Date: Friday 15 November 2013
Time: 9.30-4.30
Location and Room Details: GEE 004
Clifton Campus
NG11 8NS
The symposium is a free event but if
you plan to attend please email Simon Cross. Refreshments will be available but
lunch is not provided. However, hot meals and sandwiches can be purchased on
campus. Following the event speakers will continue discussions in a local
hostelry and restaurant in the city centre about 15 minute walk to the train
station. You will be welcome to join us for dinner before your onward journey
but for restaurant booking purposes you must email Simon Cross no later than 1
November.
Bus details from Nottingham train
station: Delegates can get the Number
4 Uni-Link Bus outside Nottingham station. The bust stop is on the
main road just outside the train station and at the Starbucks on the corner.
The bus stop is just a few doors down from Starbucks so find that and you are
more or less at the bust stop – there are a few stops and you can’t really miss
them. The bus is very regular around 8 minutes between each service and comes
directly into the campus with a journey time of around 15 minutes. Link to bus
timetables are here.
Arriving by car: delegates arriving by
car and using ‘sat nav’ please note the postal code above. Enter through the
south entrance gate and car park attendants will direct you.
Signs directing you to the symposium
location will be posted from the George Eliot building reception. Please also consult
the Clifton Campus map.
Programme
9.30-9.55
Welcome and registration.
10.00-11.15
Professor Yvonne Jewkes, Department of Criminology, University of Leicester.
Title:
Punishment in black and white: penal ‘hell-holes’, popular media and mass
incarceration.
In recent years, the prison has been
analogously compared to transportation and slavery; the
Jim Crow system; the urban ghetto; a new apartheid; and an embodiment ofstate power and security apparatuses in
post 9/11 societies. In all these analyses imprisonment is explicitly linked to
racially motivated processes of criminalization andsegregation. A
further analogous framework by which prisons might be viewed and understood,
and the focus of this article, is that of Hell. Drawing on images from Dante's Inferno, the cultural purchase of which remains undiminished seven
hundred years after it was written, this article argues that the social
exclusion and mass imprisonment of young, black men is related to broader
historical and cultural practices of discrimination and to contemporary,
mediated discourses of ‘othering’. Moreover, the article suggests that not only can the prison be understood
through the lens of darkness and lightness, Heaven and Hell, but that
such metaphors serve to justify and authorize the prison as hell-hole.
Dr
Maggie Wykes, School of Law, University of Sheffield.
Title:
What’s law gotta do with it? Comparing
the failure to successfully prevent or prosecute sexual violence in England and
South Africa.
With abysmal regularity the news in the
UK and South Africa tells stories of sexual violence. In April 2013 there was
a:
Crime
that shocked South Africa, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was brutally gang-raped.
Her throat was slit; her fingers and legs shattered. The attackers had stuck a
broken glass bottle inside her body and left her for dead on a construction
site (The Daily Beast 10/02/2013).
While such extreme violence is
relatively rare in South Africa it is a country where violence accompanies much
crime and girls talk not of if they are raped but when. Whilst in the UK a 2013
review found institutions charged with the care of children implicated in
sexual violence:
A
nursery worker who raped a toddler had a "special relationship" with
her that Ofsted and a council were aware of but failed to stop (BBC news
27/08/2013).
This paper explores the role of law in
relation to such sexual violence in England and South Africa to argue that
rather than being part of the solution law is inevitably part of the problem.
The background to this paper is a comparative and evaluative cross cultural
project involving collaboration between the Centre for Criminological Research
in the
School of Law, University of Sheffield,
UK and the Gender, Health and Justice
Research Unit at the University of Cape
Town South Africa and funded by the British Academy. Both cities and indeed
both countries have on-going high levels of violence against women, both sexual
and domestic, which have eluded significant efforts to contain and reduce them
despite consistent efforts in the UK since the later 1970s.
South Africa and England share
jurisdictional history but support criminal justice
systems in radically different
cultures. By comparing and evaluating the law in relation to the crimes that
typify sexual violence and the contexts in which it is occurring it is hoped to illuminate inhibitors to
change. These inhibitors meant that even as the new law was launched in South
Africa it was possible to state rather pessimistically that ‘at the very
minimum, the law, and in particular the new definition of rape, will aid in
providing us with a slightly more accurate count of the lived experiences of
sexual violence in South Africa. Of course, the ‘body count’ does very little
to protect those attempting to secure justice’ (Artz and Smythe 2007:17).
Whilst in England the failure of the criminal justice system to deal with ‘rape…..
encapsulates the sheer inadequacy of the law in relation to gendered violence
and the deeply gendered assumptions that surround legal responses to it’ (Wykes
and Welsh 2009:111).
So this paper asks a deceptively simple
question why is the law not working in relation to sexual violence?
