(VLS8b) Violence and Society II: Victimization construction and response

It can be argued that victim experience has re-emerged to enhance how we understand violent and/or victimizing events and our responses to them. In this session we seek papers that examine violence and aggression in all forms, from varied perspectives including, but not limited to, those of the victim(s), the offender(s), witnesses, the social context(s) in which violence occurs, reactions to norm violations from both formal (governments, police, courts, etc.) and informal systems, recovery and resilience, and prevention. Papers in this session are featured from multiple disciplines that examine harms and their effects, including papers that seek to re-imagine alternatives to how we identify and respond to violence. Tags: Violence

Organizers: Hannah Scott, Ontario Tech University, Michael Marcel, University of Victoria

Presentations

Konstantin Petoukhov, Carleton University

Constructing the 'ideal' and 'non-ideal' offender in restorative justice

Ever since the publication of Nils Christie’s seminal text ‘The Ideal Victim’ (1986), the concept has taken on a life of its own and criminal justice scholars has paid a great deal of attention to the constructions of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ victims in the criminal justice system. By contrast, critical victimological research on victims in restorative justice has enjoyed much less theoretical and empirical attention, while research exploring offender experiences in restorative justice has been seemingly absent altogether. Drawing on a critical victimological approach, this article considers the complexity of offenders’ social identities and how the categories of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders are constructed through interactions with restorative justice caseworkers. This presentation advances a series of theoretical and empirical arguments by considering the constructions of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders in restorative justice and exploring how their statuses as offenders are formulated by restorative justice practitioners. Specifically, its objective is to examine the role of power that circulates in dominant restorative justice discourses and how it operates through the work of restorative justice practitioners to complicate, disrupt, challenge, or lend support to the existing body of critical victimological research in relation to ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders in restorative justice. Drawing on the research data collected as part of 21 qualitative interviews with offenders, victims, and restorative justice practitioners, this presentation challenges the neutrality of restorative justice mediation and interrogates the law’s power to structure the field of potential actions by means of discourses that regulate the parameters around the emergence of subject positions. To this end, I argue that restorative justice tends to privilege particular narratives that fit favourably within its agenda, while marginalizing others, and agreements between partiicpants are built on the semantic and moral grounds of the dominant story. Restorative justice mediators, in this context, engage in the production of consensus within a highly politicised process characterised by struggle over the meaning of narratives whereby the social construction, performativity, and management of meaning all represent constitutive elements of the restorative justice practice as a political activity.  

Eduardo Cornelius, Universidade de Toronto

The new Brazilian criminal law: Continuities and changes in Car Wash's professional project

Since the 2000s, Brazilian legal professionals have increasingly engaged with anti-corruption and white-collar crime law. After passing globally-inspired legislation, strengthening accountability institutions, and investing in the federal police, the country saw a spike in white-collar criminal investigations. These changes culminated in ‘Operation Car Wash,’ an investigation that unravelled the “largest corruption scandal in [world] history.” Lasting from 2014 to 2021, the investigation revealed a billionaire scheme involving politicians bribing state officials to favor firms in procurement bids. For the first time in Brazilian history, powerful white individuals would join the young Black men arrested for property and drug crimes that make up most of Brazils 830,000 carceral population. The crimes of the powerful also became the nation’ s obsession, with 80% of the population supporting Car Wash and seeing corruption as the country’s biggest problem. Car Wash also produced new practices and discourses about crime and punishment reflected in the daily workings of the criminal justice system, legislative proposals, and the media. Despite these changes, research on the legal profession’s involvement with anti-corruption has mainly focused on politics. In this paper, I focus on legal actors’ contribution to continuities and changes in Brazil’s penal culture. I follow punishment scholars’ emphasis on penal material practices and symbolic frames, which are legitimated through legal actors’ involvement with anti-corruption. I conceptualize Brazilian legal actors’ fight against corruption as a “criminal law professional project” that, in competition with other legal actors, contributes to shaping penal policy. Building on scholars’ emphasis on the (un)intended consequences of prosecutors’ fight against corruption, I also discuss the potential unintended consequences of such criminal law project. Empirically, I analyze federal prosecutors’ written and oral statements about the Ten Measures Against Corruption bill in Congressional hearings. Drafted originally by Car Wash’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, the bill was officially embraced by the Federal Prosecution Service and was supported by Car Wash’s main judge, Sergio Moro. The Ten Measures sought to model Brazilian criminal law after the practices and ideas put forth during Car Wash and previous investigations. While the bill has not passed in Congress, the discourses and practices it promoted represent the culmination of Federal Prosecutors’ criminal law project. Besides, the ideas contained in the bill are very much alive in the Brazilian legal field, including the 2019 successful “Anti-Crime Bill,” which Moro proposed as Bolsonaros Minister of Justice, resuscitating much of the Ten Measures. I find that prosecutors’ professional project presents several changes to practices and discourses to Brazil’s penal landscape, while also sustaining historical continuities. In terms of practices, the Ten Measures represent a break with traditional approaches to the crimes of the powerful, increasing their accountability and making it easier to obtain criminal convictions, which the corruption literature finds to be rare. Nevertheless, despite targeting white-collar crime, these practices (e.g., weakening procedural protection for defendants) also have the potential to increase punishment against the people most vulnerable to criminalization (working-class Black young men). In terms of discourses, the Ten Measures ’ ‘talk of crime’ differs from traditional racist and classist discourses and even denounces the inequalities in the criminal justice system. However, although prosecutors’ critique of the justice system is aimed at white-collar defendants, their discourses reinforce ideas that have been historically mobilized against blue-collar criminality (e.g., “impunity”). The Ten Measures ’ discourses also tap into long-standing historical anxieties and fear about crime, representing a discursive continuity in the Brazilian penal landscape. Finally, by innovatively promoting American-inspired legal practices to fight the crimes of the powerful, prosecutors promote American criminal law as a reference to be adopted in Brazil. Yet, this innovation has the potential to negatively affect the ‘usual suspects’ in Brazil’s carceral state, the urban poor. Beyond the Brazilian case, this paper shows how the contemporary internationalization of crime control intersects with local disputes for power and local professional projects, as well as with broader social racist colonial structures, with the potential to strengthen punitive practices and discourses against marginalized and racialized groups. While white-collar crime scholars have argued that lack of punishment of the harm caused by the powerful increases inequality, this paper shows how criminalizing the wealthy can reinforce traditional projects against Black and poor individuals, usually the targets of penal policy.

