Reparations for ‘guilty victims’: Navigating Complex Identities of Victim-Perpetrators in Reparation Mechanisms

Reparations are often declared victim-centred, but in transitional societies defining who is a victim and eligible for reparations can be a politically charged and controversial process. Added to this, the messy reality of conflict means that perpetrators and victims do not always fall in two separate categories. Instead in certain circumstances perpetrators can be victimised and victims can be responsible for victimising others. This article explores complex victims, who are responsible for victimising others, but have themselves been unlawfully victimised. Looking in particular at the 1993 Shankill bombing in Northern Ireland, as well as Colombia and Peru, such complex victims are often seen as ‘guilty’ or ‘bad’ victims undeserving of reparations. This article argues that complex victims need to be included in reparation mechanisms to ensure accountability and to prevent their exclusion becoming a source of victimisation and future violence. It considers alternative avenues of human rights courts, development aid, services and community reparations to navigate complex identities of victim-perpetrators. In concluding the author finds that complex identities can be accommodated in transitional societies reparation programmes through nuanced rules of eligibility and forms of reparations.

The Presumption of Innocence and Irish Criminal Law:Whittling the Golden Thread

The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty has been described as the 'golden thread' running through the web of the English criminal law and a 'fundamental postulate' of Irish criminal law which enjoys constitutional protection. The purpose of this book is to consider whether the reality matches the rhetoris surrounding this central precept of our criminal law and to consider its efficacy in light of recent legislative innovations.

“It’s like a problem that doesn’t exist”: The emotional well-being of mothers caring for a child with brain injury.

Background: Although research has shown that significant burden and adverse psychological impact are associated with caring for a child with brain injury, limited knowledge exists concerning the qualitative experience and impact of this burden.
Objective: To provide an account of the experiences of mothers who care for a childhood survivor of brain injury.
Research design: Postal survey.
Methods and procedures: A self-report questionnaire was sent to a consecutive sample of mothers (n=86) of children (aged 8-28) with acquired brain injury, registered with a UK children’s brain injury charity. Five essay style questions enabled mothers to reflect on and describe at length their caring experiences, with particular emphasis placed on the perceived impact on emotional well-being.
Main outcomes and results: Thematic analysis identified five key themes: Perpetually Anxious, The Guilty Carer, The Labour of Caring, A Self-Conscious Apologist and Perpetually Grieving. Collectively, these themes highlight two core processes shaping mothers’ caring experiences and concomitant mental well-being. Firstly, the collective and enduring nature of caregiver burden over time. Second, the crucial role played by socio-cultural values in perpetuating caregiver burden.
Conclusions: Societal norms, particularly those relating to the nature and outcome of brain injury and motherhood, serve to marginalise mothers and increase feelings of isolation. Findings suggest the value of peer support programs as an effective means of providing appropriate social support.

Legislating about Unhealthy Food: A Millian Approach

Tackling food-related health conditions is becoming one of the most pressing issues in the policy agendas of western liberal democratic governments. In this article, I intend to illustrate what the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill would have said about legislation on unhealthy food and I focus especially on the arguments advanced by Mill in his classic essay On Liberty ([1859] 2006). Mill is normally considered as the archetype of liberal anti-paternalism and his ideas are often invoked by those who oppose state paternalism, including those who reject legislation that restricts the consumption of unhealthy food. Furthermore, his views have been applied to related policy areas such as alcohol minimum pricing (Saunders 2013) and genetically modified food (Holtug 2001). My analysis proceeds as follows. First, I show that Mill’s account warrants some restrictions on food advertising and justifies various forms of food labelling. Second, I assess whether and to what extent Mill’s ‘harm principle’ justifies social and legal non-paternalistic penalties against unhealthy eaters who are guilty of other-regarding harm. Finally, I show that Mill’s account warrants taxing unhealthy foods, thus restricting the freedom of both responsible and irresponsible eaters and de facto justifying what I call ‘secondary paternalism’.

Young people, crime and justice in Northern Ireland

Many children and young people in conflict with the law in Northern Ireland have experienced living in poverty, truancy or exclusion from school, limited educational attainment, neglect or abuse within their families, placement in alternative care, drug or alcohol misuse, physical and mental ill-health. However, their lives are also affected by the legacy and particular circumstances of a society in transition from conflict. In addition to historical under-investment in services for children and their families, this includes discriminatory policing alongside informal regulation by ‘paramilitaries’ or members of ‘the community’ and community-based restorative justice schemes as an alternative way of dealing with low-level crime and ‘anti-social’ behaviour.

Following a Criminal Justice Review, the 2002 Justice (Northern Ireland) Act affirmed that the principal aim of the youth justice system is to protect the public by preventing offending by children’. Youth justice initiatives therefore encompass a range of responses: early intervention to prevent offending and the application of civil Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, diversionary measures (including community-based restorative justice schemes), non-custodial disposals for those found guilty of offences, and custodial sentences. While ‘policy transfer’ prevailed during periods of ‘direct rule’ from Westminster, the punitive responses to ‘sub-criminal’ and ‘anti-social’ behaviour introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act in England and Wales were resisted or not implemented in the same way in Northern Ireland.

This Chapter will critically analyse the debates informing recent developments, noting key issues raised by the 2011 review of youth justice initiated as a priority following the devolution of justice and policing to the Northern Ireland Assembly. It will focus on promotion and protection of the rights of children and young people in conflict with the law.

