Feminism and Global Justice

This book attempts to persuade a new generation of scholars, criminologists, activists, and policy makers sympathetic to the quest for global justice to open the envelope, to step out of their comfort zones and typical frames of analysis to gaze at a world full of injustice against the female sex, much of it systemic, linked to culture, custom and religion. In some instances the sources of these injustices intersect with those that produce global inequality, imperialism and racism. This book also investigates circumstances where the globalising forces cultivate male on male violence in the anomic spaces of supercapitalism – the border zones of Mexico and the United States, and the frontier mining communities in the Australian desert. However systemic gendered injustices, such as forced marriage of child female brides, sati the cremation of widows, genital cutting, honour crimes, rape and domestic violence against women, are forms of violence only experienced by the female sex. The book does not shirk away from female violence either. Carrington argues that if feminism wants to have a voice in the public, cultural, political and criminological debates about heightened, albeit often exaggerated, social concerns about growing female violence and engagement in terrorism, then new directions in theorising female violence are required. Feminist silences about the violent crimes, atrocities and acts of terrorism committed by the female sex leave anti-feminist explanations uncontested. This allows a discursive space for feminist backlash ideologues to flourish. This book contests those ideologies to offer counter explanations for the rise in female violence and female terrorism, in a global context where systemic gendered violence against women is alarming and entrenched. The world needs feminism to take hold across the globe, now more than ever.

Critical literacy and social justice

Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than critical literacy, international educational reform movements stress performative standards on basic literacy. In this context literacy researchers need to ask policy-makers hard questions about taken-for-granted rhetoric that surrounds poverty, literacy and education. At school, regional and state levels, educational leaders need to argue for fair resourcing and decision-making for their communities and students. In classrooms teachers need to weave critical questioning and inclusive learning interactions into the fabric of everyday life.

Social justice in early years education : practices and understandings

The current political context necessitates discussions of social justice within education, and here we bring together early childhood professionals from a variety of perspectives to become part of the important debates that must be had. This special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood was first conceived at a meeting of academics interested in social justice in early childhood education in Albury, NSW, Australia. All of the editors are members of the Social Justice strand of the ARC Funded Excellence in Research in Early Years Education Collaborative Research Network (CRN), which is led by Charles Sturt University in partnership with Queensland University of Technology and Monash University. Some of the authors in this issue are also members of this research network, but their work is presented here with that of others from a variety of contexts. We believe that the combination of perspectives taken challenges old thinking about social justice in early years education in innovative ways.

Maintaining the ethic of service [Editorial]

This issue of Precedent is concerned with professional legal ethics. ln my view, professional ethics are rules about how you do your job, based on moral principles. By virtue of the nature of the work they do, the reputation of the institution through which they are admitted to practice (the court), and the consequences that can flow if they act inappropriately or incompetently, lawyers are under constant scrutiny in all aspects of their lives. Errors, omissions or misdeeds in both their professional and their personal lives have the potential to damage them, their clients, the profession itself and the court. We ought never to take for granted the trust the public places in us to preserve the integrity of the legal system itself, especially in times when that system may be under threat, either from without or from within.

Duty to the court and the administration of justice : some examples, implications and clarifications

No liberal democracy can survive without popular trust in its judicial system. The legal profession and the judiciary enjoy a level of independence and autonomy from the executive that makes them both powerful and privileged. A UNIQUE AND ORGANIC DUTY: So long as the courts are seen to fulfil their duty to guard against encroachments by the executive on the freedoms and rights of individual citizens with integrity and credibility, they maintain enough public support to retain their normative authority. But support for those with power and privilege is easily undermined. It is contingent upon trust. Lawyers who breach that trust in ways that go to the heart of the legal system ought to expect to be made examples of and to suffer severe penalties. The good news is that the sorts of breach discussed here should be neither difficult to anticipate nor to avoid – in theory. In practice, smart and honest lawyers sometimes fall foul of these duties for all sorts of understandable (if not condonable) reasons. Law does not get practised in a social or cultural vacuum. Lawyers are people, and people have weaknesses, failings and stresses...