11.30-1.00
Dr Judith Rowbotham, Director SOLON, London.
Title:
A ‘Pressing’ Problem – Does Prison Work? Victorian Discussions on Penal
Servitude and Their Modern Echoes.
The Victorian debate over whether
prison worked was aired very substantially in the press of the day, because
legal professionals were, in this period, the key reporters and journalists
writing up issues of crime and punishment for the consumption of interested
readers. The hostility of many barristers to the use of penal servitude at home
(as opposed to finding a new place to transport those convicted of serious
crimes) meant that issues like the length of prison sentences and the
management of prison daily life were of great contemporary concern, along with
the issue of repeat offending. Victorian reportage intended to put pressure on
both the courts and government: and there are, today, clear echoes of a similar
pressure being attempted by the modern media. This paper explores the
differences between substance and representation of punishment and the role of
the media in shaping the dialogue between the public and the criminal justice
process.
Dr
Samantha Pegg, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University.
Title:
Rationalising the Irrational – Victorian Print Presentations of Insanity Pleas.
As a defence where morality, medical
opinion and substantive law meet, insanity has provoked significant press
debate. The substantive legal rules governing the defence (articulated in McNaghten’s
case 1843) are strict, with the core of the defence a failure to realise the
nature and quality of the act or that that act was legally wrong. Despite these
stringent legal rules the Victorians were accustomed to successful pleas of
insanity, often based on meagre evidence. Victorian juries often allowed
themselves a significant degree of latitude in allowing the defence,
particularly when the defendants were women. Although the House of Lords had
ascertained the legal guidelines, it was for the populous by way of the jury to
administer the law and they were undoubtedly subject to the sway of the press.
Of course the press were not just recounting these criminal cases but
forcefully commenting upon the veracity of the defence and the character of the
defendants. It is perhaps surprising the press then frequently found jury
decisions wanting; believing insanity was being used as a device to
unjustifiably mitigate punishment. This paper explores the ways in which the
press reported upon these insanity pleas and sought to shape public
understanding of the operation and availability of this defence.
Lunch:
1.00-1.55
2.00-3.30
Dr Simon Cross, Department of English and Media, Nottingham Trent University.
Grooming
the nation? Media reporting of Jimmy Savile’s life, death and life-after-death.
The late broadcaster and charity fund
raiser Jimmy Savile has been exposed as one of the country’s most prolific
sexual offenders. This paper begins with profiles of Savile’s celebrity in the
1970s, 1980s and 1990s that show his sexual predilection for girls and
teenagers was an open secret. This then begs the question why in the 1990s and
2000s, when newspaper exposes of sexual offenders were nationally prominent,
there was no investigation into Savile’s sexual offending. The paper
illustrates how press and TV tributes to Savile’s ‘good life’ held the line on
Savile’s tangible achievements after his death which is juxtaposed with press
coverage detailing the extent of his sexual offending. The paper concludes by
discussing inter-relations of power and culpability that enabled Savile to
molest hundreds of victims with impunity.
Lieve
Gies, Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester.
Title:
An anti-human rights culture? The popular press and the Human Rights Act.
One of the principal aims of the Human
Rights Act 1998 (HRA) was to bring forth a human rights culture and spread
human rights values throughout society. Supporters of the HRA have blamed the
paucity of positive cultural attitudes to human rights on the popular press,
accusing journalists of portraying the Act as a ‘villains’ charter’ which
disproportionately benefits those who are the least deserving of human rights
protection. This paper examines what is behind the media hostility to the HRA.
It identifies a number of factors which range from the press’s self-interest in
resisting expanding privacy laws directly attributable to the HRA to a
deep-seated cultural scepticism to human rights which finds its origins in a
sense of national identity founded on a nostalgic longing for ancient civil
liberties.
3.30-3.55
Refreshments
4.00-4.45
Closing address by Prof Graham Murdock, Department of Social Sciences,
Loughborough University.
In their 1973 collection, The
Manufacture of News, Stan Cohen and Jock Young set out to take stock of
work in what was then the emerging field of deviancy and media. Thinking around
amplification and moral panics was well represented in chapters summarising
their own seminal research on the media coverage of Mods and Rockers and drug
takers, now often presented as the point of origin for work in this area. One
of the older pieces reprinted is James Davis’s 1952 article on crime news in
Colorado newspapers, which highlighted the disjunction between crime rates and
coverage and argued that the press created ‘crime waves’. The footnotes to this
article contain a reference to an earlier study conducted in Prohibition
Cleveland three decades earlier. This paper revisits this research and the
model of amplification it developed and argues for its restoration to a central
place in the history of debate around the linkages between tabloidization,
amplification, and popular demands for tougher ‘law and order’ policies.
