I found identification to be beneficial in that it helped me understand and navigate the subcultural setting that I found myself in, but I also found it problematic in that I experienced a range of negative emotions that stemmed from the intersections of my fieldwork and my biography. One particularly powerful one was a meeting with an older heroin user who was suffering from a health condition that an old friend of mine had died from some years previously. In this instance, there was no escaping the emotional impacts of my fieldwork, and it is certainly true that in this respect I ‘took my work home with me’ in a way that other researchers simply do not. Somewhat regrettably again, there is not a simple solution to dealing with these situations that can be prescribed here. All I have to offer is the importance of setting and maintaining boundaries around one’s role in their fieldwork. Greater levels of involvement will lead to greater levels of identification and in some instances, this can be emotionally problematic for researchers.
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For me then it was important to monitor myself and my motivations for being present in the lives of the people I was working with in my research, and to make efforts to manage my interactions with people accordingly. This ultimately meant making a purposeful withdrawal from the field when my job there was done, despite my desires to remain. While there is an important ethical question here to consider around the implications of ‘faking friendship’ (see Duncombe and Jessop 2012), this is set in the context of a balancing act between this and our responsibilities as researchers. There is no right or wrong here; this is not a black and white scenario. However, it is possible to suggest that while a lack of emotional engagement from researchers can be problematic in that it prevents us from understanding the true dynamics of the subjects we study, too much emotive involvement with our study subjects/ populations can in fact prevent us from effectively engaging with them critically and/or analytically as well. The emotional impacts of fieldwork: representational dilemmas The final impact of working with emotions and feelings in criminology is again ethical in nature, and it surrounds the potential for representational bias in this sort of work. To be blunt, in situating emotions at the core of research, there is the very real potential for them to skew our interpretations of what we see and hear in the field, and this presents something of a dilemma here. That is, while objectivity is argued to be an unrealistic and unachievable ideal, its polar opposite of pure subjectivity is also less than desirable in the context of criminological research. An increased focus upon emotions (which are be their very nature subjectively experienced) has the potential to direct research too far towards the purely subjective end of this continuum. The goal here then has to be to achieve a balance between the two poles; a point of equilibrium whereby researchers are emotionally attuned to their subjective feelings, yet critically aware of their objective outer worlds concomitantly. It is towards these ends that Ferrell (2012: 219) insisted ‘first and ethnographer, and only then an autoethnographer’, and Wakeman (2014) predicated his model of autoethnographic criminology on the intersections of three variables working together: fieldwork, biography, and emotion. To further contextualise the issue of representational dilemmas, Contreras’s (2013) exceptional book The Stick Up Kids is useful. Contreras outlines how the dilemma he faced involved a tension between honestly recanting the violence he witnessed in the field, and running the risk of feeding hostile discourses around the relationship between inner-city Black youths and violence. In the context of my own research, a similar dualism became apparent around the nature of addiction – if I allowed my feelings around the nature of addiction’s causal variables to feature too prominently in my account of it, then I ran the risk of inadvertently contributing to the unhelpful discourses which pathologise this issue as one of personal responsibility. This is important in the present context as it highlights the ways in which representation is
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inherently ethical in nature in criminological research; the ways in which study sites, concepts, groups and institutions are represented in our research outputs matters. When we seek to work more with emotions, we must be aware of their potential to impact upon our abilities to represent our subjects, and the consequences that these might have for them. In summary then, questions surrounding ‘the what’ have been addressed here, and it has been demonstrated that if we embrace emotions and feelings in criminological research, there are a number of significant issues that need to be recognised and worked around. However, if they can be, then there are significant potentials to be realised through this type of work. There are a number of reasons why an increased role for the emotions matters in criminology, and it is to these that this chapter now turns.
Feeling criminology: the why In moving towards a close then, the final set of questions addressed here concern the issue of why. That is, why does any of this matter? The answer is twofold: (1) it matters because it can help move the field of criminology forward by challenging some of its core ideas; and (2), it matters because it can challenge some of the field’s prevailing power structures at the same time. In what follows here I offer an example of this in practice through my own research, and then briefly outline three questions for ‘feeling criminology’ that researchers can ask themselves to hopefully transform their own research along these same lines. Why feeling criminology? As intimated above, the main reason why researchers might want to embrace emotions more in their research is that said emotions can – when employed as intellectual resources – help shift knowledge and theory around our subjects in new and potentially innovative directions. Returning to Wakeman (2014) and the previously alluded to example is useful in terms of illustrating this point. During my research I encountered a man who went to great lengths to convince me that he has control over his heroin use; that he can ‘take it or leave it’, and that whilst he has been ‘addicted’ in his recent past, he is not so any more and using the drug recreationally. This is not at all uncommon in heroin using circles. In fact, on multiple occasions I have sat next to someone who is smoking heroin and in between inhaling lines, they would be telling me how they are ‘off it’ now. To be ‘on the gear’ is to experience withdrawal symptoms daily; it is to need to consume heroin to feel ‘normal’. If one is not presently in this state – after a period in prison maybe or a home detox – they can consume heroin and still regard themselves as being ‘off’ it. This is reflected in multiple social scientific accounts of heroin use that challenge the notion of addiction as enslaving users: to various degrees, infrequent and controlled use of heroin has been regularly observed (see Warburton et al. 2005 for a comprehensive overview of this literature).
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Importantly in the present context, the notion of controlled heroin use being possible and regular underpins some influential theory of addiction – namely Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy’s (1988) theory of ‘rational addiction’ where the phenomenon is presented a set of choices governed quite basically by cost/benefit decision-making processes. It is claimed here that using emotions in the way I have described above can present a different picture, one that challenges theory such as this. The theory stems from reading data ‘as is’; from an emotionally-detached research process. If, however, it is read through the emotional identification I experienced the day that man was telling me all about the ways in which he had control over what he was doing, the picture starts to look a little different. It is possible to argue here that the opposite was true – that he lacked control over what he was doing, that he was caught up in a set of processes in which he found his abilities to control his drug use at times lacking. This is a controversial position to take (recall the above point about the ethics of representing subjects through emotionality in ways which might inadvertently contribute to harmful discourses), and it is one that cannot be objectively verified. Yet, this is not to say that it is without merit. Through an increased focus upon emotionality in and during the research process, it is possible to read data differently, and then to use said reading to theorise differently around our subjects. In this respect, it is possible to understand the ways in which some theories have been formed in respect of their relationship with emotions in the research that underpinned them. The example of addiction presented here is useful in that two readings of the same phenomenon can reveal two very different things, with the variable governing the distinction between them being the extent to which the respective researcher(s) allowed her feelings to play a role in proceedings. The question as to which perspective is right here does not really matter. What is important however is this: emotions, when used as intellectual tools, can help move knowledge forward in criminology by presenting alternative ideas and theory to work with. In this sense the inclusion of feelings in criminological research is genuinely progressive, it is genuinely dialectical. This is why it matters so much.
Three questions for ‘feeling criminology’ Finally, then, I want to close this chapter with something a little experimental – I want to offer my reader a set of very brief questions that can be used within any research process to hopefully align it with the emotive, criminology of feeling that I have expounded thus far. My own ongoing work surrounds the theoretical and methodological refinement of a specifically ‘autoethnographic’ criminology (see Wakeman, forthcoming), and frequently in the many talks and presentations I have done around this subject I am questioned around the following conundrum: how exactly is someone who has no biographic link to their subject of study (in the way that I do with drug addiction) supposed to practice autoethnography? It is a good question, and one that I usually answer as such: by embracing emotionality in the field.
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Whatever methods we use, we will experience some form of feelings whilst we do so – my belief is that these are important, and that engaging with them can teach us things. The following three questions are designed to facilitate this process. Their goal is to enable willing researchers to reflect critically upon the emotional factors at play in their research, and hopefully help them move it forwards in the process. Question 1: who am I? While it might appear simple, this is potentially the hardest question of all. But it will provide a solid foundation for what follows if earnestly and meaningfully engaged with. Following on from the work of autoethnographers alluded to above, and the advances accessible from the interface between intersectionality and criminology (see Potter 2015), the rationale here is to unpick the ways in which our biographies impact upon our current work. In my case it is relatively straight forward, I have a history of drug addiction and this colours how I can learn, think and know about this subject today. In the case of others things might not be so clear cut, but this is not to say that they are not a subject worthy of attention. For example, I currently know some people who are researching prisons who have spent time in prison themselves; I also know some people who have been victims of domestic violence who are currently doing research with people who have also been victim of such violence, and in one case, a perpetrator of it as well; and furthermore, I know of some Black scholars who are researching the ways in which young people from minority ethnic groups experience their policing. I think that these things matter, and that if we stop to reflect upon them properly (rather than just giving them a quick mention in a methodological footnote), they can and will help us think through these subjects in new and potentially innovative ways. Question 2: why do I react this way? Second, I hope that this question will encourage reflection on a deeper level around the reasons why we react to things in the ways we do. As above, while in the field I underwent a myriad of different emotive responses to people, places and things. These can reveal something about them, if thought about carefully and constructively. For example, watching someone injecting heroin into a vein in the side of their neck, on more than one occasion, made me feel sick – this feeling prompted me to ask further reaching questions of what I was seeing than I previously had done. Was it the case that I was looking at some sort of symbiotically-mediated, discursively-constructed consumption practice? Or, maybe those feelings of sickness revealed – or at the very least, permitted a social theorist to entertain the idea – that there was something more pathological at work here? Again, the ‘right or wrong’ of this is not particularly important at this stage. What matters here is the fact that it was an openness to emotionality – to working with my feelings and taking them
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seriously – that permitted and encouraged me to ask questions that I might not otherwise have asked, due to my disciplinary background and the dominant perspectives within it. Question 3: what don’t I want to tell people about my work? Finally, this question is purposely designed to ‘cut deep’. It might of course be the case that there is nothing about a project that a researcher wants to keep to herself; that there is no motivation on their part to hold anything back from anyone, at any time, for any reason. However, I suspect otherwise. My feeling is that there might be, at certain points in our research journeys, things that we might want to keep to ourselves. I think that these things might matter. This is because they may very well be linked to the fear alluded to above, and in this respect, the things which we might want to hold back might be critical to both our own wellbeing as researchers, and the intellectual development of our work. In my case, it was the pain my research was causing me due to loneliness and over-identification that I kept hidden. I did this because as a newcomer, an emerging scholar, I did not want the people I looked up to thinking that I could not cope. These feelings of fear, not shared or disclosed to anyone else, resulted in the deterioration of my mental health and thus, my capacity to do my research and ask the questions that needed answers. In this sense, the fear and shame attached to my past came to intersect with my early position in academia, and, in this respect, they can reveal a lot about both drug addiction and the structuring of criminology in the UK today. Once more, this example might be somewhat extreme, but the rationale underpinning it will hold in other contexts; the things we feel that we need to keep to ourselves can often teach us a great deal if we have the courage to confront them openly. In summary then, the questions presented here are designed to provide willing researchers with a programme for allowing emotionality to encroach upon their work. They will both permit and encourage the development of a ‘criminology with feeling’, and this is useful for two main reasons: (1) it can reveal new and interesting things about the subjects we study; and (2), it can provide a medium by which we can start to reform our field and challenge criminology’s ‘dominant gaze’ of the emotionally-detached ‘scientist’.