Submission to the Legal Affairs and Community Safety Committee Youth Justice and Other Legislation Amendment Bill

This submission addresses the Youth Justice and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014 the objectives of which are to: 1. Permit repeat offenders’ identifying information to be published and open the Children’s Court for youth justice matters involving repeat offenders; 2. Create a new offence where a child commits a further offence while on bail; 3. Permit childhood findings of guilt for which no conviction was recorded to be admissible in court when sentencing a person for an adult offence; 4. Provide for the automatic transfer from detention to adult corrective services facilities of 17 year olds who have six months or more left to serve in detention; 5. Provide that, in sentencing any adult or child for an offence punishable by imprisonment, the court must not have regard to any principle, whether under statute or at law, that a sentence of imprisonment (in the case of an adult) or detention (in the case of a child) should only be imposed as a last resort; 6. Allow children who have absconded from Sentenced Youth Boot Camps to be arrested and brought before a court for resentencing without first being given a warning; and 7. Make a technical amendment to the Youth Justice Act 1992.

Intersectionality, rural criminology, and re-imaging the boundaries of critical criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands – feminist, cultural and green – has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

Supervisor conflict management, justice and strain : multi-level relationships

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test a multilevel model of the main and mediating effects of supervisor conflict management style (SCMS) climate and procedural justice (PJ) climate on employee strain. It is hypothesized that workgroup-level climate induced by SCMS can fall into four types: collaborative climate, yielding climate, forcing climate, or avoiding climate; that these group-level perceptions will have differential effects on employee strain, and will be mediated by PJ climate. Design/methodology/approach Multilevel SEM was used to analyze data from 420 employees nested in 61 workgroups. Findings Workgroups that perceived high supervisor collaborating climate reported lower sleep disturbance, job dissatisfaction, and action-taking cognitions. Workgroups that perceived high supervisor yielding climate and high supervisor forcing climate reported higher anxiety/depression, sleep disturbance, job dissatisfaction, and action-taking cognitions. Results supported a PJ climate mediation model when supervisors’ behavior was reported to be collaborative and yielding. Research limitations/implications The cross-sectional research design places limitations on conclusions about causality; thus, longitudinal studies are recommended. Practical implications Supervisor behavior in response to conflict may have far-reaching effects beyond those who are a party to the conflict. The more visible use of supervisor collaborative CMS may be beneficial. Social implications The economic costs associated with workplace conflict may be reduced through the application of these findings. Originality/value By applying multilevel theory and analysis, we extend workplace conflict theory.

Social Justice Impacts of the Resources Boom

Until the 1970s mining leases were issued by state governments subject to conditions that companies build or substantially finance local community infrastructure, including housing, streets, transport, schools, hospitals and recreation facilities. Townships and communities went hand in hand with mining development. However, in the past thirty years mining companies have moved progressively to an expeditionary strategy for natural resources extraction - operating a continuous production cycle of 12 hour shifts - increasingly reliant on non-resident, fly-in, fly-out or drive-in, drive-out (FIFO/DIDO) workers who typically work block rosters, reside in work camps adjacent to existing communities and travel large distances from their homes. This paper presents the key findings of our survey into the social impacts of this kind of mining development in Qld. Based on the results we argue that the social license to develop new mining projects is strong for projects requiring a 25% or less non-resident workforce, diminishes significantly thereafter and is very weak for projects planning to recruit a non-resident workforce in excess of 75%. This finding is significant because there are at least 67 new mining projects undergoing social impact assessment in Queensland, and many it appears are planning to hire significant proportions of non-resident workers. The paper considers the policy implications of this growing social justice issue concluding there is a clear need for national leadership in formulating a national policy framework for guiding socially responsible and sustainable mining development into the next millennium.

