Search

Amidst the contemporary 'War on Woke' in the UK and elsewhere, increasing concern has been focussed on the 'offendability' or 'sensitivity' of students on university campuses - a concern that has largely been captured in the notion of an ongoing 'culture war'. Critical voices within the media and in government - as well as in academia - claim there has been a rise of a culture of "toxic victimhood" (Fox, 2016), and a creeping "crusade of conformism" (Hume, 2016) whereby students currently seek "freedom from speech" in the name of "intellectual comfort" (Lukianoff, 2014). This 'conformity' to the principles of 'wokeness' is considered to have an "infantilizing" effect on a generation of young people, producing pathologically vulnerable subjects, jeopardising academic freedom, and endangering freedom of expression more broadly (O'Neill, 2015; Furedi, 2017). However, largely absent from such diagnoses of the 'problem' of taking offence 'too easily' is any empirical analysis of how offence is experienced, understood, and responded to by those social subjects who describe themselves as 'offended'. This thesis seeks to remedy that absence by demonstrating the disconnect between what such contemporary criticism describes and participants' own accounts of the experience and impact of being offended. In this thesis, understood as an archive of offence, I map out and interrogate the phenomenon, materiality, feeling, and experience (the texture) of offence. This archive is primarily composed of 38 semi-structured personal interviews conducted between March 2015 and June 2017, conducted in the context of the University of Cambridge, in which participants were asked to reflect on a time in which they were offended. By interrogating the complexity and nuance of how participants describe their own experiences, and their strategic responses to offensive behaviour in the context of everyday routine university activities, I generate new models and concepts that contribute to a sociology of offence. Through unpacking participants' accounts of feeling offended, I explore both the affective and analytical dimensions of such encounters - which I argue are powerfully indexical of under-described dimensions of 'the politics of everyday feeling' in contemporary society. I explore, for example, that interviewees were able to clearly describe vulnerability to offence as a historical and materially produced relation rather than a product of individual pathology, and I argue such testimony from the study participants can help to reveal the highly patterned and repetitive nature of offence. Furthermore, through an exploration of how participants themselves analysed and deconstructed their own experiences of feeling offended, as well as their accounts of strategies deployed to respond or resist such injuries, I provide a critical and sociological language of becoming and being 'woke' as a particular incarnation of being or acting 'politically correct'. Using my participants' descriptions of how they manage and navigate the feeling of being offended in relation to others, I describe being 'woke' as a prefigurative horizon politics legible through underlying guiding principles that aim to transform conditions of livability for marginalized subjects. Yet, importantly, these accounts also demonstrate that understanding 'wokeness' as a prefigurative horizon politics means that it is necessarily replete with tensions, failures, and strategic dilemmas. Being and becoming 'woke', from this perspective, is thus revealed as an ongoing project rather than something that can be mapped or known in advance. Furthermore, this politics, in seeking to extend comfort to others, often comes at a personal cost. However, I conclude by suggesting that these operations of 'wokeness' are a means of practicing more inclusive and radical transformation through a politicization and transformation of everyday interaction. As such, this thesis utilizes queer, feminist, and anti- racist scholarship to further understanding of classical sociological issues such as identity formation, belonging, and institutional, social, and interpersonal violence through the "keyhole issue" (Hochschild, 2016) of offence and aims to provide an initial intervention into a subfield of the sociology of emotions in its own right - the sociology of offence.

The present research aimed to address two questions. First, is dating anxiety associated with sexual intimacy anxiety? Second, do young people who report harmful sexual behaviour, as an offence or harmful dating behaviour, have higher levels of dating and sexual intimacy anxiety than young people who report no harm, non-sexual harm or sexual and non-sexual harm (generalists)? The Dating Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (DAS-A) was used to measure overall dating anxiety. Questions relating DAS-A sub-factors fear of negative evaluation and social distress - dating were amended to measure sexual intimacy anxiety. A scale to measure partnership anxiety and sexual behaviour anxiety were designed. Participants were 77 young people aged 13 to 18 years (M = 15.4, SD = 1.41). Forty-five (58%) of participants were female and 32 (42%) participants were male. Results found a strong, significant association between higher levels of dating anxiety and higher levels of sexual intimacy anxiety r(75) = .80, p < .001. Young people who reported a sexual offence had significantly higher sexual behaviour anxiety than non-sexual offence (M = 15.82, SD = 6.23, p = .005) and generalist offence groups (M = 21.77, SD = 6.53, p = .044). Despite no other significant differences, a pattern emerged that suggests young people who report harmful sexual or generalist dating behaviour may have higher dating and sexual intimacy anxieties. Furthermore, young people who report harmful dating behaviour may have higher anxieties than young people who report an offence. The implications of the findings for future harmful sexual behaviour and harmful dating behaviour research and practice are discussed.

Medical confidentiality is widely recognised as a concept worth protecting. Problems arise, however, when medical confidentiality conflicts with interests that are equally regarded as important, such as the interests of justice; the interest in criminal prosecution; the interest in crime prevention; or defence rights. In order to develop convincing and workable criteria to balance the competing interests in case of a conflict, the different interests at stake must be clearly defined, and their respective importance assessed. Different ethical approaches to the balancing process will be introduced, followed by an analysis of the law of four legal systems, France, Germany, the UK and the u.s. AIl four legal systems protect medical confidentiality by the means of private law, but only Germany and the U.S. protect medical confidentiality as part of the constitutional right to privacy. In France and Germany, a breach of medical confidentiality by a physician amounts to a criminal offence. Regardless of these differences, all systems agree that medical confidentiality serves both the privacy interests of the patient, and the public interest in protecting public health. Fundamental differences materialise with regard to the recognition of medical privilege, which is recognised in France, Germany, and some States in the U.S., but is rejected by other States in the U.S. and by the UK. While in the U.S., defence rights are regarded as more important than medical confidentiality, the same is not true for France and Germany. All systems agree that medical confidentiality can be outweighed by the interest in preventing a crime that might cause serious harm to a third party, but the criteria according to which the competing interests are balanced, differ. Based on a comparison of the different approaches, criteria for a consistent and morally justified resolution of the conflicts between medical confidentiality and the competing interests will be suggested.

The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to bring the reader closer to the issue of imposing the obligation of denouncing certain categories of forbidden acts on legal entities. As a preliminary point, it must be emphasized that this obligation results both from the regulations of substantive criminal law as well as it is a subject of certain rules of procedures (art. 304 § 1 and 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.) Therefore, the obligation to report a crime may be twofold. First, it takes the form of a social obligation, second – a legal obligation. As much as a social obligation to report a crime is not accompanied by a penalty that would enhance the gravity and importance of this obligation, a legal obligation provides for such enhancement.