Conclusions This chapter set itself an ambitious aim – to outline the ways in which criminologists might embrace emotions in their work, and detail some of the things that might happen if they do so. It goes without saying that the surface has only just been scratched here. This is a complex set of ideas that requires further study and elaboration to meaningfully account for. That said, it is hoped that a case was made here, and it is certainly worth noting that some of the above measures could be put into practice by willing researchers almost instantaneously. The essence of my argument was that emotions can – and
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indeed should – be understood purposefully in criminology as ‘intellectual tools’. Our emotions provide us with opportunities to think and act differently in our research, and in this respect that have the very real capacity to enact change on both an individual and institutional level. That is, embracing emotion can help change individual research projects, and it could potentially help change criminology as a field of study too. Again, this is an ambitious task, and while the beginnings of a programme for reform were mapped out in introductory detail here, it is important to note in closing that there is still a long way to go. In the meantime, a useful endpoint for the arguments made in this chapter can be found through simplifying and condensing them as succinctly as I possibly can: the above does not necessarily need anyone to practice their criminology any differently, but simply be open to feeling it, rather than just doing it.
Note 1 Space precludes a detailed account of this research here. However, in brief it was based upon an ethnographic study of heroin and crack cocaine use in a disadvantaged area of England’s North-West. Interested readers can find more information in Wakeman (2014; 2015; 2016).
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Loader, Ian and Richard Sparks (2010). Public Criminology?Abingdon: Routledge. Lumsden, Karen and Aaron Winter (eds) (2014). Reflexivity in Criminological Research: Experiences with the Powerful and the Powerless. London: Palgrave/ Macmillan. Potter, Hillary (2015). Intersectionality and Criminology: Disrupting and Revolutionizing Studies of Crime. Abingdon: Routledge. Sparks, Richard (2002). ‘“Out of the Digger”: The Warrior’s Honour and the Guilty Observer’. Ethnography, 3(4): 556–581. Wakeman, Stephen (2014). ‘Fieldwork, Biography and Emotion: Doing Criminological Autoethnography’. British Journal of Criminology, 54(5): 705–721. Wakeman, Stephen (2015). ‘Prescribing Heroin for Addiction: Some Untapped Potentials and Unanswered Questions’. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 15(5): 578–593. Wakeman, Stephen (2016). ‘The Moral Economy of Heroin in “Austerity Britain”’. Critical Criminology, 24(3): 363–377. Wakeman, Stephen (forthcoming). Autoethnographic Criminology. Abingdon: Routledge. Warburton, Hamish, Paul J. Turnbull and Mike Hough (2005). Occasional and Controlled Heroin Use: Not a Problem?York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Young, Jock (2011). The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Postscript Concluding thoughts Some lessons from being ‘liminal’ Sandra Walklate
By way of an ending? This book has been put together on the premise that crime, experiences of crime (as either a victim, an offender or a bystander) and policy responses to that experience, are saturated with emotions. As Susanne Karstedt (2002: 300) reminded us: Emotions pervade penal law and the criminal justice system. Offenders, victims and witnesses bring their emotions to the courtroom, criminal courts deal with crimes of passion, and their decisions can occasion public outrage and anger, or feelings of vengeance among victims. Offenders feel shame and remorse when they have transgressed the laws, and offences provoke feelings of moral disgust. At the same time, victims as well as offenders elicit our compassion and sympathy. Yet criminology has been slower to embrace an appreciation of emotions and their excavation in informing the phenomenon of crime than some other social sciences have been in relation to their respective areas of investigation. For example, Adam Crawford and Stuart Hutchinson (2016) make the case that criminology might learn much from international relations in understanding what security actually feels like and for whom. This is not intended to imply that a concern with the role of emotions in the commission of crime, responses to it, or indeed the emotional impact of working in this field on criminal justice professionals and/or criminologists themselves, has been absent. This is clearly not the case. A cursory search in the library will produce references to the emotional labour of criminal justice professional (Lumsden and Black 2018), the impact of the court room experience (Moore and Singh 2018), the role of emotions in doing prison work (Liebling 1999) and/or being a prisoner (Crewe 2009), the feelings engendered as a relative of a murdered person (Condry 2007), restorative justice (Rossner 2011), to the emotion work involved in doing criminology (Wakeman 2014), victimhood and moral indignation as a driver of legal change (Sherman and Strang 2010), and much more. Indeed, some of this recent work has endeavoured to
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offer a theory of emotion for the discipline (Prieur 2018) and its various theoretical lacunae in this regard (Mercan 2018). Moreover, this collection offers examples of how ever more nuanced and thoughtful this focus on the emotional has become within criminological endeavour thereby affording a more complete understanding of this emotionally saturated field. In the three parts of this book, our contributors have perhaps considered the rather more invisible emotional dynamics contributing to our overall understanding of crime, punishment and the emotion work involved in doing criminology than those referred to above. The first part focused attention on crime. Here Walter S. Dekeseredy, Charlotte Barlow, Kay Picart and Susanne Karstedt reflecting on different kinds of ‘crime’ chart a journey through how crime might be committed, constructed, and responded to, through the lens of the kinds of emotional dynamics necessary for these acts to be accomplished. Dekeseredy reminds us that most men who commit violent acts against women, more often than not their female partners, are disturbingly normal, not the deranged men of media and/or other social constructions. The question is: how is it that the perception of the deranged male persists then? Dekeseredy makes the case that this happens in part as a result of the kind of support men receive within their peer groups for such behaviour. He argues a growing literature shows that the type of support provided by male peers may influence a man to deal with his emotional reactions to intimate relationship stress by resorting to abuse. Yet to date criminological voices have been relatively quiet on this issue. Dekeseredy ends his chapter by quoting Jock Young (2011: 225) and that quote is worth repeating in part here: Above all, we must constantly be aware of the inherent creativity of human culture and of the rush of emotions and feelings that characterize the human condition and the capacity for imagination that this demands and engenders. Here Young, and by implication Dekeseredy, are calling for a criminological imagination that might capture such a rush of emotion in understanding human behaviour. This is a point reiterated in the contribution offered by Charlotte Barlow. Almost turning the focus of Evan Stark’s (2007) concept of ‘coercive control’ on its head, Barlow extends this concept to consider the motivation of women who co-offend with their male partners. She suggests the presence of the same feelings of fear, love and desperation that might propel a woman to continue with a violent relationship can play a similar role in propelling a woman into crime. From this perspective, the continued focus on choice, as a rational feature for criminal motivation in terms of (female) offending does a disservice to the complexities of some women’s lives who might find themselves embroiled in co-offending behaviour. The choices made by women under these circumstances are rarely rationally made and/or freely given again affording some space for appreciating the hugely varied ways in which ‘love matters’ (Kuennan 2014).
