Penny Crofts

Policing, Planning and Sex: Governing Bodies, Spatially

Literatures on the regulation of conduct have tended to focus on the role of policing and the enforcement of criminal law. This paper instead emphasizes the importance of planning in shaping conduct, using the example of how planning shapes sexual conduct to demonstrate that planning can, in different times and places, exercise police-type powers. We illustrate this by analysing the regulation of brothels in Sydney and Parramatta, NSW, Australia, providing a case study of spaces of sexuality that historically were constructed and regulated as criminal, but have since become lawful. This paper examines the ways in which these transitions in law have been differently expressed and accomplished through local planning enforcement. In making such arguments, the paper emphasizes not only the potential for planners to act like police, but also the capacity of planning to supplant policing as a key technique of governmentality.

Brothels: Outlaws or Citizens?

Historically, sex services premises in New South Wales, Australia were regarded and regulated as illegal and disorderly entities; they were policed as outlaws. The Disorderly Houses Amendment Act 1995 [NSW] bestowed legal status, providing an opportunity to regulate sex services premises as legal subjects. Despite these reforms, in many areas brothels continue to be regulated more restrictively than other businesses. I argue that this is because, for many, brothels continue to be perceived as outlaws. They are regarded as inherently unlawful, disorderly, and hence warranting and requiring exclusion from the community. I argue that this conception of brothels as outlaws is constructed and reinforced through regulation. In contrast, some local councils and Land and Environment Court decisions have taken up the opportunity to regard and regulate sex services premises as legal subjects or citizens. The conception of sex services premises as citizen imports an existing legal framework, with associated accountabilities, rights and responsibilities. This shift in conception results in people viewing sex services premises differently, experiencing them differently and regulating them differently.

Home Occupation or Brothel? Selling Sex from Home in New South Wales

This article engages with the question of whether or not sex work in the home should be regulated in the same way as large commercial brothels or as home occupations. Underlying concerns about sex services premises generally are that they are criminogenic, disorderly and exploitative of women. This article draws upon original research of surveys of people living in the vicinity of sex services premises, interviews with sex workers and service providers, and council records of complaint to argue that, on the contrary, home occupations (sex services) can operate lawfully with minimal amenity impacts, and that this type of business can provide a positive work environment. We recommend that sex work in the home in New South Wales should be regulated in the same way as other home occupations.

Is your house a brothel? Prostitution policy, provision of sex services from home, and the maintenance of respectable domesticity

Policy debates on commercial sex services provide increasingly complex insights into work on the street and in large commercial sex premises, yet remain largely silent on the contribution of the domestic realm to commercial sex, despite estimates that it accounts for a significant proportion of all commercial sex transactions. Policies that affect home-based sex work are ambiguous and at times contradictory, veering from the promotion of working from home to anxieties about the assumed offensiveness of sex work. These policies have been often developed without direct consideration of home-based sex work and in the absence of evidence. Remedying this silence, this article analyses policy development for, and the experiences of, home-based sex workers in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The article concludes that working from home provides sex workers with opportunities for autonomy and wellbeing that are not available in other sex service environments, with minimal amenity impacts to the community.

Monstrous Wickedness and the Judgment of Knight

In February 2000, Katherine Mary Knight killed, then skinned, decapitated and cooked her lover in rural Australia. Knight pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence, against which she unsuccessfully appealed in Knight v R [2006] NSWCCA 292. I consider the way in which the majority judgments organised and expressed Knight’s culpability in accordance with a model of monstrous wickedness, arguing that models of wickedness articulated and applied in criminal law should be evaluated critically. The judgment of the court constructed and responded to Knight as bad, a monster who is (and will always be) dangerous (especially to men) and ultimately irredeemable. Not only do monsters justify and require extreme measures, they also contaminate and undermine systems of orders – the judgments of Knight thus read more consistently with the genre of horror than that of law. The model of monstrous wickedness ostensibly works particularly well for women who kill, as it preserves the law’s tendency to organise women as lacking agency. However, this model also generates a clash of binaries when applied to women. The monster/victim binary ascribes agency to the monster, generating difficulties for the law to reconcile the notion of a female monster with legal assumptions of the absence of female agency. This results in the problem of the female monster. The judicial creation of a horror movie monster that lacks basic humanity facilitates an abdication of the legal (and moral) task of judging a human being as human.

