There is growing acknowledgement that torture is too narrowly defined in law, and that psychological and/or sexualised violence against women is not adequately recognized as torture. Clearly conceptualising torturous violence, this book offers scholars and practitioners critical reflections on how torture is defined and the implications that narrow definitions may have on survivors. Drawing on over a decade of research and interviews with psychologists, practitioners and women seeking asylum, it sets out the implications of the social silencing of torture, and torturous violence specifically. It invites us to consider alternative ways to understand and address the impacts of physical, sexualized and psychological abuses.
There is growing acknowledgement that torture is too narrowly defined in law, and that psychological and/or sexualised violence against women is not adequately recognized as torture. Clearly conceptualising torturous violence, this book offers scholars and practitioners critical reflections on how torture is defined and the implications that narrow definitions may have on survivors. Drawing on over a decade of research and interviews with psychologists, practitioners and women seeking asylum, it sets out the implications of the social silencing of torture, and torturous violence specifically. It invites us to consider alternative ways to understand and address the impacts of physical, sexualized and psychological abuses.
This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of debate related to social harm in and around criminology. From climate catastrophe and a focus on environmental harms, unprecedented deaths generating focus on border harms and the coronavirus pandemic revealing the horror of mass and arguably avoidable deaths across the globe, critical studies in social harm appear ever more pressing. Drawing on a range of international case studies of cultural, emotional, physical and economic harms, From Social Harm to Zemiology locates the study of social harm in an accessible fashion. In doing so it sets out how a zemiological lens can moves us beyond many of the problematic legacies of criminology. This book rejects criminologies which have disproportionately served to regulate intersectional groups, and which have arguably inflicted as much or more harm by bolstering the very ideologies of control in offering minor reforms that inadvertently expand and strengthen states and corporations. It does this by sketching out the contours, objects, methods and ontologies of a disciplinary framework which rejects commonplace assumptions of ‘value freedom’. From Social Harm to Zemiology advocates social change in accordance with groups who are most disenfranchised, and thus often most socially harmed. An accessible and compelling read, this book is essential reading for all zemiologists, critical criminologists, and those engaged with criminological and social theory.
Winner of the 2018 British Society of Criminology Book Prize Britain is often heralded as a country in which the rights and welfare of survivors of conflict and persecution are well embedded, and where the standard of living conditions for those seeking asylum is relatively high. Drawing on a decade of activism and research in the North West of England, this book contends that, on the contrary, conditions are often structurally violent. For survivors of gendered violence, harm inflicted throughout the process of seeking asylum can be intersectional and compound the impacts of previous experiences of violent continuums. The everyday threat of detention and deportation; poor housing and inadequate welfare access; and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo which limits women’s personal autonomy and access to basic human rights. By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of policy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution. Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration policy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum.
Foreword: Feminism's assumptions upended / Barbara Ehrenreich -- Introduction / Tara McKelvey -- Abu Ghraib : it's like an S & M club, only it's real / Eve Ensler -- Sexual coercion, prisons, and female responses / Angela Davis -- Why did Jennifer Scala bring cunt into the courtroom? / Ada Calhoun -- Split screens / Karen J. Greenberg -- The women of Abu Ghraib / Francine D'Amico -- The misogynist undercurrents of Abu Ghraib / Lucinda Marshall -- Shock and awe : Abu Ghraib, women military police, and racially gendered torture / Ilene Feinman -- Gender and sexual violence in the military / Jumana Musa -- Women soldiers and interrogational abuses in the war on terror / Steven H. Miles -- The "mean girls" of Abu Ghraib / Erin Solaro -- Guarding women : Abu Ghraib and military sexual culture / Elizabeth L. Hillman -- "Beautiful souls" : the role of women in war / Aziz Huq -- Photography/pornography/torture : the politics of seeing Abu Ghraib / Laura Frost -- Gender trouble at Abu Ghraib? / Timothy Kaufman-Osborn -- Is that the pose of a liberated woman? / Elizabeth Maddock Dillon -- Feminism as imperialism / Katharine Viner -- The "sex interrogators" of Guantanamo / Kristine A. Huskey -- Women in the interrogation room / Riva Khoshaba -- Women's role in mob violence : lynchings and Abu Ghraib / LaNitra Walker -- George W. Bush and the war on women / Barbara Finlay -- Lynndie England in love / Janis Karpinski -- The military made me do it : double standards and psychic injuries at Abu Ghraib / Lila Rajiva -- Afterword / Cynthia Enloe.