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Romance of a different kind presents itself in Caroline Joan S. Picart’s analysis of the allure of jihadi cool. In this chapter she explores the ways in which the rhetoric of jihadi cool exploits what might arguably be seen to be as the fragile emotional conditions of the young people drawn to it. As Picart (this volume) concludes: The rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ is strategically targeted towards disenfranchised young men and women, who seek to create a name for themselves, and who are drawn to the romantic construction of the ‘badass’ and of being countercultural, which is principally built upon an appeal to the emotions, fortified through the strategic rhetorical construction of virtual imagined communities of fantasy warriors and their brides. This rhetoric is gendered and replete with fantasies offering the young people in her five case studies a sense of emotional identity otherwise denied to them. These fantasies tap into the romance of being somebody who might matter in a world in which they as individuals are marginal and marginalised. Picart suggests that in so doing this rhetoric draws on the monstrous, and the exceptional as a way of giving meaning to and for people whose lives are ordinary and mundane. Susanne Karstedt takes as her starting point the ways in which the Holocaust has shaped common understanding of mass atrocities as a bureaucratic regime and organised machinery of mass killings. However, this ‘exceptionalist perspective’ not only reflects a tendency to obscure contemporary mass atrocities, it also inhibits nuanced understanding of the Holocaust itself. In a thought-provoking and detailed analysis drawing on empirical data from a range of different documented atrocities, she makes a convincing case for understanding the interplay between cognition and emotion in order to understand how the recourse to violence can become a less difficult choice in order to prevent it. For her, emotions are not the cause of mass violence, but they do help understand the start, persistence and recurrence of such events. However, in order to understand these processes the interactive effects of emotion and cognition need to be recognised echoing some similar observations made by Jack Katz (1999) on how emotions work more generally. Importantly this chapter transgresses the conventional divide between exceptional violence and ordinary violence as well as between cognition and emotion. Each is constituted in the other. This view carries significant implications for the emotional work of the discipline of criminology. In the second part of this collection the emotional gaze has been directed towards the criminal justice process. In a tellingly revealing contribution by Dawn Moore and her collaborator (Stephanie Hoffeler, formerly Lizon, whose experience of the criminal justice process is also the subject matter of this chapter) the reader is invited to appreciate the consequences of being a ‘wilful victim’, that is, someone who refuses to be helpless and vulnerable. Through the use of photographs of Stephanie (used with her permission) this chapter examines the tensions posed between presumed rationality,
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irrationality and truth when faced with such evidence and victim understandings of this ‘evidence’. Feeling ‘tricked’ by the shelter who took the photographs and propelled by a desire to retain ownership of them, this chapter reveals the complexity of people’s emotional real lives and the ways this complexity can be erased in the drive to produce evidence, and neatly connects with the urge to punish as discussed by Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen. For these authors the inclination to pursue punishment regardless is presented as intrinsically affective and, as in Stephanie’s case, can serve to pathologise the wilful victim. Rather like the previous chapter Carvalho and Chamberlen expose the weaknesses of rationalism especially as articulated in its taken for granted form within criminology (this is a feature of the discipline also referred to and developed by Stephen Wakeman in a later chapter). Without unpacking the emotional dimensions of punishment and the purposes it serves, simultaneously provoking both feelings of solidarity and hostility, a failure to appreciate the dynamics between such feelings results. These dynamics not confined to criminal justice. These feelings reach out, overlap with other contexts in which the expression and cry for justice occurs outwith the context of criminal justice. Understanding these kinds of interconnections and intersubjectivities is for Carvahlo and Chamerlen the first step in thinking differently about how and in what ways to deliver justice. However, the emotionally of justice must be recognised first. Lizzie Seal certainly puts this first in her discussion of the death penalty. Indeed, the use or otherwise of capital punishment provokes strong public emotional reactions in a wide range of different jurisdictions about different kinds of offences and their consequences from serial murder to blasphemy. In a detailed discussion of specific case studies, which provoked strong emotional public debate during the twentieth century, Seal points to the dilemmas such individual cases pose for criminologists in making sense of them. She concludes by suggesting that criminology, rather than simply promoting human rights arguments in the face of such strong emotions (arguments in themselves suffused with emotion), the discipline needs to excavate this politics of feeling for its radical potential as an avenue for change. The multiplicity of emotions present in prison life, a context also replete with political feelings too, is explored by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Dorte Raaby Andersen. Here emotional complexity alongside the ethical and methodological dilemmas involved in conducting research in prison is explored through the eyes of the prison researcher. In the chapter, Jacobsen and Andersen looks at many of those emotional considerations necessary for being able to explore prison settings and for understanding the many different ‘pains of imprisonment’ felt by the inmates as well as the prison guards. Part 3 of the book turned attention to the emotional engagement in doing criminology. Here Lizzie Cook shares with us her difficult encounter in witnessing the aftermath of mass violence on attending the July 2015 commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Drawing on her field notes, this chapter explores both the responsibilities and the impact of witnessing and the dilemmas it posed for her. Focusing in
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particular on moral and ethical dilemmas, Cook reveals much about the kinds of fieldwork experiences often written out of the textbooks. In witnessing the burial of 136 victims at a collective funeral attended by about 50,000 people, in a very real way Cook brings to the fore not only ethical and moral dilemmas but also the neglected centrality of the dead to the discipline of criminology. This is taken up by Rebecca Scott Bray. In this chapter we are reminded of the foundational importance of the dead and dead bodies to criminology and the ways in which the dead centre concepts such as empathy, emotion, trauma, and ethics for the discipline. For Scott Bray the dead are criminology’s sovereign subject. Importantly she asks us to think about the debt criminology owe to the dead not simply because of the higher visibility being given to events like those attended by Cook, but also because the dead open the discipline to highly emotive contexts. Yet the question remains concerning the extent to which criminology as a discipline cares for the dead. Drawing on his auto-ethnographic work, Stephen Wakeman pushes the questions raised by Cook and Scott Bray further. In his chapter, we are offered a way of doing criminology ‘with feeling’. Reflecting on his own auto-ethnographic work in which the embrace of emotionality is central, Wakeman suggests that the questions raised for this kind of work are pertinent for all criminological endeavour. In sum he suggests criminology researchers ask themselves three questions: who am I? Why do I react this way? What don’t I want to tell people about my work? In his view answering these questions will promote a criminology with feeling. In his words, this is a criminology ‘open to feeling it, rather than just doing it’. Taken together there are different messages from each of these contributions but there are commonalities too. It goes without saying that all of these contributions have been open to the ways in which different emotions have suffused the work they have been engaged with either for their participants and/or for themselves. By implication all have also been consequently concerned with both the moral and ethical questions raised when both recognising and/or ignoring the presence of emotional dynamics whether that be at the collective level (Chamberlen and Carvalho) or at the level of the personal (Cook). All of these contributions also implicitly and explicitly challenge the dominance of rationality as separate and separable from emotionality as embedded within liberal (positivist) criminology. Yet at the same time there is perhaps still more work to be done in understanding the complexity of how emotions work and to what affect (Karstedt in this collection; Katz, 1999). Nevertheless, the desire to embrace the complexity of the human world (including the world of crime) is suggestive of a new starting place in doing criminology (qua Wakeman). In the spirit of the challenge posed by Wakeman’s third question (what don’t I want to tell people about my work?) in what follows I attempt to connect such personal reflections to the bigger issues facing the contemporary discipline of criminology.
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Another beginning? Here I offer some personal reflections on the challenges and promises of working and living in both the north and the south of the globe. Neither being here nor there renders an individual distant in both contexts. As a result, connections to colleagues and the discipline can change their shape and form, sometimes leaving a vacuum, sometimes creating a space filled with intellectual excitement and occasional vision. All of which can take their toll. In the light of the increasing propensity for criminological ideas and policies, along with criminologists, to travel, quickly, this toll raises some important questions. In short this has been expressed in the demand that ‘criminologists fly economy’ (Blaustein 2017). These reflections are also offered at a time when the discipline is faced with significant intellectual challenge in the form of the emergence of what has been termed Southern criminology. So, it will be useful to unpack the context in which the demand to ‘fly economy’ has arisen a little further. It is possible to discern an increasing disquiet with the ways in which a predominantly North American version of the discipline of criminology has infiltrated the shape and form of the discipline elsewhere in the globe. This disquiet has been variously expressed by Maureen Cain (2000) as the assumption of Occidentalism, by Jock Young (2011) as the ‘bogus of positivism’, by Katja F. Aas (2012) as a problem of cosmopolitanism, by Wayne Morrison (2015) as a version of American intellectual imperialism emanating from the Cold War era, and by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) as hegemonic epistemology or as Raewyn Connell (2007) would say Northern theorising. One commonality in all of these critiques is the intrinsic problem of the liberal values embedded in this version of criminology. Indeed, in many respects all of the contributions in this collection, in centring the importance of emotions, either implicitly or explicitly ask hard questions about these values and the ways in which they frame the experience of crime and criminal justice in foregrounding rationality and downgrading emotionality. Jarrett Blaustein (2017) pointedly argues that the predominance of such values needs to be tempered by both a critical and reflexive approach to the globalising discourses they contribute to. It is also the case, of course, that Southern criminology has emerged in part as a response to the predominance of such values. Whilst the notion of a Southern criminology is quite determinedly used in a metaphorical sense (Carrington et al. 2018) it has without doubt captured the intellectual imagination of those working in the geographical South as well as those working in what might be understood as the South in the North (Currie 2018). For Blaustein (2017), the emergence of this agenda also makes a call on the travelling ‘expert’ to use what might be considered their expert knowledge without undermining the processes they encounter. He expresses it this way:
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Ethical criminological engagement abroad, especially in Southern or peripheral societies, necessitates reasonable and reflexive interactions with potential research users. (Blaustein 2017: 365) He goes on to outline the kinds of questions such an ethical criminologist might ask themselves in taking up their role as ‘expert’. For example, why am I doing this, am I merited this privileged status, am I pursuing an agenda that is of benefit to the beneficiaries, amongst others. As is evident from the discussion to follow, I was already sympathetic to the increasing criminological disquiet being expressed (see, for example, Walklate and Mythen 2015), but some of the questions raised by Blaustein (2017) also troubled me.
Living in the global North and working in the global ‘South’: A personal account The invitation to take up a time-limited fractional appointment came at a personal crossroads in my career. I had recently stepped down after a fiveyear stint as head of department followed by a year’s study leave during which I spent some time attending conferences, and doing presentations at different universities in Australia. It was a wonderful trip. On my return to Liverpool University, everything felt different. I felt different though what that comprised was not clear to me at the time. However, many of the features associated with the changing nature of higher education in the UK (some of which Blaustein (2017) has also alluded to) sat less well with me personally. The approach from Monash University was unexpected. I was flattered. It took some time for me to construct a work-related package I could manage (which included moving to a fractional contract at Liverpool University) and on the day the final deal was done I was sitting in Manchester Airport on my way to speak to a victim support conference in Stockholm. That was February 2016. Recognising the personal struggle I had gone through in making this career move, my partner suggested I keep a ‘Monash diary’. I bought this first diary at Manchester Airport and have made personally reflective notes, as well as other notes relating to my feelings about this new working environment in this diary ever since. At the time of writing I am about to start volume three. I started writing that day at the airport and my notes record: My personal uncertainties are wrapped up in more fundamental ‘structural’ ones. Tonight I am going to list them though not necessarily in order of importance. i) the nature of the project itself ii) the intra-institutional relations underpinning this project iii) the wider context of this initiative and my role in it.