Steven Jordan, McGill University; Shaheen Shariff, McGill University; Christopher Dietzel, Concordia University

constructing violence: the israel/gaza "war"

This paper draws on research that we have conducted over the past 6 years on the iMPACTS project based at McGill University. Led by Professor Shaheen Shariff, iMPACTS is a multi-year, multi-million dollar Partnership Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The overarching goal of iMPACTS is to unearth, dismantle, and prevent sexual violence within universities and, ultimately, in society, through evidence- based research that informs sustainable curriculum and policy change. With its focus on sexual violence, iMPACTS has been driven by three inter-related domains: 1. EDUCATION, LAW, AND POLICY: The education, law, and policy domain of iMPACTS examines sexual violence at universities through several lenses – educational, administrative, and legal. The aim is for institutions of higher education to be equipped with an improved understanding of their legal obligations, roles, and responsibilities. Specifically, there are three overarching objectives: To reclaim the role of universities in educating their own communities and greater society on the value of sustainable models to prevent and reduce sexual violence. To bring students and multi-sector partners together to initiate evidence-based and creative ways of informing administrative and curriculum policies on sexual violence. To expand knowledge and legal definitions of what constitutes on-campus sexual violence, given interactions that take place off-campus and online.This domain of iMPACTS has generated several projects from our university partners across Canada and our McGill student team. 2. ARTS, ACTIVISM, AND POPULAR CULTURE: This domain of iMPACTS explores a range of activist and artistic interventions and the role of the entertainment industry and popular culture, as a means to uncover the roots and effects of sexual violence at universities. Specifically, this project has two overarching objectives: To study the history and ongoing work of student activism and art interventions that promote sexual violence prevention, education, and support and encourage university social and policy changes. To investigate the role of popular culture in perpetuating, condoning, and dismissing sexual-based violence and gender-based violence at universities and in society and 3) news and social media. 3. NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA: This domain of iMPACTS analyzes how sexual and gender-based violence is portrayed across media platforms and how survivors, students, and the general public engage with this content. To raise awareness and responsible media reporting of incidents that involve sexual and gender-based violence. In addition, in terms of immediate relevancy, this paper draws on these three domains to explore how and in what ways the concept of violence has been orchestrated and deployed in the events surrounding the 2023 October 7thattack by Hamas on Israel, and Israel’s response to this attack in the Palestinian territory of Gaza. We will be interested in exploring and analysing the different ways in which the concept of violence has been construed and operationalised in mainstream and social/alternative media platforms. We will also be concerned with understanding how public debate and discussion on the conflict in Israel/Gaza has raised questions about the role the of the State in generating and deploying conceptions of violence that perpetuate western colonial-settler relations with the Global South. In making this argument, we will draw on the theoretical contributions of Raewyn Connel, Dorothy Smith, David Harvey, Vijay Prasad and others who have attempted to understand violence from the perspective of subaltern populations in the Global South.