Marinella Marmo

Crime, Justice and Human Rights

I write this review at a time when state responses to crime, and even imagined crime, can be judged as violating human rights. In the interests of counter-terrorism, police arrests are reframed as raids, followed by the rapid introduction of legislation that reduces civil liberties. Crime, Justice and Human Rights is timely with its emphasis on ‘everyday’ policing, as contemporary events reveal how the everyday can become the exception. As noted by the authors in their introduction, where security looms as a political goal, human rights can provide the language and concepts to pose critical questions about the harms, benefits and limits of state action and inaction.

The myth of sovereignty: British immigration control in policy and practice in the nineteen-seventies†

This article explores how British immigration control policy was carried out during the nineteen-seventies to filter immigration, while addressing the perceived problem of ‘non-white’ colonial migration. Recently released government documents suggest that the immigration control system should be viewed as a series of inter-connected institutions and actors that operated under the influence of a number of different, and often contradictory, factors. The result of these competing factors was an immigration control system that, relying on the paradoxical whims of the government and other sections of civil society, was restrictive and suspicious towards potential migrants, but at the same time constrained in its behaviour.

Irregular migration: Emerging regimes of power and the disappearing human

In December 2012, a comparative workshop was held at Flinders University, Adelaide to discuss emerging regimes of power in response to irregular migration. The workshop was conceptually organised around similar challenges being experienced by Australia and the southern European states of Italy and Greece. In both zones, the construction of the migration problem as a question of numbers and peoples plays a large role in developing border-control policies. Reactive policies are developed around highly visible cases, rather than a systemic review of the broader problem and its real causes. Instances of highly visible irregular migration in Australia and the European Union include the post-Tampa crisis and the ‘boat people’ debate in Australia, and the critical situation on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, near Tunisia. These instances elicit strong and equally visible responses, such as the revived ‘Pacific Solution’ (offshore processing) and the transformation of Lampedusa into an offshore detention ‘container’ that closely resembles the Christmas Island detention facility. This symposium arose from these themes and aims to offer a more comprehensive approach to the issue of irregular migration.

Crime victims’ self-medication: Findings from a study in South Australia

While considerable literature has explored the complex nature of victimisation, few empirical studies have examined the role of alcohol and other drugs (AODs) in victims’ experiences, specifically victims’ self-medication using AODs and its impact on ongoing health and welfare needs. Addressing the dearth of empirical research on the nature and extent of victims’ self-medication, and drawing upon quantitative data from a survey (n = 102) of victims from Adelaide, South Australia this article explores individuals’ experiences of victimisation and AOD use against type of victimisation, type of peer support network and type of consumption. The findings indicate support for the self-medication for trauma hypothesis, namely that victimisation is positively associated with considerable increase in AOD consumption. On the other hand, there is a lack of support for the supplementary hypothesis that network support is associated with victimisation/re-victimisation. The authors demonstrate that further empirical work is needed to deepen understanding of victims’ AOD use and expedite the development of evidence-based policy and support frameworks.

The Routledge International Handbook of Criminology and Human Rights

There is a deeply held view within criminology that victims’ rights ‘movements’ are to be resisted. There is equally entrenched opinion amongst victim advocates that persons accused of offences have rights including human rights but persons as victims do not. 1 Both perspectives are fixated on the relationship between victim and accused. Both fail to ‘see’ the state in relation to persons as victims of crime and abuse of power. 2 This chapter considers how, through the lens of human rights, it may come more clearly into view.

Female Migrants: Sex, Value and Credibility in Immigration Control

This chapter seeks to explore the continuities and changes in the treatment of female migrants by British immigration control by comparing and contrasting the immigration control policies of the 1970s with contemporary practices. It will provide a historical context for understanding how certain categories of female migrants have been criminalized within the immigration control system on the basis of values around moral decency and body integrity.1 The two case studies investigated here are: the practice of ‘virginity testing’, carried out by immigration officers on Indian subcontinent women at Heathrow Airport and at British High Commissions in the late 1970s; and the British immigration officers’ treatment of female victims of human trafficking for the sex trade in contemporary times.