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S. Walklate Questions prompted as much by a Guardian Special Report on domestic violence in Australia raising all kinds of questions for me about our/my position and our/my positioning in relation to all of this. Reading between the lines of the Guardian report there is plenty of ‘positioning’ going on and my question is where are ‘we’ in all of this. (Diary notes 21 February, 2016)
Re-reading these comments now it is worth noting the use of ‘we’ (clearly I was already identifying with my new colleagues) and my concern with ‘position’ and ‘positioning’. These are issues to be considered also commented on by Blaustein (2017). The first reference to my uncertainties on ‘being liminal’ does not appear however until later that year, 3 December, 2016 to be precise. On this day writing whilst in Australia I say: The more I ‘see’ things from a distance the more I feel alienated from what goes on at Liverpool. The ‘voices’ in the virtual air at least seem increasingly at odds with the debates going on in this part of the world both intellectually and empirically. This does not mean I feel more connected with Monash but that all in all space between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is an intellectually challenging one. I only hope I’m up to it. Clearly having grasped liminality as a way of making sense of where I am at, I write ‘further reflections on being liminal’ on 21 December, 2016. This diary entry contains as many reflections on working at Liverpool as it does on having spent some time with colleagues at Monash but perhaps most importantly it touches on the relationship between biography and intellectual engagements in a deeply personal way. For the first time I write: Much of what I am involved with now1 is very close to home and that makes me feel uncomfortable too- bringing the past into the present. However the past only matters if it defines the present surely? It can’t be rubbed out but it can equip a person with empathy and an appreciation of life’s difficulties – not for them but for all of us. In some ways this diary entry reaches back in time not only to events my personal life but also to my early engagement as a volunteer with victim support organisations in England and Wales which I have written about elsewhere. On reflection it probably took the whole of 2016 for me to recognise this relationship between biography, position and positionality which alongside the extension of my fractional appointment with Monash has resulted in a deepening of my commitment to the work I am involved with there. By 10 March, 2017, I record having read Blaustein (2017) referenced here and say to myself that the challenge he lays down for people like me needs some thinking about, as indicated above. However, by the time of my next notebook entry on the question of liminality (July 2017 written in Hong Kong airport on a
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return journey from the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy conference held and hosted by the School of Justice at QUT and the Asian Society of Criminology). I write, ‘I feel less liminal now, more connected in Australia than in the UK perhaps especially in the ideas department’. I also ask myself: ‘Is this more than the grass is always greener or is there something more open (not completely) just more open than in the UK’. I certainly learned at this conference that the politics of researching gender violence are as much of a minefield in Australia as in the UK and I certainly had some great conversations with colleagues from Liverpool who also attended this conference in Cairns. Perhaps this moment forged some connections between ‘here’ and ‘there’ since I was with colleagues from both places in time and space. Moreover, by this time the ‘southern criminology’ agenda had become something I felt both familiar with and comfortable with (maybe something to do with actually going the distance in real terms) and the work I was now involved with in the UK was beginning to offer some greater coherence to my time as a whole. Or is this just the rationalist disciplinary drivers encouraging me to make a whole out of disparate parts? My diary records on more than one occasion the disparate pushes and pulls between the two sides of the globe I am involved with alongside the times when I have felt quite isolated and lonely. More recent diary entries from November 2017 onwards are indicative of this greater coherence. At this point in time liminality is more an issue of physical location rather than one of intellectual endeavour and/or position. I know I have brought as much back to my work in the UK (probably more in fact) than I have taken a UK agenda to Australia. The material I have written with colleagues both in Australia and the UK reflects what this travelling (and other travelling) has brought to my work and how I think about the discipline of criminology. For the discipline, and for the kind of criminologist Blaustein (2017) requests to ‘fly economy’ however, ‘This implies setting aside the disciplines imperialist ambitions and the concepts and methods informing them. Setting aside implies creating space not abandonment’ (Walklate 2018: 630). It suggests a way of seeing the world glancingly, out of the corner of one’s eye, with an awareness that the most important action may take place out of frame and out of focus. (Ferrell 2016: 227) In many ways this is a terrifying prospect for us all but particularly mainstream criminology and might well have been informing some of my initial anxieties about ‘being liminal’. However, as I go on to argue: It also offers an exciting agenda for the future particularly if such ‘seeing’ encourages the discipline to loosen the shackles of positivism and its imperialist ambitions, characterised by the deep embrace of Northern
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I have been, and still am, on a deeply emotional journey. I experience many tensions about my role in an international context and what that means both ‘here’ and ‘there’. However, as discussed above, how I experience these tensions and resolve them whilst personal to me, also raise important questions for the discipline. This is particularly the case when working in a policy arena in which the speed with which policies and practices travel the globe is breath taking. Time (along with emotion) is another under-explored phenomenon of the contemporary criminal justice policy world. As criminologists, particularly those working ‘here’ and ‘there’ are uniquely if uncomfortably placed to challenge such presumptions. In working ‘here’ and ‘there’ I have learned much about the political contingencies associated with how and when policies travel, the importance of political moments, the centrality of networks in setting agendas, the power of particular voices, and most important of all the centrality of cultural context. Moreover, in none of this has the travel simply been a one-way process. Hopefully I have brought as much back to ‘here’ as I have taken to ‘there’. Building on these reflections, in the final part of this chapter I make some suggestions for the embrace of an emotional civic criminology.
Conclusion: moving towards an emotional civic criminology Some of what underpins the concerns outlined above reflect pre-occupations about the role criminology as well as criminologists in the public domain sparked by the work of Michael Burawoy (2005) and developed by Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2011). Implicit to this collection and the discussion above is the way in which once the role of emotions are recognised, the ways in which traditional distinction between facts and values embedded in much (liberal) positivist criminology becomes blurred (see also Turner 2013). Blaustein (2017) suggests that one way of assessing the impact of such blurred boundaries is to apply a test of reasonableness that is, holding oneself and others to account in respect of the intended beneficiaries of criminological work. However, it is a moot point on the extent to which this kind of position still embeds the liberal project within criminology. Pursuing a slightly different angle on this debate Maggie O’Neill and Lizzie Seal (2012), following some suggestions made by Zygmunt Bauman in a public lecture, outline a vision of a critical/cultural criminology with four focal points. These are: become familiar with the unfamiliar and be unfamiliar with the familiar; seek connections and cross disciplinary boundaries; think, listen, and see consciously implying the use of multi-sensory and innovative methods (see also Jacobsen and Walklate 2016); keep the dialogue open to challenge stereotypes and create spaces for those who would otherwise be silenced (see also Ferrell
