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This article explores a high-profile review of cases of alleged historical investigatory police bias in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, referred to in The New York Times article, “When Gangs Killed Men for Sport: Australia Reviews 88 Deaths.” The title of the article contains the terms of a well-known feature of moral panic—a discovered crime fact and demand for an enforcement response disproportionate to the fact. Our analysis explores the response to the review of the list of cases, Strike Force Parrabell, as an illustration of runaway constructionism. Demand group-interest in the positive designation of the cases (as bias crime) was a means of acknowledging the prejudicial conduct of police during a time of wider attitudinal change. In spearheading the verification of this list of cases, demand groups and crusaders placed a high semiotic burden beyond its capacity as a comparable objective measure. The fitness of the list of 88 cases as a totem for police and societal wrongdoing requires evidence regarding disproportionality based on valid and reliable measures. Despite worldwide interest in NSW for its comparative high ranking in gay bias homicides, however, such ranking does not exist. Nonetheless, despite the impossibility that it stands in as proof of decades long prejudice, corruption or criminal negligence, the list of cases appears to do so anyway. As such, it is illustrative of the occupation of media frames and formats by weak data or of the runaway character of crime stories in an era of “fake news.”

The concept of “Trigger Warnings” has recently emerged in the Higher Education landscape and is proving to be both controversial and challenging to implement. Some educators frame “trigger warnings” as an ethical practice linked to pastoral care for students, others see them as a dangerous concept that can potentially erode the choice of topics we expose students to. The chapter draws on the learning and teaching practices delivered in the course Crime, Law and Trauma. The chapter examines the different ways in which trigger warnings are delivered in different contexts—teaching and non-teaching—to explore precisely how and when we might issue trigger warnings when teaching criminology topics that contain material that poses a potential to distress students.

Observers have noted that “From Auschwitz to Alcatraz, prisons have wakened … the attention of social imaginary in [the] West” (Kostanje and Ivanov 2012, p. 60). It is in this context that the space/site of the prison as a tourist destination has received increasing academic scrutiny in the past twenty-odd years, culminating in the burgeoning literature of “prison” or “penal” tourism as it is sometimes denoted (Welch 2012). Prison tourism is interdisciplinary; drawing on museology, penology, architecture, colonization studies, cultural studies, history, and criminology to enable academics to explore what motivates people to visit prisons and what they take away with them from exposure to former and sometimes current (see Walby and Piche 2011) sites of incarceration.

In the early 1940s, films started to appear where homosexual characters were represented as inherently criminal. These early representations were often subtle or implicit because various production codes operating in the United States and United Kingdom forbade explicit depictions or naming of homosexuality. During the 1940s, homosexuality was associated with disease and sexual deviance. This ensured that these early depictions were unflattering. Gradually, as time progressed and homosexuality became a less taboo topic, representations of homosexual criminality became less coded and more explicit. Filmmakers became bolder in their treatment of the theme of homosexuality and crime. The most fascinating discovery is that, when it comes to popular culture and the cinema, murder is the crime that is typically associated with homosexuality. However, murder has been a mainstay of crime film plots and so it is not surprising that homicide features in films linked to crime and homosexuality. By the year 2000, it is apparent that the cinematic treatment of homosexuality and crime had evolved to become quite sophisticated. Whereas earlier films reviled their homosexual characters such that they attracted little empathy from the audience, these later films have sought to engender a greater tolerance and sympathy for the homosexual killers they depict. Finally, it is important to note that films that depict homosexuals as killers are not an expression of homophobic sentient per se. Crime films have long situated killing as an essential aspect of their plots, and so films that feature homosexuals as murderers are simply a subset of this most popular cinematic genre.

On 20 July 2010, the Office of Film and Literature Classification forbade the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) from screening L.A. Zombie, despite MIFF having scheduled its Australian debut. This recent censorship controversy signals an occasion to pause and consider how films that are prohibited in Australia from exhibition in cinemas or film festivals, or from DVD distribution, do not consistently vanish from sight merely by being effectively banned, as this can fuel interest and inaugurate other viewing opportunities. This article argues, however, that film censorship in contemporary Australia is both neutralised and resisted. Accordingly, it will examine five techniques used to avoid outrage caused by film censorship. It will also examine how these techniques can essentially be inverted by outraged individuals to make the censorship ‘backfire’ by causing it to fail. This will be done with reference to the classification journeys of three controversial films: Baise-Moi, Ken Park and 9 Songs...

Reflecting on my experience of teaching a variety of sensitive topics in the course ‘Crime, law and trauma’, this article documents how an ethics of care guides how students are prepared to encounter sensitive material. It examines how I manage class dynamics when teaching sensitive material and explores, by way of a case study, my experience of how film texts enhance the manner in which sensitive topics can be conveyed to students. The paper concludes by highlighting the benefits of exposing students to challenging material and topics.