Constitutional Principles and Horizontal Effects: Kücükdeveci revisited

While German labour lawyers were still awaiting the German Constitutional Court’s final verdict on the principles established by the Mangold case, the Court of Justice of the European Union re-visited the question what exactly are the effects of Directive 2000/78 and the constitutional principle of non-discrimination on grounds of age. This article analyses the constitutional relevance of this case in two respects. First, it argues that the Court has accepted neither direct horizontal effects of directives nor direct effects of constitutional principles, but rather - much more cautiously - reiterated the rule that directives on constitutional principles such as non-discrimination can exclude the application of national legislation in horizontal cases. The article also demonstrates that this cautious approach has succeeded in convincing the German Constitutional Court that the Mangold judgment was not ultra vires. Consequently, the claim challenging that judgment was dismissed and a constitutional crisis avoided.

Ethnic Segregation, Moral Panics and Social Class: A Comparative Study of the Experiences and Perspectives of Working Class and Middle Class Children in Belfast

This paper begins by describing the moral panics that have tended to emerge sporadically in Northern Ireland over the last few years with regard to young people’s involvement in sectarian violence in Belfast. Within this, while these young people have been cast in the traditional role of folk devils, the paper will show how younger children also tend to be explicitly identified and named in an ambiguous way through such moral panics; playing a deviant role as participators, and sometimes instigators, of sectarian violence but also carrying the symbolic responsibility of representing Belfast’s future. It will be shown that it is because of this ambiguous position that it is adults rather than the children themselves that tend to be held responsible for their actions; either as rioters using the children as political pawns or as parents guilty of neglect. With this as a starting point the paper then explores the perspectives and experiences of two groups of 10-11 year old children living in Belfast and the impact of these moral panics on them. One group of children, living in affluent middle class areas were found to be appropriating and re-working these broader moral panics into more general discourses of derision that tended to pathologize working class children and communities more generally. For the other group of children, living in economically deprived areas with high levels of sectarian tensions and violence, their experiences of such violence and their participation in it are discussed. It will be shown that for these children, the broader moral panics that exist tend to have the effect of reinforcing the processes that tend to segregate and exclude them.

'Regina v John Terry': The Discursive Construction of an Alleged Racist Event

This article explores the conformation in discourse of a verbal exchange and its subsequent mediatised and legal ramifications. The event concerns an allegedly racist insult directed by high profile English professional footballer John Terry towards another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011. The substance of Terry’s utterance, which included the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was found by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist insult, although the fact that these actual words were framed within the utterance was not in dispute. The upshot of this ruling was that Terry was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence. A subsequent investigation by the regulatory commission of the English Football Association (FA) ruled, almost a year after the event, that Terry was guilty of racially abusing Ferdinand. Terry was banned for four matches and fined £220,000.

It is our contention that this event, played out in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, constitutes a complex web of linguistic structures and strategies in discourse, and as such lends itself well to analysis with a broad range of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Amongst other things, such an analysis can help explain the seemingly anomalous - even contradictory - position adopted in the legal ruling with regard to the speech act status of ‘fucking black cunt’; namely, that the racist content of the utterance was not contested but that the speaker was found not to have issued a racist insult. Over its course, the article addresses this broader issue by making reference to the systemic-functional interpersonal function of language, particularly to the concepts of modality, polarity and modalisation. It also draws on models of verbal irony from linguistic pragmatics, notably from the theory of irony as echoic mention (c.f. Sperber and Wilson, 1981; Wilson and Sperber, 1992). Furthermore, the article makes use of the cognitive-linguistic framework, Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) to examine the discourse positions occupied by key actors and adapts, from cognitive poetics, the theory of mind-modelling (c.f. Stockwell, 2009) to explore the conceptual means through which these actors discursively negotiate the event.

It is argued that the pragmatic and cognitive strategies that frame the entire incident go a long way towards mitigating the impact of so ostensibly stark an act of racial abuse. Moreover, it is suggested here that the reconciliation of Terry’s action was a result of the confluence of strategies of discourse with relations of power as embodied by the media, the law and perceptions of nationhood embraced by contemporary football culture. It is further proposed that the outcome of this episode, where the FA was put in the spotlight, and where both the conflict and its key antagonists were ‘intranational’, was strongly impelled by the institution of English football and its governing body both to reproduce and maintain social, cultural and ethnic cohesion and to avoid any sense that the event featured a discernable ‘out-group’.

National institutions and employers’ age management practices in Britain and Germany:‘Path dependence’and option exploration

We pursue a comparative analysis of employers’ age management practices in Britain and Germany, asking how valid ‘convergence’ and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ theories are. After rejecting the convergence verdict, we proceed to ask how far ‘path dependence’ helps explain inter-country differences. Through 19 interviews with British and German experts, we find that firms have reacted in different ways to promptings from the EU and the two states. Change has been modest and a rhetoric-reality gap exists in firms as they seek to hedge. We point to continuities in German institutional methods of developing new initiatives, and the emerging role of British NGOs in helping firms and the state develop new options. We argue that ‘path dependence’ offers insight into the national comparison, but also advance the idea of national modes of firm optionexploration as an important way of conceptualizing the processes involved.