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2017). To these four focal points, I would add two more; stay attuned to the role of the emotional whether working on policy, with marginal groups, and/or as an invited expert. As this book has illustrated, crime, criminal justice policy and the discipline of criminology are saturated with emotions. Staying attuned to the emotional life of the discipline by definition implies staying sensitive to making reflective sense of what is seen, heard, and thought about. However, in addition to this, I would also add a sixth point. This is the importance of time. If Southern criminology has emerged in part as a reaction to the space (particularly the spatial assumptions embedded in Northern theorising and its relevance in the rest of the globe), then there are also some similar issues in relation to time. This might be expressed as the dilemma of a fast or slow criminology. This dilemma has been alluded to by Nancy Wonders (2016: 202) where she states: Neoliberal forms have transformed nation-states and legal orders in the West to facilitate the production of ‘just-in-time justice’ – the increasingly flexible and fluid character of law, order, and power. Whereas her concern is with the impact that this presumption of fluidity has had on creating states of exception, in terms of my experiences outlined above, the same kind of ‘just-in-time’ justice/policy response is to be found in the mundane and ordinary. For example, the speed at which something like a Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (Clare’s Law) has travelled the globe (in the absence of any evidence as to its effectiveness) from England and Wales, to Scotland, to some states in Australia, to Canada is remarkable (see also Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon 2018). The assumption is that a fast response equates with a good response. In a different thought connected way, Patrick Savoie et al. (2017: 14) in analysing the insipid and incremental embrace of Mosquito technology to disperse gatherings of young people, suggest criminology might just want to take it a little slower. For them: Slowing down means transgressing disciplinary borders just like the technological objects that populate our world continuously do. Criminology was born at the crossroads of different disciplines (law, psychology, sociology). The material turn invites us to renew this intellectual engagement and accelerates it so as to become even more inclusive. In sum, the journey of this book is also a journey of the complexity of human life at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Much mainstream (liberal positivist) criminological work erases this complexity by erasing the emotional, spatial and time dynamics in which we all live. In the contemporary world the contraction of time and space, particularly in the presence of social media and the 24-hour digital culture, has afforded the opportunity for the emotional to come to the fore. It would seem to be an apposite moment for criminology to
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dig deep (to use Wakeman’s term) and grapple with the complex dynamic between the processes which have resulted.
Note 1 Referring to the Monash work in particular at this point in time.
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Index
Aas, Katja F. 99, 106, 208 abolition of capital punishment 113–14, 116, 123 abolitionists 107, 119, 121, 123 abuse 3, 13–17, 21, 23, 26, 33, 35, 49, 81, 84, 174, 204; physical 18; psychological 15; spiritual 15; of women 4, 13, 18, 21, 23, 35 abusers 21, 86, 89, 91, 93 activists 81–82, 161, 180 Acts and Regulations 139; Homicide Act 1957 116; Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 116 addictions 34, 196–98, 202; drug 189, 198–200; gambling 34; heroin 8, 190 adolescents 22 Adut, Ari 114–15 advocacy organisations 178–79 Aertsen, Ivo 96, 100, 104 aggression 21, 46, 68, 104–5, 140, 142; appetitive 71, 74, 76; controlled 140; sexual 20–21 Ahmed, Sara 84, 91–95 alcohol consumption 20–21 American Fascism 82 Americans 22, 45, 48–49; and children 49; and the death penalty 122 Andersen, Dorte Raaby 105, 131–49, 206 Anderson, Kjell 61, 64, 66–67, 70, 105 anger 22, 40, 63, 65, 68–69, 91, 98, 105, 110, 139, 141, 144–45, 148, 162, 190 ‘appetitive aggression’ 71, 74, 76 ‘archives of feeling’ 114, 117 arguments 8, 14, 32, 84, 93, 97, 114, 117, 188, 190, 192–93, 200–201, 206; contra 80; rights-based 125, 206; theoretical 80 assaults 13–15, 21, 85, 87–88, 156 atrocities 5, 8, 60–61, 63–76, 156, 158–62, 165, 167; crimes of 61–62,
66–67, 69–72; emotions and mass 60, 64, 73–76; events 5, 61, 64, 66–67, 69–70; large-scale 63; orchestrating and executing 63; understanding contemporary 5, 205; violent 61–62, 65–66, 69–70, 73 attitudes 21, 100–102, 104–10, 124, 136; complacent 124; enlightened 124; pervasive 17; punitive 101–2, 104–6, 108–10 Auchter, Jessica 170, 179 al-Aulaqi, Anwar 47 Australia 100, 173–74, 178–80, 209, 211, 213; and the availability of coronial findings 173, 180; colonial history of 180; and the Deaths in Custody National Monitoring Program 178; and inquests into contested deaths 172; and the Sydney Siege inquest 173–74 Australian Institute of Criminology 178, 187 Baker, David 171–73, 175 Barlow, Charlotte 4, 29–40, 204 beliefs 19, 21, 23, 188, 199; about male dominance 18; cultural 173; that men who assault or kill female intimates are pathological 13 benefit fraud 32, 34 Bentley, Derek 6, 116–22, 124–25 bereaved families 170–77, 181, 184 “Black Flag” (ISIS logo) 50 Black scholars 199 Blaustein, Jarrett 208–10, 212 Blinder, Alan 53–54 blogs 56, 174 bodies 5, 8, 16, 31–32, 52, 81, 85, 87, 91–92, 94, 162, 170–72, 179, 181, 184;
Index battered female 79, 85, 90; dead 8, 170, 182, 207; injured 80–81 Bosnia-Herzegovina 155, 158, 160, 162, 168 Bosnian Muslims 162 Bosnian Serbs 158–59, 161 Bosnian War 158, 162, 164 Bosworth, Mary 98–99, 106, 136 boundaries 114, 155, 165, 215; blurred 212; disciplinary 212; maintaining 195; society 117 Bowker, Lee H. 16, 18, 24 Bray, Rebecca Scott 169–82, 207 Brexit 104–5 Britain see United Kingdom Browning, Christopher R. 55, 60–61, 63–64, 66–69, 71 Brudholm, Thomas 62, 64, 73, 75–76 burials 7, 159–61, 163, 168, 207 Cambodian genocide 66 cameras 5, 43, 88, 92, 161, 167, 183 campaigns 121, 124–25, 158–59, 174 capital crimes 6 capital punishment 6, 105, 112–17, 119–23, 125; abolition of 113–14, 116, 123; and debates about the drive to punish 6; provokes strong public emotional reactions 206; in twentieth century Britain 116 Carvalho, Henrique 96–107, 206–7 cases 6, 34–35, 52, 55, 79, 82, 88, 113, 116–22, 125, 173–75, 179, 182, 200, 205; contemporary 121; coronial 173, 181–82; high profile 116, 121; historical 175; legal 176; mid-twentieth century 120; re-opening of 175; studies of 52, 205–6 CCTV 173–75, 181 cells 142, 145, 160, 170 Chamberlen, Anastasia 6, 96–107, 206 Child Protective Services 82–84, 93 children 5, 16–17, 36, 43, 49, 60, 69, 79, 81, 83–84, 98, 123, 174, 179; advertisements for charity 84; mixed heritage 123; as victims 17, 111; young 99, 116 ‘choice,’ preoccupation with 38–39 citizenship 103, 117 CJS see criminal justice system Clemmer, Donald R. 134–37, 139 CNN 54 co-offenders 31, 33–34; female 4, 30, 37, 40; male 31, 33–35, 37–38, 40; women 29–34, 36–40
217
co-offending 29, 35–36, 38–39; behaviour 33, 204; relationships 4, 33; and women’s pathways into crime 4 coercion 4, 30, 32, 41, 93, 136 coercive control 15, 204 coffins 161–63 cognition, and emotion 61–62, 72, 205 Collins, Randall 61–62, 65–70, 72 colonial governance 175 commercial media 157; see also media compassion 101, 147, 156, 158, 163, 165–66, 203 complicity and responsibility 155–56, 164 concentration camps 132, 145, 158 concepts 8, 96, 98, 107, 119, 122, 132, 154–55, 165, 178, 186, 197, 204, 211; of the continuum of sexual violence 14; of empathy, emotion, trauma and ethics 207; of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ 4, 43, 45; of male peer support 3, 18; of punitiveness 96–97, 99–101, 103, 105–7, 109, 111 connections 9, 47, 122, 208, 211–12; emotional 50, 85; imagined 54; intimate 48; social 50 consent 79, 81, 91 Contreras, Randol 194, 196, 201 control 4, 8, 15–20, 33–34, 38, 66, 99, 104, 109, 136, 140–41, 144, 146, 192, 197–98; of crime 102; exerting 33; illusion of 104; losing 68, 89, 119 controversies 7, 117, 119 convictions 86, 88, 123–24, 177; of Derek Bentley 6, 116–22, 124–25; of Mahmood Mattan 122–25; of Ruth Ellis 6, 13, 17, 116–22, 124–25, 156 Cook, Elizabeth 7, 154–67 coroners 170, 172–75, 178–81, 186 coronial 173, 175–76, 178, 181–82, 185; deathwork 172; findings 172–73, 175, 178–80, 182; information 173; inquest process 172, 177, 179–81; jurisdictions 172–73; recommendations 173, 179–80 Coronial Council of Victoria 175, 177 Court of Criminal Appeal 121, 123–24 CPS see Child Protective Services crimes 1, 60, 69, 125, 176, 204; of atrocity 61–62, 66–67, 69–72; control of 100; partners in 41; of passion 1, 118–20, 128, 203; understanding of 61 criminal activity 2, 29–31 Criminal Cases Review Commission 121 criminal justice 2, 9, 35, 97–102, 104, 106–7, 133, 170, 180, 203, 206, 208;
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institutions 96, 106; officials 15; policies 38, 213; practices 30–31, 35, 96, 99, 106; processes 100, 109, 205; professionals 35, 39, 203; representation of 6, 96 criminal justice organisations 36 criminal law 15, 108–9, 111 criminalisation 30, 32, 79, 81, 95, 103, 106, 111 criminals 1, 31, 81, 92, 103, 109, 111, 147, 151, 169 criminologists 2–4, 7–8, 105–6, 125, 154–55, 157–58, 165–67, 170, 172, 178–82, 188–90, 194, 206, 208, 212; ethical 209; experiencing frustrations, desires and sentiments 157; recent history of men’s offending 30; as witnesses 7, 155; as witnesses in arenas of mass violence 7 criminology 2–3, 7–9, 25, 27–30, 41, 73–75, 96–100, 111–12, 128–29, 150–57, 165–72, 182–90, 192–204, 206–8, 211–15; autoethnographic 196, 198; discipline of 3, 33, 205, 207–8, 211, 213; emotional civic 2, 9, 212; with ‘feeling’ 8–9, 188–89, 191, 193, 195, 197–99, 201; orthodox 157, 173; rationalist 6, 97; research 1–3, 9, 75, 110, 150, 154–55, 157–58, 165–66, 188–93, 195–98, 201, 215 culture 7, 21, 47, 57, 93, 109, 111, 118, 127, 134–37, 139, 144, 167–68, 184–85, 215; contemporary 101; digital 213; emotional 137; human 24, 204; masculine 140; patriarchal 3, 16; prison’s 135; and the social network 154 custodial deaths 174, 176–77, 180, 186 custody 169, 174, 178–80, 182–86; deaths in 174, 176–77, 180, 186; Indigenous prisoners in 178, 183–84, 186 Dagestan 51–53 Daily Dispatch 118–19, 181 Daily Express 116–17, 119 Daily Mail 116, 124 Daily Mirror 116–18 Danish prisons 133, 137, 146 Darfur 67, 69 databases 171, 173, 178–81, 187; digital 181; multi-layered 180; and the public scrutiny of death 178–81; searchable 178 de Menezes, Jean Charles (Inquest) 173 death justice 169–82 Death justice 182