The civic virtue of developmentalism : on the mining industry’s social licence to develop Western Australia

This paper examines the social licence to operate (SLO) of Western Australia's (WA's) mining industry in the context of the state's ‘developmentalist’ agenda. We draw on the findings of a multi-disciplinary body of new research on the risks and challenges posed byWA's mining industry for environmental, social and economic sustainability. We synthesise the findings of this work against the backdrop of the broader debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and resource governance. In light of the data presented, this paper takes issue with the mining sector's SLO and its assessment of social and environmental impacts in WA for three inter-related reasons. A state government ideologically wedded to resource-led growth is seen to offer the resource sector a political licence to operate and to give insufficient attention to its potential social and environmental impacts. As a result, the resource sector can adopt a self-serving CSR agenda built on a limited win–win logic and operate with a ‘quasi social licence’ that is restricted to mere economic legitimacy. Overall, this paper problematises the political-cum-commercial construction and neoliberalisation of the SLO and raises questions about the impact of mining in WA.

Modes of criminal justice, indigenous youth and social democracy

The political question of how the will of a community is to be democratically formed and adhered to, the question of social democracy, is normatively tied to the mode of criminal justice employed within that democratic public sphere. Liberal, republican, procedural and communitarian forms of democratic will-formation respectively reflect retributive,restorative, procedural and co-operative modes of criminal justice. After first elaborating these links through the critical response of republican and procedural theories of democracy to the liberal practice of democratic will-formation and its retributive mode of justice, our discussion considers the recent practice of restorative and procedural justice with respect to Indigenous youth; and this in the context of a severely diminished role for Indigenous justice agencies in the public sphere. In light of certain shortcomings in both the restorative and procedural modes of justice, and so too with republican and procedural understandings of the democratic public sphere, we turn to a discussion of procedural communitarianism, anchored as it is in Dewey’s notion of social co-operation. From here we attempt a brief formulation of what a socially co-operative mode of justice might consist of; a mode of justice where historically racial and economically coercive injustices are sufficiently recognised.

Penal Colonies

Prostitution has been closely associated with the transportation of women convicts to British penal colonies. Convict labor was used to found a number of British colonies including Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland, Virginia, Singapore, New South Wales, Tasmania, and Western Australia. Between 1607 and 1939, Britain transported approximately 400,000 convicts, 162,000 of whom came to Australia and about 50,000 to North America. Significant numbers of women were among those transported to the Australian and North American colonies, although their numbers were relatively small in comparison to male convicts. Transportation was typically reserved for the most recalcitrant of female offenders. Most women transported came from working-class populations, resided in metropolitan centers, and were single at the time of their offense. Although few of these women were actually sentenced for activities associated with prostitution, large numbers had a history of involvement with prostitution. Transportation was considered to offer prostitutes a chance at redemption, with colonial commentators drawing contrasts between the Old World and its vice-ridden sensuality and the colonies, which offered opportunities for redemption through religious devotion and hard work. Many women transported to the Australian colonies were described by officials as being "on the town" at their time of apprehension and were collectively considered to be "damned whores, possessed of neither virtue nor honesty". Recently, historians have argued that these assessments were emblematic of middle-class prejudices toward the open and aggressive sexuality of working-class women. The number of convict women involved in prostitution may have been higher than recorded crimes, typically involving "larceny", suggest. A number of women were charged with theft from men who had paid them (or, in some instances, refused to pay them) for sex. Historians have estimated that one in five convict women were part-time or full-time prostitutes before transportation. Many continued in prostitution after transportation, with prostitution becoming an important element in the social and economic life of the Australian colonies, where, between 1788-1830, men outnumbered women six to one. Officially, prostitution was tolerated to dissuade men from vice. For women, prostitution presented a means of securing physical protection and accommodation at a time when general amenities and employment opportunities were restricted.

Evaluation of Indigenous justice programs.: final report / Project D, Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol Programs in New South Wales and Northbridge Policy and Juvenile Aid Group in Western Australia

The Australian Government has provided funding to evaluate the effectiveness of Indigenous law and justice programs across five subject areas to identify the best approaches to tackling crime and justice issues and better inform government funding decisions in the future. This report presents the findings of subject area "D", which examined two different approaches to delivering community and night patrol services for young people: the Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol programs in New South Wales, and the Northbridge Policy project (the Young People in Northbridge project), in Western Australia. Night patrols can address crime either directly or indirectly, by prevention work or by addressing the social causes of crime through community development.