This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’, the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered.
The prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment has a special status. It is the foremost international human rights norm protecting persons from attacks on their dignity and integrity. Consequently, it has been at the forefront of a series of developments in international human rights law and international law more broadly. Having withstood sustained challenges to its absolute nature in the 'war on terror', it has broadened its scope of application, becoming more sophisticated and complex in the process. The prohibition of torture increasingly interacts with other fields of human rights law, such as non-discrimination law, international criminal law, international humanitarian law, and international migration law. The Transformation of the Prohibition of Torture in International Law analyses the nature and significance of this transformation and looks into the scope of the prohibition's further evolution. Empirical scholarship, innovative human rights body practice, and challenges from activists, particularly from the Global South, have focused on the relational nature of torture and other ill-treatment, its embeddedness in wider structures of power, and the role of international law in legitimizing-if not facilitating-widespread suffering, from mass incarceration to poverty and climate change. This analysis reveals an inherent tension in the prohibition between a conventional, narrow focus on direct State violence and a wide lens encompassing myriad forms of suffering. To retain its validity and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, argues Lutz Oette, the prohibition on torture must navigate this tension and successfully address and transform abusive power asymmetries.
Winner of the 2018 British Society of Criminology Book Prize Britain is often heralded as a country in which the rights and welfare of survivors of conflict and persecution are well embedded, and where the standard of living conditions for those seeking asylum is relatively high. Drawing on a decade of activism and research in the North West of England, this book contends that, on the contrary, conditions are often structurally violent. For survivors of gendered violence, harm inflicted throughout the process of seeking asylum can be intersectional and compound the impacts of previous experiences of violent continuums. The everyday threat of detention and deportation; poor housing and inadequate welfare access; and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo which limits women’s personal autonomy and access to basic human rights. By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of policy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution. Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration policy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum.
Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights contributes to the development of that field of study called ‘psycho-social’ that is presently more and more committed to providing understanding of social phenomena, making use of the explicative perspective of psychoanalysis. The book seeks to develop a concise and integrated framework of understanding of torture as a socio-political phenomenon based on psychoanalytic thinking, through which different dimensions of the subject of study become more comprehensible. Monica Luci argues that torture performs a covert emotional function in society. In order to identify what this function might be, a profile of ‘torturous societies’ and the main psychological dynamics of social actors involved – torturers, victims, and bystanders – are drawn from literature. Accordingly, a wide-ranging description of the phenomenology of torture is provided, detecting an inclusive and recurring pattern of key elements. Relying on psychoanalytic concepts derived from different theoretical traditions, including British object relations theories, American relational psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, the study provides an advanced line of conceptual research, shaping a model, whose aim is tograsp the deep meaning of key intrapsychic, interpersonal and group dynamics involved in torture. Once a sufficiently coherent understanding has been reached, Luci proposes using it as a groundwork tool in the human rights field to re-think the best strategies of prevention and recovery from post-torture psychological and social suffering. The book initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and human rights, showing that the proposed psychoanalytic understanding is a viable conceptualisation for expanding thinking of crucial issues regarding torture, which might be relevant to human rights and legal doctrine, such as the responsibility of perpetrators, the reparation of victims and the question of ‘truth’. Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights is the first book to build a psychoanalytic theory of torture from which psychological, social and legal reflections, as well as practical aspects of treatment, can be mutually derived and understood. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and Jungians, as well as scholars of politics, social work and justice, and human rights and postgraduate students studying across these fields.
This book challenges the given dichotomies between crime and harm, and criminology and zemiology. The main aim of the volume is to highlight the inexorable interconnectedness between systemically induced social harm and the corrosive flows of everyday crime both perpetrated and endured by those victimised by the capitalist system and its hegemonic vicissitudes. Drawing attention not only to various structurally imbedded harms, the chapters also outline the wider consequences of such harms, as they extend beyond immediate victims and contribute towards the further perpetuation of criminogenic and zemiogenic conditions. Comprising two parts, the first explores the relationship between crime and harm and criminology and zemiology, and the second explores the intersections of crime and harm through various lenses, including those trained on probation; global mobility; sexuality and gender; war and gendered violence; fashion counterfeiting; and the harms of the service economy. An exciting and wide-reaching volume written by world-renowned scholars, this collection is a must-read for students, academics, and policy makers in the fields of law, criminology, sociology, social policy, criminal justice, and social justice.