deaths 8, 13, 18, 24, 50, 72–73, 111, 116, 122, 125, 127, 158, 161, 169–82, 184–87; accidental 175; contentious 170, 184; contested 169, 172, 175, 177, 181–82; controversial 173, 178–79, 186; and critical criminological attention to 169, 182; in custody 174, 176–77, 180, 186; Indigenous 178, 183–84, 186; politics of 170; and the public scrutiny of databases 178–81; racialised custodial 180; reporting of 178; in the workplace 177 Deaths in Custody National Monitoring Program 178 Deathscapes (website) 180–83 deathwork 170; see also coronial deathwork DeKeseredy, Walter S. 3, 13–24, 204 Dhu, Ms 174–75, 178, 184 Diamond, Jared 68 digital age 169–70, 173 digital databases 181 Director of Public Prosecutions 128 discipline 2–3, 9, 30, 83, 98–99, 139, 150, 156, 166, 169, 188, 204, 206–8, 211–13; academic 166; contemporary 207; ground-breaking 137 domestic abuse 3, 13–17, 21, 23, 26, 32–33, 35, 49, 81, 84, 174, 204 domestic violence 27, 79, 82, 84–86, 91, 94–95, 210, 215; death review of 171; and images of injury used to conjure emotions in prosecutions 5; and prosecutions 6, 79, 94; victims of 79–80, 91, 94, 199 dormitories 145, 160, 170; see also cells DPP see Director of Public Prosecutions drinking 19, 21; see also alcohol consumption drug addictions 189, 198–200 drug dealers 34–35 drugs 21, 32–35, 41, 49, 189, 193, 197–201 Durkheim, Émile 97, 102–3, 109 Dutton, Donald G. 62–63, 65, 67–70 DV see domestic violence “Eagle Eye” 49–50 education 106, 142, 157, 209 Eichmann, Adolf (trial of) 63, 65 Ellis, Ruth 6, 13, 17, 116–22, 124–25, 156 ‘emotion work’ 7, 138–39, 143, 148, 203–4 emotional 1–9, 60–68, 79–80, 84–86, 88–91, 93–94, 96–107, 113–25, 131–34, 139–50,
Index 188–90, 194–96, 198–200, 203–8, 212–13; activities 2; agendas 84; appeals 104, 123; challenges 131, 143; communities 113, 116, 120; connections 50, 85; dimensions 3–4, 14, 98, 102, 133, 206; energy 66–67, 70, 142; engagements 115, 152, 206; identification 124, 195, 198; motivations 31; regimes 113, 115, 117, 120–21, 123–25; transformation 106–7 emotional reactions 1, 4, 68, 84, 114, 120, 204, 215; highlighted by press stories 117; illicit 190; strong public 1, 122, 206 emotions 67, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137–45, 147–49, 151, 153; collective 62, 65, 106; and the complexity as to how they work 180, 207; comprehension provokes 165; and criminal justice 110, 214; dynamics of 70; embracing 188, 193, 201; and female co-offenders 4, 29–31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41; of inmates 140–41; and management programmes 140, 143; negative 64, 71, 100–101, 106–7, 139–41, 195; positive 66–67, 70–71, 106; powerful 1–2, 6, 43, 148, 206; punitive 6, 96 engagements 68, 98, 132, 181–82; critical 156; emotionless 172; real-time 174, 177; sociological criminology’s 98 environment 71, 140, 146; contemporary criminal justice 100; new working 209; non-clinical 93 ethics 8, 125, 154, 156, 191, 198, 207 ethnic cleansing 159, 161 ethnographic research 134–35 Evans, Brad 156, 164–65, 167 Evening Standard 119 everyday life 1, 131, 135–36, 139–41, 144, 149, 151; and the access in prisons 138; changing emotional experiences in prison 131; and the experience of “total institutions” 132; and the prison population 131; in a prison setting 133; and the social anatomy of prison life 135, 137 evidence 14, 18, 60, 66, 79, 83, 86–87, 91–93, 155–56, 159, 170, 173–75, 177, 206, 213; audio and visual 80; corroborative 87; criminal 88, 183; empirical 70, 100; eye witness 122; oral 66; photographic 72, 95; visual 6, 95, 215 executions 2, 63, 116–18, 121–23, 127, 158; of Derek Bentley 6, 116–22, 124–25; of Mahmood Mattan 124; of Ruth Ellis 6, 13, 17, 116–22, 124–25, 156
219
expressions 6–7, 68–70, 102, 106, 115, 121, 139, 141, 144–45, 153, 161, 163, 206; emotional 113–16, 120, 141–42, 145; facial 66; public 6, 173, 175, 181; sexual 120 extremism, and violence 47, 56 Fairfax media group 175 Falkin, Gregory 31, 33 familial intimacy of grief 165 families 7, 16, 19, 90, 93, 121, 123–24, 159, 161, 163, 171, 173, 175–76, 178, 180–82; extended 160; grieving 159; mixed 124 family life 116–17 family photographs 142 fantasies 4, 43, 205 fathers 16, 18, 54, 87, 161; biological 49–50; and the inability to sustain stable relationships 49; and sexual assaults 49 fear 4, 6, 29–30, 33–40, 62, 64–65, 68–69, 87–89, 100–101, 105–6, 139–41, 157–58, 190–91, 193–94, 200; conceptualising 36; influence of 34, 40; legitimate 17; suppressing 141, 144 ‘feeling’ criminology 8–9, 188–201 feelings 69–71, 98, 101–8, 113–14, 121, 131, 139–41, 143–45, 147, 163, 165–66, 189–94, 196–200, 203–4, 206; of fear 37, 200, 204; painful 121; punitive 102, 105–6, 108 female partners 17–20, 204 feminists 5–6, 38, 80, 134 Ferrell, Jeff 157, 189, 194, 196, 211, 213 fieldwork 8, 146, 157, 190, 192, 194–96, 207; criminological 194; dangerous 146; reflections on 7, 160 findings 8, 71, 90, 95, 137, 172–73, 177–78, 189; contemporary academic 44; coronial 172–73, 175, 178–80, 182; formal 178; official 83; unofficial 90 First Nations Deaths in Custody Watch Committee (advocacy organisation) 178 Fletcher, Luke 60–61, 64–65, 68 Forensic Architecture 181 Foucault, Michel 132, 134, 137 framework 62, 65, 97, 106, 146; conceptual 97; emotion-free 98; implicit 65; interactional 62; symbolic 99, 104 friendships 7, 142, 147–48, 201 Gadahn, Yahiye 45 Gadd, David 98–99, 192
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Index
gambling addictions 34 gaming platforms 155 Garland, David 96–98, 100–102, 105, 157 gender 6, 29–31, 48, 116; relations 18; responsive approaches 39; roles 31 genocide 5, 61–63, 66, 159 genres 92–93, 169, 181 German soldiers in prisoner of war camps 60, 69 Giroux, Henry 95, 155–56, 164–65, 167 global mass media 154 global mediasphere 173 goals 87, 90, 177, 189, 194, 196, 199 Goffman, Erving 132, 136, 138–40, 142, 145–46, 151 governance issues 114 Grand Mufti 162 gratification (standards in men) 16, 18 graves 161, 163 grief 68, 117, 124, 161, 163, 165, 176 grievances 54, 65, 155; personal 44, 49, 52, 54; private 155 groups 17, 23, 31, 44–45, 54, 60, 62, 65–71, 106, 135, 138, 145, 191, 197; community 174; dynamics of 4–5, 44, 135, 139, 150; ethnic 22; grievances of 44, 52; members 23, 66; paramilitary 69; racial 22; radical jihadi 48, 54; socioeconomic 19; solidarity 102 The Guardian 175–76, 210 Guardian Australia 178 Guardian Special Report on Domestic Violence in Australia 180, 210 guilt 29–30, 33, 37, 84, 146, 155, 165–66 ‘guilty knowledge’ 147 guilty verdicts 29, 37, 83, 123, 202 Hall-Sanchez, Amanda K. 13–14, 16 Haney, Craig 105, 122, 140 Haslam, Alexander 63, 72 hate 73, 131, 139; crime of 63; propaganda 62; and religious rhetoric 45 headlines 124, 176–77 health 74, 76, 82, 106; conditions of 195; mental 14, 31, 35–36, 51, 200; and related issues 146 heroin 34–35, 191, 197, 201–2; addiction 8, 190; use and users 191–93, 195, 197–98 heterosexual relations 136 Hillsborough Inquests 173 historians 114, 179 HO see Home Office
Holloway Prison 118 Holocaust 5, 60–64, 66–70, 72, 74–75, 205; in Eastern Europe 72n7; massacres 67; perpetrators 61 home life 117, 170 Home Office 111, 128 homelessness 36, 156 homes 19, 49–50, 61, 80, 83, 93, 98, 110, 119, 155–56, 158, 163–64, 171, 191, 210 Homicide Act 1957 116 hostility 6, 96–97, 99–101, 104–6, 108, 145, 162, 206; ethnic 63; and a sense of social solidarity 97 House of Commons, London. 116 human emotions see emotions human rights (arguments) 206 humanities 83, 95, 98–99, 101, 125, 178, 185, 189, 194 humiliation 62, 66–68, 91; practices 67; victims 66–67 humour 53, 144–45 ICMP see International Commission of Missing Persons ‘ideal victims’ 39, 79–80, 86–87 identity 6, 16, 44, 74, 91, 107, 109, 124, 136, 138, 141, 144, 195, 205; emotional 205; false 140; modern 107; perceived 35; professional 141, 144; transformations 136 ideology 4, 19, 44, 47, 58, 61, 63, 65, 104, 111, 157 images 5–6, 61, 79–81, 84–95, 102–3, 154, 156, 163–64, 168, 172, 176, 181, 183–84; fragmented 90; graphic 84; moral 104; of truth 85, 95 imprisonment 140; and accompanying trauma 140; effects of 99; and the emotional effect on people 143; pains of 134, 136, 143, 152, 206 Indigenous 178; massacres 179; and racialised custodial deaths 180; status 179 individuals 7, 44–45, 65–66, 103–4, 115, 117, 121, 125, 131, 205; bereaved 174; condemned 120; experiences at end-of-life 169; psychopathic 71; self-radicalising 44 informal social control 17 informants 134, 137, 145, 147 information 134, 147, 176, 178–79; coronial 173; demographic 136, 179; personal 144; up-to-date public 178–79
Index injuries 79, 81, 83, 85, 87–90, 94, 108, 141, 176; handling of 143; photographs of 6, 79, 85–86; prior 88 injustices 6, 8, 39, 113, 120, 122, 125, 154, 158, 166, 169, 182; familial 29; historical 124; institutional 30; massive 164; perceived 125; structural 40 inmates 7, 132, 135–48, 151, 206; friendly 138; interviewing 137; subcultures 148 inquests 170, 172–78, 181; coronial 172–74, 183; delays in holding 178; findings 175; high-profile United Kingdom 173; proceedings 176 insanity 90, 123 insecurities 6, 96, 101, 103, 112, 141, 155, 157, 165–66; feelings of 104, 106, 166; heightened social 103 Inspire Magazine (al-Qaeda) 45 institutions 93, 98, 106, 131–32, 134, 136, 138, 148, 171, 197; improving prison 135; supportive 195; ‘total’ 7, 132, 136, 138, 142, 145 insults, shouting 60, 67–68, 70 intellectuals 164–65 intelligence 48, 56, 165, 168 interdependence between emotions of domination and humiliation 68–69 International Commission of Missing Persons 159 international representatives 160–61 internet 45, 48, 50–51, 53, 58 interpersonal relationships 142 Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis 32, 42 intimate relationships 3–4, 13–24, 30–33, 35–36, 38, 204 IPA see Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ISIS 45–46, 48, 54, 58–59; deployment of social media 46; Seddique Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to 54; themed T-shirts 46 Islam 49–50 Jacobsen, Michael Hviid 1–9, 131–49, 206 Jammet, Josie 51–54 Japanese Army 67–68 jealousy 3, 13, 21–22, 119–20 Jefferson, Andrew M. 98–99, 143, 192 Jewish Holocaust 62 Jewkes, Yvonne 140, 158, 165, 177, 188–90, 194 ’Jihad Jane’ see Colleen LaRose jihadi cool/chic 4–5, 43, 45–48, 55–58, 205
