Deconstructing Victim and offender Identities in Discourses on Child Sexual Abuse: Hierarchies, Blame and the Good/Evil Dialectic

Contemporary social and political constructions of victimhood and offending behaviour lie at the heart of regulatory policies on child sexual abuse. Legislation is named after specific child victims of high profile cases, and a burgeoning range of pre-emptive measures are enacted to protect an amorphous class of ‘all potential victims’ from the risk sex offenders are seen as posing. Such policies are also heavily premised on the omnipresent predatory stranger. These constructed identities, however, are at odds with the actual identities of victims and offenders of such crimes. Drawing on a range of literatures, the core task of this article is to confront some of the complexities and tensions surrounding constructions of the victim/offender dyad within the specific context of sexual offending against children. In particular, the article argues that discourses on ‘blame’ – and the polarised notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’ – inform respective hierarchies of victimhood and offending concerning ‘legitimate’ victim and offender status. Based on these insights, the article argues for the need to move beyond such monochromatic understandings of victims and offenders of sexual crime and to reframe the politics of risk accordingly.

The Reintegration of Sex Offenders: Barriers and Opportunities for Employment

The process of reintegration of offenders after release from prison, or during a community sentence, is a key aim of criminal justice policy. This article provides details from recent research that investigated the barriers and opportunities to employment for sex offenders. The authors describe the barriers that are faced by sex offenders and the anxieties that employers experience when employing sex offenders. The authors conclude that the approach taken by the State is less than reintegrative and serves to increase the barriers and reduce the opportunities for employment for sex offenders.

Enforcing Employment Discrimination Law - Potential Transplants from Italy to Britain and Vice Versa?

While substantive EU non-discrimination law has been harmonized in great detail, the enforcement regime for EU non-discrimination law consists merely of a few isolated elements. Thus, the pursuit of unity through harmonization in substantive EU law is accompanied by considerable regulatory autonomy for Member States in securing the efficiency of those laws, reflecting the diversity of national enforcement regimes, and resulting in twenty-seven different national models for enforcing discrimination law in labour markets. This article pursues two connected arguments through a comparison of rules for enforcing non-discrimination law in labour markets in Britain and Italy. First, it argues that enforcing non-discrimination law in labour markets is best achieved when responsive governance, repressive regulation and mainstreaming equality law are combined. Second, the article submits that diversity of national legal orders within the EU is not necessarily detrimental, as it offers opportunities for mutual learning across legal systems.The notion of mutual learning across systems is proposed in order to analyse the transnational migration of legal ideas within the EU. Such migration has been criticized in debates about the ‘transplantation’ of legal concepts or legal irritation through foreign legal ideas, in particular by comparative labour lawyers. However, EU harmonization policies in the field of non-discrimination law aim to impact on national labour laws. The article develops the notion of mutual learning across legal systems in order to establish conditions for transnational migration of legal ideas, and demonstrates the viability of these concepts by applying them to the field of non-discrimination law

Testing the cause of the Sphagnum austinii (Sull. ex Aust.) decline: Multiproxy evidence from a raised bog in Northern Ireland

We use a multiproxy palaeoecological dataset from Dead Island bog in Northern Ireland to examine the cause of the Sphagnum austinii (Sphagnum imbricatum) decline. The disappearance of this species from the peat record occurred just after the ‘AD 860’ tephra layer and is coeval with a rapid increase in bog surface wetness and increased mineral dust and charcoal abundance. Although it is difficult to identify one specific cause of the decline, the evidence for increased soil-derived dust is apparent and is supported by regional tephra-dated pollen diagrams that reveal extensive landscape changes due to agricultural intensification in early Medieval Ireland. As the decline of S. austinii occurred much later (~ AD 1860) in Fallahogy bog (~ 1.2 km away), we suggest that the decline of S. austinii at Dead Island was caused by a combination of fire and the deposition of soil-derived dust. We suggest that future studies should consider the use of multiple cores from each site to examine the within-site variability of the decline of S. austinii.

When opportunity matters: Comparing the risk taking attitudes of prisoners and recently released ex-prisoners

Risk-taking tendencies and environmental opportunities to commit crime are two key features in understanding criminal behavior. Upon release from prison, ex-prisoners have a much greater opportunity to engage in risky activity and to commit criminal acts. We hypothesized that ex-prisoners would exhibit greater risk-taking tendencies compared to prisoners who have fewer opportunities to engage in risky activity and who are monitored constantly by prison authorities. Using cumulative prospect theory to compare the risky choices of prisoners and ex-prisoners our study revealed that ex-prisoners who were within 16 weeks of their prison release made riskier choices than prisoners. Our data indicate that previous studies comparing prisoners behind bars with nonoffenders may have underestimated the risk-taking tendencies of offenders. The present findings emphasize the central role played by risk-taking attitudes in criminal offending and highlight a need to examine offenders after release from prison.

Interpretation of Section 17 Employment Protection Act in the light of ECJ case law and under consideration of the cases pending before the Federal Labour Court

This article analyses the relevance of the ECJ ruling in Junk for German labour law.

Pro-active protection against racialist discrimination in employment law - lessons from South Africa?

This study investigates the potential of the prohibition of indirect race discrimination to be used for law reform, and to uncover discriminatory practices. It reflects on the history and contents of the concept, and focuses in particular on its application in the Republic of South Africa