Democratic States’ Response to Terrorism: A Comparative Reflection on the Perceived Role of the Judiciary in the Protection of Human Rights and Civil Liberties

This chapter aims to discuss and evaluate domestic judges’ activity in matters related to forms of transnational crime, such as terrorism, to offer an innovative way to approach the debate on democratic state’s response to such transnational crimes. The approach adopted in this paper is based on interviews with senior Australian judges during the years 2005–2006, in the years of the so-called global fight against terrorism. The result of these interviews is put into a broader context; in particular with views expressed by judges based in other jurisdictions and involved in cases of terrorism. This approach seeks to explore how judges perceive their role in this context and in comparison to their counterparts abroad at the peak of the fight against global terrorism. Also, the chapter explores how judges are debating these issues in different geographical areas, and whether territoriality in criminal matters remains understood as a fixed legal and judicial environment. And if not, it is noteworthy to map out judicial collaborations and links within their jurisdiction and beyond, to trace down networks, and to observe the different forms of judicial dialogue. This paper aims to pin down how judges picture their role as domestic judge in the new world order.

The Empowering of the Italian Judiciary: The Shift Towards Activism

The evolving role of the judiciary as policy‐shapers and policy‐makers is becoming a topical and controversial issue in Italy as well as in other legal systems. Italian judges are experiencing a new form of responsibility, well beyond a mere interpretation and application of statutes as required by the traditional Continental civil law. They are importing and interpreting European Union provisions as well as interpreting the internal legal system through their judicial review power. This paper addresses how the wider context of the European Union and the internal judicial decodification process are pushing judges to fulfill a role as policy‐shapers and policy‐makers in a creative and innovative way. This encompasses a novel approach to the literature on both the judicialisation of policy and politics and the expansion of judicial power. The paper tackles a new and demanding role of Italian senior judges in Europeanisation and modernisation of criminal procedure.

Self-Medication and Avoidance Coping

We examine coping strategies, and how they play into the recovery narrative according to the results of the survey, interviews and focus groups. We probe respondents’ reflections on the injustice that has shaped the development of their victim identity and their coping devices, including how it relates to their need for self-medication.Many victims develop individual and social defence strategies, or what we refer to as ‘shock absorption’ strategies, through what has been referred to as the ‘impact disorganisation phase’ (Frieze et al. in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 18:299–315, 1987). However, avoidance coping is understood to become ‘maladaptive’ and difficult to overcome (Wilson et al. in Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 19:587–593, 2012). It is also commonly agreed that lifelong overuse of maladaptive or avoidance coping strategies results in ‘impaired adjustment to stress’ (Wilson et al. in Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 19:587–593, 2012). However, since ‘disengagement coping’ involves disconnecting the individual from the victimisation, self-medication plays a complex role within an unfolding victim-survivor narrative. In this respect, we review self-medication as dulling or deferring. Still, how an individual responds to trauma is linked to a unique life trajectory. For poly-victims, in particular, some form of avoidance or detachment may be adaptive to the negotiation of a survivor identity (Jordan in Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand 5:48–56, 2013) and for the achievement of short and long term goals.

Victims of Crimes, Self-Medication and Narratives of (In)Justice

This book deploys and develops concepts with which to explore the intersection of victim self-medication and a dignified identity and recovery narrative. It expands on Frank (The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Barnes (Partner Abuse 4:380–398, 2013) and Jirek (Qualitative Social Work 16:166–188, 2017) in conceptualising recovery narratives and McGarry and Walklate’s (Victims: Trauma, testimony and justice, Routledge, London, 2015, p. 4) convergence of trauma and victimhood. It builds from the position that an intimate connection is made by victims between their reflexive development of dignity and a survivor identity. An understanding of retrospective and prospective justice is considered through reflection on victims’ recovery narratives. The introduction provides a brief synopsis of the themes and concepts that are developed in the chapters. These are derived from the study on which this book is based, which involved a survey of victims, semi-structured interviews with victims and two focus groups with counsellors. As is understood in conceptualisations of the ‘poly-victim,’ prior victimisation is a predictor of future victimisation. To capture and analyse the diverse victims’ experiences that emerge in response to trauma episodes we distinguish between simple victimisation, simple poly-victimisation and complex poly-victimisation. Victimhood and victims’ need for validation, explored in the first part of the book, are explored by way of means to dignity, which is unpacked in the second part of the book. In linking their experiences and beliefs to their recovery pathway, victims conceptualise self-identity in terms of dignity and resilience.