221
jihadis 47–49, 51–52, 58, 205; radical 45, 47, 54; sites 51, 54; warriors 46–48 jihadization 50 jokes 141–42 Jones, Stephen 30, 32, 34, 37, 40, 45, 99, 101, 140 journalism 128, 164, 177 journalists 174–75, 177–78 judges 2, 6, 79, 87–88, 94, 97, 120 juries 6, 97, 122–23 jurisdictions 171–72, 179–80, 185, 206 justice 58, 97–98, 100–101, 104, 106–11, 120–25, 166, 169, 174, 176, 178, 184–86, 206, 211, 214–15; coronial 181; delayed 176; distributive 107; gendered and racial 174; informal 174, 181, 184; issues 6; outcomes 178, 181; restorative 100, 203, 215 justifications 97, 100; of atrocity violence 69; predominant ideological 170 Karstedt, Susanne 2, 60–72, 97–99, 106, 203–5, 207 Katz, Jack 13, 46, 205, 207 Kaufman, Emma 98, 105–6 Kavish, Daniel R. 22 Kelly, Liz 14–15, 34, 177, 182 Kennedy, Rosanne 121, 127, 177 killing games 67–68 killings 13, 52, 60–61, 65–70, 75; jihadi-style 52; mass 5, 67, 69, 205; personal vengeance 69 King, Rodney 103–4, 138 Klusemann, Stefan 60, 65, 67–68, 70 knowledge 15, 30, 40, 67, 118, 127, 135, 147–48, 157, 171–72, 188–90, 198, 201; prioritizing women’s experiential 15; public 178; victim’s 79 Kovaleski, Serge F. 53–54 Kühne, Thomas 60, 64, 75 Kurasawa, Fuyuki 155, 164, 168 labour 150, 180; affective 182; emotional 8, 203, 215 Lang, Johannes 62, 64–65, 73, 75–76 LaRose, Colleen 4, 43, 49–50, 52, 55–58 law 22, 56, 58, 74, 94–95, 97, 99, 108–11, 126–27, 168–69, 173, 175, 184–86, 213, 215; case 79; criminal 15, 108–9, 111; enforcement personnel 9; legislators enacting more draconian 101 law enforcement officers 2, 53 lawyers 84, 90, 111, 180 legal proceedings 79, 90, 94
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legislation 175 letter writers 118–20 Liebling, Alison 99, 104, 138, 142, 203 Lizon, Peter 79, 81 Lizon, Stephanie 5, 79–94, 205 Loader, Ian 2, 29, 62, 97, 170, 190, 212 logics 65, 98–99, 104, 184; emancipatory 169; punitive 99, 105; rationalist 97; symbolic 103 London bombings 173 ‘lone wolf ’ terrorists 44, 50–54 loneliness 143, 194, 200 love 4, 19, 30, 33, 37–40, 44, 52, 68, 83, 118–20, 127, 131, 148, 182, 186; romantic 120; stories 120 lovers 13, 18 Lumsden, Karen 189, 203 male co-offenders 31, 33–35, 37–38, 40 male peer support 3–4, 13–14, 16, 18, 20, 23–25, 27; groups 18; processes 23; theories 23, 25–26 male-to-female violence 14 male violence 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 Manchester Guardian 117–19 Martin, Greg 172, 175, 177 martyrdom 52 Maruna, Shadd 99, 103–5 mass atrocities see atrocities mass media 128, 154–56, 164, 167; commercial 166; criticised by Jean Baudrillard 164 mass shootings 54, 56, 61, 69–70 mass violence 7, 60–63, 67–70, 75–76, 155, 160, 182, 186, 205; aftermath of 7, 165, 206; micro-dynamics of 61; studies 62 massacres 54, 66, 68, 74, 158–60; Bosnian Muslims 162; Boston marathon bombing 4, 43, 52–53; Holocaust 5, 60–64, 66–70, 72, 74–75, 205; London bombings 173; Orlando Nightclub 54; Rape of Nanking 67–68; Rwandan genocidal 67; Srebrenica 7, 68, 70, 154–55, 158–63, 166, 168, 206 Mateen, Omar (Orlando night club killer) 4, 43, 53–55 Mateen, Seddique (Omar’s father) 54 Mattan, Mahmood 122–24; born in Somali 122; conviction of 122–25; execution of 124; trial of 123–24 Matthews, Roger 23, 100, 177 McCauley, Clarke 4, 43–45, 52, 54
mechanisms 44, 52, 61–62, 65, 71, 181; coping 103; defensive 140; digital 172; outline group 52 media 6, 8, 13, 91, 96–97, 101, 110–11, 127, 151, 156, 167–68, 173, 175, 181, 183–85; audio-visual 172; coverage 175–76; exposure 174; global 163; representations and representatives 156, 161, 182 mediascape 171, 181 memorialisations 7, 155, 158–61, 165–66, 206 memories 61, 128, 159, 165, 167, 184, 190; changing 86; collective 120, 122, 124–25; public 156, 165 memory cards 92 mental disorders 14 mental health 14, 31, 35–36, 51, 200 mental hospitals 132, 136 Meštrovic´, Stjepan G. 156, 158 migration 106, 169 Milgram, Stanley 63 Miloševic´, Slobodan 162 miscarriages of justice 123–24 misrepresentations 88, 146 models 63, 65, 127, 196; aggressive policing 86; prioritised rational choice 97; uncontestable 63 Moore, Dawn 5, 79–94, 205 moral responsibility 154, 156, 168 Morrison, Wayne 157, 208 Moskalenko, Sophia 4, 43–45, 52, 54 mothers 16–18, 48, 54, 81, 116, 119, 121, 168, 176 motivations 29–33, 37, 39, 60, 65, 69, 141, 179, 188, 194, 196, 200, 204; emotional 31; offending 29–33, 36–38; powerful 69; women’s 4 mourning 159, 161, 163, 165, 168, 170 Mullins, Christopher W. 22, 31 murder 1, 29, 31, 52, 116, 119, 122–24, 126–27, 171, 181; deliberate 18; of Holly Wells 29, 37; mass 13, 61; serial 206; unsolved 175; victims 87 Murder Abolition of the Death Penalty Act 1965 116 Nanking see Rape of Nanking neoliberalism 101, 105 New Jersey Prison (high-security) 136 New York Times 47, 54 news media 29, 114–15 news stories 27, 117, 120, 122, 124
Index newspapers 7, 13, 116–18, 120, 123, 158; Daily Dispatch 118–19, 181; Daily Express 116–17, 119; Daily Mail 116, 124; Daily Mirror 116–18; Evening Standard 119, 127; The Guardian 175–76, 210; Guardian Australia 178; Manchester Guardian 117–19, 127; New York Times 47, 54 Nielsen, Malene Molding 137–38, 143, 145 Nolan, James 13–14, 25 non-violence 61–62, 65, 70, 72 Norwegian prisons 147 offenders 6, 17, 22, 30, 35, 97, 100–101, 103, 106, 203; eliciting compassion and sympathy 203; female 4, 31, 38, 41; individual 62 offending 4, 29–40, 111, 146, 204; activities 30, 34, 39; behaviour 4, 29–30, 32–33, 37–40; choices 33, 36, 38–39; women 38 officers, law enforcement 2, 53 Olusanya, Olaoluwa 62, 65 O’Neill, Maggie 125, 212 online 25, 51, 54, 180; female victimization 23; flirting 48; forums 174; posts 48, 51; presence 173; searchable database 178 organisations 139; advocacy 178–79; complex 136; criminal justice 36; formal 62; interior 149; non-government 174; victim support 210 Orlando Nightclub Massacre 54 ‘over-identification’ 194–95, 200 overcrowded prison dormitories 142 paramilitaries 60 paranoid schizophrenia 50–51 parental rights 82 parents 18, 51–52, 118 partners 17, 19–20, 33–34, 37, 40–41, 209; intimate 33; male co-offenders 33 passion crimes 1, 118–20, 128, 203 pathways 4, 32–33, 39, 44, 47, 52, 55, 58; into crime 4; and offending motivations 33; women’s 38 patriarchal authorities 4, 19–22, 37 peer groups 20–21, 204; male 18, 23; sexist 23; support programs 15 peers 3–4, 18, 20–23, 204 penitentiary systems 135, 137 perpetrators 1–2, 9, 14, 16, 34, 60–70, 72, 74–76, 199; accounts of 61; individual 65; interviews 66; psychology 63–64 personal grievances 44, 49, 52, 54
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perspective 6, 23, 31, 63, 65–66, 70, 72, 98, 100, 109, 111, 117, 138, 198, 204; gender-sensitive research 134; practical-technical 135; state-centred 64 photographs 5, 79–80, 82, 85, 87–94, 161, 180, 205–6, 212; colour 81, 83; damning 89; large 117 photography 95, 155, 158, 164 physical abuse 18 Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. 4–5, 43–55, 204–5 podcasts 54, 171, 174–78, 182 Poland 69–70 police 35, 56, 70, 79, 86–88, 90, 93, 95, 98, 123, 172, 175, 182; interviewing 175; observations made by 88; officers 87–88, 116, 174; victims evading 88 Police Battalion 101 60–61, 69–70 policing 35, 62, 86, 172, 184, 199 policy 8, 32, 40, 64, 81, 92, 101, 105, 110, 125, 151, 159, 169, 208, 212–14; analyses 171; and law 81, 110; mandatory charges in 86; penal 100, 104, 133; public 99; reform 173; responses 203 political rhetoric 99–100, 158 politics 97, 104, 110, 116, 118, 126, 156, 183, 211; of feeling 113, 121, 123, 125, 128, 206; of pity 86 popular culture 6, 96, 133 population 31, 65, 116, 149, 193, 196; adolescent 22; civilian 60; educated 164; general 122; global prison 131; migrant 99; white 125 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 70–71 ‘postemotional times’ 9 Potocˇ ari (village) 159–60 poverty 34 power 15, 35, 47, 80, 92, 119, 140, 180, 212–13 power relations 125, 136, 165–66 practices 21, 23, 35, 39, 67, 97–99, 104, 106, 114, 151, 170–74, 176–80, 193, 212; coronial 170, 172–73, 180; cultural-structural 98; death investigation 176; policing 171; unethical research 195 Pratt, John 96, 99, 101–2 prayers 159, 161–62 press accounts 117–18; see also media pride 64–65, 91–92 prison culture 136, 146 prison development 134 prison ethnography 131, 133–34, 145 prison experiences 36
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prison guards 7, 131, 134, 138, 140–45, 206 prison life 7, 101, 131–35, 137–39, 141–43, 145–51, 153, 206 prison research 7, 132–35, 137, 140, 145–49, 151–52; contemporary 132, 135; criminological 134; ethnographic 134, 137 prison researchers 7, 134, 142–43, 147–48, 206; current 137; oriented 138; pains of the 143 prison sentences 29, 33, 36, 45, 134 prison settings 7, 131, 133, 206 prison staff 136–37, 140 prison studies 140, 145 prison walls 131, 135, 139 prisoners 36, 60, 69, 131, 134–35, 137, 142, 144, 146, 148–49, 151, 203; concentration camp 136; female 135; life-sentence 142 prisonization processes 134–36, 149, 151 prisons 7, 33, 35–36, 49, 55, 101, 108, 111, 131–53, 171–72, 179, 197, 199; dilapidated 133; emotional 118, 127; maximum security 149; modern pantopic 134; open 149; research on 132, 189, 206, 214; role of 134 ‘prisons of poverty’ (Wacquant) 134, 153 private grievances 155 privilege 31, 80, 88, 164, 170, 180, 182, 209 pro-abuse subcultures (all-male) 23 processes 62, 65, 67, 70–72, 74, 82, 84, 99–100, 102–3, 105–7, 135–36, 138, 171, 188, 198–99; criminal 86; decision-making 38, 198; emotional 8, 190; fact-finding 5; inquest 177; legal 85; medico-legal 176; psychological 64; recruitment 64 prosecutions 5, 61, 79–80, 86, 89, 91, 95, 122–23, 215 prosecutors 49, 64, 83, 86–87, 89 psychiatric issues 49, 51, 132 psychological abuse 15 psychologists 44, 105, 131 psychology 30, 42, 63, 75, 104, 111, 139, 150, 213 Ptacek, James 13–15 PTSD see Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder public housing 19–20, 27; estates 18; residents 19 public life 31, 113–14, 155 pubs 20–21, 116