Shooting up illicit drugs with God and the State: the legal–spatial constitution of Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre as a sanctuary

In 1999, the Uniting Church opened a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) at the Wayside Chapel in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. The Uniting Church justified this overt act of civil disobedience against the State’s prohibitionist model of drug usage by invoking the ancient right of sanctuary. This invocation sought to produce a specific sort of spatialisation wherein the meaning of the line constituting sanctuary effects a protected ‘inside’ governed by God’s word – civitas dei – ‘outside’ the jurisdiction of state power in civitas terrena. Sanctuary claims a territory exempt from other jurisdictions. The modern assertion of sanctuary enacts in physical space the relationship between state and religious authorities and the integration and intersections of civitas terrena and civitas dei. This article draws upon conceptions of sanctuary at the intersection of the Catholic Christianity tradition and the State since medieval times to analyse the contemporary space of sanctuary in the MSIC, exploring the shifting and ambiguous boundaries in material, legislative, and symbolic spaces. We argue that even though the MSIC has now been incorporated into civitas terrena, it remains and enacts a space of sanctuary.

Killing To Survive: The Walking Dead, Police Slayings and Medieval Malice

Fatal police shootings in the United States have generated much media and academic comment. These shootings fit within the historical common law category of homicides under compulsion and in practice rarely result in prosecutions and even less convictions. This article considers the laws of compulsion through the prism of early common law and slayings for survival in the horror series The Walking Dead. Contemporary accounts of justifiable homicide sustain early common law attempts to balance the need for authorized force to enforce the law against the protection of citizens from arbitrary force. Contemporary law focuses on whether or not the decision to use force was reasonable, but The Walking Dead depicts the narrowness of this question of culpability. The moral difference in slayings is not only whether a law enforcement officer’s decision to use force was reasonable, but whether or not the slayer desired to kill and was acting for a public or personal purpose. The Walking Dead also raises questions ab...

'What Kept You So Long?': Bullying's Gray Zone and the Vampire's Transgressive Justice in Let the Right One In

School bullying has been recognized only relatively recently by policy-makers, media and the courts as a serious and widespread social problem. But despite this recent notice, there has been no evidence that techniques adopted to stop bullying have led to anything more than modest success, implying that we need to do more work to unpack and theorize the nature of bullying. In this article, we consider a recent vampire narrative as a story about bullying. We offer an interpretation of this story via the theories of Claudia Card and Jacques Derrida, arguing that together this archive provides a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of damage inflicted by bullying than has been provided by realist or sociological accounts. In particular, it illuminates damage to the morality of the victim, to their soul, which is a kind of damage that has previously not been given great attention. It also highlights the ways in which practices of judgment can become very tangled when trying to resolve bullying situations, making these experiences resistant to the achievement of justice.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-sexual: Commercial Sex

Forms of commercial sex extend beyond prostitution to include a broad range of businesses that produce sexual goods and services; many of these cater to a broader range of sexual predilections, and include Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) consumers among their clientele. This article provides an overview of the shifting attitudes toward and culture of LGBTI commercial sex, and how the placement and access to LGBTI commercial sex within Western jurisdictions cannot be considered a simple response to patterns of supply and demand, but rather as the outcome of complex interactions of moral codes, legal structures, and other forms of regulations.

Monstrous Bodily Excess in The Exorcist as a Supplement to Law's Accounts of Culpability

The Exorcist is an exemplar of the classic horror film trope of possession in the 1960s–70s. In the film, Regans gradual possession by the devil is depicted by signs of transformation. This article explores how the criminal law would categorise and respond to a case of possession. How does the criminal law conceptualise out-of-control bodies? And who (if anyone) is to blame for harm done? The film suggests that Regans transformation takes place through an agency that lies outside Regans will, upsetting the Cartesian assumptions that underlie both the law and mainstream culture, concerning the division between mind/body and the supremacy of the mind in its regulation of physical states. Bodies out of control are categorised at law as involuntary. The concept of voluntariness is itself transgressive of organising concepts within criminal law, including the oppositional structures of actus reus and mens rea, and offences and defences. Additionally, I highlight the ways in which voluntariness operates at the fissures of structural distinctions of criminal law, including the therapeutic and the punitive, tort and crime, and the structural separation of suffering and wickedness.