This article assesses the role of the Indigenous culture of origin in explaining the early age of initiation into drug use and its relation to subsequent abuse and dependence amongst Indigenous Australians living in urban centres. In particular it is argued that 'culture' interacts with a range of social, internal, and environmental risk factors which thereby generate social conditions within the urban Indigenous community that tolerate and promote both the initiation into, and sustained use of illicit drugs. As such, this article also advocates that strategies that are designed to combat sustained drug use must be sensitive to, and incorporate, the traditional forms of kinship, family and care which pervade the Indigenous culture of origin.

This article engages in a discussion of a particular aspect of homosexuality that, due its taboo, sub-cultural nature, is under-theorised in socio-legal and criminological discourse both in Australia and abroad - the phenomenon of men meeting in public 'beat' spaces to pursue homosexual intimate encounters. Such forays have long been discouraged as a public nuisance and criminalised using common law "public order" laws governing offensive behaviour.1 Indeed, police antagonism to this sexual sub-culture is well documented, and in the past, agent provocateur policing procedures were commonly used to entrap men at beats.3 Despite that fact that hundreds of encounters take place every day in Australia, very few studies have sought to examine the nature of homosexual intimate encounters in public spaces. Those studies that do exist are either dated,4 or historically focused.5 Swivel's article is the only recent Australian text to demystify 'beats' and situate their relevance to criminological discourse.6 Swivel states: '[tjhe humanisation of the beat might be assisted through future research which locates the beat within other discourses'.7 This research rises to this challenge by locating 'beat' sexuality within a Foucauldian discourse of resistance, aided by references to the writings of another French philosopher, Michel De Certeau. It does so by offering an insight into the ways that men in Australia resist police attempts to regulate intimate conduct in the realm of the 'beat'. Since no State or Territory in Australia now oudaws consensual same-sex practices in private, 'beat' public spaces is one particular area where homosexual conduct is criminalised in Australia. However, it should be stressed that the crirninalisation of homosexuality is far from limited to those public spaces described and known as 'beats' - rather, that 'beats' are spaces commonly implicated in police accusations of sexual misconduct in public. This discussion does not seek to evaluate die morality of homosexual desire in Taeat' spaces, other than to acknowledge that beat sex attracts much legal, social and cultural hostility as 'dirty' sex that is out-of-place,8 repulsive, disgusting and offensive.9 Nor will this paper explore the health issue of HIV transmission or the safety issue of homophobic violence that are associated with beats - as critical as these issues are. Rather, in deference to Foucault's legacy of celebrating human resistance to the governance of sexual conduct, this discussion accepts that beat sex is a fact of life and seeks to document the tactics and strategies that gay men adopt to thwart police attempts to regulate their desire in the public realm. 10 In order to document these tactics I defer to Foucault's notion of countermemory - a competing narrative of the past composed of memories that exceed the official public history. 11 The interviews with gay men that underpin this research allowed me to access their resistant countermemories. Following, I wish to offer an ethnographic "snap-shot" of male-centered sex in public places in which the participants own narratives are paramount in documenting public sexual practices.12 Such an approach will highlight the personal and emotional nature of lived experiences that male-centered sex-in-public places so richly contain. 13 Human resistance to regulatory practices has emerged as an issue that criminological and socio-legal scholarship cannot continue to shy away from. If criminology is to remain relevant in current times, it must engage with and contribute to 'knowledge of resistance.'14 Walters argues: '[s]uch criminological work is crucial during an ascendancy of an intolerant, punitive and moral authoritarian state'.15 However, such knowledge of resistance is 'often marginalised and seen as deviant voices' in the mainstream.16 This article responds to the challenge posed by Walters by attending to male sex in beat spaces, not as a problem of deviance, but as an opportunity to elucidate an appreciation of the complex ways that same-sex attracted men resist police attempts to regulate their desire. …

In this chapter I wish to ruminate on my personal experiences as a queer researcher to reflect on queer criminology’s place in the wider discipline of criminology. Existential questions inform my discussion: to what extent does this thing we call queer criminology exist?; who recognizes it?; and what might be done in the future to ensure it captures more attention as a serious sub-discipline in the context of an already crowded field?

