Carolyn Hoyle

Labelling the Victims of Sex Trafficking: Exploring the Borderland between Rhetoric and Reality

In this article we discuss findings from a small scoping study into the experiences of victims of trafficking and those who work with them. We use testimonies from our interviews to examine issues of choice, slavery and escape. We challenge some of the current language and terminology in the literature on trafficking and call for a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between agency and victimization.

Exploring the Everyday World of Hate Victimization Through Community Mediation

For some time, hate crimes were conceptualized as acts of hatred committed by strangers – typically as violent attacks against people perceived to be different from the attacker. Considering hate as an aggravating feature resulted in increasingly punitive and exclusionary criminal justice and sentencing legislation. Left out of this picture were the messier, sometimes intractable disputes between people known to one another – neighbours, colleagues or other acquaintances – conflicts sometimes only partly motivated by prejudice. This article brings these under-researched conflicts to centre stage. Drawing on a study of community mediation in cases of ‘hate conflicts’, we explore the effects of prolonged processes of hate-motivated abuse on those involved – the main parties and often the wider community. We provide evidence of two distinct ‘types’ of hate crime cases. The first looks at the persistent targeted abuse of vulnerable victims, while the second is characterized by multi-layered conflicts involving numerous disputants. In these latter cases, we argue, it is not always helpful, and sometimes not even possible, to label one party the ‘perpetrator’ and one the ‘victim’. Indeed, we show that at times during long-term disputes, these roles are reversed and at other times they become meaningless. In both ‘types’ of hate conflict we explore the potential of community mediation to repair broken relationships and the harms caused by acts of hatred.

Informal resolution of complaints against the police: A quasi-experimental test of restorative justice

In many jurisdictions it is increasingly recognized that police complaints systems should contain a mixture of formal and less formal procedures, as well as allow for a variety of outcomes including remedial and punitive ones. Recent changes to the system for handling complaints against the police in England and Wales envisage an expanded role for local (informal) resolution, with a new range of options including restorative justice conferences. Yet little is known about whether complainants would welcome the option of a restorative justice conference or whether restorative processes would constitute an improvement on conventional practices. This article presents the results of a Nuffield Foundation funded study of these issues carried out in 2002-3 in two police force areas. The findings suggest that restorative processes can achieve moderately better results than conventional processes. While widespread implementation of this new approach is likely to prove problematic for many police services, a flexible approach to introducing changes, drawing on the experience of restorative practitioners in related areas, is likely to benefit complainants without creating dissatisfaction among police officers.

Researching Trafficked Women: On Institutional Resistance and the Limits to Feminist Reflexivity

This article exposes methodological barriers we encountered in a small research project on women trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and our attempts, drawing on feminist and emergent methods, to resolve them. It critically assesses the role of institutional gatekeepers and the practical challenges faced in obtaining data directly from trafficking victims. Such difficulties, it suggests, spring at least in part from lingering disagreements within the feminist academic, legal, and advocacy communities regarding the nature, extent, and definition of trafficking. They also reveal concerns from policy makers and practitioners over the relevance and utility of academic research. Although feminist researchers have focused on building trust with vulnerable research participants, there has been far less discussion about how to persuade institutional elites to cooperate. Our experiences in this project, we suggest, reveal limitations in the emphasis on reflexivity in feminist methods, and point to the need for more strategic engagement with policy makers about the utility of academic research in general.

Looking Back to the Future: Threats to the Success of Restorative Justice in the United Kingdom

Abstract Recent years have witnessed an entrenchment of restorative justice principles and practices in the youth and adult criminal justice systems of the United Kingdom. This research presents a comparative analysis of the findings of two empirical studies—one of a police restorative cautioning scheme conducted 15 years ago, and the second a contemporary study of youth offender panels. In this research, we argue that restorative justice practices in the United Kingdom are repeating history, rather than learning from it. Specifically, we argue that if restorative justice programs continue to proliferate with the same shortcomings—most notably, inadequate victim involvement, failure to provide a genuine role for the community, and targeting only relatively low-level crime—the future for restorative justice in the United Kingdom is likely to be bleak.

Healing harms and engendering tolerance: the promise of restorative justice for hate crime

Hate crime scholars have spent the best part of twenty years investigating the prevalence of hate crime, its aetiological determinants, the harms it causes, and how - within a democratic and diverse society – it could be diminished or eradicated (Herek & Berrill 1992; McDevitt & Levin 1993; Jacobs & Potter 1998; Lawrence 1999; Perry 2001; Iganksi 2008). Yet within the ‘hate debate’ there has been little attention paid to the potential efficacy of restorative justice. This chapter explores whether restorative justice practices (henceforth RJ) might have the potential to help to repair the harms caused by acts of hatred. It draws upon theoretical and empirical research on both hate crime and RJ and proffers some tentative observations from the early stage of a three-year empirical study into RJ and hate crime being carried out by the first author.

Abolishing the Death Penalty Worldwide: The Impact of a “New Dynamic”

The number of countries to abolish capital punishment has increased remarkably since the end of 1988. A “new dynamic” has emerged that recognizes capital punishment as a denial of the universal human rights to life and to freedom from tortuous, cruel, and inhuman punishment, and international human rights treaties and institutions that embody the abolition of capital punishment as a universal goal have developed. We pay attention to the political forces important in generating the new dynamic: the emergence of countries from totalitarian and colonial repression, the development of democratic constitutions, and the emergence of European political institutions wedded to the spread of human rights. Where abolition has not been formally achieved in law, we discuss the extent to which capital punishment has been bridled and by what means. Finally, we examine the prospects for further reduction and final abolition in those countries that hang on to the death penalty. More and more of these countries are accepting that capital punishment must be used sparingly, judiciously, and with every safeguard necessary to protect the accused from abuse and wrongful conviction. From there, it is not a long step to the final elimination of the death penalty worldwide.

Family Justice Centres: A Model for Empowerment?

The London Borough of Croydon, in the south of England, established, in December 2005, a Family Justice Centre (FJC) to respond in a flexible way to meet the varied needs of those abused in intimate relationships. The FJC brings together some 33 agencies under one roof. This article draws on a small, grounded pilot study of the Croydon FJC – the first study of a FJC in the UK − to consider if the co-location and cooperation of services to victims of domestic abuse has the potential to empower victims to make informed choices about their futures.