punishment 3, 5–7, 96–99, 101–7, 120–21, 125, 132, 204, 206; corporal 105; defining features of 107; dimensions of 6, 97; emotional features of 5–6, 77, 96–97, 99, 101–7, 109, 111, 206; framework of 6, 97; harshness of 105; mandatory 116; and social solidarity 97–99, 102–3, 107, 109; sociology of 100; symbolism of 102–3 punitive attitudes 101–2, 104–6, 108–10 al-Qaeda 45–46, 54; see also ISIS Quinney, Richard 155, 165 race 7, 18, 22, 35, 125; and custodial deaths 180; and ethnicity 20, 22, 104; and gender 31; inequalities of 31, 35; and links with attitudes 105; and links with punishment 105; and nationality 125; and religion 18, 104 racism 123–25 radical actions 4, 43–44, 51–52, 54 radicalisation 43–45, 48, 50–54, 58–59 Rape of Nanking 67–68 rapists 14, 141, 143 “rational addiction” 198, 201 RCIADIC see Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody relational subjects thinking through critical death events 181 relationships 3–4, 17–18, 29, 31–34, 36–39, 41, 50–51, 81–82, 95–96, 137–39, 147–48, 152, 171, 176, 210; abusive 30, 33–34, 36, 39–40; causal 157; cohabiting 23; emotional 13, 94, 142; family 37, 124; interpersonal 142; interracial 124; romantic 33, 147; sexual 120; social 17; stable 49, 51, 53; trust-based 141; violent 4, 32–33, 40, 204 relatives 1, 16, 113, 116, 118, 132, 161, 163, 214 Renzetti, Claire M. 21 ‘representational dilemmas’ (Contreras) 194 representations 101, 106, 115, 155–56, 164, 166, 181, 196; excess 146; media 156, 161, 182; sympathetic 121; visual 154–55, 166 reprieve (applications for) 117–20, 122 research 2, 7–8, 22, 37, 64, 79, 98, 112, 146–48, 157, 165–67, 171, 177, 188–202, 214; academic 176–77; current 44; empirical 99, 137;
Index ethnographic 132, 152, 191; and feminist pathways 29; international 18, 100; quantitative 157; social 139, 143, 165; socio-legal 6, 96; sociological 25, 139 researchers 7, 15, 23, 107, 132–34, 137–38, 142–43, 145–49, 158, 166, 171, 180, 189–97, 200; detached social scientific 194; emotive 158; ethnographic 145–46, 148; experiences of 190; reflecting critically upon emotional factors at play 199; willing 199–200 resistance 82, 86, 93–94, 137, 171, 181; symbolic 161; victims displaying resilience 88 responses 4, 21, 24, 44, 96, 154, 158, 164, 174, 178, 182, 184–85, 190, 203, 208; coping with 3, 16; distressed 70; emotive 195, 199; formal 172; punitive 36; scripted 84 responsibility 7, 20, 99–100, 154, 156, 158–59, 161, 163, 165–66, 169, 176–77, 195–96, 206; in the aftermath of violence 154–67; caregiving 37; moral 154, 156, 168; personal 196 revenge 44, 60, 62, 68–70, 185; and emotions 60; mechanisms 68–71; personal 69; and vengeance 62, 68 Rhodes, Lorna A. 134–35 Richie, Beth E. 30–31, 33 rights-based arguments 125, 206 risk factors 13, 16, 30, 32, 36, 39–40, 44, 52, 54, 92, 146, 148, 158, 196 Rowlands, Ted 123 Rwanda massacre 60, 66–70, 72–74 sadness 87, 139, 180, 182 Sageman, Marc 44–45 Sanger, Carol 85, 94 Sarajevo 160 Schechter, Susan 16 schizophrenia 50–51 scholars 9, 14, 22, 31, 101, 105, 107, 134, 148, 164, 167, 171, 182; intersectional 80; socio-legal 172; sociologically oriented 97 scholarships 6, 97, 99, 106–7, 189 schools 24, 98, 131–32, 145, 150, 159, 211 Schwartz, Martin D. 3, 13–25, 27 Scraton, Phil 171–72, 177 scrutiny 170, 173–74, 181; mandatory inquest 179; mediated 171; public 172, 175, 178 Seal, Lizzie 6, 113–26, 206, 212, 215
225
Second World War 116, 120, 160 self-discipline 118, 120 self-expression 118, 120 sentencing 1, 49, 100 ‘sentimentality’ 119–20 sentiments 33, 125, 155, 157; anti-state 182; punitive 6, 99, 101, 114, 125 Serbia 162 Serbian Radical Party 162 sexual abuse 21, 23, 25, 27, 49–50 sexual aggression 20–21 sexual assault 13–14, 21–22, 24–25, 27, 49, 68 sexual victimization 29 sexual violence 14, 26, 185 Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera 171, 181 shame 7, 30, 70, 85, 87, 91–92, 100, 158, 200, 203 shelters 81–84, 91, 93, 206; photographs 92; staff 14; women’s 81, 92; workers 79, 81, 83, 89, 92–93 Simon, Jeffrey D. 50, 53–54 Singh, Rashmee 79–80, 86, 94–95, 203, 215 social control 17, 26, 41, 98, 109, 125, 183; informal 17 social fragmentation 102–3 social groups 20, 98 social media 8, 46, 48, 173–75, 177, 181, 184–85, 213 social sciences 64, 99, 139, 190–91, 203 social scientists 15, 18, 132 social solidarity 6, 97, 102–3, 115 social systems 136–37 society 6, 33, 36–38, 49, 89, 97–98, 102, 107, 124, 132, 134, 146–47, 154–55, 171, 173; civil 115; contemporary 6, 97, 102–3; patriarchal 16, 20–21; settler colonial 171, 180 sociological 6, 96, 101; imagination 27, 149, 152; narratives 98; studies 135 sociology 2–3, 98, 102, 133, 139, 201, 213; of emotions 2, 29, 150; of punishment 100 solidarity 20, 68, 96–97, 102–5, 114, 122, 125, 136–37, 145, 206; emotional 104; hostile 105–6, 108; rituals 66–67; rituals among group members 66–67 Sontag, Susan 84–85, 154, 164 sovereign subjects 8, 169, 207 Soviet labour camps 143 Spaaij, Ramon 51 Sparks, Richard 103, 147, 157, 190, 194, 212
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‘spectatorship of suffering’ 156 spiritual abuse 15 Srebrenica massacre 7, 68, 70, 154–55, 158–63, 166, 168, 206 Srebrenica-Potocˇ ari Memorial and Cemetery 155, 158–60, 165–66 Stanford Prison Experiment 63, 72, 74 state organisations 61 state violence 84, 174, 181 Stephanie (victim) 6, 79–85, 87–94, 205–6 stories 1, 53, 80–81, 83, 85, 87–88, 113, 117, 120, 124, 178–80, 182; exchanging 60, 70; human interest 116; real-life 94, 132 Strang, Heather 2, 62, 97, 203 stress 3–4, 14, 16, 18–20, 22, 66, 139–40, 143, 148, 176, 193; and intimate relationships 4, 204; and male peer support 13–24; psychological 16; relief 145; stemming from threats to patriarchal authority 22 students 14, 21, 188 subculture 18, 195; all-male 18; of extreme drinking, drug use and bad behaviour at the party school 21; jihadi girl power 48; members 18 subjects 48, 91–92, 99–100, 103, 121–22, 141, 165, 170, 174, 178, 181, 190, 195–200; anxious 103–4; docile 80; relational (thinking through critical death events) 181 substance abuse 88 support 3, 8, 37, 39, 58, 67, 70, 104–5, 111, 169, 175, 178, 184, 191, 204; minimal economic 36; peer 3, 21; social 3, 24; welfare 99 Sydney Siege inquest 173 Sykes, Gresham M. 104, 112, 134, 136, 139–40 Syria 46–48 technologies 155–56 tensions 66, 82, 158, 176–77, 191, 196, 205, 212; confrontational 62, 65–66, 68, 70; and fear 62, 65–66, 68, 70; of prison life 133 terrorism 2, 45 terrorists 4, 44; lone wolf 44, 50–54; self-radicalising 43–55 threats 3, 14, 16–17, 20, 48, 79, 87, 103–4, 115, 141, 143–44, 147; male 17; perceived 22; persistent 15; potential 7 Tomlinson, Ian 173–74 trauma 8, 39, 71, 83, 85–86, 89, 118, 121, 207
‘trauma bonds’ 86, 94 Tsarnaev Brothers (Boston marathon bombers) 4, 43, 52–53 Ugelvik, Thomas 135, 137–38 UK see United Kingdom uncertainties 96, 107, 163, 165, 167, 210; economic 105; personal 209; relative 105 understanding violence 65 United Kingdom 32, 100, 102, 104, 114, 116, 122, 124, 172–73, 178, 180, 188, 190, 209, 211; capital punishment in the 125; and the criminal justice system 100; twentieth century culture 6, 113–16, 125 universities 99, 209 UQ National Deaths in Custody Project 179–80 values 19, 102, 115, 138–41, 143–44 vengeance 62, 68–69, 72, 106, 119, 203; and killings 69; and revenge 68 verdicts 29, 37, 83, 123 Vicky (victim) 34–37 victim support conferences and organisations 209–10 victimization 7, 16, 30, 32, 35–37, 39–40, 80; childhood 35; female 23; sexual 29 victims 1–2, 6–7, 62, 66–67, 69, 71–72, 79–83, 85–91, 93–95, 100, 111–13, 159–61, 181–82, 199, 203; abused 49; dead 119; good 86–87; helpless 80, 86; hurting 87; living 86; traumatized 86; unarmed 67; vulnerable 86–88, 94; white 105 violence 3–4, 13–18, 20, 24–27, 33, 38–39, 41–42, 60–75, 81–82, 140–43, 156, 164–67, 171, 185–86, 214–15; aftermath of 154, 163, 165–66; against women 14–15; atrocious 61–63, 66–69, 72; criminal 175; executing 65; extreme 60, 63, 65–67, 70, 73; gender-based 82, 211; involving witnesses 15; lethal 155, 157, 166, 182; nonlethal 14, 17; perpetration of 71, 74–76; unaccountable 175; understanding 65; see also mass-violence violent atrocities 61–62, 65–66, 69–70, 73 violent extremism 47, 56 violent relationships 4, 32–33, 204 Volpert, Lily 122–23 voyeurism 156 Vucˇ ic´, Aleksandar 162
Index Wagner, Sarah 159, 161–62 Wakeman, Stephen 8, 188–201, 206–7 Walklate, Sandra 1–9, 86, 94, 100, 203–14 websites 45, 173–74, 179, 187 Weierstall, Roland 60, 70–71 Wells, Holly 29, 37 Western audiences 45, 47 Western Australian State Coroner 174 Wills, Thomas A. 3, 16 witness accounts 86 wives 16–18, 20–22, 53, 123; abuse and beating of 4, 27; terrorized by husbands 17–18 women 3–4, 13–21, 29–40, 48–50, 55, 69, 72, 89, 92–93, 116, 119–20, 122, 158,
227
163, 204–5; abused 94; co-offenders 29–34, 36–40; marginalised 35, 39; offenders 30–32, 40; pregnant 88; rural 17; sabotaging 20; undergraduate student 14; urban 20; victimizing 13, 23; vulnerable 83 Wonders, Nancy 213 work 3–4, 20–21, 30, 32, 79–80, 107, 134, 137–38, 141, 143, 188, 190–91, 193–200, 207, 210–12; autoethnographic 195, 207; documentary 155; emotional 144, 205; ethnographic 133; sociological 14; theoretical 23 workplace 98, 139, 142 Yardley, Elizabeth 177, 182