This article is grounded in a critical appraisal of seminal archival documents pertaining to criminology’s knowledge of homosexual offences (and offensive behaviour) in Australia - the ‘Male Sex Offences in Public Places’ Proceedings of the Institute of Criminology (1970). It explores the role the legal gaze and the juridico-cultural imagination play in producing discourse that constructs gay male desirous bodies as flowing through the space of the city, posing the twin threats of corruption and engulfment to other, non-homosexual male bodies. My concern is to explore the theme of mapping (as a product of legal anxiety) and to elucidate how legal vision functions as a stigmatizing gaze that repudiates gay desire as a polluting flow requiring vigilance and continual regulation. To that end the article employs cartographic practices of analysis to explore how legal doctrine is mapped onto space. Additionally, it is argued that the Proceedings borrow tropes of monstrosity to chart the movement of homosexual bodies through the space of the city as imperilling other men at large.

In 1962, police officers concealed themselves for two weeks in a men's public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio, and filmed men performing illicit homosexual sex acts. The film footage was used to secure convictions for sodomy, and inaugurated a new form of police surveillance of homosexual public sex. In 2008, the visual artist William E. Jones screened the police footage in art galleries around the world, to both critical acclaim and public objection. This article examines the film, both as a prosecutorial artefact and an artwork, to explore what it says about public sex, police surveillance, the criminalization of homosexual practices, visual evidence, and contemporary art. It considers the validity of the public/private distinction as it applies to anonymous sex, it evaluates the probative value of images, the changing nature of surveillance, and the meanings of silence in both criminal procedure and artistic practice. This article argues that the act of transforming traumatic evidence into visual art requires deep ethical examination. Whatever artistic, political or historical contribution may be claimed for this work must be measured against the harm that it does to the film's silent subjects. © The Author(s), 2009.

Evergon’s Manscapes, accompanied by titles that do not provide exact locations of the places he photographs, accord respect to these spaces and in doing so preserve their status as commonplace images. In documenting those locales where gay desire is enacted on a daily basis, the Manscapes speak to the theme of “the everyday.” These everyday photographs provide testimony, not, obviously, in the formal and legal sense of the term, but rather in fidelity to the archaic meaning of the word as indicating: “a solemn protest or declaration.”6 To gaze at these images is to be drawn into spaces of gay resistance, to vicariously inhabit beat and cruising ground space, to behold signs of resistance. For the Manscapes are profoundly allegorical. Upon viewing these images for the first time they appear unremarkable, almost mundane in their depiction of common scenes (parks, foreshores, secluded hinterlands and other public spaces). As the clues in the photographs are identified, the viewer imbues the photographs with an aura of desire.7 In their totality, the Manscapes testify to the existence of those everyday places that are subject to processions of desiring male bodies.

By conducting close readings of a wide range of texts where knowledge of homosexual deviance was constructed and deployed, this article seeks to chart how two competing models evolved to account for the emergence of the homocriminal subject in Australia. In the first model, that of importation, homocriminality was imagined as emanating from abroad an exotic perversion imported from England. In contrast, a second model posited that homocriminality was simultaneously present within Australia. Exploring these models offers a valuable insight into the ways that homosexuality was imagined as deviant, threatening and offensive prior to the advent of the decriminalisation era in Australia. Furthermore, the article highlights how the gaze of agents of the law was implicated in constructing and representing homosexual desire as disgusting and unruly, warranting ongoing surveillance and regulation by the law.

Drawing on interview data of gay men who have had their behavior in public spaces scrutinised by agents of the law for signs deviance, this article explores the historical characteristics of police animosity towards such conduct in Australia. This entails examining encounters between police and gay men who pursue desire in ‘beat’ (or ‘cottage’ to the use the UK term) spaces. Exploring why these outlaw gay male subjects are so abject and troubling to the law, the discussion documents how law’s desire to regulate gay men plays out in the masquerade of ‘plain-clothes’ agentprovocateur operations where police entrap gay men by mimicking gay bodily appearances, gestures and mannerisms. This article also examines how police regulation of gay desire functions as a form of violence that delimits expressions of same sex desire in public spaces. A key theme that underpins the analyses in this paper is that the policing of desire in ‘beat’ spaces helps produce qualities of illicitness and dangerousness and that this, in turn, fuels the circuit of desire at play between gay men and agents of the law.

Social networking sites are increasingly being used by young people as a mode of social communication. Unfortunately, associated with the use of social networking sites come the risk of cyberbullying and the danger of sexual predation. This article uses a mixed methods approach to gain an understanding of the prevalence and perceptions of such risks among young people. The key focus of this article is not only to identify the prevalence of specific risks associated with social networking sites, but also to explore young people's understanding of these risks and how they manage them. This was accomplished by having a sample of South Australians complete a questionnaire about their experiences and perceptions of risk when using social networking sites. The implications of this study are that educating young people will hopefully minimise the likelihood that they will suffer harm if subjected to the twin intrusions of cyberbullying and sexual predation. A young person who has a sound knowledge of the risks of using social networking sites will be potentially less na ve, and therefore better equipped to deal with adverse communications they encounter when online.