Steven Kohm

Naming, shaming and criminal justice: Mass-mediated humiliation as entertainment and punishment

Shame has long been a dubious tool of criminal justice and has been carried on by state authorities in a variety of ways through the ages. However, since the latter part of the 20th century, humiliation has become amplified through the mass media in the name of crime control and entertainment. This article situates mass-mediated humiliation within broader trends in criminal justice and popular culture. While the enactment of humiliation via popular culture works powerfully within prevailing cultural beliefs about crime and criminality, there also exists a subversive possibility that threatens to disrupt the forces that attempt to invoke shame for purposes of profit or social control. The popular American tabloid news magazine, Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator, is used as an example to highlight the ambiguous cultural place of shame.

Pedophile crime films as popular criminology: A problem of justice?

This article responds to Nicole Rafter’s recent call to develop a popular criminology using cultural representations of crime and criminal justice to supplement and extend mainstream criminological knowledge. Using representations of child sexual abuse in film, we begin to build a popular criminology of the pedophile. In cinema, this figure opens up a cultural space to interrogate key criminological dilemmas about the nature and shape of justice. Pedophile crime films work through concepts by making emotion central to understanding and by using child sexual abuse as a moral context for otherwise abstract dilemmas. Because of their form as well as their content, recent examples of the subgenre hold the potential to challenge popular conceptions of justice in ways that mainstream academic discourse cannot.

Little Red Riding Hood Crime Films: Critical Variations on Criminal Themes

European and North American crime films since the 1990s reflect changing cinematic styles but also hardening political discourses around criminal responsibility and growing public fears of random violence and predatory strangers. The narrative structure and imagery of “Little Red Riding Hood” conventionally warns about the latter dangers, but can also offer a lesson in self-reliance and the necessity for private action to forestall them. The familiar story provides a malleable cultural referent for a number of films elucidating social, political, and criminological shifts concerning issues of crime, justice, and crime control around the turn of the millennium.

Book Review: Lee., M. (2007). Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminology and the Politics of Anxiety. Portland, OR: Willan. xi, 237 pp:

the removal of positively valued stimuli) can be easily measured and statically tested in research and studies. Finally, the arguments established in the theory are based on factors at both micro and macro levels. Crime is the likely result of strains an individual experiences, but the level and type of strain varies depending on group affiliations, physical conditions, and even factors in immediate social environments. The book is clearly written, well organized, and easy to follow from chapter to chapter with its well-connected and stimulating titles. Throughout the book, the author elaborates on terms and concepts with concrete examples and supports his ideas and arguments by findings from numerous empirical studies and research. With its broadly cited literature, the book not only provides a good overview of GST but also serves as a valuable source of literature on various topics and issues in criminology. The author takes great care in organization of the book. After each chapter, there are well-developed questions for review and discussion, so it would be an ideal textbook or reader for criminology courses in colleges and universities.